Acknowledgments; Introduction: On Historical, Social, and Aesthetic Borderlands; 1. Producing Dance in Colonial Tanjore; 2. Whatever Happened to the South Indian Nautch? Toward a Cultural History of Salon Dance in Madras; 3. Subterfuges of "Respectable" Citizenship: Marriage and Masculinity in the Discourse of Devadasi Reform; 4. Historical Traces and Unfinished Subjectivity: Remembering Devadasi Dance at Viralimalai; 5. Performing Untenable Pasts: Aesthetics and Selfhood in Coastal Andhra Pradesh; Coda: Gesturing to Devadasi Pasts in Today's Chennai
Appendix 1: Selected Documents from the Files of Muthulakshmi ReddyAppendix 2: The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947; Notes; References; Index
Summary
'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries
