Harshita Mruthinti Kamath - Sanitizing the Erotic: Sex and the Telugu Padam

Focusing on the short lyrical songs (padams) attributed to the seventeenth-century poet Kṣetrayya, this talk traces the transforming discourses on the erotic (śṛṅgāra) in Telugu South India. The Telugu padams attributed to Kṣetrayya feature intimate scenes of sex between a woman and her divine lover Muvva Gopāla, a regional form of the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa. The courtesan women who historically danced these songs in temple, courtly, and social contexts were eventually proscribed from performance under colonial and post-colonial legal reform due to their perceived sexual deviance. Just as the courtesan body was erased from performance, the overt eroticism of the Telugu padam was reimagined in a sanitized devotional frame through the figure of the brahmin male poet and the allegorical exegeses of modern commentators. Through the case study of the Telugu padam, I trace a genealogy of the erotic to speak to the broader story of sex in South India. About the Speaker: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University. Her research focuses on textual and performance traditions of the South Indian language of Telugu. Dr. Kamath’s first monograph, "Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance"  (2019), traces themes of gender, caste, and power in the South Indian dance form of Kuchipudi. Dr. Kamath’s next book, "Sanitizing the Erotic: Sex and Devotion in South India", traces the relationship between eroticism (śṛṅgāra) and devotion (bhakti) in the short lyrical poems of the Telugu poets Tāḷḷapaka Annamayya (ca. fifteenth century) and Kṣetrayya (ca. seventeenth century).