Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
Local Texas communities are using public resources to offer summer camps in Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian temple dance, for girls ages 6 to 11.
The Prosper, Texas, Parks and Recreation department is hosting classes that teach young girls a native Indian dance that the British government banned during colonial rule. Similar programs, taught by the same instructor, are also being held in nearby Plano, according to the Plano Parks and Recreation website.
Parents pay fees, but local taxpayers fund the facilities promotion, staffing overhead, and municipal infrastructure. The Daily Caller investigated the registration fees on the Prosper Parks and Recreation official sign-up portal and found that the camp is no longer publicly listed. However, the department’s official Facebook page still advertises the camp, supposedly running from May 27 to June 25. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
The Plano Parks and Recreation website shows the camp costs $199 for residents and $203 for non-residents, with ten openings remaining.
In case South Indian culture wasn’t a major in college for you: Bharatanatyam traces directly to the devadasi tradition of Tamil Nadu temples. Devadasis means “servants of God.” They were girls dedicated to deities, often before puberty. They performed ritual dances as offerings in temple sanctums, accompanied by music and gestures that conveyed Hindu mythological stories.
Of course, these, devadasis, are romanticized today, and their history has been whitewashed by removing the overtly sexualized content to claim it’s just a form of Hindu devotion. However, British colonial authorities documented and eventually banned the practice after it was discovered that the girls were entangled in a system where temple priests and local rulers hid behind patronage to trap these girls into being concubines or prostitutes.
The question becomes, why are public departments, which are funded through American taxpayers, promoting niche pagan cultural imports? Taxpayers fund parks, police, libraries, and now apparently ‘Intro to South Indian Temple Prostitution 101.’
Public funding for Bharatanatyam effectively subsidizes diaspora identity maintenance rather than encouraging assimilation into American norms. But this is the point. Elected officials and pro-immigration hawks used to claim that bringing in a large number of foreign-born populations wouldn’t affect American culture because they would assimilate. When that became impossible to prove, they argued these populations enriched American society.
Once we stopped requiring immigrants to assimilate into American culture, our close-knit communities turned into low-trust silos, where each demographic hunkers down into its personal cultural enclave. The unity that drives the American spirit is lost and replaced by a fragmented population with little to no community buy-in. (ROOKE: American Colleges Have A New Slogan: Foreigners First)
Healthy societies demand cultural assimilation from foreign immigrants. It’s actually very pro-humanist. It maximizes human flourishing by sustaining high-trust environments in which communities thrive.
American taxpayers in a majority-American suburb should not be financing the transmission of South Indian Hindu temple culture, whitewashed or not.
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