Dance as Offering to the Temple Deity

Bharatanatyam developed as the classical dance tradition of Tamil Nadu, historically performed within temple ritual by devadasis, women formally dedicated to lifelong temple service whose religious duties included performing dance as an act of worship offered directly to the temple's presiding deity rather than as entertainment staged for a paying or watching public audience, a devotional purpose the dance's highly codified repertoire of gesture, expression and movement, drawing on the ancient Sanskrit treatise the Natya Shastra for much of its theoretical foundation, was originally structured entirely around. The devadasi system that sustained bharatanatyam's temple context for many centuries carried, alongside its genuine religious and artistic dimension, a documented history of exploitation in its later forms, particularly under colonial period conditions, that scholars of South Asian performance history, including Davesh Soneji's closely researched study of devadasi communities in South India, describe honestly as combining authentic religious service with, especially by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, patterns of sexual and economic exploitation that colonial era reform and nationalist movements alike cited, from differing motives, as grounds for ending the system.