Bharatanatyam

Bharatanatyam developed as the classical dance tradition of Tamil Nadu, historically performed within temple ritual by devadasis, women formally dedicated to lifelong temple service whose religious duties included performing dance as an act of worship offered directly to the temple's presiding deity rather than as entertainment staged for a paying or watching public audience, a devotional purpose the dance's highly codified repertoire of gesture, expression and movement, drawing on the ancient Sanskrit treatise the Natya Shastra for much of its theoretical foundation, was originally structured entirely around. The devadasi system that sustained bharatanatyam's temple context for many centuries carried, alongside its genuine religious and artistic dimension, a documented history of exploitation in its later forms, particularly under colonial period conditions, that scholars of South Asian performance history, including Davesh Soneji's closely researched study of devadasi communities in South India, describe honestly as combining authentic religious service with, especially by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, patterns of sexual and economic exploitation that colonial era reform and nationalist movements alike cited, from differing motives, as grounds for ending the system.

Colonial and early independence era reform campaigns led to formal legal abolition of the devadasi system, most comprehensively through legislation such as the Karnataka Devadasis (Prohibition of Dedication) Act of 1982, which criminalised the practice of dedicating girls and women to temple service in the form the historical system had taken, ending the institutional structure that had sustained bharatanatyam's temple context for centuries.

In parallel with and partly ahead of this legal abolition, a deliberate cultural revival movement from the early twentieth century, associated particularly with figures such as Rukmini Devi Arundale, reconstructed and repositioned bharatanatyam as a respectable, formally taught concert and stage art suitable for performance by dancers from any background, largely severed from the devadasi temple system's religious institutional structure even as the dance retained, and continues to retain, substantial explicitly devotional and religious content and repertoire within its performances. Bharatanatyam today exists as a major, internationally taught and performed Indian classical dance form, its historical devadasi origins and the honest complexity of that history increasingly discussed openly within contemporary scholarship and performance communities rather than left unaddressed, even as the dance itself continues to be understood by most practitioners and audiences as carrying genuine devotional and religious meaning.