Hari Krishnan’s Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam traces the shared histories of Bharatanatyam and early Tamil cinema, two significant South Indian modern cultural practices. He argues that the development of both forms in the early and mid-twentieth centuries was owed to the free-flowing exchange of dancing bodies, choreographers, aesthetics, technique, and repertoire between the stage and the screen. Calling this interface “interocular and intermedial,” Krishnan looks beyond mere acts of representation in these medias, to focus on how social artistic networks, affective inclinations of audiences’ and performers’ lived identities, shaped the dissemination and consumption of the reinvented Bharatanatyam on the stage and in cinema (2–3). Celluloid Classicism is an original and highly systematized historical reconstruction anchored through life anecdotes, choreographic and dance text analyses, and extensive archival material such as film posters, advertisements in film magazines, screenshots, and songbooks (featuring stills from the film and details of the songs). The book is structured precisely, leading the reader through a linear and chronological evolution of “cinematic and stage versions of Bharatanatyam” (152). The first three chapters discuss the politics of staging a nationalist classical dance form through the migration of hereditary devadāsı ̄ temple dancers and the middle-class Brahmin women. The fourth chapter examines the performative careers of selected male dance teachers, and the last chapter provides an engaging discussion of how Bharatanatyam’s repertoire was hybridized and augmented in the stage-screen dialogue. The coda is an interesting reaffirmation of the continuing visible exchange of Bharatanatyam’s idiom between television and cinema. Krishnan leads us into the yesteryears of Bharatanatyam in Tamil cinema, through evocative and emphatic narratives. His work compels readers to engage with the appropriative model of dance revival that unfolded simultaneously in the cinema. His discussion, for example, of a hagiographic account that cast the hereditary courtesan T. R. Rajakumari to retrieve and reclaim the once devotional and pious identity of the devadāsı ̄ is a moving iteration of how cinematic representations significantly contributed to the devadāsı ̄ defamation. Several such accounts, including an analysis of the namesake film Devadasi (1948), showcased a devadāsı ̄ dancer-actress as the eternal temptress duping the hero (39–40). Although the Tamil drama and cinema harbored the deformed devadāsı ̄ and her traditional repertoire, these were also sites that exploited her cultural labor to dehumanize her lived and performed identity. A commentary of how the new middle-class Brahmin Bharatanatyam representative in cinema conveniently inhabited the role of the righteous wife in didactic narratives that emphasized the immorality of the devadāsı ̄ community and ultimately portrayed the next generation devadāsı ̄ women such as Jyothilakshmi and Jayamalini as “item dancers,” is visceral (70). Through such hitherto uncovered archival evidence, Krishnan astutely makes his case that these sociopolitical maneuvers centralized the devadāsıs̄ in the discourse of “degeneration of Bharatanatyam through cinema” (72). Although Krishnan’s inquiry of the caste and class-based history of cinema dance, and its prescriptive notions of female morality, is unprecedented, perhaps the author’s more significant intervention comes in the conceptual discussion of Bharatanatyam’s classicality. In the “aspirational aesthetics of Bharatanatyam,” Krishnan explores how the classical in Bharatanatyam was made popular through the cinema (152). In the most pragmatic and unimposing ways, the book explores the idea of classicism that has historically policed the practice, performance, and scholarship of Indian dance. Whereas the anti-colonial, elite cultural nationalists situated Bharatanatyam’s classicism in antique tradition and Pan-Indian Sanskrit texts, Krishan argues that it was cinema’s

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赛璐珞古典主义：早期的泰米尔电影和现代婆罗门的制作，哈里·克里希南（Hari Krishnan）。2019. 康涅狄格州米德尔敦：卫斯理大学出版社。335 页，126 幅插图。27.95 美元的纸张。国际标准书号：9780819578877

Hari Krishnan 的赛璐珞古典主义：早期泰米尔电影和现代婆罗多电影的制作追溯了婆罗多电影和早期泰米尔电影的共同历史，这两种重要的南印度现代文化实践。他认为，这两种形式在 20 世纪早期和中期的发展都归功于舞台和银幕之间舞蹈体、编舞、美学、技术和曲目的自由交流。克里希南将这个界面称为“眼间和中介”，他不仅关注这些媒体中的单纯表现行为，还关注社会艺术网络、观众和表演者的生活身份的情感倾向如何塑造了重新发明的婆罗多舞的传播和消费。舞台和电影院（2-3）。赛璐珞古典主义是通过生活轶事、舞蹈和舞蹈文本分析以及电影海报、电影杂志广告、屏幕截图和歌曲集等大量档案材料（包括电影剧照和歌曲细节）进行的原创且高度系统化的历史重建）。这本书结构精确，引导读者通过“Bharatanatyam 的电影和舞台版本”（152）的线性和时间顺序演变。前三章讨论了通过世袭的 devadāsı ̄ 寺庙舞者和中产阶级婆罗门妇女的迁移来上演民族主义古典舞蹈形式的政治。第四章考察了选定的男舞蹈教师的表演生涯，最后一章提供了一个引人入胜的讨论，讨论了 Bharatanatyam 的曲目如何在舞台屏幕对话中混合和增强。结尾是对婆罗多语的成语在电视和电影之间持续可见的交流的有趣重申。克里希南通过令人回味和强调的叙述将我们带入泰米尔电影中的婆罗多安的过去。他的作品迫使读者参与在电影中同时展开的舞蹈复兴的专有模式。例如，他讨论了一个传世名妓 TR Rajakumari 以找回和恢复 devadāsı̄ 曾经虔诚和虔诚的身份的圣徒记述的讨论，这是对电影表现如何显着促进 devadāsı̄ 诽谤的动人迭代。几个这样的帐户，包括对同名电影 Devadasi (1948) 的分析，展示了一个 devadāsı̄ 舞者兼女演员作为永恒的诱惑者欺骗了英雄 (39-40)。尽管泰米尔戏剧和电影包含了畸形的 devadāsı ̄ 和她的传统剧目，但这些也是利用她的文化劳动来使她的生活和表演身份失去人性的场所。对电影中新的中产阶级婆罗门婆罗塔那提姆代表如何在强调 devadāsı ̄ 社区的不道德的说教叙事中方便地扮演正义妻子的角色的评论，并最终将下一代 devadāsı ̄ 女性（如 Jyothilakshmi 和 Jayamalini）描绘成“ item dancers，”是发自内心的（70）。通过这些迄今未发现的档案证据，克里希南敏锐地论证了这些社会政治策略将 devadāsıs̄ 集中在“通过电影使婆罗多的堕落”（72）的话语中。尽管克里希南对电影舞蹈的种姓和阶级历史及其对女性道德的规范性概念的探究是史无前例的，但也许作者更重要的干预来自对婆罗多舞经典性的概念讨论。在“Bharatanatyam 的理想美学”中，Krishnan 探讨了 Bharatanatyam 的经典作品是如何通过电影而流行起来的（152）。这本书以最务实、最朴素的方式探讨了古典主义的思想，这种思想在历史上一直监督着印度舞蹈的实践、表演和学术研究。而反殖民主义，