[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Sabhas: Changing the Landscape of Chennai’s Music, Dance, and Drama
Organizer & Chair: Kristen Rudisill, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: Susan Seizer, Indiana University
This panel brings together four papers on the arts most commonly sponsored by the cultural organizations in Chennai known as sabhas. These organizations have members who pay a fee for tickets to entertainments scheduled by their secretaries. They are best known for their support of classical South Indian music and dance, but may also include dramas, film screenings, religious discourses, debates, or other events in their schedules. The first sabhas were founded in the late nineteenth century and they became the dominant means of patronage for music, dance, and theater in the city by the 1950s. This shift from other forms of patronage meant that sabhas have had a significant effect on the production, content, and aesthetics of all the performance arts they support.
In addition to changing the nature of the performance arts in Chennai, sabhas have changed the nature of viewing those arts. They have been central to the establishment of a new kind of cultural public sphere in which the middle class members can define middle-classness and good taste. All the presenters address how the changes to viewing and the arts have been driven by the middle class status of most sabha members and the tastes to which most of them aspire. The panel offers a variety of perspectives on the model of the cultural association whose members have had profound effects on the arts themselves as well as notions of taste.
Sabha, Samaj, Sampradaya Sangeetam: The Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Modern South India 1870-1950
Lakshmi Subramanian, Centre for Studies In Social Sciences
The concerns of this paper are three fold. One is to contextualise the formation and proliferation of sabhas (music associations and music appreciation societies) in Madras in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and to review their centrality in the construction of Karnatik music as an integral element in South Indian public culture. The second is to contrast the physical and semiotic space that the Madras sabhas represented with the earlier performative arenas sponsored largely by temples and Saiva Siddhanta mathas. This is, in order to primarily emphasize the profile of the Sabhas as sites of modern disciplinary formations, and as important vehicles of secular music. Thirdly, the paper intends to locate the sabhas in the configuring of a new musical aesthetics of performance embodied in the refined kachheri or concert that they sponsored. The reformed and modern concert format or the kaccheri, like that of a descriptive catalogue accompanying an art collection, facilitated the display of music as an object with a textual explication, fairly distinct from the emotive and non verbal forms of experiencing music in the context of ritual and religious practice. Taken together, this paper intends to map the changing musical landscape of south India from the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when a complex convergence of social changes and cultural practices associated with the creation of an urban elite, generated competing discourses of aesthetics and meaning around the consumption of music.
Choreographing Madras: Bharata Natyam, Sabhas, and the Production of Local Identities in Late Colonial India
Janet O’Shea, Middlesex University
Like the nation-state, former colonial centers grapple with a double identity. Produced by imperialist economic and governmental practices, they nonetheless incur responsibility for representing indigenous cultural identity. Colonial and early post-colonial cities like Madras had the economic resources to support an arts milieu. In the absence of royal patronage, such commercial sites, with a solid middle-class and a politically aware public, offered private support for the arts, through sabhas. Its colonial legacy enabled Madras to cultivate artistic forms that could be recrafted in the interest of a non-colonial past.
This paper investigates the localizing processes that established bharata natyam in Madras. This process began with the shift of non-brahmin arts patronage to Madras in the early nineteenth century, accelerated with the establishment of sabhas in the late nineteenth century and consolidated itself further through the emergence of brahmin patronage in the early twentieth century. These changes established Madras, not so much as a physical entity, than as a space, a place experienced through practice (deCerteau 1988: 117).
Musicologists and music historians have argued that the establishment of music institutions and the emergences of arts journalism in 1930s and 1940s Madras contributed to a new patronage system and fostered the emergence of a public culture centred around classical dance and music viewing. I extend these arguments to dance performance and patronage, arguing not only that these practices enabled the development of new communities of connoisseurship but also that they allowed dance to ground itself in different environments and encouraged dancers to relocalise their dance practice.
“Well Done, Sabha Secretary!”: Staging Classical Music in South India
Amanda Weidman, Bryn Mawr College
The social organization of Karnatic music underwent profound changes in the twentieth century. A form of music largely patronized by princely courts in the small cities and towns of South India in the 19th century came to be concentrated in the colonial city of Madras in the 20th century. Initially supported by wealthy merchant patrons and temple trustees, the sponsorship of Karnatic music shifted to a new form of organization called the sabha by the 1930s. Sabhas were largely Brahmin organizations which arranged concerts, using funds from audience subscriptions and tickets to pay the musicians. They replaced the king, temple trustee, or wealthy patron with a new class of citizen-patrons, the sabha trustees, and were dependent on sizeable paying audiences to support the whole enterprise.
Sabhas did not merely provide a new venue for Karnatic music; rather, they were central to the redefinition of Karnatic music as South India’s “classical” music in the 20th century and to the constitution of a middle-class public sphere in Madras. This paper examines the effect of sabhas on the repertoire of Karnatic music, the organization of the concert and notions of musician and audience etiquette, and the making of audiences distinguished by their caste, gender, and social class. It also considers certain elements that functioned to “stage” the music in a particular way, such as printed programs with advertisements and social and religious functions that were held along with concerts, as well as other elements that supported the sabha enterprise: microphones, the recording and radio industries, and the railways.
Sabha Comedy: Content, Aesthetics, and Patronage
Kristen Rudisill, University of Texas, Austin
The sabhas, or cultural organizations in Madras, are best known for their patronage of classical music and dance, but many also include theater productions in their annual schedules. In the 1950s some amateur theater troupes began to spring up and sabha organizers realized that their plays required a lot less money and special arrangements to stage than the large productions of historical and mythological plays by professional theater companies which had dominated Madras stages to this point.
With no networks, theaters, or real sources of funding, the amateur theater troupes were dependent on the sabhas for performance opportunities. Because of their access to theaters and audiences, sabhas dominated theater patronage in the city by the mid-1960s and made it financially unviable to produce plays without their support. They formed the Federation of City Sabhas to “fix fees and regulate theater,” as one sabha secretary put it. A play accepted by the Federation would be guaranteed at least seventy paid performances around the city. This meant that the secretaries of these cultural organizations, with the backing of their predominantly Brahmin, middle class members, wielded tremendous power in dictating the content and aesthetics of Madras theater.
This paper examines the structure, performance, and humor of one of the enduring classics of the sabha genre, Kathadi Ramamurthy’s “Honeymoon Couple,” written by Crazy Mohan in 1971. The paper will broaden conceptions of middle class, Brahmin taste from classical and religious arts and consider how humor can act as a window into that society.