Caste, Gender, and Beauty in Midcentury Telugu Cinema

Within the context of broader postcolonial initiatives this presentation attempts to locate south Indian Brahmin womanhood and clarify how its expressions of both gender and caste became so tightly connected to music and dance, beginning in the 1940s. First, the presentation traces the public and performative expressions of Brahmin womanhood to cinema and radio publics as well as advertising cultures, which installed and equated notions of beauty, gender, and caste. The author highlights the use of media, like songbooks, which featured photographs of singer-actresses alongside film song lyrics, and the implication of such media in establishing both caste hierarchies and racialized understandings of feminine beauty. The author argues that the affective attachments that extended from cinema effectively disenfranchised marginalized caste and hereditary performers because such attachments encouraged socially and economically privileged women—often glossed as “fair” women—to take up dance and music in the name of nation. In turn, this new mechanism functioned to control womanhood and expressions of sexuality by establishing Brahmin culture and aesthetics as unmarked but ideal expressions of womanhood.