"Kalaimani's Thillana Mohanambal was one of the most popular Tamil novels of the 1950's, and was made into a popular film in 1968.  TM's plot charts the course of love and artistic competition between 'Thillana' Mohanambal, a devadasi dancer from Tiruvarur, and nagasvaram player Sikkil Shanmugasundaram.  However, Kalaimani's principal aim was to reconstruct for his readers the culture of sadir (later Bharata Natyam) dance and the periya melam (nagasvaram) in late 19th- and early 20th-century Tamilnadu, and especially in the Kaveri delta.  TM owed its popularity mainly to the author's success in evoking for mid-20th-century Tamil readers a past that epitomized for them the indigenous classical tradition of the performing arts.  In this talk I show that Kalaimani presents a historical vision of the periya and chinna melam traditions that places the hereditary performer communities at the center, offers a reconstruction of the repertoire of these communities, and shows how the artists & art was accessible to and appreciated by a much wider public than the one created by the Madras-based commercial concert culture." 

Indira Viswanathan Peterson has a B.A. in English Literature from Bombay University, and M.A and Ph.D. degrees in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University.  She specializes in Indian literature in Sanskrit and Tamil, Hinduism, South Indian cultural history and Indian classical music. Formerly Professor of Asian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, Indira Peterson is Professor of Sanskrit and Indian literature in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.   

Her publications include:   
Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), a translation and study of early Tamil devotional poems (6th - 8th c. A.D); and Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi  (State University of New York Press, 2003), on the court epic (mahakavya) genre of classical Sanskrit poetry.