For most of its history the dance now called Bharatanatyam was not a stage art. It was sadir, the service of the devadasis, women ritually dedicated to a temple deity who danced before the image, at festivals and in procession, and who held land, income and a hereditary place in the temple economy. The concert repertoire still danced today was largely composed inside that world: the Thanjavur Quartet, four brothers serving the Maratha court of Thanjavur in the early nineteenth century, fixed the margam, the sequence of items that carries a recital from pure rhythm into enacted poetry and out again. From the 1890s the dedication system came under attack, from colonial officials and Indian reformers who saw it as a form of prostitution, and from a nationalist movement that wanted the dance without the dancers.
The Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 ended dedication in the presidency, and the hereditary community lost its institution. What replaced it had already begun: E. Krishna Iyer had campaigned for the dance's respectability from within the reform movement, and Rukmini Devi Arundale, a Theosophist with no hereditary connection to the art, learned it, staged it in 1935, and founded Kalakshetra in 1936 to teach it. The name Bharatanatyam, tying the dance to the ancient Natyashastra rather than to the temple women who had kept it alive, belongs to that remaking. The dance survived by changing hands, and the cost of the survival is still argued.