Editorials about women in public theatre in The Svadeshabhimani newspaper give us important clues about an emerging caste-gender order in the twentieth century.
Shilpa Parthan
This article is part of an ongoing series examining the recently digitized archives of the short-lived yet formative early 20th-century Travancorean newspaper, The Svadeshabhimani.
Two similarly titled editorials, published four years apart in The Svadeshabhimani (1906 and 1910), both highlight the question of moral decline–’sadaachaara dooshanam’ [The Spoiling of Morals] and ‘sadaachaara hati’ [The Destruction of Morals]. The concerns of both are also strikingly similar: the state of theatre in Travancore, namely, the presence and portrayal of women in plays staged before the masses. In the first of them, the editor is scandalised that Malayali women actors are playing women’s roles in theatre, led on by the practices of Tamil theatre troupes that were dominant in Travancore at the time. To make matters worse, the editorial elaborates, some of these women are of the Nair caste, no less! This sentiment might seem strange to us in the present day—how else are women supposed to be portrayed on stage, if not by women? The concerns of the second one are more familiar, perhaps: it focusses on a particular Tamil play where the naayika openly embraces and kisses the naayakan, and also explicitly instructs him on matters of sex (the now obscure term ‘kokkokavidhi’ is used to refer to this). However, the naayika is referred to using the pronoun aal, a term more commonly used for men though it is technically gender-neutral. Much more fragmented than the first one, with sections missing in the original print, this piece does not give many identifying details, but the pronoun use sits strangely nevertheless.
How do we make sense of the moral world of these editorials and the theatrical performances they are concerned with? Here, I attempt to unpack some of the caste-gender logics underlying the sexual economy of an increasingly commoditized visual space in early twentieth-century Travancore (Menon 2017). The views expressed in The Svadeshabhimani are exemplary rather than exceptional; the short-lived newspaper reflects the reformist zeitgeist at a time and site of profound social change—a kingdom under indirect British colonial rule where the commoditization of land, social reform movements led by oppressed-caste leaders, and extensive missionary activity were all shifting the existing social order, leading to new modes of imagining governance, citizenship, and moral-social selves (Desai 2005).These editorials on theatre, then, reflect larger concerns about the emergence of a public sphere in an urban centre.
Who Can Be A Modern Actress?
In ‘sadaachaara dooshanam’, the moral criticism of dominant-caste women playing women on stage indicates that this was an unusual practice in early 20th-century Travancore.1 This era saw the emergence of modern theatre in Kerala, but the scene was dominated by Tamil theatre troupes and male performers performing the roles of women. Hence, the piece opens with the specific concern about ‘foreign’ women actors like Balamani ‘encroaching’ Travancore city and leading astray its people through obscene plays. One effect of this foreign influence, the author opines, is the spread of the practice of employing women actors to Malayalam theatre and theatre troupes. The second editorial, ‘sadaachaara hati’, written a few years later, is animated by similar concerns, but spends more time reflecting on the proper role of theatre. The author is careful to say that theatre in itself is not an immoral art form, and that there are in fact exemplars of moral edification like Shakespearean and Kalidas’ plays that illustrate how theatre is an ideal form to promote ‘moral upliftment, social reform, and the accumulation of wealth’.
These reflections give us insight into the emerging economic-sexual field of visibility in Travancore that Bindu Menon (2017) refers to—the author of the editorial notes that samajams or troupes have begun specifically advertising the presence of women actors to attract viewers. But these women cannot be understood independently of caste and class; the presence of Nair women in this space causes special concern. ‘Young Nair women’ are referred to repeatedly, and the concluding assertion that ‘not just Nair women, but women of no caste/class/race [varggam] must be allowed to join troupes as actresses’ only underscores the primacy of savarna status in determining the propriety of public femininity.
Sajitha Madathil’s (2008) studies indicate that men and women performing together seems more common in oppressed-caste performance forms–in the caste economy of Kerala, male and female enslaved bodies were similarly (de)valued and shared social spaces as laborers, with the Namboothiris having the strictest norms of gender-based segregation. It is no surprise, then, that the first woman to be cast in Malayalam cinema, P K Rosy, was a highly reputed kakkarissi folk performer from an enslaved caste (Rowena 2013). Given this example, one wonders how many Dalit women were involved in theatre in various roles. In the autobiography of Ochira Velukkutty (Sreekumar 2006), who was Malayalam theatre’s biggest star portraying women’s roles in the 1920s and 30s, the testimony of a woman actor from the time show that they were relegated to dasi (handmaiden) roles supporting the central female role played by male actors, though it is hard to tell how common a trend this was, and what the caste dynamics were. In a space where male actors 2 commanded stardom playing women and Nair actresses incited public censure in the manner of the editorials, one wonders if Dalit women actresses were uniquely erased in discourse. The concern of the editorials is primarily that Nair women are now beginning to perform for an audience comprising men from all castes and classes. This helps us understand that the sexual economy of visibility which shaped ideas of male viewers and female objects in modern theatre was fundamentally determined by caste.
Region, Nation, Metropole: Moral Geographies
Also important to note in the editorials is a specific concern about the emerging modern public–from a time where art was tied to temples and dominant-caste patronage, or performed ritually within caste-specific spaces, Travancore, like the rest of the Indian subcontinent, was moving into a capitalist mode of producing and consuming art, where anyone could pay to view theatrical productions in a hall. This led to heightened anxieties among ruling elites about the decline of the caste order and the mixing of people across the norms of caste and gender. These anxieties are visible in two ways in the pieces in question: very explicitly in the concern with dominant-caste women’s presence in a mixed-caste/class male audience, and more implicitly in how ‘good theatre’ is imagined as enlightening the public. The second essay specifically praises the democratising possibilities of public theatre in that it can be enjoyed equally by ‘emperors and commoners, the learned and the ignorant’. Precisely because of its accessibility, such theatre is also tasked with spreading moral values, with the poor being portrayed as specifically vulnerable to moral decline: ‘Even he who has no money will be tempted to go watch a woman’s performance by borrowing, begging, or stealing the money to enter the theatre hall, forcing those who eke out a living through their meagre daily earnings to squander away their earnings’.
Especially intriguing are the regional imaginaries that undergird these moral concerns–it is common to see Tamil region and culture being invoked as a space of moral decadence in a lot of conversations around art. Even in debates around whether ‘devadasi’ practices existed in Kerala, the existence of devadasis associated with Travancorean temples is attributed to an unhealthy influence of Tamil culture. This was one way in which a superior and coherent Malayali culture was imagined as tying together the region of Kerala even before modern statehood. The author of the editorial also mentions that the people of other Hindu kingdoms, with their patronage of devadasis and other morally decadent practices, also do not appreciate the danger of women performing in public theatre.
In contrast, British theatre is invoked as a moral model, showing how cultural norms circulated in a transnational space in the colonial era. The author quotes prominent English critic Clement Scott saying that a woman in theatre will find it impossible to maintain her chastity, and if she tries, she will fail in her work as an actress. It is interesting that the piece invokes Clement Scott’s opinion of actresses so approvingly. According to Scott’s Wikipedia page, the original essay critiquing the immorality of actresses—specifically, the precise sentiment quoted by the Svadeshabhimani editor that no virtuous actress can remain in the industry—spelled the end of Scott’s storied career as a reputed theatre critic and led to his dismissal from The Daily Telegraph. Also instructive is the invocation of Shakespearean theatre as an ideal example of edifying theatre. While Shakespearean plays invoked outrage and censorship for their raucous plots and liberal use of swear words and sexual innuendo in 16th-century Elizabethan England, by the early 20th century, Shakespeare’s oeuvre had become an integral part of the British elite’s construction of English instruction as a tool for edifying both the working classes within England and colonized natives, completely reversing earlier perceptions of Shakespeare as ‘low art’ (Viswanathan 2014). These references hint at the tangled and contradictory dynamics of how colonization shaped morality and played a role in reimagining the local caste-gender order amid changing times.
Afterlives: The Emergence of Cinema
Concerns around which bodies can and cannot represent public femininity have persisted across the ages in different forms, sanctioning various kinds of violence. With the emergence of cinema as a new ‘technology of representation’ (Menon 2017) in the mid-twentieth century, we see the sexual economy around public performances shifting yet again. The figures who were onstage—male actors like Ochira Velukkutty and non-dominant-caste female actresses—were sidelined, very violently in the case of P K Rosy. When Udaya Studios set out to make a film out of the well-known play ‘Nalla Thanka’, Velukkutty was the first to be considered as someone who played the eponymous protagonist to great acclaim and popularity on stages across Kerala. However, protests by the women actors who had, by then, become established in cinema compelled the filmmakers to cast Miss Kumari (a Syrian Christian woman) instead (Sreekumar 2006). As for P K Rosy, her debut as the first Malayali film actress was met with widespread violence by male Nair viewers in Travancore who protested the portrayal of a Nair woman by a Dalit actress. In many ways, Jenny Rowena (2013) notes, this spectacular violence is what paved the way for dominant-caste women to take up roles in cinema:
After her defeat the Malayalam screen filled up with uppercaste women and personas played out by upper caste and Brahmin and Syrian Christian women – in the beginning Tamil actresses were imported to play out these Nair women personas, then came the Syrian Christians like Miss Kumari and later Sheela, after this we got eventually our very own Nair sister Ragini, upper caste Kalamandalam trained Jayabharathi and later the Nair/Nambiar woman, Seema.
As the Hema Committee report, released to the public a month ago, unleashes a storm of debates, social commentaries, and power struggles in the Malayalam entertainment industry, we see how these historical dynamics have endured. Once again, we run the risk of not attending adequately to the caste and class dynamics implicit in these debates around women, morality, and marginalisation in performance–while the report itself dwells extensively on dancers and junior artists as uniquely subject to gendered and sexual violence, public spaces and discussions continue to centre the actresses who portray naayika roles. How much of this comes from our ongoing tendency to associate concerns around chastity and womanhood-writ-large with Nair (or Nair-coded) women’s bodies alone? Violence against certain women’s bodies incite our progressive moral outrage, whereas Dalit-Bahujan women’s labor and talent, and the violence they face pursuing their talents, remain normalised and shrouded in silence in the popular sphere.
References
- Desai, Manali. 2005. ‘Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala, India, 1860-1957’. Social Science History 29 (3): 457–88.
- Hema, K., Sarada, and K. B. Valsakumari. 2024. ‘Hema Committee Report’. Thiruvananthapuram: Government of Kerala.
- Madathil, Sajitha. 2008. ‘മലയാളി സ്ത്രീരംഗാവിഷ്കാരത്തിന്റെ വേരുകള് തേടി [Searching for The Roots of Women’s Performances on the Malayali Stage]’ , Matsyaganddhi blog, December 6, 2008.
- — . 2009. ‘മലയാള നാടകചരിത്രത്തിലെ ആദ്യനാളുകള്: സ്ത്രീപക്ഷവായന’ [The Early Days of Malayalam Theatre: A Feminist Reading]. Matsyaganddhi blog, February 20, 2009.
- Menon, Bindu. 2017. ‘Affective Returns: Biopics as Life Narratives’. Biography 40 (1): 116–39.
- Rowena, Jenny. 2013. ‘Locating P K Rosy: Can A Dalit Woman Play a Nair Role in Malayalam Cinema Today?’ Savari blog, February 23, 2013. https://www.dalitweb.org/?p=1641
- Sreekumar, K. 2006. ഓച്ചിറ വേലുക്കുട്ടി [Ochira Velukkutty]. Thrissur: Sangeeta Nadaka Akademi.
- Viswanathan, Gauri. 2014. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. Columbia University Press.
- Wikipedia contributors, “Clement Scott,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Clement_Scott&oldid=1243933580 (accessed September 30, 2024).
