Presentation :

In this presentation I will deal with the process of censorship and related shifting of authority among those communities of professional performing artists and courtesans, in colonial and post-colonial India. I will then show how those variegated coreographic traditions got coverted and homologated into some forms of "national" and "classical" Indian (Hindu) dances during the first decades of the 20th century. I will then analyse the moralization of those previous professional performers, their repertoire and the technical aspects of the dance as well. Known in the past as Dasi Attam and Sadir Attam in the South Indian context, such dances got censured, "reinvented", "re-named" and "re-casted" from the 1930 onwards, by radically changing their interpreters, the places of learning and the system of patronage. Such process of moralization, censorship and related shifting of authority affected deeply the modality of transmission of those artistic and ritualistic forms, as well as the format of the performances, by sanitizing its erotic and liturgical content both in words and gestures. Those deep changes mirror the religious and socio-political transformation of the Indian society till today, by constructing a new artistic landscape on a regional, national and global scale.