The Last Devadasi
By Barbara L. Baer.
The Last Devadasi opens in January 1970 in a convent during a typhoon flooding the
coastal town of Pondicherry, a French protectorate in Madras State. The novel
then moves to a film set at Gemini Studios in the city of Madras (now Chennai);
from there we go to the port area of Georgetown, the colonial-era hotel The
Connemara, and an overgrown compound with cobras in the brush. I wrote Devadasi over
several decades from memory and journal entries I kept during my three years
living in South India. Where I needed to add to the places, people, music,
street noises and smells I remembered, I did research but mostly the story of
four people whose lives cross in Madras came from memory and invention.
When I lived in Madras, I taught English
literature at a woman’s college, but as soon as classes ended, I bicycled to a
thatched roof studio where I studied the traditional dance form of Bharatanatayam with
the greatest South Indian artist of her time, Balaswaraswati. By the time I
became her pupil, the majestic woman had been showered with awards in India and
all over the world, but in her youth, she’d struggled against the stigma of her
birth: Balasaraswati was born into the Devadasi caste.
At the time, I researched the Devadasi caste,
that literally means the servant of the god, a caste that originated in its
South Indian form a thousand years ago when devotees were married to a god and
dedicated to serving him. Devadasis were often the only literate woman,
schooled in sacred learning, singing and dancing, indispensible in ritual
worship. The girls from a young age were also sexual servants, and today, an
even more corrupted form of dedication happens every year when the poorest are
brought to a goddess of fertility until a man claims them.
For the novel, I created a central
character, Kamala Kumari, young and beautiful, a cinema starlet at Gemini
Studios, where, like Bollywood, low-budget musical films are churned out every
year. Even as Kamala has her picture on movie magazine covers, she still feels
compelled to hide her Devadasi caste origins. The characters she loves and
envies, bewitches and betrays, are drawn into her deception. This is The
Last Devadasi, drawn from experience, transformed in my imagination to
emerge as fiction.
The Last Devadasi
Passionate
and forbidden love clashes with tradition and caste in a changing India.
Kamala
Kumari is more than a Gemini Studio starlet: she’s a classical dancer trained
in the age-old line of Devadasis, a caste set in place a thousand years ago
when girls were first dedicated in south Indian temples to serve the gods and
men. From the promise of art and devotion, the sacred dancers fell into the
hands of priests who both exalted and betrayed them. Beautiful, brilliant and
proud, Kamala struggles to escape the old ways, entangling her Indian
assistant, Dutch lover, and his young American wife.
With
its turbulent passions amid social upheavals, The Last Devadasi takes readers
on a sensual feast in the 1970s palm-shaded trading city of Madras.
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Barbara
grew up in California, got her BA and MA at Stanford University before going to
South India to teach, study dance, and have experiences unlike anything in her
American life. She taught in Madras (now Chennai) and Tashkent, Uzbekistan,
then part of the USSR, which gave her the inspiration and voice for her
novella, Grisha the Scrivener.
After a decade of encounters and adventures, she returned to the US, taught at
Dennison University in Granville, Ohio, worked for newspapers, and wrote
fiction and travel pieces.
Barbara L. Baer
In India,
she’d studied and fallen in love with the culture and classical forms of dance,
but in America, her passion for ballet returned. She honed her skills reviewing
classical and contemporary dance for newspapers and periodicals in America and
France. Back in America, she also wrote political pieces and won a national
journalism prize for her reporting on the United Farm Workers. Barbara’s
fiction and non-fiction has often been reprinted in anthologies and she has
spoken on national and regional public radio and on Voice of America about books
as diverse as the life of a dissident Russian to a Soviet Jewish pomegranate
botanist who led her to her own amateur horticulturalism. She helped create
book festivals and started a small press to publish women writers, as well as
one man.
Credits include
fiction in Redbook, New American Review, Confrontation, New
Letters, 34th Paralleland
other publications; non-fiction in Orion
Magazine, The Nation, The Progressive, Narrative, Saisons de la Danse, The Massachusetts Review, Dance Magazine, Persimmon
Tree and more. Her work appears in collections from To Eat with Grace, 100 years of Writing from The Nation, Traveler’s Tales, Wreckage of Reason, America’s Working Women. Her novella, Grisha the Scrivener, was published in
2011.
Barbara has
lived many years in Sonoma County, California, where she writes, edits and
teaches through the county jail program, tends a garden and an orchard of
pomegranates and olives, and is active in environmental and political causes.
She lives with her husband, Michael Morey, also a writer and bricoleur, jack of
all trades, who keeps things going.
