Performing Respectability: The Berav, Middle-Class Nationalism, and the Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Among the traditional Kandyan dancers of Sri Lanka, a story circulates about the son of Nittawela Gunaya, the nation's most renowned traditional dancer of the 1940s and 1950s. After Gunaya's death, it is said, the son destroyed all evidence of his father's profession, even burning, in an act of desecration, his most prized possession, the sacred ves headdress that had been conferred on Gunaya at his initiation ceremony. Dancers recount this story to illustrate the shame and the suffering that even the most publicly esteemed of traditional dancers have experienced for more than 50 years. For even as their aesthetic legacy, the Kandyan dance, has been elevated as a national symbol of Sri Lanka, the traditional dancers and their families have increasingly become marginalized within the sphere of national public culture. At least, this is part of the story. Another part of the story is that, for over four decades, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the traditional dancers from the berava (drummer) caste of Kandy largely dominated the field of dance teaching, the only viable profession for dancers in Sri Lanka. During this period the dance was transformed from a ritual to a stage practice, and participation in the dance expanded from a small number of initiated berava dancers to virtually all of the schoolchildren of Sri Lanka's majority ethnic group, the Sinhalas. Since the 1950s the state has been the key patron of Kandyan dance, incorporating it into the school curriculum, sponsoring dance tours abroad, funding numerous national dance troupes (including those of the army and police), and establishing a variety of aesthetic teacher training institutes. Although the berava have often suffered from caste and class discrimination, the elevation of their practice to national status has also provided some space for social mobility and redefinition. Relationships between nation-states and subaltern groups have become a cynosure for understanding the experiential meanings of nationalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In South Asia, particularly for India, there is a