Tracing Gender and Sexual Political Evolution through Classical Music

This project undertakes a large-scale philological and archival study of South Indian Carnatic classical music to trace the evolution of gender and sexual politics from 1965 to the present. The research investigates how micro-level lyrical variations within staged performances of canonical compositions reflect macro-level shifts in social and political attitudes towards gender and sexuality. Each of these songs investigated, exhibit significant variations in their Charanam (thematic verse), which alter the agency attributed to femme deities (be it cis or trans) within the narrative. The core methodology involves the systematic collection and analysis of a corpus of publicly available audio and video recordings of these songs. A critical listening protocol is used to identify, transcribe, and categorize lyrical anomalies and substitutions. The songs’ in consideration are composed in Sanskrit or Kannada.