Taxonomies of womanhood on the vernacular stage

Abstract

In the new poetic genres produced at the Early Modern court of Thanjavur, in particular padams and javalis, we hear
the voice of women who address their male partners, lovers, or female friends, sometimes with caring words, dreaming
or plotting secret rendez-vous, again rebuking them for their delays or mischiefs. The language is that of the vernacular
Telugu or Tamil, the voice is of womanhood, imagined by self-presented male composers, and filtered through cultural
stereotypes and literary conventions. This paper explores a further stage of representation of such polyphony, that of
performance, in which the text is typically embodied by a female – or male – dancer, through the mastery of the
abhinaya techniques, combined with a deep understanding of the character’s psychology that draws on a complex
typology of women (nāyikā-bheda). Although the normative characterisation of female types has already a long history,
its use for interpreting a corpus of poems meant for performance seems to be a novelty in the literary landscape of South
Asia, arguably responding to the new needs of performers and audiences. In this paper, I will focus on the practice,
attested in late 19th c. printed texts but possibly older and still in use among contemporary performers, of relying on
Sanskrit texts and their taxonomies of womanhood (Rasamañjarī, Rasārṇavasudhākara, etc.) for the interpretation of
female characters in vernacular staged poetry.