Séminaire organisé par le CEIAS
?Mardi 14 décembre 2021, de 14h à 16h
? En ligne et en salle 32 du GED sur le Campus Condorcet
À propos de l'événement
1910, Port-Louis. Tamiḻ-speaking landlords and scholars gather around the newly-founded Hindu Hymn Society (HHS), known in Tamiḻ as Intu Pajaṉa Maṇṭali. Through the performance of nāṭakam (danced drama) and kīrttaṉai (lyrical devotional composition), the association actively patronizes a Vaiṣṇava (« Viṣṇu-devoted ») cultual community, in which the HSS stands as courtly centre. In the following decades, the poets and stage masters of the HHS curate an « operatic » hymnology intended for an audience of non-elite protégés. Throughout the island at the same period, Telugu landlords’ assemblies also start building new Vaiṣṇava communities through the patronage of harikatha dramas and kīrtana singing. What are the semantic luggages carried by Raṅganātha, Sakkubhāi or Rāmadāsu in a moment of transition from indenture to new modes of work and civil status? In this presentation, I discuss the early 20th century diasporic formation of what Christian Novetzke (2007) termed a « Bhakti Public », by which the mise en scène of a devotional corpus asserts the cohesive worldview of a community, never far from internal and external social hierarchies. Following the work of Davesh Soneji (2012; 2013), it is crucial to stress the importance of polyglossia, hereditary expertise and exclusive curation choices as the cultural politics at play. I argue that through their original Vaiṣṇava « world-making », patrons and artists reformulated perennial visions of lordship and social ascension from the South Indian « theatre-states » (Dirks 1988) to the plantation society. More globally, this vernacular archive is a diverse counter-record (Gupta 2020) to the dominant narratives on indentured migration and settlement.
