The year 2012 is a year of many approximations. It began with the question of censorship being raised at the Jaipur Literature Festival. More unassumingly, it marks the sixtieth death anniversary of Bangalore Nagarathnamma, an important Carnatic musician and devadasi in the early 20th century. Also, placing these facts in the context of censorship, it is a hundred years since her edition of the Telugu courtesan Muddupalani’s erotic poem Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika) was banned.

In different ways, both women, Nagarathnamma and Muddupalani, share a history of prohibition. Nagarathnamma was born to a devadasi in 1878 in a village in Mysore district. Her childhood was a harsh one; but she studied the arts in Mysore and then Bengaluru and was invited back to Mysore to perform at the palace, a vindication of the unceremonious way in which she had to leave the city as a child. When the Madras Devadasi Prevention of Dedication act finally outlawed the dedication of devadasis in Madras Presidency in 1947, Nagarathnamma was reaching the end of her life. Yet, she had lived through the social and political currents that swept through South India in the first half of the 20th century, leading up to the Act in 1947. Our knowledge of Muddupalani is purely based on what has been written about her, and her autobiographical statement in Radhika Santwanam.
Muddupalani, who lived between 1730 and 1790, was a courtesan attached to the court of Pratapasimha, one of the Nayaka kings of Thanjavur. In the preface to Radhika Santwanam, Muddupalani proudly describes her lineage — she is the granddaughter of the court dancer Tanjanayaki and the daughter of another talented courtesan, Rama Vadhuti (Potiboti). Her patron is the king Pratapasimha. In an unabashed eulogy to herself, she reveals her accomplishments in dance, music and literature. Several epics have been dedicated to her and she has been lauded by scholars. She explains that Krishna came to her in a dream and asked her to tell the story of Radhika Santwanam.
When Nagarathnamma read two versions of Radhika Santwanam she had managed to source, the errors in the text and a missing prologue which omitted Muddupalani’s introduction in one of the texts irked her. Nagarathnamma was a regular at conclaves of scholars and litterateurs, so she had also come across instances where Radhika Santwanam was wrongly attributed to a male poet. She decided to publish her own complete edition of Muddupalani’s poem. Her edition of Radhika Santwanam got into trouble when it attracted censure from a Telugu journal and caught the eye of the government’s Telugu translator, a man who was a follower of the reformer Veerasalingam Pantulu. Veerasalingam had, in 1887, published a compilation in the lives of Telugu poets in which he derided Muddupalani’s work and addressed her in derogatory ways. After a drawn-out battle, copies of the book were seized from the publishers and it was banned by the British government.
Interestingly, it is only a few months ago that an English translation of the original Telugu text has become available. The ban on Radhika Santwanam was rescinded after Independence, but that did not help the circulation of the text. In 2011, Penguin brought out The Appeasement of Radhika, a translation by Sandhya Mulchandani.
Until then, Muddupalani was even more a creature of mystique. For 20 years before this, the only window into Muddupalani’s poetry was through two tantalising extracts in Women Writing in India, a volume edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita. Radha, Krishna’s proud aunt and lover, raises Ila and schools her in the art of love. She lovingly orchestrates the union of Ila and Krishna. However, when the young lovers consummate their union, Radha is left despondent. Ila is unwilling to relinquish her hold on Krishna and uses all her charms and talents to keep Krishna from returning to Radha. When Krishna finally rushes back to the heartbroken Radha, she kicks him away in anger, taking him back into her life only when he has sufficiently apologised.
Meanwhile, how are these divergent strands rendered coherent in the contemporary?
The debate between love as bhakti or srngara may seem tiresome, yet it can never be put to rest. It is constantly addressed in dance, but also, more prominently, in the writing that surrounds dance. Consider the innocuous phrase, “her sensitive treatment of the erotic poem”, which one finds in various forms in writings on dance.
Muddupalani predates photography; however, search for photographs of Bengaluru Nagarathnamma, and the pickings are still slim. The most detailed memoir of her is her biography, written by Sriram. V — The Devadasi and the Saint. There is some poignancy to the way in which the lives of Nagarathnamma and Muddupalani intertwine and how their memory ends up being distilled most prominently in text, and in some cases, just the whiff of its existence.
On the social welfare scene, films decrying the stark lives of devadasis guarantee assured returns. But there is now a keener urge to understand, represent and even recreate the performances of devadasis. In recent times, there have been interesting adaptations like The King’s Salon, by Canada-based Bharatanatyam dancers Hari Krishnan and Srividya Natarajan, which uses research on devadasi traditions to explore what their dance repertoire may have been like and savour its fluidity of erotic expression and language.