Public Women in British India: Icons and the Urban Stage [1° ed.] 1138282553, 9781138282551

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PUBLIC WOMEN IN BRITISH INDIA

This book foregrounds the subjectivity of ‘acting women’ amidst violent debates on femininity and education, livelihood and labour, sexuality and marriage. It looks at the emergence of the stage actress as an artist and an ideological construct at critical phases of performance practice in British India. The focus here is on Calcutta, considered the ‘second city of the Empire’ and a nodal point in global trade circuits. Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time. This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining performance studies with literary history and art practices within a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and performance studies, history and gender studies. Rimli Bhattacharya currently teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. She has trained in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur and Brown Universities and has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of Pennsylvania and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has collaborated with artists and filmmakers on multimedia projects and has published on critical areas in gender and performance, children’s literature and primary education. Her corpus of classic translations from Bangla into English includes novels by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. She is the author of the key text Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’ (1998) and The Dancing Poet: Rabindranath Tagore and Choreographies of Participation (forthcoming).

Like to a woman’s youth is your pride: . . . Little did you know the ways of this wily world!

From the poem ‘Kusum o Bhramar’ (The blossom and the honey bee) by Tarasundari Dasi, Saurabh, 1895.

Teenkari Dasi (1870–1925) and Narisundari (1877–1939) Source: Author’s Collection

PUBLIC WOMEN IN BRITISH INDIA Icons and the Urban Stage

Rimli Bhattacharya

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Rimli Bhattacharya The right of Rimli Bhattacharya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-28255-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50718-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my guardian angels Henning and Runupishi

CONTENTS

List of figuresviii Prefacexi Acknowledgementsxiv Note on transliteration and translationxix Introduction

1

1 Genealogies: or, what’s in a name?

52

2 Benediction in performance: playing the saint and meeting the saint: 1880s–90s

102

3 Counter seductions: and metropolitan dysfunction

154

4 The ‘female’ confessional voice: actress-stories as captivating copy

191

5 ‘A strange meeting’ at the Star Theatre, 1912: mourning on stage

240

Postscript

291

Appendix328 Select bibliography336 Index339

vii

FIGURES

0.1 I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4 I.5 I.6 I.7 I.8 I.9 1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 2.2

Entrance to the Calcutta Town Hall, 2017 xiii Binodini Dasi as Bankimchandra’s heroine ‘Ayesha’ 2 Advertisement, Statesman & FOI, Calcutta, 4 August 1883 8 ‘Gayasurer Haripadapadmalabh Geetabhinay’/‘At the lotus feet of Hari!’, a musical play 8 One of the first Calcutta schools where students performed Shakespeare in their ‘Oriental Theatre’ in the 1850s 16 Real and imagined . . . matchbox label, c. 1920 27 A medley of genres in a bilingual playbill, 1894 28 St John’s Church, foundation stone laid by Warren Hastings in 1784, built in 1787 37 Minerva Theatre, Calcutta, inaugurated in 1893 with Girishchandra’s rendering of Macbeth48 The actress as the model, early 20th century 51 Annette Ackroyd with students of the Hindu Mahila Bidyalaya, 1875. Visiting Unitarian Annette A. Beveridge (1842–1929) established the school in 1873 with support from a progressive group of Brahmos 63 ‘Merry performance by fair sex only’ 70 Interior of ‘Emerald Bower’, c. 1920 71 Rabindranath Tagore at a rehearsal, 1930s 72 Bilingual playbill for The Wily Woman, 19 October 189584 Binodini Dasi with Saratchandra Sinha 93 My ticket for Bina Dasgupta’s Nati Binodini, 27 June 1991 108 Bina Dasgupta as Binodini playing Chaitanya in Nati Binodini, dir. Bina Dasgupta, produced by Surangana, 1991 110 viii

F igures

2.3 2.4

Jatra agency in Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 117 Kalo Sindur (Black mark of marriage), a jatra book cover141 2.5 Advertisements for jatra, Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 143 2.6 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 1: Six-armed Chaitanya as a composite of Radha and Krishna in tribhanga, dance pose of three angles 144 2.7 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 2 144 2.8 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 3 145 3.1 A letter from ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’, Majlis, 1890 155 3.2 Inner and outer spaces: Madhabi Mukherjee in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, 1964 158 3.3 ‘Can’t even shut the door when he’s lighting the fire!’ 164 3.4 ‘Manbhanjan’ in a new frame? 165 3.5 The charms of the metropolis 174 3.6 The Charms of an Actress, Advertisement, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1914 185 4.1 First performance of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan by the National Theatre company held in this residence, Jorasanko, on 7 December 1872 192 4.2 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925 194 4.3 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925 195 4.4a Mahakabi Girishchandra/‘Girishchandra the great Poet’200 4.4b Girishchandra Ghosh’s signature 201 4.5 Kalighat drawing of a sundari, c. 1870–1880 208 4.6 Problematising Binodini 218 4.7 Sarah Bernhardt in a Bengali theatre magazine, 1926 223 4.8 Pandit Ramnarayan Tarkaratna 226 4.9 The ‘accomplishment curriculum’, Pravasi, 1311 BS/1904, p. 13 233 4.10 ‘The harbinger of spring’ 234 4.11 ‘Entertainment worth ten rupees’ 235 5.1 Interior of Town Hall, Calcutta, 2017 241 5.2 ‘Won’t leave a stone unturned!’ 249 5.3 A girl and a woman: ‘Srimati Giribala and Kiran’ 258 5.4 Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 282 P.1 Sukumari as Bankimchandra’s enigmatic ‘Motibibi’ 295 P.2 Rani in the role of ‘Poriar’ in Maner Moton (As I wish) 297 P.3 Tarasundari as ‘Razia’ Sultana, first produced in 1902 299 P.4 Binodini cross-dressed in Upendranath Das’s Sarat-Sarojini306 P.5 Binodini Dasi, Amar Katha/My Story, 1912, p. 110 317 ix

F igures

P.6 P.7 P.8

Condensed images of popular 19th-century woodcut illustrations of Vidya-Sundar320 Cover, Natya-mandir, 1910 321 Within and without . . . 322

x

PREFACE

More than two decades ago I found myself in the precincts of the Lingaraj temple in Bhubhaneswar. I had only the name of a house, ‘Rakhal Kunjo’, and a cryptic address, ‘backside of Bhubaneswar mandir’, as a key to trace the daughter of Tarasundari Dasi (1879–1948), one of Bengali public theatre’s legendary actresses. Leaving behind the curious looks of the regulars hovering around the cluster of shops that surround temples, I moved slowly towards ‘the backside’, where the residential houses were laid out. For quite a while on that hot afternoon, I walked along dusty empty streets, asking the rare passerby, until someone pointed to a board announcing a music school. Was this the house, I asked the sharp-looking middleaged woman standing at the gate. I was briskly quizzed as I stood on the other side of the gate and even asked to sing a song before I was invited in. Yes, this was Tarasundari’s house: ‘Rakhal-kunjo’ was the name of the temple dedicated to Krishna, adjacent to the house proper. And yes, she admitted a little later, the lady before me was Tarasundari’s daughter. Her name was Prativa Devi, Prativa Khanna. Many before me had made that trek from Calcutta in the interests of ‘research’ (the word was uttered rather scornfully) and had turned words into print. Her actress mother appeared as patita (fallen woman) still, in print. What did I want? There was nothing left of her mother’s material legacy excepting for a photograph. She pointed to a huge framed photo that hung high on a facing wall in the high ceilinged room where I now sat. But why, I wanted to ask. Was she not proud of her mother’s talents, her fame? I have never been able to write up for publication even the gist of my conversations with Prativa Devi that took place during the two days and two nights I spent in her home. She had insisted that I stay with her and not in the newer part of Bhubaneswar where a kind family xi

P reface

was hosting me. (They were alarmed when I said I was moving into an unknown woman’s house, in the interests of ‘research’.) She rebuked me for not having brought a tape recorder and laughed somewhat disbelievingly when I said that I hadn’t, because many of those I had been interviewing in the past few years felt uncomfortable when they saw the machine before them. It’s true the ‘portable’ recorder I had then was rather unwieldy. Over the next few days, during the day, and sometimes late at night, she spoke of her father, director and playwright Apareshchandra Mukhopadhya (1876–1934), her own struggles and aspirations in education, in music, her family and memories of her actress-mother. She persisted in calling me ‘Liril’ and was pleased when she found I was not outraged at the twist to my name. Why do I evoke this meeting if I am finally to be silent about everything that transpired during those few days? Perhaps because it brought to me an intense realisation of the pain that the actress and her daughter endured for generations when, despite the pride and passion of their profession, whether acting, singing or dancing, there was always a stigma insinuated, even by those claiming to be modern researchers. In the midst of domestic chores, of cooking and cleaning, offering seva in ‘Rakhal Kunjo’, looking after her son’s family when they arrived on an evening visit and bouts of scolding me, two moments of all that was narrated to me must be synoptically narrated now, decades later: Tarasundari as a girl bathing in a North Calcutta pukur (pushkarini) or ‘tank’ as the British called them, where Binodini, already inducted into the theatre world, would also come to bathe. The two become friends and Binodini initiates Tarasundari into the theatre, and she in turn, initiates others. . . . Prativa, then a school girl, coming home one afternoon to find her mother Tarasundari setting fire to papers and other memorabilia. I saw my mother burn up everything related to her theatre days, said the daughter to me; there is nothing left. Two girl-women sharing a dip in the same pukur in the metropolis of Calcutta, immersing themselves in rehearsals in the city’s burgeoning public theatres, being mentored and monitored by educated rich disgruntled wayward passionate (whatever) babus and mentoring new aspirants in turn; their loves, lawsuits, contracts and rivalries, the highs xii

P reface

Figure 0.1  Entrance to the Calcutta Town Hall, 2017 Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

and lows of performance, negotiating literature outside of formal education, reading their parts and of knowledge that enters the senses and the sinews, bones and muscles – ‘sensuously immersed knowledge’. Writing poetry, some self-published, others in theatre magazines of a later era, daring to publish an autobiography . . . Tarasundari, many decades later, playing the same roles that had made Binodini famous. And Tarasundari, blazing the trail of other roles – ‘Mata Banga Bhasha’ and Lady Macbeth and Jona and Ramanuj and Shaiba and Rizia and Vasantasena and Medea and Razia and Lakshmibai and Udipuri Begum and Desdemona and . . . The loss of a beloved son. The years in between. The return to the stage after a retirement. Afternoon tea with the sannyasins of the nearby Ramakrishna Math, also newly established. The ground in between, then a veritable jungle. These are signs, multivalent and ambivalent, that have found form in the essays of this book.

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study germinated in the 1990s when I took upon myself the task of translating stage actress Binodini Dasi’s autobiographical narratives from Bangla to English: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’. Something of the dense history of performance traditions and of the women who became professionals of the proscenium stage in Bengal informed the introduction and afterword to my translation of Binodini’s works. To her and her fellow performers I owe most. The ‘Binodini Book’ (1998) has had an afterlife, excerpted in anthologies and prescribed as course readings, also appearing as the superscript and subtitles respectively for Amal Allana’s production of Nati Binodini (2006) and Tuhinabha Majumdar’s film, Aamar Katha: Story of Binodini (2015). The first seed of the present book was presented as ‘A Discourse of Redemption: An Actress and the Public Theatre’ in the Department of South Asian Studies, University of Chicago in April 1993 during my tenure as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University. It was published as ‘Redemption of the “Nati” ’, Institute for Culture and Consciousness: Occasional Papers I, S. Rudolph et al. (eds), University of Chicago, December 1993. Through the 1990s, ongoing research was presented at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the Women’s Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta; at a panel at the Annual South Asian Conference at University of Madison, Wisconsin (thanks to Katherine Hansen); and in the course of lectures at Brown University (thanks to Meera Visvanathan), Columbia University and the University of Konstanz (thanks to Frans Plank). Different sections of the present Chapter 5 were presented at the University of Hawaii at Manoa during my tenure as a Rama Watamull Distinguished Indian Scholar in 2000 and as Visiting Chair at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. My warm thanks to all who responded to these presentations.

xiv

A cknowledgements

In particular, the responses of Jasodhara Bagchi, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Arindam Chakrabarti, Helga Druxes, Mary Hancock, Loren Kruger and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan contributed to the first stage of the work. Anjum Katyal and Naveen Kishore at Seagull nurtured my writings on performance practices for many years, as did Anuradha Roy a proposed book on anti-theatrical diatribe from different regions of India; the urgings of Sibaji Bandopadhyay, Arindam Chakrabarti, Vrinda Dalmia, Amiya Dev and Asok Sen notwithstanding, it has taken me over 20 years to knead versions of manuscript into book. I am grateful for permission to use the following publications, which have been substantially revised and expanded for three chapters of this book: ‘Actress Stories and the ‘Female’ Confessional Voice in Bengali Theatre Magazines, 1910–25’ in Seagull Theatre Quarterly, No. 5, May 1995 (Chapter 4); ‘Benediction in Performance: Reverberations of Chaitanya Lila from the 1880s’ in Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, No. 33, 1995–96 (Chapter 2); and ‘Ekti bichitra sabhar kahini’ (The Story of a Strange Meeting), Baromas, Annual 1995 and ‘Notes on “A Strange Meeting” (Bichitra Sabha): Calcutta’ in Roma Chatterji (ed.), Indian Folklife, Vol. 3, No. 17, October 2004 (Chapter 5). A veritable army of practitioners and writers, hack and highbrow, have enriched theatre history with biographies, anecdotes, reviews, timely interviews and invaluable catalogues, showing every now and then a wonderful awareness of the entire field of performance. Little magazines, theatre groups and their journals, state-supported seminars and journals and a host of amateur ‘delvers’ have contributed in scholarly and idiosyncratic ways. I gratefully acknowledge the generations who have contributed to the making of the archives of Bengali theatre. One hopes that the sheer density of this material (even when uneven and some of it recycled) and the possible worlds it opens up in the electronic era will inspire a future generation of researchers. It has been distressing though to witness in the last few decades a trend towards canninbalising critical material without any attribution to the source. In re-publication in English for a wider audience, selected chunks, terminologies or critical templates are juxtaposed with exactly that right international name in the right place, no matter the connection, for transnational audiences. If it is ethically unacceptable, it seems to be quite acceptable, institutionally, globally. Surely the protocols of historiography require that we acknowledge lineages – past and

xv

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contemporary, including those which need to be challenged, critiqued or displaced. To all from whom I have been learning – far too many to list – and from whom I shall pillage, plunder and continue to learn, Salut! Salaam! The bulk of the archival research was done through the 1990s when I chose to be an independent scholar and to immerse myself in the performance histories of Bengal and Maharashtra. Funds for research and travel during this period came through grants and fellowships from the Indian Council for Social Science Research, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Fellowship at the Institute for Culture and Consciousness, University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellowship from the Ministry of Human Resources Development, India. Research on visual materials was made possible with support from the Ford Foundation, the Nehru Trust and a British Council Visitorship. The Ford Foundation grant came at a time of financial crisis, and Anmol Vellani’s faith in the larger project inspired me to extend my horizons. For making my London visits during the 1990s productive, intellectually and otherwise, I remember Ranjana S. Ashe, Indrani Chatterjee, Aditya Behl, Dipali Ghosh, James Nye, Divia Patel, Alessandra Iyer and Deborah Swallow; as also the Raha family. Above all, Jean Thompson who made every visit so special. Thanks are due to the staff at the following institutions for permission to study and reproduce materials: Sahitya Akademi and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, the National Library (particularly the Rare Book Section), Baghbazar Reading Room, Natya Shodh Sansthan, Sandeep Banerjee and Jayanta Dasgupta of the Statesman archives in Calcutta; the India Office Library, the Theatre Museum, the British Museum, Newspaper Library at Colindale and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and, not the least, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. I am indebted to all who assisted in reference work and documentation of archival material (in Bangla, English and Marathi) through these decades: Dilip Arinda, Urmila Bhirkdikar, Ramratan Chatterjee, Kaushik Dutta-Gupta, Swapan Ghosh and Tapan Samajdar through the 1990s, and most recently, Paromita Patranobish, Arunima Chakravarty and Himanshi Sharma. Thanks also to Prachee Dewri and Garima Rai for helping me sift through material. Most of the visual material used for research and reproduction in this book was identified and collated in the 1990s from the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat and Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta, the RabindraBharati Archives in Santiniketan, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the India Office Library and the Theatre Museum in London. Fresh xvi

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visuals have been added from many of these earlier sources as well as from the Archives of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) and the Town Hall Library. I particularly wish to thank Pratibha Agarwal and Gitashri De at Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta, and Kamalika Mukherjee at CSSSC for graciously fulfilling my many requests. Moinak Biswas, Tithi Chanda, Tuhinabha Majumdar and Vivan Sundaram have responded to my calls for help most generously; Hilal Ahmad Khan worked meticulously to transform many of the images in accordance with my vision. The book has gained a different dimension with the photographic insights of Sanchita Bhattacharyya, who devoted scorching afternoons to scouring parts of Calcutta with me and coming up with some wonderful compositions. Her commitment is exemplary. Kumar Shahani has untiringly helped me realise something of my dream of images being able to evoke and generate new narratives – new itihas. Special thanks to my editors at Routledge, Shoma Choudhury and Aakash Chakrabarty for their warm support. For their generous friendship through various phases of my life, I remember specially Ramakant and Saroj Agnihotri, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Jiji and Bhaskar Bhattacharji, Jackie (Devaki) Bhaya, Toto (Sanghamitra) Bose, Amlan Dasgupta, Geeta Kapur, Ayesha Kidwai, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Kavita Panjabi, Frans Plank, Rahul Roy, Debjani Sengupta, Vivan Sundaram and M. Vijaylakshmi, and many, many others who I will have to name elsewhere. My colleagues at CSSSC, during the two happy years I spent there, 2014–2016, have been marvellous in numerous ways. Were it not for Lakshmi Subramanian’s robust reminders and sustained support I would neither have returned to this project nor written up new chapters. My father, Prasanta Kumar Bhattacharya, initiated my involvement in performance practice and history, encouraging too, those hearty puffs I exhaled as a young loafer in a stage adaptation of Rajshekhar Basu, aka Parashuram’s short story, Rata-rati (Overnight). I deeply regret that I could not publish this book during his lifetime. I am happy my mother, Bratati Bhattacharya will finally see this in print. My brother, Tata, Soumitra Bhattacharya, provided me with an independent retreat in Calcutta for many years of work – a time and space I shall always cherish. My sister Jiji has given me sustenance, aided by the gumbad at Lodhi Gardens. The book is dedicated to Runipishi – Saraswati-Athena, Aditi Lahiri – and the super-caring Henning Reetz. They have been by my xvii

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side for almost a lifetime in innumerable locations and locales across continents. To Kumar Shahani who has reason to believe that I never know when to put a stop to my writing, I can only ask why he continues to nurture my folly with all the navarasas. Dilli, July 2017

xviii

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

Proper names have been standardised partly because of immense variations in the printed sources; the first name is often condensed: thus, Girishchandra Ghosh, not Girish Chunder Ghose. Usually, the spelling favoured by the individual actor or dramatist has been privileged over others: thus, Amarendranath Dutt, not Dutta. Actresses rarely came with a surname, and as discussed in Chapter 1, Dasi or Devi was added according to class/caste, the conventions changing over time. Their names were spelt variously in newspaper advertisements and reviews, handbills and posters, and, at the turn of the century, on gramophone records: for example, Harisundari Dasi/ Harrisundary/Hurry Sundary Dassy. I have frequently referred to literary figures and theatre people by their first names (Bankimchandra or Rabindranath) rather than their last names, following the South Asian literary convention and to avoid confusing the reader: Chattopadhyay abounds as a last name, and far too many Tagores were involved in theatrical activities. I have retained the colonial versions of place names, as in Calcutta not Kolkata, Bombay not Mumbai and so forth, for consistency and in deference to the subject of the book. In citing from any secondary material in English, I have retained the spelling of proper names as they appear in the particular source. In the case of excerpts from memoirs, biographies, contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles and reviews in Bangla, my English translations closely follow the punctuation, and where possible, the syntax of the original text. English words, when they appear in the original, have been italicised or otherwise indicated. The Sanskrit pronunciation has been favoured and reflected in the English orthography over the Bangla where words have a panIndian resonance: ‘vaishnav’ rather than ‘baishnob’; ‘shikshita’ over ‘shikkhita’; and with some titles of Bengali texts: Vidya-Sundar over xix

N ote on transliteration and translation

Bidya-Sundar and so on. However, the pronunciation of Bengali proper nouns in names of plays, have been retained; for example, Sitar Bibah, Ramer Bonobas. Italics have been used for aesthetic or philosophical terms such as bhava, dharma, moh, maya and dharma the first time they appear, and glossed in context, as they are central to the arguments of each chapter. It is hoped that a composite continuum of such keywords, with shifts over time, will emerge in the course of the interlinked chapters of this book and contribute to a new historiography of theatre Italics have also been used for theatre terminology and genres when they first appear, such as geetabhinay, geetinatya, jatra, panchrang, sangeet-natak and tamasha. I have retained the original spelling of Anglo-Indian terms such as ‘nautch’ or ‘nautee’ when used in a citation, but elsewhere referred to ‘Nati Binodini’, for example. Names of plays and other literary texts have been standardised, as contemporary references use a range of spellings for the same text. Unless specified, dates following the titles are of the year of publication, rather than of performance. The book draws heavily on primary sources in Bangla, particularly from periodical literature where dates are in the Bengali era, Bangyia Shatabdi (BS). These have been retained in the references; the equivalent year of the Georgian calendar follows. A rough English translation of the title of books and articles has been provided in the notes following each chapter and/or glossed within the chapters. All translations from Bangla and Hindi, except when otherwise mentioned, are my own.

xx

INTRODUCTION

Dramatic production in Bengal gives the tone to the North-Indian theatre. —Sylvain Levi, ‘Contemporary Theatre in Aryan India’1 Nor were any native woman present except the Nautch dancers, as these have lost their caste. —Frederick William Gaisberg, Diaries2

The body of the ‘female actor’ ‘The female actors however carried off the palm . . . the actresses well deserved the repeated applause with which the audience testified their approval.’ So went the 7 January 1874 review of a stage adaptation of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, Durgeshnandini (1865).3 The compound ‘female actor’ in this English language review of the Bangla play in the Indian Daily News captures the anxiety and excitement of a transitional era. The use of the term in this instance is ambivalent, with some of the first-generation actresses – Golap, Jagattarini and Elokeshi – playing the female roles. When the play had been staged on 20 December 1873 at least one major role, that of Princess Ayesha, was played by a man, Chandranath Chattopadhyay, who does not resurface in theatrical history.4 Within a year, such a mixed cast would be considered untenable in Bengali theatre. The actress had come to stay, and stars like Binodini Dasi (1863–1941) would make ‘Ayesha’ one of her signature roles. Significantly, numerous other performance forms with boys or men playing the female parts would continue to thrive. Jatra, that ubiquitous and shapeshifting form, popular in rural as well as urban centres of Bengal, did very well without women until the 1940s!5 1

Figure I.1 Binodini Dasi as Bankimchandra’s heroine ‘Ayesha’. Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 16, 2 Falgun 1331 BS/1924, photograph possibly taken in the end of the 19th century Source: Author’s collection

I ntroduction

Studies of ‘modern Indian theatre’ have a long history ranging from essays in Bangla at the very inception of the public theatre in Bengal to dissertations written in foreign universities from the 1880s onwards.6 Many of these writers have granted a special space to Bengali theatre, not the least for its perceived modernity in hiring women to play the female roles on the public stage. There are, of course, several traditions of actresses on the proscenium stage in India recorded from the late 18th century onwards. These include British/European, American and Australian women appearing in cities, travelling to the military stations and cantonments criss-crossing the colony and, after 1857, through the railway towns dotting the subcontinent. Alongside, indigenous women or girls from professional entertaining communities were also inducted into sporadic and early experiments in theatre.7 It was only from 1873, however, that women began appearing as professional actresses on the Bengali public stage, primarily in Calcutta, on a permanent basis. As a ‘first’ in colonial India, their appearance actually makes visible the shifts and contradictions in the women’s question as a whole. In Bengal, the actress was early identified as a ‘problem’ without whom the theatre would not run, but whose presence put into question the theatre as a legitimate social institution. In other theatrical ventures in India where women played the female parts, the matter was resolved differently. The itinerant Surabhi Theatres, based in presentday Andhra Pradesh, and active from the 1890s onward, are unique for being a professional yet a totally ‘family-run’ institution, numbering 36 companies in the latest count. Here, the wives and women of the extended families played the heroines.8 In the bilingual Bellary (Ballari) region of present-day Karnataka, Tadipatri Raghavacharyulu, better known as ‘Bellary Raghava’, was celebrated for introducing ‘family women’ into the theatrical tradition in the early 20th century.9 Both these enterprises were inspired and, to some extent, influenced by the early performances of travelling troupes of Parsi and Marathi theatre companies. Where women did come in from the late 19th century onwards was the ‘Special Drama’, insightfully studied by Susan Seizer, and popular even now in rural or small town venues of south Tamil Nadu.10 They are not part of a company but work seasonally as individual players forming a temporary ensemble. Marathi sangeet natak and Gujarati theatre companies thrived on female impersonation by the ‘stree-party’ actor. Stars such as Bal Gandharva and Jayshankar ‘Sundari’ held undisputed sway for decades, appealing to male and particularly female fans, well into the early decades of the 20th century.11 Although Parsi theatre had some 3

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striking exceptions in actresses who were introduced to the public in the 1880s, boys or men taking on female roles (stree-bhumika) continued until the 1920s.12 Women did play daredevil roles in ‘action films’ from the mid-1920s onwards.13 However, in Kerala, men were playing the female parts in the heyday of the social reform plays produced by the Left until the late 1930s.14 It appears, therefore, that Bengal’s claim to modernity on this count is not unfounded. Yet within Bengal, ‘thea-tar’ has been a loaded word, eliciting antagonistic responses of fervid enthusiasm and violent disgust from its early days, while the actress herself has been the obsessive focus of more than a century-long compendium of articles, meetings, cartoons, committees and petitions. If she was representing an extraordinary body of material on the stage, there was no dearth of acute negative representations of the acting woman in print and illustrations, on stage and on screen. The responses in print properly constitute the subject of an independent study. They surface intermittently in the present work as a prelude to a companion volume, signposting the constitutive nexus of education, morality and aesthetics as cultural capital. The argument is that with the induction of women to the public theatres in Bengal in 1873, the changing equations between occupation and marital status, between sexual and aesthetic codes and the contradictions therein, were visibly embodied. The presence of the much publicised female singing dancing body, performing on stage with upper-caste male actors for an ever-expanding audience also created a new circuit between theatre, aural and print culture. With its strong visual component, print continued to dominate the public sphere, cutting across varying classes; the following chapters illustrate how theatre would continue to recalibrate the internal dynamics of image, text and performance. The construction of the actress-figure popularly referred to as the nati in Bangla (spelt ‘nautee’ in Anglo-Indian writing) drew on a mixed lineage of the social histories and the aesthetics of multiple performance forms. These included but were not confined to the practices of proscenium theatre made available through the colonial encounter. The construction arose equally from the ongoing regularisation of inter-sex relationships and the evaluation of the woman’s place within the normative bhadra (respectable) household. The stage actress was remarkable in that she lived out every day, in her roles and in her life, the contradictions between the idealisation of ‘traditional Hindu’ womanly virtues, the impulse to modernity and, not the least, a critique of that modernity. Woman as spectacle thus became a component of disparate cultural agendas. 4

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As I elaborate in the following chapters, the actress functioned as a unit of representation and as material for display in the translation of traditional repertoire from a wide range of extant and emergent forms for the proscenium stage. She became central to the debate on whether, because of her social location, she had the right to impersonate X or Y ideal or icon. The reconfiguration and invention of ideals and icons was a pan-Indian phenomenon, inflected with regional differences.15 My study focuses on how the staging and playing of these ideals, and often their others, introduced an entirely new component to the identity and status of the female performer in a metropolitan space such as Calcutta. It opened up an area of public debate that sought to define the legitimacy of impersonation – never a question in earlier times! In turn, this generated questions about whether the enactment of certain roles granted the actress access to ‘redemption’. In the process, she was consistently pitted against the proper function of colonial western education and its male subjects, also a conflicted terrain. Her own lack of formal education coupled with the incessant attacks of the educated ‘Miss’ in popular farces may be inserted with some irony within the 19th-century project of woman’s education (streeshiksha). In the final analysis, though, the accent appeared to be on spiritual not social mobility, thereby eliding and even making invisible the question of caste, and to some extent, class, and the material contexts of production. I address these elisions by studying how at different moments of this history the actress both sought to forge a new professional identity even as she internalised many of the markers of the ideal woman. This book explores how, in her hyphenated identity of the prostitute-actress (barangana-nati) or fallen woman-actress (patita-abhinetri), the actress functioned as a fluid signifier in theatrical and indeed, in non-theatrical discourse across a spectrum of media. Several decades of research have established the interdependent if uneasy construction of colonial masculinity and, to a lesser extent, femininity.16 My perspectives on ‘acting women’ attend to the changing conventions of masculinity and femininity in relation to the mixed emotions of fear, attraction, repulsion and sarcasm surrounding the professional actress and her metropolitan location. I consider the range straddled by the acting woman in speech, song and dance; the peculiar conditions of Bengal’s experience with modernity and theatre’s role in the construction of that modernity; and finally, the fissures in various formulations of a jatiya identity (regional-national), as revealed in theatrical discourse. I dwell in particular on the fierce energy that interrupts from time to time the obviously market-driven pressures to please new audiences, and most crucially, the subjectivity 5

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of the actress emerging through the exigencies of performance. These lines of enquiry mark a departure from standard histories of ‘Bengali Theatre’ which have operated in two broad strands: either presenting a chronological and comprehensive history of the regional stage, namely ‘Bengali theatre’, or concentrating on the lives of individual actresses.17 Chapter 1 shows how the ‘appearance’ of the stage actress in the city of Calcutta in the 1870s both marks a violent rupture in the social location of the female performer, as well as continues with older genealogies. It traces the complex negotiations around terminology and ‘naming’ around this new professional. Chapter 2 marks out the place offered to actresses through the devotional paradigm offered by Bhakti – when actress Binodini Dasi plays the medieval mystic saint Chaitanya in Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s, and the ‘exemplary readings’ it has generated. The benediction scene is then analysed as visual text and as spectacle from the playtexts of Nati Binodini staged a century later, when the actress herself is iconised as a cultural referent. Chapter 3 travels through three disparate prose texts, bringing out their intertextuality through the overarching metaphor of theatricality – of enacting the self in fantasy and for an imagined public. It tracks the female body in relation to space and objects and the interlocking gazes of a metropolitan mise en scène. Chapter 4 is an exposition on voice, agency and mediation through the study of fictive ‘confessional pieces’ purportedly by actresses, with accompanying images in popular theatre magazines. The ‘actress-story’ may be read as intimations of an uneasy modernity in attempting to sieve definitions of art and accomplishment, leisure and livelihood, prefiguring the advent of cinema. Chapter 5 unravels the speeches made by four actresses in an iconic theatre hall after being denied entry to a Town Hall memorial meeting at the death of their guru. It presents us with a framework to explore the many voices of ‘mourning’ and the construction, slippage and negotiations by the doubly dispossessed seeking a voice in civil society. Throughout this study, I detail my engagement with specific terms of reference, identifying and tracing keywords and their movement across a range of discourses produced over a century, c. 1870–1990, in print, image and performance practices. The five interlinked chapters fall within a 50-year frame, from the 1870s to the 1920s, concentrating exclusively on mainstream commercial theatre. Experimental theatre that emerged in the 1920s, some of it within the ambit of public theatres, necessarily requires an alternative framework conceptualised in a forthcoming monograph. 6

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The present study is bookended by the beginnings of the public theatre and the advent of cinema: stage adaptations of contemporary literature as well as mythological episodes from the puranas flowed into early cinema. Foregrounding the stage actress also provokes questions about whether and in what ways would she be anticipating the heroines of silent cinema, although the ‘body in action’ on stage was bound to be different from that shot in cinema. This research is animated by the specific overlaps with and divergences from other performance traditions in British India. The intent is to signal moments of complex transition in the history of representations in a comparative context.

. . . and a new body of work We may begin by asking what distinguishes the theatre and the newly fabricated actress? What were the changes in the rules of the game? The following factors take us beyond discrete regional histories: the network of steamship and railways, the surge in army cantonments post-1857, and the growth of railway towns that made greater mobility possible both for Indians as well as westerners ‘playing the Empire’; the proliferation of regimental theatres for the army all over British India supported by the colonial government; and the porosity between diverse theatrical practices in towns and cities. I have traced elsewhere the contours of such a historiography, part of a monograph on ‘the trade routes of theatre’.18 Equally fruitful would be to consider how existing traditions of sangeet – a composite term embracing music and song – were reconfigured for the new stage in different regions, often within multilingual constituencies. Both these approaches inform my understanding of the actress in this book. My entry point is therefore a ‘fluid performance map’ of pre-colonial groups or communities and the emergence of artists and companies in urban proscenium spaces. I begin by highlighting that the stage actress, who was not necessarily and inevitably from a ‘prostitute’ or ‘courtesan’ background (and these have changing histories), became an important conduit for the formulation and circulation of an incredible variety of genres. These often hybrid genres included the geetinatya (derived from the older geetabhinay), operatic, romantic comedies, Urdu/Persian ‘fairy stories’, ‘fairy opera’, farces (prahasan), ‘society sketches’ (samajik naksha), elegies (bilap), pantomimes (panchrangs) and even minstrelsy!19 This impressive repertoire would soon include the refashioned devotional, centering on the lives of sants and other exemplars of devotion, and later, historical plays (aitihasik natak). I have mentioned those 7

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genres most frequently featured in bilingual advertisements, testifying to their continuing appeal even at the end of the century. In 1894, a performance of Benazeer-Budramuneer billed as ‘Fairy Opera’ was accompanied by a ‘Musical Comic Sketch’, Tarubala [a ‘social play’] and a ‘X’mas Pantomime’ (Figure I.6). Leaving aside the fascinating history of each of these genres in practice, I speculate on how this array impacted both on perceptions about theatre and the subjectivity of the actress. The stage was the space where the ‘high literary’ rubbed shoulders with the ‘low’, declamatory poetry was followed by a risqué repartee, while enduring oral traditions of pre-print cultures were reinducted for stage performances. As detailed elsewhere, the actress had to be well versed in this astonishing linguistic-musical repertoire, in tandem with assorted ‘styles’ of dancing.20 I would hesitate too, to conflate her entirely with the second-generation prostitute, composer of saucy rhymes and songs, who delighted in mocking her clientele.21 The actress found herself imbricated more fundamentally in the voicing and acting out of a set of cultural nationalisms in tension with each other. Another distinctive feature marking out the actress from other urban workers makes up the ‘machinery’ that the underdeveloped

Figure I.2 Advertisement, Statesman & FOI, Calcutta, 4 August 1883 Source: The Statesman Ltd., Calcutta

Figure I.3 ‘Gayasurer Haripadapadmalabh Geetabhinay’/‘At the lotus feet of Hari!’, a musical play. Woodcut typography in book title, early 20th century Source: Courtesy of Ashit Paul

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economy of the colonial stage had at its disposal. What might have this entailed for the actress who laboured to make the ‘illusion’ ‘real’? The repertoire of professional theatres included live horses, mechanical or ‘photo-electric’ lotuses, a ‘life-like mechanical Royal Elephant’, ‘Britannia descending on the stage’, ‘railway trains in motion’ and other curious ‘scenes’ in which ‘transformations’ abound: ‘Wonderful Decapitation/Star Theatre’ promised an advertisement in the Statesman of 3 May 1884. Yet, both workspace and resources were substantively different from various forms of spectacle in Victorian England, as also from the more capital-intensive and professionally run, spectacle-oriented Parsi theatre companies that toured British India. These material practices feed into larger discourses: Chapter 2 shows Binodini Dasi swooning on stage at a climactic moment of what was advertised as ‘Vaishnava style’ dancing, open to the ministrations of a ‘medical man’ as well as a ‘man of science’ – a Jesuit priest in this case. A visiting theosophist takes up the issue in print. The aura and the publicity around the play, Chaitanya Lila (1884) encourages the usual split between faith and rationality, affirming that the performance and its reception is a ‘vindication’ of the return to an authentic indigenous (deshyia). Another instance of the circulation of these urban commodities is found in the first section of Chapter 3, in the replay of the traditional Radha-Krishna manbhanjan pala (a musical narrative) across urban media and emblematised in fiction. ‘A Strange Meeting’ (Chapter 5) underlines an ongoing dialectic of spectacle and interiority articulated in the formal space of the relatively new social practice of a memorial meeting (shok-sabha). Overall, the essays in this book highlight the problematics of representation in speech, print and performance and the elusive ‘feeling self’ as it is deployed in a range of discourses and in material practices through the lens of performance, with the actress as a subject.

A fluid performance map Imagine then a fluid ‘performance map’ of the subcontinent roughly spanning a century and a half in which the stage actress may be sited. This was a period marked by the large-scale displacement of the hereditary performer – as musician, dancer and singer. The displacement, though taking place throughout much of the subcontinent, requires to be understood in terms of its specific determinants and its attendant dilemmas. The effort would be to nuance the study beyond a general history of colonisation or discrete histories of performance forms. In 9

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this instance, Bengal functions as a case study that I have plotted along diachronic and synchronic lines. These are histories, both complex and uneven, involving as they do a host of factors of which I single out the following: changes in patronage systems and consequent displacement and migration; marginalising and/or reconfiguration of popular forms of entertainment; the ‘revival’ of dance and music practices under threat, entailing the entry of a new class-caste of performers. An arena of contested interpretations of taste, leisure and cultivation! Arguably, one of the most crucial strands in these histories would constitute the gradual or sudden collapse of earlier systems of patronage and the uprooting of performers from the physical locations of traditional rural enclaves, princely courts, temple complexes and private mansions. The reasons might be attributed to shifts in political power between Mughal, Sikh and Maratha polities, conflicts of smaller regional powers with western mercantile groups or between companies and nation states, and the consequent changes in economic importance of cities, ports and hinterlands. The decline of the Tanjore court, a dominant centre of dance and music, transformed the configurations of the music profession in southern India.22 The fallout of political struggles, battles or takeovers by the British (Company and Crown) had an early and acute impact in Bengal. Two important events of this kind would cause the disintegration of the erstwhile Murshidabad court in Bengal after the Battle of Plassey (Palashi) in 1757, and, a century later, the annexation of Oudh (Awadh) by the British in 1856. The latter resulted in Wajid Ali Shah (1822–87), the deposed Nawab of Awadh, choosing exile and re-settlement with his entourage in Metiaburj (Garden Reach), a suburb of Calcutta.23 The decline of the older cities of Murshidabad and Hooghly by the late 18th and early 19th centuries had invested Calcutta with greater economic importance, enabling the growth of ‘a cosmopolitan bazar network’.24 The emergence and growth of a new land-owning and subsequently rentier class after the 1793 Permanent Settlement Act threw up new patterns of urban patronage. While acknowledging that the term bhadralok needs a nuanced interpretation, historians are agreed that ‘the basis of bhadralok prosperity was neither trade nor industry, but land.’25 Political instability and shifting patterns of patronage inevitably brought about substantial changes in itinerant entertainment practices and within groups organised around caste identity and regional affiliation. Professional entertainers in the subcontinent, with singers, dancers, musicians and performers often in overlapping roles, have always been segregated from other women of the household.26 10

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Belonging to specific caste groups, communities or faiths, entertainers in pre-­colonial times had also been accorded a differential status and were often entrusted with important functions by the state.27 This might include a ritual status which included affiliation to temple trusts allowing for the possession of property and various other rights,28 or being linked to the economics of slavery as part of ritual gift giving or exchange in courts,29 as well as in independent wealthy households.30 Foreign travellers, such as the Dutch Francisco Palsaert, noted in the 17th century the minute hierarchies between dancers based on caste, ethnicity, style and region, even as groups were invited to perform in well-to-do respectable households.31 These distinctions persisted, though in increasingly marginalised spaces, into the late 19th century.32

Gradations For a contemporary scholar, a key point of departure would be to take cognizance of the differences between traditional and more recent hierarchies, the continuities and the breaks involved therein. New ­aesthetic-moral categories evaluating both the performance form and the performer made for a consensus on social and legal issues along the axes of authenticity, and identity, with various groups often having to parry charges of obscenity. The colonial state was a major actor in this reformulation, the impact varying in different performance venues or spaces. For example, the latter part of the 19th century saw a shrinking of street and other semi-public performance spaces in the urban context, specifically in Calcutta.33 In Marathi-speaking regions, the new theatre known as the sangeet natak was espoused as a marker of regional/national identity over the older tamasha and lavani, although the sangeet natak drew selectively on the erotic tenor of lavani. The latter were now being labelled as vulgar and degenerate, although stubbornly, they too, would thrive through changing contexts and in multiple circuits right through to the present.34 The jockeying for caste status alongside efforts to marginalise lower-caste performers characterised this process, as Davesh Soneji points out regarding the new caste status among the kalavantula.35 The upgradation or degradation of expressive forms took on new dimensions in colonial India in an era of print culture among the emergent, though not homogenised, educated ‘middle class’. From the early 20th century, we have the induction and creation of first-generation performers into new and recast performance forms, sometimes subsumed under the aegis of ‘Revival’. Of these, the sadir nritya or dasi-attam reborn as the ‘classical Bharatanatyam’, is a 11

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transformation that has merited intense scholarly attention in recent decades.36 Male performers, particularly accompanists and teachers who were not always absorbed into the new cultural forms, must have been similarly affected by these changes, but their displacement does not appear to have been studied as much with reference to Bengal as it does elsewhere, in the case of more visible traditions.37 The reasons for this would be speculative at this point, awaiting more substantive work on the specific impact on the performing arts of the breakup of the Murshidabad court post-1757, or the decline of Bishnupur as an artistic centre.38 However, the absence of a continuous consolidated temple institutional practice in Bengal, such as those in Orissa and most regions of southern India, may explain the absence of a visible female performer consecrated to ritual worship whose presence had ritual significance.39 In neighbouring Assam, though, strong ritualistic traditions of women priestesses or deo-dhanis, and ojha-pali with men taking on roles of priestesses continued without major breaks, even as a small but influential intelligentsia sought to sanitise the festivals of Bihu.40 I am therefore making a distinction between specific performance practices in which specialist roles were undertaken and where some form of patronage ensured support for these practices, even fees exchanged, and those where singing, dancing and music making were seen as part of everyday life, embedded in seasonal and agricultural cycles. The latter, though under threat, continues to be a pan-Indian practice. Recent artistic and scholarly work engaging with and/or archiving these expressive forms through various media testifies both to their precarious location but also the enduring energy of these practitioners.41 In Bengal, one of the most visible and vibrant communities of female singers and dancers was the itinerant vaishnavis – kirtaniyas and neri-kabis (vaishnav women so called because of their shaven heads) – and bauls from a syncretic Sufi tradition. While both these marginal communities were seen as radical, the vaishnavi (boshtomi) was increasingly stigmatised. There were also women performers of jhumur and khemta, known as nachnis outside the economic and socio-economic framework of any state-temple system.42 Many of them were located in the smaller courts of tribal rulers in districts such as Purulia. Khemta-walis and jhumur dancers were extremely popular throughout Bengal, particularly in cities such as Calcutta and Dacca, provoking reformist ire. When khemta dances were introduced as interludes into all-male jatra troupes, the dancers were boys rather than women. The dances then became part of ‘sakhi-nritya’ or choric 12

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dance of female companions, providing a continuum between what became known as ‘bai-naach’ (the dance of tawaiaffs or baijis) and jatra.43 These somewhat fragmented realms of performance practices outside of temple complexes were either naturalised because of the class/sectarian/‘tribal’ affiliations of the performers, or seen as sporadic and localised phenomenon, warranting only the ethnographer’s interest. Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.) officer Gurusaday Dutt’s showcasing and promotion of select aspects of rural dances was inspired by the English Folk Dance Society with which he had come into contact during his fourth visit to England in 1929. The revival came squarely under the category of ‘folk’.44 None of the performance practices outlined above would be considered worthy of re-construction as a ‘modern classical’ lineage of ‘Bengaliness’.45 Even when the erotic survived in lesser-known expressive forms, an overarching colonial template rendered them invisible, or at best reserved for the ethnographer or anthropologist’s gaze. Many of these factors, I believe, fed into the peculiar love-hate relationship that converged obsessively around ‘thea-tar’, that was early internalised as a marker of Bengali identity. The emergence and growth of the public theatre undoubtedly marked something of a break with most pre-modern forms of patronage by an elite or upper class/caste that had maintained an unambiguous hierarchy between patron and performer and her entourage. Tanika Sarkar offers a crucial caveat on the differences in the usages of the word ‘public’ and samaj. The latter was increasingly being used for homogenising communities, such as ‘the entire Hindu community, at least in Bengal’, whereas ‘public was a more open non-denominational category which constituted itself by more openly publicizing itself on themes of general, shared interest.’46 I would add at least one more term prevalent in theatrical discourse, namely, sadharan, as also the term sarvasadharan. It was often used as an adjective, as in sadharan rangalay or public theatre, that is theatre meant for everyone, the commoner, the people. As mentioned earlier, the lavani performer was often bought by the Peshwa state for sexual, musical and other forms of labour. In contrast, the proscenium stage in Bengal was the site of chosen co-sexual labour in an urban setting, with poor girls or women being offered fees or a salary for their work. With the gamut of production processes involved in ticketed performances, came the professional demands of training, rehearsals, touring, competing with rival productions and dealing with the vagaries of the market, lawsuits and poor infrastructure. For both sexes, but particularly for the women who worked as 13

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actresses, a very different routine of training, discipline and wage-time would now fuse occupational identity with livelihood. The configurations of this professional identity were distinct from those characterising the male salaried worker occupying a respectable positions at the lower rungs of the colonial state as clerk, teacher or legal functionary. The real difference lay in the nature of the ‘cultural product’ – the plays. In contrast to the narrow administrative echelons of colonial bureaucracy for the majority of Bengali salaried workers, or the skilled and unskilled wage labour that a vast number of migrants to Calcutta were dependent on, theatre operated in a more porous, if unstable zone. Printed plays vastly outnumbered productions; they were brought to life on stage and circulated in a shared public space; their impact extended well beyond the sphere of print culture. The male founders and makers were from upper castes, primarily brahmans, and usually with a fair amount of education. Inserted almost overnight into this project, the actress-woman, whether playing female or male roles, had to be imagined differently. It also required a radical rethinking of the very concept of work and labour, variously articulated as kaaj, kaam, karya and karma, as I explore in each of the chapters.

Uneven trajectories of reform Selective forays into changes in performance practices through the 19th and early 20th centuries include studies on the devadasis in Thanjavur (Tanjore), lavani performers in Maharashtra and the nautanki in northern India.47 Dismantling the colonial constructs of the generic ‘dancing girl’ whether the ‘nautch girl’ or the ‘devadasi’ then requires us to distinguish between devadasi practices in present-day Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Orissa among other places, and their respective ritual and socio-economic status. Where would we place, for instance, devadasis who were successful in forming all-female travelling companies or tevaratiyal natakam?48 Rarely studied in a comparative context is the shifting equilibrium in the valence of morality. The erosion of ritual or social contexts of performance and the varied and complex engagement with the colonial state often led to mixed responses in different parts of British India: what was still acceptable as ‘custom’ in a particular region might be looked upon as a ‘immoral practice’ by a visitor from another.49 Often, the formation of new communities bound by religious-social beliefs created a small but fairly influential class group. The forging of a diffuse pan-Indian constituency was initiated to some extent by reformist 14

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religious organisations such as the Brahmo Samaj and later, the Arya Samaj, and their respective ‘missionising’ tours in the second half of the 19th century.50 Even here, regional and cultural differences are too acute to permit any generalisation. The results emerging from the shared tenets of the same social movement were uneven and spread over time in different places, illustrated in the following incident.51 When the dynamic Bengali Brahmo preacher Sivnath Sastri (1847– 1919) visited Madras on a mission in 1881, he was curious to listen to ‘the wonderful music of Tanjore’; but arriving at the venue – at a local dignitary’s home – he was shocked to discover that some of the ‘brightly attired’ women were devadasis. Sastri appears to be either unaware or unwilling to accept that devadasis were regarded as nityasumangali, the always auspicious woman, and that they were traditionally invited to the homes of their elite patrons for special life-cycle ceremonies.52 He records in his autobiography how he registered his protest by leaving the premises despite the entreaties of his host, and the shock of the devadasis themselves who found his behaviour inexplicable and insulting.53 The incident drew attention and Sastri was censured and ridiculed for his stance, though some residents praised him for speaking out against a ‘social evil’.54 Lakshmi Subramanian has pointed out that by 1871 ‘the preliminary census report of Madras town and Presidency’ had already ‘disapproved strongly of the traffic in young girls’.55 However, the ‘anti-nautch’ movement in Madras Presidency had not yet made inroads into this practice,56 while very different standards of morality were already operative in Bengal where the public theatre was taboo for most Brahmos. The Brahmo movement in Bengal, particularly in then East Bengal, now Bangladesh, has routinely been read as constituting the single most vociferous source of anti-theatrical diatribe. Instead of considering this charge in isolation, I have found an overarching approach more fruitful: namely locating this theatre within intersecting and conflicting discourses of education and occupation, leisure and work, and the trajectories of social and spiritual mobility. Bengal, partly because of the early formation and rapid growth of print culture along with a keen receptivity to English education by Hindus and Brahmos, also appears to have faced an early and more heavy-handed pronouncement and clampdown on questions of ‘purity’ and ‘obscenity’. The complex and overlapping genealogy in the formation of specific sectarian identities is evident for example in the 1872 Brahmo marriage bill, where Brahmos ‘insisted on classifying themselves as Hindu’.57 The exposure of the Muslim upper class to western education happened at a different pace.58 It remains to be studied in what ways the debates on 15

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Figure I.4 One of the first Calcutta schools where students performed Shakespeare in their ‘Oriental Theatre’ in the 1850s Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

the relative merits of ‘good literature’ and the dangers of the erotic or adirasa inflected theatrical production. The growth and flowering of what is now considered modern Bengali literature took place during this period. A host of factors shaped the persona and the perception of the actress in not so tangible ways. The most contentious and visible of these was the juxtaposition of the actress with school and collegegoing students, victims all of the acting bug.

Multilingualism, linguistic nationalism and the stage A remarkable linguistic fluidity was one of many shared attributes of Gujarati, Marathi and Parsi theatres, as noted perceptively by R.K. Yajnik, a historian of theatre in British India.59 Besides translations and adaptations from English, performances were in Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu and several kinds of Hindi. Many companies engaged, as full-time employees, playwrights who wrote in Urdu and performed frequently in Hindustani/Hindi, Urdu and/or what was sometimes referred to as ‘Musalmani bhasha’.60 The sangeet natak as it flourished in the Maharashtra-Karnataka region drew on Carnatic music, folk 16

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traditions (such as stree-geet), lavani and kirtans as well as compositions in Urdu from contemporary Parsi theatre, but it relied greatly on singing, primarily Hindustani ‘classical’, which, as Amlan Das Gupta reminds us, itself was going through a process of codification and classicisation.61 Similarly, Bellary Raghava’s theatre carried on experiments in Kannada and Telugu as well as Hindi, albeit with a locational marker such as ‘Bellary Raghava’.62 Unlike the above, the development of Bengali theatre was early intertwined with linguistic nationalism in what was, and is, a polyglot city.63 Further, from the 1830s–40s onwards, after the sudden end of Dwarkanath Tagore’s business ventures with the collapse of the Union Bank in 1847, the Bengali elite had little control over finance capital.64 By the end of the century, the ‘trade and industry of Calcutta was controlled by Europeans and a small group of Marwaris, as well as merchants from the Punjab, Bombay, Sindh, Gujarat and southern India.’65 By the turn of the 20th century, ‘fewer than half’ of the city’s denizens spoke Bangla.66 Official language policies in other parts of the Bengal Presidency, where Bangla was compulsorily introduced as the ‘mother tongue’ in Asomiya- and Oriya-speaking regions whetted the need among other regional intelligentsia to promote their own languages. From its very inception, some of the most eminent literary figures of the time in Bengal either wrote (or translated) plays or had their novels, long poems and other works in Bangla adapted for the stage. And the literary, as Pradip Datta among others has explicated, ‘was an extremely significant political institution in Bengal, for it played a disproportionately important role in both producing and performing the idea of the national community’.67 Further, it was not despite, but because of the tremendous impact of English, that there was a real and perceived threat of deracination.68 The desire to emulate was never free of the fear of simply imitating. ‘Englishing’ in the theatre world, at an obvious visible level, would include performing inside the theatre hall, selective use of proscenium conventions, theatre advertisements and playbills, the printed programmes and synopses. The latter was also common practice for Marathi plays in Bombay as it was in Bengal for the benefit of European spectators;69 prefaces in English were often appended to translations of Sanskrit plays into Bangla. But English filtered into ‘Bengali’ theatre in intangible ways, routinely drawing on forms and sources in English, not confined to British drama alone. English literary or scholarly texts, often produced by British a­ dminstrator-writers (Col. Tod and Sir Edwin Arnold are discussed later), were mined for themes from Indian history, particularly on ‘martial valour and martial races’. 17

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Similarly, there were efforts to create ‘a regular tragedy’ – a category considered to be missing in Indian (Sanskrit) drama, but appropriate for the times.70 The material for drama was thus heavily mediated by remixes as well as entirely novel products. The actress proved to be a critical factor in this mediation for an expanding audience in voicing multiple registers of this changing Bangla – from the literary to the colloquial including street patois, that is, in speech and in song on the one hand, and in fleshing out special effects and ‘scenic illusions’ for mythological dramas and society sketches on the other. The synonymy of the Bengali public theatre with Calcutta acquires a special dimension when we evaluate these skills. It was also reflected in the ways in which the theatre landscape was both symbolic and geographic in its metropolitan location, in the professional organisation (or lack of it) of the Calcutta-based companies, and, not the least, in how theatre became inseparably identified for Bengalis with the ‘Capital of the Eastern Empire’. The latter worked not only as an advertisement gimmick, but was a marker of identity, internalised by rulers and the ruled alike. Venues for theatre included educational institutions; private houses and the gardens and mansions of the wealthy; semi-permanent enclosures in Calcutta, such as tents in the Maidan (Green) in the 1870s or at the site of the International Exhibition a decade later. Theatre halls proper have a long and well-documented history in Bengali and English scholarship on the subject.71 By the end of the 20th century, many of these theatres would act as ‘feeders’ for a vast imperial chain with impresario owner-promoters such as the Bandmanns, father and son.72 This study focuses on the more pervasive ways in which theatrical culture seeped into the urbanscape. Never mind the barrage of anti-theatrical missiles; theatrical activities in public spaces multiplied rapidly alongside a general craze for acting even within ‘safe’ familial or semi-private spaces. To this day, amateur theatricals are hosted by local clubs in the city for the annual Durga Puja ‘cultural programme’, just as a wealthy patron in a specific para – neighbourhood or locality – would, until quite recently, sponsor jatras on festive occasions. In the 1870s, from rehearsals and performances undertaken in the homes of urban gentry (Figure 4.1), came the next stage of building makeshift theatre houses in a bid for greater freedom.73 These efforts on the part of the founding fathers to have independent performance spaces for ticketed performances would eventually map the city into physical and symbolic zones of ambiguous attraction. So emerged the currency of

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the phrase, theatar-para or theatrical neighbourhood, in the manner of boi-para or the zone of bookmakers and sellers, the former eliciting both attraction and repulsion. It gave rise to the apocryphal tale of Brahmo educationist Heramba Chandra Maitra first disclaiming any knowledge of the place when a young man wanted directions to the iconic Star Theatre, and then, urged by his conscience, running after the latter to declare that he ‘knew where it was, but wouldn’t say so’.74 A more vivid evocation of the carnivalesque atmosphere witnessed in the theatre quarter is found in the early 20th century, in an article in the Sanjibani, a leading Brahmo newspaper. The author is at pains to point out that he was on his way to visit no less a personage than Rabindranath Tagore when he was obliged to pass through ‘a dreadful scene of revelry’ before a certain theatre hall (Minerva Theatre). The article was excerpted in a subsequent issue of the theatre journal Natya-mandir, which used the occasion to fire a return salvo.75 The Sanjibani article’s tone of fascinated repugnance at the site of corruption is indicative of the hostile attitude to theatre held by a substantial number of the intelligentsia. The same locational context had figured differently though, in a letter written in 1896 by Swami Vivekananda, where it served as an index of his transformation: I was such a creature twenty years ago! I wouldn’t even walk on the footpaths of the theatar-para in Calcutta. Today, at age thirty-three I [can] live in the same house, in the same room, with prostitutes. What shall I call this? Perdition? No, I’m expanding into Universal Love which is the Lord Himself.76 By the 1880s theatre halls had become a favoured space for political meetings. In 1883 a series of ‘monster meetings’ was reported in the press; the Star and the Bengal Theatres, among others, provided alternative venues to the threatened ban by the government on outdoor meetings.77 The creation of this incipient jatiya space – within and without theatres – did not lead however, to any reconceptualisation of workspace in the theatres in the coming decades. In 1912, actresses were not permitted entry to a meeting held in in the Town Hall to initiate a rehabilitation of that wayward icon Girishchandra Ghosh (1844–1912). The actresses were finally permitted to mourn their guru from the stage of the Star Theatre, prior to the ‘real’ show. They were excluded too from the formal inauguration of a representative drama association, the Bangiya Natya Parisat that was shortly announced with much fanfare and great expectations.

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Readings in history In seeking therefore to evolve a historiography that recognises simultaneously the transience and materiality or corporeality of theatrical performance while traversing the socio-economic bases of theatrical production and circuits, what might constitute ‘sources’? What might be the possible approaches to these sources in such an enterprise? How might one begin to articulate questions about absences? How to move beyond the routine citation and use of plays and performances, dates and names, purely to substantiate arguments that do not animate the conditions of performance? How might we define labour within the complex of sensuous and imaginary activities that all performance entails? Archival legacies can be daunting, overwhelming even. In their introduction to a book on the three icons of the 19th-century European stage – Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry and Eleonora Duse – the authors muse: Perhaps the problem of writing about past performance only begins to feel pressing when there is such a wealth of documentation that the moment in question looks set to disappear in a welter of descriptive accounts in which the same terms continually recur in widely different contexts. (emphasis added)78 One might reframe this proposition for this study, for there exists a relatively rich and diverse range of accounts of the Bengali public theatre from the earliest years available to us in print journalism (in Bangla and English) in the form of reviews, newspaper advertisements, critical and anecdotal essays, memoirs and biographies, prefaces, in fiction and of course, in the plays themselves, originals and adaptations. These are primarily male-authored. Patronage was primarily male, including zamindars, royalty, professionals and political figures. The spectrum of roles played by male practitioners – amateurs and ­professionals – is equally wide. The latter include actors, managers, directors on the board of a company, the dramaturgist – sometimes known as the ‘motion master’, musicians and composers (also called ‘opera masters’), dance masters, playwrights, set designers, contributors to and editors of theatre journals, public speakers, and shareholders, lessees or owners of theatre houses. An exceptional instance of an all-woman theatre company is seen in newspaper advertisements of the early 1880s (Figure 3.5); we hear of another such company 20

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many decades later. Backstage there would be the property man, shifter, dresser, stage mechanist/machinist, tailor, prompter and a man employed on a monthly wage to write out the parts (called satt). Among women, besides the actress, the only other paid worker we hear of is the theatarer jhi or maid. She entered the homes of ‘zenana women’ and seduced them with attractive playbills – popularly called ‘handbills’ – and theatre gossip.79 Inside the theatre hall, she managed the children of the women spectators, ran errands for the latter, and was often suspected of being a go-between and arranging assignations, like the boshtomi and malini (flower-seller) in literary texts. Despite the opprobrium around the theatre, almost every male Bengali public figure, whatever the hue of his political beliefs, felt compelled to write on the theatre, sometimes openly expressing his passion for theatre-going. To cite only two such individuals, located at rather different ends of the political spectrum – Bipin Chandra Pal and Syama Prasad Mookerjee.80 In retrospect, many of their writings offer critical insights into the politics of location, and the dilemma of the educated self-conscious spectator coming to terms with the pleasure of performance. If the overall history of the stage and the actress is still being framed in bhadralok terms, well, with few exceptions, those were precisely the terms of reference of conceptualising and discussing anything pertaining to the stage! In the period considered – the third quarter of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century – most practitioners from within the theatre world worked largely with binaries of good and bad, decent and indecent, respectable and fallen, going against the grain of their own experience or contradicting statements made elsewhere. Curiously, working together did not lead to any radical or even significant break with the dominant discourse, excepting for the occasional unstinting praise for the actresses’ professionalism (Amritalal Bose), a defense of the business of theatre (Amarendranath Dutt), a rather convoluted insertion of the female subject as the ‘true devotee’, contradicted in a later essay (Girishchandra Ghosh), and so on. Amarendranath’s autobiographical novella, Abhinetrir Roop or The Charms of an Actress (serialised in 1913, dramatised in 1914), represents an extreme version of this schism. Dutt realised more acutely than any of his contemporaries the devastating effects of the colonial economy for any cultural activity or, indeed, for any human interaction. The object of his study was primarily the figure of the actress – an overdetermined figure, surfacing in every possible narrative paradigm, as we see in Chapter 3. Empathy notwithstanding, he was hell-bent on punishing such women for active as well as ‘innate’ sexuality. 21

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The abundance of stage roles to be taken over by the actress was in acute contrast to the situation of the novice who came to the stage from an impoverished social stratum with little or no formal schooling, who was always employed in the theatre for skills in singing, dancing or acting, and possibly for her looks. She came from the lower classes, usually from the lower castes, and from locations considered to be redlight areas. She began work very young; for her, the playing of parts on stage would constitute her primary mode of ‘self-representation’. She was not party to the plans for a national theatre, but was the subject of incessant debate on her presence on the public stage. She figured by name and her role in advertisements for plays, and as the generic actress in attacks on the stage in print. She would become the subject of a popular genre of confessional narratives called ‘abhinetri-kahini’ or actress-stories. Through these stories and other accompanying visuals, including photographs, she entered, among other places, the intimate space of the nascent bourgeois home. Almost from the inception of the public theatre, theatre songs had a wide-ranging circulation including in printed anthologies; snatches of favourite lyrics acted as leitmotifs to a particular dramatic text in the mofussil or provinces.81 An interesting conjunction of capitalist enterprise and technology – initially, only of foreign gramophone companies – ensured that by the beginning of the 20th century the voice of the actress-singer was disseminated well beyond the confines of the theatre house.82 Writings by stage actress in Bengal are confined to a few articles and some slim volumes of poetry, with the exception of the autobiographical writings of Binodini Dasi. As one of the first-generation actresses, these autobiographical writings have come to occupy a crucial space in the present’s version of the past. In translating her autobiographical writings and in my introduction and afterword to these texts I had considered their incorporation as material to authenticate other texts, as well the readings they have generated in recent times. The present work is concerned with the construction and uses of ‘Nati Binodini’ in diverse social texts. Binodini Dasi’s autobiography, My Story (Amar Katha), seems to have provided a perfect mise en scène for the replay of the history and business of theatre in the productions of the last three decades of the 20th century. Her autobiography is a running thread in this book, the text rendered invisible in the selective versions of her life that have been revived for repeated consumption in our times. It was not pure chance that these autobiographical texts, poems and a few other writings by actresses were first published in theatre magazines. The first decades of the 20th century became a period of consolidation in defining a distinctive jatiya theatre, as comparisons 22

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were set up between Bengali with European theatre, including Russian theatre. The comparision did not extend to the already successful Parsi or Marathi theatres, although the first Parsi theatre, the Victoria Natak Mandali, visited Calcutta as early as 1874.83

Juxtaposing categories It will be clear by now that I have not worked with the usual periodisation favoured in studies of the Bengali theatre: of naming a phase after the maker: ‘Girish-yuga’ after Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Sisir-yuga’ after Sisir Kumar Bhaduri (1889–1959); or after a movement such as the Gana-Natya Andolan or Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). In siting the actress, I have also sought to question the categories of public, commercial, professional, people’s, popular and populist, national – as they are used indiscriminately as moral-political markers both by practitioners of theatre as well as by critics and scholars.84 This would hold true of discussions of the political efficacy of theatre from the 1940s onwards – decades not addressed here. In passing, I have looked at some alternative positions in understanding changing forms such as jatra, or terms such as ‘theatrical-jatra’, the ‘jatratical’ and ways in which they have reinvented themselves in relation to changing practices in ‘theatre’. The term ‘public theatre’ could also be used to indicate the conflation of the neo-jatra with the ‘commercial theatre’ (originally called the public theatre by its practitioners) and the overlaps between the people or folk (lok) component of jatra, neo-jatra and ‘group ­theatre’ – a generic apellation for non-profit theatre groups that came up in the wake of IPTA and exceptionally active from the 1960s–80s.85 An extended discussion of these categories in terms of theatrical practice requires a conceptual and analytic framework altogether different from this study. I interrogate our uses of these labels to suggest entry points for conceptualising consumer forms (such as neo-jatra) and for enabling strategies for re-visioning gender and class in cultural production. Above all, it has been necessary to work with an overlapping notion of text and event, performance and reading: to work against the grain of a purely ‘literary’ reading of the play; to relate theatrical practice with other visual forms such as prints and painting; and to highlight, whenever possible, the choices made by individuals in terms of their professional identity and personal emotions. Each of the chapters in this book has sought to saturate the thick history of performance with shades of the performing self. The actress is both a subject and 23

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an interrogative category in the contingencies of the socio-political imperatives that fashioned the Bengali stage. We find traces of her subjectivity not only where we may expect them to be – in first-person narratives, but in sudden juxtapositions – in a stray review, a phrase from an advertisement, or a cropped photograph.

Performance: material event and ideology Close readings of performance contexts are intended to interrogate and, when necessary, counter the theoretical framework informing terminology such as ‘spectacle’, ‘male gaze’, ‘cross-dressing’ and ‘liminality’ central to the discourse of contemporary performance studies. Clearly, they cannot be applied as universal categories but may be placed relationally within other discursive contexts. The interpretation and translation of keywords such as chaitanya, karya, karma, moh, maya, dharma, abhiman, darshan and nazar, to mention only a few, demands particular attention. The shifting, and more importantly, the shifted contexts of such words and their teleologies are of crucial significance when we are engaged in writing history as it were, in translation. In citing primary material therefore, I have retained the Bangla/ Sanskrit original of specific words in parenthesis. Efforts to come to terms with coeval ways of seeing, of legitimising spectacle with satire, of balancing reform with sentiment are reflected in the terms of reference for the acting woman by generations of Bengali theatre practitioners and critics: females, Hindoo female, female actor, nati, ranga-nati, rangini, kulta nari, abhinetri, mancha-­abhinetri, barangana-abhinetri, beshya-abhinetri, patita-nari, patita-abhinetri, shikshita-abhinetri, bhadra nati, fallen women, public women, women of the/about town, demi-monde . . . A spectrum encompassing terms from Sanskrit poetics to Victorian discourses of morality! A new technology of viewing is also being put together: thence, a new understanding of drishya-pat, drishya-kavya, drishti, darshan, nazar . . . alongside ‘mechanical wonders’ and ‘scenic illusions’. This takes us to the domain of the spectacle and the visibly gendered body as it may be represented, for example, in the visible or invisible ‘sacrifice’ staged in the drama: an early example would be the layered representation of the mythological, Daksha Yagna (1883). I have been exploring these concerns since the 1990s, focusing on the uses of technology on stage in conjunction with the female body, through a range of media and forms. The subject of an independent monograph, they filter into this study as well.86 Terminology from different traditions of seeing, listening and appreciation enrich but complicate such histories 24

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and requires a methodology beyond a schematic framework of production and reception contexts. Something like a stable nomenclature may yet emerge as we move through a continuum of forms, literary and visual, and trace shifts in the ‘categorisation’ of relationships – both interpersonal and between human and divine. A case in point with regard to categories would be the visual representation of traditional female performers, where the displacement of the icon makes for significant mis-readings, persisting even now in museum catalogues and other formal sources of cultural knowledge.87 One might take as an illustration the public outcry that erupted in 1873 around the ‘seduction’ of Elokeshi, a married woman, by the temple priest or mahant of Tarakeswar, a popular pilgrimage place near Calcutta, her murder by her husband and the ensuing legal case and punishment.88 The incident signals among other things the publicising through press reports, woodcuts, lithographs, prints, pamphlets and the scores of farces and plays it spawned, the crossing over of Elokeshi from the kulastree (woman of acknowledged family lineage) to the ranks of the patita (the fallen woman). In her work on Kalighat paintings, Mildred Archer posits: ‘Voluptuous women were shown holding scarlet roses (an indication of their profession), combing their hair, nursing peacocks, eating pan or smoking nargila pipes.’89 She then maintains, ‘the rose is an emblem of the courtesan’. Therefore, Archer argues that in the print depicting Elokeshi post-seduction, she appears with ‘the rose indicating her fallen state [after she is] prevailed upon to become the Mahant’s mistress.’90 However, Krishna’s brother, Balarama, also appears with a rose on the same page! The rose has travelled far both in its situational context and the semantic-symbolic space it occupies to become – from an art historian’s perspective – an attribute of the generic courtesan. We may recall that the rose figured as a consistent motif in Mughal miniatures as well as those of the Pahari school in the hands of the royal personage, male or female, in full-length portraits or otherwise.91 By the time it reappears in popular portraiture – in patas and prints produced in ­Calcutta – the rose has shifted as a marker of refinement, beauty, and or any other spiritual quality it may have symbolised in allegorical terms. Deployed now in the hands of ‘common’ women who are presented as objects of desire, the rose, like the musical instrument, sets apart in somewhat mocking tones the unashamed public woman. It identifies the unproductive or non-reproductive qualities of the woman on display. Leisure and refinement, when displayed as part of a bazar transaction, can mark immorality. Chapter 4 traces the incorporation at a later date of this desire, as a sign contained within the perimeters 25

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of respectability – visually displayed as seductive yet modest. So, the performing woman with a musical instrument, real and imagined, will appear on matchbox labels manufactured in Sweden, Austria and other northern lands, shipped back for consumers in India.92 She will also re-appear as a woman of ‘accomplishment’ (not for sale) in homilies on conjugality and in magazine advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s, duly segregated from the stigma of the professional singer or musician. The insistence on calling oneself an ‘amateur’ by many male practitioners indicates that the stigma cut across gender lines. I suggest that what distinguishes the theatre from other British imports such as the print technology that made woodcut illustrations possible is the criterion for ‘role playing’ and the social-spiritual weight granted to impersonation. Theatre and attendant publicity invited endless public debates on the codes of conduct of the practitioners and the rights and responsibilities of the colonial rulers. This was quite at variance from the rights of Indians regarding dramatic representation on stage. I pause to raise a question about the well-documented Dramatic Performances Control Act of 1876.93 What might explain the shifts from explicitly ‘nationalist’, certainly bold attacks of the early years aimed at the British (even if they were selected groups allied to the state, such as the indigo planters in Nil Darpan) to the flood of innocuous geetinatyas and, subsequently, to the devotional genre that dominated the public theatre? A plausible reading places the entry of women on stage as both enabling as well as wearing the brunt of this shift. The success of the geetinatya as ticketed entertainment was enduring, with strong implications for dominant codes of representation. Pulin Das sums up the impact of the Act: The theatre came to terms with the changed situation and began to put up safe operatic or mythological plays with an emphasis mostly on the visual properties in production . . . Thus the challenge once thrown from the stage, receded.94 A plausible but one-dimensional reading which shies away from the uneasy if not contradictory alliances of the entire ‘project’. The ambivalence informs a contemporary spirited rebuttal (in English) of the 1876 Act by an erudite Pandit, reprinted in Das’s book: in a country where female emancipation is unknown, except amongst denationalized cliques, and where women of easy virtue have been from time immemorial the caterers of public

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Figure I.5 Real and imagined . . . matchbox label, c. 1920 Source: Collection of Soumen Pal. Courtesy of CSSSC Archives

Figure I.6 A medley of genres in a bilingual playbill, 1894 Source: Harindra Nath Dutta Collection (hereinafter HNDC), courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta

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amusements, what is only a development of existing national institutions cannot be hooted down as a daring innovation of immorality. (emphasis added)95 The diagnosis of ‘easy virtue’ could hardly make it an easy ride to develop a legitimate national theatre. Particularly, under an uneasy colonial power which coded its control over cultural representation as a defence of morality! The role of the press reflects this paradox: English and regional language newspapers appear to have been equally involved in these questions, as were periodicals and journals representing an array of positions. Theatrical representation, like other British imports, also involved technology, but because human beings were the medium of representation, the moral component gained prominence. This fuelled the continuing controversy of whether ‘inferior’ women may play ‘superior’ roles: the ‘incongruity’ of Binodini Dasi playing the Vaishnav spiritual icon, Chaitanya, was picked up by the Englishman (1884), to which the theosophist Col. Olcott responded in the ‘native’ Reis and Rayyet. About half a century later, a similar attack was made, this time by lay devotees of Ramakrishna Math as to whether ‘ordinary’ (sadharan) theatre folk should have the right to act in Yugadevata (1948) – a drama on the life of the 19th-century Calcutta mystic Ramakrishna, which cast him exclusively as a divine incarnation. Between the two may be inserted the debate on the appropriateness of an old Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) appearing on the same stage in the 1920s and 1930s with students of both sexes in dance dramas for fundraising purposes. A reader questioned the appropriateness of what she scathingly dubbed as ‘mahila-theatre’ initiated by an ‘irresponsible’ poet. The controversy generated correspondence over several issues of Udbodhan, a publication from the Belur Math. In each instance, a privileged editorial position was claimed even as public participation was invited. While the specific formulations on impersonation underwent changes, the explicit concern continued to be with female, and implicitly, with male sexuality. At the crossroads A potentially charged area where the construction of sexuality intersects with ways of seeing lies in the practice of what goes by the umbrella term ‘cross-dressing’. The term requires nuanced glossing within the multivalent matrix of performance practices in the Indian 29

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and the larger South East/Asian context. In her study of cross-dressing and gender roles Marjorie Garber notes perceptively: The role of religion in most western cultures is itself an oppositional structure that depends upon discriminating between insiders and outsiders and upon sharply delineated male and female spheres leads to a construction of both Christianity and Judaism that almost inevitably invites both gender parody and gender crossover.96 Garber’s note of caution resonates with particular significance in India’s ‘living traditions’ even in the 21st century. One might begin by asking if it is possible to recover the erotics of performance and reception contexts without taking as a starting point categories of the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human. One might – quite randomly – consider groups or community dance forms such as lai haraoba in what is popularly known as ‘Manipuri dance’ where girls/ women specialise in playing Krishna and Radha. Or, of individual dancers innovating within a tradition, such as done by Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra (1926–2004), an exponent of the Odissi form, with his exquisite rendering of Radha. Why is there no irony in an elderly balding man conjuring the ideal feminine, beloved of Krishna? Perhaps the densities of contemporary praxis in the Indian subcontinent is best comprehended and re-presented in another medium than print, the shifting histories better captured through a subtext of sophisticated and informed allusion in cinematic language, only to be recalled in writing, like gestures.97 With that preamble, I outline selective aspects of Vaishnavism which emerge as a nodal point in the material analysed in this book. The distinctiveness of Vaishnavism lies in its advocacy of sakhi bhava or imagining the divine as an intimate female companion, a paradigm that also runs through legends and folklore across the subcontinent.98 What then might be the implications of professional woman entertainer cross-dressing in public and recontextualising this Vaishnav praxis? For one, the performing woman for a ticketed audience was herself a new phenomenon. Second, there was a reversing of the codes of jatra where boys played the sakhis and the female roles; and also given that the practice of men playing women continued in jatra until the 1940s. Third, during the first phase of amateur theatre sponsored by the Calcutta elite (until the late 1860s), female impersonation was considered a perfectly acceptable practice with many amongst the

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male gentry actually playing bejewelled heroines. This was a period when the ‘classics’ (namely Sanskrit) texts were brought alive on stage in Bangla, complemented with innumerable songs and hybrid music. The latter might range from ‘native orchestras’ or ‘concerts’ to actually having the Fort William Band accompany the performance. Memorialised as high art in the subsequent decades, the heroines were usually high-born mythical-fictional beauties such as Ratnabali, Urvasi, Sakuntala and Bhanumati. Along with their female entourage of sakhis as well as the ‘nati’ of Sanskrit drama,99 these heroines may be grouped as ‘classical nayikas’. The license was one of class and the pretext was often one of wealth and of display; the avowed aims – of re-presenting the classics or promoting social reform. Sixteen-year-old Kaliprasanna Sinha reportedly made a beautiful Bhanumati; Saratchandra Ghosh, later, one of the founders of the Bengal Theatre and a key figure in the induction of actresses, is said to have thrilled the spectators as he dazzled the stage with 20,000 rupees’ worth of ornaments in his role as the eponymous ‘nayika’ in a version of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala.100 Rabindranath’s elder brother, Jyotirindranath Tagore (1849–1925) whose plays were popular on the public stage, was unanimously acclaimed as having made a ‘charming Natee’ (variant spelling of nati). This was in a performance of Naba Natak, the specially commissioned social satire against kulinism, at the Jorasanko Tagore family mansion in 1867.101 Interestingly, the second tier of stage-struck young men, from a middle-level professional class, who initiated the public theatre, regularly impersonated women at least until the early 1870s. We are faced with an intriguing question: how and why did the public theatre, once it began hiring women as actresses, distance itself from these conventions of boys or men playing women? Was it a matter of caste, class and wealth impacting on gender roles? And, if the same members of the audience who came to the theatre continued to relish jatra, surely they were able to switch to different codes of ‘seeing’ across varying performance contexts? Would centuries of exposure to differential shades of gender bending have been entirely erased by the ‘realistic’ entry of women as actresses on the proscenium stage? Consider too, the particular ‘relish’ afforded by more explicit narratives of women dressing or acting as men (more common than the opposite) in a swathe of legends, tales and songs (gathas), often infused with allegorical shades of Sufism that permeate legends of passionate lovers. Kumar Shahani’s film Khayal Gatha (1989) embeds in its intertwined gathas, the sakhi or sister dressed as the absent male lover – an

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allusion to the legend of Mumal-Rano.102 It would seem that we can only theorise gender in performance on a case-by-case basis, attentive to the dynamics of the text in question. Certainly, impersonating ‘woman’ need not only be a form of burlesque. In chronicling the ‘thriving transvestite demi-monde impinging on the norms of popular entertainment’ in the US in the 1870s, Lawrence Senelick holds that the female impersonator ‘came to the forefront . . . when a mania for display was prevalent in women’s clothing’.103 Although the term ‘burlesque’ is to be often found in 19th century theatre advertisements in Calcutta, burlesque using female impersonation of the kind discussed by Senelick would not have found favour in the Bengali proscenium theatre that sought to distance itself from other local traditions of impersonation, for example, the local bohurupee, the chameleon-like performer (still extant) who changes his ‘guise’ at will. The preponderance of female impersonation in burlesque, pantomimes and other variety acts that were being offered by touring and resident western companies would not have been considered as a suitably ‘refined’ model for emulation. Not surprisingly, the parallel history of theatricals by white soldiers in British India thrived on female impersonation, privileging burlesque as a form. This too would be relatively segregated from the regular theatre-going public. I would argue that ‘transcendence’ of gender is specific to the individual articulating or embodying it and can hardly be supposed to yield automatic results in all interrogations (theoretical or otherwise) of sexuality. Transvestitism and transformation into ‘a woman’ is central to the practice of many syncretic movements or sects in the subcontinent, and may signify a history of substitution.104 Further, ‘transformation’ is often counterbalanced by other ‘realities’, such as having a female partner in practising prescribed but socially suspect or proscribed austerities.105 And of course, there is a long tradition of the hijra community and their marginal status but auspicious presence at life-cycle ceremonies. In many of his paintings, artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) stages ‘acts of masquerade’, investing deeply and playfully on the polyvalence of impersonation in Vaishnavism: I refer particularly to a painting he called Sakhibhav (1995). In an illuminating essay, Geeta Kapur observes: ‘By drawing into his painterly spectrum iconographic sources that confirm the presence of androgyny within India mythology, Khakhar endorses his own invented, inverted, sacrament of a male couple’s embrace.’106 One would therefore be wary about using terms like cross-dressing and androgyny either in a general way or in isolation, without taking 32

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into account their range of signification and the many histories contained in their usage. Categories of masculine/feminine or male and female may function in a binary or in a complementary manner. A meaningful exercise would be to trace how, once such categories enter into cultural circulation from textual exegesis or even specialised religious practice, they may be read (radically, ironically, compassionately) in their new contexts. I have cross-hatched ‘cross-dressing’ in at least two ways: first, as a ‘devotional mode’ including representations of androgynous saint figures to the ‘taking on’ or ‘becoming’ the loved one; and second, as representations of censored or possible social practice, as an explicitly theatrical device. Cross-dressing in drama generally involves dressing up with the intent to deceive, although of course deception itself may function in unpredictable ways. In Binodini Dasi’s case, the real-life incident of her visiting the dying Ramakrishna disguised as a young gentleman is in order to deceive the ‘guards’ to gain entry.107 Simultaneously, it is read as an index of her devotion. On stage, a deliberate fusion rather than confusion of gender categories is sought. The fusion is suggested in the concept of bhava which advocates imitation in order to become the object of imitation or to realise oneness. Offstage the scenario is different. The confusion ‘in real life’ occurs backstage when Binodini as Chaitanya – prior to renunciation, when s/he is still ‘Nimai’ – comes to receive Ramakrishna’s blessing. This could of course simply be Ramakrishna’s ‘delight’ in confusing fixed categories, and juxtaposing and valorising an ‘inner truth’ as opposed to the ‘exterior appearance’. For the benediction to have its complete moral/spiritual significance in theatrical representation, rather than displace or replace plots around deception or mistaken identity, ‘cross-dressing’ may be interrogative and radical. Or, it may leave intact or actually reaffirm ‘traditional’ structures of gender difference. It may also erase multiple non-binary figurations in textualised traditions and practices.

Bhakti: sacred and secular I address in some detail therefore the intersection of the concept of bhakti as a mode of personal devotion and salvation with the particular configuration of gender roles necessitated by the setting up of the public theatre. Inevitably, the latter participated in and was constituted by the more central concern with the women’s question, as it was formulated in debates, discussions, critical writings sometimes directly related to legislation, as well as in its representations in literature and other popular media. 33

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Here, I have marked out from the annals of theatre history, the moment of slippage between the ‘salvation’ of the devotee (bhakta) and the ‘redemption’ of the fallen woman (patita). It is a moment that creates – indeed requires – a particular agential role, even a functional role when re-presented as history, for the figure of the saint-guru. To use a phrase that we will encounter frequently, it is ‘in the guise of’ the exemplary even if transgressive saint figure, suggesting a crossover from the human to the divine, that the actress may legitimise her appearance in public. In having Binodini Dasi play Chaitanya (before Ramakrishna), a tradition of Bengali Vaishnavism that makes successful dramatic representation a mode of personal liberation, raganuraga bhakti,108 is being harnessed to counter the charge of the licentiousness of theatre, as part of the westernised, morally degrading pleasures of the metropolis. It addresses in particular, the anti-theatrical diatribe that locates ‘sin’ in the person of the actress. The presence of the paradigmatic figure of the guru/saint also makes it possible to stage, as it were, the conscious discipline of Bhakti yoga in the person of the actress as a sadhika or aspirant. I have argued that although enabling in some ways in its immediate historical context, the enactment of bhakti by the outcast woman (and consequently, the public granting of grace to the actress) is equally the site of interrogation by an actress such as Binodini Dasi in her autobiography.109 Ultimately, the paradigm lends itself to readings and productions in contemporary times that erase both the material conditions of performance as well as their historical contexts. Instead, a powerful spectacle of faith is produced to achieve a ‘resolution’ of the contradictions encountered: (1) in the transition from and interchanges between different performance forms; (2) between the perceived separation of art and religion; (3) in the ongoing debates on the definition of culture as either entertainment or education; and (4) finally, in the representation of female sexuality as cautionary spectacle and the dissolution of that threat. The spectacle of faith in late 20th-century representations erases the material base of these contradictions as they were epitomised in the establishing of the proscenium theatre by the colonised ‘natives’, and as they were embodied in theatre performers themselves. The place of gender in the production of the spectacle and the ‘resolutions’ offered in each case operates in very different ways in the two performance contexts – of the 1880s and the 1970s–90s – foregrounded in Chapter 2. The central argument derives therefore from the congruence of at least three histories: first, the history of Chaitanyaism in Bengal with

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the concept of personal devotion or bhakti as salvation, particularly its paradigm of religious-aesthetic salvation; second, the actual phase of Bhakti on stage from the 1880s onwards; and third, the construction of the figure of the ‘prostitute-actress’ alongside 19th-century discourses around the women’s question. I have confined myself to sketching the performance contexts of the public theatre in Calcutta and in tracing an orientation common to most accounts by theatre practitioners themselves of those contexts. Thus, Bhakti revival as a social phenomenon has been considered from the perspective of stage practice and of theatre history. Given the heterogeneity of Bhakti movements in the subcontinent, the necessity for establishing specific local, regional and temporal contexts cannot be reiterated too often.110 A close reading of these contexts will allow us to focus on the discursive structures of cultural production and to complement studies that come under the rubric of ‘Hindu revivalism’ in this phase of the social history of Bengal.111 It should now be possible to explicate the ways in which ‘redemption’ functions in this book and the various levels of its signification. I use redemption to generally mean the forward movement of ‘good’ from ‘evil’, leading to a state of being saved from being fallen – a movement that Hayden White characterises as the hallmark of the Romance narrative. By ‘emplotting’ is meant ‘constituting a particular story through the process of exclusion, stress and subordination’.112 Its extended signification in Bengal includes the emerging construction of the bhadramahila and her ‘others’. The purpose of emphasising the ‘originally flawed’ enterprise of a national theatre is not to claim a ‘natural’ or immanent beginning for redemption but to demarcate the topography of this project. The discourse of redemption has a more complex history and is formed in a larger social context than will be possible for me to chart here. I have concentrated on its alignment with theatre history obliquely through a valuation of English education, its appearance at significant points in the practice of theatre and in representations of that practice, until it finds in the figure of ‘Nati Binodini’ the means of re-presenting its own story. Obviously, in the trajectories I have traced of theatre history (em)plotted in redemption, it is not possible for the emplotment to be identical at any time in the course of a century, and clearly it has not been possible to pursue exhaustively all of these coordinates within the space of this study. By identifying an underlying though not unifying discourse of redemption common to disparate strands, I wish to extend the theological underpinnings of redemption into the social and the political. This is

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elaborated in each of the chapters, showing how a contested process of secularisation is negotiated on the stage, making visible the desired, the feared and the imagined. I have conceptualised the actress of the Bengali stage as a ‘working woman’ and her conflicted status as a ‘modern professional’ in the colonial economy of 19th-century Bengal.113 My chief concern has been to trace ideologies of religion and education and their impress on the gendered politics of labour and forms of cultural production. It is precisely by affirming the intertwining of the indigenous and the foreign, the amateur and professional, the rural and the metropolitan that we may also move away from an understanding of ‘the bhadralok’ as a singular and homogenous category. Siting the actress as a nodal point in the interpenetrative discourses of education, religion and reform, often but not exclusively articulated within a nationalist paradigm, I have explored the compulsions behind the staging and thence, demarcating or excluding in highly spectacular ways, social roles of and for women. Concurrently, I have looked at continuing practices of boys and/or men playing female roles, whether in older forms such as the Krishna-jatra or in freshly composed plays such as Michael Madhusudan Datta’s Krishna Kumari (1861) for a new elite clientele in Calcutta. If subcontinental performance practices have thrived by cutting across ethnic, religious and other identities or, at least, have been in conversation with different sectarian affiliations, to what extent do we find the construction of singular religious identities congealing in the 19th century? How may we explain silences and absences in the entire map of theatrical representation, stretching across almost a century? What goes into the construction of a new performing self, inscribed by the texts being enacted on stage, simultaneously enveloped by the public debates on the performer’s ‘low’ status? How would this compare with other accounts of or by working class or lower-caste women in Bengal? In asking such questions, perhaps I am seeking to capture an endless mirroring, going back and forth in time and space! The material conditions of performance for an underdeveloped market within a colonial economy gave to the public theatre a unique and interstitial social space. I shall try and situate the actress and the range of dramatic roles she played within this fluid space; although, if we were to go only by the printed tirade against her presence and right to impersonate, that space would appear to be forever sealed . . . no matter what the ‘tone’ of dramatic production.

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Figure I.7 St John’s Church, foundation stone laid by Warren Hastings in 1784, built in 1787. View from Council House Street, Calcutta Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

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Notes 1 Sylvain Levi, The Theatre of India (Le Théâtre Indien) (1890) (trans. Narayan Mukherji), Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1978, Vol. 2, p. 107. 2 Entry of 6 November 1902, The Fred Gaisberg Diaries, Part 2: Going East (1902–1903), (Compiled and ed.) Hugo Strötbaum, p. 14. www.recording pioneers.com/docs/GAISBERG_DIARIES_2.pdf (accessed on 1 June 2017). 3 ‘Introduction’, Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), Girish Rachanabali [hereinafter GR], Vol. 5, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991 (1975), p. xi. 4 Ibid. 5 The long lineage of brilliant female impersonators in jatra includes Phanibhushan, Choto-Phani, Chapal Rani, the last being the stage name of Chapal Bhaduri, son of stage and film actress Prabha Devi and brother of actress Ketaki Dutta. Female impersonators added Rani (Queen) to their pseudonym. 6 These include Nisikanta Chattopadhyaya, The Yatras or the Popular Dramas of Bengal (‘An Inaugural Dissertation’ . . . presented at the University of Zurich), London: Trubner & Co., 1882; Prabhu Guha-Thakurta, The Origin and Development of Bengali Drama, London: Kegan Paul, 1930; and R.K. Yajnik, The Indian Theatre: Its Origins and Its Later Developments Under European Influence with Special Reference to Western India, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1933 (based on a Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, July 1931). Amongst later scholars with the same view, Chandra Bhan Gupta holds that ‘the Bengali stage is the most artistic’, its ‘distinguishing feature’ being that ‘the feminine [sic] roles are played by women’, The Indian Theatre, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal & Sons, 1991 (1954), pp. 140–1. 7 Plays and variety entertainment put up by the various British armed forces primarily depended on their own men for female impersonation, though they occasionally collaborated with professional actresses and ‘ladies of the station’. Army initiative seems to have also predominated in amateur theatricals among civilians as well. For the interaction between the military and civilians in Bombay, see Kumudini Mehta, ‘English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and Nineteenth Century’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bombay, March 1960. I thank Shanta Gokhale for sharing a copy of this wonderful work.   In Calcutta, Mrs. Emma Bristow who was herself an actress and later, the wife of rich merchant, is credited with having brought over actresses from England for the Calcutta stage in 1789. The Russian linguist Gerasim Stepanovich Lebedeff’s (1749–1817) courageous and abortive venture in 1795 to set up a ‘Bengallie theatre’ saw the appearance of Indian girls/women in the play Lovers’ Disguise. Some decades later, productions by wealthy private patrons such as Nabeen Kumar Basu also hired girls in 1835; the review is cited in Chapter 1. 8 The history of the Surabhi Theatres was published on the occasion of ‘World Telegu Conference’; the preface reflects the exigencies of regional nationalism in contemporary India: [T]he Surabhi theatres can be styled as itinerant, family, professional, people’s theatres . . . Over thirty family theatre groups spread over the entire Andhra Pradesh . . . The Kohinoor and the

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Surabhi theatres belong to the Telegu soil and so the Telegu race takes legitimate pride in both of them. Pandit Sri Rama Sastry, Preface, Surabhi Theatres, Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Sangeeta Nataka Akademi, 1975, p. i. 9 Modali Nagabhushana Sarma, Bellary Raghava: Prince of Players, Hyderabad: Andhra Mahila Press, 1982, p. 3. According to Sarma, ‘Bellary Raghava’ (1880–1946) believed: ‘Why refuse her (woman) a place on the stage, the great kindergarten school [sic] of education for the masses?’ Ibid., pp. 121–2. A practicing lawyer, Raghava was inspired by Shakespeare; Sarma believes that the insistence on women as actresses may also have been because ‘it also appears that women graced women’s parts’ in the traditional Bhagavatalu varu. Ibid., p. 112. 10 Susan Seizer, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 11 Writings on Bal Gandharva (1888–1967) in English include Mohan Nadkarni, Bal Gandharva: The Nonpareil Thespian, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1988; Dyaneshwar Nadkarni, Balgandharva and the Marathi Theatre, Bombay: Roopak Books, 1988, esp. pp. 57–9; and, for a recent treatment of the impersonator as a hyper-feminised object of male fantasy, see Meera Kosambi, Gender, Culture, and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema Before Independence, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015, pp. 265–90. Jayshankar ‘Sundari’s’ (1889–1976) magic as a ‘female-actor’ for 30 years is summed up by Balwant Gargi in Theatre in India, New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1962, p. 131. 12 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Stri Bhumika: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No. 35, 29 August–4 September 1998, pp. 2291–300. 13 Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. 14 Men played both the ghosha-clad Nambudri women as well as untouchable working class women in the plays of V.T. Bhattathirippad and others. I thank Kavitha Balakrishnan and P.J. Binoy for this information. 15 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in Nineteenth Century Bengali Literature’ in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 250–67. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010 extends the trail into other medium, sites and regions. 16 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997 (1995). 17 The Bangla bibliography for individual actresses is too extensive to be cited in full here; most of them have been referred in the book. A few recent works: Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati (Theatre and the Bengali Nati), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2004 has comprehensive information on the lives of 45 actresses and snippets on another 50. Sudipto Chatterjee in The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007, focuses on the hybridity of the emerging theatre; actresses are not central to the study. Bishnupriya Dutt and Urmimala Sarkar-Munsi’s

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Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010 provides vignettes on a range of actresses in varied contexts, over time. Sarvani Gooptu, The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015, is well structured but draws primarily on the existing Bangla scholarship, replicating the discourse of ‘sin’ in the study of actresses. Anna Morcom, Courtesans, Bar Girls & Dancing Boys: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance, Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2014, has valuable insights into contemporary dance practices in India, but stays with a thesis of a monolithic colonial impact. Thanks to Lakshmi Subramanian for bringing Morcom’s book to my attention. 18 Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘Promiscuous Spaces and Economies of Entertainment: Soldiers, Actresses and Hybrid Genres in Colonial India’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Vol. 41, No. 2, Winter issue, 2014, pp. 50–75. 19 For a synoptic account of the travels of minstrelsy in British India, see Bhattacharya, ibid., pp. 67–8. 20 Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘The Nautee in “the Second City of the Empire” ’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2003, pp. 208–12. 21 Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998, pp. 105–13. 22 Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 23 Rosie Llewellyn Jones, The Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah, 1822– 1887, Gurgaon: Random House India, 2014 provides a sympathetic and succinct account of the ‘re-settlement’ of Wajid Ali Shah in Metiaburj (Garden Reach). 24 Pradip Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History, Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Limited, 1978, pp. 14–15. 25 See ‘Introduction’, Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1995, especially, pp. 4–5; and for the links between land, caste and religion, Introduction, Sarkar, Hindu Wife, pp. 11–16. 26 Despite very different approaches, this is largely the thesis in Veena Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’ in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Pran Neville, Nautch Girls of the Raj, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009. Vidya Rao argues for a more fluid identity in the rendering of songs, ‘Wifes, Tawaifs and Nayikas: Transcending the Boundaries of Identity’, Indian Journal of Social Work, January 1996, pp. 40–66. 27 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Laughing Performer’ in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay Reader, New Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2012, pp. 1–37. 28 Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Gender Issues in Early South Indian History’ in Saroja Bhate (ed.), India and Indology: Past Present and Future, Calcutta: National Book Agency Pvt. Ltd. 2002, pp. 703, 708–9.

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29 In Peshwai Maratha, lavani dancers were sourced from the kunbinis and bateeks bought by the state for domestic and agricultural labour and sexual labour, primarily on grounds of adultery. Sharmila Rege, ‘Conceptualising Popular Culture: “Lavani” and “Powada” in Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly, 16 March 2002, p. 1041. 30 Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. 31 Francisco Palsaert, Jahangir’s India or The Remonstrantie (trans. W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl), 1925; repr. Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2001, p. 83. 32 Edwin Arnold singles out the beauty of the ‘Mohammedan’ and ‘Hindu’ dancers at his Parsi host’s home in Poona and also mentions the ‘Hindu theatre’ where the female parts were played by ‘Nautchnees who discharged it intelligently’, India Revisited, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886, pp. 82–9. 33 Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 127–79. 34 Sharmila Rege, ‘The Hegemonic Appropriation of Sexuality: The Case of the Lavani Performers of Mahararshtra’ in Patricia Uberoi (ed.), Social Reform, Sexuality and the State, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Occasional Studies 7, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996, pp. 23–36. Veena Naregal, ‘Performance, Caste, Aesthetics: The Marathi Sangeet Natak and the Dynamics of Cultural Marginalization’, Indian Sociology, Vol. 44, Nos. 1–2, June 2010, pp. 79–101. Makarand Sathe emphasises that reformer Jyotibha Phule had early seized on the radical potential of the tamasha. A Socio-political History of Marathi Theatre, Thirty Nights (trans. Makarand Sathe et al.), Vol. 1, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 26. 35 Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012, pp. 143–4. 36 For a pioneering examination of what ‘Revival’ entailed for the performers, see Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 November 1985, pp. 1869– 76. On the specific construction and consolidation of ‘Bharatanatyam’, see Matthew Harp Allen, ‘Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance’, TDR, Vol. 41, No. 3 (T155), Fall 1997, pp. 63–100. Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court is a recent exposition of standardisation and cultivation of taste. 37 For example, Gowri Ramnarayan on the nattuvanars who trained the women to dance in ‘Where Are the Master Gurus?’ Hindu: Dance Folio, December 1998, pp. 6–9. 38 Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, with her focus on Murshidabad, studies the rarely explored terrain of ‘a political economy based on female slave-use and hire’ including those trained in music and dance. Studies on theatre in 19th-century Dacca and other towns in present-day Bangladesh, based primarily on contemporary newspapers, offer glimpses of the changing contours of other performance forms, as in Muntassir Mamoon,

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Unish Shatake Daccar Theatar (Theatre in 19th-Century Dacca), Dacca: Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 1979 and Unish Shatake Bangladesher Theatar (Theatre in Bangladesh in the 19th Century), Dacca: Subarna, 1985. Art history has been more attentive to these areas: for example, Ratnabali Chatterjee, From the Karkhana to the Studio: A Study in the Changing Social Roles of Patron and Artist in Bengal, New Delhi: Books and Books, 1990. Gulammohammed Sheikh brings out the interaction between artists of the regional paramparas or traditions and the Mughal ataliers in western and north-western India in ‘The Making of a Visual Language: Thoughts on Mughal Painting’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 30–1, November 1997, pp. 7–32. 39 According to Niharranjan Ray, ‘The earliest reference to temple girls in Bengal is the eighth century Rajatarangani of Kalhana, in respect of the dancing girl, Kamala’ History of the Bengali People (trans. John W. Hood), Calcutta: Orient Longman Ltd., 1994, p. 377. Syed Ahmed delineates the rupture as follows: With the advent of the Muslims, the state ceased supporting the temples, and, as a result, the latter found it financially difficult to maintain the devadasis . . . Devoid of support from the highly skilled devadasis, the court theatre dwindled, as did public temple performances given on festive occasions. Thus, by the 16th century, female performers ‘disappeared’ from the elite court and temple-based theatres. S.J. Ahmed, ‘Female Performers in Indigenous Theatres of Bengal’ in Firdous Azim and Niaz Zaman (eds), Infinite Variety: Women and Society and Literature, Dacca: University Press, 1994, p. 277. 40 As early as 1829, Haliram Dhekiyal Phukan had expressed his reservations about ‘the obscene dance and songs and songs exhibiting lustful feelings’ in Bihu celebrations in his Asam Buranji (written in Bangla). Dhekiyal was initiating a discourse that continued into the 20th century. Translated and cited in Nilakshi Phukan Borgohain, Female Dance Tradition of Assam, Guwahati: Purbanchal Prakash, 2011, p. 223. Thanks to Prachee Dewri for this reference. 41 Two very different examples: Kumar Shahani’s film Bamboo Flute (1999) and Subha Chakraborty’s monograph on contemporary performances in honour of the snake-goddess Manasa in A Journey to Joramath, Singing the Manasamangal Pala, Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 2010. 42 Ahmed, ‘Female Performers’ offers a condensed account covering undivided Bengal and contemporary Bangladesh. 43 An article in Bangadarshan, Falgun 1289 BS/1882 critiques the changes in jatra, maintaining that ever since Kashinath of Gopal Oriya’s company introduced the khemta dance as performed by the nautch girl, ‘everyone dances; even Dasarath [Rama’s father, the old king] would dance if he were not playing the violin.’ Cited in Amal Mitra, Kolkatae Bideshi Rangalay (English Theatre in Calcutta), Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1967, p. 234. 44 Gurusaday Dutt, The Folk Dances of Bengal, Calcutta, 1954. The book was published posthumously; the manuscript was begun around 1934. 45 The urge to claim a ‘classical’ form in competition with other regions/states has finally resulted in ‘Gaudiya nritya’ being ‘recognised’ as Bengal’s own!

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46 Sarkar, Hindu Wife, pp. 61–2. 47 Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival’; Rege, ‘The Hegemonic Appropriation of Sexuality’; Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1993 (1992). 48 P. Rajagopal, Interview with P.K. Bhupathi, 22 January 1999, Seagull Theatre Quarterly, No. 31, 2001, p. 89. Pran Nevile’s well-documented and beautifully illustrated Nautch Girls of the Raj reproduces the overarching colonial template of ‘nautch’ for all female dancers. 49 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Colonial State: Theory and Practice, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016, especially chapters 1–2. 50 See Sivnath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj, Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1973 (1911–12); and for a discussion of Reformist movements, Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964, chapter 4. 51 See Farina Mir on the Arya Samaj’s policy of ‘Hindi-isation’ in Punjab, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012 (2010). 52 In the words of Saskia Kersenboom-Story: ‘The concept of the necessary harmony of male and female sexuality to ensure happiness, fertility and property is one of the most basic motivation for the origin of the phenomenon of the nityasumangali.’ Nityasumangali: Devadasi Tradition in South India, New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1987, p. 8. 53 Outlining the supportive environment of ‘Gurukulam’ Amrit Srinivasan argues: ‘The devadasi’s householding system provided convincing testimony of the distinctive experiment tried out by South Indian temple Hinduism in the professionalisation of the feminine arts.’ ‘Gurukulam’ in Geeti Sen and Susan Visvanathan (eds), ‘Second Nature: Women and the Family’, IIC Quarterly, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4, Winter 1996, p. 207. 54 Sivnath Sastri, Atmacharit (trans. Suniti Devi), Nisith R. Ray (ed.), 1918; repr. Calcutta: Riddhi India, 1988, pp. 156–7. 55 Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court, p. 120. 56 See particularly the memorial by the Hindu Social Reform Association of Madras to the Governor of Madras and Viceroy in 1893 reproduced in Nevile, Nautch Girls of the Raj, pp. 118–20. 57 See Sarkar, Hindu Wife, pp. 82–3. 58 Muslim women entered the field in the early 20th century. Sonia N. Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education in Colonial Bengal’ in Krishna Kumar and Joachim Oesterheld (eds), Education and Social Change in South Asia, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007, pp. 218–47. 59 Yajnik, Indian Theatre, pp. 9–10. Kathryn Hansen, ‘Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Community Formation in the NineteenthCentury Parsi Theatre’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 2003, pp. 381–405. 60 The Parsi Original Victoria Natak Mandali (also known as the Southern Maratha Dramatic Company or Madrasi Musalmanche Natak) performed Vadra Munir Benazir (1879, 1889) in both ‘Marathi and Musalmani bhasa’. K.B. Marathe, Marathi Rangabhumicha Purvarang: Kiroloskar purva Marathi Rangobhoomicha magova (A Prologue to Marathi Theatre: Prior to Kirloskar), Pune: Srividya Prakashan, 1979, Appendix.

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61 On the codification of khayal by Bhatkhande see Amlan Das Gupta, ‘Words for Music Perhaps: Reflections on the Khayal Bandish’ in Das Gupta (ed.), Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Calcutta: Thema, 2007, pp. 239–56. 62 Sarma, Bellary Raghava, pp. 112–13. 63 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 31–2, 49. 64 Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1976. 65 Kenneth Mcpherson, The Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta, 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974, p. 4. Thanks to Debjani Sengupta for this reference. 66 ‘In 1918 the population of Calcutta was still largely of migrant origin, with nearly 50% of the total population coming from areas beyond Bengal.’ Ibid., p. 2. 67 Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘Questionable Boundaries’ in Heterogeneities, New Delhi: Tulika Publishers, 2010, p. 158. 68 See Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘Cutlets or Fish Curry? Debating Indian Authenticity in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2006, pp. 257–72. 69 These include plot summaries and positive exhortations by the editor of the Bombay Times: for example, in the column ‘The Hindoo Theatre’ ‘(From a Native Correspondent)’, 16 February 1853. Another editorial (8 March 1853) ‘for the purpose of exhibiting performances new to the European spectator’ vouches that ‘these plays are of genuine native origin from the early classic dramas of Hindoostan’. Cited in S.N. Banhatti, A History of Marathi Theatre: 1843–79, Vol. 1, Pune: Venus Prakashan, 1957, Appendix 7, p. 392. 70 In the ‘Advertisement’ or preface in English to the second edition of his Bidhaba Bibaha Natak (Play on Widow Remarriage) (1856), Umeshchandra Mitra argues that tragedy alone was an ‘effective instrument . . . for social reformation [sic]’ in Pinakesh Sarkar (ed.), Harano Diner Natak (Plays from a Lost Age), Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1999, pp. 187–8. 71 Mitra, Kolkatae Bideshi Rangalay; Rathin Chakraborty, Kolkatar Natyacharcha, Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1993, has photographs of the buildings. 72 Bhattacharya, ‘Promiscuous Spaces’; Christopher Balme, ‘The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of Globalization’, Theatre Research International, Vol. 40, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 19–36. 73 Rimli Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, p. 131. (All references in this book are to the translated English text, rather than the Bangla original. Hereinafter Binodini Dasi.) For a profile of the Calcutta gentry who were precursors of the public theatre, see Brajendra Nath Banerjee, Bengali Stage: 1795–1873, Calcutta: Ranjan Publishing House, 1943. An insightful reading of these newly emergent spaces or the reconfiguration of traditional spaces such as the nat-mandir (which held the family deity)

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or the inner courtyard of the mansions of the urban wealthy, is found in Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny, 2005; repr. London and New York: Routledge, 2006, esp. pp. 158–9, 213. Girishchandra also refers to a performance of Kapalkundala by his company which took place in the nat-mandir of Maharaja Sri Radhakanta Deb Bahadur, in GR, Vol. 5, p. 363. This would be an exception rather the rule. 74 Heramba Maitra’s son Ashok Maitra would marry Kananbala (aka Kanan Devi), one of the first stars of Indian cinema. 75 Monilal Bandhopadhyay, ‘Sanjibanir antardaha’ (Sanjibani’s Fulmina tions), Natya-mandir, 1st year, No. 9, Chaitra 1317 BS/1910, pp. 731–2. 76 Letter no. 9 (in English) by Vivekananda to Mr. Francis Leggett (6 July 1896) in Swamijir Bani o Rachana: Sankalan (A Compilation of Swamji’s Speeches and Writings), Calcutta: Udbodhan Karyalaya, 1996, 8th ed., p. 443. The original letter is addressed to ‘Frankincense’, an affectionate version of ‘Francis’. 77 ‘Monster meetings’ of early nationalist crowds, especially of young men, at the Star Theatre and near Bengal Theatre in Beadon Square were frequently reported, as in the Pioneer, 5 May 1883, p. 5. 78 John Stokes, Michael Booth and Susan Bassnett, Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 3. 79 For his childhood memory of the visits of the jhi as a prelude to theatre’s attraction, see Ahindra Choudhury, Nijere Haraye Khunji (In Search of My Lost Self), Vol. 1, Calcutta: Indian Associated Publishing Co., 1962, pp. 18–19. 80 Syama Prasad Mookerjee, ‘The Bengali Theatre’ (The Calcutta Review, January 1924) and Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘The Bengalee Stage’ (The Hindu Review, February 1913, pp. 40–7); repr. in Bohurupee Natya Patrika, Chittaranjan Ghosh (ed.), No. 42, Special issue, March 1974, pp. 29–49, 56–60. Both articles were written in English. 81 Robert Darnton, ‘Literary Surveillance and the British Raj: The Contradictions of liberal Imperialism’, Book History, Vol. 4, 2001, pp. 133–76, attests to the large print runs of plays, especially farces, as well as songbooks, and book reading and group ‘listening sessions’ in the city and mofussil towns, and in the countryside. 82 Names of performers are listed in Michael Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, Bombay: Popular Prakashan Pvt. Ltd., 1994. 83 Somnath Gupta, Parsi Theater: Udbhav aur Vikas (The Rise and Growth of the Parsi Theatre), Allahabad: Lokbharati Prakashan, 1981 (1960), pp. 111–12. 84 Morcom rightly problematises the ‘popular’ in the mainstreaming of Bollywood, which is used as ‘soft power’ by the government in her Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys. 85 For extended interviews with important practitioners of Group Theatre, see Seagull Theatre Quarterly, Nos. 29–30, June 2001. 86 The most recent presentation being ‘Subject: Lotuses and Fires: “Scenic Illusions” on the Nineteenth Century Imperial Stage’, Faculty Seminar, Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences Calcutta, 8 April 2015.

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87 These and other questions on the rationale and history of cataloguing emerged during my research on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of Kalighat patas in Summer 1995. Preliminary findings were presented in a paper titled ‘Visual Representations of Traditional Female Performers and Problems in Research Methodology’, at the Department of English, University of Pune, 1995. 88 See Sarkar, ‘Talking About Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal’ in Hindu Wife, pp. 53–94. 89 Mildred Archer, Indian Popular Painting in the India Office Library, (London), New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1977, p. 142. 90 Ibid., p. 151. 91 The connection is emphasised though not elaborated on by Hana Knižková, The Drawings of the Kalighat Style: Secular Themes, Prague: National Museum, 1975, p. 67. 92 For a fascinating account, see Gautam Hemmady, ‘Matchbox Labels and the Stories They Tell’ in Jyotindra Jain (ed.), Marg, Vol. 68, No. 3, March–June 2017, pp. 66–73. 93 Prabhat Kumar Bhattacharyya, Shadow Over Stage, Calcutta: Barnali, 1989 provides a comprehensive account. 94 Pulin Das, Persecution of Drama and Stage, Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons Private Ltd., 2004 (1986), p. 11. 95 Pandit Prannath Saraswati, ‘The Dramatic Performance Bill’, first published in the Mookerjee’s Magazine, 1876, in ibid., p. 147. 96 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, p. 213. 97 Kumar Shahani’s 35 mm film Bhavantarana (Immanence) (1991) on dance embodied in Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra opens up such a possibility. 98 Sakhya bhava or intimate companionship: one of the five primary modes or bhavas through which the devotee of either sex may relate to Krishna. 99 The word ‘nati’ refers to the actress, the wife of the sutradhar or narrator, who appears with him in the prastavana or prologue and introduces the play in Sanskrit drama. 100 Bipinbehari Gupta, Chapter 10, 4 Ashad 1314 BS/1907 in Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Puraton Prasanga (About Old Times), Calcutta: Pustak Bipani, 1989, p. 79. 101 Abanindranath Thakur with Rani Chanda, Gharoa (Informal Spaces), Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1971 (1941), p. 93. 102 Mumal-Rano is a romantic tale from Sindhi folklore immortalised by Shah Abdul Latif in Shah Jo Risalo where, in the tradition of the vipralambha sringar, it is not uncommon for a woman (a sister or an intimate female companion) to dress as the lover to comfort the heroine in the anguish of her separation. A different aesthetic convention found in Sanskrit court poetry is viparitrati, in which the woman takes the man’s role in love. 103 Lawrence Senelick, ‘Boys and Girls Together: Glamour Drag and Male Impersonation’ in Lesley Ferris (ed.), Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 88. 104 In his essay on ‘Brihannala: Utsa o patabhumi’ (Brihannala: Source and background), Sujit Chaudhury posits that goddesses were originally worshipped by priestesses who were gradually replaced by priests, either

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castrated or transvestites, and eventually by men who put on women’s garments during the ritual, as in the Ojhapali dance of the SrihattaKachar region. Prachin Bharatey Matripadhanya: Kimbadantir Purnabichar (Matriarchy in Ancient India: A Review of Legends), Calcutta: Papyrus, 1990. 105 As in the case of the Bartaman-panthis in Bengal, Jeanne Openshaw, ‘Raj Krisna: Perspectives on the Worlds of Little-known Bengali “Guru” ’ in Rajat K. Ray (ed.), Mind Body & Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 131–2. 106 Geeta Kapur, ‘The Uncommon Universe of Bhupen Khakhar’ in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Culture, Cambridge, MA: INIVA, London, MIT Press, 2007, p. 11. For a 20th-century scholar’s negative view of men dancing in sakhibhava, see Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay’s letter to Gopal Haldar in 1932, cited in Chaudhury, Prachin Bharatey Matripadhanya, pp. 80–1. 107 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, ‘My Story’, p. 95. Swami Prabhananda, mentions ‘Nati Binodini’s’ daring visit to Ramakrishna ‘dressed as a sahib, wearing a hat and coat’ in SriRamakrishner Antahlila, Calcutta: Udbodhan Karyalay, 1989, Vol. 1, p. 36. 108 See David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Raganuraga Bhakti, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 109 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 57–9. 110 As for example, Kumkum Sangari, ‘Meerabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, No. 27, 7 July 1990, pp. 1464–75 and Vijaya Ramaswamy, Walking Naked: Women, Society and Spirituality in South India, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1997. 111 Amiya P. Sen, Hindu Revival in Bengal: 1872–1905, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. 112 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 6, note 5. 113 My emphasis on the actress as a working woman owes much to Tracy C. Davis’s study of Victorian actresses, although our approaches have been necessarily different. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, London: Routledge, 1991.

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Figure I.8 Minerva Theatre, Calcutta, inaugurated in 1893 with Girishchandra’s rendering of Macbeth Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

AN INCOMPLETE ROLL CALL OF NAMES . . . Biralhari Bonobiharini/Bonobihareenee/Bhuni Chapalasundari Charubala Charushila Chhoto Rani Durgarani Elokeshi Ferozabala Gangabai/Gangamoni

Angurbala Aparna Ashalata Ashcharjamayi Asmantara Basantakumari Bedanabala Bhushankumari Binodini/Hadu/Hadi Binodini Dasi/Benodini

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Pannarani (Chhoto) Pannasundari Prabha Debi/Prova Prakashmoni Pramadasundari/Pramoda Purabala Puturani Radharani Rajbala Rajkumari/Raja Rajlakshmi (Chhoto) Rani Rani (Banka or crooked) Ranibala Ranimoni Ranisundari/Ranusundari Renubala (Sukh) Rosy (Babar Shah, 1917), a ‘certain foreign beauty meant to attract an audience’ Sadhana Bose (Sen) Sailabala Sarabala Sarajubala Saraswati Saratkumari Saratsundari Sarojini/Nedi Sashimukhi Shantabala Shefalika (Putul) Sherabala Shyama Sindhubala Sonamoni Subashini Sudhirbala (Potol) Suhashini Sushilabala, The ‘Divine Sushila’ Sushilabala (Chhoto) Sushilasundari Tarakbala/Miss Light Tarasundari Tincoury/Teencowri Dassy/Teenkari Teenkari (Chhoto) Tolo-Hari Tulseemoney, manager of Female Theatre Tunnamoni Ushabati/Potol

Golap/Golapi/Golapkamini/ Golapsundari/Miss Golapsundari/ Sukumari/Mrs. Sukumary Dutt Haridasi/Bodo-Hari Harimati: Indira/Choto/Bodo) Harimati (Biral) Harimati (Gulfan)/Gulfanhari Haripriya Dasi Harisundari/Blackie-Hari Hemantakumari (Bodo) Hinganbala (Hena) Indubala Indumati Jadumoni Jagattarini Jnanada Joydurga Kadambini/Kadambinee/Kadu Kaminisundari Kanan Bala Dassi Kankabati Sahu Khetramoni/Khetu Kiransashi (Chotorani) Kironbala/Kiran Bala Kohinoor Bala Krishnabhamini Kumudini Kusumkumari Kusumkumari/Bishad-Kusum Kusumkumari/Khonra-Kusum (Kusum the lame) Kusumkumari/Prahlad-Kushi Kanan Lakkhimoni/Lukhimoni Manoroma ‘Kapten’ Mona Monimala Mrinalinee/Mrinalini Nababala Nagendrabala (Bunchi) Nalinibala Nandarani Narayani/Narayoni Narisundari Neri Nibhanoni Niharbala Niradasundari Nistarini Nolini

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According to Usha Chakraborty, ‘about 40 women took to the stage from 1873–1910,’ The Condition of Bengali Women Around the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1963, p. 94. This would be a conservative estimate even if we consider only those who appeared in advertisements. The figure would not necessarily take into account the new recruits, those who played bit roles, and the chorus girls or ‘balet-balas’, at a least a dozen of whom danced in each piece. These names have been compiled from advertisements reprinted in Shankar Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900 (Source Materials for the History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982; and, from the list of actresses in Group Theatre, October 1987, Appendix, pp. 338–43.

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Figure I.9 The actress as the model, early 20th century. Top left: Kamlabai Kamat (1900–97), Marathi theatre and film actress. Right: Hemantakumari Dasi played ‘Jodhabai’ in D.L. Roy’s Nurjahan in 1908. Haripriya Dasi played the heroic Marathi queen in D.L. Roy’s Tara Bai (1903) Source: (Left) Author’s Collection. Courtesy of Reena Mohan; (Right) HNDC, Natya Shodh Sansthan; (Bottom left) HNDC, Natya Shodh Sansthan

1 GENEALOGIES Or, what’s in a name?

Theatre goes viral There is a season for outbreaks of fever, cholera, smallpox and the like; nowadays, it is the season for performing plays. Rare is the village in which you will not find a group of actors . . . But how beneficial is this?1

So wrote the editor of the influential Somprakash in 1872, taking stock of the veritable epidemic of theatrical activities (natakabhinay) in Bengal. He went on to praise an earlier tradition of drama in the land, observing that its rasas, bhavas and the sahriday (sympathetic and cultivated) audience marked it as part of a civilised society, comparable with Greek and Roman civilisations. For, in those instances, theatre catered to refined and sophisticated pleasure – bishuddho amod. (The phrase would feature as a critical category in debates on performance, performers and questions of taste and morality for over a century.) This tradition was then contrasted with contemporary jatra which was considered ‘rustic’ and ‘obscene’ and pronounced as degraded.2 The editor held that the jatra was bound to pervert tastes if it were not uprooted and replaced by the recent trend of abhinay. However, there were two preconditions to encouraging the latter: Firstly, the poetic content of plays will have to improve and plots should show some ingenuity. Secondly, in most places, the acting is now being done by schoolboys and their teachers. Potentially, this is immeasurably harmful for society. It is an established fact that if the mind is distracted by entertainment during study hours, no learning can take place. We have particularly observed that if one is overcome by the pleasures of 52

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poetry (kavyarasa) there is no desire to study grammar (vyakarana). In particular, the people of this land [Bengal] have a natural disinclination for labour; we are prone to an excess of emotion . . . We have seen that many a boy who was happily pursuing his studies in school has become an extremely odious creature from the time he turned to acting and gave up his studies Of those who turn to acting, most end up as bad characters. This is hardly to be wondered at, considering the kind of people they mix with. We have no objections to theatricals if this practice of catching hold of schoolteachers and schoolboys is abandoned and if professionals (vyavsayi lok) undertake the acting. It was indeed the practice to have the acting done by professionals in earlier times, as becomes quite evident when we read the ancient plays. (emphasis added) I have cited at length from this rather long editorial to mark out a particular aesthetic-moral position, one among many, along the threedimensional battlefields of Bengali theatre. The year 1872 marks the beginning of a public theatre in Bengal. The editorial is located at a vantage point in history, in looking back, in looking at the present and in proposing an acceptable future practice. The last involves specialised investment in this latest western addiction of natakabhinay. The writer has nothing against acting per se, but questions: Why should any one and every one indulge in theatricals? Certainly not schoolboys, whose sole duty is to learn – learning that is not fanciful, but useful and instrumental. The solution lay in professionals taking over the new form. At stake then, was the very understanding of key words such as ‘professional’ (peshadar) or ‘business minded’ (vyavsayi). Disregarding intermediate musical and performance forms that continued to thrive, the editorial implies that acting should continue to be a hereditary caste or community-based profession as in ‘ancient times’. There is a fear, however, that the new business of theatre would involve a new generation of performers, not necessarily linked to performance by hereditary or caste occupation, or of ritual performance in tandem with a seasonal calendar. There are related incipient concerns: Would monetisation of work create disjunctions and contradictions in the existing social stratification? Would the introduction of a stage technology, however primitive, bring about changes in body movement and expression, even in modes of enunciation? 53

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Was it surprising then, that the second precondition set by the Somprakash editor was not met when, only a year later, the professional actress did appear on the public stage in 1873? Was it because she did not come from any single recognisable existing caste or community of such performers? Yet, she was marked as a ‘public woman’ because of her alignment with female-headed households operating with different sexual and social codes. She would be sharing the stage of a modern co-sexual workplace, performing with upper-caste men from families with status. Theatre was now open to a ticketed public of which educated boys and young men composed a significant part. Also, by churning out a platter of offerings, the public theatre was catering to a range of tastes rather than a refined palate. It did not help that the actress featured centrally as singer and dancer in these dramatic pieces and, that her ‘lines’ in Bangla – whether sung or spoken – traversed a scale of linguistic registers. As I foregrounded in the title of an earlier work, ‘The Nautee in “the Second City of the Empire” ’, the actress was now located in the heart of the modern city – the metropolis of Calcutta.3 The professional actress thus acquired a range of new signification that both emerged from as well as impacted deeply on the ways in which the women’s question was articulated in successive decades. And what of the young lads and men who actually initiated and produced theatre in Bengal? Male actors included those groomed in the new educational institutions set up under colonial auspices in Calcutta and elsewhere. Male practitioners of theatre patronised by the Bengali gentry played the female roles until the 1870s. Many of this generation turned into the professionals of the succeeding decades of the 19th century. As already noted, this was a group whose addiction to and affiliation with the business of theatre gave them a kind of indeterminate status amongst the nascent and heterogenous middleclass.4 Outcasts of a sort, they were not altogether cast out of the net of respectability, as was the actress. It is this unstable and unequal but shared ground that forms the subtext to this book.

Model women In her seminal essay on ‘Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes’, Joan Kelly held that although the early European feminists like Christine de Pisan (1363–1429) simply drew upon the histories of illustrious women that began with Boccaccio, and upon similar ancient and medieval sources for ‘examples of women’s capacities’, subsequently 54

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[t]hese mythic founders of language, agriculture, the several arts and sciences and of states [Isis, Ceres, Minerva] dropped out from most later defences – along with Christine’s saints and holy women. Those who remained to figure most significantly as models of womanly nature were women of learning and women warriors and rulers. Kelly argued: The feminists rightly understood that the issue of female power was critical, even for women of no rank . . . amazonian figures and tales of matriarchy, along with biographies of actual women warriors and rulers, were perpetuated to keep alive a fading image of independent women and of women as makers of culture and civilization.5 From our perspective it would appear that in the 19th century women figure as markers, rather than makers, of the composite called ‘Aryan or Vedic’ culture. (Saints and goddesses would figure prominently in theatrical repertoire.) Uma Chakravarti maintains that although there were exceptional instances of a self-conscious refutation of a ‘golden age’ theory, in general the normative woman was to be moulded in the image of the ancient Aryan nari.6 She underlines that ‘the convergence on the fundamental characteristics of Hindu womanhood cut across the liberal-revivalist divide.’ Were there variations within the generic model of the ‘Arya nari’? Two sets of examples ranging over half a century provide an interesting contrast. Nilmoni Basak’s (c. 1808–68) much anthologised Naba-nari (1852; 4th edition 1865) was written in defence of woman’s education.7 It heralds in its punning title the eclectic roll call of nine new young women (naba covers all three meanings). Sita, Savitri, Sakuntala, Draupadi, Damayanti, Leelabati, Khana, Ahalyabai and Rani Bhabani are culled from the puranas as well as historical figures from the recent past. Eclecticism may signal a certain desperation in the project to retrieve the past under colonialism. But consider the circulation of these names as texts, as well as the broader reformist project within which such anthologies may be situated. In 1851 a prize had been announced for the best essay in Bangla on the ‘Exemplary biography of Females in ancient and modern times’; it was meant to be used in textbooks for girls of the Bethune School, set up in 1849. Nilmoni, an exemplary pupil of Vidyasagar, won the prize in 1852 for his Nabanari, which then became a textbook for boys of the Hindu School. As 55

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Debipada Bhattacharyya points out in his study of the genre of charit in Bengali literature, the common element of Basak’s nine women was that they were all ‘ideal’ women.8 Projects like Basak’s stemmed in part from a desire to write a history in response to the charge that in lieu of history, India had only outrageous myths to offer. It was also an effort to illuminate the past by offering young learners names and lives of Indians who were ‘learned and talented’. The prefaces to these anthologies place learning before ‘character’ or talent. The continuum between education, writing in Bangla, the choice of models from the past and the present (reiterated in prefaces), and the material production and dissemination of such books, both as prescribed textbooks as well as for general readers,9 indicate that morality of the new age was invested in the very act of learning. That these women straddle various ages, regions and realms need not be attributed to the writers’ ‘confusion’ between the mythic and the historical. The categories themselves were being reworked in these collections. The claim appears to be one of agency, in the writer being able to draw on innumerable such figures who may motivate the present generation of learners, not only by the individual charisma of their lives, but by their having lived at all, even in memory. Writers looked ahead as much as they did to a luminous if lost ancient India. The study of biographies was also meant to support ‘character formation’ (charitra gathan), possibly through the twin windows of inspiration and emulation. The 1850s–70s appear as the high water mark of an educational agenda with an encyclopaedic thrust. This is testified by the theme of the publications of the Rahasya Sandharbha: biographical sketches populate the issues of this periodical, evident from a list of contents reproduced in Bhattacharyya’s study. What is worth knowing is both extensive and inclusive, embracing as it does the lives of Mohammad, Sakyamuni, as well as Empress Noorjahan, and Princess Jahanara who is praised for her learning. Also from the 1860s and in the same genre are Kishorichand Mitra’s Hindu Females (1863), Martha Saudamini Simha’s Nari Charitra (1865) and Bholanath Chandra’s Hindu Female Celebrities (1869). However, later works such as Mahendranath Roy Vidyanidhi’s Prachin Arya Ramaniganer Itibritta (An Account of Ancient Aryan Women) (1887) or Kaliprasanna Dasgupta and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Arya Nari Bharat Chitra (Aryan Women – A Portrait of India) (1908),10 which ran into several editions, are couched unambiguously in the language of patriarchy, motivating women for the greater good of husband, clan and nation.

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A similar mix of legendary and historical women, as in Basak’s Naba-nari, may be observed in Arya Nari Bharat Chitra: Padmavati, Khana, Sukanya and Arundhati among others make for strange company within the covers of a single book. The second volume of Arya Nari Bharat Chitra (c. 1910) reflects swadeshi politics in its conscious attempt to bring in models of the historical martial woman from other parts of India: Jijabai, Tarabai, Ahalyabai and Rani Bhabani among others are evoked along with praise of the practice of jauhar (mass immolation) by women to save their ‘honour’. The titles indicate how such exemplary martial women are juxtaposed relentlessly alongside the construction of ‘India and Indianness’ (Bharat and Bharatiyata). Many of these texts seek to instruct women on the dharma of the sati and the glory of martial energy (kshatriya tej), offering a heady concoction of the sati as shakti.11 By the 1880s, heroines from Rajasthan inspired by Lieut. Col. James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1820) dominated the Bengali imagination in literary and art works of all hues.12 Surprisingly, Michael Madhusudhan Datta’s Virangana Kavya (Narrative Poems on Warrior Women) (1861) was never adapted for the stage, though the virangana – the martial or warrior woman – as a generic type, featured strongly in nautankis and was given a new avatar in the stunt films of the 1920s and 1930s.13 References to contemporary women in other parts of India are rare: Pandita Ramabai’s speeches had made a stir in Calcutta, but she does not figure as a model. The contemporary woman who did figure on stage is best exemplified in the publicity around Elokeshi’s murder, mentioned in the introduction. Nineteenth-century role models for women, whether anthologised with a clear ideological thrust and used as textbooks for female education, elaborated in conduct books or staged as ideal characters in plays, were primarily devised and initiated by educated men and sometimes women, though they would have resonated amongst other classes and castes as well. Types intended to function as cautionary models would include educated or westernised females, wives as harridans and termagants, or an ‘entertaining’ underclass that figured explicitly as singers and dancers and were little better than whores. From the 1870s onwards the public sphere was awash with farces (often illustrated) brought out by cheap presses and commanding a diverse readership. Various strands of print and visual culture fed into performance on stage. Into this entire spectrum of real, imagined and desired women, entered the actress.

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Learning, livelihood and leisure The Somprakash editorial with which we began dwelt on the vulnerability of the schoolboy to the virus of theatre. Once the actress stepped on stage, the virus was embodied in her person. Perceptions about the Bengali stage (by insiders and outsiders) were inseparable from the multivalent experience and conflicting responses to colonial education, occupation and livelihood, and professional identity. In this respect, therefore, it was very unlike the strong attacks on theatre from the Christian church, whether in its early days in the Roman Empire or in the Puritan anti-theatrical diatribe articulated centuries later in Elizabethan England.14 To subsume these larger anxieties about learning, livelihood and leisure entirely within the ‘Puritanical mindset’ of ‘reform-minded’ Brahmos, or to isolate morality as a category outside of this matrix, would be to miss out on the complex interplay between religion, caste, class, gender and race in colonial Bengal. Certainly, much of the inspiration for ‘native’ theatre may be said to have come from within the precincts of the new institutions imparting English education. Performing Shakespeare in English and later, in translations and adaptations in regional languages has long been recognised as a pan-Indian phenomenon.15 Shakespeare was part of the university curriculum. It was a civilisational enterprise, of enthusiastic schoolboys and college students encouraged by equally enthusiastic masters. The emphasis on public speaking took on larger social dimensions: Brian Hatcher describes Calcutta in the 1830s as a space where voluntary associations began to spring up as if overnight, representing the urge to promote collective endeavors in publishing, education, agriculture, and political representation . . . and public debate [became] a prominent part of religious, political, and social life throughout the 1830s.16 Public speeches and sermons would find a focused channel in the congregational practices and missionary thrust of the various branches of the Brahmo Samaj, despite and through several schisms that the movement underwent. Besides the actual curriculum, new modes of declamation, recitation, public speaking and performance formed a continuum of speech registers yet to be studied. The investment in western education was almost total on the part of Hindu and Brahmo males by the 1850s, a class that would later define itself as the shikshita sampraday. But, for all the encouragement 58

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about ‘English classics’,17 we find a strong ambivalence about performance in educational institutions and of boys playing female roles. The memoirs of many of the first-generation Bengali students under the new educational dispensation articulate a clear separation between ‘good’ or ‘educational’ theatre versus ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ theatre.18 Besides homoeroticism, an unspoken anxiety may have been about caste, since traditional performers were usually from non-brahman castes.19 In the following decades, the potential corruption of schoolboys and college-going youth constituting the chhatra samaj20 – future bhadra or respectable citizens – became an area of equal if not greater concern than theatre’s effect on respectable women. The vulnerable schoolboy open to seduction by the worldly wise prostitute-actress or by debauched theatre types became a common trope, dramatised in Apurba Sati (1875), as I have discussed elsewhere.21 The play’s authorship has long been controversial, but is usually attributed to the brilliant actress-writer-manager Sukumari Dutta, whose acting career roughly spans 1870s to the early decade of the next century.22 The trope was brought to life in a series of battles against ‘vice’ in Dacca in the 1880s and 1890s when selected buildings became the pressure point for either supporting or damning theatre.23 While Brahmo teachers and preachers played a crucial role in these protests, there is a danger in any selective referencing of the anti-theatrical or anti-actress agenda. The diatribe must also be contextualised within the violent opposition and strong social ostracism faced by many young people who chose to become Brahmos; the latter were perceived as targetting vulnerable youth, ‘converting’ them from the straight and narrow path of tradition. The trajectory in Bombay Presidency was different: Parsi students who were initiated into English literature and drama went on to become successful and respected theatre entrepreneurs themselves.24 The bulk of Marathi actors in sangeet nataks were brahmans who went on to professionalise very successfully despite the initial opposition to the ‘acting craze’; of course, in these theatres women performers became the norm only in the 1930s. The larger disquiet in Bengal was with western education itself and its hybridised-alienated progeny. The latter, epitomised in ‘the Baboo’, would be made to dance a long shadow-life in both English and Bangla essays, images and plays, by coloniser and colonised: the ‘Bengali Baboo’ was the standard butt of home-grown minstrel shows in British India.25 Imitative westernisation was emblematised in the category of ‘Young Bengal’, dating from the 1820s. Partha Chatterjee highlights that the critique of modernity was aimed at ‘an uncritical imitation of English modernity’.26 To be educated in the western mode 59

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was desirable, but what then of lineage and ancestral traditions and one’s beliefs – indeed, one’s sense of belonging? Perhaps we can configure the modernity debate somewhat differently. Modern Bangla came into being, finding its voice in relation to Sanskrit, English, Persian and Urdu, and in diverse genres. Keeping in mind this dense history of the vernacular coming into its own, we return to the underemphasised role of the public theatre in making available an incredible range and register of Bangla to a primarily but not exclusively urban population. Recall an earlier point made about the actresses’ role in popularising variants of the vernacular on the public stage as Bangla moved through various phases to a canonical status. Juxtapose this with the treatment of western education and its aspiring recipients, literally on the same stage. For refracted through the prism of farces, male and female characters representing extreme versions of the ‘eju’ (educated) became the very stuff of drama, often in a crude manner. Here was another conundrum. The stage actress had little or no formal education. Talent apart, she either came with a basic training in performance skills and/or was mentored in the course of her career to be a professional. In 1835, a much-cited English review of a performance of Vidya-Sundar staged at Nabeen Kumar Basu’s house gushed: ‘The female characters in particular were excellent. The part of Bidya played by Radha Moni [sic] . . . a girl of nearly sixteen years of age . . . filled the minds of the audience with rapture and delight.’ The reviewer expressed his surprise ‘that a person, uneducated as she is, and unacquainted with niceties of her vernacular language should perform a part so difficult with general satisfaction’ (emphasis added). He mused: [H]ad this girl, who made such a capital figure on the stage, been educated in the study of the vernacular language, I, as a Hindu, beg my countrymen to consider how her talents would have shown! Was not her ingenuity, though she spoke only by rote, sufficient to convince those who charge Nature being partial to men that Hindu females are as well fitted to receive education as their superior lords? (emphasis added)27 There is some contradiction in the ‘natural’ ingenuity attributed to Radhamoni and the immediate clarification, ‘though she spoke only by rote’. On what basis did the reviewer assume that Radhamoni had little or no understanding of what she was able to represent so well? The 60

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favourable review is also intriguing, given that attacks on dramatised versions of Vidya-Sundar had already appeared in print.28 Bharatchandra Ray’s Annadamangal (1752), of which Vidya-Sundar is a part, had an absorbing print history from 1816 onwards, with woodcuts embellishing chosen scenes of princess Vidya’s lovelorn condition in her secret amour with the handsome Sundar (Figure P.6).29 The text featured prominently in the obscenity debate as a byword for adirasa, strong eroticism, especially in the frank expression of female desire. But quite unique in the history of theatrical discourse is how the particular example of an exceptional professional performer is used to push the larger cause of women’s education – at least, that of ‘Hindu females’. Keeping in mind the substantial body of empirical histories of women’s education in colonial India,30 I shift tack at this point to consider how the promise of mobility through education operated quite differently in the arena of performance in a transitional era. We do find mention of the education and cultivation of arts by tawaiaffs and devadasis at the higher levels of their profession. On the whole, however, performance techniques or skills have always been starkly differentiated from formal learning that has been conceptualised as ‘knowledges’ within disciplines or as ‘subjects’ for which one is awarded degrees. Performance skills have also largely been ‘distributed’ to subjects along caste lines; even in instances of more syncretic histories, hereditary musicians have usually been accorded low status.31 Perhaps the specific equation between English education and livelihood, already evident in enthusiastic letters home in the 1830s by Emily Eden,32 and elaborated with reference to a later era by Sumit Sarkar as a salaried job, chakri,33 was not quite operative in the world of theatre. Many of the founding fathers of the theatre had at best an unhappy relationship with formal education.34 For long, theatre as a full-time profession was perceived to be attracting the wastrel and the wanton – the male who had slipped out of his class-caste ideals, and the woman who came from lineages and locations where licentiousness was the norm. Yet it was the stage, both amateur and later the commercial theatre, which showcased a particular meld of the literary and the musical that circulated and consolidated markers of respectable cultural capital. Surely this range was not cultivated and performed only with ‘natural ingenuity’ and ‘by rote’ à la Radhamoni? What were some of the underlying questions in the vexed agenda of ‘female education’? Which female was to be educated, if at all? What was to be the nature and limit of this education? And inevitably, what was she to do with her education? 61

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Given its long and intensive investment in the women’s question alongside legal and other forms of activism, the Bamabodhini is a good reference point to address some of these questions. The periodical was begun in 1868 and run by Brahmos as an organ of women’s emancipation. In her introduction to a volume of select writings from the journal, Bharati Ray observes that questions of vocational training and education did come up and a good mix of the two was sometimes offered, as in the Bethune School curriculum of 1849.35 Ray also cites Madanmohan Tarkalankar who opined that women may earn without any constraints (sachhande), but within the precincts of the home (antahpur) by engaging in various crafts; adding, ‘should the people of this land be absolutely overcome by greed, it is not inconceivable that women, if educated, will completely disappoint their expectations.’36 The Enlightenment programme of an inclusive rational and useful education also generated misgivings about turning education into a marketable commodity. It appears to be general sentiment voiced against the marketing of ‘knowledge’, irrespective of gender, for Madanmohan continues that there are men who engage in learning for filthy lucre; they ‘write bad books, which lead to bad thoughts and thence to bad actions’. Expectedly, Vidya-Sundar surfaces as an example of such a book.37 Articles in the Bamabodhini offered definitions of the shikshita or ‘truly educated’ versus the biliasini or the luxury loving woman who indulges in bibiani or female frippery. Brahmos had to deal with continuous attacks, including nasty allegations, for their project of ‘inserting’ women into the public sphere. Kadambini Ganguly (1861–1923), the first female qualified medical practitioner in Bengal, was called a whore in print; a case was filed and damages won by her husband, Dwarakanath Ganguly. Hence, the insistent distinction in Bamabodhini between the frivolous, sexually promiscuous bibi who flaunts the little learning she has, and the ‘genuinely’ educated lady who is modest, austere and caring. It is also worth noting the differences within Brahmoism on the question of ‘Anglicising women or emancipating them’ and the consequent schism between the Keshub Sen group and the ‘Progressives’ that David Kopf has carefully contextualised.38 The overall claim was that education would actually make a better wife, better mother and better nationalist subject. The actress did not fit into any of these categories, nor was she an accepted member of an older recognised community with access to and legitimate pride in erudition and cultivation of the arts. It was only in the early decades of the 20th century that the actress would figure explicitly as a necessary object of education, when the call arose for the shikshita abhinetri. 62

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Figure 1.1 Annette Ackroyd with students of the Hindu Mahila Bidyalaya, 1875. Visiting Unitarian Annette A. Beveridge (1842–1929) established the school in 1873 with support from a progressive group of Brahmos. Later called the Banga Mahila Vidyalaya Source: William Henry Beveridge, India Called Them, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1947. Courtesy of Malavika Karlekar

Calibrating the ‘foreign’ and the ‘indigenous’ Outside of the pages of the Bamabodhini (cautious, for all its daring) was exhibited a general horror of the ‘educated Miss’. The barely or newly educated Bengali woman was seen to be quite seduced by Bengali, not English, novels and plays, cheap Bat-tala productions of sensational texts, including wedding night songs (basargan).39 Women often featured as the butt of satire, as one who had abandoned her ‘age-old’ dharma of seva (service) and sattitva (chastity), for a life of idleness and vanity. In this paradigm it was but a short step from being a reader of ‘novel-natak’ to turning into a viewer in the theatre hall and, then, to actually appearing on stage – an object of public display. On stage, this type of the seeking-to-be-westernised woman was ranged beside the overtly seductive gold-digger, the prostitute – and both arraigned against the icon of the devoted suffering wife, who was unfailingly valorised. Farces attacked the ‘educated Miss’ as well 63

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as the superficially educated young man who was keen to educate his wife, bring her ‘out’, expose her to the public gaze and thereby turn her into an immoral object of desire. Long after one would have believed that both these types had been exhausted, they continued to provide grist to the melodramatic and farcical mill of the public theatre. Rabindranath’s 1916 novel Ghare-Baire (Home and the World) had an older and cruder genealogy on stage. Farces, with their satire of pretentious urban lifestyles, are often affirmed by scholars as representing the ‘plebian voice’ of the period.40 But the lively critique often underscored reactionary positions, particularly in the single-minded attacks against emancipatory projects for women as being ‘derivative’. The attacks were similar on the Marathi stage.41 An instance where the public theatre came under attack for its reactionary views was the hugely successful Khash Dakhal (1912) by actor, playwright and director Amritalal Bose (1853–1928). The comedy revolved around the ‘excessively independent’ and domineering Bilasini Karforma (the first name meant luxury-loving), and the absurd Mr. Singh. Bose’s play was misogynist; but he was also attacking the new educational ‘system’ for men that effectively tied up marriage with dowry – dowry to fund the groom’s education. Farces of this category, even by intelligent and socially acceptable doyens of the stage such as Bose, reveal the overwhelming and irrational fear of hierarchies and social roles being overturned in the promised but failed colonial narrative of progress. They evoke a dystopia of a kind of ‘eternal present’ from which there was apparently no escape other than a genuflection towards the ‘traditional’ – a construction worn threadbare by the end of the century. The robust vitality of language and emotion in satirical social plays, albeit commissioned, such as Kulinkulasarvasya (1854, performed in 1857), seems not to have existed. The marketing of skills, often conflated with the skills of deception – could never be considered as knowledge that translated into a degree and thence to a job. Nor was theatre a cultural ‘product’ that could be harnessed to more utilitarian processes or training institutions, as would be the case with industrial art schools of craft and design. Theatre was rarely to be discussed as art or kala, though the actress would be read in terms of her chhala-kala, that is the arts of deception, her skill in artifice. Nor, like older performance forms, did it seem to be unreservedly a platform for mass edification, until the upsurge of neo-Vaishnavism made possible a revamping of the professional stage. Yet even after the pitch of that emotional fervour, Girishchandra coolly tried to discriminate between the ‘natural feminine’ performance skills of a woman impersonating a saint versus a man 64

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with ‘masculine energy’ playing the final spiritual phase of a sant-­ avatar like Chaitanya. Naturally, he ruled in favour of the latter.42 Well before the furious, often tiresome debate was waged in print and person about the stage actress and the Bengali theatre, white women were travelling across the subcontinent singly or, with companions, or husbands and/or business partners and as members of, or leading, theatrical companies. Occasionally, they teamed up with European ‘ladies of the station’ who otherwise aided and abetted the ‘men’s only’ regimental theatres. A legitimate question would be the impact of Christianity on this debate about morals in the context of race and religion. According to Thomas Metcalf: By the 1850s and 1860s Christianity was for most Englishmen increasingly a mark of their own difference from, and superiority to, their Indian subjects. . . . Although abandonment of the hoped-for conversion of India undercut much of the logic that sustained liberal reform, still the new policy had room for other enduring liberal ideals. One was religious toleration, elevated after the Mutiny to a new place of pride.43 Petitions or protests from assorted quarters to the colonial state on the morality of ‘native theatre’ often hinged on the question of official patronage and legitimisation. The Brahmo Mirror commented that where prostitutes were acting, the presence of the Governor General would only encourage corruption (durniti). In a separate exchange of letters between Amritalal Bose, manager of the Star Theatre, and Reverend Charles H. Walker of the Oxford Mission that took place in the columns of the Statesman in December 1889, a reference was made to an incident of 1883: the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, and his wife had initially accepted an invitation to a Bengali theatre and had then been persuaded to withdraw by other Indians who held it would set a bad precedent.44 Lady Dufferin’s memoirs actually show a surprising degree of involvement in ‘native theatre’; she even singles out actress Khetramoni in her part of a saucy maid.45 Decades later, Lady Hardinge’s acceptance of an invitation to the Shobhabazar Raja’s became the subject of a controversy between the Sanjibani and Natya-mandir.46 The reason: professional stage actresses had sung the welcome song and enacted Girishchandra’s frothy Abu Hossain at this invited performance. Responses by theatre practitioners to polemics by missionaries of Christian or Brahmo persuasion was inevitably couched in the idiom of the ‘deshiya’, whose meanings encompass the indigenous, 65

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the authentic, the regional-national and ‘of the soil’. We return to the interpellation of education, caste and gender in Chapters 2 and 5 by probing into the range of polemics that centred on the figure of the actress in the wave of neo-Vaishnavism sweeping over Bengal and parts of northern India.47 In early 20th century the Swadeshi movement saw a wider move on the part of writers and scholars towards reclaiming a pure ‘deshiya’ speech – one of the many components of ‘swadeshi motherhood’! Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s analysis of children’s literature underscores how major figures such as Rabindranath Tagore valorised women as the bearer of a truly deshiya tradition, now ‘lost’ to male literati, but still a living force in women’s tongues.48 Girishchandra’s focus on the (bhadramahila) mother as the natural and proper source of inspiration informs his essay on ‘Streeshiksha’ (Women’s education).49 The actresses he tutored and often praised, and who were to express their gratitude after his death, remained outside this category. Only some categories of women were revered as the yet uncorrupted subaltern. The actress was not one of them. A similar desire to salvage the imperilled feminine impelled historian Dineshchandra Sen’s drive to collect, compile and publish the oral repertoire of narrative ballads or geetikas sung by women of Mymensingh district (in Bangladesh). Sen’s observations on the amoral ‘types’ in the geetikas may be read as part of this new regional nationalism. In his 1890 volume on the Bengali language and literature, Sen analyses the conceits in the description of women in the court poetry of Raja Krishnachandra of Nabadwip, tracing them to Sanskrit sources as well as to Urdu and Persian poetry. He concludes that the active conspiring female go-between, such as the all-time favourite Hira Malini in Vidya-Sundar, is not an ‘authentic Bengali Hindu character but a foreign import’ (bangiya hindusamajer khanti charitra nahe . . . bideshi amdani).50 He seems surprised to find ‘women of this kind’ in the geetikas of former East Bengal. As to the kutini-dasis found in popular Bat-tala publications, he thinks they too, are ‘foreign’ influenced. In a footnote, he suggests that their popularity in later ‘Hindu literature’ may be attributed to Muslim and Buddhist influence.51 (Buddhism was a state religion under the Pala dynasty, from the 8th to the 12th centuries; Islam found a home in Bengal from the 13th century onwards.) Evaluating Bharatchandra’s Vidya-Sundar, Sen asserts: ‘The sole reason for its success is the exquisite magic of its language, the music of the words.’ In other words, he says, it is ‘obscene melodious literature’.52 Were such neat segregations and surgical incisions operative also on the stage, given the urban appetite for novelty and variety? 66

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In theory, the stage provided the most exciting forum for the representation of various versions of ‘new women’. By and large, however, actresses essayed a range of romantic heroines in otherwise indifferent plays, as advertisements proclaimed the centrality of song and dance routines in the ever-flourishing geetinatyas. It was also the case that the traits of the transgressive heroine, best exemplified in Bankimchandra’s scintillating novel nayikas, were often overshadowed by the spectacular elements advertised in competing productions of the novel. When Bankimchandra’s Kapalkundala (1866) was adapted by Atulkrishna Mitra at the turn of the century, along with the monotonous refrain of ‘Magnificent Display of Scenes and Costumes’, the advertisement promised theatregoers a ‘Thrilling Sensation . . . A living Tiger on the stage’.53 The novel, which had gone through a long history of stage productions, evidently needed to be pepped up. Another attractive anti-model was of the ‘modern miss’, as she was described in a review. She could easily be slotted as a misfit, even a monster, as in the alliteratively titled farce Meye Monshter Miting (c. 1874), a satire on the editors of Bengali newspapers who promoted female education. The woman who tried to appropriate the role of the westernised Bengali babu – himself an object of satire in Durgacharan Ray’s Pash Kara Chele (The Male Graduate) (1879) and Krishnadhan Chattopadhyay’s Pash Kara Babu (The Babu Graduate) (1880) – was doubly monstrous, as in Radhabinod Haldar’s Pashkora Maag (The Wench with a Degree) (1888), Balloone Bangali Bibi (The Bengali Bibi on a Balloon) (1890)54 and Durgadas Dey’s Miss Bino Bibi B.A. (1892). The stage offered several versions of the babu: Nimchand in Sadhabar Ekadoshi (1866), an early and successful piece by Dinabandhu Mitra (1829–73), was probably one of its most powerful avatars;55 skits and sketches around the theme continued on the public stage.56 On 6 October 1877, ‘The Extravaganza Young Bengal’ was advertised.57 However debatable the actual effect of ‘Young Bengal’ as a radical force, it had been identified as a ‘critical category’ by practitioners such as Manomohan Bose at the very inception of the public theatre. By the 1880s, the category had reified into an ideological position. It provided a ready-made target for those who advocated a more deshiya bhava or indigenous sentiment in cultural production. Routes ahead A typology of icons can only be the starting point of our enquiries. In the movement from texts (oral and printed) and from pre-colonial 67

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performance forms to stage plays, one wonders to what extent actresses were able to consciously inflect or reinterpret these representations. How did various phases of male mentorship shape the role? Did market conditions entirely mediate the representations on stage and, at a secondary level, in performance history itself? In what ways did the ‘new woman’ incorporate the old who was equally a construct? From this vast array of types, emplotting overlapping and contradictory versions of the old or the new, what did the actress ‘typically’ come to embody? Did the female performer at all feature in plays - whether as the kobiwali, khemta dancer, vaishnavi-kirtaniya (pre-modern), or, even as herself - the ‘manch abhinetri’, the contemporary stage actress? To address the last question first: possibly because many of the older performance traditions were being slowly eclipsed by the theatre – in terms of print, publicity and self-image – the female performer was never conceptualised historically in the plays. She provided the necessary oomph to farces primarily as a whore with a smattering of artistic accomplishment. At best, she was present metonymically – as a negative trace or a relic of those traditions – as Kanchan in Sadhabar Ekadoshi or, Rangini in Girishchandra’s pantomime, Bellick Bazar (last performed in 1887). In later decades, a ‘baiji’ sequence was often introduced, much like an ‘item number’ is in contemporary commercial films. Chapters 3 and 4 show that when actress figures did begin to feature in plays or stories, they hardly challenged the construction of the beshya-abhinetri circulating for decades in print discourse. It would therefore be useful to identify several alternative entry points which would go beyond a purely linear chronological history of the Bengali stage. Poet and dramatist Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) consciously grappled with questions of representation as part of a larger project of cultural identity. His conception of the new woman was intrinsically linked to his literary ambitions, his cultural and social identity, his plans for a national language and literature and, not the least, was reflected in his conjugal life. He thought aloud on each of these matters in his letters, which he continued to write in English even as he sought to recast Bengali language and literature. It was a moment that coincided with the frenetic theatrical activities among the landed gentry, sponsored and patronised by various rajas, which brought to the forefront questions around impersonation and same-sex representation, as elaborated in my essay on ‘The Nautee’. Standard histories of Bengali theatre posit an abrupt break in this patronage by the landed gentry, especially rajas, maharajas and maharanis, many of whom were compradore banians titled by the British. 68

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I would suggest that, encouraged by the railways from the 1870s onwards, new links developed even as older ones persisted between the Calcutta-based public theatres and assorted royalty dotting the region. Girishchandra was invited late in his career to actually set up a theatre, complete with acting personnel from Calcutta, in Rampur Boalia by a zamindar from Rajshaji (in Bangladesh). A renowned clarinet player at a Calcutta theatre brokered the process. Sushilabala, who was part of the troupe, is said to have received her early training in this same theatre, dubbed the Marvel Theatre.58 More frequently, companies were hired for two to three days for life-cycle ceremonies, as we see in the following 1901 advertisement in English by the Classic Theatre: As my Company is starting next Sunday by [the] Loop Mail to perform at Cossimbazar palace on account of Mahrajah Monindra Chandra Nandy Bahadur’s son’s wedding, public performances on our stage will be postponed until further notice.59 Cossimbazar (Kashimbazar), then a nerve centre of English trade in Murshidabad district, has a particular significance in the annals of theatre history. A generation ago, the play Apurba Sati had been dedicated to ‘Maharani Swarnamayi, benefactoress of Bengali education’. Of humble origins, Swarnamayi was married to the Maharaja of Cossimbazar. Widowed at fifteen, she had to fight hard against her relatives, the British, and other forces that sought to deprive her of title and property. Her list of philanthropic work was extensive, including generous contributions in the field of education, for which she was granted the title of ‘Maharani’ by the British.60 As part of their professional commitments actresses travelled out from the capital to these royal/zamindari enclaves, ensuring too, the filtration of ‘Calcutta theatre’ to other regions and an exposure of the actress to a larger world. Binodini Dasi’s memoirs record a more unusual set of travels.61 I can only signal here to these multiple trajectories of patronage and indicate how the theatre – and the actress – functioned as a conduit between the old and the new. The need to offer diverse theatrical fare is seen in the advertisement by an all-woman’s troupe, including managers. Not to be missed is the byline in the advertisement Figure 1.2. The patronage of these estates and courts extended to foreign companies and individuals traversing British India. A mixed bag of amusements, ‘Varieties’, appear to have gradually supplemented the more 69

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Figure 1.2 ‘Merry performance by fair sex only.’ Advertisement in the Statesman & FOI, 11 August 1883 Source: The Statesman Ltd., Calcutta

established patterns of patronage of court singers, musicians and artists, some resident and others invited for special occasions. Interestingly, this hybrid mix became part of noblesse oblige in spaces where the stage actress was not invited. Such was the garden retreat of ‘Emerald Bower’ where the Pathuriaghata Tagores offered an ingenious indigenous menu for the consumption of pukka sahebs and almost sahebs on fraternal occasions like their 1881 ‘College Reunion’.62 The theatrical activities of the Jorasanko Thakur family at their residence in North Calcutta were one of a kind in every way. From supporting social reform plays, to casting their women in in-house productions, scripting and choreographing dramatic pieces, it extended to the personal involvement of various illustrious members with the public theatre at different moments in history.63 Cultivation of the arts in general and love for the theatre was a legacy left behind by the maverick business magnate ‘Prince’ Dwarakanath Tagore and his intense involvement with the Chowringhee Theatre, and later, the Sans Souci in Calcutta.64 Instead of a bald summary of the extensive contributions of their men, women and children – Jyotirindranath, Rabindranath, Abanindranath, Jnanadanandini, Kadambini, Prativa among others – it would be worth mapping how the family theatricals of the Jorasanko Tagores, influenced by western music, painting and stage practices finally (and also) turned out to be a series of continuous experiments in discovering, presenting and creating an ‘Indian’ sensibility and style. Their ‘Bharat Utsav’ is symbolic of this quest; it was also the occasion of staging Rabindranath’s first ‘musical-play’, Valmiki Pratibha (1881). In this first experiment, we have a very different understanding and use of female emblems: Saraswati, and the little girl lost who brings back to the murderous bandit Valmiki his 70

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Figure 1.3 Interior of ‘Emerald Bower’, c. 1920 Source: Photograph by P.C. Tagore. Collection of Siddhartha Ghosh. Courtesy of CSSSC Archives

lost humanity, kindling his poetic genius. The founding of the asram school in Santiniketan (about 150 kilometers from Calcutta) at the turn of the century and Rabindranath’s decades long experiments with utsavs and performance in open spaces with students of Visva-Bharati is the subject of another book.65

Some generic categories We now make a brief foray into a vast forest of etymologies, with a provisional plotting of words such as nati, patita, sati, kulastree and kulta – words that we shall repeatedly encounter in relation to the actress for almost a century. A few questions: How did theatre practitioners, critics and contemporary historians try and insert themselves in selected or available histories of drama or natya? Were they able to reconcile extant (if ancient) terms with contemporary practices? How may we identify and trace the routes of some of these keywords, taking note of shifts in meaning, even when the word appeared to be the same? 71

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Figure 1.4 Rabindranath Tagore at a rehearsal, 1930s Source: Courtesy of Rabindra-Bhavana Archives, Santiniketan

As is known, the actress as conceptualised in the Natyashastra was expected to be a cultivated and highly trained woman, but belonging to a distinct class.66 In the technical discussion of sub-genres of drama in the Natyashastra, kulastree as a social category was used to define the various kinds of nayikas or heroines.67 Thus, a prakaran was considered shuddha (pure) when the nayika was a kulastree; sankirna (mixed) when the nayika was a ganika. Visvanatha’s categories in the 14th-century Sahityadarpana were similarly drawn: ‘The nayika is sometimes a kulanari, sometimes a veshya (whore), and sometimes both may be present in the same play.’68 Scrolling through centuries we find these same terms annotated quite differently, often involving a conflation of occupational and sexual roles, so that the nati is classed along with the saurindhri and roopdasi – women lower in status and with fewer material resources than the ganika, the courtesan proper – for sexual services of a certain kind,69 although nati is often used interchangeably with ganika. Nati is also used to indicate the occupational identity of a performer with suggestion of sexual favours.70 Studies of the ganika in ancient India, for example, establish both the shared oppression as well as the superior hierarchical position of the ganika because of the latter’s 72

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state-sanctioned rank in comparison with other woman with overlapping occupational roles.71 Sukumari Bhattacharji’s glosses on the kulavadhu and the bhadramahila suggest that the distinctions between kulavadhu or kulanari and ganika were also a matter of access to education: historically, it was the ganika who was required to be educated for entertaining her clients.72 The ganika should not be confused with the category of the ‘shikshita abhinetri’ – the demand for whom peaked in the early decades of the 20th century, moving into film discourse! The discussion on educated women and the arts would take a different turn in Rabindranath’s Santiniketan, particularly when students from his university, Visva-Bharati, began performing in public in fundraising tours. Many of the above terms were invested with more than one meaning: for example, in the Brahmabaibarta Purana a woman enamoured of a man other than her husband was called a kulta.73 However, the word also signified a female spiritual aspirant. According to the Sanskrit–English dictionary compiled by Monier Williams, ‘kulata’ refers to ‘an honourable female mendicant’ (see Panini IV. I. 127), in addition to meaning ‘an unchaste woman’.74 Kulta, barangana, barbanita and swadhinjaubana are all categories found in the mahakavyas and puranas. D.D. Kosambi’s gloss on the ganika and the veshya and his references to the dancing girl suggest yet another configuration between occupation and identity.75 But these finely graded and often overlapping categories were erased as more fixed equations between occupation, marital status and sexual codes were being set up in the last quarter of the 19th century, which we examine through the dynamics of representation itself. Through the 1850s and 1860s, the nati – or the woman who in tandem with the sutradhar introduces the play to the audience, usually with a song – functioned essentially as a dramatic device. Several 19th-century playwrights, such as Mir Mosharaff Hossain in Zamindar Darpan (1872), used the convention imaginatively to comment on current socio-political issues. We note that the terms natnati (signifying occupational roles), along with various other Sanskrit theatrical terminology, were consciously introduced by Ramnarayan Tarkaratna (1822–64). He wrote for the amateur theatre run by the Calcutta gentry.76 As a teacher of Sanskrit in Fort William College, Pandit Ramnarayan’s introduction of the classical terminology for the new plays was clearly an attempt to establish a lineage with classical ‘Hindu’ theatre. This was the same Ramnarayan, fondly called ‘Natuké Ramnarayan’, who had composed the earliest of the social reform plays, commissioned by the zamindar of Rangpur, Kalichandra 73

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Raychaudhuri. In Kulinkulasarvasya, Ramnarayan attacked indiscriminate polygamy by kulin brahmans. In giving his oppressed kulin women a speech that was earthy and colloquial his approach was that of a modern. Another play with a reformist agenda, espousing widow remarriage, was Ramnarayan’s Naba Natak (1867). It won the first prize in a theme-oriented drama competition that was advertised in the Indian Mirror and organised by the Jorasanko Tagores. This Pandit was no revivalist (Figure 4.8). Other histories of the word nati evoke pre-colonial lineages of occupational identity spanning disparate locations of patronage. Adya Rangacharya’s gloss on the ‘nati’ in the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara (14th–17th centuries) maps a movement of the female performer from the court to the temple.77 Literary historian Sukumar Sen takes the existence of a nat jati in Bengal as indicative of a distinct occupational identity. He points out that the nat usually took on the woman’s roles; and also claims that ‘from the beginning [sic], the work of the nat and that of the nati (as dancer) had gone separate ways,’ so that the nati as the female dancer also came to be associated with promiscuity.78 Sen’s account does not make clear the reasons either for the separation of ways or for the promiscuousness attributed to the nati. Is it assumed that the separation of performance components (acting from dancing) demarcates or even creates a different site of sexuality? A similar segregation is made by historian Usha Chakraborty in her comments on professional female entertainers who were prostituted by the male members of the community for livelihood.79 Of the mirasis and other hereditary performers in the northern India, Adrian McNeil remarks: ‘Somehow the stigma of this association [with prostitutes] also carried through to urban centres in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it was even extended by the rising middle classes in the cities to almost all hereditary musicians.’80 Although nat-nati are often used as a ‘couple word’, that is to refer to a male and a female performer, respectively, in the latter part of 19th-century Bengal it is the sometimes unsaid and often used hyphenation that precedes nati, as in the ‘barangana-nati’ or ‘patita-nati’ and the almost total conflation of the two, that is at issue here. The hyphenated identity is new.

Hyphenated identities Sattitva as an ideal to be realised through the practice of domestic virtue figures consistently in folk tales. Literary production explicitly directed at theatre reframed – through an overarching category of 74

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sattitva – several otherwise disparate narrative traditions. The following examples will indicate the spectrum: (1) the erotic-mystic tradition of parakia-prem or extra-marital love, privileged in one version of the Radha-Krishna story, is highlighted in the titillating titles of many of the ‘hit’ geetinatyas relating to Radha: Nagendranath Bandyopadhyay, Sati ki Kalankini (Virtuous or Notorious?) (1874), Radha ki Sati (Is Radha Chaste?); (2) The puranic story of the self-immolation of Sati, the consort of Shiva and daughter of Daksha: Sati-milana (The Marriage of Sati and Shiva); Sati Nataka (also on the theme of Daksha Yagna); Daksha Yagna Natak or Sati Lila; (3) the renunciation of Sita by Rama (from the Ramayana) is again reworked into a play by Nagendranath Chattopadhyay with a punning and provocative title: Sita ki Asati (Is Sita Unchaste?) (Calcutta, 1879); (4) the story of Savitri-Satyavan: Radhagobinda Kar’s Adarsha Sati (Calcutta: 1875; 2nd edition 1879), advertised in English as ‘The Model of Chastity’;81 as also in Atulkrishna Mitra’s Adarsha Sati (1876); and Kalikrishna Chakravarti’s Sati Prabhava Nataka (The Power of Sati) (1879). To this ensemble we may add the subgenre of biographies of women which went by the generic name of ‘sati charitra’. Compositions on the trials of the courageous chaste heroine go back at least to 17th-century court poet Daulat Kazi’s Sati Moina, inspired by an Avadhi text. By the end of the 1870s, therefore, we find a significant re-contextualisation of otherwise familiar episodes or versions from various puranas from literary and oral sources for the regular consumption of an emerging theatrical public. It was inevitable that there was a substantial loss in the richness, variation and differences in theme, treatment, mode of narration/presentation; and most important, the location that had characterised the earlier material into its adaptation for a relatively ‘fixed’ representation on stage, foregrounding the word ‘sati’. In part, advertising and the use of catchy titles to outscore rival companies dictated the reworking of these stories. At any event, they were able to feed on the buzz around sattitva.82 These exemplars became critical in the way they were used to define the good woman from the bad, the housewife from the prostitute, the actual sati to the one who merely plays one and so on. A little studied strand is how, from the Bhakti revival onwards, the ‘other woman’ was also conceptualised as an exemplar of faith: the widowed, abandoned or destitute woman, maddened with love for Krishna, refuting the claims of sansar/domesticity. Amongst numerous such women in Girishchandra’s works, a dominant type, yet to be studied in all its ramifications, was the mad woman, the term ‘pagalini’ signifying both generic name and function in Sribatsa-Chinta 75

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(1884) and Bilwamangal Thakur (1886). Jobi-pagalini or Jobi the mad woman in Balidan (Sacrifice) (1905), which circulated as a ‘social play’, was a more overdetermined version of this type. These constructions of the ‘maddened woman’ whose expressivity lies in songs, fall into a category distinct from that of Dhruba and Prahlad, the boy devotees of puranic fame who, as we have seen, were also played by actresses. We see later how literary critics singled out the mad woman or ‘pagalini’ as a role that the actress could do justice to. The argument was that psychologically, the mad woman reflected the actress’s own ‘tormented’ moral position. We come now to the new compound of the ‘patita-abhinetri’, literally, the fallen actress. In a strictly religious sense, patit meant fallen or sinner and was applied across a range of believers in religious discourse across various denominations – from Brahmos to Shaktas. Girishchandra, for example, often referred to himself as ‘patit’, and Ramakrishna invariably figures in the writings of Binodini and Girish as Patitpaban or the Redeemer of the Fallen. But I have not yet encountered any consistent use of a hyphenated term like patit-nat, or anything approximating it, in theatre history. The word patit seems to have been used primarily in relation to caste: as for example, the ‘patitudhar andolan (jat-pat-todak)’ started by Raja Mahendrapratap Singh (in Vrindavana) who had been made an outcaste for breaking caste rules in his schools.83 A related term, ‘barangana-nati’, functions ambiguously within theatrical discourse. Girishchandra himself offers at least two glosses, in different contexts. When performance space shifted from the enclaves and andarmahals (inner quarters) of private mansions, streets, natmandirs located in family mansions, akhdas (vaishnav gathering grounds) and fairs or festivals to the enclosed theatre hall, it meant an inevitable change in viewing practices of the performer herself, as well as in ‘the eye of the beholder’. Participation took a different form, as the ‘framing’ of the performer took place through stage lighting, curtains, the raised stage, and other machinery as much as through the declamatory mode of the actor or actress concerned. Girishchandra brings alive this point most forcefully by both denying this shift and also suggesting that this distance can be overcome. He targets the ‘beholder’ in his 1900 essay on ‘Nritya’.84 (‘Dance’ is perhaps an imperfect translation for the component of performance that ‘nritya’ encompasses in Sanskrit; it includes abhinaya which emerges from dance.) Girishchandra used the instance of the Vaishnav sankirtan which involved singing, dancing and chanting the name of Hari or Krishna as a collective, to make his point. The dramatist staged a 76

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defence of the theatre and of actresses by arguing that when respectable wives (‘kulabadhu’) watch men dance the sankirtan, they are not moved to lust; why should then the male spectator be aroused when he watches the actress? To those who would damn the actress, he says, ‘You cannot love the theatre and despise the actress.’ An unexceptionable argument, it would seem. However, when Binodini Dasi made a similar connection in her insistent question about work (karya), namely: ‘Of what use have I been or of what worth has my work been?’, it remained for Girish an unanswerable question. Occupying the entire prefatory section of My Story, Binodini’s question provokes an examination of the relationship between worker, work and consumer. It interrogates the basis of her own guru’s life as a theatre worker. To anticipate the following chapter: the sankirtan as a form of public mobilisation and a collective display or enactment of emotions, though much contested, also became the most favoured citation both for and against ‘tradition’, put forward by people who seem to have little in common.

The nati In another context of Girishchandra’s explication of dharma, the nati becomes the symbol of avidya – ignorance and illusion – the flesh and blood manifestation of maya. Paradoxically, as the lowliest of the low, the prostitute-actress is also one who has the greatest right to chant the name of Hari. The reversal of status, where the lowliest or the most unlikely might be singled out for illumination, defines most traditional narratives, including folk tales. In the oral narratives of Purulia for example, Kalidasa as an archetypal riddle maker is cast as an ignoramus who becomes by the grace of Saraswati the most luminous of the navaratna, the nine gems, of Vikramaditya’s court.85 Similarly, Ratnakar, the murderous bandit, is transformed into Valmiki, the seer-poet of Ramayana. Outside of myth and archetypes, what might be the implications of this grace granted to the ‘other’ in a modern context? I would maintain that while this paradox (essential to conversion) is an integral component in the original staging and the immediate reception of Chaitanya Lila, it contributes very differently to the specular element of the benediction scene in the late 20th century. When Binodini Dasi plays Chaitanya, she manifests faith by using one illusion – that of her impersonation – to destroy the greater ‘illusion’ of avidya and maya, as we see in Chapter 2. However, while barangana (prostitute) suggests a more neutral occupational identity (as one who sells her 77

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sexual favours), patita, in its emphasis on the moral lapse of the fallen woman has suggestions of the erotic even as it contains the seed of redemption. In the theatrical discourse of the late 19th century, the word nati may therefore indicate occupational identity, social identity through lineage, and even function as a philosophical emblem. By the first decades of the 20th century, we find a significant shift in the use of words like kulta, kulatyagini and kulta kanya, as increasingly the stage actress herself became a subject of literary representation and even literary consumption. This is most evident in the corpus of fictional biographies and ‘autobiographies’ of actresses in theatre journals such as Natya-mandir, Roop-o-Rang and Sachitra Sisir (Chapter 4). While kulta and related words are still being used to refer to the protagonist of these ‘life-stories’, the preferred word is abhinetri. Finer hierarchies were set up to distinguish between nartakis (dancers), sakhis (choric maids) or balet-balas (ballet girls) and the abhinetris who were the actresses proper. The dancer or chorus girl was represented as little more than an automaton who dances as per the demands of the instructor-manager; she may on occasion be ‘promoted’ to actress status.86 Such hierarchies may have been gradually introduced by the availability and inclusion of biographical snippets about female film stars from the West in theatre magazines. A working hypothesis of the usage of kulta, beshya, barangana, nati and patita suggests that there exists a moral lexicon which moves from kulta to patita, the first emerging from the woman’s active relationship to her kula and even suggesting volition in her movement outside of this relationship, and the second suggesting seduction and thence a ‘fallen’ state. Woman as the kulta provokes censure or even punishment; the patita invites a measure of sympathetic benevolence and even a chance of salvation, usually through grace. The entry and increased circulation of the patita label is undoubtedly linked to the Victorian construct of the ‘fallen woman’ both in organised social philanthropy as well as in literary narratives of social danger in England.87 We could move beyond this obvious connection and attempt to understand the ways in which various social groups interacted in different cultural spheres to continue to load the word with an unusually extended range of signification. We might say that the first set of words is formulated around a caste-clan identity, in relation to kinship ties of the kula; whereas with patita, the focus is on the already fallen individual, although functioning as an archetype, as for example of ‘the penitent whore’ as identified by Leslie Ferris.88 It is possible that with the loosening of rural or provincial roots and the breakdown of 78

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the extended network of traditional community ties in the metropolis, patita came increasingly to replace the kulta. Provisionally then, we may juxtapose the sati with the patita and suggest that the construction of categories of women essentially devolves on the question of chastity. Patita is a general rubric which collapses histories; it spans a range of suspected or proven illicit liaisons and was/is applied to any woman who came from a family of professional entertainers (such as the domni), who in any case did not follow the norms of bhadralok respectability, had an extra-marital relationship or liaison/s, and lived in ‘red-light areas’ or with prostitutes. Once theatres started hiring women, anyone who was a professional actress, a nati, was a patita. Increasingly, it became a synonym for a professional or registered prostitute.89 The moral indictment implicit in the word nati gains ascendancy until the occupational (and however ambivalent, artistic) index is removed and the figure of the actress is localised in the generic patita or the ‘fallen woman’. The proliferation of this word and its accelerated use into the 20th century, argues for an active and extensive presence of differential – legitimate and illegitimate – spheres of sexuality. The best-selling Shikshita Patitar Atmacharit (The Autobiography of an Educated Fallen Woman) (1929) purportedly written by a ‘Manoda Debi’90 and Dilip Kumar Roy’s Patita o Patitpaban (The Fallen Woman and the Redeemer) (1978)91 offer two ends of the range in this discourse. The former utilises and reworks in extreme ways the narrative structure of the fictional biographies of actresses written by male authors and popularised in the journals since the mid1920s. The Atmacharit claims to be the ‘real-life’ story of ‘an educated fallen woman’ written to warn ‘the youthful social reformers of Bengal’ by ‘one who was [herself] a deceiver’. Patita o Patitpaban is also addressed to young people in Bengal: as stated by Roy in the preface, it is a celebration of the greatness of the figure of the Redeemer in redeeming fallen women. After half a century of reform and public debate on the woman question, the nati falls, as it were, between two worlds. She comes to represent the untouched subject/object of the reform decades, the ‘unenlightened’ residue of those very practices reform agitated against, the very opposite of that picture of ‘naturalise[d] or domestic bliss, all sweetness and light – the innocent child bride, the selfless Annapurna projected as the Hindu familial norm’.92 She is a hardened, moneygrubbing professional; this is probably worse than merely selling her sexual favours, for she earns money by impersonating those very ideals even as she publicly flaunts her otherness. 79

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The nati became the ultimate pariah for at least two reasons. First, she was untouched by reform – selective or appropriate education, proper marriage or at least a respectable profession such as teaching combined with upright spinsterhood was not possible in her case. And second, because she was visibly dependent on male mentors and patrons for almost every part of professional life: recruitment, training, employment, speech and a platform for performing. Unlike the street singer, the kirtaniya, the dhapwali or the boshtomi, she had little possibility of innovation either in the form of her work – singing, dancing, delivering her lines – in the content, and its elaboration or in the choice or nature of the performance. (At the top rung, she did have considerable powers of negotiating, choosing between theatre companies and even negotiating rates and bonuses.) Unlike the tawaiif, she did not work within a jamait or community, with the kotha usually offering a secure base against the vagaries of the world. Tawaifs were also graded in strict hierarchies, of descent (biradri), levels of accomplishment, seniority of age, training (taleem), but suffered less social opprobrium because of relatively well established, wealthier circuits of patronage which went back to pre-colonial times and continued through much of the colonial era.93

Articles of faith To speak therefore of redemption, sinfulness and the need to be absolved and saved, and consequently, the need for a figure who redeems, is not to ‘extrapolate’ ‘different’ theologies and their civilisational structures, but to foreground in fact, the interpenetration of ‘articles of faith’. In this case, the aesthetics and theology of salvation in Vaishnav doctrine and practice merged with a construction of morality which paradoxically came from some of the most powerful social reform movements of the time, including Brahmoism. Brahmoism had absorbed Christian ideals associated with monogamy, partnership and family life. In addition, as Debipada Bhattacharyya notes, the practice of keeping diaries as records of practice of faith and lapses was initiated by Brahmos. It is in autobiographies such as Sivnath Sastri’s Atmacharit (1918) that we glimpse the intersections of the individual with the larger socioreligious movement of the time and overlaps in alliances, alongside the factionalism within the movements themselves. There is thus considerable difficulty in demarcating clearly Brahmo, Christian (of various denominations), Vaishnav or other sectarian Hindu positions, either from the point of theology or in terms of sanctioned social norms, particularly as each of these was itself in a process of acute re-definition. 80

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There is an oft-cited critique by Ramakrishna of what he felt was a Christian and Brahmo obsession with ‘guilt’ and ‘sin’: ‘Whoever says I am a sinner, I am a sinner, day and night, becomes one.’ This echoes his statement about the Bible recorded in the Kathamrita: ‘the Christians have a book . . . it’s full of sin and damnation, why? and turning to Keshub [Sen], And in your Brahmo Samaj too, there’s only sin . . . Liberation (mukti) begins with the mind’.94 A recurrent theme of the Kathamrita is belief and the importance of repeating ‘god’s name’. The brand of bhakti that Girishchandra wrote about or staged in the public theatre was inflected heavily with the concept of grace (kripa). It paid particular emphasis on the access of ‘the lowly’ as well as the process of ‘seeking out’ the greatest of sinners as recipients of this grace. As we shall see in the following chapter, in her references to Guhak Chandal (the outcaste) and the Yavana Haridas (the converted Muslim), Binodini Dasi situates herself in a frame similar to these two outcast/es who not only become recipients of grace, but subsequently function as exemplars of faith. The discourse of secular enlightenment sought to separate the religious from the cultural, creating in fact these two categories. Bhakti revival in Bengal preceded but in some ways also prepared the ground for the aggressive Hindu nationalism where, besides the inspirational power located in the female as Shakti, women were themselves inspired to take on militant roles. A kind of ‘hiatus’ may be observed on the stage – the lull before the storm. With Bhakti, a new space was created for the other woman: the fallen but converted and/or redeeming woman, who becomes the living symbol of faith and love. Originally a recipient, she is subsequently an exemplar; the threat of non-­conforming sexuality is subsumed in divine impersonation, impersonation so perfect that it is affective, moving others in need of salvation and presenting an edifying spectacle to those always already ‘saved’. When this history is enacted in the 1970s–90s, it is not simply a replay. For the woman who cannot be cast either in any of the more familiar iconic variations of the mother or the cruder anti-models of the westernised monster, and whose historic location in theatre, from anonymous quarters, automatically places her beyond the pale of normative sansar, the trajectory visualised now is ‘transcendence’ through embourgeoisement. The anomaly of Binodini Dasi’s position during her stage life, the place of her writings decades after her exit from the theatre, the ‘silence’ about her during the rest of her long life and for several decades after, and the many ‘Nati Binodini’ productions in the late 20th century have to be evaluated in terms of the place of the patita-nati in formulations of ‘the Bangali jati’ (collective or race), 81

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and in the changing emphasis on the relationship between ‘Hindu’, jatiya, deshiya and Bharatiya. This last set is of particular relevance to us since it is indicative of negotiations between the modalities of identity formation, voiced as the ‘local’, ‘regional’ and ‘national’ from the 1880s to the 1990s.

Disjunctions Prior to the appearance of a handful of kulastree in public, the actress was the most visible professional whose class origins, labour, stage roles and ‘appeal’ provides us with a classic case study of the modern urban professional woman. A class-caste which has been rendered invisible in the construction of the normative woman is the working, labouring class, whose livelihood demands unchaperoned mobility, a co-sexual workplace, the possibility of multiple partners or informal relationships and public appearance. The case for the actress is strengthened if we agree that the actress is mobile, has a voice, and is required to take up a marked and highly visible space. Above all, she works outside of her home, no matter if she regards the theatre fraternity as ‘family’. Her sudden entry in public from localities already marked out as ‘unsavoury’, but representing both recently constructed ‘traditional’ models of womanhood as well as the transgressive romantic heroine and the ultraprogressive modern, invests her simultaneously with some power and extreme vulnerability. Working in the theatre meant bringing alive the romantic heroines of the new age; articulating in performance the literariness of a language coming into its own, as in Madhusudan’s kavyas; and re-presenting in the course of a single show both idealised heroines of familiar stories from the puranas and desirable heroines from adaptations of English plays, light-hearted pantomimes and misogynist farces! This range made her crucial in demarcating theatre from the jatras, which were often reworked for the proscenium theatre as geetinataks. The disjunction then, between the medium, that is the actress who enacted these roles and the roles enlivened by specific and varied modes of enactment, throws into question any one single criterion for impersonation. Popular discourse rarely engaged with this range; rather, it created an apparently irresolvable split between the p ­ rostitute-actress and the ‘superior woman’ or the ideal character (unnata, uchanga charitra). It is worth assessing the historical continuum of the split in critical discourse, if, as I argue, the nati is the dispossessed, claiming a share of the public sphere. The following example suggests the extent of this split. In the 1960s, while making a critical assessment of Girishchandra Ghosh as dramatist and theatre person, writer and literary critic 82

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Pramathanath Bishi maintained that the lack of ‘the housewife’ (grihastree) in Girishchandra’s plays was to be attributed to the absence of a (‘real’) housewife to play these parts: In the pictures of contemporary life found in Girish’s plays only those of the ordinary male householder (grihasta) is present. But there is almost no representation of the character of the householder’s wife. The reason for this lacunae is that the actresses of those days were incapable of portraying such characters. They lacked the worthiness to play the part of the housewife; they excelled in the role of the mad woman.95 Ellen Donkin cites a letter by Byron written in 1815 where he was commenting on contemporary women playwrights and their inability to write tragedy: ‘Women (saving Joanna Baillie) cannot write tragedy. They haven’t the experience for it.’ Byron provided a more graphic translation of ‘experience’ in the second letter, written in 1817: When Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written even a tolerable tragedy, ‘Ah (said the Patriarch) the composition of a tragedy requires testicles.’ If this be true, Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does – I suppose she borrows them.96 The essentialised experience of being a housewife, or for that matter, a man (and attested to by specific genitals) does not include the art of acting or writing, disabled by biology in Byron’s diagnosis and disabled by class in Bishi’s comment. Women who were or were like prostitutes (as opposed to the bhadramahila and the kulanari) were there by default. The bhadramahila was constructed in opposition to whatever the nati represented. And if the ‘actress’ could act, it was because she and the likes of her were naturally full of artifice (chhalana). Divine madness (diwana) was a socially sanctioned path of salvation for women: Radha was celebrated in her divyunmad state, as were archetypal lovers such as Soni-Mahiwal and Laila-Majnu. However, an actress might excel as the mad woman presumably because she too, was a creature who operated outside the margins of bhadra society. She would never be able to enact successfully the ‘good woman’ because she lacked the experience of being one. Bishi’s assessment suggests that stage performances by women did not require any learning or cultivation. One could in effect, make visible for a public only what one ‘was’ – this being fixed in perpetuity. 83

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When men played tragic, seductive or even wicked women, they could excel at female impersonation; not because they were ‘that which they represented’, but because of their superior art, talent and dedication. At a time when female impersonation was still in vogue, Amritalal Bose was challenged to do a better Sairindhri (woman character in Nil Darpan) than anyone else – any other man, that is. He practiced ‘her’ laments and wails for hours – as a key to representing the character. Similar claims were made a generation later about Khetramohan Ganguly (1823–93) who had ‘mastered’ feminine gestures perfectly, in playing Bankimchandra’s heroines. His rendering of ‘stree-bhumika’ passed into theatrical lore.97 Significantly, a part of his musical training was by Benaras-based ustads, suggesting that he may have cultivated a more feminine gayaki, individuated vocalisation. The challenge in this instance lay in ‘cultivating’ or proving one’s superiority in art, outside the realm of morality. Was this purely a gendered distinction? Or, was there a decisive shift in representational practice from more traditional performance practices which not only allowed, but required, the actor to ‘become’? Was ‘becoming’ to be made available to women only through the discourse of redemption, working its way through the construction of the actress as beshyaabhinetri, and therefore, legitimately the most receptive to ‘grace’?

Figure 1.5 Bilingual playbill for The Wily Woman, 19 October 1895. ‘The curtain will fall to Harinam sankirtan’ Source: HNDC. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan

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Binodini, Amodini, Pramodini – or, what’s in a name? The juxtaposition of ‘Nati Binodini’ with ‘Binodini Dasi’ in this book is not to devalue the epithet nati, meaning female performer, or heroine or actress. Nor is it intended to sequester Binodini from the etymological and social genealogy of the word in its varied usage in cultural history. The accent on an actress and the nati then, is intended to counter the iconicity of a Binodini by invoking positively the very namelessness that has nourished it (Nati Binodini = patita-nati > almost-­bhadramahila) in order to signify the ‘collective’ to which she belonged. I am aware though that the danger of such a strategy lies in ignoring or even erasing the very real distinctions that existed between actresses such as Binodini Dasi or Sukumari Dutta who were toasted in print as ‘stars of the native stage’ and the raw recruit, who might be condemned forever to play the anonymous handmaiden or sakhi – the ‘lower order actresses’ (nimna-srenir abhinetri). Binodini, Pramodini and Amodini were and are still used (in fiction) as generic names for actresses, in contrast to the more neutral and modern sounding Nabin, Bijoy, Umesh and Kailash for actors.98 The most popular jatra production of Binodini’s life – Brajendra Kumar Dey’s Nati Binodini – gave her mother the rhyming name of ‘Amodini’. Binodini does not refer to her mother by name either in her autobiographical narratives or in the book of poems that she has dedicated to her mother. The branding and mass marketing of names had occurred initially in the large-scale production and wide consumption of Kalighat paintings and continued into the late 19th century chromolithographs representing the city’s beauties, called sundaris. The latter carried captions ostensibly naming the beauties: ‘Sushilasundari’, ‘Ranisundari’, ‘Golapsundari’ and even ‘Tablasundari’.99 The interchangeability of these names with those of the generic stage actress is not a coincidence. To caption was to personalise the anonymous public woman and to sell the generic image as ‘individual’. Theatre advertisements linked role and performer in multiple ways, some of which I mention below. Theatre magazines would draw on and develop these already circulating images in conjunction with a variety of journalistic devices to display the actresses’ ‘charms’ and play them off against her ‘unfortunate’ status. We note the generic and ‘secularis/ed’ names for actresses. By secular names, I mean here, those not identified with gods and goddesses, as in Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati or mythical heroines such as Sita. The 85

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shift is towards an appropriation of the names of classical romantic nayikas, a democratising of literary antecedents with hints of erotic tales not quite told. The connections between fictive, imagined and projected identities are fused in the actress being given as token of public adulation, or taking on, the name of the heroine or hero in signature roles. Variously known as Golapi and Golapkamini, the actress Golap became (reknowned as) Sukumari after the heroine she played with great elan in Upendranath Das’s Sarat-Sarojini in 1874. After her marriage, Sukumari was the only actress to be advertised as ‘Mrs. Sukumari Dutt’.100 Various modes of urban circulation in newspaper advertisements and reviews, placards, magazines, playbills or simply by word of mouth conferred a new identity, even where a well-known mythical/religious name was integrated into the name of the actress. The epithet ‘PrahladKusum’ or ‘Prahlad-Kushi’ (Kushi being an affectionate diminutive of Kusum) was conferred on one of many Kusumkumaris on the Bengali stage for her performance as Prahlad in Prahlad Charitra. It commemorates her success in playing the exemplary boy devotee Prahlad, who undergoes various trials and is saved by Vishnu’s intervention. ‘PrahladKushi’ becomes a public referent encoding not only Kusumkumari’s own prowess, but memorialises a particular version of this otherwise familiar subject in jatra, even linking it to a particular theatre company. For, by the late 1870s, not only was the same novel or jatra dramatised or adapted by competing dramatists for the stage, but very often the ‘same’ play would be produced by rival theatre companies, with a substantial number of the audience play-(s)hopping for purposes of comparison. Actor-producer Amarendranath Dutt revelled in this kind of competition, soliciting audiences through provocative advertisements and columns in magazines to judge the better actor or show. I would call these instances of ‘reverse imprinting’, somewhat different from stage names: the role itself is now stamped with the name of the actress who makes the play memorable. The actress’s worth (marketability) is recognised, even immortalised, in her new name. The uniformity of this particular practice – cutting through a range of roles, whether of a contemporary heroine or a boy devotee of puranic lineage – is an indication of changing reception contexts in the metropolis. The role in tandem with a particular performer is converted into economic exchange. The taking of stage names is also a feature of mobility, signalling the opportunities for re-casting identity in the vast and anonymous spaces of the city. Many upper-caste Hindu women might actually have wanted to change their names to protect or disavow a former identity or erase family (kula) affiliations: this motive becomes a refrain in 86

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the ‘first-person’ actress-stories analysed in Chapter 4. In his study of women performers, Amlan Dasgupta alerts us that ‘the religious identity of performing women artists at this time, as indeed of other ethnic musical groups, cannot be simply described. In many cases they seemed to have adapted to local religious conditions.’101 There is also the known and unknown history of women who needed to ‘pass’ as ‘Hindu’ in new modes of entertainment, as Kathryn Hansen notes in the case of the Parsi theatre companies.102 Sumanta Banerji’s observations on Muslim prostitutes in Calcutta offer another insight: ‘Findings from British administrative records point out the preponderance of Hindus over Muslims amongst the prostitutes of Bengal’ (the difference was primarily because of interdictions against widow remarriage and various other proscriptions of kulinism amongst caste Hindus). And ‘Among Muslim prostitutes, there seemed to be a tendency to hide their religious identity.’103 Taking on Hindu names may have been in order to service a larger clientele, or to live in ‘Hinduised’ localities. Name changing for Muslims of both sexes may have yet another reason: ‘Bengali Muslim migrants held lowest status amongst their coreligionists in Calcutta and eagerly sought higher status by change of name and if possible of language and occupation.’104 In the enterprise of the Bengali public theatre which became in effect a ‘Hindu theatre’, it is more than likely that there were many Muslim women who chose a ‘Hindu-sounding’ name to gain employment in the theatre. Muntassir Mamoon refers to a certain ‘Dunia’ in Dacca, whom he calls both a ‘baiji’ and a ‘barbanita’. Calcutta had a heterogenous population, including a large number of daily commuters to the city, seasonal and part-time migrants/labour, and foreign performers ‘passing through’. Alongside ‘marginal Europeans’, there were resident populations of Jewish, Armenian, Parsi, Eurasians later called Anglo-Indians, baijis and tawaiaffs circulating from north India and Maharashtra. In addition, there was a huge population of migrants and settlers communities from other regions of the subcontinent working in different tiers of the formal and informal service sector and in industries such as jute mills which came up in the second half of the 19th century. (Calcutta did not have a significant industrial working class population, as did Bombay.) Intermittent references to women who had western or Christian names points to gaps in our research. For example ‘Rosy’, who acted in Babar Shah (1917), is only mentioned as a ‘certain foreign beauty used to attract an audience’.105 Until we allow interpenetrative histories to tell their tale, there is a danger of being trapped in discrete realms of race, ethnicity, region and any other real or perceived marker of difference. 87

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The changes and ambivalence in ways of naming and construction of identities thereof map a world in transition. Female performers from pre-theatre times went by first names such as Radhamoni or Durgamoni; more often than not, the names included caste identity, as in Horu Methrani (feminine suffix of methar, a sweeper caste).106 Conventions regarding the usage of proper names and surnames or caste names underwent changes. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay points out that a public man of letters such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), who was engaged in forging a new prose in Bangla, felt the need to instruct his readers on modes of address appropriate to status, caste and gender. Bankimchandra held that daughters of brahmans (brahmankanya) could write ‘Debi’ after their names, while daughters of sudras (sudrakanya) were to write ‘Dasi’.107 Dasi was also the approved feminine suffix for women professing Vaishnavism, just as Das was used for men, both meaning servitor, or one who has submitted to the divine. A large number of actresses came from a Vaishnav background, specifically from those communities considered ‘outcastes’ even within Vaishnavism, such as jat vaishnavs. Within the theatre world, though, it seems more likely that class distinctions were also being maintained in the use of Dasi, rather than only indicating a specific sectarian or caste identity. Advertisements of the public theatre used first names for both sexes, but usually had a surname for the actor. Sometimes ‘Dassy’ (Dasi) was added after the woman’s first name; at other times the actress’s name was prefixed with ‘Srimati’ (often spelled ‘Srimaty’) or ‘Miss’. Binodini called herself ‘Srimati Binodini Dasi’ in her published autobiography. It was also an established practice to begin an autobiographical text in Bangla with information about one’s birth, name of the father and forefathers (pitri parichay) and about one’s kula (kula parichay or goshti). Coming as she does, like many actresses, from a female-headed household, Binodini Dasi is silent about the absent father. But she affirms with pride her urban origins. She mentions her address – the street name and even the house number: ‘I was born in the metropolis of Calcutta, in a family without means or property . . . House No. 145 on Cornwallis Street, is now in my possession.’108 When actress Narisundari died in 1939, the obituary in Amrita Bazar Patrika (‘Miss Nari Sundari: Death of the Prima-Donna of the Bengali Stage’) mentioned that ‘she died at [sic] her own residence at Santi Ghosh Street, Baghbazar, at the advanced age of 62.’109 It would seem that the metropolis did function as the primary marker of professional identity. Yet, whether in stories or histories, the social identity of a shared cosmopolitan milieu is almost never granted to the actress, excepting in 88

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the most negative of ways. Rather, a striking feature of most ‘actressstories’ is the absence of any identifiable metropolitan locale. ‘Namelessness’ in the present context, therefore, includes the lack of the name of the father – what I would call part of ‘received a­ nonymity’ – and extends into euphemisms of ‘conferred anonymity’. Biographers and theatre historians down to our times ‘confer’ anonymity when speaking of the ‘origins’ of the actress. They do so not by saying that their place of birth is unknown, but by referring to it as ‘that locality or lane which is forbidden, obscure or of ill-repute, prostitute quarters’: nishiddho-palli, akhyata-para, kukhyata-gali, aggyato-palli, patita-palli; or ‘a certain place’, ‘a non-place’, ‘an evil place’: amuk jayega, asthan, kusthan.110 These euphemisms for places that must not be named reflect the erasure of the material conditions of life outside the stage. They hint darkly at the worst possible combination – of poverty with moral depravity. Namelessness as preferred anonymity has clear class and gender connotations: male patrons were referred to in anonymous terms such as ‘A-babu’ or ‘–babu’, or ‘Amuk-babu’ (a certain babu) by the actress herself, and by co-workers as ‘X or Y’s babu’. The generic ‘theatarer babu’ was used to refer to the bhadralok with whom an actress had a patron-client relationship, with or without romantic undertones, and in some cases in the form of a secret marriage known as gandharva vivaha.111 With the significant exception of Gurmukh Rai (1864–86), who appears in 20th-century Bengali productions as the Marwari/ Punjabi ‘businessman’ type (with a stagey accent), Binodini Dasi’s ‘babu-protectors’ are not named either by her or by her biographers, nor do they have names in playtexts, although they are identifiable figures in Calcutta’s social history. Binodini follows this practice in not naming Saratchandra Sinha – the upper-class patron whose cowife she had become and with whom she spent almost 30 years of her life. She chooses to refer to him in eulogic terms of endearment: he is variously her ‘hridaydebata’ (lord of my heart) and ‘deb-taru’ (divine tree). This anonymity is read as a sign of necessary discretion, in deference to bhadralok sensibilities. In popular representations of her life, Sinha’s aristocratic lineage would be domesticated as ‘Ranga-babu’. In Teenkari Dasi’s life as ‘narrated’ to her biographer Upendranath Vidyabhushan (who presents it in the first person), there are ‘bhadralok’ clients who strike a deal for Teenkari with her mother on condition that she severs all connections with the theatre. In an otherwise graphic account of the details of the bargain, the protracted negotiations and Teenkari’s stubborn refusal to give in to her mother, the two clients figure only as ‘duti bhadralok’ (the two gentlemen). 89

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Vidyabhushan’s account lets the behaviour and speech of the ‘bhadralok’ speak for itself.112 In the case of the stage actress and woman as historical subject, namelessness and anonymity are reflected in a sustained absence of dates, names, origins and other particulars that constitute a ‘record’ of a life. It is understandable that women writing letters in the early decades would wish to be anonymous. In what is believed to be ‘the first letter . . . by a woman in a literary periodical’ citing the ills of kulin polygamy and asking for reform, published in 1831 in Samvad Kaumudi, the letter was signed ‘amuki devi’ or ‘a certain lady’.113 In the few instances we have of the signature of the actress appended to her own writings and those attributed to her usually include the following: ‘an/this unfortunate woman’, ‘this ill-fated creature’, ‘this miserable or wretched woman’, gendered in the literary form in Bangla as hathobhagini, abhagini or dukhini. Its Victorian counterpart is found in the numerous letters written by prostitutes printed in newspapers and other media in Britain during the debate on the ‘Great Social Evil’ in the 1850s. The letters were invariably signed ‘An Unfortunate Woman’, ‘Another Unfortunate’ or ‘One More Unfortunate’.114 This strand in the intertwined discourse of prostitution and performance is crucial in the unravelling of the ‘actress-stories’ where anonymity is played up through the mode of the confessional and an almost absent locale. The Bengali public theatre also shows a clear departure from the practice followed in reviews, advertisements and other reports on English/Western actresses that appeared in the press. English actresses followed the conventions of the Restoration stage, such as the renowned Mrs. Esther Leach (1809–43) and her daughter Mrs. Anderson, among the many others who performed in the Calcutta in the early 19th century. After 1857, the trail of actresses and singers from Australia, Canada, England and the United States who toured the subcontinent en route were advertised with first and last names: Miss Clare Ellis, Miss Louisa Pomeroy, Miss Lizzie Gordon, Miss Blanche Ewing and so on.115 Their ‘benefit performances’ in the big cities index their travels and rank. Police reports, court cases and census records would unearth at least a few bones of recorded history – a genealogy that I would like to pursue in future. Internal litigations dogged Bengali companies at every level, underlined in the cheeky Bengali title of a 1960s study which could be translated as ‘From the Greenroom to the Courtroom’!116 Visiting actors, actresses and companies were not exempt, as we find in the sensational 1883 case of the Pollard Juvenile Opera Company.117 90

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We come now to a much-alluded event on the subject of naming – the proposal to name after herself the theatre that Binodini Dasi helped construct. In 1883, when the young businessman Gurmukh Rai was smitten by the actress, he offered to build a new theatre for the group then working in the National Theatre if she became his mistress. After considerable internal conflict Binodini agreed, partly in response to the pressures of her colleagues, but primarily because of her own commitment to a theatre of their own. Undoubtedly, there was an aspiration, an ambition even, to legitimise her professional as also her social identity through a building in the metropolis. In recognition of her decision and the sacrifice it entailed, the new theatre was to be called ‘B. Theatre’ – a distinct if properly discreet reference to her. When the time came to do the deed, as it were, her colleagues secretly registered it as the Star Theatre: it was felt that naming a theatre after an actress would not be good for business.118 We know Binodini refused several lucrative offers of money from the same businessman to set up her own theatre and continued to perform in the Star Theatre until her abrupt departure after a final performance on 1 January 1887. (In this last performance, the ‘Star of the Native Stage’ played ‘Rangini’ – a generic song-dance performer, in Bellick Bazar.) Binodini could have learnt something of the name game from a fellow actress in Europe. Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) became a familiar name to Bengali readers at the turn of the century, courtesy of the theatre magazines. Bernhardt was successful in naming a theatre after herself, but only because she had ‘taken over’ the actual building. At age 55, when Bernhardt leased the Théâtre des Nations in the Place du Châtelet for 25 years, ‘her first move was to rechristen the place the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt’.119 During the Second World War Occupation of Paris, the Nazis changed the name to the original one because the actress was half-Jewish; it was renamed after her in 1947, but is now simply Théâtre de la Ville. The ‘impersonation of morality-respectability’ with the ‘taking on’ of caste names raised hackles again in the 1930s when the film industry opened up newer avenues of employment. An editorial granted that while there were a few ‘genuine bhadramahila’ entering films, Now, the fact of the matter is, that these days, actresses of a particular category (bishesh sreni) are also changing their names and taking on a respectable surname when signing up for films. We do not know why they are so insistent on pretending to be respectable and thereby attempting to hoodwink the audience. 91

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The article goes on to outline the various problems that would arise from this move on the part of the ill-reputed (akhyata) women, finally leading to a complete blurring of identities: ‘In the not so distant future we might even find that the bhadramahila and the actress from the socalled particular class have mixed to become one in the film world’ (emphasis added).120 It was the possibility of illusion upon illusion that would put all genealogists in a tizzy.

The new public woman We have seen that the ‘appearance’ of the stage actress as an integral feature of the commercial theatres in Calcutta in the 1870s marks a violent rupture in the social location of the female performer and continues with older genealogies. The prejudice against actresses – and acting – is hardly new, nor is the association of actresses with prostitutes unique to Bengali theatre. Theatrical history all over the world offers many instances of courtesans or prostitutes doubling and overlapping as mimes or players. Similarly, while professional entertainers on the Indian subcontinent have always been segregated from other women of the household and/or belonged to specific caste groups, the former had also been accorded a differential status in the social ­spectrum – a deference that generated great indignation amongst endof-century reformers.121 The uncertain middle and upper middle class origins of the founding fathers of Bengali theatre created the sharpest caste and class divide between the ‘respectable amateur’ and ‘the professional’. Rather than replicating this binary model through discourses of oppression and resistance, this chapter has traced the complex negotiations around terminology and ‘naming’, scanning the terms of reference for this new public woman – the actress, whose moorings are yet to be established in the public eye. These negotiations are inseparable from the larger debates on education, livelihood and legitimate modes of entertainment, synoptically marked out in the chapter. Genealogies may enable us to do more than trace lineages – biological, socio-economic, linguistic; they can also identify points of departure. They plot the relations between power and subject creation, identity and subjectivity, and allow us to explore the unresolved dynamics between the professional and her/his work/art.

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Figure 1.6 Binodini Dasi with Saratchandra Sinha Source: Collection of Siddhartha Ghosh. Courtesy of CSSSC Archives

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Advertisements which promised both ‘ideal women and scenic illusions’ reveal the seamless way in which the actress was successful in moving between the abstract ideal women circulating in bhadralok discourse – whether in projects related to women’s education or in the construction of a distinctive indigenous history – while feeding into the material production of scenic illusions on stage which demanded a new use of her body. Her visibility as one and the other lays bare the uneasy processes of her commodification.

Notes 1 Somprakash, 17 Paush 1279 BS/1872. 2 For an impassioned defense of ‘wholesome jatra’ versus the rage for ‘natyabhinay’ which caters to ‘baser instincts’, see Anon. Madhyastha, Part 2, No. 28, Falgun 1280 BS/1873, pp. 706–14. 3 Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘The Nautee in “the Second City of the Empire” ’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2003, pp. 208–12. 4 Rimli Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, Introduction, pp. 5–10. 5 Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 84. 6 Uma Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, p. 68. 7 An obituary in English for ‘Baboo Nilmoney Bysack, Assistant to the Commisssioner of Burdwan’ mentioned his translation of Persian tales and of the Arabian Nights ‘[and] . . . a History of India’ but emphasised, ‘Nobonaree ranks as his best performance.’ Cited in Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay, Nilmoni Basak, Harachandra Ghosh, Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 2004 (1350 BS), pp. 7–11. 8 Many translations of ‘model lives’ from English were intended for the readers of the Bengali Family Library. Debipada Bhattacharyya, Bangla Charit Sahitya (The Charit in Bengali Literature), Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1982, p. 117. 9 Ibid., p. 124. 10 Kaliprasanna Dasgupta and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, Arya Nari Bharat Chitra Granthabali (Collection of Sketches of the Arya Nari in Bharat), Calcutta: Bhattacharya & Sons, 1909 (1908). 11 Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Introduction’ in Recasting Women; Chakravarti, ‘Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?’, pp. 47–51. 12 Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Tod’s Rajasthan and the Bengali Imagination’ in Rimli Bhattacharya (ed.), ‘Texts Travelling Text’, special issue of Yearly Review, No. 12, 2004, Department of English, University of Delhi, pp. 61–76. 13 See Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Virangana in North Indian History, Myth and Popular Culture’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 23, No. 18, 30 April 1988, WS25–33 and Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1993 (1992), pp. 262–3.

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The model is not to be conflated with the ‘action women’ discussed in Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. 14 See Dorothea R. French, ‘Maintaining Boundaries: The Status of Actresses in Early Christian Society’, Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 52, No. 3, August 1998, pp. 293–318, and for Puritan attacks, see Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, especially pp. 22–46. 15 Jasodhara Bagchi, ‘Shakespeare in Loin Cloths: English Literature and the Early Nationalist Consciousness in Bengal’ in Swati Joshi (ed.), Rethinking English: Essays in Language, Literature and History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 146–59. Shakespeare was part of the curriculum of the University of Calcutta from 1868 to 1897. 16 Brian Hatcher, ‘Bourgeois Vedanta: The Colonial Roots of Middle-Class Hinduism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 75, No. 2, June 2007, p. 307. 17 English literature was first taught as a subject in the colonies, and by ‘classics’ was meant Greek and Latin. See Leigh Dale, The English Men: Professing Literature in Australian Universities, Toowoomba, QLD: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1997. 18 Rajnarain Basu, Ekal o Sekal (The Present and the Past) in Baridbaran Ghosh (ed.), Nirbachita Rachana Sangraha, Calcutta: Dey Book Store, 1995, p. 289. 19 Bangla fiction often provides sympathetic vignettes of runaway impoverished brahman boys who join jatra groups, such as Nilkanta in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Apad’ (Nuisance) first published in Sadhana (1895) and ‘Prince Ajay’ in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali (1929). 20 The term is taken from John Berwick’s essay, ‘Chatra Samaj: The Significance of the Student Community in Bengal c. 1870–1922’ in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind Body & Society, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 232–93. 21 Bhattacharya, ‘The Nautee’, pp. 233–4. 22 Amit Maitra, following Sukumar Sen, concludes that the real author was Upendranath Das who ‘gifted’ the authorship to Sukumari, Rangalaye Banganati (Theatre and the Bengali Nati), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2004, pp. 47–52. 23 Dacca Prakash, 23 March 1893, excerpted in Muntassir Mammoon, Unish Shataker Daccar Theater (Theatre in 19th-Century Dacca), Dacca: Bangaladesh Shilpakala Akademi 1979, p. 100. See also Kalish Mukhopadhyay, ‘The Star Theatre: The Dacca Tour, 1887’, Banga Natyashalar Itihas (The History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: Star Theatre Publication, 1973, Vol. 1, pp. 375–6. 24 Kumudini Mehta, ‘English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and Nineteenth Century’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bombay, March 1960, Synopsis, p. v. 25 See for example, review of ‘the original Christys’ performing ‘a lively episode in the career of Bengalee Baboodom’ to a crowded house in Roorkee. Pioneer, 8 November 1873, p. 4. 26 Partha Chatterjee, ‘Our Modernity’, http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/partha1. pdf (accessed on 21 May 2013).

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27 Bhuban Mohan Mitra, ‘The Native Theatre’, The Hindu Pioneer, 1, No. 2, October 1835 in Alok Roy (ed.), Nineteenth Century Studies, Calcutta: Bibliographical Research Centre, 1974, pp. 190–6. 28 Calcutta Journal, 26 February 1822, p. 287, cited in J.K. Dasgupta, ‘Some Early Dramas in Bengali’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1935, p. 113. www.jstor.org/sta ble/608105 (accessed on 25 May 2014). 29 Nikhil Sarkar, ‘Calcutta Woodcuts: Aspects of a Popular Art’ in Ashit Paul (ed.), Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983, pp. 35–6. 30 Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 1998. 31 For a comprehensive account see Adrian McNeil, ‘Mirasis: Some Thoughts on Hereditary Musicians in Hindustani Music’, Context: A Journal of Music Research, No. 32, 2007, pp. 45–58. 32 Letters from India by The Hon. Emily Eden, Edited by Her Niece, In Two Volumes, London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1872. http://digital.library. upenn.edu/women/eden/letters/letters.html (accessed on 23 May 2015). 33 Sumit Sarkar, ‘ “Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti”: Ramakrishna and His Times’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 29, 18 July 1992, pp. 1543–66. 34 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 9–10. 35 Bharati Ray, ‘Introduction’ in Sekaler Nari Shiksha: Bamabodhini Patrika, 1270–1329 BS, Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1994, p. 23. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., pp. 17, 22. For other permissible modes of earning a livelihood, see pp. 123–7. 38 David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 38–41. 39 Anindita Ghosh, ‘Contesting Print Cultures in Colonial Bengal’ in Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty (eds), Book History in India: Print Areas, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 181–2. 40 Ibid., p. 180. 41 Meera Kosambi, Gender Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema Before Independence, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015, pp. 77–9. 42 See Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Purush angshe nari abhinetri’ (Women Actresses in Male Roles), (Rangalay, 9 Chaitra 1307 BS/1900), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1992 (1972), Vol. 3, pp. 820–3. 43 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, Vol. 3, p. 48. 44 Letter by Charles H. Walker, Statesman, 4 December 1889; response by Amritalal Bose, Statesman, 19 December 1889. 45 Lady Dufferin, better known for fundraising for hospitals, also wrote lively anecdotal accounts of all kinds of performances in her memoirs, Our Viceregal Life in India, Selections from My Journal, 1884–1888, London: John Murray, Vol. 1, 1889. 46 Bhupendranath Bandyopadhyay, ‘Sanjibanir chhatfatani’ (Sanjibani in a tizzy), Natya-mandir, 2nd year, Nos. 7–8, Magh-Falgun 1320 BS/1913, pp. 613–17.

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47 Vasudha Dalmia, ‘ “The Only Real Religion of the Hindus”: Vaisnava Self-Representation in the Late Nineteenth Century’ in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stiertencron (eds), The Oxford India Hinduism Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 (2007), pp. 90–128. 48 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Gopal-Rakhal Dwandasamas, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1991, pp. 74–5. 49 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Streeshiksha’ (Women’s Education), GR, Vol. 3, pp. 813–18. 50 Dineschandra Sen, Bangabhasha o Sahitya (The Bengali Language and Literature) Vol. 1, Calcutta: c. 1890. 51 Ibid., p. 568, n. 1. 52 Ibid., pp. 568–9. 53 Statesman, 22 June 1901, in Shankar Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1901–1909 (Sourcebook for the History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1994, p. 123. 54 For details of this afterpiece see Ashok Kumar Mishra, Bangla Prahasaner Itihas (A History of Bengali Farces), Calcutta: Modern Book Agency Private Limited, 1988, pp. 211–12. 55 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Complexities of Young Bengal’ in A Critique of Colonial India, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985, p. 23. 56 Nikhil Sarkar estimates that Battala publishers brought out ‘500 farces between 1854–1899’ that followed the vogue for ridiculing the babu in Kalighat patas. Woodcut Prints, p. 35. 57 Shankar Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900 (Sourcebook for the History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982, p. 132. 58 Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, p. 278. 59 Bengalee, 16 February 1901, in Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan: 1901–1909, p. 278. 60 Usha Chakraborty, The Condition of Bengali Women Around the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1963, pp. 113–16. 61 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 68–71, 139–48. 62 The ‘Hon’ble Maharajah /Jotendro Mohun Tagore Bahadoor’ had a daylong programme which included kirtan, snake-charming and jugglery, farces, gymnastics, ‘Living Chess-men’ as well as ‘Tableaux Vivants of the Principal Rasas of the Hindus!’ Statesman, 3 February 1881. The Statesman of 7 February 1881 reported ‘that there was a “bumper gathering”, despite an entrance fee of Re. 1.’ Ranabir Ray Choudhury (ed.), Calcutta a Hundred Years Ago, Calcutta: Nachiketa Publications Limited, 1987, p. 12, n. 4. 63 Documented in Chitra Deb, Thakurbarir Andarmahal, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1359 BS; Ajit Kumar Ghosh, Thakurbarir Abhinay, Calcutta: Rabindra Bharati Society, 1988; Abanindranath Thakur with Rani Chanda, Gharoa (Informal Spaces) 1941, repr. Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1971; and Rudraprasad Chakraborty, Rangamancha o Rabindranath: Samakalin Pratikriya (Rabindranath and Theatre: Contemporary Responses), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995. 64 Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

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65 For larger implications of this shift, see Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘Opening Up the Utsav: Rabindranath Tagore and Choreographies of Participation’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Nos. 51–2, 2014–16, pp. 9–38. 66 Iravati, ‘Female Theatre Artists in Bharata’s Natyashastra’ in T.T. Mukherjee and Amita Singh (eds), Gender, Space and Resistance: Women in Theatre in India, New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2013, pp. 47–56, offers a genealogy of the actress termed the natakiya and emphases the intensive training she underwent in all the arts and other subjects. All-women troupes (streepreksha) were also a feature of ancient theatre. 67 The Natyashastra (trans. and ed. Adya Rangacharya), New Delhi: Munshi Manoharlal Private Ltd., 1999 (1996), Chapter 20. 68 Vishwanatha, Sahityadarpana, Dhirendranath Bhattacharya and G. Vidyanidhi Bhattacharya (eds), Calcutta: Sanskrit Book Depot, 1371 BS/1964, Chapter 6, pp. 247–54. 69 Sukumari Bhattacharji, Prachin Nari: Samaj o Sahitya (Ancient Women: Society and Literature) Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1989, p. 57. 70 Ibid., p. 57. 71 Ibid., pp. 54–74. 72 Ibid., pp. 36, 138. 73 Ibid., pp. 55–6. 74 This particular conjunction was brought to my attention by Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Gender Issues in Early South Indian History’ in India and Indology: Past Present and Future, Calcutta: National Book Agency Private Ltd., 2002, p. 712, n. 21. 75 D.D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality, New Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 1994 (1962), pp. 67–8. 76 Prabhu Guha-Thakurta, The Origin and Development of Bengali Drama, London: Kegan Paul, 1930, p. 57. 77 Adya Rangacharya, Notes on Indian Theatre, New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971, pp. 64–5. 78 Sukumar Sen, Nat, Natya, Natak, Calcutta: Mitra & Ghosh Publishers, 1991 (1972), pp. 29, 15. 79 The ‘slippage’ is addressed in Bhattacharya, ‘The Nautee’. 80 McNeil, ‘Mirasis’, p. 49. 81 Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, p. 215. 82 R.K. Yajnik considers the ‘the passion for the representation of the Sati’ as one of the three ‘medieval forces’ in modern Indian theatre. The Indian Theatre, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1933, p. 67. 83 Jadugopal Mukherjee, Biplabi Jibaner Smriti (Memories of a Revolutionary Life), Calcutta and New Delhi: Academic Publishers, 1983, p. 298. 84 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Nritya’ (Dance), GR, Vol. 3, pp. 846–9. 85 Roma Chatterji, Folklore and the Function of Popular Consciousness in a Village in the Purulia District of West Bengal, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delhi, 1985, pp. 164–5, n. 4. 86 For example: ‘Kaifiat’ (An Explanation) (21 Agrahayan 1331 BS); ‘Bismrita abhinetrir atmakatha ba charam shiksha’ (The autobiography of a forgotten actress or the ultimate lesson) (28 Agrahayan 1331 BS) and ‘Nartaki Amala’ (Amala the dancer) (25 Magh 1331 BS), all published in Roop o Rang (1924).

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87 For the framing of the Victorian fallen woman see Sajni Mukherji, ‘The Two Marthas: Legal and Philanthropic Panopticism’ in Sheila Lahiri Chowdhury (ed.), Reading the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1991, pp. 59–70. 88 Leslie Ferris identifies ‘the penitent whore’ as one of the ‘Archetypal Images of Women in Theatre’ in Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre, London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1990, pp. 79–95. 89 It is in this sense that the word is used even in contemporary sociological studies, as in Zarina Rahman Khan and Helaluddin Khan Arefeen, Patita Nari: A Study of Prostitution in Bangaladesh, Dhaka: Centre for Social Sciences, 1989. 90 The anomaly and erotic appeal of the educated actress, explains in part the best-seller status of the scurrilous Manoda Debi, Shikshita Patitar Atmacharit, 1336 BS/1929, repr. Calcutta: The Versatiles, 1986. 91 Dilip Kumar Roy, Patita o Patitpaban (The Fallen Woman and the Redeemer), Calcutta: Surakavya Samsad, 1978. 92 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 203–4. 93 The Asiatic Journal, August 1816, ‘Asiatic Intelligence – Calcutta’, pp. 205–6: Nikhee, Ashroom, . . . a woman named Zeenat, who belongs to Benaras, performs at the house of Budi Nath Baboo in Jorasanko. Report speaks highly of a young damsel, named Fyz Boksh who performs at the house of Gooro Prosad Bhos. Excerpted in Samvadpatre Sekaler Katha 1818–1830 (About the Past in Newspapers), Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay (compiled and ed.), 5th rpt, Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, 1415 BS/2008, p. 466. 94 Sri M., Kathamrita, Calcutta: Udbodhan, 1986, Vol. I, pp. 99–101. 95 ‘Introduction’, Pramathanath Bishi (ed.), Girish Rachanasambhar, Calcutta: Mitra & Ghosh, 1963. 96 Ellen Donkin, Getting Into the Act: Women Playwrights in London: 1776–1829, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 178. 97 ‘Bangiya Natyashalar Itihas’ (The History of Bengali Theatre) (bisheshagya likhito/by a specialist), Natya-mandir, Chaitra 1319 BS/1912, No. 9, p. 681. 98 Cited in Introduction, Debipada Bhattacharyya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991, Vol. 4, p. xxxix. 99 See for example, coloured lithographs titled ‘Sushilasundari’ and ‘Jnanadasundari’ (1890–1900), printed at the Chorabagan and Kansaripara Art Studio, respectively, reprinted in Radha Prasad Gupta, Kolkatar Firiwalar Dak aar Rastar Awaj, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995 (1984), facing pp. 64–65. 100 ‘Mrs. Sukumari Dutt as Pramila’ in the play Meghnad Badh at the Emerald Theatre, Statesman & FOI, 26 February 1888. 101 Amlan Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’ in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, New Delhi: Sage, 2005, p. 7, n. 13. 102 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross Dressing in the Parsi Theatre’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2, May 1999, pp. 127–48.

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103 Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998, pp. 88–90. 104 Kenneth Mcpherson, The Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta, 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974, p. 19. 105 Sushil Kumar Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753– 1980, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1982, p. 119. 106 Devajit Bandyopadhyay, Banglar Manchageeti, 1795–1872, Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1999. 107 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Sahaj rachana shiksha’ (Easy Lessons in Composition) in Gopal Haldar (ed.), Bankim Rachana Sangraha, Calcutta: Kolikata Sahitya Samsad, 1993, p. 1197. Cited in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Gopal-Rakhal Dwandasamas: Uponibeshbaad o Bangla Shishu Sahitya (The Dialectic of Gopal-Rakhal: Colonialism and Bengali Children’s Literature), Calcutta: Papyrus, 1991, p. 233. 108 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 61. 109 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 June 1939, No. 148, p. 7. 110 A recurrent phrase in otherwise sympathetic biographies of actresses: for example, of Kironbala in Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, p.  109; of Sushilabala in Baidyanath Mukhopadhyay (ed.), Samsad Bangla Natya Abhidhan (Dictionary of Bengali Drama), Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2000, p. 409, among others. The most discreet euphemism – ‘anya samajer char kanya’ (four daughters from another level of society) – is found in Rathin Chakrabory, Kolkatar Natyacharcha, Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1993, p. 23. 111 Indra Mitra, Sajghar (The Greenroom), Calcutta: Triveni Prakashan, 1964, p. 9. 112 Upendranath Vidyabhushan, Binodini, Teenkari o Tarasundari (1919– 20), Calcutta: Roma Prakashoni, 1985. 113 Bhattacharjee, ‘Introduction’ in Reflective Prose, p. xiii. 114 Sajni Mukherji, ‘The Two Marthas’. 115 I have traced the names of at least 60 actresses (some returning annually) travelling from and through Europe, Australia and North America (from the 1870s to 1880s) in the columns of the Statesman alone. The Statesman often covered a particular performer or company through their travels in India and elsewhere on the global circuit. 116 Chitragupta, ‘Greenroom theke Courtroom’, Ultarath, June–Septem ber 1966. Ramapati Dutta, Rangalaye Amarendranath (Amarendranath and Theatre), 1940; Devajit Bandyopadhyay (ed.), repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2004, chronicles the numerous lawsuits by and against Amarendranath Dutt. The case between Dutt and Amritalal Bose was publicised in newspapers like the Indian People, 22 January 1905, p. 45. See also Sarvani Gooptu, The Actress in the Public Theatres of Calcutta, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015. 117 South Australian Weekly Chronicle, Adelaide, 22 December 1883, p. 7, offers a glimpse into the case. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article93177250 (accessed on 25 April 2015). 118 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 89–90. Director-actress Usha Ganguli of Rangakarmee has been successful in naming a hall located on Prince Anwar Shah Road, Calcutta, after Binodini Dasi.

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119 Cornelia Otis Skinner, Madame Sarah, New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988, p. 262. 120 Desh, 3rd year, No. 35, 18 July 1936; repr. Desh, 17 November 2006. 121 Item 3 of the 1893 memorial spelt out the indignation: ‘That countenance and encouragement are given to them, and even a recognized status in society secured to them, by the practice which prevails amongst Hindus to a very undesirable extent.’ Cited in Pran Nevile, Nautch Girls of the Raj, New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009, p. 118.

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2 BENEDICTION IN PERFORMANCE Playing the saint and meeting the saint: 1880s–90s [1] [Chaitanya (Nimai) has renounced his wife (Vishnupriya) and home in the preceding scene. Here, Ramakrishna, who has been watching the play, is overcome by bhava and begins to dance.] Ramakrishna: Does anyone ever realise consciousness [chaitanya] in a day? At first, when one is young – it is the age of un-consciousness. Girish: At the end of the play . . . Ramakrishna: The end is where consciousness has just awakened.  [Binod still dressed as Nimai appears with the others . . .] [Ramakrishna blesses her] May you have chaitanya, Ma. —Chittaranjan Ghosh, Nati Binodini, Act II [1973]1

[2] [Still dressed as Nimai, recovers from her swoon and prostrates herself before Ramakrishna.] Ramakrishna: This is the boy who played Nimai! Good boy, a good boy. Girish: Not a boy, a girl. Ramakrishna: A girl! That was a fine trick! [Placing both hands over Binodini’s head:] Say, Hari [is our] guru; [Our] guru [is] Hari. Binod: Hari guru. Guru Hari. Binod:

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Ramakrishna: Binod: Ramakrishna: Binod:

[Repeats] [Repeats] May you have chaitanya. Such compassion (kripa). . . . I am a great sinner. You have compassion for me as well? —Brajendra Kumar Dey, Nati Binodini, Parva 2, Drishya 3 [1973]2

The enactment of a climactic moment in Chittaranjan Ghosh’s play Nati Binodini, Act II, and in Brajendra Kumar Dey’s celebrated jatra, Nati Binodini, Parva 2, Scene 3, in 1973 – and the replay of a definitive moment from the annals of theatre history. Here is an exchange which appears to need no explanation because of its systematic inscription in cultural memory. The reference in contemporary discourse is always to the moment of ‘authenticity’ signalled and established by the ‘actors’ in the scene. The scene is arresting in more ways than one. It is visually so, not only because of the familiar tableau of saint meets sinner. But because coming as it does immediately after the scene depicting the renunciation of sansar by Chaitanya, it becomes for the spectator a multilayered representation of three ‘people’ in three temporal frames: our contemporary, the visible actress (late 20th century) who is playing Binodini Dasi (the late 19th-century actress), who is playing Chaitanya (charismatic saint from the late 15th and early 16th centuries). It is a matter of happy chance that when Binodini renounced the stage, she was the same age – 23 or 24 – as was Chaitanya when he renounced the world. Thus the scene accentuates the experience of historicity by drawing the spectator through this layering with all its attendant religious-erotic connotations (in view of the literal and spiritual cross-dressing involved). It simultaneously proves effective in arresting all possibility of action on the part of both ‘Ramakrishna’ and ‘Nati Binodini’. We witness in these productions and representations the process by which the female subject, Binodini, as also the male subject, Ramakrishna, are both substituted for iconised figures – the former as the recipient and the latter as donor. The transmission of grace as kripa, with Ramakrishna as the bestower and Binodini as the recipient, is then replayed in all its iconicity in subsequent Binodini productions in the subcontinent. Binodini playing Chaitanya also evokes reverse sexual roles, that is, s/he ‘recalls’ Chaitanya playing Radha in the appropriate bhava as an expression of his ecstasy.3 But for the audience, she also plays the ‘male element’ in Chaitanya to perfection – Girishchandra’s disavowal

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notwithstanding. In Part II of the same play, it is also a throwback to the composite shadabhuja murti, the six-armed image, of Chaitanya as Radha and Krishna, come alive in the dynamic strokes of the Kalighat artist (Figures 2.6–2.8).4 Binodini is thus truly androgynous in playing Chaitanya, but she is always the fallen woman playing a perfect Chaitanya. Although the SrisriRamakrishna Kathamrita contains many incidents of such benedictions and the transmission of an extra-ordinary awareness through touching by the diksha-guru or the initiating teacher,5 the isolation of the act and its dramatic framing, as also the fact that as the barangana-nati, Binodini is the lowest of the low, imparts to the scene its uniqueness as a spectacle of faith. In fact, for the scene to have an effect in its immediate context of the city, the theatre, and its extended bhadralok constituency, Binodini must forever be engraved as the fallen woman and the outstanding nati. Her professionalism is then to be read backwards as stemming from her faith which, in turn, is seen also to originate from the lowliness of her social origins – the unknown/unnamed father, the lack of a genealogy and so forth, as discussed in Chapter 1, and her continuing occupation where she is an asrita, a mistress, even as she appears in public for a ticket-buying audience. The incident becomes proof of the inexhaustible grace of the Patitpaban and consequently, of the remarkable transformation of her life. The mirroring of hagiography in secular life, or of the past in contemporary history, will be further buttressed by the exemplum of Yavana Haridas which figures prominently in Chaitanya’s life. Haridas is important in Girishchandra’s play, and is internalised and made into an interrogative marker by Binodini in her autobiography.6 The benediction is both an index of her faith, manifested in her acting talent, and also the grace of the saint-avatar, reserved for the lowliest.

Lives of great men The canonisation of Gadadhar Chattopadhyay (1836–86) as Sri­ Ramakrishna Paramhamsadeb which took place during his life and was reinforced by the subsequent establishment of the Math and Mission by his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda,7 placed the former in the pantheon of the Bengali bourgeoisie. It is not surprising that Binodini Dasi becomes a subject worthy of representation only after Ramakrishna himself is established as being commercially viable in his reincarnations in theatre, film and jatra. As to why Ramakrishna is taken up rather than the usual saint figures – legendary or historical – it seems reasonable to surmise that besides the formalisation of 104

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Ramakrishna’s avatarhood and teachings through the monastic order and Math-Mission’s prolific publication programme, an audience had already been prepared by the public theatre, especially through the plays of Girishchandra and others who wrote in a similar vein.8 The imprint of Ramakrishna’s sayings on Girish’s plays, both with regard to his ‘religious’ heroes as well as in the actual lyrics and dialogue, had been emphasised often enough in analyses of the Bhakti phase of the playwright’s career.9 The point had not escaped Girish’s contemporaries. A reviewer of Girish Ghosh’s Kalapahar (1896) observed: ‘[a] counterfeit presentment [sic] of . . . [the late Ramakrishna Paramhansa] is given in the character of “Chintamoni”, which the author himself assumed with much credit in his histrionic powers.’10 The persona of the living avatar, Ramakrishna, was constantly being read into the ‘characters’ of Girishchandra’s plays. There are then two separate but related narratives which come together in the representations of Binodini: first, Ramakrishna’s investiture as ‘the patron saint’ of the public theatre;11 and second, the increasing focus from the 1940s onwards on Ramakrishna as a subject in Bengali films and plays. We are told that while most theatre halls usually have a picture of the goddess Kali backstage, from the 1880s a picture of Ramakrishna also became a permanent feature.12 Other sources inform us that at the head of every placard or playbill connected to the public theatre, particularly the Star Theatre, was printed the legend, ‘We take refuge at the feet of SriSriRamakrishna’ (SriSriRamakrishna charan bharsha).13 The introduction of Ramakrishna’s portrait into the pre-performance ritual of jatra companies is relatively recent. As for Ramakrishna as a subject of plays and films, I excerpt below the relevant details from Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay’s study of Ramakrishna and the Bengali stage. The first play on Ramakrishna was staged in 1948. Significantly, the producer was the owner of Kalika Theatre. Apparently no ‘real names’ could be used, since the lay devotees, who spoke through the Math, were against divine personages being played by the actors and actresses of the public theatre (sadharan abhineta-abhinetri). Following negotiations, the play, originally called SriRamakrishna, was finally called Yugadevata with fairly transparent changes in the names.14 In this instance, anonymity only affirmed the unique identity of the devata or god who may legitimately represent the yuga or era. As we saw, the anonymity of the generic actress was of a different kind. In the 1880s it was Chaitanya who had been hailed as the Yugavatar in Girish Ghosh’s playtext. The Bengali audience of the 1940s had no doubts as to the identity of their yugadevata. (Yuga of 105

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course would encompass more than the 20th century.) It is not surprising that Yugadevata was a ‘hit’ following World War II, a harrowing decade for Bengal on multiple counts. In Chattopadhyay’s words: The Bengali theatre was going through lean years . . . no play would run for very long; there was no new play that was good: the old plays were being rehashed, anyhow. At such a point, Yugdevata created a storm . . . after the sameness of all these years, the joy of a new taste.15 Despite legal injunctions and other forms of opposition from various quarters, this palpably ‘disguised play’ ran to full houses in Calcutta for 500 nights.16 The idea of making a film on the subject had come up as early as 1917, according to Chattopadhyay; however, it was only in 1949 that ‘Ramakrishna’ first appeared in a film on Vivekananda, succinctly titled Swamiji. By 1977, at least thirteen films and several jatras and plays on or around Ramakrishna had been produced. Actor Gurudas Bandhopadhyay, who would later be identified as the Ramakrishna of films and who specialised in playing holy men, is quoted as observing, ‘So many jatras, so many plays, so many films [on Ramakrishna]; as far as I understand, the Thakur as a subject [in English in the original] has meant business over two crores.’17 There were also biographical (charit) films on the lives of several other contemporaries of Ramakrishna including Girishchandra, Vidyasagar, Rani Rashmoni and Bamakhepa. It is possible to trace a legacy from the flourishing genre of biographical writings (charit-sahitya) in Bengal in this 20th-century nationalist reclamation of 19th-century Bengali ‘greats’ for popular consumption in films. Clearly though, the success stories of the Ramakrishna productions had triggered off a chain reaction. Was this an isolated phenomenon, peculiar to Bengal? Or should it be inserted in the relay of ‘sant plays’ and ‘sant films’ with a nationalist ethos that were being produced all over India? The later was exemplified most powerfully in V.G. Damle and S. Fatehlal’s film Sant Tukaram (1936) on the beloved 17th-century Marathi bhakti poet.18 Sant Tukaram is a more than fortuitous reference here, for the film acknowledges the erotic in the devotional, as in the transformation of the prostitute singer who is sent to seduce Tukaram but is moved by his powerful rendering of religious verse and his compassionate spirituality. In Bengal, the criteria of impersonation, as to who may legitimately impersonate whom, continued to be an integral part of the conflict 106

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between religious ideology and social reality, particularly as it was embodied in the actress.

A 20th-century revival: ‘She who was blessed’ In the 20th century, ‘Nati Binodini’ as a particular iconic construct was launched in the wave of Ramakrishna’s success at the box office. The prolific and successful dramatist Bidhayak Bhattacharya (1907– 1986), whose script for Nati Binodini was the first to be staged, had earlier written a script for a Ramakrishna film. In his words: Everyone blessed by Thakur has been mentioned in the Kathamrita and in Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s works – everyone, but Binodini . . . but Binodini – she too had received [his] grace. Thinking of this, I thought of making a play about Binodini. (emphasis added)19 The plays featuring Binodini as a titular heroine came much later, evident in the following summary of the reprint history of Binodini’s autobiography. First serialised in the Natya-mandir as ‘Abhinetrir Katha’ (An Actress’s Story), it was reprinted after a gap of over three decades as ‘Binodinir Atmakatha’ (Autobiography of Binodini) in three issues of the film magazine Roopmancha in 1956. Binodini appears to have been brought to the attention of the serious Bengali reader only with the reprint of her autobiography, Amar Katha (My Story). This was initially serialised in the literary journal Ekshan in 1962–64 and subsequently published with selections of her other writings as a book in 1964 with an introduction and extensive notes.20 The three Nati Binodini productions – by Nandikar, Shilpitirtha and Natto Company, respectively – ran more or less around the same time (1972–73), although the script for the Nandikar production was the first to be written, initially as a novel, by Chittaranjan Ghosh in 1965. Even in the case of this early version, the reprint of Amar Katha proved crucial. Of the three productions, the jatra version by the Natto Company had the longest run – an almost uninterrupted 10 years. Its author-director Brajendra Kumar Dey was awarded the annual prize for the best pala-writer in 1973. Bina Dasgupta (1952–2005), who played the title role, was given the West Bengal ‘Best Actress’ award for her performance in 1973. In 1991, Bina Dasgupta herself went on to direct Nati Binodini, basing it primarily on Dey’s jatra. She produced it in the proscenium theatre in a dramatic mode often referred 107

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flippantly by its practitioners as the ‘jatratical’; it was also performed as a jatra. The performance I saw on 27 June 1991 also took place on the proscenium stage, in Bijon Theatre. The brochure accompanying this production explicitly foregrounds the specific construction of the Ramakrishna-Binodini connection that I have sketched above: ‘She who was blessed by Thakur SrisriRamakrishnadeb’ precedes the title of the production, Nati Binodini. A few observations about the various elements contributing to the revival: the 1964 reprint of Binodini Dasi’s writings was in commemoration of the actress’s birth centenary, while Nandikar chose to produce Nati Binodini to mark the centenary of the founding of the public theatre in Calcutta. A genuine desire to honour the actress for her contribution to Bengali theatre was one of the reasons behind the revival, but it also established a specific equation between the metropolis, the public theatre and the reclamation of the historic individual or culture hero/ine. More important is the realignment of sexuality and social roles that took place in this intersection of anniversaries. Once Nati Binodini proved successful in the commercial circuit and in the Nandikar production, it became part of the repertoire of the

Figure 2.1 My ticket for Bina Dasgupta’s Nati Binodini, 27 June 1991 Source: Author’s collection

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jatra companies along with other biographical palas such as Karunasindhu Vidyasagar and Ramakrishna-Saradamoni. The celebration of non-puranic or historical ‘model-couples’ was also the celebration of conjugality; this is significant in view of my later argument for the ways in which Binodini may be staged. The preface to the fifth edition of Brajendra Kumar Dey’s text announced the immediate sensation the pala had created with its box-office returns: ‘The first edition of Nati Binodini [the playtext] sold out immediately . . . Nati Binodini [the performance] has broken the 100 year-old record of jatra and raised the Natto company’s rate to Rs 8000/- per pala.’ Dey laid claim to an extended audience because of the piece’s supraethnic appeal: ‘Not only Bengalis but the world of the non-Bengalis have been drawn to this performance.’21 In contrast to the earlier ‘conspiracy of silence’ that had impelled the reprint of her autobiography, the last quarter of the 20th century witnessed a virtual resurrection of ‘Nati Binodini’ in Bengal.22 The dissemination of this version continued in other media as well: besides actual performances, Dey’s pala was broadcast regularly from the 1970s in a special radio programme and songs sold in cassette. Nati Binodini is also a popular play among amateur theatre groups ranging from middlebrow office club groups to the more upper-class members of the Calcutta Club.23 Actors playing Ramakrishna have ranged from a popular Bombay film hero such as Mithun Chakraborty to Ajit Panja, the former cabinet minister, in a 1998 production. Binodini herself has been played by a range of talented actresses including Keya Chakraberty, Ketaki Dutta and Bina Dasgupta (in Bangla) and Seema Biswas (in Hindi, prior to the actress’s title role in Bandit Queen) by the 1990s. Subsequently, we have witnessed TV serials and sruti nataks (recited plays) galore. The most recent of these films, which seeks to move out of this time-tested mould, was released in 2015.24 Among the more recent productions in Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore which are not discussed in this chapter, Amal Allana’s was carefully conceptualised with three actresses playing Binodini.25 Until the 1990s, most productions in Bangla appear to favour Brajendra Kumar Dey’s script, rather than Chittaranjan Ghosh’s, for reasons elaborated below. In contrast to the pala, Ghosh’s script strives to both inform the spectator as well as bring up issues other than the Ramakrishna connection; but the focus is still on Girish in the role of a defendant. Despite its interrogatory note, Chittaranjan Ghosh’s play also moves inexorably towards a denouement characteristic of melodrama, emphasising redemption. The last scene between Binodini and Girish ends with the word ‘chaitanya’ repeated several times, both 109

Figure 2.2 Bina Dasgupta as Binodini playing Chaitanya in Nati Binodini, dir. Bina Dasgupta, produced by Surangana, 1991 Source: Author’s collection

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in their conversation as well as in the snatches of songs and echoes of Ramakrishna’s words heard offstage.26 Although Dey disarmingly announces in the dedication that his pala is ‘derived’ from Chittaranjan Ghosh’s play of the same name, the entire weight of the drama is now on the ‘deliverance’ of the public theatre by Ramakrishna. Dey replicates the original betrayal of Binodini and the Star Theatre by making it just another sensational element in the plot.27 I refer to all three productions – group theatre Nandikar’s play, the jatra pala of Natto Company, and Bina Dasgupta’s ‘jatratical’ – but my focus is on the latter, since this was the production I witnessed. I propose that it was the pala which proved pivotal in ensuring the commercial viability as also the upward mobility of neo-jatra in last quarter of the 20th century.28 The pala also proved crucial in framing the discourse of redemption within which ‘Nati Binodini’ circulates as a public referent. What makes for this extraordinary appeal: how does the fallen woman illumine the saint, the saint the public theatre, and theatre the ‘Cultural Heritage’ of Bengal’?

Staging Bhakti: Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s It is clear from the preceding account that Binodini Dasi could only be considered a safe and worthy subject if she was introduced as ‘Nati Binodini’ – the nati who was redeemed by Ramakrishna. The germination of this morality tale was actually coterminous with the composition of the actress’s autobiography: it was voiced in the admonishing-admiring tone of the preface that Girishchandra Ghosh wrote for Amar Katha in 1913: ‘Bangla rangamanche Srimati Binodini’ (Srimati Binodini and the Bengali Stage). This was an essay that Binodini had at first rejected and then included in her book after the death of her guru.29 Girish Ghosh used the respectful ‘Srimati’ in the title and elsewhere in his essay, rather than the appellation ‘Nati’. In a rather lengthy preamble, Girish gave his reasons for having originally expressed hesitation about writing a preface and why he finally agreed to do so. He concluded: Reading this autobiography will destroy the pride of the zealous devotee, the righteous will embrace humility and the sinner will be given new hope. Those who are unfortunate like Binodini and having no option take up a disgusting path for their livelihood, those who have been seduced by the honeyed words of the licentious, 111

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they too will be hopeful that if like Binodini, they can commit themselves to the theatre, body and soul, they can expend their despicable birth in the service of society. Those who are actresses will understand the kind of dedication that is necessary towards her roles in order to earn the praise of the masses. Thinking thus, I have agreed to write this preface. Girishchandra may have felt obliged to have presented his protégé’s text as an exemplum because he was shrewd enough to realise that the only guise in which Binodini Dasi could be accepted by the contemporary readership was as the patita whose outstanding performance, especially as Chaitanya, drew upon her the blessing of Ramakrishna himself. Girishchandra, unlike most of the later commentators on this episode, took pains to highlight Binodini’s intellectual abilities and superior acting skills in general, in addition to or besides the benediction by Ramakrishna. However, a conflation of technical excellence or virtuosity with moral excellence or virtue was already formulated in this presentation. Girishchandra’s preface to Binodini Dasi’s autobiography was written several decades after the production and resounding success of Chaitanya Lila in 1884. Broadly speaking, there have been two kinds of critical responses to the play. Only a few scholars have sought to relate, somewhat sketchily, the success of the play to the matrix within which the life story of the saint-reformer was originally staged. Devipada Bhattacharyya, the editor of Girishchandra’s collected works, attributes the tremendous popularity of Chaitanya Lila to ‘Hindu Revivalism, the Theosophical and Neo-Vaishnava movements’ and Ramakrishna’s role in praising the play.30 Other and more frequent responses have been either to puzzle over the excessive popularity of the play given its ‘lack of tension’ and the suspense considered proper to drama, or to critique Girish for his ‘medieval mindset’. In either case, it is Girishchandra’s unquestioning acceptance of Chaitanya’s divinity that appears to be cause for condemnation or celebration and for the subsequent rating of Girish as a good dramatist or a good devotee. I consider briefly Girish’s playtext and some contemporary accounts of the play in order to hypothesise about the kind of audiences it drew and to evaluate its impact on the contemporary theatre scene. What were some of the factors contributing to its ‘event-making’ quality? First, Chaitanya Lila was produced in an existing background of Hindu religiosity which had already been tapped by what has subsequently come to be termed as the religious plays (dharmiya natak) in Girish’s repertoire. The first years of the Star Theatre had seen the 112

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production of Daksha Yagna (1883), Dhruba Charitra (1884) and ­Sribatsa-Chinta (1884), among others. Girish himself has dwelt at length on his own concern with an audience that needed ‘explanations’ and the consequent advantage of a religious play with a puranic theme that takes as a starting point an intimate familiarity with the plot. It may be remembered that ‘historical plays’ like Anand Raho (1881) had failed, while the puranic series of Ram-based plays – Ravan Badh, Lakshman Barjan, Sitar Bibah, Sitaharan, Ramer Bonobas – produced from 1881 through 1882 was a huge success. Second, most of the religious plays mentioned above already had a captive audience in jatra palas. Dhruba Charitra, the story of the exemplary boy devotee of Vishnu, figured as a favourite pala in many popular jatras both in Bengal and elsewhere, including in the women’s quarters of the Jaipur court, performed by an all-female cast. Chaitanya or Nimai, as he was fondly called, obviously had a very different appeal from Dhruba or Prahlad: first, for being a historical person, and second, for being Bengal’s own saint. Chaitanya’s life had already been the subject of jatras, as in Krishnakamal Goswami’s (1810–88) Nimai-sannyas, but Girish’s subtitle – ‘a drama of devotional love’ (prem-bhakti natak) – indicates the shift in emphasis. In restructuring it as a gospel of love, the appeal to an extended urban audience would be considerable. Third, while Girishchandra felt that his Chaitanya Lila was greatly inspired by Milton’s Paradise Regained, he was in fact reworking many dramatic conventions familiar to an audience bred on non-proscenium performance forms. In 1599, Paramananda Das’s Sanskrit play Chaitanya Chandroday Natakam had ‘characters’ such as Adharma and Kali-avatar, representative of one of the four Yugas. These characters as well as traditional emblematic roles from jatra such as that of Bibek (Conscience) acquire an explicatory function in Girish’s play, given the significance of the avatar in Kaliyuga. Girish brought this out most forcefully in the interchanges between the characters of Mother, Progeny of Sin – Lust, Greed, Moh and the choric Kali (yuga).31 This explains as well the doctrinal importance given to allegorical characters such as Paap (Sin), Kali (of Kaliyuga), and Vairagya (Renunciation), without taking away from the inherent drama of the saint’s life. Finally, apart from a new and more elite group emerging from neoVaishavism, it is likely that a section of the audience for the Bhakti plays was drawn from those who already followed some version of popular Vaishnavism. From the early 1860s onwards there were innumerable small presses operating in North Calcutta, particularly along the Garanhata-Chitpur axis, catering to a readership ‘of ordinary 113

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people, particularly those following Vaishnavism, who neither had nor were expected to acquire English education’.32 The plays would have tapped into this clientele as well.

A ‘return’ Despite the continuities outlined above, Chaitanya Lila on stage was seen as marking a return to the deshiya (already glossed in Chapter 1), signifying any or all of the following: indigenous, regional or national. It therefore signalled a ‘coming together’ of disparate, even polarised groups. And it granted the public theatre a status hitherto absent. Ramakrishna’s appearances at the Star undoubtedly provided the final seal of approval, but other factors in the regrouping merit consideration. Girishchandra’s preface to Binodini’s autobiography melds the good actress with the true bhakta. Contemporary reviews of Chaitanya Lila which celebrate its ‘sublime Morality’ reveal a similar conflation in foregrounding an interactive bhakti. Thus, in response to attacks in the Englishman which critiqued the representation of ‘Mahaprabhu Chaitanyadeb’ by a ‘socially outcast actress’, Shambhucharan Mukhopadhyay, editor of the Reis and Rayyet, wrote in praise of the play, singling out Binodini’s rendering of prem-bhakti: The Chaitanya Lila is indeed a moral exercise alike for players and audience. No man can sit for half an hour in the Star Theatre without being struck by the general superiority – the high tone of the acting. (emphasis added)33 In a lengthy open letter to the Reis and Rayyet, the American, Col. Henry Steel Olcott of the Theosophical Society, made explicit the ‘role’ of the actress who played Chaitanya: The poor girl who played Chaitanya may belong to the class of unfortunates (Alas! how unfortunate these victims of man’s brutishness), but while on the scene she throws herself into her role so ardently that one only sees the Vaishnava saint before him. Not a lewd gesture, not a sensual glance of the eye, not the slightest suggestion of animal desire, like those which make up the attraction of nautches to their patrons . . . So thoroughly does the Star actress feel the emotions of the saint she personates, so intensely arouses in her bosom 114

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the religious ecstasy of Bhakti Yoga, she fainted dead away between the acts the evening I was there, and a medical man who shared my box had to go behind the scenes each time to administer restoratives. (emphases added)34 Col. Olcott (1832–1907) and the Russian émigrée Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1821–91) had come to India in 1879 after founding the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875.35 The Society moved from its original base in Madras to set up its Bengal branch around the time that Chaitanya Lila was first staged. In the course of his long letter to the Reis and Rayyet, Olcott distinguished between this performance and the generic ‘nautch’, apparently similar, both involving a woman performing in public. He maintained that the actress’s performance was an outward expression of an internal transformation. In his piece, the focus is the ‘unfortunate’ actress herself as much as her representation of Chaitanya. The fainting fits and restoration by ‘a medical man’ are proof of the intensity of (Eastern) faith attested by (Western) science, and not simply the result of an exhausting virtuoso performance. Yet another dimension to the deshiya component was the approbation by Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904) of Girish’s plays as ‘truly Hindu theatre’. Editor of the Daily Telegraph, Arnold was a noted orientalist and a Tory. Amongst his considerable oeuvre, Arnold had re-presented short narratives from the Mahabharata, including ‘Savitri or Love and Death’ and ‘Nala and Damayanti’ as part of his Indian Idylls (London, 1883). He had written a preface to Miriam Knight’s translation into English of Bankimchandra’s Bishbriksha, now titled The Poison Tree, The Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal (London, 1884). More pertinent to the business of theatre, Girishchandra based his play on the life of Buddha, Buddhacharit (1885) on Arnold’s narrative poem, The Light of Asia or, The Great Renunciation (1880). In the preface to his poem, Arnold had observed that ‘the mark of Gotama’s sublime teaching is stamped ineffaceably upon modern Brahminism.’36 In Girishchandra’s interpretation, Buddha was another incarnation of Vishnu. Arnold’s literary works were also feeding into the contemporary rage for mysticism and exoticism in London.37 His contribution to the staging of the ‘Empire of India Exhibition’ in London in 1895 cast him as an active collaborator in ‘presenting’ India to Indians as well as to the western world.38 Subsuming the Olcott-Arnold position under the broad banner that goes by the name of ‘Hindu revivalism’ would therefore erase the many internal histories as well as the shifting positions within the 115

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larger fields with which Olcott and Arnold identified themselves.39 We might keep in mind some of these alignments for our immediate subject: the mediated representations of Hindu/Indian/Bengali identity on stage and the sexuality of the performing woman as enabling or disrupting such representations. Both Col. Olcott and Sir Arnold were duly cited by Girish himself as well as by later commentators as proof of the non-Hindu, non-Indian ‘other’ who have been converted by the ‘virtue’ of the subject matter and the ‘verity’ of the performance. Arnold in particular appeared in many of Girishchandra’s essays on the Bengali theatre as a representative of the discerning foreigner who had grasped the essence of Indian/Hindu culture unlike, it was implied, those overly westernised Bengalis who wrote disparagingly of the public theatre.40 Arnold’s role as the translator of India’s rich past was endorsed even by those firmly located outside the theatre world, as for example, the Brahmo reformer Sivnath Sastri.41 Yet, more important to theatre history than the ‘subject’ of this play has been the question of audience reception, as to how the play affected and continues to affect its audience. While the preponderance of karuna rasa (pity) on the public stage is the occasion for caustic comment by Pramathanath Bishi, for theatre historians such as Hemendranath Das Gupta and earlier commentators like Abinashchandra Gangopadhyay and Apareshchandra Mukhopadyay, yet another proof of the ‘honest appeal’ of Chaitanya Lila was the overwhelming flow of tears that the play elicited.42 In their version, the ‘alien’ character of groups such as Young Bengal – for long constructed in opposition to the ‘popular’ and the ‘deshiya’ – was finally exorcised in this flow of tears.43 Accordingly, a humanitarian concern for the ‘unfortunate’ actress merged with an approbation for ‘traditional’ sentiment. In his letter from which we presented an excerpt above, Col. Olcott had defined the appropriate audience response: ‘[I]t is impossible for anyone but a civilised peg-drinking babu not to be moved,’ thereby indicting that whole class of deracinated and déclassé individuals who sat in judgement on the ‘native stage’ and whose pseudo-westernisation would preclude an authentic bhakti-based response. Like many who commented on the topic, Col. Olcott’s letter, although aimed at those who would attack the actress on moral grounds, was actually a polemic on faith and on ways of seeing. At issue was an invocation of alternative modes of representation, where the audience participated not merely as distant, emotionally distant passive spectators and where the social identities of performers were not objectified to bring upon them contempt or disgust. The play was seen to herald an invitation to ‘return’ – through spectacle – to a state of being which would 116

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Figure 2.3 Jatra agency in Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017. Advertisement for a jatra pala, Swarga amar swamir ghar (Heaven Is My Husband’s Home) Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

engender a humane community. In this transaction, not only were the spectator’s own (forgotten, disowned and colonised) roots reclaimed, but performance and performer also ultimately freed of their stigma. The stigma extended to the need to run a professional enterprise with a need to entertain; for the actress, it was the employment she needed in order to survive (‘employment’ always seen as dissembling at dual levels), the oppressive structures (social and economic) within which she had to operate, and the exposure to a ticketed public. A distinction was also affirmed between what was ‘truly’ indigenous and open to mass comprehension through emotional participation in a common space, and that which was ‘derivative’ – enjoyed by an ‘elite’ minority. This binary then became the criterion by which not just this play, but the validity of a jati’s cultural agenda would be appraised.

The constituents of spectacle The specialisation of functions in theatrical production in late 19thcentury Britain meant spheres of the ‘legitimate drama’ alongside the music hall, aquadramas and a host of other popular forms.44 In Bengal, 117

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the same company catered to a host of eclectic demands. A typical evening’s fare in 1886: STAR THEATRE Wednesday, 17 January at 9 p.m. the Sublime religious play CHAITANYA LILA to be followed by the sparkling society sketch Ekakar Or The Social Chaos.45 This is apparently a familiar template: after all, a satyr play followed tragedy in Greek drama, or the afterpiece in Sanskrit drama. However, there were significant differences in the theatrical fare churned out by the Bengali public theatre. At one level, it seems to have taken its cue from the ‘theatre of varieties’ that was so popular in Britain. Besides, there was no dearth of models for variety acts by visiting performers in British India. Simultaneously, there was an effort to make the theatre a ‘safe’ urban space that would preclude attacks from seditionsniffing rulers as well as those fellow Bengalis who were pushing for refined and harmless entertainment. The safety valve of puranic and bhakti plays was a way out of charges of vulgarity or excessive westernisation. But the mythological and devotional merged, often seamlessly, with a host of other genres including pantomimes, sketches, farces and ‘operas’ – often by the same dramatist. Puranic themes were frequently cast as ‘pantomimes’ to give the audience a taste of the old and new. The internalised Orientalism ensured that these hybrid pieces were even advertised as an ‘Oriental oddity’.46 Until the end of the 19th century, theatre companies projected the entire range as one of entertaining edification. The morally uplifting experience was not presented as being exclusive or comprising a world in itself; it was part of an eclectic bill of fare. Binodini Dasi mentions the mastery of bhava which allowed her to move from the depiction of one shade of emotion to a completely different one, playing conflicting roles on the same day – even within the space of the same play – with equal success.47 For the performing woman, the range of roles, last-minute switches, the poverty of resources, the financial and physical dangers of her profession, on stage and off, only accentuated her versatility. But it was a necessary condition for marketability. The ability to triumph over these odds signified her professional excellence. Versatility extended to the reception context as well, making for two different takes on ‘the immersion’ required by performance. We 118

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see this in the contradictory accounts of Ramakrishna’s response to the afterpiece. According to some versions, while Ramakrishna was ‘immersed in bhava’ during a performance of the religious play, Brishaketu, he enjoyed equally Amritalal Bose’s hugely successful comedy, Bibah Bibhrat (The Matrimonial Fix) (1884), which came on immediately after Brishaketu.48 Swami Chetanananda’s account states the opposite: Ramakrishna did not stay for the afterpiece; overwhelmed by the earlier play, he felt the afterpiece to be ‘false’ after tasting ‘the real thing’.49 The latter version may well underline the response of the ‘uncommon spectator’ whose own spiritual state contributes to the total impact of the ‘true impersonation’ on stage. The more common response would point to the need for variety in ticketed entertainment for shows which went on well beyond midnight. The flexibility enjoined on both performer and audience was premised on a mastery of technical skills drawn from disparate sources. The production process of theatre ensured a hybrid menu that went far beyond the select or specialised pieces which constituted the repertoire of older performance forms. The ‘religious affect’ could now be presented as one of the many offerings of the urban theatrical experience. The ‘religious’ in any case was inextricably bound with positions on cultural identity and its alleged affiliations, as we shall see in subsequent sections.

Music, bhakti and the deshiya The real breakthrough represented by the success of Chaitanya Lila and the numerous plays it inspired lay in innovations in music, song and dance. The play was scored by Benimadhab Adhikari (Ghosal), chief pupil of Ramat Vaishnav and Ahmad Khan. Girishchandra records that it was Benimadhab who ‘first introduced the vaishnavstyle dancing on stage . . . and taught Binodini’ to dance as Chaitanya. In turn, Binodini greatly helped him in instructing the ‘lower-rank actresses’, meaning the lowly sakhis or chorus girls.50 Kirtans were typically sung to the accompaniment of instruments such as the ektara, sarinda, khol, khanjani or gopijantra, many of which are highpitched percussion instruments. By contrast, the tabla, sarangi, violin and clarinet were considered sensuous, given perhaps the long association of the tabla and sarangi with performative arts supported by courtly patronage, and the violin and clarinet with westernisation.51 As mentioned earlier, jatra itself was open to changes from early 19th century onwards; for instance, in 1828 Kali Raja was called ‘nuton’ or new jatra! Jatra underwent major innovations from the 1840s, particularly under the auspices of Madanmohan Burman, popularly 119

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known as ‘Madan Master’, who added the do-tara, sarinda and the violin.52 The introduction of the percussive mridang, kartal or cymbals and the khol to stage music must have added a heightened dimension to the existing ‘concert’ – the term by which the ensemble of musicians and musical instruments was known in the theatre. Besides introducing a significant difference to the aural dimension of stage music, these sounds would evoke other temporalities. It was not instrumental music alone that marked the shift, but the human voice. Sankirtan or singing the name of Vishnu/Hari (Harinaam) in a group, as a form of ‘emotional worship’, is recognised as the most crucial innovation made by Chaitanya, because of its capacity for mass mobilisation.53 Chaitanya is credited with having brought kirtan outdoors and to the streets.54 Benoy Ghosh further qualifies that it was the nagar-sankirtan, that is kirtan sung and danced through the city (nagar) streets, that proved to be a revolutionary instrument of proselytisation in the Vaishnav movement of 16th- and 17th-century Bengal – always represented in popular prints.55 How did the sankirtan prove effective on the stage, in the urban colonial, centuries after Chaitanya? In an earlier phase of Brahmoism, around 1867–68, Keshubchandra Sen (1838–84) had attempted to revitalise the sankirtan as a means of public mobilisation in Calcutta. This had partly been in response to the charges by the progressives within the Brahmo movement against an excessive concern on their leader’s part with Christian notions of ‘sin’ and ‘guilt’. Keshubchandra’s focus on Jesus Christ, explication of the Bible and fraternising with Christian missionaries had, in the words of Sivnath Sastri, increasingly ‘upset the progressives’.56 The public performance of devotional songs being perceived as an instrument of affirming one’s faith and social rights as a citizen will not seem very far-fetched if we recall Keshubchandra’s own intense experiments with devotional plays in the 1860s. Nevertheless, it is ironic that it was ultimately in spectacle-land, in stage performances by actors and actresses – those paid and trained to enact group fervour – that the sankirtan would enjoy a renewed prominence in the metropolis. Advertisements indicate that the ‘nagur sankirtan’ featured as a choreographed and spectacular finale, distinct from any general ‘crowd scene’.57 By the end of the century, playbills would announce, ‘The curtain will drop to the singing of Harinamsankirtan’ (Figure 1.5) – presumably in lieu of ‘God Save the King’? In fact, from being an instrument of individual and communal mobilisation in a religious-social movement, the sankirtan had already

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been transformed into ‘an authentic’ cultural artifact, one of many ‘proofs’ of the diversity of ‘Hindoo music’. It became a novel ‘cultural offering’ for visiting westerners. Charles Capwell informs us that when U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant came to Calcutta in 1879, he was entertained by the Pathuriaghata Tagores at their garden villa, ‘Emerald Bower’, located on the Barrackpore Trunk Road (Figure 1.3), now a university campus. Grant was apparently impressed by the range of entertainment ‘of an Oriental character’ which included ‘the NagarKirtun, with all the paraphernalia which usually accompany the procession of the Vaisnavas’.58 This rather condensed description of the refashioning of the sankirtan from the 1860s to the 1880s – moving through sectarian grids and stagings for niche audiences by an urban gentry to its high visibility and commodification on the public stage – reveals the heterogenous spirals that fed into theatrical fare. Theatrical representations in turn impacted on other media such as prints and oleographs emanating from art studios of the city, a circuit meticulously delineated by Christopher Pinney.59 Girishchandra believed that the language of sankirtan – of Vaishnav devotion – was understood by all. Language did not mean the words alone but the communicative model itself; the sankirtan on stage was to some extent a resolution of the standard contesting claims between language and spectacle, bringing together visual and the aural effects and combining them with movement in ways that a more ‘realistic’ theme would not have permitted. For, the sankirtan was also communal dancing, not choreographed in the manner of the ballet-girls for ‘mere’ choric interludes. More importantly, the sankirtan inside the hall and for a ticket-buying audience functioned partially as a device to break down institutional systems, particularly the clear bifurcation of performance space in the urban proscenium theatre. As Raymond Williams noted in his essays on culture, such institutional systems are themselves ‘a function of specialisation’.60 The question of language, as a contested site of authenticity requires more attention than it will be possible to give here. By language, I mean here primarily songs with a particular emotional affect that almost every Bengali playwright has perceived to be the ‘soul’ of Bengali drama.61 Given the powerful tradition of songs encoded in emotional memory, it should not be surprising that the songs from Chaitanya Lila have continued to dominate contemporary productions of Nati Binodini. They have also enjoyed tremendous popularity outside of stage performances in records and cassettes at least until the 1990s.62

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Signature roles Clearly, these plays were written with Binodini Dasi in mind, much as Victorien Sardou’s were written for Sarah Bernhardt.63 But the GirishBinodini ‘partnership’ was of a very different order. While more than one generation of actors and actresses regarded Girishchandra as their mentor – Teenkari Dasi (1870–1925) and Kironbala (1868–90) were two other star pupils – Binodini Dasi was especially favoured by Girish on account of her exceptional versatility and commitment. That was reason enough for the playwright-manager to have cast her as the charismatic performer-saint. Whether the performance is actress based or text based, the star appeal of a particular actress may be used to initially attract the public, although of course, the role itself might make her a star. The obituary in English of Kironbala (aka Kiran Bala), who succeeded Binodini as Girishchandra’s favourite, bore the impress of Binodini’s signature role. Death has plucked away another ‘Star’ from the native stage. The sudden and irrevocable resignation of the lady ‘Star’ had plunged the manager into a sea of despair . . . the young novice proved to be the real pole-star of the manager’s hope to save his theatre from the impending peril . . . She had to interpret Chaitanya, perhaps the most difficult of Bengalee dramatic characters, and in her delineation of it she proved herself thoroughly deserving of the exalted lift, if not equal to her glorious predecessor . . . [H]er greatest drawback in the acting of these old parts was the brilliant triumphs of her predecessor, the glowing tints of which could never vanish or fade from the memories of her audiences. She knew this and wisely contained herself by imitating the great actress even at the risk of being considered affected and artificial – the inevitable result of all imitations.64 The writer refers to a live performance simulating another iconic performance inscribed in memory, even amongst those who may never have witnessed Kironbala’s celebrated predecessor. Kironbala was re-playing Binodini’s Chaitanya. Legends around the playing of a particular role that filters into urban lore elicit re-presentations that work through a subtle manipulation of highlighted, even fragmented, aspects of what is an otherwise ‘inimitable’ whole. 122

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In her own writings, Binodini recorded at length the intense physical thrill of performance – the stage fright, the power of impersonation, the effect of the mechanics in shaping her own involvement (especially in the scenes of self-immolation); and of the excitable response from the audience who (mis)took the player for the character depicted, particularly the ‘Muslim characters’.65 Given the ecstatic chanting demanded by Chaitanyaism, the conscious exultation of body and mind might well produce psycho-physical transformations or the desired satvika vikara, manifested in carefully phased signs such as perspiration, tremor, stupor, stillness and trance. Binodini swooning and dancing to exhaustion was itself a spectacle, irrespective of the verisimilitude of her impersonation of a historical-religious character.66 In this case, the performance became an event – even a ritualised event – with popular accounts and debate on the details of the ritual. The opening up of theatre to a larger social world happened in other ways in the case of Chaitanya Lila: in addition to the usual instruction by the motion master, the music master, the dance master and the rigorous training sessions in speech, the play involved an extended period of indoctrination by ‘the learned’ and the ‘greatest devotees’ (bhaktachuramani). These included theatre aficionados, such as Sisirkumar Ghose (1840–1911), who was not professionally attached to the theatre and who was considered a public figure on several counts.67 The play afforded this group an occasion where they might participate in a production of the public theatre but for a ‘superior purpose’ – for the propagation of Vaishnavism – untainted by the exigencies of livelihood. As we saw in Olcott’s reference, participation extended also into the avowed intersection of science and faith. Complement this pre-performance build up with Binodini’s account of Father Lafont’s (1837–1908) visit to the theatre: The sankirtan I danced as one possessed. On some days it came to such a pass that, unable to bear the pressure of performance, I would faint on the stage. One day I had fainted thus in the middle of the play . . . We had unusually large crowds all through the run of Chaitanya Lila . . . The respected Father Lafont had come on the particular occasion that I just spoke of. After the drop-scene had fallen, he went backstage. When he learnt from Girish-babu about the state I was in, he said, ‘Come, let me take a look!’ Girish-babu led him to the greenroom. When I regained consciousness I found that a huge bearded saheb dressed in flowing garments was running his hands all over my 123

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body – from my head to my feet. When I sat up, Girish-babu told me, ‘Pay your respects to him. This great pandit is Father Lafont.’ I had heard of him but had not seen him until then. I bowed before him with folded hands. He stroked my head and asked me to drink a glass of water. After I had drunk it, I felt recovered enough to continue with my acting. I did not continue with my performance lifelessly, as I had done on the former occasions when I had fainted on stage. I cannot say why this was so.68 Father Lafont’s career merits an extended gloss if we wish to move beyond the binaries of the emotion/reason, religion/science within which Chaitanya Lila was/is located by Girish’s contemporaries and ours. Of Belgian origin, Lafont joined the Society of Jesus in 1854 and studied philosophy and natural science and later, experimental physics before he came to Calcutta in 1865. Here, he joined St Xavier’s College which had been established in 1860 on the ruins of the Sans Souci Theatre! He taught natural sciences at the college and from 1868 he began giving public lectures on various scientific subjects, continuing to do so until his death in 1908. His lectures are said to have inspired talents such as diverse as Dr Mahendralal Sircar, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, the Pathuriaghata Tagores, Moulavi Abdul Latif Khan and Rajendralal Mitra, many of whom were close friends. Lafont contributed greatly towards the foundation of the Science Association, which was later to produce eminent scientists such as C.V. Raman. He was the first to set up a science museum in India in St Xavier’s College.69 The pre-performance austerities; the presence of doctors, savants, believers; the actress swooning in the course of the performance and being revived by the ‘medical man’, or Father Lafont reviving the actress in the greenroom, fed into the excitement of drama on stage and in the box, the greenroom and Girishchandra’s office (according to Binodini’s account), and was brought to a peak with Ramakrishna’s advent. The intense drama between the rustic but destined guru and the recalcitrant bhakt, Girishchandra, aided and abetted by other bhaktas created an in-house circuit of emotional energy that fed into the performance and the narratives swirling around the performance. It was to subsequently inform theatre history and the cultural memory of a people, or theatrical reconstructions of such memories. With the extension of the stage into other spaces of the theatre hall and the breakdown of the roles between the actress (an immoral and illiterate paid employee), the learned and the devout (respectable 124

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professionals) recognised as Vaishnavs, and the mediating figure of the mystical saint (Ramakrishna) who is both participant and spectator (i.e. spectator moved to ‘absolute’ participation), a conceptual reordering of space is taking place. By enacting Chaitanya Lila on stage and by being conscious of yet another lila (divine play) being enacted in the interaction with Ramakrishna, ‘presence’ is being juxtaposed against ‘representation’. Ramakrishna’s presence at the performance and the subsequent act of benediction became the subject of many anecdotal essays which served to imbue the public theatre with a sense of mission, just as Girishchandra himself was ‘given’ the task of using his plays for educating ordinary people – ‘lokshiksha’ in Ramakrishna’s words. There is also a sense that the devotees and disciples of Ramakrishna were privileged spectator-participants in a unique play approximating lila in an immediate terrestrial context. The multiple dimensions of the dramatic in the perception of social relations are brought out in an essay by Girish Ghosh. In this memorial essay on one of Ramakrishna’s devotees – Ramchandra Dutt, popularly known as ‘Ram-dada’ – Girish reiterates the ‘real reason’ for Ramakrishna’s appearance at the Star. (Ramakrishna had already visited the theatre twice at the time that Girish wrote this essay.) [A]lthough Ramchandra always followed his Master everywhere he went, when Ramakrishna went to the theatre he did not [accompany him], because he considered the theatre to be polluted ground. But when he saw the Master bestowing His grace on me in his home, he lamented to his friend Sri Debendranath Majumdar, Alas, how ignorant I have been, the very place that the Master chose to step into, where He appeared, to grant grace to the fallen [those] I believed to be polluted. The Master alone knows His lila. The Compassionate One (Deendayamaya) had gone to the theatre to be merciful to the lowly in the guise of watching the performance, but how would a stupid person like me understand this. (emphasis added)70 In Chaitanya Lila, Girish was presenting Chaitanya’s life as history and as an indigenous heritage; it was also a model appropriate for contemporary crisis. Chaitanya had been regarded as a saviour and Kaliyuga was also a time of salvation, particularly for those conventionally relegated to the margins of society, such as women and people from the lower castes. The ‘chorus’, comprising allegorical characters like 125

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Bibek, Bhakti and Bairagya (some of whom are spillovers from jatra), voices doubts, raises questions, explicates and elucidates in order to establish the historical moment of the Kaliyuga, the specific relevance of prem-bhakti and thence, the need for an avatar. This is explicitly brought out in Chaitanya Lila, Act II, Scene 4. But while on the one hand the aim was to represent on the stage and articulate through the sankirtan and dance a desired collective, care was taken to disassociate the religious ideology of the Bhakti plays from the lower-class populist Vaishnavism which, like jatra and kobigan, was increasingly perceived as degenerate and fraudulent.71 This is true of both the extended theological expositions within the play as well as other discourses by the playwright in other social forums, as in the later speech on ‘Dharmasamannyay’ (1909), where Girish explicated on the mission of Mahaprabhu Chaitanyadeb as ‘Patitpaban Gaurango’.

Bhakti-rasa and social mobility The demand for bhakti-rasa plays proved so great that even the latest technological advances, such as a dynamo installed by the wealthy Gopallal Seal for his Emerald Theatre (the original Star Theatre hall at Beadon Street) and expensive ‘scene-sceneries’, failed to draw crowds. The old hits did not work even after Girishchandra was hired by Seal in a bid to bolster sales at a monthly salary of Rs. 350 and a bonus of Rs. 20,000. It was not until the staging of Purnachandra in 1888 with an emphasis on bhakti-rasa that the Emerald began to draw crowds.72 Among the subsequent productions was Bishad (1888), which focused once again on the ideal Hindu woman and her selfless service to her husband. Chaitanya Lila and the many other plays launched in its train actually attracted women and/with children to the theatre. Allegedly, they brought together the liberal rationalists or the western-educated and orthodox or sectarian Vaishnavs. This second example of ‘bringing together’ offers yet another instance of how dramatic relations are inducted into social relations and vice versa. The upgrading of Vaishnavism as a result of Chaitanya Lila has been well documented. Amongst the more enthusiastic appraisals of the play by drama critics are the notes to the play in one of the collected works of Girishchandra.73 Even if we disregard the plethora of superlatives (usually ‘unique’) used to describe the ‘phenomenon’ rather than the play, we are bound to take note of the writer’s claim that while earlier, ‘Chaitanya’ had been confined to Vaishnavs alone, he (or Vaishnavism as represented by him) was now being reclaimed 126

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as a ‘jatiya heritage’. The writer argues that because of the influence of Brahmoism, earlier, educated Bengalis did not hold the doctrine of devotional love or prem-bhakti in any regard. But with the play, and the subsequent production of works such as Sisirkumar Ghose’s Amiyo Nimai Charit and his play SriNimai Sanyas (1909) and Nabinchandra Sen’s life of Chaitanya, the Amritabha (1909), Bhakti appealed to a new class of devotees who came to figure in the social history of neo-Vaishnavism. Amongst other accounts, there is the vivid evocation of the celebrated Bijoykrishna Goswami (1841–99) – a vaishnav of Brahmo persuasion – leaving his seat and dancing in a state of bhava during the performance. The play itself did not bring about any social revolution, as most of Bengali histories of theatre claim. But its undoubted success and the readings of that success indicate the fertile ground of its production and reception contexts. In the new plays of the 1880s, the explicitly religious is staged through the shift to Vaishnav figures – medieval as well as puranic devotees of Hari, rather than relying only mythological stories featuring divinities as mortals. It was the spectacle of faith that mattered, rather than an explication of a familiar puranic incident. As a contemporary reviewer observed of Girishchandra’s Nasiram, the stage became a platform for ‘religious teaching’. The Bhakti phase marked a definite break with other dramatic traditions. The excessively emotional current of Vaishnavism popular in Bengal was reinducted for this new audience.74 A crucial difference in the new performance context was that saints and other exemplar figures of bhakti were now being played by women instead of boys – the very women who were branded as ‘fallen’. This had major repercussions for the hierarchy of social relations within the theatre world, just as it made possible the appropriation of theatre as a metaphor for the world outside of the stage – of lila being pervasive. Whatever the criticism of this ‘excess of Chaitanya-bhakti’,75 neo-Vaishnavism in the theatre meant a crucial reorganisation of the relationship between audience and performance, between actress and the theatre, and between the recasting of familiar material as bhakti. Brajendra Kumar Dey’s claim, that his Nati Binodini ensured the upward mobility of the jatra (jatey tuley dilo) in the 1970s, is precisely what Girishchandra might have claimed to have done for the public theatre with his production of Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s. Bhakti as performance and spectacle may be related to a certain caste and class mobility. In the case of Chaitanya Lila, by attracting a new class of patrons to the theatre, bhakti extended in turn the sphere of selected theatre people into other more exclusive public places. Besides 127

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the privileged position that Girishchandra occupied in Belur Math as the ‘wayward but true’ devotee of Ramakrishna, we cite two specific instances indicating this extended sphere. A few years before his death, Girishchandra was asked to deliver a paper on ‘Gaudiya Vaishnavdharma’ for the 1909 religious conference, ‘Dharmasamannyay’. The sabha was held in the Town Hall in Calcutta and was presided over by the Maharajah of Darbhanga. My other example is that of the posthumous honour accorded to Girishchandra, the outcast-nat. The Town Hall memorial meeting after Girishchandra’s death in 1912 does not quite approach the legitimacy conferred on the Victorian stage by the granting of knighthood to another actor-manager of Victorian England, Henry Irving, in 1895, and the gentrification of the East End in London.76 Nonetheless, it stands out for the ‘public recognition’ of ‘Bengal’s Garrick’. In 1913, the Statesman thought it worthwhile to run an interview of Amritalal Bose under the heading, ‘The Bengali Stage. Its Past, Present and Future – An Interview with the Bengali Irving’.77

The iconography of benediction The move from the larger matrix of the production and performance context of Chaitanya Lila to an evocation of that context in Nati Binodini requires not only a methodological shift on our part but a selective plotting of the former in the discourse of theatre in the intervening years. At this point of our investigation it is still the Colonel’s ‘but’ that redeems the ‘unfortunate’ Star actress. It is still her powers of impersonation and her capacity for bhakti yoga and so on that are to be inscribed in the descriptive defence of the fallen woman playing the saint. To recapitulate (from the afterword to my translation of Binodini’s memoirs): The focal point of the entire narrative that has gained ascendancy since Girish’s Preface and has actually obscured the nuances of his own ambitions for a national theatre (as well as his ambivalence and contradictions about the practice of theatrecraft), is concentrated in that classic scene of blessing (through actual physical touch) which is both benediction and transformation.78 I have privileged this one scene from among many, not to reaffirm its significance as peripetia but to draw attention to the ‘dramatic’ construction of a master discourse which occludes all other interpretations. 128

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The scene is also crucial in providing a context for keywords such as patita, bhava, dharma and sadhana, enunciated both by the actresses themselves as well as by other figures who participate in this discourse. This classic representation of ‘saint and sinner’ is used to legitimise in one frozen gesture of blessing and in one utterance, a century of the public theatre’s ambiguous location in Bengali middle-class life. The movement towards iconisation is quite the reverse of the magic touch initiating or affirming sexual awakening. Iconisation in our example symbolises the sublimation or conquest of the sexual; but as we shall see, here too the movement is towards a reward of true love, in the embourgeoisement of the fallen woman. The two excerpts cited at the beginning of this chapter occupy somewhat different contextualised space in the actual ‘scripts’, but they are similar in that they are paradigmatic for contemporary readings of Binodini and the public theatre. The comparison is useful from another point of view: in illustrating how the magic gesture or touch may release from bondage the whole theatre of action. The spellbound inhabitants of an entire kingdom or forest may be animated, as in various versions of sleeping beauties. Alternatively, to take the more remarkable example of Ahalya, who is released from her stony bondage by the touch of Rama, the benediction becomes part of a much larger narrative, where immured Ahalya becomes one of the many beings who await deliverance for aeons and who may only be saved at the appointed time and place. Whether in the puranic story functioning within the many strata of epic time and its elaborate network of boons and curses or in the more linear fairy tale, the single gesture or touch, transferred from man to woman, signifies power over a larger world. I make this ‘Proppological’ intervention to foreground its formal and reductive features; on transposing the trope to a more immediate world, we find that the magic touch – of Ramakrishna blessing Binodini – is staged so that its efficacy may extend to the entire theatre world (the professional stage), in order that the latter may be accorded a morally justifiable place in bourgeois cultural life. The actual extension and the reenactment of that moment take place many decades after the incident, thereby insinuating a certain ‘historical’ authenticity. However, in its constant replay in print,79 the incident of benediction given utterance in the linguistically reverberating one line: ‘May you be granted consciousness, ma’ (ma, tomar chaitanya hok)80 – takes on the contours of a frieze. The brochure of the 1991 production of Nati Binodini, directed by Bina Dasgupta, who also plays the title role, displays prominently just such a shot of ‘Ramakrishna’ standing, his 129

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hand outstretched in a gesture of benediction and the actress as ‘Binodini playing Chaitanya’ kneeling with folded hands and looking up at him. In the bottom right-hand corner of the same page is a close-up of the actress as Chaitanya, eyes raised upwards in devotion, directing, once more, our gaze to the Ramakrishna-Binodini frieze. I have eschewed a potentially rewarding study of the semiotics of the costumes, lighting, music, scenography and acting styles or the symbology of gesture in the staging of redemption, since it would require glossing the performance contexts of each form – the ‘one-wall’ jatra, group theatre productions in the proscenium theatre and the jatratical in the playhouse. However, a few points may be made: first, the benediction scene as also the one informing the audience of Ramakrishna’s death, is the occasion for special effects, both in the Bina Dasgupta jatratical as well as in productions by other lesser known groups.81 Second, the jatra pala constantly switches back and forth between Dakshineswar, the stage and Girish’s home. Of these three symbolic locales, Dakshineswar by the river is most visible through the ‘cutouts’ of its distinctive temple spires. The visual effects sharply define a triangular circuit, with Dakshineswar being ‘home’ to both Ramakrishna and goddess Kali forming the apex of the triangle. The temple is also an iconic landmark of contemporary Calcutta. In these representations of Nati Binodini, ‘chaitanya’ is read to mean an almost epiphanic moment of realisation (on the part of Binodini) whose inevitable consequence is an exit from the public theatre and salvation through conjugal domesticity, albeit not of the conventional kind. The irony involved in projecting such a contradictory position of the patita-nati’s redemption outside the theatre-world does not appear to have affected the force of this representation. At any rate, it forecloses effectively any other, more sustained and potentially more conflict-ridden process of awareness, suggested by the word chaitanya. It remains to insert and inscribe the ‘scene’, signalling as it does the animation of a field, into a larger, popular drama of the redemption of the public theatre, and of the Bengali middle class. At the end of the 20th century, the range and impact of the discursive field elaborated around this century-old scene of benediction is immense, as the excerpts below reveal. The first is from an essay on ‘the theatre of yesteryears’, part of a volume commemorating Calcutta’s tercentenary. The writer summarises the incident and concludes: It was to this theatre [the Star] that Thakur SrisriRamkrishna Paramhamsadeb came to see a performance of Chaitanya Lila and blessed Binodini who played Chaitanya, by placing 130

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his hand on her head and saying, ‘May your consciousness awaken.’ Binodini’s consciousness did awaken. She quit the world of acting.82 The second excerpt is from a lengthy piece recalling the past glory of the Star Theatre after a fire gutted it in 1991:83 ‘It was this theatre that Parampurush SrisriRamakrishna had graced with his presence . . . Binodini’s life took a completely different turn because of his blessings.’84 And third, an editorial in the literary magazine Desh: The Star was the pilgrimage place (manchapeeth) of a remarkable history. Thakur SriRamakrishna had come to the Star to see Chaitanya Lila being enacted. And on that day, by placing his hand on her head and blessing Nati Binodini, he brought about a renaissance of the entire Bengali stage.85 (emphasis added) Yet, Binodini Dasi had inscribed her autobiography as a narrative of pain, a bedona-gatha. The above excerpt may be juxtaposed with the well-documented association with the Math, of Binodini and many of her colleagues, as well as successive generations of theatre people.86 An interesting variant to the redemption of the actress-courtesan may be found in the resolution of Emperor Justinian’s desire for the mime and dancer Theodora. In the words of a feminist theatre historian: At the height of her [Theodora’s] career as an entertainer, the Emperor Justinian fell in love with her and wished to marry her. However, the law decreed that actress-courtesans could not become Roman citizens and thus could not become the legal wives of citizens. Justinian’s desire, along with the new Christian concepts of repentance and salvation, produced the edict of 521 ad which declared that actress-courtesans could repent, renounce their profession and become the legal wives of Roman citizens. The marriage of Theodora symbolises a crucial transition in women’s theatre history: the passing of the classical tradition of the actress-courtesan and the rise of Christianity, which assured women spiritual mobility (they could be saved) and forbade theatrical performance.87 131

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A recent study pursues the after effects of Theodora’s marriage and the subsequent status of the actress in Roman society in early Christianity.88 In My Story, Binodini questions repeatedly, why in her case, she could not salvage even this spiritual mobility.

Exemplary readings Binod: It is because of your kindness that I have come to this teerthsthan for my sadhana. Let me carry on peacefully with my sadhana. Amrit: Your sadhana has come to fruition (siddhilabh). Gurmukh Rai . . . will build us a theatre worth twenty thousand rupees . . . He wants you in return. —Dey, Nati Binodini, Parva I, Scene 3, pp. 38–9 When Brajendra Kumar Dey produced Nati Binodini in the 1970s, he could actually refer to an existing aesthetic-religious discourse and play consistently on the keywords that I highlighted in the introduction. By heavily underlining them when they were used by the ‘bad’ or ambiguous characters, he reworked them into the language of melodrama. In contrast, Binodini is given the same terms in a fairly straightforward manner to indicate her sincerity, as in the conversation above between Amritalal Bose (Amrit) and Binodini (Binod). Binodini has just been informed of the deal, namely, a theatre for (instead of) a nati. The double entendre on teerthsthan (pilgrimage place) and keywords such as sadhana, siddhi and so on, draw on the satiric tradition of ‘babu literature’, including Bankimchandra’s enumeration of the range of meanings encoded in the word ‘babu’ in an eponymous essay of 1874.89 Secular pleasures – in this case, hybrid products imported from the west – have taken over the moral and social imperatives of the traditional pilgrimage. And the pilgrimage route over arduous terrain has shrunk to primrose path to the metropolitan theatre! There is another ‘straight’ tradition grounded in theatre history, present also in standard histories of drama. As insider accounts, they indicate both the place of theatre in national life and the place assigned to Binodini in these readings in their retrospective evaluations of the significance of Chaitanya Lila. As we shall see, the proper subject of these writings is never Binodini Dasi, although she is a necessary component in that representation. Among others, Girish’s famous contemporary, Amritalal Bose, was to eulogise the impact of the play several decades later. In his ‘Puraton filer ekkhani pata: Chaitanyalila ki kariache’ (A Page from an Old File: The Achievement of Chaitanya Lila) 132

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(1924), Amritalal hailed the first performance for its role in awakening ‘the slumbering Hindu’ and spreading a gospel of universal love, so that ‘in every village, every city and every locality was heard the Gita, Chaitanya Charit and the sankirtan’. It inspired ‘the foreignreturned, English-educated Bengali’ to turn to the religion of the masses and ‘declare without shame and with pride that he was Hindu Hindu Hindu’.90 Echoes that resonate in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1900 novel Gora, where the protagonist eventually forswears precisely that one ‘rooted’ identity. Amritalal’s sentence echoes in our own times, where such slogans have been naturalised in the body politic since the momentous razing of the Babri Masjid and its fallout in India of 1992, with devastating everyday repurcussions in the quotidian life of 21stcentury India. Referring more specifically to the theatre world, Amritalal declared: [W]hen the lowly actress in the guise of Sri Chaitanya enacted his/her lila, our humble stage was transformed into a veritable paradise, and when the performance was viewed by another avatar – SriRamakrishna of Dakhineswar – then, were we truly blessed . . . The stage is now indeed a place of pilgrimage. (emphasis added)91 Similar sentiments are to be found in the standard biography of Girishchandra written in 1927 by Abinashchandra Gangopadhyay who had been Boswell and Ganesh in the last decades of the dramatist’s life: It was an auspicious moment when, by writing this play, Girishchandra made New Bengal (nabya-Bangla) – so proud of its western education, and shaven-headed Vaishnavs, wearing the proper tilak mark on their foreheads, sit side by side and weep together.92 Despite the familiar language of a communal emotion – the ecstatic tears, for example – and the shared seating space, what we have in this graphic image of a bridging of ideologies is the picture of a new urban-based middle class (madhyabitto) community. It is not very different from the role attributed to Ramakrishna in the context of colonial India, as expressed for instance in Swami Saradananda’s evaluation of his guru: ‘[Ramakrishna brought] . . . back the westerneducated Indians who had strayed into the blind alley of rationalist scepticism and materialist aspirations back into the Hindu spiritualreligious fold.’93 133

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When the Chaitanya incident appears in Rangalaye Trish Batsar (1933), Apareshchandra Mukhopadhyay’s valuable memoirs of 30 years of his life in the public theatre, it is in order to delineate the extraordinary ‘mediating role’ played by the dramaturg-devotee Girishchandra Ghosh in ‘bringing back’ the devotional as the proper subject of drama to the stage.94 Mukhopadhyay’s thesis lies in defining the ‘poison of English education’ and its corrosive influence on the Bengali mind; the Chaitanya episode allows for a dissolving of barriers between indigenous traditions and derivative adaptations. As an example of the latter, he cites the works of Michael Madhusudan Datta which continued to feed the public theatre, although, as we know, not without significant shifts. In both the versions mentioned above, Binodini Dasi loses her name, even her identity as an actress and, simply becomes, ‘a prostitute’ (barangana).95 The person of the actress is presented as the familiar persona of the patita and is ultimately transformed into a synecdoche. The salvation of an individual, designated here as patita, becomes a metaphor for the regeneration of the public theatre and the renaissance of the Bengali people. Mukhopadhyay’s commendation of the priest-like function of Girishchandra in ushering in a renaissance of the ‘Bengali heart-mind’ by bringing bhakti into the theatre, harks back to the ‘purpose’ versus ‘pleasure’ debate around the theatre. The ‘recovery’ of hitherto excluded or reviled indigenous tradition provides an easy answer. Modern metropolitan entertainment has to bow down before the upsurge of faith and the familiar enactment of that faith. The demarcation of time, space and moral state: ‘tainted’ versus ‘pure’, ‘fallen’ versus ‘saved’, in the person of the patita-nati and in the moment of benediction, is a logical culmination of Mukhopadhyay’s descriptions of theatre life as a delightful ‘hell on earth’ (theatar ehojagater narak).96 Consequently, he uses exactly the same language as Girishchandra’s biographer and Amritalal Bose to underline the significance of Ramakrisha’s presence in the theatre: ‘The Lord SriSriRamakrishna’s footsteps transformed the Bengali theatre into a pilgrimage place.’97 The replay of sankirtan on the urban stage becomes a symbolic affirmation of a selective scripted ‘history’. Contemporary, and arguably more radical, theatre practitioners such as Utpal Dutt (1929–93) have not moved any further away from the prostitute-actress construct and its particular role in the representations of Nati Binodini, despite other, more self-consciously probing representations of the actress in plays such as Tiner Talwar (The Tin Sword) (1971). In a 1992 monograph on Girishchandra Ghosh brought out as part of Sahitya Akademi’s ‘Makers of Modern India’ 134

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series, Binodini figures in Dutt’s narrative only as a beneficiary of the catholicity of Ramakrishna’s beliefs. Ultimately, both Ramakrishna and Binodini are used to rescue Girishchandra from the charges of writing for the box office. Dutt’s critique of the ‘bourgeois prejudices of the Indian middle-class’ and championing of Ramakrishna ends with the actress being recast in accordance with the very bourgeois norms critiqued by him. ‘It was probably his joie de vivre that brought Ramakrishna frequently to the theatre, to Girish’s plays in particular,’ suggests Dutt, contrasting this with the ‘hate-campaign’ of the ‘bourgeois puritans against the immorality of the theatre’: But the ‘illiterate’, ‘idolatrous’, ‘superstitious’ Ramakrishna chose this moment to visit Girish’s theatre and bless the actress Binodini by touching her, and to hell with what the most potent, [sic] grave and reverend signors thought about it. To a Vedantist ‘prostitute’ is not a repulsive animal, but as Ramakrishna realised while praying to Kali that it was the Mother who had assumed the appearance of prostitute. In ecstasy he had asked her, ‘Mother, you are also in them?’ And in answer to questions from puritans, he asserted: He has become everything – everyone is divine. All women are mothers. I see no difference between prostitute and faithful housewife. (English original)98 In some respects, Dutt’s isolation of the incident and recontextualising it in his reading of the history of the public theatre in Bengal is more open to critical scrutiny than the readings cited so far. Dutt uses unquestioningly the overarching metaphor of ‘the Mother’ to laud Ramakrishna’s erasure of the conventional distinctions, even polarisation, between prostitute and housewife. The all-subsuming category of the mother appears to be the only one within which other bourgeois categories of womanhood may be sublimated, leaving no place for locating or identifying other categories of a femininity which includes sexuality. (Ramakrishna blesses Binodini as ‘ma’, commonly used in Bangla as a sign of either affection or respect, depending on the age and status of the addressor and addressee.) Also, by linking Ramakrishna’s acceptance of the prostitute as the Ma Kali (the goddess) with his state of ecstasy, a privileged, even rarefied state of mind and body is posited against the less inspired and more workaday sphere from which the ‘bourgeoisie’ express their contempt or prurient curiosity. There appears to be no other alternatives 135

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to these two spheres presented in oppositional terms – between those of the transcending mystic and the bourgeois puritan. Finally, there is the avowed nature of Dutt’s project, which is to redeem Girishchandra, the dramatist-dramaturg from charges of commercialism and populism. This results in a rather extreme evaluation of either the scope or the actual achievement of the public theatre: Girish, earlier in his career dissipated much of his energy in wild living and absence of a purpose. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda gave him a serious aim – ‘educating the masses’, as Ramakrishna put it, in patriotism and love of humanity, sympathy for the downtrodden, and the great democracy of the Vedanta.99 However laudable this aim (even if one were to desist from exploring the ‘great democracy of the Vedanta’), until the Gana-Natya (People’s Theatre) movement in the 1940s, theatre in Bengal did not really attempt to ‘educate the masses’. The point has been noted frequently enough, but it needed one of theatre’s most talented and committed practitioners – Manoranjan Bhattacharyya (1889–1954) – to analyse the precise reach of the public theatre.100 Utpal Dutt’s sympathetic awareness of the conflicting social contexts of the actress, her mentors and the patrons of theatre had been evident in that layered and innovative play, Tiner Talwar, which also problematised most powerfully through the device of the play within the play, the political project of the public theatre in its early decades. Dutt’s stimulating play on Madhusudan Datta, Darao Pathikbar (Stop, O Wayfarer) (first performed in 1980), also comes to mind. Is it the project of reclaiming social and political consciousness for Girish Ghosh and perhaps, for Ramakrishna, that makes Dutt singularly reductive in this inexorable gravitation to a binary model? We are obliged to confront here the ideology of forms, although it might seem extreme to split Dutt into playwright and critic and to suggest that it is really as the former that he adopts the more critical role. Historian Sumit Sarkar’s gloss on this ‘scene’ through his exposition of ‘ “Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti”: Ramakrishna and His Times’, although similarly situated in a study of Ramakrishna and not Binodini, emerges from an entirely different perspective. Juxtaposing the construction of sexuality among the late 19th-century bhadralok in Calcutta and Ramakrishna’s responses to this ideology, Sarkar observes, ‘Sex in such a degraded form was presumably an object of pity and grace, not a threat – and perhaps for a man who found 136

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even sex in marriage intolerable, prostitution was not all that specially repugnant.’101 This and other related comments on Ramakrishna’s relationship to women and the place of women in his discourse, open up different entry points into the study of religion and gender relations. However, the description of Binodini’s autobiography as ‘a moving, if somewhat flamboyantly repentant account of her life as prostitute and actress’ suggests that the benediction scene continues to cast its shadow, despite the care taken by Sarkar to separate prostitute and actress.102 Was it at all possible for contemporary critics to conceptualise a different location of the actress in the public theatre, outside of the redemption trope? In the 1920s, the earliest of Binodini’s biographers, Upendranath Vidyabhusan (1867–1959), described Binodini and her world thus: She is a true (female) aspirant (prakrita sadhika) of the rangamandir; her all-renouncing contemplative search (sadhana) is like the renunciation of a great yogi which leads to enlightenment (siddhilabh).103 That all of these keywords appear in the space of a single page indicates the extent to which the metaphor of religious salvation informs the style and spirit of Vidyabhushan’s biographies. Yet, Vidyabhushan’s position is remarkable, for while his language is hagiographical, his ‘subject’ is still human and her location social. This is primarily because Vidyabhusan does not displace Binodini’s ‘salvation’ from the material conditions of her profession on the stage – a point I will soon elaborate. Vidyabhushan does not present Binodini as the actress saved by Ramakrishna. His biographies of two other celebrated contemporaries of Binodini, Teenkari Dasi and Tarasundari Dasi, are if anything more celebratory of the latter’s dedication to the theatre and love for the profession.

Of agendas To summarise then, the very different agendas for which the same model of redemption has been utilised in a range of temporal contexts: first, for espousing an ‘authentic’ Indian/Bengali and sometimes even a distinctive ‘Calcuttan culture’, as opposed to what Apareshchandra Mukhopadhyay and other characterise as synthetic westernised products, such as those created by Madhusudan Datta. A persistent legacy of this discourse is the collapse of ‘jatiya’ and 137

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‘deshiya’. The criterion of ‘authentic Bengali’ (khanti Bangali) figures as a recurrent criterion in the reviews – by and large laudatory – even of Nandikar’s 1972 production of Nati Binodini. Second, the model is evoked to prove the existence of a people-based ‘revolutionary theatre’, as Utpal Dutt argues in favour of Girishchandra’s plays. In doing so, Dutt sets up a pattern of (af)filiations in the intellectual history of Bengal.104 And third, to construct around ‘Nati Binodini’, representations of the theatre as a platform to spread religiosity, in order to defend the latter against charges of licentious entertainment or good show business. The suffusion of ‘religious terminology’ in all these discussions of the theatre is neither a coincidence, nor is it of recent origin, as I said at the beginning of this chapter. The rangamanch in particular was repeatedly invoked as a peeth or peethsthan from the 1880s onwards: peethsthan is a sacred site, also suggesting a desired destination of a teertha or pilgrimage.105 It is possible here to chart the struggle between emergent national ideologies and the actual performance conditions existing in the proscenium theatre in the city. The contradiction perceived from within the theatre between the new roles marked out for women as a whole and those who played these ‘traditional’ roles was reflected in the attempt to relocate the entire field of non-procreative female sexuality – linguistically and evocatively, that is through highly selective images – associated in the urban popular with dharma. This was part of the larger struggle to integrate religious and cultural practices in the formation of a national (Bengali, Hindu) identity. Another keyword that was deployed critically at different moments of the debate was ‘shiksha’, meaning both education, teaching and instruction. As we saw in Chapter 1, from its earliest days ‘thea-tar’ was flagged both as a sign and, in its physical habitation, as everything that was the very opposite of what ‘good education’ represented or promised, namely, the docile student immersed in his studies, leading to safe employment. Vidyabhushan clearly meant something other than ‘western education’ when he extended the moral efficacy of the public theatre and its social (educational) role by concluding, ‘Therefore, the theatre is not a place of luxury (bilaskhetra); it is a “hard taskmaster, a disciplined place of learning” (kathor shikshaghar)’.106 The shift of metaphor was more than a routine privileging of education over entertainment; it emerged from this writer’s unusual awareness of the differences between his own social standing and intellectual positioning and those of his subjects. Vidaybhushan’s sensitivity to and affirmation of the actresses’ social struggle as a collective, and his reiteration of the 138

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professional worth of theatre on its own merit and not merely as a stage for bhakti, stands out in every respect from the texts considered so far. An established Sanskrit scholar and professor, sympathetic to Brahmoism (although he never converted), he was one of the few writers of the time who was not connected directly with theatre production but had a lifelong passion for the theatre. Vidyabhushan’s critical positioning with regard to art and actress is a road not taken in theatre historiography.

Of closures The Binodini-Chaitanya-Ramakrishna iconography and its variant configurations outlined so far may surface unexpectedly, choreographed through gestures. One recalls the exquisite sequence in Guru Dutt’s film Pyasa (Eternal Thirst) (1957), where the prostitute Gulab (Waheeda Rahman) follows the lonely poet Vijay (Guru Dutt). ‘Summoned’ by the haunting notes of a kirtaniya, she finds herself on an open terrace from which the object of her desire is refracted on to the female vaishnavi in the courtyard below who is singing of Radha’s love.107 Pyasa brings together the poet and the prostitute in compassionate love which recognises the other, both walking the streets of the alienated city of post-independent India. The kirtaniya is reinscribed into the failed promises of the modern nation state as a transcendental sign of longing, of love in separation – a far cry from the derided figure of the actual 19th century ‘boshtomi’ in urban spaces, as in metropolitan Calcutta. This chapter has marked out the place offered to actresses through Bhakti at the end of the first phase of the public theatre and the ‘exemplary readings’ it has generated. Tracing ‘Nati Binodini’s’ entry in cultural discourse via Ramakrishna, it turned to the performance context of Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s and subsequent readings of that performance. While salvation through grace, the low and the meek being considered most worthy, is a recurrent trope across cultures and religions, I have sought to historicise the precise elements and the social ‘actors’ that makes the spectacle both ‘moving’ and ‘memorable’. This approach integrates Vaishnav aesthetic theology and role-playing with the androgyny of Binodini Dasi playing Chaitanya, the fallout of which is further explored in Chapter 5. It also alerts us to the irresistible appeal of a binary between the ‘deshiya’ and the ‘derivative’, which then becomes the criterion by which not just this play but the validity of a people’s or nation’s cultural agenda is appraised. These forms of reification and identity-making, couched as the authentic or 139

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spontaneous emotion of a ‘majority’, informs our present where essentialism is reinforced through the use of technology and big data. Moving between two axes of time and space, the actual benediction scene has been analysed for its aural-visual cues and as spectacle from the playtexts of Nati Binodini staged in the 1970s–90s. I have suggested that the specific melodramatic mode within which gender roles are framed (and fixed) in the three-tiered re-presentation of ‘Nati Binodini’ in the late 20th century also subsumes a narrative of the once imperial city. In conclusion, a few observations on how the circulation of jatra palas ensured the continuing appeal of ‘Nati Binodini’ as story and as exemplary model on the one hand, offering a self-reflexive commentary on its own commercial-cultural status on the other. A domestic closure of the most conservative kind was provided for the staged history of Bengali public theatre in the jatra Nati Binodini. Binodini as the fallen actress in Dey’s neo-jatra was constantly juxtaposed against Girishchandra’s wife, Surat Kumari, whose death marks the implicit climax of the play. In a posthumous eulogy, Girish’s wife is evoked as the grihalakshmi behind the genius – the invisible angel of the (theatre) house: ‘She who was a Basumati in patience, an Arundhati in selfless service, a Sabari in trust . . . that jewel of womanhood is no more. The source of Natyacharya Girishchandra’s extraordinary talent has dried up.’108 Dey’s pala invents a sister-in-law (boudi) relationship between Binodini and Girish’s wife. There are no accounts of actresses interacting with bhadramahila. In her autobiography, Binodini acknowledges with affection and regard many women from her immediate family, her co-actresses and neighbours remembered from her childhood, but she makes no mention of women from other classes and in other spheres. The list of virtues and the emblematic list of role models in the above excerpt is reminiscent of the textbook constructions of the ideal Hindu female, with one difference: Surat Kumari is the ‘Arya nari’ domesticated in the Bengali male’s object of desire: the boudi (sister-in-law) is the quintessential Bengali female provider in the margins – she who combines motherly functions with a semi-seductive role. Arguably, the valediction of Surat Kumari along with the construction of Nati Binodini allowed the public theatre and neo-jatra to set up an equally respectable identity vis-à-vis the challenge of superior art presented by the not-for-profit ‘group theatres’. Prabhat Kumar Goswami suggests that a revamping of jatras had occurred during the Swadeshi era when, in an effort to survive, jatra had moved from traditional puranic subjects to historical events. The entry of the historical (aitihasik) pala and its link to theatre was 140

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Figure 2.4 Kalo Sindur (Black mark of marriage), a jatra book cover, Calcutta: Sahitya Mala, n.d., 1990s. Tagged as a ‘samajik natak’, performed by ‘the famous Gananatya Opera’ Source: Author’s collection

heralded in the new name for Mathur Saha’s company which was called the ‘theatrical jatra party’. Brajendra Nath Banerjee notes a much earlier shift, when the Nala-Damayanti story was reworked from the Mahabharata into a ‘yatra of the new type’ in the 1820s! 141

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From early 20th century onwards, convoluted ‘defenses’ of the stage frequently took recourse to the authenticity of jatra and its unique hold even over modern (adhunik) members of the audience. Rebutting an article in Pravasi on songs in the jatra, Lalitmohan Chatoopadhyay took exception to the author’s singling out of ‘dances in Chaitanya Lila’. He claimed that the success lay in creating a mass audience, an affective community that breaches all socio-economic barriers: It is necessary to inform the reader, specially with information about Chaitanya Lila, that lakhs of people – the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the respectable and the low – have viewed this very Chaitanya-Lila for the past 30–35 years and have wept unceasingly on viewing the play. They continue to do so; their numbers are beyond all reckoning.109 The revamping in the 1970s should therefore be seen as one of many such reinventions, which allows ‘jatra’ to survive through selective appropriation of ‘modern’ elements. This was understood by Sisir Kumar Bhaduri who, while considering the jatra to be the ‘truly Bengali drama’ (as opposed to the proscenium theatre in which he acted for most of his life), was aware of the transformation of the jatra into ‘the theatrical jatra party’ in the last 30 years.110 By the 1970s, jatra had appropriated many of the features of the public theatre and of the commercial cinema, reaching out to huge audiences in rural areas and small towns with the aid of new technology. The hub of jatra production was North Calcutta; companies fanned out seasonally to rural areas and the industrial belt across the Eastern region. It found in a piece like Nati Binodini a means of combining some of the conventions of the traditional jatra (a religious theme, the focus on Chaitanya, the string of songs) with a historical dramatic story that could be staged as its (neo-jatra’s) own history.111 Used selectively, Binodini Dasi’s life offered a ready-made plot: if the moment of benediction meant the conversion of the fallen woman, she could only continue to live either as one who has renounced worldly life, a sanyasini or one who had entered a segregated and decorous life as a wife. Ranging her with ‘Ranga-babu’, following the public benediction, meant that the jatra pala could conclude on a note of happy conjugality: Binodini, ‘dressed as a bride’ (badhubeshe) and childhood sweeheart Ranga-babu make a final appearance as newly-weds. They seek blessings from the ailing Girish, cast explicitly here as the father figure. In this version, for the woman who is presented as a melodramatic 142

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victim, redemption is conjugality, suggesting also, in this case, class mobility. The last section of this tripartite biography of stage > redemption > conjugal home (sansar), that is Binodini’s ‘domestic interlude’, forms in fact the subject of most of the popular biographies or fictional recreations of Binodini’s life and requires to be addressed separately.112 However obliquely, the missing housewife, the ‘grihastree’ of Pramathanath Bishi’s critique, has found a place on stage. A more detailed study of Bengal in the last decades of the 20th century will have to be made before we can argue whether the particular constraints of cultural self-representation evident in this case arise from the need to affirm a regional-national history or, in fact, to establish a distinct regional identity (through its construction of a golden age of theatre history) in its attempt to recover lost economic and political power when viewed against the national scene as a whole. The figure of the Redeemer may be established only through other figures who need to be redeemed; consequently, the Redeemer is always in need of objects of redemption.113 The chronological frame afforded by the Chaitanya incident need not therefore not function entirely as a synchronic one, constructed only as a reading, but rather as a preliminary plotting of the interlocking histories covered by its narration.

Figure 2.5 Advertisements for jatra, Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

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Figure 2.6 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 1. Six-armed Chaitanya as a composite of Radha and Krishna in tribhanga, dance pose of three angles. Kalighat painting. c. 1889. (Original in colour) Source: Author’s collection

Figure 2.7 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 2 Source: Author’s collection

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Figure 2.8 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 3 Source: Author’s collection

Notes 1 Chittaranjan Ghosh, Nati Binodini, Calcutta: Auto Print, 1973, p. 67. 2 The pala was written and first produced in 1973, directed by Arun Dasgupta. The excerpt is translated from the 5th edition of Brajendra Kumar Dey, Nati Binodini, Calcutta: Nirmal Book Agency, undated, p. 113. All references in this book are to this edition. The quick turnover of editions attests to a strong print market for the pala. 3 An account of Chaitanya ‘lost’ in his role while dancing as Radha is found in Chaitanya Bhagvat by Brindaban Das (middle vol., chapter 18, lines 237–40. See also Sukumar Sen, Nat, Natya, Natak, Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1991 (1972), pp. 55–6. 4 Discussed in Rimli Bhattacharya (ed. and trans.), Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’ , New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, p. 96. 5 The Kathamrita records many such instances of Ramakrishna’s initiation and granting of spiritual insight through touch (sometimes touching the chest of the devotee with his feet) and sometimes accompanied with the same utterance ‘Chaitanya hou’. For example, Sri M, SrisriRamakrishna Kathamrita (BS 1308), repr. Vol. 16, Part 1, Calcutta: 1387 BS, p. 226; Vol. 31, Part 4, repr. 1388 BS, p. 280; and notably, the first encounter with Naren (later Vivekananda) (BS 1311) Vol. 6, Part 2, repr. 1388 BS, p. 48. I am grateful to Lily Ghose for collating these references for me.   Romain Rolland’s biography also highlights the ‘testing’ by Ramakrishna of ‘the boys’ before they become his chosen disciples, the most dramatic being the case of Naren (p. 180) and Subodhananda (p. 165). Rolland notes: ‘Extraordinary tales are told of his physical and spiritual hyper-sensitiveness . . . the touch of an impure person gave him physical pain analogous to the bite of a cobra’. The Life of Ramakrishna (1929), (trans. E.F. Malcolm-Smith), repr. Calcutta: Advaita Asrama, 2000, pp. 141–2.

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6 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 201–2. 7 The Ramakrishna Math and Mission were fully established by 1897 and legally registered in 1909. 8 Girishchandra himself wrote several essays on Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and other disciples in journals such as Janmabhumi and Udbodhan (collected in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.) Girish Rachanabali) [hereinafter GR], Vol. 5, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991. Sumit Sarkar notes both the ‘mutually beneficial alliance’ with the stage and the ‘colossal and growing market’ for the Kathamrita, ‘Ramakrishna and the Calcutta of His Times’ in Geeti Sen (ed.), The Calcutta Psyche, New Delhi: Rupa & Co and India International Centre, 1990–1991, pp. 113, 115. 9 ‘Introduction’, Debipada Bhattacharyya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1992, Vol. 3, pp. 18–19 traces the interaction from 1884 onwards when Girish is said to have received Ramakrishna’s grace. Bilwamangal was produced in 1886, Nasiram in 1888. Bilwamangal is said to be inspired by Ramakrishna recounting the story to Girish; the English translation of the play is said to have been revised by Sister Nivedita. The story of devotee Nabhajidas is found in the 17th-century Vaishnav Bhaktamala (Lives of devotees). Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch (SriRamakrishna and the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: Deb Sahitya Kutir, 1992, pp. 70–4, 100–1. On Girishchandra’s modelling the Vidushak’s character after Ramakrishna in his play Jona, see Pabitra Sarkar, ‘Introduction’ in Jona, Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1984, p. 53. 10 Statesman, 3 October 1896 (quotes in the original). 11 The phrase was originally used by Christopher Isherwood: ‘By giving his approval to Girish’s art and encouraging him to continue practising it, Ramakrishna became, as it were, the patron saint of the drama in Bengal.’ Ramakrishna and His Disciples, Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1990 (1964), p. 254. See also Sumit Sarkar, ‘ “Kaliyuga”, “Chakri” and “Bhakti”: Ramakrishna and His Times’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, 18 July 1992, p. 1557. 12 ‘Ramakrishna’s picture is to be found hanging backstage in nearly every theatre in Calcutta. The actors bow to it before they make their entrances.’ Isherwood, Ramakrishna, p. 254. 13 Ashutosh Bhattacharya and Ajit Kumar Ghosh (eds), Shatabarshe Natyashala (Hundred Years of the Stage), Calcutta: Jatiya Sahitya Parishad, 1973, p. 249. 14 Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch, pp. 131–2. 15 Ibid., p. 132. 16 Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay’s hagiographic account may be juxtaposed with his contemporary, Diptendra Kumar Sanyal’s caustic review of the same play. Endorsing the ‘noble project’ of the stage to represent a worthy cause, Sanyal thanks the Kalika Theatre company for bringing the life and sayings of a ‘great man’ such as Ramakrishna to the masses. He then trashes the play for its failure to bring any fresh insights to the life of a saint (as Shaw had done in Saint Joan) and most importantly, for reducing the subject to a handful of ridiculously transparent ‘special effects’.

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Gurudas Bandopadhyay is singled out for his ‘incredible performance’ and ‘superb craftsmanship’ (despite being drowned at times by the loud prompting). ‘Kalikaye Yugadevata’, ‘An Allegorical Play on the Life of SriRamakrishna’, Achalpatra, 1st Year, Nos. 10 and 11, Agrahayan-Paush 1355 BS/1948, in Jyotirmay Chaudhury (ed.), Achalpatra Sankalan, Calcutta: Nath Publishing, 2001, pp. 48–9. 17 Dey in conversation with author, Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch, p. 132. Dey, pala-writer of Natto Company, for long a leading jatra company in Bengal, echoes the sentiment: ‘It is really quite astonishing, whatsoever has been written about Ramakrishna, by anybody, has proved to be extremely successful’ (emphasis mine). He goes on to cite the various Nati Binodinis staged by different companies and concludes that they were all successes because of Ramakrishna’s presence in the productions: ‘Such is His blessing. It’s just enough to get Him there.’ Cited in Ibid., p. 135. 18 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman (eds), Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, New Delhi: Oxford University Press and British Film Institute, 1995, p. 251. See also Kumar Shahani, ‘The Sant Poets of Prabhat’ (1980) in Ashish Rajadhyaksh (ed.), The Shock of Desire and Other Essays, New Delhi: Tulika Books in Association with the Raza Foundation, 2015, pp. 88–91. 19 Cited in Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch, p. 134. 20 See ‘Introduction’ in Soumitra Chattopadhyay and Nirmalya Acharya (eds), Amar Katha: Binodini Dasi, Calcutta: Kathashilpa Prakash, 1964. For further publication details of Amar Katha in Binodini’s lifetime, see Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, Appendix II, p. 250. Devajit Bandopadhyay, Binodini Rachanasamagra (Collected Works of Binodini Dasi), Calcutta: Patra Bharati, 2014. 21 Dey, ‘Preface’, Nati Binodini. To contextualise the performance fee of Rs. 8,000 per pala: In the 1960s the Natto Company charged Rs. 1,000 per pala; by the 1980s, this had risen to between Rs. 25,000–30,000 per pala. Dey himself is reported to have been paid Rs. 300 per pala in the 1950s; this rose to Rs. 5,000 by 1965, whilst in 1981 a top-ranking jatra writer was paid as much as Rs. 35,000 per pala. Rudraprasad Sengupta, ‘The Hijack of Jatra’, Sangeet Natak (Special issue on ‘Traditional Idiom in Contemporary Theatre’), Nos. 77–8, 1985, p. 61. For an exposition of ‘the popular’ in relation to contemporary jatra, see Utpal Dutt, ‘An Armoured Car on the Road to Proletarian Revolution’, Interview by Malini and Mihir Bhattacharya, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 8, July– September 1984, pp. 25–42. 22 In the preface to his Nati Binodini, Chittaranjan Ghosh also remarks on the ‘sudden discovery’ of Binodini, but does not offer any explanations for the phenomenon of ‘Nati Binodini’. 23 Amongst a number of amateur performances, the southern branch of the Nikhil Bharat Nari Sammelan (an All India Women’s organisation) performed Nati Binodini at Vidya Mandir in South Calcutta with an all-women cast in 1988. A reviewer felt the play of lights and the song, ‘Despise the sin not the sinner’, composed of Ramakrishna’s sayings, established the ‘atmosphere’. Shantanu Gangopadhyay, Desh, 4 June 1988. The performance at the Calcutta Club was produced on the occasion of the

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Bengali new year, on 13 April 1991, and directed by Dr Basudev. Personal communication by Rekha Sen. 24 Tuhinabha Majumdar, dir., Aamaar Katha: Story of Binodini (A Text of Betrayal), Films Division of India, 2015. 25 Amal Allana’s Nati Binodini (2006) had three Binodinis. 26 Ghosh, Nati Binodini, p. 91. Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay stresses, ‘Even a progressive theatre group such as Nandikar, has accepted in their play this connection [i.e. Ramakrishna’s death and Binodini’s exit] . . . they have not been able to dismiss the possibility’ (emphasis added). Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch, p. 143. 27 For Binodini’s account of the betrayal by her colleagues over the naming of the Star Theatre, see Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 89. 28 The phrase in Bangla is ‘jatey tuley dilo’, literally, upgrading of caste or status. For an unabashed account of the profits grossed, see Dey’s prefaces to the first and second edition of the published versions of his Nati Binodini. Bina Dasgupta (1952–2005) who made ‘Nati Binodini’ famous in the jatra version was known as ‘Jatralakshmi Bina Dasgupta’; the reference to the goddess of fortune is not gratuitous. 29 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Bangla rangamanche Srimati Binodini’, (1913) in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991 (1975), Vol. 5, pp. 363–9. ‘Srimati Binodini and the Bengali Stage’ (trans. Rimli Bhattacharya) in Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 210–20. 30 Introduction, Debipada Bhattacharyya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1986 (1971), Vol. 2, pp. xxxxvi–vii. 31 Girishchandra Ghosh, Chaitanya Lila, Act II, Scene 4, in GR, Vol. 2, pp. 386–7. 32 Sukumar Sen, Battalar Chhapa o Chhabi, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1989 (1984), p. 73. 33 Reis and Rayyet, 10 October 1885. Introduction, Bhattacharyya, GR, Vol. 2, p. xxxxiv. 34 ‘The Native Theatre’, Reis and Rayyet, 7 November 1885, p. 512. 35 For the impact of the Orientalist-internationalist Theosophists on the ‘revival’ of Bharatanatyam through Rukmini Devi (1904–86) and her husband George Arundale, see Matthew Harp Allen, ‘Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance’, The Drama Review, Issue 41, No. 3 (T155), Fall 1997, pp. 70–3. 36 Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia: Being The Life and Teaching of Gôtama (Revised Edition), Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Company, 1892, p. 5. Rukmini Devi was also to produce the piece at the Theosophical Society in Madras, c. 1935. S. Sarada, Kalakshetra Rukmini Devi: Reminiscences by S. Sarada, Madras: Kala Mandir Trust, 1985, p. 2. Cited in Allen, ‘Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance’. 37 ‘In the London of the 1880s mysticism was being taken up by the young and enquiring . . . There was a Theosophical society, founded by Madame Blavatsky, a Rosicrucian society, a Hermetic Society, a Society for Psychical Research.’ Sheila Goodie, Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre, London: Methuen, 1990, p. 27. 38 See J.S. Bratton et al. (eds), Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage: 1790–1930, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994, p. 166.

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39 Amiya P. Sen, Hindu Revivalism in Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 334. American-born Indian dancer Ragini Devi (1893– 1982) was to find a home with her infant daughter with the theosophists at Adyar in 1931. 40 See for example, Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Nater abedan’ (The Actor’s Plea) (1307 BS/1900) and ‘Bartaman rangabhumi’ (The Contemporary Stage) (1308 BS/1901) in Rathindranath Ray and Devipada Bhattacharya (eds), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991 (1969), Vol. 1, pp. 235–8, 742–5. 41 Sivnath Sastri, Atmacharit, 1918, repr. Calcutta: Riddhi India, 1988, pp. 190–1. 42 Hemendranath Das Gupta, Bharatiya Natyamanch (The Indian Theatre), Calcutta: Bangabhasha Sanskriti Sammelan, 1945, pp. 37–8. 43 Ibid., p. 37. 44 See Part I of David Bradby et al. (eds), Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 45 Amrita Bazar Patrika, Wednesday, 17 January 1886. 46 Shankar Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalyer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900 (Sourcebook for the History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982, p. 90. 47 On playing Chaitanya and Biliasini Karforma on the same day, see Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 96. 48 Kathamrita, Vol. 1. 49 Swami Chetanandanda, Girishchandra Ghosh: A Bohemian Devotee of Sri Ramakrishna, Introduction by Christopher Isherwood. Mayavati, Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, (Indian edition) 2009, p. 134. 50 Girishchandra Ghosh, Rangalaye Nepen: Banganatyashalaye nrityashiksha o tahar kromobikash (The Teaching of Dance on the Bengali Stage and Its Development), 27 Chaitra 1315 BS/1908, in GR, Vol. 5, p. 336. 51 Hemendranath Das Gupta, The Indian Theatre, repr. Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1988, pp. 155–6. As Jyotindra Jain points out, the violin had been easily incorporated in religious iconography: witness for example, patas showing goddess Saraswati with violin (and not vina) in hand. Kalighat Paintings, Images from a Changing World, Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1999, Fig. 107. 52 See Gita Sen, Adhunik Bangla Natake Prayogritir Bibartan (An Account of Production in Modern Bengali Drama) Part 1, n.d., CSSSC archives, Calcutta. 53 For a popular coloured lithograph of the nagar sankirtan (1895) printed at the Chorebagan Art Studio, Calcutta, see the British Museum website, Museum no. AN117467001. www.britishmuseum.org/join_in/using_digi tal_images/using_digital_images.aspx?asset_id=117467001&objectId=16 13292&partId=1 (accessed on 10 June 2017). 54 S.K. De, Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962 (1940), pp. 108, 442. 55 Benoy Ghosh, Kolkata Culture, Calcutta: Bihar Sahitya Bhavan Ltd., 1953, p. 139. 56 Sivnath Sastri writes of the dramatic impact created by the sankirtan when he first heard it in a group and was drawn to participation. The group was popularly known variously as the ‘Anandabadi’ (Joyous group) or the

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‘Amritabazar Group’, as it was led by the two brothers – Sisir Kumar and Hemanta Kumar Ghose – owners of Amrita Bazar Patrika, Atmacharit, p. 77. For an account of Keshubchandra’s lifelong struggles in redefining Christianity and the crisis of 1866–7, after which the bhakti of Chaitanyaism was introduced to the breakaway Brahmo Samaj of India, see Rolland, The Life of Ramakrishna, pp. 76–82. 57 ‘Grand Procession of Nagur [sic] Sankirtan’ at the Star’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 August 1895. 58 Report in the Indian Mirror, cited by Charles Capwell, ‘Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta as a Component in the History of a Secondary Urban Center’, Asian Music, Vol. 18, No. 1, Autumn–Winter 1986, p. 146. 59 Christopher Pinney, ‘Staging Hinduism’ in Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. 60 Raymond Williams, Culture, Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1986, p. 135. 61 Manmath Ray, ‘Loknatya: Jatragan’ in Bhattacharya and Ghosh (eds), Shatabarshe Natyashala, pp, 17–68. 62 A cassette from the 1990s comprises eight songs interspersed with bits of dialogue and assumes an audience familiar with the ‘Nati Binodini’ story. The cover features Binodini, ‘Ranga-babu’ and Ramakrishna: Nati Binodini, Dinen Gupta, Nibedita Films, 1993. Bina Dasgupta’s 1991 brochure had a dozen verses from the songs in the production. A contemporary review of a dramatic reading (sruti-natak) of Chaitanya Lila by Girish Sansad critiques the performance for its excessive display of bhakti. The reviewer also comments on women in the audience singing along with the performers. Shantanu Gangopadhyay, Desh, 28 December 1991. 63 Cornelia Otis Skinner, Sarah Bernhardt: Madame Sarah, New York: Paragon Publisher, 1988 (1966), p. 203. 64 Reis and Rayyet, April 1890. 65 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 152. 66 On fainting fits and swoons, on stage and off, ‘acted’ and ‘real’ and their role in the creation of a star status, see Skinner, Sarah Bernhardt, pp. xix, 14, 19, 154–5. 67 Sisirkumar Ghose who was originally from Jessore (now in Bangladesh), studied in Calcutta. He became the founder-editor of the influential Amrita Bazar Patrika (1868), which first came out in Bangla and later also in English. Ghose and his brother contributed greatly to political activity, creating district-level political associations, also travelling to foster unity at a pan-Indian level. Ghose was regarded as a devout Vaishnav: his publications in this area include Sri Amiyo Nimai, Vols. 1–3, Lord Gaurango (written in English) and Sri Nimai Sanyas (1909). His association with the Bengali stage began in the era of amateur productions and continued thereafter. Two of his plays were performed at the National Theatre: Naisho Rupayia (Nine Hundred Rupees) (1873) and Bazarer Ladai (Fight in the Bazar) (1874). 68 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 94–5. 69 I thank Robi Ranjan Sen for collating this information from St Xavier’s College, Calcutta.

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70 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘ “Ram-dada”: Bhaktachuramoni swargiya Ramchandra Dutta’ originally published in the Tatwamanjuri, 1311 BS/1903, in GR, Vol. 5, pp. 290–5. 71 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 237. 72 Pulin Das, Banga Rangamancha o Bangla Natak: 1795–1920 (The Bengali Stage and Bengali Drama), Vol. 1, Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1963, p. 242. 73 Ramen Chaudhury (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Dhrupadi Sahitya Sansad, 1966, Vol. 4, Appendix, pp. 294–9. 74 On Rammohan and Bankimchandra’s ‘aversion’ for the excesses of Vaishnavism and the difference between Vaishnavism and Bankimchandra’s ‘Vishnuism’, see Sumit Sarkar, ‘Calcutta and the Bengali Renaissance’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Calcutta: The Living City, Vol. 2, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1991, esp. pp. 101–2. Rabindranath’s critique of certain forms of organised Vaishnavism, particularly in the context of gender relations and romantic love, was expressed in his novel Chaturanga (serialised in 1914, published 1916). 75 See Debipada Bhattacharyya, Bangla Charit Sahitya, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1982, p. 249. 76 See Michael Baker, The Rise of the Victorian Actor, London: Croom Helm, 1978, pp. 160–74. 77 Statesman, 25 May 1913. 78 Bhattacharya, ‘Afterword’, Binodini Dasi, p. 195. 79 For example, Debnarayan Gupta in Nayika o Natyamanch (The Heroine and the Stage), Calcutta: Jyoti Prakashan, 1976, p. 33. 80 For Binodini’s account, see Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 95. In some popular retellings, the familiar tor is used instead of the more formal tomar. Chittaranjan Ghosh’s play attempts to explicate ‘chaitanya’ by means of a dialogue between Ramakrishna and Girish; Binodini is outside of the provenance of this discussion. Ghosh, Nati Binodini, p. 67. 81 As an example of the latter, see a review of Nati Binodoni staged in Dibrugarh in Assam, based on Chittaranjan Ghosh’s script, which urges all revolutionary theatre workers (sangrami karmi) to read Binodini Dasi’s account of ‘My Life as an Actress’. At the same time, the review comments approvingly on the simultaneous play of lights in Binodini’s home and on the person of Ramakrishna in a particular scene. Deb Ranjan Dhar, ‘Bhabikaler Nati Binodini’ in Natya-lipika, Calcutta, 1973, pp. 106–8.   Almost two decades later, another critic comments on the predominance of Ramakrishna in Bina Dasgupta’s production, but adds that the bhaktirasa will make for ‘added entertainment’. Dulendra Bhowmick, Anandabazar Patrika, 19 July 1991. 82 Jagganath Ghosh, ‘Sekaler Theater’, Desh Binodon: Kolkata 300, 1989, p. 132. 83 This was not the original Star Theatre that Binodini had helped build and the one to which Ramakrishna had come, but a new theatre built by members of the original company. It was also called the Star and known as the Hathibagan Star, after its locality. The Hathibagan Star burnt down on 12 October 1991 in a suspected case of arson. 84 Robi Basu, Bartaman, 20 October 1991.

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85 Desh, 25 April 1992 (emphasis added). 86 Chattopadhyay, SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch, pp. 141–79. 87 Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre, New York: Routledge, 1988, pp. 31–2. 88 Dorothea R. French, ‘Maintaining Boundaries: The Status of Actresses in Early Christian Society’, Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 52, No. 3, August 1998, pp. 293–318. 89 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, in Jogesh C. Bagal (ed.), Bankim Rachanabali, Calcutta: Sahyita Sansad, 1361 BS/1954, Vol. 2, pp. 9–11. 90 Roop o Rang, No. 1, 18 Ashwin 1331 BS, pp. 2–3. 91 Ibid. 92 Abinashchandra Gangopadhyay, Girishchandra, 1927, repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, n.d., p. 198. 93 Swami Saradananda’s biography of Ramakrishna, Srisri Ramakrishnalila Prasange, Vol. I, Chapter 1, titled ‘Yuga prayojan’ (The Need of the Age), is summarised in Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 231, 318. 94 Apareshchandra Mukhopadhyay, Rangalaye Trish Batsar, Swapan Majumdar (ed.), Calcutta, 1972, p. 71. 95 Gangopadhyay, Girishchandra, pp. 70–1. 96 Note the fixed spatial location of hell rather than a punitive but potentially regenerative rebirth related to the fruits of karma (karmaphal). The patita-nati is often objectified as ‘an infernal vermin’ (naraker-keet); and often, she perceives herself as such. 97 Gangopadhyay, Girishchandra, p. 71 98 Utpal Dutt, Girish Chandra Ghosh, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992, p. 54. 99 Ibid., p. 55. Tiner Talwar was also written as a salute to the heroic founders of the public theatre. See also Dutt’s longer study of Girishchandra’s plays for a more impassioned defence of the playwright. Here, Dutt also questions the criteria by which canons of ‘literary history’ are formed, by trying to establish Girish’s political project in his plays and through his theatre practice: Sukumar Sen, considered to be foremost literary historian of Bangla is attacked for using ‘Victorian middleclass aesthetics and ethics’ to evaluate a ‘deshiya’ playwright as Girish Ghosh. Utpal Dutt, ‘Yuga Yantrana’, Girish Manas (Girish’s Mind), Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1983, p. 155. 100 Manoranjan Bhattacharyya, ‘Janagan o theatar’ (The People and Theatre), Theatar o Anyanya Prasanga (Regarding the Theatre and Other Matters), Dibyanarayan Bhattacharya (ed.), Calcutta: Pratikshan Publications, 1987. Bhattacharyya was a stage and film actor, critic, political worker and later, founder-member of the theatre group Bohurupee. He also played Ramakrishna in one of the many Ramakrishna films! See also Pramathanath Bishi’s introduction to Girishrachanasambhar, which emphasises the limited middle class and lower middle class appeal of Girishchandra’s plays. 101 Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga’, p. 1545. 102 Ibid., pp. 1556–7. 103 Upendranath Vidyabhushan, Binodini, Teenkari o Tarasundari (1919– 20), Calcutta: Roma Prakashoni, 1985, p. 85. (Vidyabhushan also wrote

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the biographies of Girishchandra, Amarendranath and Dwijendralal between 1919 and 1920.) In the Natyasastra, siddhi means success in performance (chapter 26), but siddhilabh is commonly used to mean success at the end of any sustained effort or enterprise. 104 Himani Bannerjee makes a persuasive case for the ‘filiation’ between Utpal Dutt and Michael Madhusudan Datta in ‘Representation and Class Politics in the Theatre of Utpal Dutt’ in The Writing on the Wall: Essays on Culture and Politics, Toronto: Tsar, 1993; see especially p. 86. 105 Technically, the rangapitha in the Natyasastra is the part of the stage indicating the actual acting space down front, that is below the stage head or the rangasirsa which made up the elevated portion. 106 Vidyabhushan, Binodini, Teenkari o Tarasundari, p. 83. 107 On the ‘astonishing cinematic mastery’ of this shot: ‘The crane movements during Gulab’s tender and hesitant movement towards a Vijay absorbed in his thoughts’ to the song ‘Aaj sajan mohe ang lagalo’, see Rajadhyaksha and Willeman (eds), Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, p. 328. The lyrics of the song were by Sahir Ludhianvi and the music by S.D. Burman. 108 Dey, Nati Binodini, p. 190. 109 Lalitmohan Chattopadhay, ‘Theatar Bidwesh’ (Hatred of the theatre), Natya-mandir, 3rd year, Sravan 1318 BS/1911. As to the question of why should there be dancing in theatre, an ingenious defense is offered: dance in the theatre has not borrowed not from the west, but was taken from Parsi Theatre; hence it is not bideshi but swadeshi! 110 Cited in Subir Ray Choudhuri, Bilati Jatra Theke Swadeshi Theatar (From the English Jatra to a Swadeshi Theatre), Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 1971, p. 79. 111 ‘The play is a travesty of history’ wrote actress Keya Chakraberty (1942–77) in her review (18 April 1969), of the 1969 production of Nati Binodini in Chittaranjan Ghosh (ed.) Keyar Boi (Keya’s Book), Calcutta: Nandikar, 1981, pp. 115–18. 112 Discussed in Bhattacharya, ‘Introduction’ in Binodini Dasi. See for example, Gupta’s Nayika o Natyamanch and Nati Binodini: Manche o sansare (Nati Binodini: On stage and at home), Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons Private Ltd., 1984; Sachindranath Bandhopadhyay Natyadeuler Binodini (Binodini in the Temple of Theatre), Calcutta: Sahitya Vihar, 1986, as also the jatra titled Bodhu Binodini (Bride Binodini). 113 I thank Arindram Chakrabarti for this last point.

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3 COUNTER SEDUCTIONS And metropolitan dysfunction

Interlocking gazes I bring together three quite different texts dating from the 1890s to the 1920s for the overarching metaphor of theatricality that they map onto the ‘urban labyrinth’ of the colonial metropolis. They are the anonymous ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’ (1890); Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘Manbhanjan’ (1895),1 later translated by the author into English as ‘Giribala’ (1915); and playwright-actor Amarendranath Dutt’s Abhinetrir Roop, first serialised in a theatre journal c. 1911.2 When Dutt adapted his novel for the stage in 1914, he translated the title as The Charms of an Actress. These interlinked compositions may be unravelled like music, following the enactment of the self in fantasy and for a real and imagined public. We track in them the movement of the female body in relation to genres, objects and urban spaces at the intersection of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. Each text foregrounds the spectatorial gaze, with or without attendant emotions, within and outside the proscenium theatre. An obsession with roop – meaning beauty, outward form, the guise, or simply the form and image – generates the movement within the texts, demarcating what I call ‘artful zones’ of urban morality. Placed in juxtaposition, they make it possible to trace a conceptual repertoire embracing values as nature, nurture, emotionality and so on, and their extension beyond the sphere of intimate emotional bonds. The actress or the ‘woman acting’ embodies both maya (ensnaring worldliness) and the cash-nexus of the colonial metropolis. Rather than offering a chronological account of social reproduction and formation through the prism of these texts, the chapter will trace the dimensions of communicative transaction, the determinants of various media and performance forms and the shifting cartography of male and female sexuality

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Figure 3.1 A letter from ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’, Majlis, 1890 Source: Majlis, Vol. 1, No. 2, Ashar 1297 BS, pp. 21–3. Author’s collection. Courtesy of Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, Calcutta

in an urbanscape and their mediated participation in the discourse of commodification. The theoretical framework for the chapter derives as much from an attention to genre and gender as it does from a consideration of some well-known global models of 19th-century urban hermeneutics. An interrogative and destabilising dimension to these global models is introduced through religion or religiosity that informed the content of the proscenium stage all over British India. It both drew on and reconfigured a variety of performance codes and modes of seeing.3 All three texts were written at least a generation after the establishment of the public theatre in Calcutta and the immediate publicity granted to actresses through bilingual advertisements, playbills

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and posters. At a purely narratological level, they show some affinity with various sub-genres of Victorian popular fiction such as ‘slum fiction’ and ‘mysteries’. Primarily, however, they testify to the hybrid genealogies of women, work and leisure in the fin-de-siècle colonial metropolis. Abhinetrir Roop stands out for its concern with working women and mobility in the city. While reinforcing many of the usual stereotypes of the prostitute-actress, it draws the reader’s attention to the alluring female body as also one that requires nurture, food, rest, security and support. It is a body which labours and is vulnerable to violence. Finally though, the text is unable to grant legitimacy to any female vocation other than the ‘naturally’ prescriptive one of the suffering good wife or, a new model of the celibate ‘sister’. The conventional ascription of promiscuity to the domestic maid (jhi) and other lower-class and lower-caste women is displaced onto the more skilled, professionally trained and economically better-off woman, whether she be an actress or a midwife. Morality is inseparable from ­mobility – in her need to travel unescorted, the irregular hours of work, and a co-sexual workplace. At the turn of the 20th century, female sexuality, women’s education and professional training continue to be interwoven in ways that are suspect. The woman’s question is far from being resolved.4 Abhinetrir Roop shows the split of the colonial Bengali entrepreneur-artist at its most acute. The strong autobiographical element in this serialised novel sharpens the implications of this split. When ‘all is lost’, the triumph of ‘the Hindu wife’ – in death – provides the only exit from the serpentine coils of the city.5 A formal narrative closure is announced by the establishing the pre-eminence of darshan – presented here as a transformative vision of the divine in the icon of Kali. It is a metaphoric (and metaphysical?) triumph over the hitherto predominating schema of incestuous and interlocking gazes that made complicit the anonymous subjects of the city. My excursion follows a chronological though not a strictly linear path. I read the anonymous tract alongside Tagore’s short story (both the Bangla text and his English translation), to propose a particular model of narcissism and voyeurism that is eventually ‘sublimated’ through transformative darshan. The last section traces the particular telos of movement, moral and physical, in Amarendranath’s novel. Its closure establishes the triumph of a Christian notion of salvation through service, even as it advertises a glimpse of ‘Ultimate Reality’ for the protagonist (and the reader) in heightened typography. Vouchsafed as darshan, the typography of the novel turns the printed font iconic. 156

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The anonymous ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’6 and the outrageous Mrs. Shil For the writer in the 21st century there is some pleasure in approaching Rabindranath Tagore in an oblique or bankim manner. I do so by yoking together the two texts from the 1890s: ‘Miss Bankimbinodinir Patra’ (Miss Bankimbinodini’s Letter, hereinafter Miss BB), published anonymously in the racy and popular journal Majlis (1890), and Rabindranath’s Bangla short story ‘Manbhanjan’ in the highbrow Sadhana (1895), a journal brought out and nurtured by the Jorasanko Tagores. The names of the journals cue us to different readerships: a get-together for entertainment (majlis) seems to preclude the idea of dedication or concentration (sadhana). Intention apart, the two pieces share an intriguing intertextuality through the pervasive metaphor of theatricality and the narcissistic female protagonist. In both, the cloistered private space is made public as the reader is invited as voyeur into the enactment of the text. In ‘Miss BB’ this is brought out explicitly through the woodcut preceding the ‘letter’ in which the writer pointedly begs the editor to please publish her likeness in the woodcut she is sending him. Tagore’s story, sans illustration, invokes more explicitly the claustrophobic, prison-like space allotted to a housewife of the urban propertied class. His 1901 novella Nashtaneer had mapped the subjectivity of its beautiful and educated heroine, Charulata, onto the different levels and spaces of the wealthy urban home, creating a complex play of interiorities. Charu, also lonely in marriage with unfulfilled yearnings, haunts us through Madhabi Mukherjee’s radiant expressivity in Satyajit Ray’s film Charulata (1964) (Figure 3.2). In both texts under consideration in this chapter, the woman’s subjectivity finds an expression in the discourse of romantic sensibility, but this is pre-coded and thus subsumed in the construction of the self almost entirely as an object of desire. In ‘Miss BB’ the subject is permitted to ‘speak’ for herself only as a clone of the heroine (nayika) in the lately arrived genre of the novel. Shall we define this heroine as ‘the novel nayika’ – ‘novel’ as to the genre and the type’s claims to novelty? The constructed name, ‘Bankimbinodini’ in Bangla, which I have hyphenated in English for clarity as ‘Bankim-Binodini’, reiterates the impulse to create beautiful and dynamic heroines epitomised in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s ouevre of historical romances in Bangla.7 Viewed suspiciously by conservatives for being ‘western’ and seductive even in its Bengali avatar, the novel generates a continuum between novel-reading women and the westernised Indian ‘Miss’ who fantasises that she is a heroine in a novel. 157

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Figure 3.2  Inner and outer spaces: Madhabi Mukherjee in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, 1964 Source: Estate of Satyajit Ray. Courtesy of Sandip Ray

Miss BB professes to be a ‘university woman’ and an avid reader of Bankimchandra’s novels. They have ‘so turned her head’, she ‘confesses’, that she is giddy with the desire to be a protagonist herself. (Shades of Emma Bovary.) She laments that she was never considered fit material for the stage. This could be interpreted to mean that either she never figured as a theme for inspiration or that she was never called upon to be an actress. As a result of her (western) education and (indiscriminate) reading, she believes she is a writer whose talents merely awaits recognition in print. She parades a host of contemporary dramatists and writers, including Swarnakumari Devi and Rabindranath Tagore, who for different reasons have ignored her. The generous sprinkling of English words in the Bangla text reinforces the oft-made charge that exposure to western education turns young women into affected creatures. The house is called ‘Kusum Kutir’, the ‘sylvan cottage’ in the city.8 As a combination of the precious and the promiscuous, ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’ is constructed somewhat differently from the long list of farces about the educated ‘Miss’ such as

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Durga De’s Chhabi (1896), Miss Bino Bibi B.A. (1898) and Encore!! 99! Srimati (1899).9 In its epistolary mode, ‘Miss BB’ draws on an existing tradition of men writing as women in letters to the journals and newspapers such as Samachar Darpan in an earlier period, sometimes to bring out the wretched plight of women. By the end of the 19th-century, the ‘confessional’ female voice in popular periodicals will be explicitly used to titillate – the subject of the following chapter. The mode of address is inflected by theatricality, as if the speaker is rehearsing a script. The subject of enunciation in the first-person letter to the editor is cast in a social role shaped in part by the expectations of the audience for whom the speech-performance takes place. The reader is invited to decode and consume this self-reflexive textuality, inscribed by the hyphenated genealogies of Bankim and Binodini. If Miss BB’s ‘accomplishments’ caricature the modern young woman, in the process they offer a deconstruction of the very magazine that ridicules her. The bouncy, teasing style of the ‘letter’ matches the general tone in Majlis. In a self-fulfilling prophecy then, ‘her’ projection of this self indeed becomes material for the readers of Majlis. If the attack is on the make-believe world of fantasy, the romance-reality dyad is never allowed to occupy a fixed position. A concession is made by suggesting a distinction between the heroine’s false consciousness and the male/female reader in the real world who is empowered to see through her delusions through the specific framing of the text. The reader sees Miss BB’s likeness in the woodcut before the printed text begins. A configuration of an intimate, almost claustrophobic, space . . . a long-haired young woman is seated on her bed, eyes downcast, in an attitude of romantic melancholy. The interior showcases the bed, the bedspread and the bolsters, picturesquely askew – emblems of her idleness, her loneliness and her inviting sexuality. She is alone and drooping, the emblem of the ‘lost’ woman. Two framed pictures, one looking suspiciously like a popular print of Chaitanya’s nagarsankirtan, and the other possibly a landscape. The round looking glass or window in the private chamber foregrounds the optics of looking out and being looked at. Miss BB traces another lineage from 19th century urban visual culture. As we know, the name ‘Binodini’ is also linked with one of the many generic beauties (sundaris) circulating in multi-media – in Kalighat patas, lithographs, oleographs and prints, placards, pamphlets and handbills. The adjective ‘bankim’ alludes to the coy play of the oblique gaze, the sidelong glance (bankim drishti or kataksha) initiated by the heroine in a game of seduction.10 Listing

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out her many skills, yet to find takers, the ‘writer’ boasts she knows well how to make the appropriate seductive turn of the neck (bankim griba). In the Kalighat patas, the Calcutta dandy is the potential consumer of the generic beauty in flesh and as image, demarcating a distance between the buyer and the product. There is no such clear demarcation in the case of the female subject when she is both the object of desire as well as the active subject, showcasing herself as a ‘desperate’ object for the reader/viewer. The complex configuration of self-­reflexivity in image and text makes it distinct from contemporary cartoons of the modern novel-reading woman who bosses over her husband, effectively turning him into a mute, subservient, labouring housewife. This was a powerful trope of role reversal which continued well into the mid-20th century, as we find in Partha Mitter’s exposition of cartoons of ‘the emancipated woman’.11 In our texts, the heroine’s narcissism lies between the interstices of education, reading habits and the presumably ungendered leisurely consumption of images of generic urban beauties. They evoke an urban audience whose sphere of visual interests would include print culture, the single ‘framed’ image in patas or oleographs, and the corporeality of the actress’s brightly costumed and ornamented body singing and dancing on stage, viewed from a certain distance. A range of optics is brought into play. Men would have greater access to each of these media, but women as consumers would also figure, albeit in a more oblique manner.

Narcissism and art The very first paragraph of Tagore’s short story ‘Manbhanjan’ (in Bangla) is an elaborate mise en scène of the princess in the tower: Giribala lives in the metropolis, but is entirely cut off from the city’s delights or horrors. Details appear like props in a play. The plot is schematic, the irony heavy-handed: a single brick has been left out at certain intervals along the length of the high wall enclosing the terrace to allow (the confined respectable woman) a glimpse of the view outside. There may not be much of a view anyway; probably more such bricked-up walls and terraces make up the skyline. Giribala, the young and stunningly beautiful wife of Gopinath can only display her charms and the throbbing desires of her youthful sexuality to the sky on the open terrace of the topmost floor of the house. Giribala is all of sixteen years, the enchanting ‘shoroshi’ celebrated in erotic poetry. She is only now discovering her womanhood, from being 160

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a child wife (balika) on whom Gopinath had once lavished his attentions, much as one would on a doll. Giribala’s beauty is fabricated by a set of ornate similes: ‘like sudden rays of light’, ‘like consciousness after sleep’, ‘like a wound that overwhelms’. Her beauty is ‘searing’, ‘wounding’, ‘ravishing’ and ‘stunning’: it ‘intoxicates’ her, just as word play, litotes, onomatopoeia, assonance and other rhetorical devices abound within the text to intoxicate the reader. Rabindranath’s verbal pyrotechnics matches the heroine’s beauty and the dazzling metaphor of theatricality that powers the story. The language also mimics the hyperbole in conventional tropes delineating beauties. In this respect, it is of a kind with the discourse of ‘Miss BB’, intertwining representation with readerly expectations. Gopinath, who has inherited his father’s wealth, is an empty-headed brute. Smitten with the charms of an actress called Lavanga, he has abandoned his wife for a life of aimless dissipation. He seeks only to impress his coterie of sycophants – mirrors to his ego. Thus far, we have the well-rehearsed narrative of 19th-century babu culture in metropolitan Calcutta. The twist in the tale occurs when, despite her husband’s interdiction, Giribala goes to the theatre and is overwhelmed by its visual and sensual delights. Here, she witnesses an ‘operatic’ version of the traditional Manbhanjan pala in jatra featuring the eternal loveplay of Radha-Krishna. (The term is explicated fully later in this chapter). Usually performed by cross-dressed itinerant players in a form known as ‘Krishna-jatra’, it has now been transplanted on the urban proscenium stage. While witnessing this reconfigured performance, Giribala fantasises playing an imperious unforgiving Radha to a repentant and pleading husband, transposed as Krishna. Once addicted to the theatre, she secretly goes there every Saturday with the help of her doting maid Sudha. Even as the springtime south wind becomes a protagonist, rustling the flowers in the pots and the flowing sari on Giribala’s body, she resolves on seducing her husband: today, she would make her lonely imaginings come alive. These dreams are shattered when Gopinath does come back one night, but only to demand the keys to the almirah. She agrees on condition that he stays the night. He refuses and finally, the frustrated and furious Gopinath strips an unyielding Giribala of all her jewellery and leaves with ‘a parting kick’. The narrator uses this moment to draw our attention to a larger aesthetic and ethical question: ‘Can kavya, drama and novels all be lies then! Can the same emotional spectator be so unfeeling a husband!’12 While the narratorial aside brings into the same literary fold the classical Sanskrit poem (kavya) with contemporary novel and drama, the allusion is to the 161

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complex tradition of rasa aesthetics in which aestheticians and their commentators have debated for centuries on the proper way of eliciting the appropriate emotion in performance and in poetry in the cultivated rasik spectator, maintaining that the aesthetic is a world distinct from everyday life.13 There is no witness and no sound made: domestic violence is silently enacted in the secluded interiors of a well-to-do urban household.14 In contrast, when Gopinath assaults a theatre actress, her screams bring the management to the scene and he is thrown out of the premises with the help of the police.15 The actress enjoys, at the very least, a commodity status in the theatre. The colonised male subject manifests his power by wreaking violence on the women he seeks to possess – whether it is his wife, or her other, the nati. The following day Giribala leaves the city, saying that she is going to her father’s – a bourgeois twist to the classical response of the khandita nayika, the angry abandoned woman. Meanwhile, in order to take revenge on the theatre management who have thrown him out for assaulting an actress, Gopinath takes away their leading lady, Lavanga, to an unknown destination. The management has to make do with a fresh recruit, but all anxieties are put to rest when the new actress turns out to be a hit. On his return to Calcutta, Gopinath is curious to see this latest sensation in a new play. In a sequence of dramatic events coded as a play within the play, the actress playing the eponymous heroine Manorama suddenly lifts her veil to reveal herself to the audience – and to Gopinath – as his wife Giribala. She elicits only rage in her husband. His outburst has nothing to do with the rasa of the play. As he is being thrown out for the second time, Gopinath can only threaten ‘I will murder her!’ The curtain on Tagore’s story drops with Giribala presumably continuing to play to the admiring gazes of the hundreds who throng the theatre. She is now a professional nati. If the fictive Miss BB’s yearnings emanate from her novel-tainted imagination, travelling from her private boudoir to the world of print, Tagore shows Giribala realising her dreams by actually going public. Is her life on stage more than a triumphant revenge as inscribed in the narrative schema? Or, is she now a public woman who can dazzle only in colourful roles, to be denied any interiority? ‘Manbhanjan’ relies on the formal features of the fairy tale working through inversion and repetition with different outcomes and substitution of characters. But it offers readings beyond the rather linear journey of the protagonist from the interior of the respectable residence to the footlights of the theatre, en stage. 162

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The political economy of desire A passage of English translation of his own story by Tagore highlights the nuances of the Bangla original. In case the reader misses the subtext of exuberance and excess in the opening paragraph presenting Giribala, Tagore sums it up in the language of surplus and capital in the third paragraph of the story: She has no children and, having been married in a wealthy family has very little work to do. Thus she seems to be daily accumulating her own self without expenditure, till the vessel is brimming over with the seething surplus. She has her husband, but not under her control.16 Both Giribala and Miss BB are not required to earn a livelihood, although Giribala is clearly as much a piece of property as is the threestoreyed mansion of the Shils. The dead father-in-law, Ramnath Shil, as the caste name suggests, was probably of an earlier generation of comprador-entrepreneurs (banians), his fortune made at a particular phase of colonialism. Following the convention of babu-narratives, the son is destined to be a wastrel. Giribala, being presented as a wife and daughter-in-law is allowed the luxury of parading her bunch of keys, that iconic marker of the Bengali matron. But time hangs heavily on her hands just as the keys hang purely in a decorative fashion from her sari end. By the end of the climactic scene in Part I of the story, where the keys assume the symbolic investiture of more than an entry into her almirah or jewel box, they have disappeared from her sari-end. Giribala awaits her husband, dressed to kill, without the least encumbrance of her housewifely status. She could be a courtesan awaiting a long-lost client-lover. She is now all ornament – as precious as the jewels that adorn every part of her body – jewels that her husband will systematically strip off her when she will refuse to hand him the key. Miss BB was explicitly presented as a ‘Miss’; both protagonists are childless and are divested of a context of kinship, familial relationship or any extended community. Giribala’s only companion is Sudha, her maid, who also appears to have considerable leisure. Giribala exists in the relentless display and admiration of her own beauty, charged with autoeroticism. The metaphor of display unravels itself by r­ e-presenting the body in discrete attributes. The list seems unending – the glance, the motion of the neck, movement of the limbs, gestures or mudras relating to the hands. Then, the coiffure, the make-up, the clothes, accessories and ornamentation, this last, especially in relation to 163

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Giribala both in ‘real life’ and later, in her stage avatar as Manorama. An explicit satire of the listing of attributes of the nayika as derived from the Sanskrit kavya tradition.17 The setting, too, is within a frame, lit up, pervaded by the sight and presence of invisible and visible human bodies and innumerable male and female gazes. ‘Home’ has already metamorphosed into the metaphor of the public playhouse that Jean Howard, in the context of the early modern stage in England, compactly evokes as a ‘place of licensed gazing, [where] men and women alike were spectacles and spectators, desired and desiring’.18 The mirroring of the gaze in the eyes of myriad spectators, visible and invisible, present and desired, in performance and rehearsal extends to mirroring as subjects. The maid, Sudha, is Giribala’s ‘Mirror mirror on the wall.’ Finally, there is the glance, the regard, in the flashing eyes of the heroine – the kataksha. That which one reads of in novels will actually be enacted before one’s eyes, on the stage proper.

Figure 3.3 ‘Can’t even shut the door when he’s lighting the fire!’ Source: Basantak, Plate 2.9, pp. 109–10

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The narratorial strategies in the respective texts suggest that both Giribala and Miss BB seek an audience only to exhibit themselves. A consonance is suggested between the female body and expression in print, in seeking only to be desired and admired, so to control those who will desire and admire them. Desire thus coded can only find a release in enacting power and romantic thralldom. This is hardly new. All beautiful women are to be feared for they are capable of ensnaring and enslaving with their beauty. The break with the conventional beauty and the motif of dissimulation as artfulness lies elsewhere. We are not told anything of Giribala’s education or as to whether she reads at all. Certainly, no book figures in the otherwise thick description that we have of her bedroom on the topmost story of Ramanath Shil’s house. It has been ‘done up’ with a lot of money but ends up more like a tawdry boudoir with framed engravings of western beauties in various stages of undress. One cannot miss the triangulation of the repressed and deflected desire of the male colonial subject who has obviously commissioned or bought the paintings. It is this mediated

Figure 3.4 ‘Manbhanjan’ in a new frame? Cartoon by Jatin Sen, n.d. Source: Jatindrakumar Sen, Briddhasya taruni bharya (The youthful wife of the old man), in Kumaresh Ghosh (ed.) Sekaler Cartoon, Calcutta: Grantha Griha, 1993 (1975), p. 9. Author’s collection

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and alienating sign of desire that pervades the intimate sanctuary of the bedroom and extends to the glitter of the theatre and its ‘false’ mimesis, with ‘false’ women playing divine beings. Tagore’s critique of the professional stage is quite explicit. But theatrical experience lies not only in the performer’s appearance or acting prowess; Tagore’s ‘Manbhanjan’ – ‘Giribala’ also offers a thesis of female spectatorship. Narcissism, when projected on stage in the erotic love-play of the archetypal lovers Radha-Krishna, loops back to activate a desire in the woman to impersonate other social female selves. Deconstructing ‘Manbhanjan’ When Rabindranath Tagore translated his short story ‘Manbhanjan’ into English, some two decades after its publication in Bangla, he called it ‘Giribala’ after the heroine. He opted for the safer title instead of retaining ‘manbhanjan’, the technical term from vaishnav aesthetics, which refers to a specific as also a recurring phase in the eternal lila between Radha and Krishna – Radha seeking revenge and Krishna appeasing Radha. Literally meaning the ‘breaking of abhiman’, overcoming through appeasement and abasement the wounded pride of one’s beloved, ‘Manbhanjan’ is also the name of a generic pala in Krishna-jatra focusing on this dimension of their relationship. The term is not confined to lovers alone; it is used affectionately in relationships that cut through generations and between kin or friends. Manbhanjan occupies a central place in the emotional life of Bengalis, male and female, and nothing brings this out better than the account (whatever be its veracity) of the redoubtable Rammohun Roy shedding tears on witnessing one such pala.19 The popularity of this theme in its primary context is attested by its recurrence in the repertoire of the Kalighat painters (patuas). Many patas show Krishna at Radha’s feet and vice versa, the iconography blurring distinctions between the urban dandy and the playful divine lover. In a secularised urban mise en scène, they show a modern day babu as a supplicant to his wife/ mistress, continuing well into the 20th century, as we saw in Jatindrakumar Sen’s cartoon above.20 ‘Manbhanjan’ thus functions as a referent in multiple ways both for the characters and for the readers. One may conjecture that Rabindranath chose to sacrifice this richly layered referent in his translation precisely because he assumed that the context, its sophisticated eroticism, juxtaposed against the crude melodrama in the commercial theatre, would be impossible to render into English. Or perhaps he was uneasy given the usual vilification of a sensual Krishna 166

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in Anglo-Indian writings. This is partly understandable, given Ward’s transliteration of the Manbhanjan-pala as ‘Manu-Bhungu’.21 An overarching linguistic and cultural anxiety may also be responsible. Translating the text in 1917, Rabindranath’s anxieties extend to common words such as ‘sari’, which has been variously rendered as ‘the garment’, ‘the robe’ and ‘blue silk’. The self-censorship at work in ‘rewriting’ his works into English is most evident in deleting all references to the particular, the topical and the interplay of cultural codes in a colonial context.22 The chequered history of Rabindranath’s engagement with the public theatre which began from 1886 onwards and included productions by Amarendranath at the turn of the century cannot be dealt with here.23 Clearly though, both Bangla and English versions makes fun of commercial theatre and its recycling of old wine. Fiction was not far off from reality: Mankunja, a youthful composition by Amarendranath Dutt was rewritten and produced on stage in 1904 as SriRadha geetinatya – one of many in this genre with cross-dressed women and songs and dances galore, ensuring a full house.24 The first play that Giribala sees on the proscenium stage is the ‘Manbhanjan opera’ re-presented. The word ‘opera’ was in currency in British India; the earliest of the operatic troupes, primarily Italian and French, began touring the subcontinent from the late 18th century. Subsequently, the word circulated in advertisements for musical plays in the vernacular public theatre. The word is pointedly used in the original Bangla story to signify that the play is a reworking of a traditional pala for the proscenium stage for a hybrid audience. Rather than evoking the rasa or bhava of Radha-Krishna’s breaking and making up in the mytho-pastoral landscape of Vrindavana, it is the urban theatre hall with its circuit of erotic energy that now provides the excitement. An additional attraction is that instead of the male impersonator of traditional jatras playing Radha, it is the actress who plays the role. The second play within the story is Manoroma, in which Giribala will substitute for the abducted actress, Lavanga. Although named after the heroine Manorama (the enchanting one), the play is a parodic replay of the manbhanjan theme: the setting is contemporary and the intention didactic. The actual manbhanjan functions as a coda to this play. In this section, Rabindranath’s translation highlights his tongue-in-cheek treatment of vaishnav padavali literature which otherwise deeply inspired his poetry throughout his life. The hero is taught a lesson after the heroine has been elevated, Cinderella-like, to a suitably high status. But in this embedded play, in contrast to the story, there is to be no real destabilising of gender 167

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equations. If anything, the ‘lacks’ of the neglected heroine will be compensated by the glamour of wealth, visible on her body, as well as the invisible patriarchal support of a lost and found wealthy fatherin-law figure. Rabindranath exaggerates and travesties the melodramatic dimensions of his own story in the play within the story. The manbhanjan motif, therefore, works dialectically in this interplay of text, performance and imaginative reconstruction. Rabindranath suggests that the feminine imagination does not need the provocation of a western or ‘westernised’ novel to gravitate towards fantasyland. Through repetitive witnessing and visual – aural consumption of not just the actress, but the entire artifice of theatre, Giribala projects her loneliness and alienation into ‘becoming’ an enchanting Radha. Her obsession turns into ‘a kind of reality’ when she metamorphoses into a public actress. Henceforth, the actress will play roles for an anonymous audience, including lumpen moneyed types such as her husband. This route is initiated as much by the padavali songs sung by her maid Sudha as it is by Giribala watching – avidly and clandestinely – the enactment of the quintessential scene of making up and surrender in the manbhanjan opera being performed in the public theatre. Her transformation has little to do with novel reading: rather, the fantasy grows in direct proportion to the tormented material conditions of her life, the spiritual emptiness of her being, the absence of an understanding other and the availability of refashioned mytho-poetic fantasies in the metropolis. From at least the early 19th century in Bengal, women were being forbidden or cautioned against watching performances of or even listening to vaishnav lyrics. The usual reason cited was the ‘obscenity’ of the erotic verses. There must have also been the threat of being corrupted by the actual presence of the female performers, who were kirtaniya or dancers of jhumur. They offered in their being and practice, alternative lifestyles and modes of livelihood.25 In ‘Manbhanjan’ these fears are apparently sanitised: first, by having the confidantemaid sing the verses. Sudha is presumably of rural origin; she may have even been handed over to her young mistress from her natal family to accompany the child bride to her in-laws in Calcutta. She is illiterate but familiar with literary conventions through oral circulation. Second, in its new incarnation for the proscenium stage as ‘opera’, the traditional material has apparently been ‘refined’. But the story makes it clear that it is very potent material. At least in relation to the material conditions – of oppression, seclusion and isolation – within which women such as Giribala live. Rabindranath plays with the permeability of the performance-material itself: Is ‘Manbhanjan’ on stage, 168

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religious or secular? Is it pure spectacle? Metaphysical or physical? Subtle or gross? Spiritual or sensual? In provoking these questions, was he also offering a story of origins? Who is the stage actress? Where does she come from? Or put another way, what kind of a woman is, or becomes, the stage actress? By taking us step by step through the emergence of an actress: from the desolate and abandoned Mrs. Shil (Junior) to the anonymous debutante who becomes a hit, Rabindranath was, at one level, reworking the charge of original sin laid usually laid on the actress – her dark, obscure origins, and the lack of the name of a father. In his English translation, Rabindranath elaborates on why Gopinath refused to grant Giribala permission to go to the theatre: But the woman to whom her husband Gopinath has surrendered himself as a slave is Lavanga, the actress, who has the reputation of playing to perfection the part of a maiden languishing in hopeless love and swooning on the stage with an exquisite naturalness . . . Giribala had often heard from him about the wonderful histrionic powers of this woman and . . . had greatly desired to see Lavanga on the stage. But . . . Gopinath was firm in his opinion that the theatre was a place not fit for any decent woman to visit. (emphasis added)26 This brings us to the third question: What then of the acting woman already inscribed as a nati in the narrative, who has no speech, who we never encounter face-to-face and of whose subjectivity there is no trace?

The ‘charred stick’ ‘Lavanga, the actress’ is first mentioned as the object of Gopinath’s attentions, and eventually as the woman to whom Gopinath has enslaved himself, leaving his beautiful young wife at home. The next round of mediation is through Sudha who has already established herself as Giribala’s greatest (and sole) admirer. Sudha’s report of Lavanga goes beyond objectification: she describes the actress as ‘a charred stick in a woman’s clothes’.27 Lavanga, she tells Giribala, is so grotesquely ugly that she merely masquerades as ‘woman’. Focalised through Sudha, the perspective is not unlike that on boys playing damsels in jatra, whom a contemporary English writer described as ‘sooty fairies of the Bengali stage’.28 The ridiculous name of the actress 169

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(Lavanga means clove) highlights her pretentions to class, caste and beauty, but also her objectified status. The contradiction of the urban proscenium stage was that it was forced to depend on the conventional low-class/caste entertainer-prostitute from whose ranks stage actresses were drawn. The language of excess, of hyperboles and defamiliarisation is also Sudha’s, who first brings an account of her rival to the closeted Giribala. In the original Bangla text, the narrator never refers to Lavanga as an actress. Her performance is described as exaggerated, false and ridiculous: she emits nasal cries like an animal (dak chharito) and pants loudly to indicate theatrical grief and passion. Her performance brings forth cries of ‘Excellent!’ from crude patrons like Gopinath, who can only respond to excess. After her first excursion to the theatre, Sudha comes back with a sweeping denunciation of all actresses (abhinetridiger). She then points out to the particular woman (tahar or her, presumably Lavanga) when appealed to for the second time for reassurance. When Giribala transgresses her husband’s command and ventures to the theatre, her experience is quite different. When she sees Lavanga on stage, possibly because of her own immersion in role-playing, she can see her rival only as part of a mythical tableau. Giribala ‘sees’ an exquisite Radha being haughty to a subservient Krishna. In doing so, she transgresses the protocol of darshan which requires an interactive exchange between the icon and the deity: Giribala is so engrossed in imagining herself as the ‘flesh and blood’ Radha on stage that Lavanga – either as actress or as woman – merits a moment’s consideration in her thoughts, and therefore, in the story. What Giribala will see on stage is a mytho-fantasy: ‘a chorus of beautifully dressed natis’ (the word is used for the first time here) dressed as the beautiful cowherding women of Vrindavana. These ‘Brajangana’ (damsels of Braja) . . . ‘began dancing to the music as the theatre reverberated to the applause of the spectators and the blood in Giribala’s youthful body responded in a madness of passion’. The response is worth noting, for it cuts through the established canon of the male gaze, upon which most of the contemporary anti-theatrical diatribe was based. A respectable woman spectator is ‘turned on’ by the circuit of charged emotions, moving back and forth between sight to sound and odour, of performers and spectators. Her response would confirm the worst fears of those critics who feared that respectable women would forswear all restraint if they caught the theatre bug. Giribala’s response is mediated by her infatuation with the theatre and what it promises, in contrast to the sterility and violence of 170

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her own conjugal life. Sudha, her maid, shies away from this illusory world. Rabindranath hints as much when he uses the word moh to indicate Giribala’s own state of illusion in wanting to make her husband weep at her feet. She is intoxicated by the sensuousness of the theatre, the illusion generated by performance, and obsessed with the possibility of conquest through seduction. The repeated use of words such as moh, nesha, maya, maya-sinhasan and mayamandita in the Bangla text finally embraces an entire class of spectators and consumers who run after illusionary and addictive pleasures and imitate without understanding. Not surprisingly, Giribala is completely enthrallled at the possibility of ‘making alive’ these pleasures for the admiring gaze of the audience. It seems to be the very opposite of the drudgery of domesticity or the intimacy of companionate love. From her perspective it is certainly not linked to work! We next hear of Lavanga when she is rehearsing for her next play where she will play Manoroma. It is at this juncture that Gopinath ‘takes her away’ on a boat trip to punish the management for having him thrown out of the hall. And that is the last we hear of Lavanga. The new actress – who will turn out to be Giribala – takes centre stage. There is no indication that Lavanga was anything other than an object of temporary infatuation for Gopinath: he was thrown out for ‘molesting’ another actress in the greenroom. The actress with the exotic, sensual name of Lavanga or fragrant clove – consumed as a mouth freshener by performers and dandies, idle men in pursuit of bought sex – is made to exit well before the story ends. In Tagore’s ‘Manbhanjan’, the professional actress is the most disembodied of the characters. If instead, it is Sudha aka Sudharani the maid who emerges as the only ‘embodied’ character in Rabindranath’s story, we may speculate why this is so. She is a mirror to Giribala’s narcissism. In her troubadour-like singing of praises to her mistress and gestures such as caressing her feet (also a referent to the traditional frieze of manbhanjan, i.e. Krishna begging forgiveness at Radha’s feet), she becomes a substitute lover. Rabindranath hints at what Ismat Chughtai was to develop more frankly in her short story ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt) (1942), where the child narrator barely comprehends but intuitively senses the lesbian relationship between the beautiful and neglected Begumsahiba, whose husband is involved with other men, and her ugly but indispensable maid. Sudha also plays the duti, the traditional companion and messenger between Radha and Krishna. The duti’s role was a critical one in the traditional Krishna-jatras, which preceded and overlapped with the proscenium stage. Invariably, the best male performer played 171

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the duti and doubled as the troupe leader. Even in early 20th century, Neelkantha Adhikari (Mukhopadhyay) was praised extensively for his rendering of Vrinda-duti in the ‘Manbhanjan pala’.29 When Giribala was still sufficiently ‘bound’ by her husband’s prohibitions, she had sent Sudha to the theatre to check out Lavanga. It was Sudha who escorted her mistress to the theatre when Giribala’s ‘jealous curiosity’ impelled her to see her rival. Her efforts during and after the first play, Manbhanjan, to bring Giribala back to the reality of her social status and her dependence on her husband were overruled by the latter. Giribala, says Rabindranath, was now in another realm, where ‘society was suddenly freed from its laws of gravitation’.30 Sudha is brushed aside, and in the climax to Part I ceases to be Giribala’s confidante. Giribala chooses to keep her humiliation to herself and is absolutely alone – free too, from all constraints of her wifely identity. The lower-class servant woman, working for wages, frank and outspoken, with her regional repertoire of oral/folk/devotional pieces was often constructed as a foil to the middle-class ‘educated’ and therefore alienated bhadramahila, or the uneducated and ill-treated wife, a virtual prisoner of the zenana.31 The Indian woman as a living carrier of the best of indigenous tradition naturally assumed greater importance in the Swadeshi era, just as her speech, from being considered ‘rustic’ or ‘uneducated’ became cherished precisely for those reasons by nationalist thinkers. Although Rabindranath wrote the Bangla story before the Swadeshi era, Sudha’s spontaneous and natural expression through songs and proverbs contrasts sharply with the absurd mannerism of the heroine on stage and Giribala’s untiring admiration of self. Unlike the ‘precious’ mistress, the maid with her repertoire of indigenous poetry, rhymes, songs and tales embodies an ‘art-less’ living sub-text. There was besides a well-developed type in the public theatre’s repertory that Rabindranath must have been familiar with. The jhi or the servant-maid was invariably presented as a saucy ‘character’ on stage. First-generation actresses such as Khetramoni (d. 1903) made a mark in such roles, on occasion, impressing English visitors to the theatre with feisty body language and delivery. Off stage too, there was indeed a person called the ‘theatarer jhi’, mentioned in Chapter 1. If Sudha is the only ‘real’ person, all the rest are ‘performing’ in a world where they are in search of roles and audience. Gopinath’s drawing room is a stage of sorts, the audience his band of parasitical cronies. Their adulation stirs him to re-invent and, in Tagore’s words, ‘surpass himself’ every day. The masculine space of the baithak-khana 172

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(salon) was indeed fashioned to showcase the wealth, wit and hospitality of the host. Once Gopinath becomes a habitué of the theatre world and leaves off coming home, his wife sights him in the theatre hall, as a member of a drunk and boisterous set of the audience. This set, categorised as the pseudo-westernised and frivolous rich, had early been satirised in plays like Dinabandhu Mitra’s Sadhabhar Ekadoshi (1868). Tagore moved the battle of class, gender and of representation itself, right onto the stage. In the climax in Part II of the play, ‘Manoroma’ (the former Mrs Gopinath Shil) ‘slightly bending her neck, shot a fiery glance of exultation at her husband’.32 She is at home on the stage while he is denied admittance, for all the democracy of a ticketed entry. He has become a threat to the management’s latest asset. Rabindranath treads a fine line between celebrating his heroine’s desire for liberation and her exhibitionism. Giribala is not just rehearsing for husband Gopinath, although she might well have done the latter. Patriarchy ruled that only a husband could comprise a legitimate audience to his wife’s accomplishments. Indeed, by the turn of the century, conduct books were advising wives that it was their duty to entertain their husbands; they had only themselves to blame if they lost out to professional entertainers. (I discuss this in the next chapter in relation to the ‘accomplishment curricula’.) The transformation of Giribala is incipient. From the opening paragraph it is clear that she is an ‘actress’ waiting in the wings. She is primarily interested in having an extended stage to show off her beauty, her body, her self. Enthralled by her own beauty, her only desire is to possess and enslave. The bedroom and the extended terrace function as sets, where she is perpetually engaged – between bouts of ennui – in rehearsing with a synaesthetic field of colour, scent, season, costume and jewels, visual and aural effects. Giribala has the erotic teasing gestures of the professional courtesan though the only man she has sexually known is her brutish husband. In the absence of mentors or an appropriate environment there is not much else that the courtesan did cultivate that the 19th-century urban housewife may also cultivate. According to the injunctions of alankarshastra, the former is required to match her constructed self with the season, the waxing and waning of the moon, the time of day and night. She is herself the craftsman and the jewel. In the course of the very first visit to the theatre, Giribala loses herself in the overwhelming sensuousness of the theatre hall, lights, music, the sight of other faces, bodies and gazes, the gilt frame of the stage, the scenery, the dramatic pauses between the Concert’s loud music. As she lets go of fear, caution, loses her awareness of others in the audience, in a disenchanted 173

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retracing of Radha’s abhisar or tryst, she finds something like a sexual release in the artifice of performance. Her theatrical experience seals a fundamental absence of ‘feelings’ in the desiring subject. I come back then to my own question about ‘Manbhanjan’ being a story of origins. Is Rabindranath re-defining the ‘real actress’ in terms of Giribala’s narcissism and projection of herself as another? Is he also suggesting that alienation is indispensable to the ‘true actress’? It is just that these narratives of alienation in Giribala’s case happen to coincide, rather happily, with a fit punishment for an owner-husband who cannot value properly what he legitimately owns and might possess.

Figure 3.5 The charms of the metropolis. Statesman & FOI, 5 January 1884 Source: The Statesman Ltd., Calcutta

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The consistent advertising of ‘Zenana Boxes’ and special rates for these boxes by a range of theatre companies33 indicate the regular attendance of ‘respectable women’ to the public theatre. Bhakti apart, we may attribute their presence to a desire to move out of the confines of the home and the chores of domesticity; a desire to display herself ‘dressed up’; as well as an active desire on her part for experiencing visual sensual pleasure.

Locale Our final text, Amarendranath’s Abhinetrir Roop (hereinafter AR), showcases a society where, with the exceptions of two female icons of self-less service, rapacious competitiveness is all. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator even comments on the cannibalism rampant amongst the characters.34 Fathers and mothers, instead of acting as protectors, turn to prey on their children or beget monsters who seek in turn to destroy others as well as their own parents. The inversion of ‘natural roles’ cuts across class lines. Encompassing the entire gamut of a Balzacian novel – debts, frauds, lawsuits, bankruptcy, suicide and murder – AR could be read, in line with the author’s intention, as a devastating exposé of the colonial metropolis. The 1914 advertisement for the dramatised version of AR described it a ‘Realistic Society Play’. This alone would not warrant our attention, for there was already a century-long history internal critique of Bengalis critiquing Calcuttan babu culture. Mocking, ironic and hardhitting in turns, these ranged from sketches (naksha) to tracts, doggerel verse and, of course, farces and ‘social dramas’.35 Amarendranath’s senior and contemporary, Girishchandra Ghosh, had successfully experimented with a wide range of genres, ranging from geetinatyas to mythologicals; he had also introduced Bhakti on stage with great flair and publicity, but had also outlined the nexus between social relations and money in ‘social dramas’ like Haranidhi (1889) and Prafulla (1889).36 Haranidhi’s plot revolves around litigation, whoring, drinking, warrant, jail, exploitation of the poor; and, at the heart of Prafulla is a ruinous fratricidial dispute. There are several features that distinguish AR from others of this genre. For one, it is a novel of urban movement, involving actual scenes of tracking and discovery and descent into obscure quarters. The narrator, whose tone shifts between heavy-handed didactic pronouncements and a casual almost impersonal stance, leads the readers through layers of the colonial city, through different strata, and its heterogeneous constituencies – ethnic and professional. Amarendranath’s 175

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own class affiliations and his deep involvement with the theatre world at various levels enabled him to realise far more acutely than any of his contemporaries the devastating effects of colonial economy for any cultural activity or, indeed, for any human interaction. AR’s ­automaton-like protagonist is a ‘nouveau-babu’, newly initiated into the primrose path, having recently come into property. Unlike the usual trajectory of degradation or the rake’s progress, he is shown for the greater part of the novel to function as if in a trance, without reason, discrimination and sensibility, and entirely at the mercy of his sycophants. Nalini is neither a victim turned schemer like Moll Flanders, nor a passive romantic dreamer longing to consume in the manner of Madame Bovary – heroines marking different phases of capitalism in the western novel.37 His passive but rapid descent into ruin makes of him a focaliser through whom the ‘mysteries’ of the city can be exposed. This exposure is not in the manner of Mayhew in Victorian England, or even Reynolds – the dark underbelly of London as Babylon.38 Nalini seems animated only at the very end, when repentance is subsumed into a Christian trajectory of salvation. The object of Nalini’s erotic attention and therefore, the ‘cause’ of his degradation, is the actress called Nirupama, the ‘incomparable’. Another remarkable feature of this formulaic novel is the attention given to the material conditions of an actress’s life. Narratorial comments on Nirupama’s work at the theatre, rather than a generic description of the theatre world, often emerge in unexpected subtle touches. Returning from home from the show, she is so famished that she falls on the meagre meal waiting for her, even before she can be informed about the transaction regarding her new patron. An anecdote in Amarendranath’s biography highlights his attention to work conditions and concern for hungry chorus girls whose rehearsal timings have been extended in order to hastily mount a new production.39 Although finally reduced to a stereotype, the initial chapters portray Nirupama with a degree of sympathy. The theatre is both a workplace and an escape, granting her some hours of forgetfulness from the horrors of her ‘home’, unvaryingly represented as ‘hellish’.40 Nirupama herself voices the ambivalence about the place of theatre in social life and the place of actresses in society. ‘I came to the theatre at the age of eight,’ she tells her lover. ‘I was raised there, and made a place for myself in the market by virtue of my training. Were it not for the theatre, we would not have met each other.’ But she is also afraid that ‘people will blame the theatre’ for bringing about the ruin of young men, destroying relationships; after all, it is a place where women are displayed as commodities.41 Nalini consoles her by saying 176

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that sacred sites such as places of meditation and pilgrimage and temples also function as places of illicit assignations: why single out the theatre for censure?42 Her defence of theatre extends to the moral efficacy of plays on audience as well as the ‘models’ they provide to the actress and of course, the audience. When Nalini confesses his burden of debt, Nirupama urges him to apply to his wife for her jewels, for she alone can save him from imminent ruin. Her faith in his wife, of whom she knows nothing, is based entirely on the roles she has played of the ideal wife: I have played many roles in numerous plays and I have understood that the heart of a woman who is devoted to her husband (pativrata ramani) can never be the basis of deception. In whatever miserable condition you may choose to keep her, however you may ill-treat her, and however miserable you make her, yet she is still yours. In times of crisis she will give up for you every drop of blood in her heart – this I know well. I have learnt this lesson whilst I was in the pure sanctuary of the theatre – the natyamandir.43 Yet Nirupama is willing to give up this cherished (and sacred) refuge for Nalini and accompany him to Munghyr: ‘What can I not do for you?’ she declares rhetorically.44 Autobiographical and other accounts of the lives of actresses indicate that such hiatuses were usually temporary, the pull of the stage invariably overcoming all other considerations.45 The privileging of the theatre as a workplace is not without ambivalence, for it is because of her actress skills that Nirupama’s sexual attractiveness is given a fillip. Within a matrilineal structure, she is regarded primarily as a source of income, a ‘rojgarey meye’ – an earning woman. Her mother and sister, who make up the family, feed on her. Therefore, although the theatre is repeatedly described as a workplace and the actress as a waged employee requiring skill and dedication, Nirupama’s primary identity, as it emerges in AR, is that of a prostitute (the pimps being the mother and sister). She is one who ensnares men with her beauty and seductive powers: voice, gaze, movement, costume and ornaments. Even her work – acting – has ultimately to do with her ‘natural’ qualities of being good at deception (chhalana). Paradoxically, it is on stage, in playing the good wife that she learns that such a creature exists! Amongst the few symbolic topographical shifts in the novel – the one from Calcutta to Kashi (the favoured name for Benaras) is noteworthy.46 Both Nalini, as also the narrator, simultaneously affirm 177

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the sacred aura of Kashi and therefore, its difference from the modern metropolis, even as they interrogate the segregation between the sacred and the secular. Despite the extravagant vows exchanged by the lovers by the sacred Ganga at Kashi, the affair is over by chapter 11 of the novel. When Nirupama’s mother abandons her and steals the last of the daughter’s jewellery, it is in Kashi that the former seeks refuge. The final destination and the final act are linked: the most sacred of locations requires capital for the cultivation of spirituality, as penance for a sinful life.47 The binary of prostitute and housewife is often destabilised: Nalini is ‘amazed’ at Nirupama’s ‘housewifely qualities’ when she packs up for their journey to Kashi. Besides the protagonist’s flight and recovery in Almora in the Himalayan hills (hallowed by Vivekananda’s aura), most of the novel is set in Calcutta, with several references to red-light districts. Amarendranath composes his serialised novella with intercutting ‘shots’, in the manner of cinematic juxtaposition and montage. It could be argued that the latter also constitutes the essence of urban experience – of glimpses, of visitations and the possibility of stories that chance encounters may provoke or disclose. Of course, as Robert McFarland argues in his reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘Das öde Haus’ (The deserted house), the urban text may finally prove to be ‘indecipherable’.48 Voyeurism, spying, fantasising, witnessing through sight and overhearing are techniques that appear in pulp fiction and romantic fiction dealing with the underworld, inspired in part by the ‘mysteries’ of 19th-century Europe, most notably Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842–43).George W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (first series, 1844–46) was not only a bestseller in Victorian England; it also ‘enjoyed an international circulation in French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations’.49 Less known, but significant for my emphasis here on the hybridising of genre and gender, was the great popularity in British India of writers like Reynolds, Maria Correlli and other practitioners of the Gothic, the romance and the detective genre. Priya Joshi points out, Reynolds, in particular, was ubiquitous in the colonial period. His novels were translated, adapted, with gusto in a number of Indian languages: The Seamstress was adapted in 1877 into Marathi . . . Mysteries of London (itself a bowdlerised ‘homage’ to Eugene Sue’s Mystères de Paris) was a favorite in Hindi and Bengali (where imitations D. N. Paul’s Mysteries of Calcutta appeared as late as 1925); was held in highest esteem by Tamil novelists.50 178

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Joshi argues that ‘The well-made universe of Western realism was both alienating and defamiliarizing to a colonial reader, who turned to a more familiar, antirealist literary landscape for pleasure: that of melodrama, romance, and the gothic.’ This argument is persuasive only in part: it is not as if ‘the Indian mind’ gravitates naturally towards the latter. As the following analysis suggests, there were/are forms of urban ‘hell’ spelt out in terms of the disjunctions between ‘work’, ‘inactivity’ and money, that certain ‘magnified’ literary forms, such as the those mentioned above, were capable of containing.51 There was a fit, however implicit, between socio-economic conditions and the chosen genre. A plethora of cheap publications refracted contemporary anomalies into ready-made mazes of ‘mysteries’, ‘secrets’ and serialised detective fiction.52

. . . and the lens AR opens with visual seduction: Nalini, a young man who is heir to considerable fortune, newly married, with a six-month-old son, is smitten by an actress by the third scene of a play he has come to see with his crony, Khitish. The latter watches Nalini devouring the actress with his gaze. The gaze encompasses complicity, seduction, consumption and transaction, becoming a metaphor of movement of bodies and currency. The text abounds in detailed references to money in all forms of transaction. In the very first pages we are given the prices of various categories of theatre tickets as well as the exact terms and conditions of the contractual agreement initiating ‘the affair’ between Nalini and Nirupama. Nirupama is yet to return from the theatre when her mother strikes a deal with Khitish and Nalini, with Khitish acting as the go-between. (We learn that Khitish and Nirupama’s mother had been unsuccessful in negotiating an earlier deal with a babu for the daughter.) Nirupama’s elder sister who combines seductive prowess with business skills facilitates the transaction. The implication is that she is no more than a professional prostitute or prototypes of the scheming procuress. The terms and conditions, similar to that for prostitutes – a bandha or contractual agreement for a fixed period – includes a monthly allowance of Rs. 150, six months to be paid in advance and jewellery of specified design and weight. In chapter 6, anxious about losing the currency that an available, or emotionally unattached Nirupama represents, the elder sister comes to tell the latter that their mother is on her deathbed. The sister plays the grief-stricken daughter well enough to deceive even the professional actress Nirupama, who is then locked up at home. Khitish’s daughter’s 179

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marriage is also depicted predominantly as an economic transaction, with caste taking a token place. Nalini seeks a short-term affair, ‘apatoto’, for now, is what he says. His automaton-like role stems from a certain bhadralok fear of pollution from financial transactions; Khitish carries the cash and negotiates the contract. Nalini’s naiveté about cash or his reluctance to deal with it has serious consequences that are highlighted later in the exchanges with the sharp businessmen and moneylenders, represented as ethnic others – Marwari, Punjabi, Gujarati, Parsi – also residents of colonial Calcutta.53 In fact, many of the famous Bengali theatres were financed and built by these ‘others’: Pratapchand Johuree and Gurmukh Rai being the oft-named duo. Despite abounding in stereotypes, AR surprises the reader with curious displacements. So the stereotypical money-grubbing attributes of a contemporary urban prostitute are slowly manifested in Khitish who, in other respects, possesses all the attributes of a bhadralok: he is educated, upper caste, with a family and a taste for western vices such as drinking and dining in fashionable restaurants. The narrator did warn us that ‘we shall be seeing Khitish in multiple guises’. In Khitish, Amarendranath creates a parasitic Pandarus who is worldly wise and self-serving, completely opportunistic. In his chameleon-like role, he plays the companion-confidant, pimp, agent, private secretary, errand boy and benefactor; sometimes, enacting a caricature of the ‘duti’ – the self-less female friend who acts as the go-between, as in Vrinda-duti of the Radha-Krishna lila. In a reversal of the wife having to regard her husband as god, no matter how he may behave towards her, Khitish tutors Nalini on the kind of men actresses desire: actresses desire men who are ‘smart, vivacious and witty’. It wouldn’t do for Nalini to be ‘shy’. Nalini is obliged to swill brandy to summon up courage and loosen his inhibitions. The reader is afforded a quick inspection of Niru through the shutters as she enters her home through his gaze. She returns his gaze and checks out her new man – a transaction in which she has so far had little choice. But Khitish is no duti. A product of his times: he derives voyeuristic pleasure in looking at the lovers as if they are characters in a play, but without any emotional investment. His cynical asides strip them of ‘personhood’. Thoughts of his own wellbeing predominate, although he claims that he is doing what he does only to support his family. This split subjectivity finds an extension in the narrator’s tone, when, on the return of the ‘hero’ (nayak) and ‘heroine’ (nayika) to the ancestral garden estate (bagan bari), ‘the waves dance’ and ‘the very statues come to life’. The sarcasm continues as the affair is consummated: 180

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‘The ancestral garden estate which had been so carefully preserved for so long, was finally sanctified.’54 Contemporary audiences would have relished the autobiographical reference: smitten by her role as one of Bankimchandra’s heroines, a youthful Amarendranath had abducted and lived with debutante actress Tarasundari in his ancestral gardenhouse. There, he had formed the ‘Indian Dramatic Club’ with friends and hangers-on, as a prelude to his entry the world of commercial theatre.55 The garden retreat is one of several ‘zones of artifice’. The topos echoes a literary tradition of representing these retreats along the river, initially set up by Europeans and emulated by wealthy Bengalis, as sites of staged weekend licentiousness – real-life theatre, as it were.56 Nalini travels the usual path of the rake’s progress: extravagant expenditure, accumulation of parasitic cronies, overwhelming debts and loans and imbrication in litigation for and against. We find in the last, another allusion to the publicised lawsuits in Amarendranath’s own theatre career. It is not clear whether adulterous love is meant to be the cause or effect. If Nalini is destined to be ‘saved’, Amarendranath makes a departure in the case of Khitish, as the latter ‘reveals himself’ to be worse than a (female) prostitute. The early chapters set him up as a rogue who manipulates innocence and desire into greater levels of corruption for his own pleasure and monetary gain. Gradually, he is embroiled in his own game. The narratorial voice sometimes merges with Khitish’s; elsewhere, as in his excessive enactment of grief to news of Nirupama’s abduction, he is compared to a monkey.57 In the later sections where the Khitish succumbs to the seduction of an attractive woman Chandra (the moon), the narrator puns on the name, suggesting his gullibility. Khitish might well be an indictment of Amarendranath’s own self-devouring class. Of Nirupama we are told that hers is ‘still a woman’s heart, not hardened like a prostitute’ – a remark that surfaces as a refrain at various stages of the narrative from the otherwise cynical narrator. The narrator vouches for Nirupama’s honesty when she declares her love for Nalini, even if it is expressed in the throes of drunkenness. Through the all too familiar stereotyping of scheming women of the underworld, AR brings out, albeit crudely, the financial and physical vulnerability of women who entertain and sell their bodies. The elder sister abandons her mother to live with a younger lover; it is suggested that the lover is supported by her. Nirupama abandons her mother for her love for Nalini, returns to her mother, and again abandons her for the unworthy and brutish Natabar. She is abused and abandoned by two of her lovers. Chapter 12 has a surreal moment 181

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when the prodigal daughter feeling betrayed by her lover returns to the abandoned mother in the dead of night. This is the silent sleeping metropolis. At that very moment the mother lies dreaming of a violent struggle with her daughter over their sole capital – a box of jewels and cash. It is a premonition of her final abandoning of Nirupama. The mother-daughter relationship is shot through with suspicion, fear and anxiety: they are competitors to the end. After welcoming her daughter back home, she dresses her up like a fatted calf for slaughter. Now entirely in her mother’s hands, Nirupama becomes entirely a bazar commodity.58 The rupture proves irreversible. Amarendranath is unsparing in the depiction of the passive males, pimps and other middlemen – often bhadralok in respectable professions – who prey on working women. He brings together Nirupama the actress and Hirabai the baiji, representing two different traditions in overlapping eras operating in the same city (see ‘Postscript’). Both are performing women who work with a limited amount of capital – looks, youth, contacts, and performing skills – and almost no social security. Once this capital exhausted, she is as much a victim as her potential clients. Moreover, she has limited forms of exercising her choice, especially in the choice of male patrons. Chandra marks a break from the female entertainer: with her earnings as a midwife, she has the power to help her ex-lover’s wife. It is her profession which is projected as infamous, although within less than a decade we come across unapologetic advertisements by women doctors who speak openly about their midwifery skills.59 The novel attempts an exploration of sexual passion against the compulsions of livelihood and the inexorable playing out of the will to live. With a few exceptions, all human relationships – biological, professional and otherwise – are vitiated. The men are either passive and automaton-like creatures, schizoid, often suicidal and deranged or active and scheming, initiating and enabling violent transactions. Nalini is a rake with a difference: he is passive and enervated, living in a state of perpetual premonition, waiting for annihilation. In contrast to the travails of the workplace, AR abounds in scathing descriptions of idle and narcissistic would-be-dandies: in chapter 8, the narrator mocks the attempts of the foppish dilettantes (saukheen babusampraday) at setting up an amateur ‘concert party’ and theatricals.60 Dutt’s farce ‘Theater’ (1900) had similarly mocked those bhadralok who claim a high moral ground by virtue of their ‘amateur’ status. They are as corrupt as those professionals (peshadari) – male and female – who are placed at the lowest end of the spectrum.

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The ‘Cosmic Actress’/‘Cosmic Player’ In the three texts considered in this chapter, the male protagonist is either absent, or when present, is reduced to a pitiable automaton-like role. Steve Neale alerts us to ‘The contradiction between narcissism and the law, between an image of narcissistic authority on the one hand and an image of social authority on the other.’61 In the first two texts, narcissism and narcissistic identification of the female protagonist with the heroine in print as well as with the heroine on stage are linked to fantasies of omnipotence and control. The female character/ persona desires other males, she wishes to be an object of desire, and she is ‘desperately’ in need of a public affirmation. Tagore’s story constructs a meta-narrative revealing its ‘means of production’: the unveiling by Giribala/Manorama at a climactic moment in the play is also an unveiling, rather than a veiling over, its ideological construction. In this sense, it moves away from feminist readings of classical Hollywood cinema. Notwithstanding this sophisticated treatment, prior to Giribala’s metamorphosis, Tagore can only represent the professional actress as a ‘charred stick’ with no histrionic talent and certainly no history. Giribala herself is imprinted as a fetishised beauty. Interestingly, neither Tagore’s nor Dutt’s text traces the disintegration of an image of an omnipotent masculinity. Rather, they begin with the apparently powerful (and wealthy) young male marked already as a site of helplessness and implied impotence, either in the thrall of cheap ‘bazar’ seduction or open to manipulation by their male sycophants who score over the gold-digging prostitute-actress in denuding the hero of health, wealth and social status. This could be read as a critique of hyper-masculinity in ‘Manbhanjan’/‘Giribala’ – the swaggering husband who has no active role in the economy other than as a vacuous consumer. AR is far more ambivalent: Nalini’s gaze is never controlling, his silence is not one of powerful disdain. Khitish, the male sycophant, is not only rendered impotent, materially and sexually in AR, but is sexualised as the helpless female. There is no social law other than the norms of retrenched patriarchy. Litigation over property that sunders family members and familial ties is shown as thriving in the legitimate realm of colonial law.62 Fratricide and parricide define socio-economic relations among the wealthy. At the level of the plot, punishments are doled out to transgressing women in suitably gruesome combinations: sedation and rape, kicking to death, disfigurement and death by sexually transmitted disease and so on. The portrayal of violence between

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the women and later, against Nirupama, Hirabai and Chandra is horrific, lingering well after the usual sops have been handed out to penitents in the text. Only the faithful and suffering wife is allowed a lingering but pure death. Durga is the ultimate ‘Hindu ramani’ (printed in bold type) whose commitment to her husband makes her supremely sacrificing. She is a ‘sati kulanari’ – ‘the only treasure that is still left for the Hindu to be proud of’.63 If Nalini was smitten by the outward manifestation of beauty (drishya) of the prostitute-actress, repentance is transmuted to reward as he is vouchsafed a vision (darshan) of the archetypal cosmic dancer, goddess Kali – the ‘cosmic actress’ (visva-abhinetri).64 The vision is granted at the end of a catachestic session in which he continues to be mute, presumably struck dumb with remorse. At a related level, it is only the chaste single woman in service of mankind, called ‘Sister Aparajito’ (the invincible), who can serve as a mediating force between this world and another. To reiterate my earlier argument, although the iconic image is of Kali, salvation for the protagonist is spelt out along the lines of Christian or missionarised notions of disinterested charity and service – also adopted by organisations such as the Ramakrishna Mission. The ills of colonial capitalism, of which there is no direct critique in the AR, and the failure of supposedly modern cultural institutions such as the professional theatre ‘run’ by Indians, though entirely subject to colonial law, are both embodied in the persona of the actress. Despite intermittent allusions to her ‘common humanity’ – a trope that will also surface rhetorically in the speeches by the actresses in Chapter 5 – and the rare flashes of subjectivity accorded to her, Nirupama is cast as abject, diseased and deranged. She can neither be integrated through marriage into society, nor be celebrated as a talented actress, as often was the case in Victorian fact and fiction. This aspect fits quite well with Laura Mulvey’s description of ‘voyeurism [and its] associations with sadism’ and the way the entire narrative of sadism occurs ‘in a linear time with a beginning and an end’.65 If ‘Miss Bankim-Binodinir Patra’ encourages misogynist humour at the expense of the single, educated and hopelessly isolated but sexually inviting woman, Tagore’s ‘Manbhanjan’ is only partly successful in inverting many of the normative categories it plays with, including that of the sexually abused ‘housewife’ and the sexually available ‘actress’. Abhinetrir Roop, or The Charms of an Actress, which Dutt advertised as a ‘realistic society drama’, subverts every problematic question it raises regarding male and female sexuality, the relationship of gender, 184

Figure 3.6 The Charms of an Actress, Advertisement, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1914 Source: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 December 1914, Col. III, (Town Edition), No. 199, p. 3. Collage by author

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class and ethnicity to labour, and the economy of desire in a colonial metropolis. With its sensational construction and its unabashed voyeurism, Abhinetrir Roop sets the agenda for the public theatre well into the 20th century. In this life and the next it is only dysfunctional conjugality that triumphs, however marred by alienation, violence and contempt at the level of emotional and social relations, and in its many brutalisations. The theatre as an urban workplace has no place in these texts.

Notes 1 ‘Manbhanjan’ was first published in Baisakh 1302 BS/1895. The English translation by Tagore was first published in The Modern Review, May 1917. ‘Giribala’, in Sisir Kumar Das (ed.), The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2012 (1996), Vol. 2, pp. 262–7. Subsequent references to the 1895 Bangla text will be as ‘Manbhanjan’ and to Tagore’s English translation as ‘Giribala’. 2 Abinetrir Roop was serialised in 31 chapters of the Natya-mandir between 1318–20 BS; then published as a novel. The references in this chapter are to the novel and the serialised version of the same text in the Natyamandir. Chapters 1–19 (pp. 1–151) and chapters 24–31 (pp. 186–254) are from AR, the novel (n.d.), published by Amarendranath Dutt (Calcutta: Star Theatre). Chapters 20, 21 and 23 are from two issues of the Natyamandir, serialised in No. 9 (Chaitra 1318 BS) and No. 10 (Baisakh 1319 BS) respectively. Chapter 22 appears to be missing in these texts available at the archives at the Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta. There are records of Amarendranath’s dramatised version being performed on the public stage from December 1914 to February 1915. In the 1914 production, Amarendranath played Nalini. 3 See for example Anuradha Kapur, ‘The Representation of Gods and Heroes in the Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century’ in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds), The Oxford India Hinduism Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 262–88. 4 This chapter presents a counterargument to the dominant reading of a ‘resolution’ to the woman’s question, for example: ‘[T]he debate was resolved for the Hindus/Brahmos/Christians’ (unlike the case for the Muslim bhadramahila). Sonia Nishat Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education in Colonial Bengal’, Education and Social Change in South Asia, Krishna Kumar and Joachim Oesterheld (eds), New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007, pp. 218–47. 5 In the novel, Dutt eulogises his wife Hemnalini as ‘Durga’. In real life he also published several poems expressing his repentance. Although the serialised version of Abhinetreer Roop began appearing from Chaitra 1318 BS/1911 in the Natya-Mandir, according to his biographer, Amarendranath wrote the autobiographical text after his wife’s death in 1913, plagued by remorse. Despite his ‘cruel neglect’ of her, she had ‘worshipped him as a god’ and ‘served him’ in every way. She died after nursing him back from a critical illness. See chapter 6 in Ramapati Dutt, Rangalaye

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Amarendranath (Amarendranath and Theatre), 1940; Devajit Bandyopadhyay (ed.), repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2004, pp. 323–8. 6 I have retained the italicised English Miss of the original Bangla text. ‘Bankimbinodini’ appears as one word in Bangla; the hyphenation is mine. 7 Amongst others, Bankimchandra’s heroines have been sensitively analysed by Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993 and Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, New Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 135–90. Neither critic has analysed stage productions involving Bankimchandra’s heroines. Nor does Amitrasudan Bhattacharya analyse the actresses playing the heroines in his monograph Rangamanche Bankim, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1982. 8 Possibly a not so veiled reference to the charismatic Brahmo reformer Keshubchandra Sen’s house in Calcutta which was called ‘Lily Cottage’. 9 A.K. Mishra, Bangla Prahasaner Itihas, Calcutta: Modern Book Agency Private Limited, 1988, pp. 274–6. 10 Amongst others theoreticians, Bhatta Lollata (c. 9th century), interpreting Bharata’s Sutra on Rasa elaborates on the erotic or sringar rasa: ‘The erotic is to be acted out by reactions such as the skilful play of the eyes, movements of the eyebrows, and side-long glances.’ Pollock comments, Hence, it is in the character that rasa exists ‘in the literal sense’, and in the actor only figuratively – but in no sense in the spectator, an interpretation whose reality later commentators would confirm even as they sought to refute it. Sheldon Pollock (trans. and ed.), A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 243. 11 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, Illustration 107, pp. 170–1. 12 Tagore, ‘Giribala’, p. 266. 13 In the words of Pollock, ‘[C]lassical aesthetics in particular felt called upon to invent an entirely new lexicon precisely to make sense of the entirely new sort of experience that the aesthetic represents – something our authors never tire, century after century, of explaining.’ Introduction, A Rasa Reader, p. 25. The Reader offers a comprehensive selection and translation of theories of rasa across centuries. 14 See also Sarkar, Hindu Wife, p. 81. 15 For the interaction between prostitutes and the police, as clients and prosecutors, see Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000. The usual fracas around the theatre was between agitating teachers, students, social reformers, missionaries and the police. 16 Tagore, ‘Giribala’, p. 262. 17 On the incorporation of the nakha-shikha description of classical Sanskrit into the novel, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 10. 18 Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 91.

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19 On Rammohun Roy ‘weeping at a man-bhanjan pala’, see Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaishnavism in Bengal 1486–1900, Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985, p. 415. 20 In Kumaresh Ghosh (ed.), Sekaler Cartoon (Cartoons of Yesteryears), Calcutta: Grantha Griha, 1993 (1975), p. 11. 21 Chakravarti, Vaishnavism in Bengal, p. 467. 22 Tagore’s letter to William Rothenstein, 31 December 1915, Calcutta: ‘Macmillans are urging me to send them some translations of my short stories but . . . the beauty of the originals can hardly be preserved in translation. They require rewriting in English, not translating.’ Cited in Mary Lago (ed.), Imperfect Encounters: Letters of William Rothenstein and Tagore, 1911–1941, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972, Letter no. 107, p. 216. 23 The most comprehensive account is Rudraprasad Chakraborty, Sadharan Rangalay o Rabindranath, Calcutta: Visva-Bharati Publications, 1999. 24 Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2004, p. 452. 25 Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’ in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 127–79. 26 Tagore, ‘Giribala’, p. 263. 27 Tagore translates the epithet as a ‘burnt log dressed up in a woman’s clothes’, ibid. 28 Calcutta Review, 1851, ‘The Bengali Drama’, Vol. xv (n.d.), Cited in H.N. Das Gupta, The Indian Theatre, repr. Delhi: Gian Publishing House, 1988, pp. 136–7. 29 Lalitmohan Chattopadhyay, ‘Jatra’, Natya-mandir, 2nd year, No. 5, Agrahayan 1318 BS/1911, pp. 325–30. 30 Tagore, ‘Giribala’, p. 264. 31 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, The Gopal Rakhal Dialectic: Colonialism and Children’s Literature in Bengal (trans. Rani Ray and Nivedita Sen), New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2015, pp. 38–40. 32 Tagore, ‘Giribala’, p. 266. 33 See advertisement for Chaitanya Lila, Indian Daily News, 2 August 1884, cited in Shankar Bhattacharya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan: 1872–1900 (Sourcebook for the History of the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982, p. 202. 34 AR, p. 636. 35 See particularly Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Laughter and Subjectivity: The SelfIronical Tradition in Bengali Literature’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2000, pp. 379–406. 36 See for example Utpal Dutt on Girishchandra, Girish Manas (The Intellectual World of Girish), Calcutta: Ajanta Printers, 1983. 37 Edward Ahearn, Marx & Modern Fiction, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 31–75. 38 Reynolds actually instructs his reader to look at a map of London and compare the rich and the poor, ‘The result will prove that two-thirds of the mighty Babylon are covered with a plague-mist of demoralization, misery, ignorance, wretchedness, squalor, and crime.’ The Mysteries of London, p. 84.

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39 Dutta, Rangalaye Amarendranath, p. 211. 40 AR, pp. 17, 27–8. 41 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 42 Ibid., p. 36. We are reminded of the Mahant-Elokeshi scandal which erupted in a popular pilgrimage place, Tarakeswar, near Calcutta. See Sarkar, Hindu Wife, p. 80. 43 AR, pp. 52–3. 44 Ibid., pp. 32–3. 45 Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘ “Public Women”: Early Actresses of the Bengali Stage – Role and Reality’, in Geeti Sen (ed.), The Calcutta Psyche, New Delhi: India International Centre and Rupa, 1990–91, pp. 149–50. 46 The other outward moving radials are to Munghyr, considered to be a healthy resort for well-to-do Bengalis; and Almora, in the Himalayan hills, where Vivekananda had established a Vedantic centre. 47 It is believed that dying in Kashi ensures a heavenly abode. 48 Robert McFarland, ‘ “Das öde Haus”: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Urban Hermeneutics’, Monatshefte, Vol. 100, No. 4, Winter 2008, pp. 489–503. www. jstor.org/stable/30157811 (accessed on 28 July 2016). 49 Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, ‘Spectacular Women: The Mysteries of London and the Female Body’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, Autumn 1996, p. 31. 50 Priya Joshi, ‘Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India’, Book History, Vol. 1, 1998, p. 209. Joshi also posits a readership that is ‘extremely wide-ranging’, less riven on class and race lines in colonial India than in contemporary Victorian England, p. 211. www.jstor.org/stable/30227288 (accessed on 12 August 2016). 51 For an analysis of Balzac’s Paris, see Ahearn, Marx & Modern Fiction, pp. 119–63. 52 Sukumar Sen, Battalar Chhapa o Chhabi (Print and Pictures of Bat-tala), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1989, pp. 81–2. See also Sripantho, Bat-tala, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1997. 53 As Nalini’s financial difficulties worsen, he signs a worthless cheque thereby initiating a sequence of evasive tactics that ultimately fail (chapter 16). Faced with imminent arrest and a criminal case, he takes recourse to a Marwari jeweller called Karamchand. With the appearance of another Hardayal, a ‘brahman moneylender’ (probably Punjabi), to whom he pawns the jewels, Nalini falls into a trap. 54 AR, p. 22. 55 Dutta, Rangalaye Amarendranath, pp. 108–9. 56 The mandatory ‘baganbari’ escapade appeared in Bholanath Mukhopadhyay’s 1863 farce, Aponar Mukh Apuni Dekho (Look Upon Your Own Face). 57 AR, p. 43. 58 Ibid., p. 84. 59 See for example, ‘Dr. Miss B.K. Chowdry/Specialist in Midwifery/Viceroy’s Medalist and etc. . . .’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 August 1919. 60 AR, pp. 57–8. 61 Steve Neale, ‘Prologue: Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’ in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hard (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 14.

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62 The financial ruin of the two brothers is brought out in slow degrees; the rot is already present within. The elder brother Jaminibhushan, a rake in his time, is clever at getting the property partitioned off through unfair court ‘awards’: it is a property twice mortgaged. He instigates Nalini’s creditors to put out a warrant in his name. 63 AR, p. 97. 64 Taking Abhinetrir Roop as an instance of the connection between Ramakrishna and the Bengali theatre, Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay draws our attention to the (barely visible but prime mediating icon) in this exchange between Swami Bimalananda and Nalini. Nalini’s darshan includes the figure of Ramakrishna ‘disguised’ as a humble servitor or devotee of Kali, the playful divine mother. SriRamakrishna o Banga Rangamanch (SriRamakrishna and the Bengali Stage), Calcutta: Deb Sahitya Kutir, pp. 122–4. 65 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, London: Macmillan, 1989 (1975), p. 14.

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4 THE ‘FEMALE’ CONFESSIONAL VOICE Actress-stories as captivating copy

When I finished my performance and entered the greenroom, my heart rang out with despair. I sat there for a long time, my face cupped in both my hands. Then, sighing deeply, I slowly got up and with trembling fingers began taking off my costume. I could only think, Alas, wretched woman, what is this you have done? I too could have sacrificed my life, like the chaste wife in the play, contemplating all the while the dust of my husband’s feet . . . I had blocked that path with my own hands.1

Not for titillation alone: theatre magazines The impulse to plant the flag of Bengali theatre in a larger historical and temporal arena manifested itself in both predictable and singular ways at the turn of the 19th century, peaking after World War I, in the 1920s. The agenda included recounting the lives of theatre personalities, in particular, of male theatre directors, singers and actors – including those who had excelled in female roles. The lives of actresses entered via a more circuitous route. Alongside some ‘real-life’ write-ups, a plethora of ‘actress-stories’ (abhinetri kahini) appeared in the burgeoning theatre magazines. Using a meld of available genres, male writers adopted a cut and paste method to produce such stories on a regular basis (see Appendix). More intriguing was the consistent use of the first-person narrative voice, both fictive and in citation, generating a flow of what I shall call the ‘female confessional’ voice. Presented in print narrative and complemented by the generous use of photographs, prints and painted photos that were spiced up with titillating captions, the actress-story tells us tales in more ways than one.

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Figure 4.1  First performance of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan by the National Theatre company held in this residence, Jorasanko, on 7 December 1872. Now known as ‘Ghariwala Mullick Bari’ Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

This chapter profiles the actress-story in two important magazines in the first quarter of the 20th century. I shall consider the first two years of Natya-mandir (1317–19 BS/1910–12) and Roop o Rang (1331–32 BS/1924–25), highlighting some of the changes in the intervening years. I begin by briefly juxtaposing the actress-story against the broader field of women’s writing and then lay out the parameters within which the magazines operated. Keywords such as bhava, roop and rang, which recur across the wide range covered by the magazines, are re-contextualised. Finally, I identify the strategies being tried out to create ‘authentic’ and ‘respectable’ female voices that would also make for captivating copy. The exercise should enable us to gauge why some kinds of narrative became more powerful, more seductive than others, and the range of readerly responses that the magazines sought to evoke. I suggest that the actress-story was not intended for titillation alone. It is as though the actress figure generates an excess of erotic energy that the actress-story can then explain as a ‘natural’ biological urge 192

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conjoined with the usual trope of innocence seduced. Here, the loss of a respectable normative home is perforce the gain of the stage, as the putative respectable female turns into the fallen woman and ­prostitute-actress. This is not entirely a fictional device: upper-caste widows or abandoned wives and women invariably lost all access to natal or marital homes once they were seen as having transgressed patriarchal sexual norms.2 It is not this truth-claim that is stake here, but rather what the stories obfuscate. Janus-faced, the actress-stories claim to ‘explicate’ and lay bare the genealogy and subjectivity of the actress, while they fall back on well-worn narratives of seduction and natural promiscuity. This chapter establishes how the stories and their magazine space capture several narratives of transition in which the actress, and more generally, ‘the acting woman’, was being constructed for a wider reading, viewing and listening public. The magazines seek to consolidate and legitimise the past decades of the history of the Bengali public theatre, even as they offer tantalising glimpses of an unfettered female sexuality, explicitly set against a western/international frame. Remarkably, many of the images peppering the printed text of the actressstories prefigure characteristics attributed to the short-lived but daring ‘modern girl’ who soon – and all too briefly, appeared on the silent screen.3

Slippages My choice of the two magazines is not entirely fortuitous. In both were published the autobiographical writings of the actress Binodini Dasi – the single most publicised ‘star of the native stage’. Since the 1960s when her writings were reprinted, her life continues to be produced on stage and in film. Both popular and scholarly works tend to gloss over the context of her writings.4 Rather, as we saw in Chapter 2, the emphasis has been on a discourse of redemption for the stage actress and her many incarnations on stage and in print. I underline some of the ways in which these magazines seek to bridge the gap between the bhadramahila and ‘other’ women. The contents, layout and publication contexts of both these magazines indicate the central ambivalence about the female performer and her ‘brand’ of womanhood. They attempt to exploit the growing interest in theatre and media personalities to offer new templates of modernity which would appeal – even if vicariously – to those who were not actresses. Given the meagre resources of men and money that theatre magazines could muster and the imperative to create addictive matter to ensure 193

Figure 4.2 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925. From left to right, top to bottom: (1) ‘Pratiksha’ (Waiting); (2) ‘Nrityashila’ (In a dancing mode); (3) Miss Mary Odette (1901–87) French-born actress of the silent era; (4) ‘Antarer Nidhi’ (The inner compass) Source: (1) Roop o Rang, No. 32, 23 Jeystha 1332 BS, p. 663. Author’s collection; Roop o Rang, No. 41, 30 Sravan 1332 BS, p. 871. Author’s collection; (3) Roop o Rang, Author’s collection; (4) Roop o Rang, No. 25, 5 Baisakh 1332 BS, p. 511. Author’s collection

Figure 4.3 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925. (1) ‘Sachakita’ (Surprised); (2) ‘Sadyasnata’ (Just bathed); (3) ‘Lasyalila’ (Eroticsportive); (4) ‘Untitled’ Source: (1) Roop o Rang, No. 37, 2 Sravan 1332 BS, p. 775. Author’s collection; (2) Roop o Rang, No. 31, 16 Jeystha 1332 BS, p. 641. Author’s collection; (3) Roop o Rang. Author’s collection. (4) Author’s collection

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extended circulation, it is not surprising that the fabricated actressstory became a staple content, alongside regular biographical sketches of stage personalities in Bengal and abroad. The mingling of the real and the fictive, the autobiographical with the counterfeit confessional, the deshi with the bilati, might not have been entirely a conscious strategy on the part of the editors. In retrospect one might ask what was the horizon of readerly expectations that this mix contended with? What factors may have determined the choice of images? What kind of slippages between text and image do these narratives elicit? The construction of the bhadramahila identity in print, comprising largely, though not exclusively of exhortatory and didactic literature was part of the reformist moment initiated by men, but it was a movement in which women of a certain class, caste and religion participated in a significant measure. Since the 1990s, several studies on ‘the wider communicative space of the print media’ have focused on the ‘the educational writings of the women reformers, the end-of-the-century women intelligentsia’.5 A substantial archive of work has emerged on the autobiographical writings of Bengali women from the mid-19th century onwards, with reprints (and translations into English) from departments of women’s studies and feminist presses as well as mainstream publishers.6 Yet, attempts to understand the construction of ‘bhadramahila writing’ remain incomplete if we do not take into account the project of gentrification undertaken by theatre practitioners themselves, and the problematic of the actress figure therein. The actress-story strategically located itself at the confluence of these often territorially separated genres and forums. As fiction, the actress-story had every potential of being subversive: the actress was indeed one of the earliest working woman in a newly fashioned semi-institutionalised urban mode of cultural production, not part of industrial labour. But it was precisely this dimension that was absent in these stories and their fictive resolutions. The stories erased the workaday experiences of the professional actress. They erased too, all references to the commodity world of performance and its socio-economic ties to a larger imperial economy. In tandem with the ‘curious’ images they were juxtaposed with, they functioned primarily as stories of safely tittilating consumption.

Writing women The fairly substantial output of women’s published writings in Bangla that we have from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries comprises articles in newspapers and journals, poems and pamphlets, tracts, novels, 196

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short stories and a range of forms loosely termed as personal narratives, in addition to a surprisingly large number of plays or dramatic pieces which were rarely performed. An earlier estimate by Chitra Deb includes names of 194 women writers who wrote between 1859 and 1910, excluding at least 50 who wished to remain anonymous.7 Recent sources indicate women as contributors in print from the 1830s.8 In the early 19th century the Sambad Prabhakar, edited by the acerbic poet Iswar Gupta, published both prose and poetry by women. Later, periodicals such as the Bamabodhini, Bangabandhu, Antahpur and Abalabandhu were published exclusively for women. The Bamabodhini Patrika, brought out from 1863 onwards by the Brahmo Samaj, even had a section marked out for writings by women called ‘Bamarachana bibhag’. An anthology of women’s writings, Bamarachanabali, was compiled in 1872 from the contributions to these journals. Other journals from a later period that published women included Pravasi, Bharatvarsha, Basumati, Bangasree, Bangalakshmi and Uttara as well as Bankimchandra’s Bangadarshan. Periodicals addressing the Muslim bhadramahila question and writings by Muslim women themselves emerged at the turn of the century.9 Women made significant contributions to many children’s journals as writers and editors.10 While the label of ‘bhadramahila writing’ neither erases differences of social location, education and other affiliations of the writers nor suggests a commonality of purpose or target readership, it is also true that women contributors were for the most part daughters, wives and mothers of men from a propertied and/or salaried class. Even if visible in print, very few of these women who had made an entry into ‘the public sphere of letters’ enjoyed physical access to public spaces of the city, although it was not unusual for women to be part of the audience from the 1880s onwards. On the rare occasions when women wrote about the stage, the tone was one of admonition or warning. An editorial in the Antahpur offered an exemplary ‘incident’ to its readers about how, after a show, certain ‘theatregoing purdah women’ (theatargamini abarodhbashini) had lost all sense of direction – both regarding the topography of the city and their own moral compass!11 Stage actresses lacked the identity of a patrilineal genealogy. The channels through which their writing appears in print add a different dimension to our study of women’s writings. Binodini Dasi’s works are aligned in a peculiar trajectory vis-à-vis the contributions to most of the periodicals mentioned above. The difference lies not in her own class origins alone, but in the kind of readership she was addressing. This will be evident if we quickly pass in review the corpus of her published writing. Saurabh (Sravan 1302 BS/1895) was a short-lived 197

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literary journal which published poems by Binodoni Dasi and her younger contemporary Tarasundari Dasi (P.3). It had been founded and jointly edited by Amarendranath Dutt and Girishchandra Ghosh, theatre people both. Basana, Binodini’s first book of verse dedicated to her mother and Kanak o Nalini, in memory of her dead daughter, was published privately. Significantly, her prose writings were not published in any of the women’s periodicals mentioned earlier, but in the theatre magazines selected here: Abhinetrir Atmakatha (An Actress’s Autobiography) in two issues of Natya-mandir (1317 BS/1910); and Amar Abhinetri Jiban (My Life as an Actress) serialised in Roop o Rang (1331–32 BS/1924–25). Her book Amar Katha (My Story) was first privately published in 1912. The actress as catalyst figure Theatre had long featured in the press – in Bangla and English, in the form of notices, advertisements, reviews, reports, letters and articles, well before the inauguration of the public theatre in Bengal on 7 December 1872. In an earlier era, the Englishman had carried elaborate and detailed reports about actresses such as Mrs Esther Leach, Mrs Chester and Mrs Deacle who had become famous in Calcutta (and Bombay), as evident from the numerous advertisements, lengthy reviews and often verbose ‘discussions’ in print on English theatricals in the city, and of touring companies or individuals who travelled all over the subcontinent.12 The Calcutta-Bombay circuit emerges clearly in Kumud Mehta’s pioneering work on English theatricals in Bombay where actor-impressarios such as Dave Carson (d. 1896) pop up with startling regularity. The diversity of ‘amusements’ both ‘European’ (a term favoured over ‘English’) and ‘native’ was grist for the press. The pages of the Samachar Chandrika were loaded with reports and advertisements of amusements in Bangla. A visiting actress, Miss Clara Ellis, even advertised in a Bengali newspaper in 1850.13 The advent of the specialised magazine in Bangla concentrating exclusively on matters theatrical was a relatively later phenomenon.14 The weekly Rangalay (1901), Rangamanch (1907), Natya-mandir, Natya Pratibha (1913), and Natya Patrika ((1918) appeared in the first decade of the 20th century. Some of the better known theatre journals that came into their own in the 1920s were Sisir (1923), Sachitra Sisir (1923); Mahila (1924), Nabayuga (1924), Roop o Rang (1924), Ranga-darshan and Falguni (1926).15 No wonder there was a satirical play on short-lived theatre magazines, Roopkumari, by N. Banerjee, staged on 3 December 1925! 198

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Their entry coincided with the end of the first phase of the public theatre, called ‘Girish Yuga’ after Girishchandra Ghosh. Most historians consider ‘1912–22 . . . as the period of decline’ of the Bengali stage.16 By the end of the 1920s, most of Girishchandra’s contemporaries were dead; prominent among them were Ardhendhushekhar Mustafi (1851–1908), Radhamadhav Kar (1853–c. 1910), Dharmadas Sur (1852–1910) and Amritalal Bose – all of whom had been instrumental in the founding and running of professional theatres. Amarendranath Dutt, flamboyant scion of the Hatkhola Dutt family of Calcutta, had made a comet-like entry into the theatre world, initiating a series of controversial changes. His untimely death in 1916 left the less than 50-year-old business of the public theatre shaky. As a period of relative hiatus in terms of stage gurus, the era of the specialised theatre magazines turned quite naturally to stocktaking, evaluating and documenting the ‘golden era’. An attempt to forge a distinct regional identity informed this project of recording the founding decades of public theatre. Bengali theatre was frequently compared with western theatre – both mainstream and experimental. The comparison did not extend in any meaningful manner to other theatrical ventures in India, including Parsi theatre. The Calcutta port was not only an exit point for Parsi theatre companies to Rangoon, but the city had been the hub of rival Parsi companies for several decades. From the 1880s, advertisements for the Parsee Elphinstone Dramatic Club ran cheek by jowl with those for Bengali plays in the Statesman & FOI (Figure 3.5). A rare reference to Parsi theatre surfaces in the late 1920s when a photograph of Jamshedji Framji Madan (1856–1923) as the ‘Founder of the Parsi Theatre in Bengal’ was published in Roop o Rang. Madan had ensconced himself firmly in Calcutta, supplying goods to army cantonments and eventually building up a vast entertainment network. His production of Bilwamangal (1919), held to be the first ‘Bengali motion picture’ – actually a silent film with Bengali intertitles – crafted links between theatre and cinema on the one hand and finance capital and ‘cultural capital’ on the other, for an already captive audience. This fascinating cross-over of genre, ethnicity and the formation of ‘national majoritarian tastes’ awaits exploration. Perhaps this silence had to do with the fact that most theatrical companies that emerged in colonial India relied on stree-bhumika, boys/ men playing women. Perhaps, the men from the Bengali theatre world wished to put themselves on a par with ‘bideshi theatar’ primarily on the basis of their theatre having adopted a particular representational code – with women playing themselves. 199

Figure 4.4a Mahakabi Girishchandra/ ‘Girishchandra the great Poet’

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Figure 4.4b Girishchandra Ghosh’s signature Source: Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 1, 18 Aswin 1333 BS. Author’s collection.

For undoubtedly, the catalyst-figure in the Bengali magazines was the actress – her celebrity status elsewhere in the world was juxtaposed (anxiously) with her social location and her charms in the Bengali milieu. I read the increasing obsession with the generic actress as an attempt to rehash the modernity debate in this new magazine culture. The consensus appears to be on projecting the bhadramahila as the new ‘performing’ woman who could now legitimately step out of her secluded world and also be on display, within certain parameters. This stratagem would elide the need to regard the Bengali stage actress as a professional. She would now predominantly feature as a site of natural promiscuity. As an explicit agenda though, theatre magazines had three basic objectives: to document the history of the public theatre; to provide information about other ‘national theatres’; and to provoke interest in (and advertise) contemporary productions of the particular company it was affiliated with. Male theatre personalities figured centrally in this history. Almost all the magazines had theatre practitioners in the role of writer-editors, many of them bringing out several short-lived periodicals associated with and promoting a particular company. Amarendranath brought out Rangalay during his years at the Classic Theatre; Natya-mandir came out during his Star Theatre phase; and Roop o Rang came out from Art Theatre, under the editorship of Apareshchandra Mukhopadhyay. A subtext of rivalry, arising from factionalism among and within companies, fed into the publication and contents of the magazines. The Ardhendushekhar group allegedly brought out the short-lived Rangamanch, while Roop o Rang went out of its way to promote Girishchandra.17 The founder-editor of Rangamanch, Monilal Bandyopadhyay, was quickly incorporated into the editorial board of the Natya-mandir. These internal logistics must have played a part in determining the extent and nature of 201

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the space given to the actress. Overall though, she was an ubiquitous presence. An individual actress, publicised through her stage name, was often featured for her role in a specific play. She might be compared to a famous predecessor of an earlier generation, or placed in competitive proximity with a contemporary linked to a rival company. But it was the generic actress who proliferated the magazines in a range of fictive ‘personal narratives’. She was made to inhabit a literary space that artfully hinted at authentic sources. Story and history were deliberately enmeshed to produce an addictive flow of narratives that claimed to unravel the ‘real’ psyche behind the stage actress. The ostensible pretext could have been to protect contemporary actresses, but the straightforward objectives spelt out by the editors undoubtedly coexisted with deep apprehensions about the self-representation of a beleaguered group of male theatre practitioners. How else do we understand the silence about the labour and investment in theatre work?

Articulating the ‘problem’ The composite genre of the actress as story material also has to be viewed against the long tradition in print of anti-theatrical rhetoric and defense of the stage. The actress was a nodal point in both. I roughly plot some of these representative positions. ‘Rangalaye Barangana’ (Prostitutes in the Theatre), an early piece from the 1870s, had a surprisingly modern argument.18 Based on a historical overview, the argument was made in secular terms, with an acute awareness of contemporary modes of representation and the exigencies of the new form: the public theatre. It was understood and underscored that men playing women, as in the amateur theatre until the early 1870s, would not do anymore. The essay suggests that for the woman who was cut off from familial or kinship ties – from any stable social locus, acting could be a means of social salvation. In line with the reformist discourse of the author (the journal was brought out by Brahmos), actresses were referred to as ‘our unfortunate sisters’; the word patita was not used. Instead of the usual depoliticised moral prescription, we see an effort to expose the social underpinnings of ‘the problem’. A decade later, the editor of Prabah, articulated a very different position in his two-part ‘Natak o abhinay’ (The drama and acting).19 In a tone which presumed a readership fairly educated and ‘into’ theatre, the following objectives, broadly commensurate with a nationalist stand, were explicated: (1) to bring the theatre of ‘our desh’ [Bengal] up to the standard of English theatre; (2) to aim for a total ‘elevation’ 202

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of the conglomerate of desh, bhasha and jati through the medium of drama; and (3) thereby, to attempt an appraisal of what constitutes ‘true drama’ (prakrita natak). The core concern was the impediment posed by the lowly female performer to all of these noble objectives. The writer singled out actresses (‘abhinetri’) for their ignorance, lack of refinement and lack of real involvement with the drama. It argued that it was not simply a question of morals; it was the complete lack of refined qualities in actresses that prevented theatre from being accepted as a respectable art. Evolving from the mid-1880s onwards, Bhakti, in tandem with the discourse of redemption, entrenched itself as the only way out to redeem the triumvirate of desh, bhasha and jati. The theatre was projected as a veritable temple (dharma mandir), in which playing the part of saints was itself a mode of salvation for the prostituteactress. The worth of the public stage lay in the actresses being moved sufficiently while ‘playing the part’ and, in turn, being able to move spectators and bring together disparate, even rival socio-religious groups, in the aura of a communal fervour. The question of formal education or the desirability of employing ‘shikshita-abhinetri’ was yet to rear its head. By the end of the 19th century, several polemical pieces had made the connection between entertainment and national life quite explicitly. They fell back on the now familiar category of refined pleasure (bishuddho amod) as the critical marker of quality, as opposed to mere entertainment.20 In subsequent writings, however, there was a concerted effort to prove that theatre was not an extension of the licentious brothel, but in fact a temple of education (shiksha mandir). I propose that theatre magazines attempted to address some of these concerns carried over from the preceding century. But there was a shift in strategy. Rather than taking recourse to the straightforward polemical prose essay, letter or editorial of earlier decades, they chose the seductive mode of the bare-it-all narrative, combining the persuasive and the authentic sounding. It was as though the subject of intense debate through the preceding decades was to be finally given a voice. The magazines did privilege the first-person ‘female voice’, but in the form of atmakatha and galpa, constructed by male writers. It was the diffusion of theatrical discourse into unresolved questions of sexuality, morality and desire troubling the nascent middle-class urban culture that both inspired and enabled the formulation of the actress-story. Its particular, articulation was also linked with a new mode of consumerism targetting the same class, in which women would see their own heightened or desirable ‘likeness’ in objects on sale. 203

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In the second editorial essay of Roop o Rang titled ‘Rangalay Alochona’ (Theatre criticism), Amarendranath Ray had observed that theatre was quite literally ‘the talk of the town’, now consumed by the entire family, and not only as stage performance: These days acting provokes waves of discussion, as was not the case formerly . . . The educated have begun to understand that theatre fulfills a very natural and a deeply felt need in human nature. Thus, for ordinary people, acting has not only become a matter of respect, but something they love. Acting, actors and actresses are discussed enthusiastically on the streets, in schools and colleges, in offices and in drawing rooms. Many Bengali newspapers now deem it worthy to carry weekly columns on the theatre. Undoubtedly, these are signs of life. (emphasis added)21 ‘But’, he cautioned, qualifying these positive signs of theatre’s upward mobility and lateral movement into different spheres of public life, ‘it is necessary to examine the directions towards which theatre criticism is moving.’ The editorial then traced the growth of theatre magazines in relation to public opinion about theatre. The highest praise was reserved for the short-lived weekly, Rangalay (1901), which Ray dubs ‘the first real theatre magazine’ in Bengal. With the demise of the Rangalay, the monthly Natya-mandir had to be brought out as a result of the never-ending attack on the Bengali stage. Girishchandra’s editorial manifesto in which he had declared that ‘we shall be our own critics’ is duly cited. The Roop o Rang editorial thus claims direct descent from the Natya-mandir’s need to defend theatre and maintains that unfortunately, even after fourteen years, the situation has not changed much. In tracing quite unequivocally then, a relationship between the relevance of theatre magazines and the unceasing anti-theatrical diatribe by the educated and the respectable, the Roop o Rang editorial unearths ‘the problem’ of the female stage performer present from the days of the inception of the public theatre. The magazine was careful, however, not to directly confront this thorny area. The ‘problem’ was articulated primarily through tactics of displacement, outlined in the following section. The adaptation and reworking of existing material for journalistic purposes was linked to the public theatre’s ‘existential’ crisis – embodied in the female performer. Beyond the need for defense, we find a great investment in experimenting with new configurations of the feminine through an apparently 204

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eclectic juxtaposition of text and images. One may read a narrative of proto-globalisation in these efforts.

A new consumer aesthetic The theatre magazines were responding to and feeding a new reading public, not all of who might actually be theatregoers. In contrast to the more highbrow or literary journal that did not have to apologise for its existence, the specialist theatre magazine had to cater to as well as mould different reading and viewing habits. It had to ensure respectability not only for itself but equally, for the theatre as a profession and for theatre-going as a social activity. The objectives were clear enough; the ways in which these might be realised were open to experimentation. Among the various strategies aimed at creating a subscriber-writer continuum was the editorial notice addressed specifically to readers of both sexes, inviting their ‘opinion’ on any one topic. Three outstanding opinions were to be published and prizes for them announced in subsequent issues.22 The first editorial in Roop o Rang by Debendranath Basu made a virtue of necessity as it announced with a flourish its open-door policy: ‘Like the many branches of the same tree . . . it would be impossible to put on record the possible contents . . . but one might say without the slightest hesitation or shame as to what it will not contain.’ The editorial promised that there would be no satire or malice, only ‘whatever is bhadra’. It espoused what was essentially an aesthetic of ‘good taste’, the chief objective being to present ‘the plain truth and refined taste in simple language’.23 The second editorial by Amarendranath Ray was more explicit about the agenda of the journal and its genealogy. Referring to ‘the late Kshetranath Bhattacharya who wrote in the Education Gazette’ as the person who had initiated drama criticism in Bengali newspapers, the editor pointed out the Bhattacharya had made the question of the actress central to his discussion of the future of Bengali theatre. Despite claiming to take up such vexing social questions, subsequent editorials as well as miscellaneous articles in every issue of Roop o Rang were characterised by constant wordplay. The second half of the magazine title punned on the rangmanch or stage, as well as rang, meaning colour. Roop, meaning beauty or outward form was, as we have seen, multivalently referenced in Amarendranath’s serialised novella, Abhinetrir Roop. The magazines felt obliged to underline ad nauseum an alliance with literature and art. Simultaneously, the editorials continued to play on the need for liveliness and the desirable 205

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image and the complementary nature of roop and rang: beauty and colour, form and essence. The subtext of almost every article of Roop o Rang spoke of the need for colour, pleasure and pleasing images in everyday life. The wordplay along with the visual text consciously propagated a cult of aesthetic consumerism that aspired equally to espouse a new idiom of the ‘colourful’ and ‘attractive’ – quite the opposite to austere spiritual nationalism. It was a combination likely to appeal to a class in which female readership was on the rise, when leisure extended from theatregoing to reading about it. The avenues of acceptable employment for women were restricted. It was in the 1940s that large numbers of Bengali bhadramahila were forced to work for wages outside of the home, while radical refashioning of mobility, visibility and private-public spaces actually took place with the mass migration of ‘refugee women’ to the city in the 1950s.24 The contents of the Natya-mandir during the two years of its existence included serialised ‘theatre stories’ such as Monilal Bandyopadhyay’s Othello and Amarendranath’s Abhinetrir Roop, besides poems, stories and essays. These too, were dominated by repentance scenes. In common with popular Bengali journals, the Natya-mandir also ran serialised romances such as Harisadhan Mukhopadhyay’s Mehr-ulnisa and, ‘historical-dramatic narrative’ (aitihasik natakiya akkhayika) translated from the English, such as Kironchandra Dutta’s Shaitaner Parinam (The Devil’s Due). The lively wordplay and chatty tone of the magazines contrasted sharply with the inevitably grim denouement of the actress-stories. I suggest that this contrast was managed through a complex interweaving of expressive desire with personal embellishment as models of a proto-global femininity, but underscored by the heavily didactic narrative of the actress-story. The confessional ‘voice’ was diffused: it was not confined to the actress-story alone, but capillary like, it ran across a variety of columns that would later become the exclusive terrain of women’s magazines. The latter included advice and opinions on beauty, health, companionship and compatibility and so on – ‘neutral’ feminine topics, apparently outside the orbit of theatre. Yet to be studied is the apparently inexhaustible fund of pseudosociological articles on the psychology of love, their credibility authorised by the star status of the ‘speaker’, that is to whom they were attributed: as in, Actress X has this to say on love. In contrast, in the fictive pieces dealing with the same topic, the first-person narrator had nothing to say about love. Here, an extreme dramatic conflict was posited between the twin poles of a woman’s ‘nature’ – self-denial versus self-gratification. Ultimately, by a process of inexorable logic, 206

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the magazines moved towards a definition of conjugality that totally eschewed the everyday working life of the actress, but absorbed the colour and spice (roop o rang) of stage women. By the former, I mean the excitement, drudgery, discipline, entailed in theatre, sexual vulnerability, competition, involvement in the roles, the mastery of techniques, access to the literary, the pleasures and travails of travel, new audiences, financial independence and so on. In deriving a definition of ‘beauty and colour’ from actresses – both stage and film – particularly those from abroad, the magazines functioned like new scriptures (shastras), distinct from the prescriptive conduct books of the 19th century, and distant from the sombre admonitions of women’s journals like the Antahpur. The latter continued to warn ‘improperly’ educated women – particularly young ­widows – against devouring vulgar novels and plays.25 Theatre magazines, which were themselves a cross between novels, plays and other ‘dialogic forms’, openly and tacitly encouraged fragmented reading (print) and seeing (in print and performance), even acting out enchanting modes of femininity. They extended the sphere of respectable feminine activities to playing musical instruments or singing in ­company – legitimising them for emerging models of womanhood. Advertisements played a critical role in this refashioning. It is around this time that images of women performers – real and imagined – became part of brand names in everyday consumer goods such as matchboxes. We are told for instance, that the success of Gauhar Jan’s 1903 image on a matchbox label, after the publicity of her gramophone records, triggered off images of a myriad ‘Jans’ on labels printed in Sweden, Austria, Japan and Belgium, all meant for the Indian market (Figure I.5).26 General issues on the woman’s question, albeit in a diluted form, figured alongside mixed reportage on current events in the theatre world. An explicitly ‘social theme’ often took resort to the rubric of female authorship, sometimes by name and often only mentioning the sex of writer. In ‘The Unhappiness of Widows (Written by a woman)’ we have a first-person polemical voice, staged as a dialogue, with ‘Society’ (Samaj) as the protagonist.27 The wide range of topics spanned in these social essays may be gauged from a piece such as ‘Nari o Jatir Bhabishyat’ (Woman and the future of the nation/race) by another regular contributor, Gajendrachandra Ghosh. It comprised extracts from contemporary speeches by Lala Lajpat Rai at the Hindu Mahasabha, as well as debates on the age of marriage and childbearing in the USA!28 The recruitment of diasporic correspondents with impressive educational and professional qualifications made it possible to publicise 207

Figure 4.5 Kalighat drawing of a sundari, c. 1870–1880 Source: Private collection of Radha Prasad Gupta. Courtesy of CSSSC Archives

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the international ambit of the magazine and the respectability of its contributors. In ‘Bilati theater o musik hall’ (The English theatre and the music hall) by ‘Mr B.C. Sen, Barrister-at-Law, F.R.M.S.’ (local correspondents were called Sri not Mr), the writer wished to educate the discerning reader about the differences between the music hall and the legitimate theatre in England, and why one should not be confused with the other.29 In ‘Ekti abhinetrir bibah’ (An actress’s wedding) we have the same correspondent reporting on the wedding of the English actress Viola Tree (1885–1938), daughter of Sir Herbert (Beerbohm) Tree. The wedding, covered as a society event, informed readers about the respectability accorded to actresses elsewhere. The magazines worked with a melange of contrasts with several objectives: they added glamour to the world of show business while affirming the happier state of affairs vis-à-vis social recognition of the actress in more enlightened lands – especially England. The aesthetics of the 1910s and 1920s looked westwards for inspiration, even if the figures and faces it worked with had elements of the indigenous. Advertisements, as always, were also at the forefront of this venture, discussed in the conclusion to this chapter.

Curious tales of celebrities I shall not attempt here to formulate distinctions between the narratorial suffixes used most frequently with the word ‘abhinetri’: namely, katha, atmakatha, kahini, charit and jibankatha. Taken together, they might allow us to construct a typology of narrative genres; the emphasis in these texts is not so much on the autobiographical as on the confessional. I extend the term ‘confessional’ to include the opinions (couched as beliefs) expressed on a range of issues, objects and people by figures made known to the public as stars or celebrities. These are the first of media stars – letting on their ‘secret’ likes and loves – using their own life as a basis for pseudo socio-philosophical pronouncements on all manner of things. The ‘female confessional voice’ was thus critical in extending theatrical discourse to a more diffuse field of female subjectivity coded in consumerist terms. The actress or the generic female performer (singer, dancer) figured in several discourses and across genres in the space of the same journal. The latter included serialised auto/biographies of contemporary actresses of the Bengali stage; ‘lives’ of English and other western actors/actresses as a historical overview; columns or snippets on current events in the lives of western actresses; fictional auto/biographies; sketches ‘based on real life’, and stories proper, or those avowing their 209

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fictional status. Each of these categories came with a profusion of illustrations and photographs. In trying to imagine a reception field we have to rely greatly on the narrative modes employed in the magazine. The word ‘abhinetri’ functioned generically in the titles to the items listed above, as for example, ‘Abhinetrir prem patra’ (An Actress’s Love Letter) by Gnyanendranath Chakravarty.30 Repeated usage of the word ‘abhinetri’ (rather than ‘nati’) in the various generic types outlined above along with the visual matter cued the readers to specific modes of reading printed and visual material as a composite. A particular match involved juxtaposing the actress with the ‘bichitra kahini’ or the strange tale. The umbrella term ‘strange or curious tale’ (bichitra kahini) similarly spanned a wide range of forms across magazines. In a column devoted to ‘Theatre Talk’ (Theaterer katha), presumably the same Gnyanendranath Chakravarty provided translated excerpts from accounts of three western actresses: ‘We have presented the readers of the Natya-mandir with three brief autobiographical accounts . . . in the future we would like to publish the intriguing travel tales of many other famous actors and actresses.’31 The curious tale became the norm even when the life of a historical figure was previewed. After a laudatory account of the 1 ­ 7th-century actress Nell (Gwynn) in Nachghar, came the following ‘Notice’: ‘Another exciting life-story of another such famous actress will be published in the following issue.’32 Theatre magazines of the next decade continued to advertise the ‘strange tale’: ‘Abhinay o janasadharan: Sri [sic] Prabhavati Debi Saraswatir bichitra galpa’ (Acting and the Public: Prabhavati Debi’s strange tale) or ‘Narir tripti prabhriti bichitra sundar rachana’ (A woman’s sense of contentment and such like strange and beautiful compositions).33 To the modern reader, the perceived distinction between the strange tale and the straightforward short story (galpa) appears to lie in the degree of authenticity posited: the former is more ‘real life’, the latter more explicitly fictive. By the early 20th century, the short story had become an indispensable staple of all magazines whether highbrow or lowbrow, often usurping the place of the serious reform-oriented essay. It seems natural therefore that an item in ‘Natya-prasanga’, a regular information column of the Natya-mandir, referred approvingly to a recently launched monthly, the Galpa-lahari, because it had dispensed with ‘dry essays’ and had given place only to stories which were ‘juicy’ (saras) and sensational.34 The actress-stories fulfilled the demand for stories that were sensational and moral. By and large, they were aimed at an audience reared on a long tradition of didactic charit-texts.35 The 210

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selective extrapolation of the sensational, which already had a thriving circuit in the Bat-tala press and its mixed clientele, was now ‘upgraded’ for an extended audience. Frequent references to film and theatre personalities from abroad added to the glamour. It was emphasised that it was the latter’s professional success that lent credence to whatever they had to pronounce on diet, hairstyle or marriage. These ‘real-life successes’ – photographs vouchsafing their existence – became pundits of the new morality. Intimations of immortality associated with celebrity culture.

The mind-body split Antecedents of the confessional voice are to be found in earlier admonitory texts targeted at women readers, particularly neo-literates, although they must have provided fodder for the general reader as well. These include missionary tales, deriving in part from the exempla and written with the explicit intention to proselytise. While the didactic sub-text continues in the actress-story, its particular narratorial strategies privilege reading (and viewing) pleasure. The female voice was primarily constructed by male writers whose educational or professional credentials were as important as their names: for example, ‘Sri Batakrishna Ghosh M.A.’ was one of the regular contributors to the Natya-mandir. Despite the repeated evidence of male authorship, so potent is the authority of the ‘first-person voice’ that 21st-century scholarship unreservedly accepts these stories as testimonials to a history of origins.36 Arguably, the actress figure functioned as a ready-made text to notate the contradictions of a yet to be stabilised consumer culture, while professing to offer a story or orgins. Curiously, the stories are neither set, as one might imagine, in exotic locales, nor are they located in any recognisable way in Calcutta. They show a striking absence of the concrete, the geographical, and the material. Verily, they abstract the colonial metropolis. The drama is almost entirely played out in rhetorical language, through stock situations and phrases familiar from sensational novels. The ‘female-confessional’ in the actress-story is distinguished by the language of despair, lengthy self-recriminating sentences, the frequent recourse to formulaic set phrases and the passage of the central character from happiness to sorrow weighted against a system of rewards and punishments. Not a trace of irony, unlike Tagore’s ‘Manbhanjan’. Male-authored erotic tales of ‘confession’, of characters with subcriminal affiliations or underworld connections, have flourished in 211

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burgeoning urban centres for centuries. The impossible pursuit of individual happiness forms the spine of Ihara Saikaku’s tales of Five Women Who Loved Love and the longer first-person Story of an Amorous Woman. Saikaku wrote as a citizen of Osaka, for the amusement of the townspeople in the new commercial centres of 17th-century Japan. Better known to an English-speaking audience are the picaresque travels of Defoe’s heroine in Moll Flanders (1722). In both instances, the first-person narrator-protagonist conceived by a male writer emerges as a bold, adventurous woman who uses her charms and her body to make money or a name (read reputation). After she has undergone a more than average share of trials and tribulation, entailing seduction, deception, rape, thievery, murder and various natural disasters, she ends her life in a mode of renunciation. It is possible to read characteristics of the repentance tract grafted onto these urban tales, novels or novellas coinciding with the growth of commercial activity in a society where mercantile practices had not earlier commanded respect. In Saikaku, the stories clearly bear the imprint of Buddhism in the constant refrain of the transience of the material world. Late Romantic writing in Europe also produced texts of confession, focusing on the marginalised of society and granting them in narrative a glamour that belied the destitution of their social standing. In fact, there was an already established genre of the ‘confessional’ pertaining to the stage in England. The titles indicate their liminal status vis-à-vis Victorian erotica and pornography, such as the anonymous Intrigues and Confession of a Ballet Girl; disclosing startling and voluptuous scenes before and behind the curtain, enacted by well-known personages in the theatrical, military, medical and other professions; with kisses at Vauxhall, Greenwich &c., &c., and a full disclosure of the secret and amatory doings in the dressing room, under and upon the stage, in the light and the dark, by one who has had her share.37 The author of a similar text Ella, the Ballet Girl A Tale by ‘Rose Ellen Temple (Late Miss Hendriks)’ establishes ‘her’ intent quite clearly: It is some time since I have produced a novel or a tale, but I have found models from Life instead of from Romance, and whilst a few affected prudes will pretend to read so open a tale of Seduction encachette, many more will openly read, and I trust approve, of the lesson intended to be conveyed in ‘ELLA, THE BALLET-GIRL’.

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Fascination for the ballet-girl as a social ‘type’ led to claims by Albert Smith of producing The Natural History of the Ballet-Girl: [S]o we follow with this our social zoology . . . For we intend to touch lightly upon pink-tights and gauze-petticoats . . . we shall knock over theatrical romance for common-place reality; and try if we cannot make the one as interesting as the other, even by reversing the ordinary effect of glamour.38 The actress-stories in Bangla share affinities with these texts produced within histories of urbanisation in different cultures and at very different times. But they are best understood in their own topoi. Aspects of the actress-story may be traced to the genre of ‘secret stories’ or ‘mysteries’ (gupta katha) that ruled the Bat-tala press from the 1870s onwards. Bhubanmohan Mukhopadhay (1841–1916), a professional satirist and ghostwriter for several rich patrons, wrote a provocative text. Originally written as Ei Ek Notun: Amar Guptakatha (Here’s Something New: My Secret Story) (1870–73), it was reprinted as Haridaser Guptakatha in 1904. The book enjoyed notoriety and was read clandestinely by bhadralok as Rabindranath Tagore pointed out in an evocative story called ‘Khata’ (Exercise book) (1891). Many of the graphic details of the ‘secret stories’ and the genre called kechha kahini (scandalous stories) were often borne out by government reports.39 In the former, the sensationalist elements were couched in the language of the cautionary. The sketches in the theatre magazines shared some of the schematic plot of ‘mysteries’ as well as the admonitory model of earlier farces.40 But actress-stories unfold almost programatically within a configuration of pre-determined roles with ‘donor figures’, ‘benefactors’ and so on. Usually in the first person, they feature a ‘female narrator’ with an assumed name or a stage name chosen for professional as well as security reasons. At some point the reader is informed of the narrator’s ‘real name’, and, usually, of an affectionate diminutive given to her by her parents (Sadu for Saudamini, Niru for Nirupama). This establishes an authentic familial past, a normative home and an intimacy with the reader: ‘You may call me Sadu.’ They usually show the seduction of the household female (gharer meye) by the attractive rake, with the brothel as a final destination. She prefers to keep her stage name a secret for fear of adverse reactions. This ensures a guessing game with the reader because the narratives carry an air of immediacy, hinting that the narrator could be any contemporary actress. The stories are about a ‘woman with

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a past’. The patently fake air of mystery is enjoyable even when not entirely credible. There are recurrent references to her attractive visage and build, her blossoming youth and ‘the appetites of her body’ – held to be the chief reasons behind her ‘fall’, besides her overweening pride. Of course, these traits are also the reasons behind her success. Acting prowess (abhinay nipunata) is inseparable from her feminine charms and wiles (chhalana). The complete split between the repentant mindheart (mon) and the uncontrollable demands of her body – her dehadharma, is steeped in a Judaeo-Christian discourse of carnality. The subject is tossed in an ever-whirling vortex between the two until death steps in. The past is resurrected through a range of strategies such as formulaic phrases that nevertheless lend authenticity to the act of making public one’s inner life. Thus the declaration of imminent revelation is followed by or juxtaposed with veiled and deferred disclosures: ‘I have something to say’; ‘a particular reason prevents me from saying more’, or most frequently, ‘had I known then’. The mystery is sustained by transitional phrases, frequently encountered in women’s writings of the time, suggesting discretion or an art-less narrative (depending on the context): ‘However, let that be’; ‘Anyway’. The narrative works through a judicious mix of self-censorship, suspense and inevitability, projecting a readership in the know: ‘as is usually the case in such situations’; ‘exactly what happen to . . . people like myself’; ‘as was to be expected’; ‘[I] threw myself into a life of sin’ or ‘drowned myself in a sea of sins’. There are not so subtle references to one’s superior qualities, especially of physical attributes, to establish credibility: ‘I was told . . . that I was quite a beauty.’ Such cues are scattered throughout the narrative directing the reader to construct a woman who is a creature of extremes: ‘wretched women such as ourselves’, ‘cursed life’, ‘my weak character’, ‘an irrepressible sensuality’, ‘heart was bursting’, ‘trembled with anger’, ‘a fire rages inside me’ and so on. In sharp contradiction to this excess, because of the dissimulation she is forced to practice, the ‘I’ is presented a feeling-less monster: ‘I was made of stone’; ‘a stone-hearted woman’; [I was] ‘like a stone statue’, including ‘direct’ confessions such as ‘Many were the men on whom I practiced cruel deceptions.’ In most cases, the subjects are single women at the time of narration, although the exceptional story might cast the female performer as a mother with little girls, as in ‘Amala o Chapala’. Only occasionally is she a second-generation performer with a mother who is or was also performer. In such cases, the heroine is herself cleansed of professional contamination through her inherent nobility, as in the play 214

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Apurba Sati by Sukumari Dutta that has surfaced several times in this book. After half a century of women on the proscenium stage, there must have been a good many second-generation artists; the absence or erasure of a generational occupational identity in the stories can only be deliberate. An ingenious solution is offered by the author of ‘Natir bibah’ (A nati’s marriage), where the marriage of the actress Oindrilla with the bhadralok-actor, Madhusudan, is celebrated by the paternal manager who hopes the union will bring forth ‘a new race (jati) of actors and actresses’ as in ‘the days of yore’.41 It could also be an allusion to the marriage of a first-generation actress Sukumari to a bhadralok-actor, discussed in the postscript. There would have been a mix of castes amongst theatre actresses, with many, like Binodini, belonging to the ‘lowest’ among Vaishnavs – the jat vaishnav.42 With the apparent invisibility of caste identity of performers in the context of the metropolitan proscenium theatre, came the desire to forge a new professional community. The marriage of professional work with upward social mobility was modeled perhaps on the numerous theatrical families who made up the backbone of the profession in England. The reasons for the protagonist’s entering the profession are predictable: elopement with a lover, seduction, or deception practiced by men and sometimes by women. The entry to the stage is inevitably a fallout of unhappy or enforced liaisons or conjugal relationships. It is never a decision made without such pressures. Love of acting or the theatre as a chosen profession does not figure in these narratives. The initial departure from a family home whether in the countryside or in the city is rarely based on economic necessity. The theatre is never foregrounded as a viable, if partial, source of income. It is primarily seen as a ‘natural’ place of display for those already fallen, for those who have ‘come out’ their homes. The result is almost complete elision of any stark economic necessity that in most cases initiated or inspired a stage career. That the city was also an exciting space offering new options of livelihood even when triggered by economic compulsions, and of carving out an identity, is borne out in Binodini’s autobiography, as well as in interviews of latter-day actresses such as Kanan Bala, Sarajubala Devi and Sabitri Chattopadhyay, among others. A combination of titillating details and sorrowful accounts reconstructs, albeit sketchily, the conditions of survival during her professional life as an actress. She is helped, at least initially, by a male benefactor figure from the theatre world; the latter has no ulterior motive and is kind and reproachful by turns. This individual is usually referred to as ‘Sh-babu’ or ‘M-babu, in keeping with the 215

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mystery-generating strategies of the sketches. The anonymous male figure is also a standard motif in contemporary biographies and plays about actresses as mentioned in Chapter 1. But there is little or nothing about what the choice of theatre entails. When the protagonist of an actress-story laments, ‘What a terribly hard life it was!’, she is not referring to her work – rehearsals, memorising, greasepaint, performance, learning and unlearning, touring and the rest of it. It is only about the mind-body split. While little or no information is given about the actual workplace or the training, there are enough particulars delineated about social relationships in and around the theatre to suggest to the reader the place of the prostitute/actress in society. The identity of the actress is actually constituted by these three crucial absences: her metropolitan location; economic need (even destitute circumstances) making the theatre a viable means of livelihood; and the conditions of her workplace or the routine of work. In the manner of most confessional literature, the end of the protagonist’s life is usually the starting point of the narrative presented to the reader, that is ‘realisation’ and a certain ‘objectivity’ regarding one’s own life is the precondition to re-presenting that life, particularly if the aim is didactic. A dreadful end is reserved for the actress: madness, diseases such as syphilis, destructive liaisons, exile (as far away as the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean) and death. In some cases, the lover is voluntarily renounced; only in rare instances is there a courageous denunciation of the first man to have seduced her. A strong moral ending rounds up the story. The rare happy ending involves respectability – the sanction of marriage. A rhetorical question is sometimes tossed at the reader asking him or her to judge the rights of the case, as in ‘Dayi ke?’ (Who is to blame?). The crisis may centre on a moment of dramatic recognition, or more interestingly, it might originate in a lack of recognition. This makes possible the staging of a scene of deception, usually as part of a revenge motif but sometimes to further a project of self-sacrifice, intrinsic to a (Hindu) woman’s nature, streedharma. Revelation is similarly double-edged: hubris – pride in acting skills or interchangeably, in one’s powers of seduction – threatens disclosure. In moments of dilemma, the protagonist is torn between her inscription as a fallen woman and the experience of shared womanhood, naridharma. We often find a play within a play that, Hamlet-like, provokes changes in real life; not in the simple manner of a morality play, but as a sophisticated playing out of revenge or repentance. The experience of playing an approved role (the faithful-unto-death wife in ‘Saudamini’) or of witnessing a scene where the heroine turns away from the sins of the 216

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flesh (Othello) triggers off a fatal course of repentance. Fatal, because in most cases, the end is death or a period of terrible conflict, that ends in a death-like state. Because the actress of the Bengali stage was indissolubly imbricated in a particular discourse of the fallen woman, it was the story not staged, not told in the ‘official biographies’ published in the magazines, that then became the subject of a serialised life-story. It was inevitably the story of the fall, the subsequent exit from familiar familial and kinship ties, an outcast status in the city, the search for a new means of livelihood and the finding of a new identity as a stage actress – a metropolitan tale of metamorphosis. The narrative continued with a return to the past and ended quite often with the dissolution of the actress-identity. The obsessive rewrites of the auto/biography of the prostitute-actress were negotiated within this fictional framework. It might be fruitful here to juxtapose the actress-story with Vasudha Dalmia’s observations on the varta, a popular narrative genre in which the life of devotees of the Vaishnav Pushtimarg sampradaya (community) ‘were endowed with a didactic goal’.43 Dalmia mentions one such varta of the guru, the Acharyaji, ‘about the veshya (prostitute) who is transformed into an “immense” love for her swarupa, Lalji, whom the guru had given for worship and care’. In contrast to the varta, the subject of the actress-story can never experience a permanent conversion; she idealises and longs for that conversion primarily as freedom from her ‘natural promiscuity’. Her change of heart is temporary: within these texts she has no sampradaya or guru to turn to, and her family rejects her. The stage becomes the only means of enacting ‘spirituality’, but this too is finally shown as a self-deception. A very different take on the possibility of transformation through the support of a guru will be seen in the following chapter. To return to the epigraph to this chapter: the taking off of theatrical costume is an enactment of the stripping off of the false actress self and the ‘uncovering’ of or recovering of the ‘real’ remorseful wife who would be chaste. The continuously shifting tenses in these narratives seek to capture intense fluctuations of remorse, cutting through the specific temporal phases of then and now. Acting, reflecting, retrospecting and recreating in writing become inseparable. The conscientious strain of performance as Bhakti is still visible in this piece. However, the involvement with acting as a craft or profession is no longer given importance. In all such stories, the quality of performance as an index of talent, dedication and commitment to a profession is either absent or is totally stripped of the subjectivity of the fictive firstperson narrator. 217

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Figure 4.6 Problematising Binodini. Painting by Gogi Saroj Pal and actress Satakshi Nundy in Tuhinabha Majumdar’s Aamaar Katha: Story of Binodini, Films Division of India, 2015 Source: Still by Abhijit Bhuniya. Courtesy of Tuhinabha Majumdar

Imaging the new woman Text, image and voice are not to be perceived as discrete items, for the narrative emerges from a continuous reading of the three in the pages of the magazine, from the carryover of performances and certainly, from the spectacle in the theatre. The close proximity of unrelated material generates new narratives. The English theatrical scene in the subcontinent, comprising a wide spectrum of performance forms, had inspired large-scale production of prints, posters and postcards which were in circulation in the colonies. From at least the 1860s, English language newspapers in British India, such as the Pioneer (published from Allahabad), advertised celebrity photographs of Europeans. Only next in precedence to the royal family came generals, followed by performers and actresses. Picture postcards from a later era showed otherwise decorous-looking women in coy, alluring poses and dressed in anything ranging from a wedding dress to a bathing suit or maillot. Women playing the breeches part were a favourite, as they were depicted in costume. Actresses’ photographs

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in postcards contributed to more than individual publicity, as Tracy Davis observes in her study of actresses in Victorian England: [P]ostcards were invested with a playgoer’s emotional and physiological memory of watching the actress in the playhouse, but it also means that the actress’s stage persona (her living presence amidst an audience) was invested with the playgoer’s emotional and physiological memory of erotica (if any).44 Phototype postcards, which first appeared in 1899 in England, were soon available in India. In addition, many photographic firms produced printed colour postcards, usually depicting castes and occupational types. The firms of Marcopolo and Bourne & Shepherd in Calcutta and Higginbotham in Madras and Bangalore were famous for their postcards as well as general photographic work.45 The vending of illustrated books as well as individual engravings, prints and chromolithographs both within the city as well as to villages and provincial towns had long been an established practice.46 But the spread of photographs to middle-class homes created very different ‘sets’ of representation. The ideals of conjugality sanctioned the eventually mandatory wedding photo as also the family album. Group photos prevailed in institutional spaces such as schools. Photographs of actresses proved to be the trump card of the theatre magazines. Already, outside of the hall with its painted backdrops and the mechanics of spectacle, the public theatre had generated several hybrid modes of visual illustration which peaked with the mass production of oleographs and prints.47 While these must have appealed to a broad range of buyers, an extended reading public now required visual material as well as printed matter to supplement interest in theatre and films. Illustrated (sachitra) journals became de rigueur by the 1920s. The editor of Ranga-darshan frequently levelled charges against rival periodicals such as Sachitra Mashik Basumati for seeking to attract readers with prurient pictures of ‘semi-nude’ woman, or seeking to legitimise images with tagged lines from Rabindranath’s poetry (Sachitra Sisir).48 How did this new visual configuration manifest itself in the theatre magazines? Saurabh, an early magazine in which poems and musical compositions by actresses occupied a privileged place, featured cherubs, billowing drapery and sundry Victorian motifs, framing the text. These must have been sourced from a huge pool of ready-made designs, similar

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to those we find in Binodini’s autobiography. The bigger and brasher Rangalay, which came out some six years later, was replete with advertisements, usually of the same brands, in almost every issue. The Natya-mandir carried photographs but almost no advertisements. The cover picture of the first issue with the motto ‘All the World is a Stage’ foregrounded a woman whose sari folds contour her figure as erotic divinity. While her pose is inspired by neo-classical statues, she simultaneously evokes Bharatmata, Britannia and Saraswati (Figure P.7). It is with Roop o Rang that the treatment of the female body becomes more experimental. This is partly because of the magazine’s concern with the ongoing debates on the nature and definition of art, particularly in the re-interpretation of the concepts of bhava and saundarya, and not exclusively as feminised categories. Tapati Guha-Thakurta has shown how these concepts were already contested categories in discussions and the formulation of ‘Indian’ art.49 The magazines show a concurrent search for the ideal of ‘the beautiful woman’ or a definition of ‘beauty’ and of ‘women’. Often, this constitutes a topic in itself, as in Gnyanendranath Chakravarty’s ‘Jiban rahasye narir saundarya’ (Woman’s beauty in the mystery of life);50 sometimes it becomes a story centred around a test of chastity, a variant of tales like Beauty and the Beast, as in Saroj Kumar Chattopadhyay’s ‘Aparichito’ (Unknown), which begins: ‘I am a beauty. Everyone said I was beautiful.’ A diverse range of visual matter was experimented with in this quest for beauty that was recognisably ‘Indian’ but with a western radius. The first issue of Roop o Rang carried a cover painting by artist Jamini(ranjan) Roy (1887–1972) captioned ‘Prasadhon’ which showed a Santal woman arranging flowers in her companion’s hair, while another issue devoted a full page to photographs of the hairstyles of the American fashion icon, Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), titled ‘Swansoner keshsajja’ (Swanson’s coiffure).51 The actress figure with its endless possibility of roles and variegated mise en scène open to public viewing became crucial to these experiments. The generic sundaris or Calcutta beauties celebrated in the Kalighat patas, lithographs and chromolithographs from an earlier century have given way to more fragmented imaging. Figures 4.2 and 4.3 are examples that showcase the youthful female body as (a latterday) oriental Barbie doll in ‘lilting dancing’ rhythms. The subject looks at the viewer, archly or otherwise. Such full figure images frozen in coy poses carry suggestive one-line or one-word texts and are juxtaposed with the printed text of the actress-story. ‘Sachakita’ or ‘Startled’ was placed next to an essay on patita bhoginigan (fallen sisters). ‘Sadyasnata’ or ‘Just bathed’, in colour in the original, shows a woman partly 220

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draped in a wet sari showing her flesh tones (more suggestive than the female nude), ostensibly drying her long tresses. Placed alongside the story ‘Abhinetri’ by Batakrishna Ghosh and reproduced after thirteen issues, the full-bodied female in a clinging garment was arguably the most popular motif of the Bengali ‘village belle’. It had sold as prints and would later feature prominently in films. By the 1890s there was a pronounced interest in Bengal in the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), the ‘theatrical’ conceptualisation of whose paintings based on ‘scenes’ from the puranas has been extensively studied.52 I see a break from Varma’s bevy of female models in the figures under discussion. They neither provide the lead of a familiar puranic tale – of Sakuntala or Nala and Damayanti – as with Ravi Varma, nor do they work with recognisable iconic figures of the Bharatmata kind that became part of swadeshi branding. The casual practice of flipping through a magazine made for a new mode of contiguity and ellipses. The caption to an image might be quite unrelated to the text on the adjacent page. The reader-viewer was now being asked to invent a tale for the modern heroine, much like the popular genre of Victorian ‘problem pictures’ which often depicted women in ‘suspect situations’.53 The actress-story published alongside these visuals provided clues to realise this project.

Bhava in new media A word here, on the reconceptualisation of bhava in relation to photography. In theatre, bhava could claim both a classical Sanskrit lineage as well as an affinity with a more specific regional specificity in the aesthetics of Gaudiya Vaishnavism and its more recent avatar in neoVaishnavism, delineated in Chapter 2. Girishchandra’s bhakti plays had made bhava a critical criterion of authenticity. The references to bhava in the magazines encapsulate all of these histories, ‘classical’, ‘textual’ and performance-based. They also extended the discourse of social redemption, offering a mode that combined religious belief with contemporary theatrical practice. An intriguing application of familiar categories to a novel subject was effected in the write-ups and photographs which came under the nomenclature bhavabhinetri, broadly meaning the ‘actress-in-bhava’ or ‘the actress expressing bhava’. Thus, ‘Bhavabhinetri Elen [Aileen] Pringle’ shows seven shots of the actress’s face, each expressing a different bhava.54 ‘Miss Mary (Marie) Odette’ (Figure 4.2) also showed different expressive bhavas. A similar series of eight bust-sized photographs of an aged Girish Ghosh with bilingual captions (the English in 221

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parenthesis) displayed entirely new bhavas, such as ‘Roopmugdha’ or ‘Smitten by beauty’. A recent study informs us that these photos were taken at the request of fans when Girishchandra had gone to Benaras to recuperate, just before his death.55 Interestingly, ‘Roopmugdha’ was also used as a caption in one of the rare photographs of Binodini where she was not depicted in a role.56 The implication being that she could be presented as ‘herself’ only when she was representative of a higher aesthetic ideal. This resolution – of expressive bhavas coming alive with modern technology – is a significant move away from the initial reservations expressed about photographs when ‘art’ was considered to be bhavvyanjak (idealistic) and photographs swabhavik (naturalistic). It is likely that along with the entry and increasing presence of bioscopes, new visual narratives were coming into being.57 For example, ‘Chhabite galpa’ or ‘Picture stories’, was first started by Dhirendranath Gangopadhyay, better known as ‘DG’ of the cinema world. His booklet, called Bhaver Abhivyakti (subtitled, ‘Expressions and Caricatures – 100 pictures in all’), was published in Hindi, English and Bangla. Another booklet, ‘Expressions of a Graduate or a Passed B.A.’ (subtitled ‘Laughing scene of delightful humour’) came out in English and Bangla.58 The multiple language editions indicate a large clientele in Bengal, many of whom would also subscribe to theatre magazines. The new visual configuration was also in response to the emphasis on documentation, discussed earlier. Histories of the public theatre with ‘life stories’ of the founding fathers gave rise to what the editor of Roop o Rang called the ‘Character Photo’ (charitra chitra). The implication was that the ‘complete person’ could only be brought alive for the reader if the printed text was supplemented with the visual likeness. For the most part, single portraits were featured under this head. Group photos of ‘Amerikar Rashtrapati o abhinetr sampraday’ (The American president and a group of theatre people) intended to prove the worth of theatre folk in foreign lands. As part of the gentrification process, importance was given to explicitly nationalist figures such as Chittaranjan Das. Surendranath Bannerjea and wife make a mandatory appearance as a couple (dampati) gracing the magazine. For all the literary greats connected with the theatre, but not actually working in the public theatre, was reserved the last page of the journal that carried full-page painted photographs of Bankimchandra, Dinabandhu Mitra and ‘Visvakobi Rabindranath’ among others. Film and stage actresses from abroad were given equal prominence with much being made of Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry.59 Terry is cited as one of Binodini Dasi’s models in her memoirs.60 In an English 222

Figure 4.7 Sarah Bernhardt in a Bengali theatre magazine, 1926 Source: Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 2, 8 Kartik 1333 BS, p. 31. Author’s collection

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advertisement for Tarasundari’s benefit night, in which she was starring in both Shahjahan and Pauline, Girishchandra wrote: We have heard of the triiumphant progress of Sarah Bernhardt, we have heard of the stage jubilee of Ellen Terry, and we hope confidently that Bengal will not lack [sic] behind, but will rise to the full height of the occasion and give her favourite actress a magnificent reception such as will be long remembered in the annals of our stage.61 As yet, the forms of address were not fixed: ‘Miss Julie Op (American actress)’,62 but ‘Srimati Priscilla Dean’63 and ‘Srimati Mary Pickford’64 accompanied full-page photographs of the star in question. Photographs of Bengali actresses however, showed them invariably in roles from ‘famous literary works’: Binodini Dasi as Bankimchandra’s heroine ‘Ayesha’ (Figure 1.1), or cross-dressed as ‘Sahana’ in Girishchandra’s adaptation of Pygmalion and Galatea; Sukumari as ‘­Motibibi’ – another iconic Bankimchandra heroine (Figure P.1), and so on. Readers were obviously so familiar with the literary text behind the play, that the title of the play was often omitted in the caption to the photograph. The intermeshing of the literary character and the star’s embodiment of the role underlined the public theatre’s connections with high culture and buttressed a superior regional identity. The intertwining of the literary as suitably theatrical fare in fact became a distinct marker of Bengal’s modernity. The literary text became central to cinema; for long, films were called boi (books).

Whither workplace? Clearly, the actress’s persona was more saleable than any exposition of the place, nature or context of her work. The varied array of women in the magazines went hand in hand with a reluctance to experiment with sets and theatre design on the ground. This compares strangely with the enthusiasm for and interest in avant-garde theatre in Europe, testified by numerous articles on and photographs of Stanislavski directing Anton Chekhov’s plays, scenes from productions of Moscow Art Theatre, as well as individual portraits of and articles on Max Reinhardt and Gordon Craig – a fairly vast swathe of material offering an abundance of information and commentary on theatrecraft in west. In stark contrast was the silence about the working conditions and the workaday lives of contemporary Bengali actresses. I would suggest that the actress-story was meant to compensate for this silence. 224

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The 1850s and 1860s had seen a spate of social reform plays representing the oppression of peasants, against polygamy, bride price, prostitutes, alcohol and in favour of widow remarriage and so on.65 The woman’s question was addressed directly in frank, often brutal, critiques of social practices initiated and perpetuated because of kulinism. The treatment by the dramatists had been probing and complex. Nineteenth-century farces were a mixed lot: their strong polemical engagement on topical issues such as the 1891 Age of Consent Bill had kept alive a tradition of social commentary, although a majority showed women as being ‘naturally’ wanton or lewd. Hence the sharp split between the promptings of ethics (niti) and that of the body (deha dharma). It must be said though that even in those cases where the threat of female sexuality was linked to education, farces touched on the repressed sexuality of women, of their objectification and use by others (men) as commodities and their anguish.66 Half a century later, the seamless narrative of the actress-story privileged a much more homogenised representation of women. Neither patriarchy nor socio-economic conditions featured; the exaggerated split self appeared to be the sole basis of conflict. When, rarely, the formulaic plot seemed to privilege female subjectivity, it was that of the chastised and worth-less woman whose only model was the ideal of a self-sacrificing pativrata: ‘like the chaste wife of the play’ in the epigraph. Only she who had failed to be the good wife was forced to become an actress. Cast out from her clan as a kulta, her insatiable sexual appetites overweighed all other considerations. Why did the actress figure so prominently in the theatre magazines of the 1920s and 1930s? Was it because hers was the only ‘real’ or recognisable figure in whom the ambivalences and contradictions of modernity could be located, exaggerated, explored and exorcised? The theatre was a co-sexual workplace where women drank and smoked, flirted with men and earned their own livelihood. The actress was constructed as the desirable embodiment of ideals dramatised in largerthan-life stories. Moreover, by the early 20th century, writing itself granted respectability to the ‘native’ or ‘Hindu’ woman, doubly so, in the case of the outcast native woman – the actress. Our overview would suggest that the writer-editors of theatre magazines were using the actress-story not really to describe the theatre world or even to discuss the actress as ‘the fallen woman’. The magazines actually became a forum to air views on conjugality, the psychology of love, speculating on the reasons for the married woman (gharer bou) leaving her home, the problems of the single woman (abandoned, widowed, seduced) – obliquely addressing the entire troubled spectrum 225

Figure 4.8 Pandit Ramnarayan Tarkaratna Source: Author’s collection

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of female sexuality that was both threatening and inviting. The predominant tone was one of ambivalence, determined by an exploration of real scenarios within the framework of moralistic tales. The actress-story moved out of familiar moral grids when it acknowledged and sought to dissolve the strict compartmentalisation of the ‘woman at home’ and the ‘woman of the stage’, evoking the woman on the street, as we saw in Chapter 3. ‘Otherness’ now had a different valence: the female performer was represented as the ‘other woman’ in conjunction with a housewife or grihabadhu. In fact, the return to her past was to establish that she was once a grihabadhu herself, or had every possibility of becoming one. She might be a singular victim of patriarchal practices, but she had been forced to become an actress because of the irrepressible impulses of her own nature. There was neither choice nor celebration of her profession. Within her lies dormant all the proper attributes of a grihabadhu, so that she uses her considerable acting prowess to try and return to the fold whenever, or if, the occasion permits. ‘Saudamini’ or ‘Sadu’ is so skilled an actress that she succeeds in temporarily taking on the guise of the ‘pure woman’ (Appendix). Her mother-in-law is taken in by the deception and curses her – the disguised daughter-in-law – believing Saudamini to be a sympathetic outsider. It is only while playing perfectly the ideal wife, that cracks appear in the professional self; the reader becomes witness to her tormented psyche. Social taboos prevent a return either to the natal or marital home. Therefore the staging of elaborate scenes of deception to prove her worth for a reader who is situated ‘outside’ the story but is the intended addressee. In most cases, the other ‘characters’ are unable to see through her acting. It is the reader who occupies a privileged place in terms of her ‘larger life’ – that part which remains unknown to the rest of the world. The process of self-recrimination and ‘realisation’ – one of the many extreme emotional fluctuations enacted in the stories, is couched in the language of excess. The appropriate ‘movements’ are played out in slow motion, as we find in the epigraph to this chapter. The confessional address to the reader is apparently the only act of ‘plain speaking’ in the protagonist’s life. Of course, theatrical discourse pervades this ‘transparent’ self as well. I would propose then, that the actress-story represents a serious attempt to negotiate the hitherto compartmentalised domain of the home and the world; to establish bhadra antecedents for the ‘public woman’; to provoke through the melodramatic ending and emphasis on poetic justice remorse, repentance and sorrow in those who have left the fold. Simultaneously though, the actress-story lets off the hook 227

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or exonerates and ‘explains’ the motivations of other bhadralok associated with the actress by foregrounding relationships other than that of the asrita (protected) and her babu patron. The figures in the story differ from the 19th-century archetype of the urban courtesan in western Europe who is purified by male love, even if at the end she has to die to maintain the family honour of her lover – as in the many lives of Marguerite Gautier, the Dame aux Camélias created by Dumas fils, first as a novel (1847) and then adapted for the stage (1852), followed by Puccini’s La Boheme (1896).

Interiority Finally, what kind of reading do these texts invite, given the periodic, serialised and mixed-media context of their appearance? How may they be juxtaposed against the fractured and multiple narratives in contemporary novels such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (Home and the World)? Rabindranath’ novel interweaves three firstperson narratives (atmakatha) whose tenor is largely confessional and introspective, and not merely accounts of specific incidents. The novel is structured around inner lives, presented as multiple subjectivities and perspectives, problematising language as communication. The actress-story presents an unbroken tale with predictable pauses for ‘suspense’ and including long stretches of self-dramatisation. The narrative, even when extreme emotions or situations are depicted, reflects the seductive flow of events. The reader is not required to implicate herself in the ‘inner life’ of the actress figure in any way that would subvert the formulae of the narrative. At the same time, the stories are not undisguised tracts of repentance. There is neither absolute condemnation nor any clear exoneration, neither violent denunciation nor any exultation. In effect, they are a kitschy working out of an acute socio-economic contradiction, written from the perspective of those within the profession, but who view their female counterparts as belonging to a different species. It only their perspective we can recover, of those unwilling or unable to grant to others – their coworkers – a space within the profession. So, the moral is construed entirely in the physical, in recognisable and heightened attributes of sexuality. This construction leads to a severance of art from profession, of skill and training from performance, and of livelihood and labour from passion. The public theatre was really the only locus of urban metropolitan life which could place the matter of occupational identity squarely within the ‘women’s question’. It was here that issues of modernity 228

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and gender roles, occupational identity and caste, education and class, religious belief and secular performance conditions, continued for long to be in complete disjunction, despite the incessant debates on representation centred on the presence of the actress. Extensive studies of a similar nature with a broader context would establish that ‘nationalism’ even amongst metropolitan intelligentsia did not have a uniform growth or showed the same face at any given point in the colonial situation. Theatre presents a unique area of practice and representation. For theatre magazines, it was never a simple question of formulating an anti-colonial front, as might have been expected or desired. They were involved in a complicated process of selective borrowing, adaptation and reworking, not always with a single conscious agenda. Yet, they reveal an almost collective myopia in choosing to focus more on the cultural-religious place of theatre and representations of theatre in popular middle-class opinion, rather than on the actual stuff of contemporary performance. The editor-writers were usually theatre practitioners themselves; for long they, too, had been regarded as outcasts, a fact that the actresses bring up in their public speeches. In writing about theatre, the editors were addressing the enemy within – bhadra samaj or respectable society. The magazines aimed at raising theatre from the penumbra of the urban petty bourgeoisie or provincial visitors who made up bulk of the audience to a more selective, educated middle-class clientele. However shaky the economic foundations of theatre companies, the public theatre had come to be closedly identified with Bengali cultural identity. In bringing out specialised theatre magazines, the editor-writers sought to inform, defend and entertain as well as record their own endeavours for a hopefully more appreciative posterity. They were traversing new territory in print journalism in order to bridge the gap between the label of immoral entertainment and the realm of refined aesthetics. They buttressed their project with the ‘latest’ information/gossip about stars in the west. The actress-story was enmeshed in all of these objectives. The theatre magazines of this period were a cross between an art-andaesthetics miscellany on the one hand, and the women’s magazines of the post-war decades with columns on health, exercise, beauty and the usual bevy of cover girls on the other. What has been their effect on the way lives of performing woman may be narrated? At the time of their composition, publication and reception there was perhaps a degree of exploration. With time, the formula of the actress-story ensured a ready-made frame within which the lives of all performing women may be read, as examples from the late 1950s show.67 The actress-story arguably set in motion and put in place the 229

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conventions of biographical writings of women performers as tales of moral degradation and repentance. Even when viewed sympathetically, very little agency was showed as motivating a woman’s choice of a livelihood or the desirability of acting as a profession for the single woman. It was only her anguish at being an actress that was spotlighted. Simultaneously, it was in their decorative presence in various roles or ‘moods’ – as ideals or types of socially desired models of womanhood – that they could figure in the magazines and in newspaper advertisements. The biographer or research scholar is almost expected to ascribe to his/her subject an undistinguished but unequivocally ‘illreputed’ neighbourhood, the ubiquitous ‘forbidden quarters’, ‘obscure area’. The rare autobiographical piece of a ‘genuine’ actress, when found, is not surprisingly, fetishised. This is one reason behind the obsession with ‘Nati Binodini’ to the almost total exclusion of her fellow female performers. By the very constraints of the formula and indeed, the publication context, the ‘confessions’ precluded any real appraisal of those very attributes which are used to brand the actress as ‘ungenteel’ – mobility, liaisons outside of marriage, independent decision making, earning a livelihood, public appearance and pleasure and pride in performance skills.

Moving images: culture and spirituality In the 1830s, Calcutta had been introduced to the technology of the phantasmagoria. From the 1890s onwards, bioscopes were already being used as fillers and as miscellaneous packages in theatre halls. ‘Romancing the bioscope’ occupied a privileged space in the theatre magazines. They appeared partly as a rival and partly as new technology with which, it was believed, that theatre had the closest affinity. Advertisements of full-fledged or independent bioscope screenings were ubiquitous in the 1910s, offering a miscellany of shorts ranging from ‘Coronations’, to ‘tiger and lion hunts’, and ‘Dances of Siva’ – the eclecticism working on the lines that Tom Gunning has described in his ‘The Cinema of Attractions’.68 Bioscope shows were also available for private in-house shows as entertainment during Durga ‘Poojah’,69 presumably supplanting or at least complementing the ‘nautch’ that had for long entertained sahibs and memsahibs. Did the introduction of this new technology bring about a change in the perception of the actress? Did the stage actress gravitate to the screen? Did she gain in this shift from the proscenium to the celluloid? And, did she eventually move out of the frame of the ‘actress-story’?

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By way of a partial response here, we turn to a news item in the mid-1920s. A column on ‘The Business of Film and Indian Ladies’ reported that a German company wished to make a film on the life of Buddha, Buddha Lila. The following advertisement (in English) had sadly failed to draw an expected response: ‘Wanted – A number of cultured Indian and Anglo-Indian ladies to portray leading roles . . . Clear-cut features, olive complexion, large expressive eyes and sympathetic spiritual personality.’70 The writer then explained in Bangla, ‘That is to say, they are inviting educated Indian ladies to work in the company’ (emphasis added) and warned that if Bengali women continue to be ‘overly shy’, ‘ladies from other regions of India’ would seize the opportunity to pursue a career in films. This was a new take on the spiritual as it had prevailed from the 1880s onwards: the ‘spiritual personality’ was now being explicitly linked to class and formal education, not to mention the olive complexion. It might also have been a warning that ‘Bengali ladies’ were in danger of losing out to Eurasian/Anglo-Indian women! We note a major shift in the span of three years: from the cry to ‘educate the actress and make her into a real woman who might better serve the nation’ to advertising for ‘the educated or respectable actress’ – one who may replace the present class of illiterate prostituteactress. An occasional article such as Sudhindrakumar Deb’s ‘Abhinetri’ (Actress) (c. 1925) called for a reform of existing social conditions rather than harping on individual rehabilitation.71 Sudhindrakumar spoke of educating and training the present set of actresses and suggested that they be given better wages for their work in the theatre. But the responses in subsequent issues of the magazine and the letters to the editor swerved towards the usual directions, exhorting the actress to take up ‘the path of good’ by engaging herself in an ‘honest occupation’ and serving the nation.72 The thrust was firmly on individual rehabilitation as a national cause. ‘Nati’, written three years later by Monilal Brahma, came closer to addressing the ground realities. The writer cited the director of a newly established Bengali film company’s demand for ‘educated ladies’ as actresses rather than uneducated prostitutes. The author conceded that this increasingly heard demand was indeed a noble idea – but how feasible was it? The real need was to educate the average theatregoer (sadharan darshak) and make him more appreciative of beauty. Otherwise, even the respectable performing woman (bhadra-nati was the newly coined term) would continue to be an object of vulgar curiosity. The article emphasised the vital connection between livelihood and

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identity: there have been actresses since ‘times immemorial’; undoubtedly, they are superior to common prostitutes. However, it is not they who lead the educated actors astray; it is absurd to suggest that they should be ‘replaced’ by educated actresses. For it is the former who have made the staging of plays possible thus far; hence, ‘we should take them along with us’ should there ever come a time when we have ‘educated ladies’ for actresses.73 Such sentiments were rare. For the most part, the nati was singled out for redemption, the patita-abhinetri was revealed as a lapsed woman from a ‘bhadra’ family who simply had no other option but to take to acting. The search then moved on to the ideal ‘educated actress’ who would also be a professional. Significantly, ticketed performances by the boys and later, girls/women of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Bolpur asram’ had already started taking place in the theatre halls of Calcutta, as well as in the ancestral home of Jorasanko – all choreographed and directed by Rabindranath. The primary identity of the performers was as always as ‘students’ of Santiniketan, emphasised in both advertisements and reviews. These shows and subsequent performance tours all over India were not entirely a part of a monetised economy, but they were ‘fund-raising’ tours. The evolution of the educated girl or woman into singer-dancer-actress would follow a different trajectory in Rabindranath’s asram-school-university, but not without stinging questions being raised for decades.74 The alienation of labour and its separation from value as worth finds its most popular manifestation in the actress-story. The contradictions the stories encapsulate lead to a denial of history, of generational and occupational identity.

Coda ‘It is necessary for a woman to learn vocal and instrumental music,’ Nagendrabala Mustaphi had maintained in an article in Bamabodhini around the turn of the century.75 A prolific writer on women’s conjugal and domestic duties, Nagendrabala began quite unexceptionably: ‘Music helps create a joyful mind . . . it is the supreme elixer for mental pain.’ Joy leads to good health, another ‘benefit’ for women singers and musicians. She reserved the biggest selling point for the last: ‘Even if a husband is depressed, his wife can always make him happy through music.’ Therefore, ‘if respectable women were trained . . . many men wouldn’t tread the wrong path and be totally ruined.’ Nagendrabala clinched her argument: ‘The day women from decent homes will learn to sing to the

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accompaniment of a veena, like the Aryan women of the past . . . from that day, conjugal disharmony will disappear.’ The ‘Aryan woman’ of yore was finally being reincarnated in the accomplished but modest wife! The optics of the theatre house are reworked in many such advertisements foregrounding the ‘accomplishment curriculum’.76 Two advertisements spanning two decades bring before us the nature of the translated young woman in an age of mechanical reproduction, involving image and sound. The actress-story and the particular construction of the confessional voice was not without use outside of the theatre world within which it was apparently circumscribed, as we note the hybrid beauty standing beside her instrument. The 1927 advertisement (Figure 4.10) for a ‘Mullick flute harmonium’ in the Nachghar is subtler. The visual chiasmus of indoors and

Figure 4.9 The ‘accomplishment curriculum’, Pravasi, 1311 BS/1904, p. 13 Source: Collection of Rabindra Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Courtesy of CSSSC Archives

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outdoors, gaze and melody, nature and culture, and text and image works with brilliant economy in the accompanying text: The koel, harbinger of spring, moves close to the window, quite enthralled; when, with youthful voice, the blossoming girl in her chamber, plays on, matching note for note.77 This is the transformed mise en scène, where the movement into conjugality is displayed confidently: the bhadramahila may flaunt a body or voice beautiful, within the approved parameters of domesticity. The harmonium, unlike the stigmatised instruments of female performing women in the Kalighat patas, has now found a resting place indoors, in the bedroom, on the nubile girl-woman’s lap.78 Her blossoming body is as much the text of the advertisement as is the magical mediatory effects of the instrument. A perfect fit between nature outdoors – the enraptured wooing male singing bird, now a listening kokil as well – and culture indoors – the musical instrument, the young girl, whose accomplishment (not professional art), will initiate marriage – and of course, the invited voyeur-reader.

Figure 4.10 ‘The harbinger of spring’. Advertisement for Mullick Flute Harmonium, Nachghar, 1927 Source: Author’s collection

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Figure 4.11 ‘Entertainment worth ten rupees’. Ticket for Kamale-Kamini at the Hathibagan Star (n.d.) Source: Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta

Notes 1 Excerpted from ‘Saudamini (Abhinetrir Atmakahini)’ (An Actress’s Autobiography). Anon. Roop o Rang, No. 4, 22 Kartik 1331 BS, pp. 82–5. See Appendix for my translation of the full text. 2 Usha Chakraborty, Condition of Bengali Women around the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhopadhyay, 1963. See also Sumanta Banerjee on distress sales in times of famine as well as the violence against women in the countryside triggering off migration to Calcutta, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998, p. 31. 3 Since the publication of an early version of this chapter in 1995, interesting work on actresses in the era of the silent cinema includes Priti Ramamurthy, ‘The Modern Girl in India in the Interwar Years: Interracial Intimacies, International Competition, and Historical Eclipsing’, Women Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1/2, The Global & the Intimate, Spring– Summer 2006, pp. 197–226. www.jstor.org/stable/40004749 (accessed on 22 July 2014); Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008. 4 See ‘Afterword’ in Rimli Bhattacharya (ed. and trans.), Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, pp. 187–243. 5 For example, Himani Bannerji, ‘Fashioning a Self: Educational Proposals for and by Women in Popular Magazines in Colonial Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 43, 26 October 1991 and Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali

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Women, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 58 and 92. See also Malavika Karlekar, Re-visioning the Past. Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. 6 Among a rich corpus of work, see Indrani Chatterjee, ‘The Muslim Family in South Asia’ in Afsaneh Najmabadi and Suad Joseph (eds), Encyclopedia of Islamic Women’s History, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007; Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1995; Akimun Rahman, Bibi Theke Begum: Bangali Musalman Narir Kromobibartaner Itihas, Calcutta: Gangchil, 2009. 7 Chitra Deb, Antapurer Atmakatha, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1987, pp. 5, 40–2. It is also the case that many men published under women’s names. 8 Sutapa Bhattacharjee (compiled and ed.) (trans. by Sheila Sengupta), Reflective Prose, Writings by Bengali Women of the Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2011. 9 Sonia Nishat Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education in Colonial Bengal’ in Krishna Kumar and Joachim Oesterheld (eds), Education and Social Change in South Asia, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007, pp. 218–47. 10 Several women, including Swarnakumari Devi, wrote on science for children. See Gargi Gangopadhyay, ‘Reading Leisure: A Print Culture for Children in Colonial Bengal’, Unpublished thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Arts) of Jadavpur University, Department of English, 2012, p. 136. 11 Editorial, ‘Theatar o Banga Nari’ (The theatre and Bengali women), Antahpur, 7th Year, No. 2, Jeystha 1311 BS/1904, pp. 41–3. 12 Mrs Leach’s career (1810–48) was extensively covered in the Englishman. See also Amal Mitra, Kolkatae Bideshi Rangalay, Calcutta: Prakash Bhavan, 1967. 13 A ‘Miss Clara Ellis’ informed the ‘native baboos’ of her ‘amusing dramatic acts’ (koutukjanak natyakriya) that would be performed in the Town Hall, Samvad Purnachandroday, 16 September 1850. 14 Nripendra Saha, ‘Bangla Natya Andolan o Natya Sambadikata’ (Radical changes in Bengali theatre and journalism), Natya Akademi Patrika, No. 1, Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1990. 15 Compiled from Sushil Kumar Mukerjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres, 1753–1980, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi and Company, 1982, pp. 755–7. 16 Ibid., p. 118. 17 Dhananjay Mukhopadhyay, Bishnu Basu (ed.), Bangiya Natyashala (The Bengali Stage) 1316 BS/1909, repr. Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1998. 18 Jogendranath Bandyopadhyay, ‘Bidyabhushan, M.A.’, Aryadarshan, Bhadra 1284 BS/1877, pp. 226–39. 19 Damodar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Natak o abhinay’, Prabah, Part 1, No. 3, Ashar 1289 BS/1882, pp. 70–7 and Part 1, No. 6, Aswin 1289 BS/1882, pp. 166–70. 20 Adharchandra Mitra, ‘Jatiya jiban o natyashala’ (National life and the stage), Dasi, Part 5, No. 10, October 1896, pp. 539–46. 21 Editorial, Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 2, 8 Kartik 1331 BS/1924, pp. 25–7. 22 Roop o Rang, 1st year, 2 Jeystha 1332 BS/1925, p. 589. 23 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 1, 18 Aswin 1331 BS/1924, pp. 1–2.

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24 Debjani Sengupta, The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 126–42. 25 ‘Baidhabya Jibaner Chitra’ (A picture of widowed life), [by] ‘A Hindu Widow’, Antahpur, Magh 1309 BS/1902, p. 193. 26 Gautam Hemmady, ‘Matchbox Labels and the Stories They Tell’ in Jyotindra Jain (ed.), Marg, Vol. 68, No. 3, March–June 2017, p. 72. 27 ‘Bidhabar Nirananda (nari likhito)’ (A widow’s sorrow, written by a woman), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 27, 18 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, pp. 545–7. 28 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 25, 5 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, pp. 502–3. 29 Natya-mandir, 3rd year, Jeystha 1320 BS/1913, pp. 836–46. 30 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 14, 18 Magh 1331 BS/1924, pp. 279–82. 31 Natya-mandir, 4th year, Aswin 1320 BS/1913, pp. 189–94. 32 Nachghar, 4th year, 13 Jeystha 1334 BS/1927. 33 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 29, 2 Jeystha 1332 BS/1925, p. 587. 34 Natya-mandir, 3rd year, Nos. 3–4, Aswin-Kartik 1319 BS, p. 157. 35 Ipshita Chanda, ‘Notes Towards Tracing the Charit as a Genre’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Vol. 31, 1992–1993, pp. 20–32. 36 See for example, Introduction, Devajit Bandyopadhyay (compiled and ed.), Beshyasangeet, Baijisangeet, Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 2001, pp. 67–8. 37 Rose Ellen Temple, Ella, The Ballet Girl, London: Rozez and Co., c. 1870. [British Library]. 38 Albert Smith, The Natural History of the Ballet-Girl, London: A Henning, 1847, p. 7. [British Library: Bound as ‘Tracts in the BL: 12353 B.40. with engravings.] 39 See ‘Introduction’, Bijitkumar Dutta (ed.), Sukumari Dutta Ebong Apurva Sati Natak, Calcutta: Paschim Bangla Natya Akademi, 1992, pp. 14–15. 40 Relatable to Sumanta Banerjee’s observation on farces such as Prasannakumar Pal’s Beshyashaktinibartak Natak (1860) in which a ‘prurient interest in the red-light areas masqueraded as moralistic intervention’. Dangerous Outcast, p. 206, note 61. 41 Munindraprasad Sarbadhikary, ‘Natir bibah’ (A nati’s marriage), Natyamandir, 3rd year, Magh-Falgun 1319 BS/1312, pp. 494–505. Prasannamayi Debi offers a similar eugenic solution in her travelogue, Arayvarta: Janaika Bangamahilar Bhraman Kahini, Calcutta: 1888. Impressed by the healthy but poor brahman boys in the United Provinces, she suggests that they be imported to Bengal where they can be married to Bengali girls and so produce better stock than the current disease-ridden effeminate race of Bengalis. 42 Jeanne Openshaw, ‘Raj Krisna: Perspectives on the Worlds of a LittleKnown Bengali “Guru” ’ in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 160–1. 43 Vasudha Dalmia, ‘Forging Community’, Hindu Pasts. Women, Religion, Histories. Ranikhet: Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University, 2015, pp. 160–1. 44 Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 132. 45 Christopher Pinney, ‘The Victorian Raj and the Rise of Nationalism, 1858–1914’ in C.A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British, 1600– 1947, London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990, p. 295.

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46 Radha Prasad Gupta, Kolkatar Firiwalar Dak aar Rastar Awaj, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1995 (1984); Sripantho, Keyabat Meye (That’s Great, Girls!), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1988, pp. 42–3. 47 For an overview see Nikhil Sarkar, ‘Calcutta Woodcuts: Aspects of a Popular Art’ in Ashit Paul (ed.), Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983, pp. 11–49. Also, Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. 48 Amarendranath Ray, Ranga-darshan, 1st year, 28 Agrahayan 1332 BS/1925, pp. 3–4. 49 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 137. 50 Roop o Rang, No. 46, 3 Aswin 1332 BS/1925, pp. 982–4. 51 Roop o Rang, No. 23, 21 Chaitra 1331 BS/1924, p. 461. 52 Geeta Kapur, ‘Representational Dilemma of a Nineteenth Century Indian Painter’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 17–18, June 1989; GuhaThakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art, pp. 101, 110, 212–13. 53 Pamela Fletcher, Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture, 1895–1914, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 54 Roop o Rang, No. 19, 23 Falgun 1331 BS/1924, p. 377. Probably Aileen Pringle (1895–1989), the silent film era American stage and film actress. 55 The photos appeared in Roop o Rang, No. 17, 9 Falgun 1331 BS/1924. According to Swami Chetanandanda, ‘This series of portraits of Girish was taken in the winter of 1909 in Benaras, at the age of 65. The first is titled “en essee”, or Girish in his essential nature. The subsequent poses form an actor’s portfolio of emotional states.’ Girishchandra Ghosh: A Bohemian Devotee of Sri Ramakrishna, Mayavati and Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, Indian edition, 2009, pp. 98–109. 56 ‘Roopmugdha – Binodini’, Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 18, 16 Falgun 1331 BS/1924. 57 The first bioscope was shown on 7 July 1896 in Bombay. 58 Siddhartha Ghosh, Chhabi Tola: Bangalir Photography Chorcha (Taking Pictures: Photography and Bengalis), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1988, p. 77. 59 Sarah Bernhardt became a great favourite in Bengali theatre magazines: the second issue of Roop o Rang carried a black and white photograph of the actress in what appears to be an ‘Oriental’ dress, 1st year, No. 2, 8 Kartik 1331 BS/1924, p. 31. Her death triggered off retrospectives., as in Nachghar, No. 34, 3 Magh 1331 BS. The magazine later carried a life of Ellen Terry, Nachghar, 4th year, Ashar 1334 BS/1927. 60 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 80 61 Indian Daily News, 11 January 1912. Cited in Shambhunath Chakravarty, Bish Shataker Theatery Bangla Natak (Bengali Plays in 20th-Century Theatre), Calcutta: Kalyani Publishers, 1994, p. 403. 62 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 16, 2 Falgun 1331 BS/1924, p. 326. 63 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 28, 26 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, p. 575. Chakravarty, Editorial, Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 29, 2 Jyestha 1332 BS/1925, pp. 575–6. 64 Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 29, 2 Jyestha 1332 BS/1925, p. 597

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65 Ghulam Murshid, Samaj Sanskar Andolan o Bangla Natak, 1854–1876 (Social Reform Movements and Bengali Drama), Dacca: Bangla Academy, 1984, p. 7. 66 Sripantho, Keyabat Meye; and Sambuddha Chakraborty, Andare-Antare: Unish shatake Bangali Bhadramahila (Indoors and Within: The 19th Century Bengali Bhadramahila) Calcutta: Stree, 1995. 67 I have traced the actress-story up to the 1940s and 1950s. Alongside biographical sketches of cinema and theatre actresses, Roopmancha carried the fictional ‘Natir janma’ (The Birth of a Nati) by Nirmal Dutta, 8th year, No. 7, Kartik 1355 BS/1948, pp. 27–33. The heroine is now a cinema star, but the narrative is cast in the apologia-defense mould of the actress-story. 68 Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle, Vol. 8, Nos. 3 and 4, Fall 1986, pp. 56–62. Thanks to Manas Ray for this reference. 69 Advertisement of the Elphinstone Bioscope Co. in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 November 1911, p. 3. 70 Gnyanendranath Chakravarty, ‘The Business of Films and Indian Ladies’, Roop o Rang, No. 26, 12 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, p. 525. 71 Deb claims that the recent complaints about actresses of the public theatre are not from the usual moralists, but from the rasiks, connoisseurs: ‘There are now many educated actors, but almost no actress worth the name; the latter still wallow in the illiterate tradition of the old days.’ Sudhindrakumar Deb, ‘Abhinetri’ (Actress), Nachghar, 2nd year, No. 38, 21 Falgun 1332 BS/1925, p. 7. 72 Letters to the Editor, Nachghar, 2nd year, No. 40, 5 Chaitra 1332 BS/1925, p. 41. 73 Nachghar, No. 38, 24 Falgun 1335 BS/1928, pp. 6–7. 74 Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘Performance and “Begging Missions” ’, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 52, No. 19, 13 May 2017, pp. 64–70. 75 Bamabodhini Patrika, Bhadra BS [year not mentioned] in Sutapa Bhattacharjee (ed.), Reflective Prose, pp. 235–6. Nagendrabala Dasi published in the Bamabodhini between 1894 and 1904. She also authored Nari Dharma (Women’s Dharma), Calcutta, 1900 and Garhastya Dharma (A Householder’s Dharma), Calcutta, 1904. 76 See for example, the full-page advertisement by R.B. Das, agents of the Gramophone Company, featuring a range of female figures in scenes of leisure with an assortment of instruments in Pravasi, No. 22, 1922. Thanks to Kamalika Mukherjee for bringing this image to my attention. 77 Nachghar, No. 30, 27 Paush 1335 BS/1928, p. 8. As regards the performing instrument, the harmonium was seen as the more genteel and nationalist version of the piano. 78 In early modern England, ‘women playing musical instruments were considered erotically stimulating.’ Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 123.

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5 ‘A STRANGE MEETING’ AT THE STAR THEATRE, 1912 Mourning on stage

How dangerous has English education been! The very essence, the rasa of life has been lost. The festivals of Rath or Holi are of no consequence anymore; football, bat-ball [cricket], and the theatre – those are the sort of things one cares for. As for seasonal festivities and melas – those are now regarded as activities of the lower classes! . . . Having learnt English, the civilised babus have severed all emotional links to their native land and to their own people (swadesh and swajati) . . . They have begun to hold utsavs and melas in the English manner: they feel bound to inspire you with speeches and the sound of clamorous applause. Thanks to English education they have lost all memories of the past.1

When the Catholic sannyasi turned radical nationalist Brahmobandhab Upadhyaya (1861–1907) exhorted his fellow Bengalis to deliver themselves from their spiritual slumber, their collective amnesia, he invoked earlier, pre-colonial modes of communality. In this article on ‘Rath jatra’ or the Chariot Festival, the formal space- and time-bound meeting was perceived as having replaced the traditional community fair or mela – a word linked to milon or ‘coming together’. In an instance of history turning into farce, ‘Rath yatra’ has taken on a very different significance in the political life of independent India of our generation – dividing and demonising communities. Upadhyay’s exhortations, explicating the significance of festivals, appeared in a series of articles in his mouthpiece, the daily Sandhya, begun in 1904. He bypasses the point that the printed periodical itself is a modern medium for reaching out to an anonymous audience, as is the public meeting. His critique of the newer and alienating forms

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Figure 5.1 Interior of Town Hall, Calcutta, 2017 Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

of communication (as opposed to communion, involving a mingling of people) offers a perspective on the nature of and the contradictions inherent in the formation of public culture in colonial India at the beginning of the 20th century.2 The chapter will focus on the speech and the space articulated by professional stage actresses and the event in which they spoke as a collective – a smriti sabha or memorial meeting at the Star Theatre, Calcutta in 1912. The speeches, subsequently published, were made by four actresses prior to the performance of a regular show in the theatre in commemoration of their recently deceased guru, Girishchandra Ghosh. Rather than simply ‘looking back’ into theatre history, this exercise presents us with a framework to explore the construction, slippage and negotiations by the doubly dispossessed seeking a voice in the participatory process of civil society – albeit within the promises of colonial rule. It is a meeting in more ways than one: mourning is articulated in a language of bhava that is at once specific to Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and also inflected by the performance practices of proscenium theatre – itself a product of the colonial encounter. Mourning

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the guru includes the act and the space for re-presenting the self, for self-fashioning in articulating grief and, arguably, for participation in a secular ritual. The valorisation of interiority finds articulation in the lately arrived ritual of the condolence or memorial meeting in the city’s public halls. We begin by taking up two key English words, ‘speech’ and ‘meeting’, and their usage from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries in Bengal. By extension, we include the physical spaces now created for both – spaces that are regarded as being exclusive rather than inclusive, in relation to the construction of new audiences or publics. Buildings such as the Town Hall and the theatre halls, and open spaces including squares, parks and greens such as the Maidan in Calcutta, indicate the mixed nature of groups and communities that were mobilised and whose energies were harnessed to propagate a bewildering variety of opinions and activities. Nineteenth-century Bengal was characterised by the centrality of sabhas and samitis (associations, organisations) which, along with print journalism, enabled the formation of a colonial public sphere, albeit for a small group of educated bhadralok class, particularly from the 1830s onwards. As Benoy Ghosh points out in his study of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, ‘these sabhas and samitis became the most crucial nerve centres for larger social transformations.’3 By the 1870s, meetings to mark the death of public figures became a well-established convention, as were the speeches by notable individuals at these meetings.4 Many of these speeches subsequently found their way to a larger audience in print. The speech (byoktrita or bhashan in Bangla) was an apparently democratic mode of address that colonial rule brought into social life and is usually seen as a subsidiary of English education. It was part of the legacy of the Enlightenment and the 18th-century public sphere in England. Comparing the ‘forms of social and discursive power dictated by Victorian gender politics’, Deirdre David contrasts Macaulay’s speech with the letters of Emily Eden written during her travels in India and posits that ‘Macaulay’s speech belongs to the indisputably male genre of public parliamentary performance.’ It was an arena from which women would be inevitably excluded, since ‘there were no women in Parliament’; also ‘Victorian men were far more likely to possess the astonishing familiarity with classical learning exhibited by Macaulay than were women since they were not given his kind of education.’5 The gendered discourse of the parliamentary speech in England is a point of departure for this chapter in which I seek

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to complicate the location of the speech-making or speaking subject, both male and female. The Indian male was obliged to be a supplicant in order to speak in places such as the Town Hall, since permission had to be sought for any meeting. As a colonial subject, even at the turn of the 19th century, he had little occasion for making speeches in the House of Commons. It is also true that in colonial Bengal there was really no special occasion required for a ‘speech’ or a ‘meeting’ – so much a part of popular discourse had the two words become in Bangla, taking on a strong parodic edge in the process. Long before the era of nationalist politics, speeches were integral to the reformist agenda of innumerable sabhas and samitis that were not confined to Calcutta alone but flourished independently in rural and semi-urban Bengal. Memorial meetings may be considered a tertiary area in this respect. They were not necessarily linked to the ideology professed by a group bound by identifiable features of caste or class but were crucial in the construction of a particular persona in relation to any specific ‘public’. In effect, the formal ‘speech’ on occasions such as the condolence or memorial meeting constitutes a modern genre that is exclusively linked to male, upper-caste colonial subjects, and was perceived as a marker of modernity – even when the actual content of the speech might be a tirade against modernity.6 The ‘strange meeting’ of 1912 thus offers an anomaly in a number of ways: in this instance, the sabha is briefly taken over by the ‘­ prostitute-actress’ on her own platform – the performance stage, and before a ticket-buying audience in a theatre hall. The space for these speeches was created by default, since actresses had been denied admission to a highly publicised meeting in the Town Hall after the death of ‘natyaguru’ Girishchandra Ghosh. None of the contemporary accounts mentions who or which authority denied them permission. The silence in these accounts along with the careful excision of the actress in later efforts to establish a Bengali dramatic association, mentioned at the end of this chapter, suggests the complicity of the theatrical fraternity in these acts of exclusion. To summarise the argument I have been developing so far, the professional identity of the actress was stained by the stigma of wage earning, of overlapping and conflated forms of livelihood, namely of having a series of patron-protectors and displaying oneself in public – as part of her work, and of already being marked as the prostituteactress. Besides economic security, the need for a male protector or patron must have stemmed partly from a search for companionship

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and to ward of unwanted attentions of other men, as in the case of migrant women labourers working in the jute factories in and around Calcutta and Howrah.7 The stage actress did not have access to precolonial or early colonial support systems, where, despite the low caste and status, it was arguably a shared status with the male counterparts, often linked by biological or caste ties and certainly by contractual economic arrangements. Subsequent attempts to be accepted as part of a ‘religious community’ of neo-Vaishnavites were equally fraught, as we have seen in Chapter 2. In this instance, the four women functioned as a collective and articulated a complex subject position in addressing a metropolitan audience comprising men and women. I attempt to trace the intersecting discourses through which their positions were articulated, by examining speech in conjunction with mourning. The right to mourn and the legitimate space for expressing grief is central to this exposition, for it permits us to historicise how the most intense personal feelings may be articulated in the public domain. It is a critical area under exploration in histories of sensibilities or mentalities.8 Expressions of public mourning across different cultures have included bereaved women keening over fallen warriors as well as women performing grief as paid mourners, or ritual collective mourning as in the composition and singing of marsiya within Islamic tradition. What happens when new modes of mourning are popularised, even institutionalised, as part of metropolitan culture? In what contexts may grief be a representation, offering a narrative of the self? Is grief the expression of an exclusive personal loss? Is social contempt necessarily internalised as self-hatred; if so, how might this be revealed in or construed as mourning? How may ‘lost subjects’ suggest repentance through the performance of grief? In what ways, if at all, does the performance elicit a similar response in the spectator-viewer, through a combination of distance and empathy? For purposes of historical citation we may (quite randomly) posit that prisoners being carted away for public execution would offer a certain kind of spectacle for a crowd. If we juxtapose this with yet another kind of socio-political setting which permits a greater control of meaning and affect, we may propose a different model of spectacle making. For example, in England, with the development of institutions of reform – particularly with women as objects of reform – we have instances of interaction between select members of the public (largely determined by status, wealth and gender) and the reformed subject through writing, as well as in the actual display of the female penitent.

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Such was explicitly the case with the inmates of the Magdalen Hospital in 18th-century London, where the penitence of former prostitutes was exhibited and consumed as spectacle. It was also a means of fund-raising to support the institution of reform.9 In the present study, while there is a possible overlap between expressions of mourning and penitence, I believe that the Calcutta actresses deliberately disavow the latter trajectory: they project themselves as functioning predominantly within the framework of the guru-shishya relationship. The latter is by no means an essentialised definition, as we shall see in the following sections. At several levels therefore, we are apparently considering a hierarchised but ungendered relationship: first, between the (deceased) guru and (devoted) shishya; and second, of the actress as the generic bhakta or devotee whose sex does not matter. However, when articulated through the discourse of redemption, the speakers are gendered in relation to moral status: they are fallen women who may be redeemed through ‘sincere impersonation’ of ideal or superior roles. The only escape from these slots is in their foregrounding the process of ‘becoming’ through concentrated performance – intrinsic to raganuraga bhakti of Vaishnava theology. More pertinent to my argument is the genre in which ‘becoming’ is expressed here. In this instance, they are not performing as an exemplary character in a bhakti play or a ‘mytho-drama’. The actresses innovate to use the formal conventions of the condolence meeting to speak of that within – the interior self, mediated through the discourse of Vaishnavism – articulating a new definition of the private and the public. Religiosity is intrinsic to this articulation; the mode, however, is the formal speech. I will further suggest that in presenting their ‘inner selves’ they transgress even the reconfigured devotional framework of bhakta-guru and self-realisation that Vaishnavism offered to the actress. Given the proliferation of media and its globalisation in our own times, one could also raise the question of the relationship between reportage and entertainment. This would be particularly apt if we posit the ‘theatre community’ as being an amorphous one in its actual composition and practice. (It was inevitably perceived as being fairly homogenous and occupying a distinct social space by those who were not theatre practitioners.) ‘Speech’ therefore bears a range of meanings here: as language or tongue; talking or verbal communication; as well as the more formal context of a lecture or address which assumes an interested audience, anonymous or invited. Speeches and public

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meetings were seen as constitutive of the civilised male colonial subject who could then use both against the colonial state, as noted by one of the major respondents to the Dramatic Performances Act in 1876.10

For men must keep and women must weep If our contemporary sensibilities are offended by the presence of professional female mourners as relics of a feudal system, we are not wholly immune to the images of grief or mourning that we encounter every day in the media. To this day, newspaper reports of killings in Kashmir or of oppressed groups such as Dalits in the subcontinent tend to carry photographs of the public wailing of women, of women in disarray and oblivious to their public appearance, maddened as it were by grief. If these images of groups of women mourning that appear routinely in newspapers, on television and other media and continue still to be a powerful representation of pain and loss, it is largely because they are felt to be the human and personal side of otherwise marginalised people, faceless groups or stigmatised movements such as ‘terrorist outfits’ and indeed, of their victims – or simply, survivors left to carry on with the burden of living. Such images may be used to provoke reprisals or legitimise the community that the mourning women represent. Expressions of grief as utterance, taking on forms of wailing and keening, are gendered in more visible and audible ways than in the more explicitly religious forms of ritual.11 In diverse cultures, professional mourners, called rudalis in north and north-west India, and women of the Valayiar caste in southern India,12 have often been employed by the family of the deceased to perform this role in public. The public display is in proportion to the status of the family hiring the mourners and the status of the individual to be mourned. Where women form a visible section of such a public event, there is a complex social nexus mediating between grief and its articulation, feeling and mourning, and, in the specific role of public mourning allotted them traditionally or professionally. For instance, in Afghanistan, a personal experience of a tale relating illness and misfortune in the family may be expressed in a social visit that provides ‘the key stage for women to display emotion’; the emotion is called tapos (tapos kawel, meaning to enquire after) in Paxto.13 The skill lies mostly in the teller’s ability to move her listeners to tears. The nature or extent of gham or pain endured by the speaker determines which is the most powerful story. While the pain may emerge from a number of actual hardships endured, the performance of tapos is determined by certain 246

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parameters and may therefore rightly be also considered as an ‘aesthetic of suffering’. More directly, literary genres such as the epic or the Greek tragedy have foregrounded within the text representations of grief by women. This space permits more than a re-play of women – as mothers, daughters and wives – grieving over their dead or wounded menfolk. The critical and even polemical functions that underwrite descriptive passages as well as dialogue or choric chants in speech, enable a questioning of the most ‘heroic’ events of the war or conquest, turning them into the most ‘horrific’. Consider the ‘Stri Parva’ in the Mahabharata after the carnage at Kurukshetra is over. Gandhari, accompanied by her hundred widowed daughters-in-law, wades through the dismembered and half-eaten corpses of her hundred sons before she confronts Krishna. She will then curse Krishna as the cause of this mass slaughter.14 Or, as Martha Nussbaum reminds us, consider Hecuba at the beginning of Euripides’s The Trojan Women (451 bc): Hecuba remembering the slaughter that is now already over, as also the slaughter in progress around her, and addressing a different audience in time and space.15 Arguably, the notion of ‘community’ in the above examples is quite different from the accoutrements of a semi-bourgeois society that emerged under colonial auspices in India. (Economic historians such as Amiya Bagchi have argued that colonial conditions were in fact not amenable to the creation of a civil society.) The sabhas and samitis that emerged as new modes of community formation for reformists and conservatives alike in the 19th century often retained many pre-colonial affiliations. Equally, many of them were not bound, at least in terms of their avowed agenda, by the more traditional links of caste and religion, but by commitment to specific secular social causes such as women’s education. But meetings were regularly convened for instance, to ‘protect’ schoolboys from the depravity of theatres that employed women as actresses. On her part, while the actress was professionally engaged and empowered to speak (and sing) on stage, enacting an impressive array of roles, she had no voice outside of performance. Speeches by a collective of actresses, albeit in the mode of mourning, naturally invite attention. A word on the speakers as writers: the actresses named certainly existed, testified in numerous references and photographs, as well as in standard histories. It cannot be proven today of course that it was they who actually composed and wrote out the speeches. What merits our attention are the subject positions taken up in the course of the evening’s ‘performance’ that both draw on and extend the possibilities of existing discourses. 247

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Women and speech In nineteenth-century Britain, while a public man was a citizen, a ‘public woman’ meant a prostitute.16

Implicitly of course, the ‘ban’ on addressing a public extended to all women who were, or aspired to be, bhadramahila. The entire paraphernalia of speeches, meetings, causes and so on, especially for purposes of reforming and saving the nation, was open to satire, irrespective of the sex of the speaker or organiser.17 A woman’s involvement in these activities was nothing short of monstrous. Only ‘low’ women would shout or quarrel in public, or perform in public, whether on the streets or inside the theatre. A woman who spoke loudly in public was characterised as chotolok (low caste/class) at best, and unnatural at worst. The public theatre itself generated enough farces where the butt of the attack was the ‘modern educated woman’ who presumed to take on a legislative role in sorting out affairs through discussion and dialogue with a collective. The alliterative title of a popular anonymous farce hammered home the point: Meye Monshter Miting (1874) – literally, ‘women monsters meeting’. Conducting meetings was considered a particularly masculine affair, suggesting bossiness and self-importance and shameless exhibitionism when women presumed to take over. In fact, the two most dreaded scenarios for genteel women was their taking up of jobs (chakri) and indulging in public speaking (sabhaye byoktrita), initially, even amongst the most progressive reformists groups.18 In his study of cartoons produced from the 1870s, Partha Mitter notes that ‘employment was the prickliest issue’ in the generally charged discourse of liberated or emancipated women, for ‘[t]he loss of manliness in the colonial era weighed heavily on the Bengali mind, just as it regarded the emancipated woman with unmitigated horror.’19 Public speeches meant more than appearing before an anonymous public and drawing attention to one’s physical appearance and one’s opinions. A ‘speech’ itself required a manipulation of language through rhetorical devices, an attempt to form opinions and control, to invite evaluation of the points put forward. A Bengali woman as a judge was possibly the worst nightmare – more of a threat to the self-esteem of the bhadralok than the white man himself.20 This state of affairs in colonial Bengal, by and large valid till the early decades of the 20th century, would appear to be not very different from the situation in early modern England. As commentators 248

Figure 5.2 ‘Won’t leave a stone unturned!’ Cartoon by Binaykumar Basu in Meyemahal (Women’s Sphere), 1927 Source: Kumaresh Ghosh (ed.) Sekaler Cartoon, Calcutta: Grantha Griha, 1993 (1975), p. 31. Author’s collection

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have pointed out in the Renaissance, ‘even those humanists most progressive in their advocacy of women’s worth insisted vehemently that rhetoric and public speaking were anathema to women,’ evident for example in Karen Newman’s reading of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene.21 Women who thus ‘displayed’ themselves were perceived as being both presumptuous and immoral, ‘monstrous’ in their deviation from prescribed norms of decorum. Fast forwarding by several centuries to ‘Inde’, the subcontinental colony in another continent, would bring in more complex dimensions to our exposition of women and speech. A brief overview might be useful if we wish to situate the ‘story of a strange meeting’ alongside the history of other sabhas and samitis being conducted and organised by women in British India. While the ‘women’s question’ occupied a critical space in public debates of all kinds, it was some time before women began representing themselves in public. As Uma Chakravarti among others has pointed out, ‘no women featured in the debate on the entire widow remarriage controversy.’22 This section offers a selective survey of movements which consciously campaigned for better rights for women, encouraging their entry to the public sphere alongside examples of individual women who gained iconic status as public speakers. Women preachers and upadeshaks of the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj, active by the 1880s, were received with hostility in the press. Partha Mitter notes that Brahmos in particular became the butt of the cartoonist’s pen for their role in the emancipation of women.23 In the 1860s Brahmo women (brahmikas) had in fact taken to the streets to campaign against purdah. In 1862, Keshubchandra Sen had established an ‘Antahpur Streeshiksha Samaj’, meant for elderly women who wished to educate themselves within their home. The year 1864 saw the ‘Brahmika Samaj’ being established; women were to deliver the upasana (sermon). The more radical members of the Samaj sought to promote mixed congregations for religious discourse and singing, education for women and other visible forms of mobility for women along with inter-caste marriages, widow remarriage and so on. These reforms amongst others were to lead to the first split within the Samaj in 1866, the one led by Debendranath Tagore naming itself as the Adi (or original) Brahmo Samaj and the breakaway group calling itself the Bharatbarshiya Brahmo Samaj.24 The disavowal of precisely those women who were appearing in public – the stage actress – occurs in these same decades. This is not surprising: if anything, the emancipation envisaged for women within the Samaj was bound to be at the cost of the shameless acting woman; for in many ways the latter was 250

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the most visible continuing legacy of the decadent lifestyle and morals of ‘babu-culture’. A striking exception of a woman public speaker was Ramabai (1858–1922), who was feted in Calcutta in 1878–79 and given titles of ‘Pandita’ and ‘Saraswati’. Her speeches generated a debate amongst the intelligentsia.25 On the whole, she was supported both by traditional pandits as well as reformers, particularly Brahmos such as Keshubchandra Sen who encouraged her to study the Vedas.26 This was partly because of her brahman status but also because she was highly educated in Sanskrit. Uma Chakravarti argues that prior to Ramabai’s conversion to Christianity ‘she appeared as a godsend to the reformers’ for she was seen as the very embodiment of the learned ‘ancient Hindu woman’ such as Gargi and Maitreyi. Her marriage to a low-caste ‘Bengali babu’ (as reported in the Marathi press) and subsequent widowhood meant that on her return to Poona in 1882, Ramabai literally had no community or samaj to fall back on. Initially, with the support of liberal reformist men, Ramabai set up and addressed women in the chain of Arya Mahila Sabhas, but her speeches to women were threatening to the brahman-dominant elite in Poona. Ramabai’s speeches are of interest for reasons other than their radical content: she saw in public speaking a means to raise funds for various causes, and to ensure her own financial independence. According to Chakravarti, ‘She was probably one of the first known women who wrote and lectured for a living in the nineteenth century.’27 Soon enough, Ramabai was being satirised by Marathi playwrights on stage.28 Women organising themselves into sabhas and samitis offer another alliance of class and affiliations. In 1882 writer and editor Swarnakumari Devi (Ghoshal), daughter of Debendranath Tagore, founded a Theosophical Society in Calcutta for women. However, ‘it could not run long for want of enough women members’ and closed down in 1886. The same year Swarnakumari founded the Sakhi Samiti for the discussion of philosophy and literature. She also staged the first allfemale cast of Rabindranath’s Mayar Khela in Bethune School (for girls) in 1888 to raise funds. In terms of petitioning, Mrinalini Sinha mentions the ‘native female memorial, allegedly signed by the Bengali bhadramahila’ in response to the Ilbert Bill in 1883. This event also saw the first mobilisation of white women in India who felt threatened by the implications of the bill.29 The bill figured became material for a farce in at least two instances. An afterpiece by the Hindoo Female Theatre about ‘all the fuss about Dat Ilbert Bill’ was advertised in the Statesman of 29 September 1883. The title reflected the mixed-race travels of minstrelsy 251

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in British India. The Female Theatre, whose advertisements feature repeatedly in English-language newspapers of the early 1880s, stands out for its brief but sustained engagements until its apparent disappearance from theatre history. As regards the representation of women in mainstream nationalist movements, in the 1889 Congress Session at Bombay, ‘ten lady delegates’ including Pandita Ramabai had been sent by ladies’ associations that ranged from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to the Mahila Arya Samaj. We are told that although the women delegates were allowed to sit on the platforms, they did not speak or vote on resolutions. In the following Congress Session of either 1890 or 1900 (the dates are contested), ‘women were allowed to move the customary vote of thanks.’ It was during the Swadeshi era that women really ‘came out’. The response to Lord Curzon’s plan to partition Bengal – referred to more graphically as ‘Banga-angachhed’ or vivisection of Bengal – entailed a leap from the grihamandir (the temple of home) to ‘desh’ (country/nation) through samaj seva or social work. Several issues of the Sanjibani captured the general excitement.30 An excerpt is translated below: The women, like the men, are also expressing their grief at the vivisection of Bengal, holding meetings in villages and towns, swearing to discard all foreign goods and use only swadeshi ones instead. In some sabhas, women are taking the initiative in instigating and inspiring the men, while in their homes, they are using their influence to initiate their husbands, brothers and children to the worship of the mother[land?].31 Sarala Devi Chaudhurani (1872–1945) created great impact in mobilising students and young men to the swadeshi cause, making public appearances and speeches and staging nationalist rituals. Her aristrocratic background, as Swarnakumari Devi’s daughter and Rabindranath’s niece, helped her up to a point, but in the 1920s even she was held responsible in the print media for corrupting young minds.32 The redefinition of the use of or access to public space in the Swadeshi era naturally evoked mixed responses. An extreme but not atypical response is found in Shikshita Patitar Atmacharit (Autobiography of an Educated Fallen Woman) mentioned earlier, in which the avowed female voice of ‘the educated fallen woman’ warns the reader of the disruption of proper gender roles brought about by Swadeshi. Coincidentally, around the same time – from 1906 onwards – the suffrage movement in England was increasingly being played out in the 252

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streets, parks and public buildings of London, with women from all walks of life participating in mass suffrage demonstrations. Actresses like Elizabeth Robins brought to the movement their own expertise in performance script and management.33 Across the Atlantic too, actresses played a crucial role in the realm of organisation and representation as suffragists.34 The Swadeshi upsurge notwithstanding, it is generally accepted that it was M.K. Gandhi, and later Jawaharlal Nehru, who made possible the entry of Indian women to the public sphere as a mass at a national level. Regional histories throw up more heterogenous narratives, such as that of the Mahili Samiti in Assam.35 Most all-India women’s organisations were formed in the decade between 1910 and 1920.36 Women were also encouraged to seek suffrage during this period. In 1920, Madras granted women the right to vote; Bombay followed in 1921 and elsewhere by 1929. When the resolution in favour of women’s right to vote by the Bangiya Nari Samaj was defeated in 1921, an important reason given was that it would allow prostitutes to mingle with bhadramahila. The resolution was only moved in 1925.37 What Geraldine Forbes calls the ‘politics of respectability’ is evident from the first decades of the 20th century, taking on a new dimension under Gandhian leadership.38 In 1925, in keeping with its agenda of transparency and dissemination to a national audience, Young India published a letter several pages long – the entire text of the correspondence between Gandhi and his interlocutor from Bengal – on the ‘immoral nature of theatrical entertainment’ and the urgent need to ban this ‘vice’ if the youth wished to purify themselves for the nationalist struggle. Around this time, when the Civil Disobedience movement had caught on, a collective of prostitutes from Barisal, wishing to mobilise as a group for political representation, had sent a petition to Gandhi. Gandhi admonished them with a stern nay, saying that until they purified themselves – first by giving up their professions – there was no way they could organise themselves under the auspices of the Congress.39 Significantly, Gandhi’s texts were translated into Bangla and published in the theatre magazine, Roop o Rang.40 Forbes suggests that women such as Goshiben Captain, ‘[o]ne of the Oxfordeducated granddaughters of Dadabhai Naoroji who was a founding member and leader of the Congress [also] insisted that members should have impeccable credentials.’ She concludes, ‘In the final analysis most politically active women chose respectability over solidarity with their fallen sisters.’41 Unlike the Actresses’ Franchise League, which was formed in 1908 in Britain, there are no records of a professional association of stage 253

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actresses, although there must have been diverse informal networks that enabled such women to sustain themselves and their work in the public theatre. We have seen an early and very visible example in the advertisements put out by the all-women ‘Female Theatre’ in the Statesman & FOI through the 1880s. In the early decades of the 20th century we hear of at least two very remarkable instances of women organising on the basis of profession as well as location. The latter functions here also a class/caste and moral marker, for a jatiya cause. After disastrous floods in North Bengal in 1920, Rajbala (c. 1886– c. 1967), a former circus performer and later a noted singer-actress, brought together women entertainers living in the Rambagan area. Calling themselves the Rambagan Nari Samiti, the women collected relief material for the state Bengal Relief Committee. When the women of the Sonagachi area put up a Bhikarini Theatre for fund-raising purposes, Rajbala formed the Kangalini Theatre (literally, Theatre for/ of the Destitute), renting the Star Theatre for their shows. The Committee gratefully acknowledged their contribution in a newspaper.42 Once the immediate impact of the floods was somewhat assuaged the Kangalini Theatre wound up, but mother (Rajbala) and daughter, Indubala (1898–1984) continued performing as the Female Kali Theatre between 1922–24, primarily with an all-female cast.43 These sporadic efforts, otherwise poorly documented and seen as outside of the bhadramahila ambit, are crucial fringes in the transitional decades of large-scale female participation.

Preamble to ‘a strange meeting’ We now come to the events within the theatre world leading up to the ‘strange meeting’. Soon after Girishchandra Ghosh’s death on 8 February 1912 a special performance in which ‘almost all actors and actresses of the Bengali Theatre participated’ was arranged at the Kohinoor Theatre in Calcutta. Amarendranath Dutt chaired the programme and the proceeds went towards a memorial fund for Ghosh. A report of this group enterprise – a practice that would later be called ‘combination night’ – was published in the influential Natya-mandir.44 The magazine was then running a series of articles under the general heading Girish Pratibha or ‘The Genius of Girish’, listing the various activities undertaken by admirers of Girishchandra Ghosh in Bengal and elsewhere to commemorate his death. Ten days later (21 Bhadra 1319 BS), a special condolence meeting for the ‘nat-guru’ was convened at the Town Hall after extensive lobbying by the theatrical fraternity. An editorial in the Natya-mandir said that 254

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although there had been ‘thousands of shok sabhas for Girishchandra all over’, the Bengali theatre world had so far desisted from holding one in the metropolis of Calcutta since they had come to know that the Retd. Justice Mitra was planning a huge affair in the Town Hall, following a memorial meeting for Sister Nivedita. The editorial then appealed that Girish being ‘Bengal’s Shakespeare and Garrick’, the leaders should see to it that the public meeting was held in the Town Hall so that ‘lakhs of admirers’ might not be denied the opportunity to pay their respects in the very same place where ‘the Poet Rabindranath’ had been honoured in his lifetime.45 According to Shankar Bhattacharyya, the meeting was presided over by the Raja of Burdwan, Bijoychand Mahtab, and eminent citizens like Surendranath Banerjea, Gurudas Banerjee and Sureshchandra Samajpati. The ex-judge and the professional actor-dramatist were at two ends of the social spectrum; but Mitra was a former class friend of Girish’s and a great admirer of the dramatist. Mitra’s chairing of this meeting was also reported as an unqualified success in a subsequent issue of the Natya-mandir. Within a fortnight (2 Aswin 1319 BS), a smriti sabha was held at the Star Theatre prior to the regular evening show. Holding condolence and memorial meetings for theatre personnel was regular practice. What was irregular was the composition of the chief speakers: four actresses of the Star Theatre who read out prepared texts honouring their deceased teacher. Amarendranath Dutt, the then lessee of the Star, chaired the meeting. The event then appeared in print as ‘the story of a strange meeting’ (ek bichitra sabhar kahini) in the Aswin-Kartik issue of the Natya-mandir. Coding it as ‘bichitra’, meaning strange but also variegated – an adjectival referent we have already encountered in the actress-stories – directs a particular kind of reading. The report came with a pretext: the actresses had been granted this opportunity in response to their entreaties to honour their guru, since they had been denied admittance to ‘the Town Hall or any other public meeting’ held after Girish Ghosh’s death. The three consecutive events as well as the manner in which they were subsequently reported in the Natyamandir may be read as finale to what is generally held as the ‘golden era’ of the public theatre in Bengal. The sequence may be also be read as constituting a break in the negotiation of public space along lines of gender, class and less visibly, but no less explicitly, of religion. The chequered history of the Hathibagan Star Theatre has found repeated mention in the annals of the Bengali public theatre, particularly after it burnt down in 1991.46 Yet, the ‘strange meeting’ has quite eluded or perhaps, has simply been elided by scholars and commentators.47 It is a story of a representation – as in legal parlance – made by 255

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the actresses petitioning on their own behalf to a ‘moral community’ that has set itself to judge the speakers. The speakers as a jati or collective have already been judged, and are therefore speaking as the accused. Even if an individual actress was praised for particular roles and her singing, the performing woman in Bengal figured as a generic entity in the print media as an object of censure or warning. We know that the actress occupied a definite place in the agenda of the founder-editors of the Natya-mandir. The very first editorial by Girishchandra had promised the readers that it would publish the writings of ‘actresses skilled in composition’ (rachanakushali abhinetri). However, with the exception of the autobiographical narrative of Binodini Dasi who had long since retired, much more was said about the actress, and purportedly by the fictive ‘actress-narrator’ than by contemporary actresses themselves. The speeches at the Star by four actresses – Sushilabala,48 Ranisundari, Narisundari and ­Basantakumari – lie between the surfeit of confessional actress-stories and the rare first-person narratives by contemporary actresses. The speakers were all second-generation actresses. Binodini Dasi stands outside this ring. Not only was she from an earlier generation; but her professional grievances were simply too overwhelming to be subsumed in professions of unalloyed devotion for the dead guru. Her public statement lay in the preface to her published autobiography and her comments on Girishchandra’s preface to her text. What do we make of Amarendranath’s role? To the project of theatre magazines and the extensive use of advertisements and gifts in marketing theatre may be added his introduction of the bioscope to the theatre and his pioneering role as entrepreneur in the history of the sound recording industry in India.49 As lessee, proprietor, actor and producer, and an enfant terrible of the theatre world, Amarendranath exercised his generosity as well as exploited the inherent box office value of actresses coming on stage before the performance proper: The coming Wednesday – is a Red-letter Day in the Dramatic world! please read carefully! STAR THEATRE Hony. Dramatic Director – Sj. A. L. Bose Wednesday, the 18th September at 8–30p.m. A meeting in memory of the Divine Dramatist Girish Chundra Ghose – will be held by all the actors and actresses, of the Star Theatre – Under the presidency [sic] of Amarendra Nath Dutt, The principal Actors and Actresses will speak on the occasion . . .50 256

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The particular framing of the meeting as well as its published proceedings indicates that Amarendranath himself was not averse to using the occasion to score a few points against the audience. In the printed version, it is the actresses who get pride of place. The ‘strangeness’ of the meeting is clearly an allusion to their speeches, for theatre halls had long been a site for public speeches, well before the Swadeshi era. Notwithstanding the contested position of public theatres, or perhaps because of their ostracised status, a tradition of honouring theatre people on stage and in print was already in place. Girishchandra himself had composed essays commemorating his male colleagues – Amritalal Mitra, Ardhendhushekhar Mustafi, Nripendranath Bose aka Nepen, and Dharmadas Sur among others.51 These essays were first read out in a theatre hall and subsequently published in the Natyamandir; they often provided Girishchandra with the occasion for commenting on the contemporary theatrical scene. Thus, in the course of speaking on his late colleague Ardhendhushekhar, the actor-manager spoke out against the Municipality Bill that aimed at restricting performance hours!52 The stage had become something of a platform, though hardly with the thrust of rational reform as Vidyasagar and his contemporaries had envisaged. Besides having memorial essays and special commemorative issues dedicated to them, male theatre people also enjoyed benefit nights during their lifetime as well as posthumously. Speeches were a regular feature of these benefit performances. A speech ‘in English on the Actress’ by the director Upendranath Das was advertised on 1 March 1876 as part of the Upendranath Das Benefit Night.53 In contrast, there are few recorded instances of benefit performances and memorial meetings for actresses; in most instances, their date of death is not known. Jadumoni (c. 1853–1918), talented singer-actress from the first phase of the public theatre, was exceptional in the public honour accorded to her after her death, although she died poor. Her smriti sabha, held at the Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, was presided over by the nationalist Chittaranjan Das. One reason could have been her training as a dhrupad singer and patronage by the Pathuriaghata Tagores.54 A memorial meeting was understood to be a sober act of commemoration, part of a new discourse and belonging to a new economy. One might contrast the shok sabha and its expenditure of words to the ostentatious post-cremation ceremonies or sraddhas for kith and kin as well as anonymous brahmans and destitutes that defined the nouveau riche of Calcutta through the 18th and 19th centuries. Establishing status through competitive and conspicuous acts of expenditure such as feasts on ritual occasions, gifts of cloth, alms, vessels and so on 257

Figure 5.3 A girl and a woman: ‘Srimati Giribala and Kiran’ Source: HNDC. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan

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was part of the phenomenon known as daladali, entailing a jockeying for power and mobilising support groups.55 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay provides many such instances of caste mobility in Bengal, for example, the Matua sect forging a new collective self-image ‘raising’ themselves through such community feasts.56 Nevertheless, as with extravagant ritual feasts, the importance of the meeting rose in proportion to the status of its convenors and the speakers, besides of course the status of the person it sought to thus honour. Marked by an extravagant air of solemnity and self-consciousness in those who are visible in the performance of the ritual, the public meeting accrued yet another level of ‘reality’ in being reported in newspapers and journals for a wider public.

Of lotteries and the lot of the native actress The Town Hall ‘is the largest hall in Calcutta . . . where the [sic] public meetings of all descriptions take place, all parties in Calcutta having an access to it: the Hindus, the Mahomedans and the English may call a meeting, provide they do it for a public purpose.’57

Bhuban Mohan Mitra’s description of the Town Hall as a space where ‘all parties’ have access was written in 1835. He might have also included the ‘steadily growing Eurasian population in Calcutta’ who had made major efforts at representing their community during the 1820s and early 1830s with at least two recorded speeches by Henry Vivian Derozio.58 Completed in 1813, the Hall was built on money raised by lotteries and public subscription. It became the locus for a diverse range of activities, some for administrative and ceremonial purposes and others in the nature of public meetings, including protest meetings against colonial laws.59 For quite some time at least, it provided the chief exception to white town and black or of other zones of the city, since joint meetings by Europeans and Indians on shared issues were quite common till the 1850s. According to Basudeb Chattopadhyay, it was also ‘the historic site which witnessed the transformation of the mentality of the Bengali intelligentsia vis-à-vis the Raj . . . of how an interracial collaboration was eventually transformed into contestation of public space’.60 The records of public meetings in the Town Hall include innocuous ones like the very first one of the Calcutta School Book Society in 1818. Others were obviously intended to register 259

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protest against the government, such as demanding the repeal of the Press Regulation of 1824, or for mobilising public opinion such as the one on 5 January 1835 criticising the Charter Act of 1833.61 Similarly, there were meetings against the Vernacular Press Act in 1878, and later the inflammatory Age of Consent Bill in 1891.62 Public mobilisation had begun to take on a new dimension after Lord Curzon announced the partition of Bengal, as we saw with women’s participation. Sumit Sarkar observes: The Town Hall protest against the Partition announcement on 7 August 1905 began in a similar way . . . but the immense crowds that had turned up compelled a spill-over in the fields around the hall, with three separate sets of orators. Soon open-air meetings were being held in parks all over the Bengali areas of Calcutta, though in the absence of loudspeakers . . . Maidan rallies at the foot of the Ochterlony Monument became common only a generation later.63 Amongst other venues that would eventually be chosen or built to espouse nationalist causes, theatre halls proved to be in demand. During the Ilbert Bill Agitation in 1883, for example, the Star Theatre became the site of political demonstrations. This was partly because of its location, but also because theatres had already been inscribed as places with democratic access.64 Not all meetings held in the Town Hall were ‘protests’; it was also a prestigious meeting place. For instance, in 1882, the Mahomedan Literary Society celebrated its 18th anniversary by ‘the usual conversazione at the Town Hall’, at which some of the most eminent of scientific gentlemen in the city, European as well as native, are present, for the purpose of exhibiting interesting experiments in natural philosophy, chemistry, while awakening a love of such studies in the minds of the rising generation of Mahomedans, to promote a friendly social intercourse between all classes of the community.65 In 1893 the Town Hall was the venue for a ‘meeting on social purity’ organised by the Calcutta Missionary Conference to discuss the ‘problem’ posed by European prostitutes and other ‘moral lepers’ who ‘dishonour the European name in the eyes of Eastern people’. The particular topic clearly cut across race, religion and caste and provoked 260

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wide interest as ‘Protestant missionaries were joined by Hindu Muslim, Parsi and Roman Catholic speakers.’66 The other most frequent use of the premises was to felicitate ‘great men’. For instance on 5 September 1894 there was ‘a public meeting of the Hindu Community . . . to thank Swami Vivekananda and the American people’.67 Rabindranath Tagore was felicitated on his 50th and 70th birthdays. At the sabha at the Town Hall on the occasion of Tagore’s 50th birthday in 1912, Santa Devi and fifteen other little girls presented him with a bouquet of flowers. This last merited a special mention in her memoirs because ‘at no other sabha before this had girls presented him with flowers in public’!68 Also present at this sabha were a few women from the Tagore household and Ramananda Chatterjee’s wife. More relevant to the subject of this essay is the 1909 religious conference, the ‘Dharmasamannyay’, which was held in the Town Hall in Calcutta and presided over by the Maharaja of Darbhanga. At this conference, held only a few years before his death, Girishchandra was asked to read a lecture on ‘Gaudiya Vaishnav-dharma’. This invitation legitimised the otherwise socially outcast actor’s acceptance into bhadra society, despite and perhaps because of his flamboyant public role as the wayward but ‘true’ devotee of Ramakrishna. Basudeb Chattopadhyay’s condensed monograph refers to the large number of balls and concerts that took place in the Town Hall, but he does not mention the theatrical performances staged in the Hall. In fact, theatre groups had been renting the Town Hall from the 1870s onwards. An early instance was the staging of Nil Darpan on 29 March 1873 ‘for the benefit of the native hospital’.69 Official permission had to be sought for all such public performances or occasions whether for balls, concerts or meetings; only ‘charitable causes’ were exempt from the Rs. 100 fee charged from 1867 onwards. The Town Hall was the most public, and unlike the public theatre, also the most respectable of all meeting places in the metropolis. It was possibly the chief site commonly accessed by large sections of the rulers and the ruled, until the exigencies of securing permission to hold meetings pushed Indians to think of alternative sites and spaces. To return then to the posthumous honour accorded to the outcastnat, Girishchandra: the Town Hall memorial meeting after Girishchandra Ghosh’s death in 1912 does not approach the legitimacy conferred on the Victorian stage by the granting of knighthood to another actormanager – Henry Irving – in 1895, and the subsequent gentrification of the East End in London.70 Nonetheless, it stands out for the ‘public recognition’ of ‘Bengal’s Shakespeare and Garrick.’ The choice of the 261

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Town Hall, instead of the public theatre, as a venue for a memorial meeting for Girishchandra signified a major shift in the theatre world. It was not entirely a coincidence that the very next year, in 1913, the Statesman deigned to run an interview of Amritalal Bose under the heading ‘The Bengali Stage. Its past, present and future – An Interview with the Bengali Irving’.71 If the memorial meeting at the Town Hall was a triumph of sorts for the theatrical community, the act of legitimisation required a clear demarcation along gendered lines: in order for the male theatre folk to have access to the portals of the Town Hall, the actress had to be kept out. Sushilabala’s speech makes an emphatic reference to this parting of ways. The meeting was one of the many significant efforts to legitimise the ‘native’ and largely metropolitan-based theatre, and its contribution to a jatiya sentiment. If the real breakthrough had taken place earlier – in the visits of Ramakrishna to the public theatre in the 1880s, alongside the highly successful staging of a series of Bhakti plays such as Chaitanya Lila, Dhruba Charitra, Prahlad Charitra and Nasiram – ‘the strange meeting’ makes clear the legacy of that discourse in the actresses’ speeches.72

Niti (ethics) and rajniti (politics): 1880s In order to attend to the speeches of 1912, we will need to move back a few decades before Swadeshi, and a decade and a half after theatre went public and actresses hired. Implicit in the debate around theatre was a need to find the ‘right impersonator’ for these roles in progress being tried out for Bengali women. The business of theatre could not afford to wait for that ideal moment when the good wife could also be a public performer without losing her legitimacy as grihastree. Girishchandra’s interpretation of interactive bhakti was ostensibly only for the actress. We could argue though that it was fundamentally an attempt to resolve contradictions in the much broader arena of social roles, and in questions of faith and cultural identity. This was spelt out as spiritual salvation in and through work, endorsing a commitment to the profession. Simultaneously, it presented theatre itself as a central mode of national (religious-social) regeneration through transcending a ‘purely’ commercialised profession. It was a notable if rather convoluted attempt to both work out a slot for the condemned women as individual subject and legitimise the profession. But reviews such as the one reproduced below, written in late 1880s, the high water mark of the Bhakti years, show that the attempt failed. I believe this is partly because the equation between education, vocation and 262

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profession was still being formulated as constituting separate spheres for women. Further, the continuing note of condemnation now constituted the official nationalist voice. In the desire to begin with a clean slate, as it were, the stage had to first actually rid itself of the perceived source of pollution. During 25–27 October 1888, the regional or pradeshik session of the Congress was held in Calcutta in the British Indian Association Hall. The Vina Theatre Company had been asked to perform for the delegates on 26 October. The Bengalee’s comment on the performance may be cited in full: [T]he Delegates who attended [the] Provincial Conference were entertained at the Vina Theatre. More than a hundred Delegates were present . . . Chandrahans was followed by a political piece which had been composed for the occasion. The evils of the out-still [?] system were vividly depicted and the need for the through [sic] union between the Hindus and the Mohammedans was insisted upon in eloquent terms . . . [W]e have reasons to know that the Delegates have formed a most favourable information of the histrionic powers of the Vina Theatre Company. In this connection, we desire to advocate the claims of Vina Theatre to public patronage. It is the only Indian Theatre in the town where there are no female actresses. No one objects to female actresses provided they come from the respectable classes of society. But in the present circumstance of the Indian Society this is not possible; and the result is that female characters are represented by woman of questionable virtue. The noblest characters in Hindoo traditions – Sita, Sabitri and Damayanti – are too often represented by those who have not the smallest pretensions to their purity and their womanly devotion. It seems to us to be an outrage upon Hindoo sentiment that such exalted characters in the Hindoo legends should be represented by women of the town. The Indian stage needs to be reformed; and we are glad to note that the Vina theatre under the auspices of Babu Rajkristo [sic] Roy, has set an example which is worthy of all praise and richly deserving of public encouragement. (in English in the original; emphases added)73 The switch is sudden from the rhetoric on Hindu-Muslim unity to the declamation on Hindu traditions, Hindu sentiments and Hindu legends, interchangeable with ‘the Indian Theatre’ and ‘Indian 263

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Society’ – ‘society’ being a literal translation of the word ‘samaj’. On a typical evening, Calcutta in the late 1880s would have offered a range of ‘European amusements’, shows by a Parsi company and at least three or four Bengali theatres, not to mention a couple of circuses (Figure 3.5). The exclusive focus on only one of these was to showcase a suitably ‘exalted’ Bengali theatre within the framework of nationalist aspirations. One appreciates the heroic effort involved in projecting the link between the ideal Hindu woman and the Hindu nation, given the unhappy career of the aforesaid Raj Krishna Roy. The only two attempts of the ‘reformed Indian stage’ to have males play the women’s parts – at the inception of the Great National in 1873 and later at the Vina Theatre in 1888 – were complete failures.74 The public could not accept boys impersonating women after more than a decade of ‘the real thing’. In the second, and equally short-lived phase of the Vina Theatre, actor-dramatist and proprietor Roy was obliged to bring back actresses. As compensation, perhaps, he sought to make ‘respectable women’ part of the audience by advertisements such as the following: VINA THEATRE, 38, MACHUABAZAAR-ROAD, THANTHANIR, SATURDAY, 14th DECEMBER, at 9 P.M. RUKMINI-HARAN AND KHOKA-BABOO. NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, AT 6.30 P.M. MIRABAI AND GHOSER PO. Every male ticket-holder of Rs. 4, 3, 2, 1 and As. 8 should be allowed to bring 8, 6, 4, 2, and one household female respectively free. Director R.K. Roy.75 A ‘household female’ might have referred to any female family member, but possibly included female domestic servants, the jhi. Nevertheless, the attacks did not abate. An article of 9 November 1888 in the Sulabh Samachar bemoaned the exit of the Arya Natya group for lack of finances and the consequent leasing out of Vina Theatre to Upendranath Das, the radical dramatist director of Sarat-Sarojini and Surendra-Binodini fame. (Das will figure in the Postscript.) The writer expressed his outrage, for Das, ‘we hear is to use prostitutes’ for his production: Is it not a matter of shame and contempt for Bengal that Bengalis have still not learnt to promote superior ethics (sanniti)? 264

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If it were not so, how could we have three playhouses – the Bengal, the Star and the Emerald – in the same city of Calcutta, each running uninterruptedly for so many years with prostitute actresses and netting such huge profits? Last year, Calcutta’s Star Theatre went to perform in Dacca with prostitutes in their group, but they were not successful because of the protests of the bhadralok there. The people of Dacca, it seems, are more mindful of ethics than those of Calcutta!76 (emphasis mine) The reference may be to the 1887 row between students, boarders of Jagannath College, Dacca, and the touring Star Theatre Company, discussed by John Berwick in his study of the ‘Chatra Samaj’.77 Student mobilisation against actresses or public speeches against theatre had a long history and therefore need not be read exclusively as nationalist discourse. Theatre companies were frequently the target of intermittent social boycott and public protests, often internalised by educational instructors seeking to protect their young wards from the venality and charms of the prostitute-actress. Venues for such meetings included open spaces (maidan) and city squares; the press took varying stands. The following item in a Dacca newspaper about the same Jagannath College underlined the need to find alternative modes of protest: News On Wednesday last, the 4th of Aswin, a meeting took place on the grounds of the Baptist Church Maidan against the ­prostitute-tainted Ananda Natya Samaj come from Calcutta. The principal of the Jagannath College, Srijukta Kunajalal Nag, M.A.; the Sanskrit Instructor Srijukta Chandrakanta Nayalankar of the Dacca College and many such other eminent people also made speeches at this meeting. I have heard these kinds of speeches on several other occasions. We are not in favour of such passing phases of agitation. We [too,] have been surprised at the Ananda Natya Samaj’s latest strategy of attracting a crowd that is drawn to prostitutes; nevertheless, it is unseemly to have a student movement around this issue.78 Public discussions on morality, and the case for and against theatre, have to be contexualised in a long-standing comparison and contestation between Dacca and Calcutta, with the East Bengal brahman often 265

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ridiculed for being gauche, but also being privileged over the pseudosophisticated and morally suspect babu-brahmans of Calcutta. This is only to signpost the ways in which the debate on public access, its relation to entertainment, education and Brahmo reformism forms a relatively unexplored strand in the print journalism emerging from Dacca.79 The championing of Raj Krishna by the Pradeshik Congress underlines how a selective representation of ‘culture’ would be posited as a primary strand of the nationalist project. The Congress session of 1880s in Bengal could be juxtaposed with the one in Madras in which sadir-nritya was introduced in its reformed avatar, on the occasion of yet another Congress session in 1927.80 In contrast to the distancing of various elite groups and constituencies from the public stage in Bengal, primarily because of the presence of the actress, political leaders and leading Maharashtrian intellectuals and political activists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) forged links with practitioners of the sangeet natak.81 Obviously, the many faces of cultural nationalism did not emerge at the same time and in the same manner across British India. Besides significant variations regionally, opinion and practices diverged even within Bengal. This is critical to appreciate the specific ways in which expressive modes had to be invented for new audiences as well as for tracing how notions of the self were internalised, or a persona constructed for kin or friend in the course of a memorial speech.82

The ‘human’ in a liminal space Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affectations, passions . . . as a Christian . . .? If you prick us do we not bleed? . . . The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. —Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 1

Euphemisms like ‘anonymous quarters’, ‘obscure’ localities and ‘darker regions’ referring to ‘origins’ of the actress (Chapter 1) were in stark contrast to the publicity of performance – the footlights and the glare of the proscenium stage; the placards, handbills and advertisements, and the widely circulating theatre magazines where her photographs were published. The show before the show on the stage of the Star Theatre in 1912 created a liminal space: it combined the formal 266

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atmosphere of a meeting place with the intimate space of ‘a home’, neither of which had ostensibly anything to do with ticketed entertainment. How was this transformation effected? For one, the actresses allude to the fact that they have come before the audience like ‘ordinary people . . . denuded of theatrical make-up’ (shoja manusher matan, natya-shaj bina). From being cast as painted natis, they were now ‘human beings’ who wish to pay homage to their guru. (There is no claim to being a bhadramahila.) It is precisely this gap that the actresses choose to explore and expose. We may read this absence of costumes, make-up and jewellery – markers of their trade as professional entertainers – as also constituting a performance, enabling a reference to those other identities which will then be teased out in the speeches. While the actresses do not present themselves as penitents, the absence of theatrical ‘décor’ invites a different regard. In some ways it anticipates the desexualised discourse of seva that would characterise women’s involvement in political demonstrations and so on in the coming decades. The marshalling of penitence for a ticketed spectacle – the meat of contemporary reality shows – is not new. Recall the inmates of the Magdalen Hospital in London who were bound to attend divine service at chapel twice on Sundays: The services were noted for spectacular scenes of sentimental distress displayed by the serried ranks of penitent prostitutes. These occasions were open to the public by ticket, issued by the committee and the chaplain, and became notably fashionable events. A poem on this edifying spectacle, also ticketed for fundraising purposes, contrasted ‘the women’s former finery as prostitutes with their unadorned beauty as penitents in the Magdalen chapel’ (emphasis added).83 Although facing a mixed audience, in the very first speech Sushilabala singles out the women in the audience: ‘the wise and the discerning, the respectable housewives’. She addresses them as ‘mothers, goddesses of household prosperity’ (ma janani grihalakshmigan). ‘Ma’ is also a class marker, used by inferiors to their class or caste superiors, irrespective of age. As for the audience, we know that devotional plays from the early 1880s onwards had succeeded in drawing women to the theatre, as in this report in English: National Theatre: – This popular place of amusement continues to draw crowded houses; and we congratulate Baboo Girish Chunder Ghose on the success which has crowned his 267

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efforts to provide amusement for the native community. Last Sunday some of the most anglicised and go-ahead members of the community were there, accompanied by their educated and emancipated wives and other female relatives – an unprecedented sight in the history of the native stage.84 While theatre-going respectable women were not uncommon by the early 20th century, there is no record of how many women on this occasion were regular playgoers and how many part of the special invitees mentioned earlier by Amarendranath. Like Amarendranath, Sushilabala begins with an apology. However, in the rhetorical question, ‘How have we dared to speak today?’ she distinguishes between the socially unacceptable selves of the actresses and the respectable ‘mothers and housewives’ of her address. In the mode of Shylock’s representation she continues with exquisite sarcasm: ‘It is true we are fallen, it is true we are social rejects, but we are human beings. You may not think so, but we too, have a right to express and articulate our grief. Perhaps none of you will object to this slight claim to a common humanity’ (emphases added). She moves on to an elaborate construction which underlines the relationships between the players involved, rather than their individual social status: ‘If we have any right to be grieved at the death of a loved one, how is our mourning in any way reprehensible?’ Like Amarendranath, Sushilabala anticipates possible objections: ‘Some of you may think, why the need to grieve in public?’ and answers: ‘[T]he desire for sympathy, to share our grief is not unique to us, but is a rule of nature, the way of this world.’ The common denominators are therefore nature and humanity and not the social constructs and divides of bhadramahila and patita that the speech had implicitly invoked at the beginning. Returning then to the moment of utterance, the event as it unfolds, the speaker underlines the exigencies of this particular performance: ‘Why have we thus dared? [Because] . . . it is you – through your compassion and grief – who have given us the courage to do so.’ And, in a swift turn of the argument, the speaker points to the act of legitimisation that attended Girishchandra’s death and made of him a ‘Bengali national hero’. She then asks, ‘Is this not a matter of pride to us?’ A common Bengali national identity is invoked, apparently cutting through divides of gender, class and caste, not so much of religion in this case. But Sushilabala is also making a very thinly veiled charge of usurpation: our guru has overnight become your hero. We are overwhelmed, yes. But surely that does not deprive us of our right to mourn the person we know best. 268

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Then follows a direct reference to the hugely attended and much publicised Town Hall meeting where ‘[w]e had fondly wished to pay our respects.’ The speaker lauds the ‘acceptability’ of the actor made visible in the Town Hall meeting: ‘For long we had felt sorrowful that our fellow actors should be despised and shunned on our account; but the respect that has been lavished on an actor has erased our sorrow.’ This reference to an uneasy professional alliance allows Sushilabala to return to the crucial question of the actress and her profession: ‘It was Girishchandra who instilled in us unhappy creatures the desire to live off the fruits of our hard labour on stage.’ Once she makes the point – the difference between the tainted actor and the contaminating actress within the theatre world – Sushilabala returns to the subject of the memorial meeting of Girish-babu with a disclaimer appropriately modest for a pupil, and a woman at that: ‘We do not know of the genius of Guru Girishchandra . . . we only know.’ The speaker now establishes a second level of difference between those who will mourn Girish as a public figure – as a dramatist, litterateur, devotee – in the anonymous civil society, and those who regarded him as a father, a teacher, those whom he had personally inspired to labour in their profession. It is for this last gift of self-worth that Sushilabala chooses to pay her homage to her guru, as does the actress Narisundari in her speech. Here, the professional is not seen as alienating or degrading or as the exclusive fruits of a monetised economy, but rather as one lived in a working relationship, built on trust and emotional exchange. She then makes formal return, almost like a theorem, to the beginning of her text. When Sushilabala charges the audience to remember Girishchandra ‘for ever’, it is a double-edged statement, for she adds: ‘We shall cherish his memory in our hearts till the moment of our death.’ Then comes the surprising assertion: ‘It is the remembrance within that we shall cherish.’ It is this space then, that is carved out – outside of the Town Hall from which they are barred. It is outside too, of the theatre which is their ‘home’, their place of employment and source of sustenance, the stage from where they have been permitted to speak. (They cannot of course claim a ‘home’ in the manner of the household female; as we saw in Chapter 3, home is shown as a greater hell than the hell of the theatre.) The private space of their hearts is an inner sanctum to which only the individual actresses have entry. It is an experiential domain – neither biological, nor inherited, nor one to which any one may buy access. Barely 10 days before she read out her speech at the Star Theatre Sushilabala had sung and performed at the Kohinoor Theatre ‘combination 269

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night’ mentioned earlier. On that occasion she had played the difficult part of Jobi in Balidan (a passionate ‘social play’) and Subhadra in Pandav-Gaurav (a mythological), both by Girishchandra. That evening’s programme had drawn a full house and the sale of tickets alone raised a memorial fund of Rs. 3,636 – a considerable sum for the time, although the prices of tickets had been raised for the occasion. The oblique thrust of her speech is also to differentiate between the fundraising activities in public in which actresses such as she have an assigned role and the moment of articulation when she may express her private self. The emphatic reference here is to the lived experience of her association with Girish Ghosh and how that would continue to live within her and others like her, through her work.

Of merit Eklavya, the son of the King of Nishadas, Hiranyadhanu, came to Drona for instruction in archery, but since he came from a low caste, Drona did not accept him as a disciple. Eklavya respectfully touched Drona’s feet with his head and withdrew into the forest and there, making a little image of Drona, he thought of him as his guru, and began practising the arts of war. . . . Drona: Brave, if you are indeed my disciple, then give me the gift due to a guru, gurudakshina. —Adiparva, Mahabharata85

The next speaker, Ranisundari, delineates more explicitly the exact nature of Girish Ghosh’s contribution in their eyes. She returns to the past when she was only a spectator, ‘when I had not for a moment aspired for glory to make my life worthy as an actress’. Having come to the theatre several times to watch Girishchandra perform, she is overwhelmed by his performance. But it was the sight of other women on stage apparently like her who, because of their tutelage under Girishchandra, could play the most difficult of roles with the greatest of ease, that she ‘was inspired to become an actress myself’. This is a conversion narrative with a difference: Ranisundari, primarily a singer trained in courtesanal practices, aspired to be an actress herself, rather than the role represented by the actress she saw on stage.86 The actress performing on stage represented another possible identity. The difference in the quality of women is therefore not between the usual binary of the grihalakshmi and the patita, but 270

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elaborated and analysed as difference in achievement, expressed in degree of talent and professional training, to which potentially anyone with an intensity of desire and discipline may aspire to. One may read in this the very premise of secular democracy, where potentially every citizen is also a subject. Through her reminiscences Ranisundari makes the most direct statement about the choice of a vocation: ‘there is nothing so precious in human life as the ability to support oneself and live with one’s work.’ Girish Ghosh is her guru because he made it possible for her to realise this aspiration. Ranisundari draws the audience’s attention to this link, otherwise absent in the public domain. Her speech gestures towards a secular modern identity, where the role model is not of the ideal woman – either of the suffering wife or indeed of the female warrior. Rather, a new professional identity that inheres in the choice of vocation, the labour of performance, and by virtue of performance becoming an ‘actress’ and, perhaps, ‘the role’! The emphasis is on merit earned in this life, not the conventional definition of accruing merit for a better birth in the next life. Narisundari (1867–1939), who was celebrated for her singing prowess and her good looks, delivered the shortest and the most thoughtful of the speeches. She was a regular of the Star Theatre although she had done stints at the Minerva and the Alfred.87 She would perform in the 1914 dramatisation of Amarendranath’s sensational Abhinetrir Roop. Beginning with the usual apologia: ‘I do not know how to make a speech, nor have I ever had occasion to speak at a public meeting,’ Narisundari implictly questions whether these are essential qualifications for mourning in public. Far more significant are the bonds forged through working together: ‘No one, perhaps, had as close a relationship with Girish Ghosh as did the actors and actresses’ – a sharp reference to the posthumous lionising of Girish which now situates him in a different orbit. A second difference is valorised: ‘His plays may live forever in the heart of Bengalis (Bangali jati), but we actresses have learnt to live our very lives from the characters’! What is only a work of fiction or simply literature or drama to the audience, constitutes the very being of the actresses. They live the texts not merely through impersonating the characters but by internalising the models. As she continues, Narisundari cannot resist flinging a barb at the sanctimonious heads of society who set themselves in judgement on theatre and on actresses: The pure and the upright have only taunted us, cast us aside; Girishchandra, however, was not one of them, but only a 271

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great man (mahapurush). He spoke through us, wretched creatures, [when we played] Nitai, Pagalini . . . By his grace I have chanted Hari’s name: therefore, he was not only my shiksha-guru but also my dharma-guru. We sense a movement here from various interpretations of professional to the claims of the spiritual. The use of the term shiksha-guru in juxtaposition with dharma-guru is notable; the more usual juxtaposition is shiksha-guru and diksha-guru, a terminology characteristic of Vaishnava communities.88 Is it surprising that in all the four speeches, only Girish’s bhakti plays are remembered and the roles of ideal women enumerated? Basantakumari, who makes the last of the four speeches, celebrates the Vaishnav saints Chaitanya and Nityananda on the one hand and ideal women such as Sita, Savitri and Damayanti on the other. Does this mean that even at their most interrogative, the actresses as a collective were unable to move beyond the very icons that played so well, and that they were forever pitted against?

Language Basantakumari makes the longest and, in some respects, the most conventional of the four speeches. She has a disclaimer about the language at their disposal: ‘as uneducated women, our language lacks ornament and a rhetorical ending.’89 The use of high literary Bangla by actresses who had little formal education and were for the most part perceived as ‘illiterate’ is significant on several counts. The rhetoric may be seen as a mark of honour to the guru and appropriate to the formal occasion; it also establishes the actresses on an equal linguistic (and class) platform with the bhadralok and bhadramahila. But its very formality becomes an ironic comment on the speakers’ subjectivities, on their ‘interested presentations of the self’, as I elaborate below. When the speeches were inserted as recorded event in print they were labelled purely in terms of sentiment and expressive affect. The editor introduced them as ‘bhaver abhivyakti’ – an expression of feelings; thus making bhava appropriately feminine and devotional, as the topos appropriate to guru-bhakti. Bhava is both feminine and of the theatre. It is also, as seen in Chapter 2, central to Vaishnava aesthetics of salvation, though subsequently linked with new forms of expressivity linked to consumerist display, outlined in Chapter 4. Bhava can also be used to mean pure sentiment, i.e. at the most it could be seen as ‘touching or moving’ but not necessarily an appeal to the intellect 272

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or rational discourse, precluding any understanding of socio-economic realities. Thus, in the only reference to this meeting made by a latterday critic, Debnarayan Gupta, in his sketch of Narisundari’s life, Gupta comments: ‘Narisundari made a moving speech (ek hridoygrahi byoktrita) in the above meeting.’90 Narisundari’s short speech is reproduced in full in Gupta’s essay (and I may gratefully acknowledge here, initiated the earliest version of this chapter), but there is no comment on the irony inherent in Narisundari’s self-representation or that of her colleagues. Is this partly because of the deceptively formal language? In these previously written out, prepared speeches, the actresses appear keep to the overly chaste and formal pattern of male bhadralok discourse brought to a fine art by the early decades of the 20th century. But as is evident from the preceding paragraphs, they also move beyond the parameters established for memorial speeches in repeatedly returning to the gap between their social location and their own self-worth as made possible by their guru, as also by drawing selectively on the vocabulary of bhakti. In the contemporary report published in the Natya-mandir, the ‘strangeness’ of the meeting emerges greatly from the collective and gendered nature of the enterprise, itself preceded by the pre-texts I have enumerated: namely, the exclusion of the actresses from public meetings in memory of Girishchandra; their written appeal to Amarendranath to be granted a platform in their ‘home’ (the Star Theatre); and finally, in the preparation and the act of reading out before an assembly of worthies the text of their grief. As the extracts from the speeches suggest, the group identity derived from an internalisation of the difference attributed to them – as actresses – by the bhadra world, as much as it did from the sequence of activities listed above. It was not only a difference between proper grihabadhus and natis who were read as patitas. It was also the gap between their ‘illiterate, uneducated’ selves and the learned men as well as the educated woman (‘shikshita nari’) in the audience who were socially granted the right to judge them.

The frame At a Washington Center for Politics and Journalism seminar for students and interns . . . former Reagan new media adviser Michael Deaver held forth on his secret for using television to the best political advantage of his client. The answer, he said, was realizing that ‘television isn’t news, it’s entertainment.’91

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‘Theatre’s capacity to confuse and elide social difference’ is not unique to the present context. The actresses are first presented before the regular audience, then re-presented in print for an extended readership, with the frame doubled as it were: the introductory note in the article is followed by a ‘report’ commenting on Amarendranath’s introduction. The main text comprises the four speeches of unequal length by Sushilabala, Ranisundari, Narisundari and Basantakumari. Nagendranath Sarkar rounds off the pre-performance event with a vote of thanks ‘on behalf of the actresses’ (!) and a rambling eulogy of Girish Ghosh the playwright. Sarkar repeatedly stresses that the theatre is a sacred pimgrimage space to which the faithful may travel for ritual purification. To what extent are the actresses circumscribed within and by this frame? On the occasion of the ‘Combination night’ at the Kohinoor, veteran actress Teenkari Dasi had sent a letter apologising for her absence due to her ill health. Amarendranath Dutt read out the letter prior to the performance (and following his recitation of a poem on Girishchandra by Amritalal Bose). Amritalal’s long poem (‘Smritir Sanman’) (In honoured memory) celebrated in verse the unique features of every one of Girish’s better-known plays as well as the roles the latter had made famous. It was an evaluation of a theatre personality who had come to represent an entire era. By contrast, Teenkari’s letter was brief and respectful, with no attempt at expressing even the most conventional platitudes about the merits of her guru. The letter was in keeping with the reason cited by Teenkari for not wishing to hold elaborate pujas in her home even when she was prosperous enough to do so: ‘God has given us a lowly place, as the lowliest of the low . . . People will only ridicule me . . . they’ll say that the wench (beti) is trying to make money . . . [I]t is better that we unfortunates pray to Him in our hearts.’92 At the Star Theatre meeting too, there was no attempt by the actresses to evaluate Girishchandra as actor or dramatist. The speeches appeared to keep completely within the frame demarcated by Amarendranath in the introductory paragraph of the printed article: ‘[R]emembering the blessed name of the late great mahashoy Girishchandra Ghosh’s compassionate affection, the actresses offered the gift of their hearts’ devotion with profound respect.’ Nevertheless, the point was made by Narisundari that it was only through ‘wretched creatures’ such as they, that Girishchandra’s noblest characters came alive for the audience. It was they who sang the wonderful songs, spoke the moving speeches, whether cross-dressed in the role of Nitai, or as the Pagalini, and thereby moved the audience.

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The introduction cum apologia by Amarendranath is worth noting for another reason. It anticipated objections by the ‘refined or fastidious sort’ (ruchibagishgan) but also implicated the audience in the ‘business’ of theatre. Amarendranath highlights the market value of the actresses: ‘Those with whom we have to run this business, without whom it would be totally impossible to run the business of theatre.’ By ‘revealing’ to the audience his own ‘initial confusion’ on receiving the actresses’ application, he sought toally with the former. But by appealing to the audience on behalf of the actresses he underlines his role as mediator: ‘Do not deny these wretched women [the opportunity] to “kneel and weep” [before you].’ This is homage as expiation. A ritual enactment of redemption which the theatre as a workplace, and Girish as the guru, has made possible. The speeches run through a gamut of emotions, the tone fluctuating from the solemn to the rhetorical and flowery, from the austere and simple to the sharply ironical. The kowtowing to the audience appears as excessive, given the interrogative nature of the presentation. There are continuous reminders of what they had made possible for Girishchandra, bringing alive his characters, although ‘of course’ only because of his tutelage. Even here, Ranisundari evokes Eklavya, the classic epic exemplar of the self-taught who succeeded in becoming Dronacharya’s best pupil through sheer dedication and talent, since his outcaste status did not give him the right to be taught by the master. Implicit in the evocation is the gurudakshina exacted by the sage from his lowly ‘pupil’: Eklavya excelled in archery over the five Pandava princes who had been trained by Drona; he had to offer his thumb (angushtha) as the mandatory gift to the guru. In an early essay focusing on the first generation of actresses (Teenkari Dasi, Binodini Dasi, Sukumari Dutta and Tarasundari), I had said: The sense of achievement as actresses was constantly undercut by the absence of having a place to stand, and a sansar to which they could belong. Binodini’s images of the mother as a true woman, or a sati as a true woman, has to be seen as part of the repertoire of received roles within which they were obliged to construct their sense of self. It is only when playing such roles that the actress was granted a sense of fulfilment. No wonder then, that many of these early stars did see the stage as the locus of dharma, while realising at the same time, that socially, they were grounded for life in quite another region.93

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Recalling her own years on the stage, Binodini Dasi had said, And there were many who criticised me; their criticism had nothing to do with my acting. They censured me saying that it was a sin for people of my sort to even act the part of such lofty characters. Each one said whatever he thought. In our times, just as there was praise, so there was equally strong censure if a mistake had been made. They abused us in the vilest of language for the most trifling of mistakes. (emphasis added)94 Was this split to be ever resolved! Should the actress be judged for her powers of performance or for her perceived immorality, her genealogy or lack of it? What if her worth lay in her ability to become the ideal bhakt or those ideal characters? Would it still qualify only as performance, at best, an artifice ‘natural’ to immoral woman? Or, more radically, would it indicate a mode of being, which actually made the actress superior to those who only came to watch and hear her? To reiterate, the speakers at this meeting were not from the first generation of actresses. They were imprinted by the emotional affect of the Bhakti era, of neo-Vaishnavism, as it was played out in the working of the public theatre and in the exigencies of actual performance. Theatre history has all too often ignored the entire field of performance and concentrated exclusively either on dates or events, or event-making incidents which have lent themselves to theatre apocrypha. It is within this rich matrix of work as aspiration and self-realisation – linking occupation, identity, self-worth and artistic achievement – that the actresses locate themselves in their collective tribute to Girishchandra on a public platform. Constructing their speeches carefully as formal paeans, and published as testimonies of ‘guru bhakti’, the actresses take recourse to the discourse of Vaishnavism, of the Gaudiya Vaishnav sampraday. This is done most emphatically in characterising Girishchandra as their ‘­shiksha-­ guru and dharma-guru’.95 The speeches merit attention beyond the confines of stage history for the way in which they draw on the Vaishnav ‘culture of interiorisation’, whereby ‘all conventional distinctions’ are broken down ‘through a recognition of manush or human being’.96 The speakers inflect these terms with the specific contradictions of their social location and the illusion or hypocrisy of those who come to see them perform. Read out by women whose primary modes of representation and self-representation out of the stage was as the devotee and/ or the devoted pupil, it is in the rhetoric of the speeches, particularly 276

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in the use of irony, that the actresses undeniably move out of the frame they appear to have adopted as parameters.

Fictions of identity Although the actresses are speaking as a collective, I have highlighted the differences articulated in each of the individual speeches. The event showcases a coming together of apparently two very different modes of representation: (1) traditional practices of women mourning in public for an eminent figure: king, holy man, politician and so on; and (2) women delivering ‘a speech’ in a public meeting for a ticket-buying audience, possibly including regular playgoers as well as special invitees, part of the discourse of modernity. In conceiving action and speech as primary sources of plurality, and narratives as ‘society’s ways of coping with the past, the present, and a possible, utopian future’, Hannah Arendt has elaborated on ‘the public sphere in relation to narrative as performances’.97 She has persuasively argued that disenfranchised groups may employ or deploy narratives to ‘contest conceptions of subjectivity and notions of morality’, and even to make a moral claim for justice. The channels by which new forms of solidarities are created therefore, rely on the capacity of narratives to disclose previously invisible marginalisation, exclusion and prejudice. In this instance we have seen the performance of several ‘identity claims’ between the ‘event’ and its ‘reportage’. Those stories are either lost or are yet to recovered which will tell us whether there were any accompanying attempts on the part of the actresses to effect institutional transformations, or initiate what is broadly understood to mean ‘action’. Nevertheless, by presenting the audience with some of their own perceptions and beliefs about the speakers, the actresses inspire a reflective process, necessary for any kind of ‘deliberative democracy’. Besides holding this mirror up to the audience, the speakers also make use of the autobiographical to present the audience with a range of plausible identities. The inflections within what we provisionally term a ‘Hindu’ identity are many, imbued as it is with Christian notions of guilt and redemption, Vaishnava raganuraga bhakti, an interrogation of caste, and above all, by the positioning of the modern self as spectator, working woman, colleague and pupil. There is also an enactment of a singular claim of civil society: that there is a life of friendship and interpersonal relations, besides that of pure ‘need’. The actresses play with at least four categories: humanity, class, profession and faith. The last is embodied as the bhakta or devotee, referring specifically to 277

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the guru-shishya relationship. Carving out the space of bhakta entails more than devotion; it is an assertion of the rights of the faithful. From this perspective, the actresses inscribe themselves within a long tradition of exemplar figures, such as those of Bhakt Prahlad or Dhruba. By invoking Eklavya, caste is inserted with an interrogative intent. The precise nature of the ‘autobiographical’ in these speeches is also open to several readings of which I will outline two here. Are they, for example, a testimony to what Habermas calls ‘the illocutionary mode’? In his words: ‘it is not a matter of reports and descriptions from the perspective of the observer, not even self-observations; rather, is it a matter of interested presentations of the self.’98 Further, by problematising reception, the attempt is to reveal the construction of the normative which paradoxically can define itself by denying humanity or rights of feeling and expression to its other. The second reading draws on Freud’s classic essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, which coincidentally was written within a few years of the 1912 meeting.99 As pointed out by the editor of Freud’s works, the German word traüer, like the English ‘mourning’, can mean both the affect of grief and its outward manifestation.100 Freud identifies one ‘trait’ to distinguish between the conditions of mourning which may involve ‘grave departures from the normal attitude to life’ and melancholia, which is ‘a pathological condition’: ‘The disturbance of selfregard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same.’ What we find interesting, is that both these conditions are in response to the loss of a loved object or an ideal. The mentoring relationship (not excluding a sexual relationship) between guru and shishya falls within the purview of the Freudian field. In this dyad of the (male) guru and (female) shishya, the guru is clearly posited both as a loved object and an ideal. Given that most actresses came from women-headed households and the absence of a patriarchal lineage (pitri parichoy) was a source of critical social indictment, Girishchandra is like a parent but also not one. Moreover, there is neither reproach for the guru’s death in this case, nor a desire to punish oneself, as in classic cases of melancholia. Rather, the loss has several dimensions. The loss itself is twofold: first, in terms of death and the physical absence of guru and fellow actor. Second, and more significantly, because Girishchandra for long was himself regarded as an outcast; he has now been posthumously lionised and awarded public recognition through a process that is enabled in part by excluding the actress from the theatre community. This is not an individual grief being articulated but that of the four actresses as a collective. And their grief has to stand out against

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the grief of ‘the world at large’ – at a point in social history when Girishchandra’s death is being perceived as a ‘jatiya loss’. The ‘nature of identification’ which was of concern to Freud101 is thus rendered more complex in this argument, particularly through the Town Hall meeting when the ‘split’ or separation between guru and shishya is made publicly as it were. The lack of social acceptance which the guru had mitigated is now brought to a point of ‘no return’. Despite this seeming dead end, what emerges in the speeches is an affirmation of the primary identification with the ideal object. In fact the ‘loss’ actually provides a locus for the affirmation of the self, fractured as it may be, through the various categories outlined above. It is a self which extends well beyond the mandate of redemption enabled by the guru, and internalised by the actresses. Are we then looking at a ‘performance of mourning’ rather than at individuals ‘in mourning’? The chapter has shown that the speeches are primarily about the construction of subjectivities as mediated and made possible by the guru. Therefore, the actresses are ‘in mourning’ whether or not they are ‘performing’ mourning. Finally, a word about pain. Freud’s observation that ‘the mood of mourning is a painful one’ takes on a particular resonance given the feminisation of pain in contemporary Bengali literature. Binodini Dasi actually inscribes her autobiographical text, My Story, as a bedonagatha, while the shok-gatha was much favoured by women writers of the time,102 although several shok-gathas were composed by male poets after actress Sushilabala’s sudden death. The claim to common humanity notwithstanding, the actresses also suggest that their social location actually makes them more sensible to pain. For pain is already inscribed into the social body of the actress.

‘Vilap’ or ‘The Great National Mourning’ The public theatre was a major arena where the new literary Bengali both colloquial or chalit and formal or sadhu, could be heard, as also Hindustani and English! Actresses had to mouth recent classics for a living. And the urban stage was where the range of the Bangla language could be paraded. In addition to the string of songs and dances, the plays themselves – historical, puranic, romantic – were word-laden, with long passages in verse, interspersed with songs. My epilogue turns the spotlight on a young actress playing ‘Bangla language’, personified as a Mother or ‘Mata Banga Bhasha’. The piece was a lament (vilap) composed on Vidyasagar’s death.

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The genre of the shok-natika (elegiac-play) allowed for the representation of grief for a public figure on stage, distinct from the ­biographical-devotional whose legacy I have outlined in Chapter 2. On Pandit Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s death on 29 July 1891, Amritalal Bose composed a one-act play comprising five scenes. The play was called Bilap – Bidyasagarer swarge abhahan (‘A Lament: Vidyasagar welcomed in heaven’).103 Upendranath Vidyabhushan, an early biographer of the actress Tarasundari Dasi, gives us glimpse of the backstage politicking that went into casting. Amritalal himself was keen that Tarasundari play the role of ‘Mata Banga-Bhasha’, eulogising Vidyasagar’s seminal contribution to Bangla language. Others in the management objected not on moral grounds, but for technical reasons. Not only was it the most difficult role of the play but it also entailed singing many songs, and Tarasundari was not considered to be a good singer. The impasse was resolved only after the renowned composer Ramtaran Sanyal offered to compose songs especially for Tarasundari. Under his tutelage, and spurred by her own determination, Vidyabhusan records that Tarasundari eventually played the part with great delicacy of feeling (bhavamadhur koria abhinay koriachhilen), overwhelming the audience with her talent and sincerity. Pandit Maheshchandra Nyayratna, who was amongst the members of the audience on the opening night, wrote a glowing account of her performance for the newspapers the following day.104 The confusion about the dates and the circumstances of this performance gives us an insight into the exigencies of theatrical production and how the lives of public figures featured for larger consumption. According to one source, Vilap was staged in the Star Theatre (Hathibagan) on 22 August 1892.105 However, Vidyabhushan gives 22 August 1891 as the date for the first performance of Vilap by Tarasundari.106 The year 1891 is corroborated in the chronology of performances put together by theatre historian Sankar Bhattacharyya who cites the English advertisement in the Indian Daily News: The Great National Mourning STAR THEATRE TO-NIGHT SATURDAY, THE 22ND AUGUST, AT 9 P.M. A new Dramatic Representation BILAP, OR The welcome of Vidyasagar in Heaven/ TO BE PRECEDED BY/SITA’S EXILE. 280

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The advertisement of 26 August 1891 in the same newspaper actually mentions Tarasundari by name in the role of ‘Banga Bhasha’. It is notable that Vilap continued to be performed almost every other day in combination with another piece, as was the usual practice, at least until 25 October 1899.107 Meanwhile, the rival City Theatre also advertised Vidyasagar as ‘A new piece written in honour of the Late Pandit Isvara Chandra Vidyasagar, C.I.E.’ Vidyasagar opened at the Vina Theatre (which the City had rented) on 21 August 1891, that is just a day before Bilap opened at the Star.108 Vidyasagar does not appear to have enjoyed as long a run as Bilap, but it was performed at least for the next two days. The Star and the City Theatre companies were going through a bitter phase of rivalry extending to lawsuits at this time; one can only speculate as to whether it was the basically the same or a very similar piece being performed under a different name. Factionalism and mass defections of actors and actresses leading to split loyalties obviously added to the politics of production.109 What is clear is that both companies were capitalising on the death of a public figure, posthumously idolising him as a champion of women’s causes. Farces about widows and widow remarriage had been the staple of the stage. Several decades after these plays were staged, the editor of Nachghar wrote a piece on Tarasundari, titled somewhat extravagantly, ‘The most outstanding actress in the world’ (Jagater annatam sreshtha abhinetri). By all accounts, Tarasundari – ‘the Divine Sarah of Bengal’, was an extraordinary actress, often salvaging the reputation of a production or a company by her individual efforts; the effort to ‘internationalise’ her is understandable. The Nachghar writer recalled a young Tarasundari playing the part of ‘Mata Bangabhasha’ in the play commemorating Vidyasagar: ‘In rendering her mourning song and her elegiac lament . . . that young actress gave every indication of her skills. [It was] a sight that came alive before the audience, moving them to tears.’ The editorial added that the youthful actress’s performance had earned her ‘a permanent place’ on the Bengali stage.110 As a footnote to this tale, we may recall that Vidyasagar had resigned in protest from the committee of the Bengal Theatre when a decision had been taken to hire women to play the female parts. It was understood that all such women could/would only be prostitutes and Vidyasagar had felt that this would vitiate the potential of theatre as a platform for social reform. Vidyasagar died a bitter man, disappointed over the failure of his campaign for widow remarriage. 281

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Figure 5.4 Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

Excisions Less than two years after the ‘strange meeting’, the idea of a Bangiya Natya Parisat materialised. Great care was taken to ensure that the chief patron and other individuals were persons of impeccable credentials. The Natya-mandir carried a detailed report of the inaugural meeting of 26 Chaitra at the Star Theatre.111 It was a laudable effort to bring together amateur and professional theatre groups or companies, celebrities and the general public in interactive sabhas, amidst ambitious plans to set up a library, a publication programme and commission portraits in oil of eminent ‘forefathers’. The actress was meticulously excised in the agenda. Speeches followed in the usual manner. I excerpt the one by ‘Bhabotosh Ray, B.A.’, representative of Chhatra Samaj (student body): I endorse the setting up of this Natya Parisat on behalf of the entire Chhatra Samaj. I am sure every one will unanimously agree that it is the Chhatra Samaj which is the primary patron

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of contemporary dramatic art and of dramatic literature. I may dare to say that the student body from all of Bengal will join in the work of the Natya Parisat with great enthusiasm. They will express their deepest feelings about the state of dramatic art in each session of the Parisat and will thereby earn the gratitude of those organising the Parisat. This speech by a ‘B.A.’ ratifying the Bangiya Natya Parshat distinguished between and clearly separated ‘contemporary dramatic art’ and the women who were conduits of that art. The educated male student, hitherto perceived as most vulnerable to the virus of the stage, was now being called upon for its gentrification. The ‘strange meeting’ was then something of an exception and truly quite strange. The physical exclusion of actresses from the meeting at the Town Hall following Girishchandra’s death was formally institutionalised at this inaugural meeting of the Bangiya Natya Parishat. In 1922, 50 years of the public theatre was celebrated with great fanfare at the Calcutta University Institute Hall, the venue signifying a further rise in the status of professional theatre. The actress did not figure in the detailed press reports on the occasion.112 Mourning, meeting, speech and performance thus refuse to be contained in their proper spheres. The ‘strange meeting’ as an event that took place and was recorded in history, albeit in a popular and ephemeral theatre magazine, became a space for ‘interested’ representations. The speeches by the actresses address a gamut of issues central to theories of representation, including mimesis, as well as drawing on the praxis of bhakti as a mode of becoming. The rich panoply of rhetorical devices draw on the formal devices of the conventional speech (interjection, interrogation, anticipation of an argument, etcetera) while alluding to marginalised epic characters, invoking alternative paradigms of the guru-shishya relationship. The narrative of mourning frequently turns to the discourse of rights, and the ‘natural’ expression of grief is often worded as a space for legal representation of a profession that is built on labour and investment. Repeatedly in their speeches, the actresses emphasise their aspirations, and choice of livelihood or profession for which a price is paid. It is ‘hard labour’ – physical, intellectual and emotional, involving a modern schedule of pre-determined days and times for extended periods of rehearsals and show time. Work is simultaneously inflected with an emotional-spiritual resonance for it involves carving out the space of bhakti – as a bhakta, following a tradition of exemplar figures.

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Notes 1 Brahmobandhab Upadhyay, ‘Rath Jatra’ (The Chariot Festival) (Sandhya) in Amarendranath Ray (ed.), Bangalir Pujaparban (Festivals of the Bengalis) Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1950, pp. 8–9. Born Bhabanicharan Bandopadhyay, Brahmobandhab collaborated with Rabindranath Tagore in setting up the Brahmacharyasram for boys in Santiniketan, but soon moved towards active involvement in revolutionary politics. 2 See for example, the arguments proposed by Neeladri Bhattacharya, ‘Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public’ in Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld (eds), Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogues and Perceptions, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006, pp. 130–55. 3 Benoy Ghosh, Vidyasagar o Bangali Samaj (Vidyasagar and Bengali Society), Calcutta: Orient Longman Ltd., 1984, pp. 109, 145–7. 4 A germinal version of this chapter was first published in Bangla, ‘Ekti bichitra sabhar kahini’ (The Story of a Strange Meeting) (in Bangla), Baromas, 1995, pp. 75–9. For an extended gloss on the shok-sabha see Partha Chatterjee, ‘On Civil and Political Society in Postcolonial Democracies’ in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 165–78. 5 Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 37. 6 Speaking of ‘the savage and yet playful game of self-mockery’ that Bengali cartoonists embarked on, Partha Mitter underlines: ‘Significantly, criticisms of modern ideas emanated not from traditional groups, but from within the urban elite itself.’ Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 159. 7 Samita Sen, Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 (1999), pp. 115–16. 8 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on Indian Colonial and Post-Colonial Experiences, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. For a very different approach see Veena Das, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, Daedalus, Vol. 125, No. 1, Social Suffering, Winter 1996, pp. 67–91. 9 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 171–7. 10 Speech by Pandit Prannath Saraswati, in Pulin Das, Persecution of Drama and Stage, Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons Private Ltd., 2004 (1986), pp. 148–9. 11 I am leaving aside here the practice of widow immolation, which offered the greatest opportunity for a public display not only of the sati, but the act of sattitva and their incessant visual representation in colonial texts over centuries. 12 Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Gender Issues in Early South Indian History’ in Saroja Bhate (ed.), India and Indology: Past Present and Future, Calcutta: National Book Agency Pvt. Ltd. 2002, p. 707

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13 Benedicte Grima, ‘Suffering in Women’s Performance of Paxto’ in Arjun Appadurai, Korom and Mills (eds), Gender, Genre and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 78–101. 14 ‘Strivilaparvadhyay: 4, Stri Parva’, Mahabharata, where the blindfolded Gandhari narrates to Krishna the lamentations of each of her hundred widowed daughters-in-law. Gandhari curses Krishna that the women of Yaduvamsa would lament in like manner at his death. 15 The relevant section on the limits of ‘compassionate imagination’ is also to be found in Nussbaum’s ‘Liberal Education in a Time of Global Tension’, Convocation Address delivered on 9 September 2004, University of Knox, USA. www.knox.edu/x8053.xml (accessed on 27 September 2006). 16 Eileen J. Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. 17 As in Rabindranath Tagore’s play for children, translated as ‘The Ordeals of Fame’ in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated Children’s Tagore, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. 18 ‘But there are some who say that after she has had some education, is a woman to go out and get a job or is she to go lecturing at sabhas?’ is the rhetorical question in an article in the Bamabodhini, 1270 BS/1863 in Bharati Ray (ed.), Sekaler Narishiksha, Bamabodhini Patrika: 1270–1329 BS, Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1994, p. 5. 19 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 169. 20 Ibid., p. 169. 21 Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 134–5. 22 Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2000, p. 117. 23 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 170. 24 Benoy Ghosh, Vidyasagar o Bangali Samaj, Calcutta: Orient Longman Ltd., 1984, pp. 304–5. 25 On Rabindranath Tagore’s and his sister Swarnakumari Devi’s response to Ramabai, see Sutapa Bhattacharjee, ‘Introduction’ in Reflective Prose, Writings by Bengali Women of the Nineteenth Century (trans. Sheila Sengupta), New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2011, p. xiii. Swarnakumari’s essay on Ramabai in Bharati and Balak, Sravan 1296 BS/1889, is reprinted, pp. 35–7. 26 Chakravarti, Rewriting History, pp. 307 ff. 27 Ibid., p. 316. 28 Meera Kosambi, Gender Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema Before Independence, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015, p. 78, pp. 292–3. 29 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997 (1995), pp. 62–3. 30 Sanjibani, 19 April, 24 and 31 August and 28 September 1905. 31 From Report of Native Newspapers in Bengal, West Bengal Archives, Calcutta, cited in Bharati Ray, ‘Introduction’, Sekaler Narishiksha, Bamabodhini Patrika, p. 41, n. 23.

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32 The controversy was about an evening of song and dance at the University Institute Hall on 26 January 1928 to raise funds for political prisoners. Srimati Sushma Devi’s letter in ‘Jalshar Chithi’, Udbodhan, 30th year, Issue 4, Baisakh 1335 BS, Vols. 28–9, pp. 242–4. 33 Ellen E. Dolgin, Shaw and the Actresses Franchise League: Staging Equality, Jefferson: McFarland, 2015. 34 Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–1920, Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishers, 1984. 35 Hemjyoti Medhi, Gendered Publics: Chandraprabha Saikiani and the Mahila Samitis in Colonial Assam, forthcoming from New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 36 Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India, New Delhi: Kali for Women and the National Law School of India University, 1996, p. 124. The Bharat Stri Mahamandal was founded in 1910. 37 Ibid., pp. 128–32. 38 Geraldine Forbes, The New Cambridge History of India: Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, South Asian Paperback edition, 1998. 39 Gandhi stated, ‘No one could officiate at the altar of Swaraj who did not approach it with pure hands and a pure heart . . . I appreciate spinning, but it must not be used as a passport to vice . . . I was told in Barisal [East Bengal] that the corporate activity of these women had made them unhealthily forward, and that they were already producing a corrupt influence upon the Barisal youths . . . so long as they continue the life of shame, it is wrong to accept donations or services from them or to elect them as delegates or to encourage them to become members of the Congress.’ Young India, 15 September 1925. See also, Biswanath Joardar, Prostitution in Historical and Modern Perspectives, New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1984, p. 59. 40 The article quoted Gandhi as saying that though legally, they (prostitutes) have no obstacles to becoming Congress members, in the interest of the public . . . they should voluntarily move away. Roop o Rang, No. 37, 2 Sravan 1332 BS/1925, pp, 774–6. 41 Forbes, Women in Modern India, pp. 133–4. 42 Jugantar, 29 November 1922, mentions a contribution of Rs. 1,700, cited in Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2004. 43 Badhon Sengupta, Indubala, Calcutta: Mousumi Prakashani, 1984, cited in Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, p. 813 44 Natya-mandir, 3rd year, Nos. 3–4, Aswin-Kartik 1319 BS/1912, pp. 139–44. 45 Natya-mandir, 2nd year, No. 9, Chaitra 1319 BS/1912, pp. 709–10. 46 For details on the Star Theatre, see Rimli Bhattacharya (ed. and trans.), Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, pp. 173–4. 47 The usual exception is Shankar Bhattacharya who gives us the larger context in his Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1910–1919, Abhijit Bhattacharya (ed.), Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1996, pp. 67–9. The plays to be performed after the meeting were Rabindranath Tagore’s Raja o Rani (billed as a ‘grim tragedy’) and A.N. Dutt’s ‘popular melodrama Jeebonay Moronay’ (In Life and in Death). Amarendranath’s

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biographer, Ramapati Dutta, mentions the speeches as a mark of the former’s generosity. Rangalaye Amarendranath (Amarendranath and Theatre), 1940; Devajit Bandyopadhyay (ed.), repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2004, pp. 320–1. 48 There were two Sushilabalas at the Star Theatre at this time, one of whom was called ‘chhoto’ or younger. The Sushilabala cited here was the more famous of the two. Celebrated for her voice, she was called ‘Kokil’kanthi Sushilabala’ or ‘Sushilabala the Nightingale’. Her last performance before her death in 2 January 1915 was in the role of the noble wife Durga in Abhinetrir Roop (chapter 4). 49 Michael Kinnear, The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899–1908, Bombay: Popular Prakashan Pvt. Ltd., 1994, pp. 15–17. 50 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11 September 1912, in Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1910–1919, pp. 67–9. 51 ‘Rangalaye Nepen: Banga natyashalaye nrityashiksha o tahar kromobikash’, 27 Chaitra 1315 BS/1988; ‘Amritalal Mitra’, 1315 BS/1908, read out at the memorial meeting held at the Kohinoor Theatre; ‘Nat-churamoni swargiya Ardhendhushekhar Mustafi’ (An actor par excellence) and ‘Natyashilpi Dharmadas’ (Dharmadas, the theatre artist), Bhadra 1317 BS/1912, and among others, GR, Vol. 5, pp. 335–9; 340–56; 363 and 370–2. 52 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Nat-Churamoni Swargiya Ardhendhushekhar Mustafi’, GR, Vol. 5, p. 354. 53 Shankar Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982, p. 139. 54 Amlan Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’ in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, New Delhi: Sage, 2005, pp. 29–30. 55 S.N. Mukherjee, ‘Daladali in Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1975, pp. 59–80. 56 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Popular Religion and Social Mobility in Colonial Bengal: The Matua Sect and the Namasudras’ in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind Body & Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 152–94. 57 Basudeb Chattopadhyay, The Town Hall of Calcutta: A Brief History, Calcutta: Homage Trust & Govt. of West Bengal, 1998, p. 28. 58 Ibid., pp. 25–7. 59 Eardley Latimer, Handbook to Calcutta and Environs, Calcutta: Oxford Book Company, 1963, p. 27. 60 Chattopadhyay, The Town Hall of Calcutta, p. 29 and Foreword, p. 7. 61 ‘Town Hall Meeting on January 5, 1835, Criticising the Charter Act of 1833’ in Gautam Chattopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Early Nineteenth Century, Calcutta: Research India Publications, 1978, pp. 259–64. 62 P. Thankappan Nair, Calcutta Tercentenary Bibliography, Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, Vol. 2, 1993, pp. 673–6. 63 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The City Imagined’, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 180. 64 John Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj: The Significance of the Student Community in Bengal c. 1870–1922’ in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind, Body & Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 242.

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65 Statesman, 3 February 1882. 66 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj, 1793–1905, London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1980, pp. 131–3. See also Sarmistha De, Marginal Europeans in Colonial India: 1860–1920, Calcutta: Thema, 2008. 67 Nair, Calcutta Tercentenary Bibliography, p. 676. 68 Santa Devi, Bharat Muktisadhak Ramananda Chattopadhyaya o Ardhasatabdir Bangla (Seeker of India’s Freedom, Ramananda Chattopadhyaya, and half a century of Bengal) 1945, repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2005, p. 233. 69 Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, pp. 6–7. 70 See Michael Baker, The Rise of the Victorian Actor, London: Croom Helm, 1978, pp. 160–74. 71 Statesman, 25 May 1913. 72 Besides Ramakrishna’s epoch-making visit to the Star Theatre to see Chaitanya Lila on 21 September 1884, two other visits by him have been recorded: 14 December 1884 to see Prahlad-charitra, and 25 February 1885 to see Brishaketu and Bibha-bibhrat. 73 The Bengalee, 3 November 1888. Cited in Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, pp. 294–6. For an account of Rajkrishna Roy’s career and eventual bankruptcy, Ibid., pp. 296–300; also, Sushil K. Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753– 1980, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1982, pp. 119–22. 74 Subir Roy Choudhuri, Bilati Jatra Theke Swadeshi Theater (From English Jatra to Swadeshi Theatre) Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 1971, pp. 47–8. 75 Statesman & FOI, 14 December 1888. 76 Sulabh Samachar, 9 November 1888. 77 Sahachar and Sanjibani, RNNB, week ending 17 September 1887, cited in Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, p. 241, note 34. 78 Dacca Prakash, 23 September 1888, cited in Muntassir Mammoon, p. 96. 79 I am indebted to the compilations of reports from Dacca newspapers by Muntassir Mamoon. 80 The young lawyer, E. Krishna Iyer, who danced dressed in the attire of the female dancer, to accord it respectability. Laksmi Viswanathan, ‘He Held the Candle for Dance’, The Hindu, 11 April 1997. 81 Naregal, ‘Lavani, Tamasha, Loknatya and the Vicissitudes of Patronage’, p. 8; Kosambi, Gender Culture and Performance, pp. 20–1. 82 Consider the genre of the shraddhiki, a personal essay about the deceased, read out (often printed) during Brahmo memorial services. See Malavika Karlekar, ‘A Daughter Remembers. Kamini Ray’s Shraddhiki’ in Manushi, No. 85, pp. 26–32. 83 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, p. 176. 84 The Statesman & the FOI, 27 April 1881. 85 ‘Sambhavaparvadhyay: 22, Adiparva’, Mahabharata gives us an account of the training of the Kaurava and Pandava princes and Drona’s promise to make Arjuna the best archer in the world. When this is threatened by Eklavya’s unassuming but undoubted superiority, Dronacharya, in order to keep his word, demands Eklavya’s dakshina angushta (right thumb), which the Nishada prince does immediately. No more is heard of Eklavya. 86 Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, p. 192.

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87 Talented singer Narisundari had joined the Star Theatre at age fifteen in 1894, where she successfully debuted as the innocently seductive ascetic, Rsyasringa. 88 Chaitanya Prasanga (Regarding Chaitanya), in Jagdish Bhattacharya (ed.), Calcutta: Bangyia Sahitya Parishat, 1396 BS/1989, p. 82. 89 The preface to Sukumari Dutta’s Apurva Sati has a similar disclaimercritique of the artifice of formal eloquence and rhetoric. See translated extract in Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘ “Public Women”: Early Actresses of the Bengali Stage – Role and Reality’ in Geeti Sen (ed.), The Calcutta Psyche, New Delhi: India International Centre and Rupa, 1990–91, pp. 142–3. 90 Debnarayan Gupta, Banglar Nat-Nati, Calcutta: Sahityalok, 1985, Vol. 1, pp. 130–1. 91 Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, ‘Politics Today’, Star Bulletin, Honolulu, 10 April 2000. 92 Upendranath Vidyabhushan, Tinkari, Binodini o Tarasundari (1919– 20), Calcutta: Roma Prakashoni, 1985, pp. 157–8. 93 Bhattacharya, ‘Public Women’, p. 163. 94 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi: My Story, p. 100. 95 Chaitanya Prasanga, Jagadish Bhattacharya (ed.), p. 82; see also Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Popular Religion and Social Mobility in Colonial Bengal’ in Ray (ed.), Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, p. 166. 96 Jeanne Openshaw, ‘Raj Krsna: Perspectives on the Worlds of a Littleknown Bengali “Guru” ’ in Ray (ed.), Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, p. 135. 97 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 175. 98 Jurgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (trans. W.M. Hohengarten), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p. 167. 99 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Sigmund Freud: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Moment, Papers on Metaphsychology and Other Works. Vol. XIV, 1914–1916 (trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud), London: The Hogarth Press, 2001, pp. 243–58. Originally, ‘Traüer und Melancholie’ expounded by Freud in 1914, finished in 1915, published in 1917. 100 Ibid., p. 243, note 1. 101 Ibid., p. 241. 102 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, pp. 27–8. 103 On Pandit Vidyasagar as represented in Bilap! Ba Bidyasagarer swarge abhahan (1891), see Arun Kumar Mitra, Amritalal Jibani o Sahitya, Calcutta: Nabhana, 1970, pp. 304–6. 104 Vidyabhushan, Tinkari, Binodini o Tarasundari, p. 67. 105 Jagannath Ghosh, ‘Vidyasagar and the Bengali Theatre’, p. 240. 106 Vidyabhushan, Tinkari, Binodini o Tarasundari, p. 66 and Appendix iii. 107 Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, pp. 364–5. 108 Ibid, p. 314; see also Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres, p. 123. 109 Neelmadhab Chuckerbutty [sic] defected with a whole team from the Star to the City Theatre Company. He played Vidyasagar on 22 and 23 August 1891. Bhattacharyya, Bangla Rangalayer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, pp. 312–14.

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110 ‘Jagater annatam sreshtha abhinetri’ (The most outstanding actress in the world), Nachghar, 2nd year, No. 4, Nalinimohan Raychaudhury (ed.), 15 Jyestha 1332 BS, pp. 63–9. 111 A detailed report of the meeting at the Star Theatre in which the Parisat was instituted (on 26 Chaitra 1320 BS) came out in Natya-mandir, 4th year, Nos. 8–9, Falgun-Chaitra 1320 BS/1913, pp. 582–97. 112 Mukherjee, The Story of the Calcutta Theatres, pp. 146–7.

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Visible and invisible seams Histories of Bengali theatre, past and present, rarely allude to the multilingual and heterogeneous indigenous traditions flourishing in the city.1 A random referencing would make this clear: one hears of only ‘Gopal Urey’ and his troupe in the mid-19th century, but Odiya jatra was popular in the city at least until the 1990s; besides, the Bengali stage was often supported by Rajas and Raj Bahadurs from Orissa (e.g. Balasore). Parsi Theatre entered Calcutta from the 1870s and became a permanent fixture from the 1880s onwards, well before the 1920s as is sometimes held.2 A Parsi theatre company was invited by Nawab Abdul Ghani to perform Inder Sabha in Dacca in 1876. Little is known of performance practices amongst Armenians, or for that matter, of Gujaratis, although Jayshankar ‘Sundari’ made his mark in Calcutta. It was only in the 1920s that an editorial in the Pravasi applauded Gujarati schoolgirls performing garba at the Corinthian Theatre. Poet Subhas Mukhopadhyay alludes to the ‘bustling downtown’ of 1930s Calcutta where, amongst other communities, the Chinese ‘had their own theatre and newspaper’.3 A recent memoir by ‘Miss Shefali’ (Arati Das) makes visible the Anglo-Indian community’s seminal role in the entertainment business as late as the 1960s.4 Most striking perhaps is the absence of names and contributions of the many Muslim communities that resided in and visited Calcutta, including of course, Bengali Muslims. One may speculate on the nature and implications of this absence given the centrality of performance and pedagogic practices associated with many sections of the pan-Indian Muslim community. To begin with, ‘the Muslim community’ was heterogeneous in terms of caste, class, ethnicity, location and most importantly, language. In early 20th century, ‘The mass of Muslims in Calcutta were . . . divided into a variety of geographic, 291

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occupational, linguistic and racial groups which ranged from the . . . Pushto-speaking Pathan moneylenders of Mechua Bazar to the . . . Bengali-speaking lascars of Kidderpore.’5 Historians note several characteristics defining Bengali Muslims. Asim Roy points out that the first census of Bengal in 1872 ‘clearly underlined the predominantly rural character of the Muslims in Bengal’, although by the end of the 19th century ‘Muslims constituted about one-third of the total population of Bengal’.6 Unlike the Hindu landowning class, old and new, which invested early in English education and entered various levels of the colonial bureaucracy and the concerted efforts of several Brahmo groups in large areas of social reform (engaging also in ‘missionary tours’ to parts of British India), for much of the 19th century Muslim gentry and aristocracy preferred to live in the countryside. According to Kenneth Mcpherson, ‘the giants amongst them were notably the Nawabs of Dacca, Murshidabad and Bogra.’7 He argues: ‘The professional class drawn from the ranks of the rural Ashraf families, the dispossessed Muslim aristocracy of Bengal . . . looked down upon the mass of their Bengalispeaking co-religionists and the immigrant Urdu-speaking Muslims of Calcutta.’8 Sonia Amin further notes the ‘growth of a separatist feeling which took pride in the Islamic heritage and separate identity of Muslims’.9 However, both Amin and Bharati Ray, among others, also highlight the turn to Bangla (over Persian, Arabic and Urdu) by the Muslim intelligentsia.10 This bare sketch underscores the complexities in conceptualising absences of class, caste, ethnicity, language and religion in theatre historiography. Mir Mosharaff Hossain (1847–1912), poet, writer and dramatist, is amongst the most renowned of Bengali playwrights. His Zamindar Darpan (1873) strikes the 21st-century reader with its forthright satire of an oppressive zamindar class, dubbed as a ‘new species of animal’.11 Jayanta Goswami mentions several Muslim writers of farces that he has culled from advertisements, but the latter comprise fewer than half a dozen of the 500-odd farces that are listed in his volume, unless pseudonyms were being used.12 Contrast this with the overwhelming presence of Muslim actors, actresses, playwrights and d ­ irectors – a majority of whom were born in the 1940s and 1950s – in a recent theatre directory, covering the ‘two Bengals’, West Bengal and Bangaladesh.13 The extremely vibrant theatre scene in contemporary Bangladesh sharpens the interrogative dimension to the very nomenclature of ‘Bengali theatre’. Playbills, advertisements, memoirs or related evidence in print do not indicate either male or female performers with Muslim names in 292

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19th-century Calcutta. As posited in Chapter 1, there would have been performers, especially women, who may have taken on names that were not explicitly religiously coded, or retained only a generic Bangla name – reflecting a normative practice in the larger society that continues to the present. Ustad Allaudin Khan (1862–1972) was one of those rare talents who also played the flute, violin and tabla in public theatres when he came to Calcutta in search of employment; he took on a Hindu name when employed at the Minerva Theatre. The business and material production of theatre would have involved Muslim artisans, costumiers and set construction workers, feeding into theatrical production at different levels. What then of teaching practices filtering into the theatre from traditions of hereditary performers? These are historical strands waiting to be identified and woven together. We have seen how the immense popularity of geetinatya, variously advertised as ‘the musical play’ or ‘opera’, made the public theatre commercially viable. In 1899, Maniharan, a quickly churned out geetinatya by Girishchandra, had 28 songs. Though not comparable with the sheer numbers defining the sangeet natak – ‘Annasaheb’ Kirloskar’s Sangeet Shakuntal (1880) had 200 songs – even social and historical plays in Bangla could not do without songs, with the raga and tala mentioned in printed plays. The importance given to ‘Motion Masters’ and ‘Dancing Masters’ indicates the indispensability of dance – irrespective of theme and genre, as some critics complained.14 I can only touch here upon some of the zones of professional performers that overlapped with or had links with the informal networks of the commercial stage. Undoubtedly, various communities of Muslim performers – seasonal, migrants and residential – of other than Bengali origin, would have contributed greatly to theatrical fare, as they had done from the 18th century towards the entertainment of the city’s wealthy elite. Alongside the well-documented references to ‘nautch’, confidently reported in early Bangla and English language newspapers, ‘baiji’ culture (as it was popularly referred to), continued well into the 20th century. The diffusion from the exiled Wajid Ali Shah’s ‘court’ in Metiaburj awaits more documentation.15 Besides, the dazzling Gauhar Jan (1873–1930), who sang and danced and recorded an astonishing repertoire, there were other residents and visitors with strong links to dance gharanas, a practice continuing at least into the 1940s.16 A large section of Muslim and Hindu baijis were seasonal migrants who came to Calcutta and were invited to other zamindari enclaves in Bengal. Amlan Dasgupta notes that as was the practice in most of North India, Muslim ustads trained the women in singing. 293

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Amongst those who moved between private performances and singing in theatres Gangabai and Jadumoni’s careers as singer-actresses are well known,17 as would be Ranisundari’s from a later generation.18 Instances of tutoring of the novice or would-be actress by women singers may be gleaned from Binodini’s memoirs. Musical and economic exchange between male ustads and musicians such as sarangi players and singers are sometimes documented, as with Indubala’s training.19 Ustads are more frequently mentioned by name in the lives of later day singer-actresses such as Angurbala and Ashcharjamayi Dasi.20 The exchange of musical knowledge between female entertainers and their accompanists is more than a plausible hypothesis given the contiguous areas of living shared by baijis and other lower class, caste singersdancers as well as registered prostitutes.21 Wealthy patrons would of course offer individual accommodation in the city to superior artists. The melding of one medium with another and changes in traditional repertoires become more pronounced with the entry of recording technology into Calcutta. Of ‘Sashimukhi a successful theatre artiste at the Classic Theatre’ we are told that ‘Gaisberg chose her after seeing a mujra performance at a wealthy Bengali home.’22 However, Das Gupta ironically quotes Frederick Gaisberg recalling ‘ “Soshi mukhi” and “Fani bala”: two little nautch girls aged four teen [sic] and sixteen with miserable voices.’ Whatever the quality of their voice, they created history on 8 November 1902 by recording under the Gramophone Company label.23 If these are a few of the seams connecting private mujras to the very different structure of theatre production and later, the film industry, we must factor in the sharp differences as well. Consider the more intimate space and the seating (of patrons) in the mujra performed in the tawaif’s kotha or the gentry’s jalsaghar (private concert hall), and the shift in scale, proportions and optics of the framed proscenium theatre and its magnified aural environment. The same song, dance and abhinay had to be learnt, choreographed and rendered for a totally different acoustic and illuminated space, and, for a ticketed audience seated in many tiers, many of whom would come for ‘fun and games’. In the theatre, the ‘situation’ (as the term is used in Bombay film parlance) for songs in the course of the play was created as much through music and dance as with special effects, lighting and stage machinery. The rules of the game for publicity would also be different. From 1883 onwards advertisements for Nala Damayanti promised the delectable sight of ‘lotusmaidens’ arising from magic lotuses by a ‘mysterious scientific process’. The movement of the female body would perforce be different on the stage, especially in relation to dance. Sakhis dancing as a chorus, 294

Figure P.1 Sukumari as Bankimchandra’s enigmatic ‘Motibibi’ Source: Author’s collection

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or a male-female duo prevailed over solo pieces. Gaisberg, who travelled East with his recording studio and landed in Calcutta in 1902, wrote in a diary entry that he found at least a dozen ‘ballet girls’ dancing ‘in unison’ to a 14-member brass orchestra at the Classic Theatre. ‘All they wore was an almost transparent gauze gown,’ he added.24 Theatrical fare was perforce far more hybrid and dependent on a heterogeneous ticket-buying audience than the range demanded by the protocol of courtesan traditions. We know of tawaifs who mastered an assortment of genres and languages (including English), particularly for the gramophone industry, but such versatility was the individual’s choice, not a company’s routine.25 If the public theatre continued to draw on and benefit from spliced bits of the tawaiaf’s repertoire, it was equally influenced by jatra where boys danced as sakhis – their dance was disparagingly referred to as ‘sakhi nritya’. Most actresses debuted either as sakhis or ballet girls, alongside playing androgynous males in bhakti-rasa plays, sometimes well into their mature years. Besides relying on the usual khemta and jhumur in the early decades and moving on to more ‘western inspired dancing’ in the early 20th century, we have seen how theatre was quick to appropriate living practices such as the nagarkirtan and choreograph ‘Vaishnav style dancing’ for a ‘super hit’ like Chaitanya Lila in the 1880s. Similarly, the pervasiveness of diverse kirtan traditions in Bengal, with generations of outstanding performers of both sexes, left their impact on many of the actresses and determined the plays and roles in which they were cast.26 Eclectic diversity was the rule rather than the exception. I take up only one aspect of the language question here, as to how it may have linked performer, members of the audience and readers of plays. Bharati Ray holds, ‘The Muslim elite of Calcutta, whether they belonged to the aristocracy or the new professional middle class, favoured a pan-Islamic, pro-Urdu culture.’ Ray also highlights the turn to Bangla language by elite Bengali Muslims, from the earlier importance given to learning primarily from Arabic, Persian, Urdu and later, English. ‘[S]eeds of Bengali [linguistic] – Muslim nationalism’ are traced from the 1880s onwards.27 In this, Ray follows Amin’s argument that ‘the Muslim liberals in Bengal (known as nabya muslim, adhunik shikshita sampraday) were the great cultural synthesisers of the period.’ Interestingly, ‘the Brahmo community and modernised Turkey furnished models of social reform.’28 Amin and Ray agree that ‘the term bhadramahila can be applied . . . to the educated Brahmo, Hindu and Muslim middle-class . . . because the class character was comparable and the colonial rule that they were subjected to was common.’29 Certainly, some of the injunctions in conduct books that 296

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Figure P.2 Rani in the role of ‘Poriar’ in Maner Moton (As I wish) Source: HNDC. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan

Amin cites from have an uncanny similarity with codes of appropriate female behaviour discussed in the preceding chapters, especially with regard to warnings about the new woman’s obsession with ‘novel-natak’!30 297

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In terms of patronage, the most reliable sources, such as Shankar Bhattacharyya, document theatre companies being invited to perform in the estates of Hindu zamindars and rajas in undivided Bengal, including Dacca-based theatres such as Purbabanga Rangabhumi (1865), the Crown Theatre (c. 1890) and the Diamond Jubilee Theatre (1897). With the breakup of the larger courts, many of the landed gentry, predating and post the Permanent Settlement Act, invited and supported musicians and singers (primarily male ustads) from other parts of the country. The situation in Calcutta may not have been different. A rare advertisement in 1884 announced the presence of Muslim royalty – ‘Prince Jehan Kadir Mirza Wajhed Ali, with his suite’ for a performance of Hurrish Chundrer at the Bengal Theatre.31 A more fertile linguistic conjunction occurred with the predominance of touring Parsi theatre companies in Calcutta from the 1880s. When Laila-Majnu was performed on 13 May 1893, the advertisement in the Indian Daily News announced: Nawab Syed Amir Hossain, C.I.E. with friends, has kindly consented to grace our Theatre tonight with his presence. The Mohammedan gentry of Calcutta are respectfully requested to assemble on this night, as a special programme has been arranged for their entertainment. It is plausible that Parsi theatre, with its emphasis on romance-fantasy, spectacular effects and Urdu/Hindustani dialogue, would have attracted a more pan-Indian audience, including the Bengali Muslim gentry who would be more at ease in Urdu, unlike the lower-class Bengali Muslim who would have only spoken Bangla. This would not necessarily imply separate linguistic spheres, as we find in the instance of Benazeer-Budramuneer (c. 1872) composed by the Parsi playwright ‘Aram’. Parsi companies in Calcutta made it a staple through the 1880s. On 23 December 1893, it was performed under the same title at the Star, but this time as a ‘Bengali geetinatak’.32 The following year, a playbill advertised it as ‘the Late Rajkrishna Ray’s Fairy Opera’ to be staged at the Star Theatre (Figure I.6). Theatre companies obviously borrowed from one another: perhaps Bengali companies were trying to cope with the competition from the Parsi theatres by composing ‘fairy operas’ along similar lines? It is around the same time that Hindi plays appear on the Bengali stage. Tarasundari played the role of Radhika in ‘That Charming Hindi Opera’, Krishna Bilas, on 6 August 1892.33 On 27 May 1893, the Indian Daily News advertised a ‘New Hindi Performance/ Ramashwamedha/ 298

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New Scenes! New Dresses!!/ Lovers of vocal music will find abundant food for their entertainment.’34 The 1890s also saw a multitude of musical extravaganzas in Orientalist settings. Some were ‘Persian’ themed; others bore the impress of the Arabian Nights. It is not clear

Figure P.3 Tarasundari as ‘Razia’ Sultana, first produced in 1902 Source: HNDC. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan

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whether this was a conscious attempt to woo other ‘non-Bengali’ spectators, part of a global circulation of the Arabian Nights, or simply the signs of an exhausted repertoire as the greats of the first generation were on the decline. Parsi theatre had followed a different trajectory. In a 1869 preface, K.N. Kabra had maintained, ‘Just as the West had its Homer and Shakespeare, so the East had its Kalidasa and Firdausi.’ ‘Kabra’s embrace of Firdausi and the Persian past was a continuation of recitational and dramatic traditions among the Parsis,’ observes Kathyrn Hansen.35 It is notable that Kabra mentions these iconic poets in the same breath, both of who would have been well known in the various courtly cultures of the subcontinent. As against this intertwined legacy, Bengal got rid of its Perso-Arabic heritage in a more ruthless manner. One notes too the absence on stage of the everyday life of Bengali Muslims. Besides the tantalizing heroines of Bankimchandra’s historical romances that long continued to bolster the fluctuating fortunes of theatres, ‘nawabs’, ‘begums’ and ‘badshahs’ returned to Bengal in a flood of historical plays and romantic fantasies at the turn of the century. A 1915 advertisement for Nur-Mahal – the inaugural piece for the Thespian Temple – put it pithily: ‘A trip to the dreamland of Mughal Romance’.36 Historical (patriotic) plays with Mughal and Marathi themes, which were rare in the 1880s, peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. Occasionally they were savaged for being ‘ahistorical’ and ‘showy’37 or for the absurdity of the costumes.38 Overall, it is difficult to find scholarship which integrates an analysis of print culture and of everyday performance practices at the ground level that embraced members of both sexes, even in segregated spaces. Or, of cults in which music, singing and dancing are part of social celebration (as with wedding songs), as well as forming the basis of syncretist spiritual praxis – as has been imagined memorably by Ritwik Ghatak in Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (A river called Titash) (1972).39

Between labour and pleasure: what was this place of work? No one but a churl – in fact no one at all – can fail to be pleased, flattered, touched to the heart by the spontaneous admiration of the public . . . To escape from one’s self every night, to thrill with emotions . . . to be another woman, interesting, plaintive, charming, tragic, witty, or whatever her creator made her – is the fullness of joy. To feel the electric current of sympathy play back and

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forth across the footlights is well, it is an intoxication of pleasure. – Ethel Barrymore, ‘The Young Girl and the Stage’40 When I saw before me the rows of shining lights, and the eager excited gaze of a thousand eyes, my entire body became bathed in sweat, my heart began to beat dreadfully, my legs were actually trembling and it seemed to me that the dazzling scene was clouding over before my eyes. Backstage, my teachers tried to reassure me. Along with fear, anxiety and excitement, a certain eagerness too appeared to overwhelm me. How I shall describe this feeling? For one, I was a little girl and then too, the daughter of poor people. I had never had occasion to perform or even appear before such a gathering. – Binodini Dasi, My Story41

The thrill of performing before a live audience can only be imagined by those of us who are not public performers. I have sought to illuminate some aspects of what the urban proscenium stage might have meant for those who made their living off it. Interleaved with all those who may have loved theatre, but not without reservations, guilt, apology and righteousness. Taken in isolation, the debates on representation invariably seem to fall back on the hyphenated identity of the prostitute-actress. Cautionary, always, about the dangers of blurred identities in theatre, of a social fabric already corrupt or in imminent danger of being corrupted. The preceding chapters have unravelled how these debates emerge from a far wider span of interlinked issues: the role and nature of education for men and women, the relative merits of instruction over entertainment, lineage versus talent, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the compulsion to forage for novelties to meet the exigencies of the market amidst an avowed concern to ‘retrieve’ (and fix) the dharma of the age by defining the ‘authentic’ – in short, the entire matrix and the invisible fibres of cultural production. The public theatre in colonial Bengal was neither state-sponsored, as would be the case with many centres of dramatic production in post – Independence India, nor supported through privatised structures operating in a corporatised manner as in this century. Andrew Beck’s comment (epitaph?) on the British television industry in the early 20th century suggests that the latter is no guarantor 301

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of quality: ‘Unfortunately, economic and structural changes in the industry have stressed the need to produce drama with the lowest possible budgets in the least time possible.’42 The economic history of the Bengali commercial theatre, based in the ‘second city of the Empire’, awaits detailed study. Some broad strokes with reference to the actress are drawn below. Professional Marathi companies did not make Bombay their exclusive hub. They relied on intense tours of regions that Meera Kosambi calls ‘Greater Maharashtra’, ‘performing the same “new” play for three to five years’.43 Calcutta-based companies operated under tremendous pressure to offer variety, often churning out last minute productions of the same play to compete with rivals, seeking to dazzle spectators with special ‘scene-scenery’ rented and or commissioned from Chitpur. A 1909 advertisement for an evening’s entertainment at the Kohinoor, sums it up: ‘Which affords Play-goers a golden opportunity for gratifying at one sitting their taste for solid drama, Sparkling Opera, side-splitting farce and Scentillating [sic] Scenery’.44 I have maintained that for the actress, and some of her male colleagues, theatrical work was seen as a way out of destitution (and fulltime prostitution), an alternative livelihood, a platform for captivating the heterogenous and anonymous audiences in the city – perhaps the occasional viceroy – or, niche audiences, when invited to perform before zamindars and lesser or greater royalty. Addiction to theatre work invariably prevailed over offers from wealthy babus or businessmen who were attracted to them, but who made the contract conditional on the actress quitting the stage. A not so-flippant question might be: What might constitute a classic account of ‘a day’s work’ by an actress who had also to keep her babu happy? For, acting was also internalised as a mode of self-transformation. And of moving others in the audience through overwhelming bhava to orchestrate a range of affect. Music and song was integral to this objective. The establishment of the public theatre with its time-bound and yet unpredictable cycles of production involved arduous hours of performance time, group rehearsals, and memorising of parts; a co-sexual workplace, the vagaries of finance even in leading theatre companies, and the precarious livelihoods of competing companies or coteries, usually lead by the actor-manager. Perhaps because there was no real middle class and indigenous performance forms still thrived in overwhelming diversity, we do not really find a stratified consensual structure of bourgeois hegemony operative in this world. The history is not one of a linear transition from feudal to bourgeois and state patronage. Even if certain practices 302

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were seen as obscene, rustic or lacking in refinement, they continued to influence and be drawn into newer forms. Cultural production did not move sharply or exclusively from the mythological to the everyday world of the bourgeoisie, the private lives of ordinary people – held as one of the defining features of realism; rather, many worlds of the modern and the pre-modern overlapped and co-existed. While the public theatre did entail cross-generational work, often for both sexes, we do not hear of theatrical families, as in Britain. To assess the social location, mobility and claims to new subjecthood on the part of the actress would require an exhaustive inventory of wages, bonuses and other incentives, gifts, contracts with theatres and patrons, tokens of appreciation, property, taxes and so on. Actresses are known to have owned property, sometimes leaving behind bequests to charities in their wills. This socio-economic profile would obviously be contextualised within that of other working women, such as industrial workers and women in the domestic sector. (Agricultural workers may not figure centrally in this exercise.) It is believed that ‘the growth of an urban wage economy in colonial Bengal . . . contributed to an unprecedented rise of domestic servants in Bengal.’ From the 1880s on, there was an increasing demand in the hiring of servants in Bengal and by the first decade of the twentieth century domestic service accounted for 12 per cent of all occupations in Calcutta . . . the highest amongst all the cities in British India.45 The actress may have shared antecedents with the domestic worker or jhi in terms of class, caste and or origins, or may have been obliged to become one in times of distress, but numerically she was part of a much smaller group, as seen in ‘An incomplete roll-call of names’. Another dimension in relation to labour would be her identity as an urban worker. Nikhil Sarkar sees the woodcut artist as a unique and original product of the urban culture of Calcutta. Artisanal classes of the wood block makers and engravers from earlier eras, who were trained by European missionaries, draughtsmen, for whom it was a legitimate form of livelihood, broke away from caste-bound professions, and entered a new domain of work.46 Unlike them, the actress represented a new underclass: she was almost exclusively trained by Bengali males and her art and livelihood lay in the display of her body, her self. Her public persona operated at multiple and contradictory levels. In Chapter 5, we saw that while the value of work was reinserted into the flow of mourning by the actresses, it was simultaneously 303

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severed from a wage economy. It brought labour into the realm of pre-capitalist values of emotional bonding, guru-shishya, and was not intended to be a gloss on the actual material conditions of production.

Defenses Theatres experimented with a host of genres, many of which – whether a farce or a ‘grand Durga Poojah pantomime’ – were openly coded as fun (moja), sheer entertainment. But defences about the need for actresses that emerged from insider perspectives inevitably revolved around the stage as a platform for reforming specific evils and/or elevating the ‘masses’ through religiosity. The overwhelming design was to present the stage as a recuperative space for the ‘truly’ deshiya or jatiya, even to the emotions that plays would elicit, and so bridge the contradictions and the alienation arising from the entire gamut of colonial experience, including the bitter debates on religion, gender, caste and race amidst shrinking opportunities and political space. The need to affirm the indigenous was a sentiment that had been uncannily voiced in a speech by Manomohan Bose on the first anniversary of the inception of the public theatre.47 Given the tendentious nature of reforms and the unpredictable positions taken by and within various groups on a specific subject of reform, one can hardly expect any consensus on how we may plot these positions in terms of dramatic content, modes of representation and their politics. In the longue durée we have traversed, the reformer was often cast as unpatriotic or not ‘national’ enough – a charge that Ramananda Chatterjee felt obliged to refute strongly in a public lecture (in English) in 1904: ‘Change there had been and change there could be. Only it must be directed by reason.’48 Ramananda’s statement was in line with that of an early Brahmo, Akshaykumar Datta (1820–1886), who, in the words of historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, had interpreted Brahmoism ‘in terms of untrammelled rationality’.49 Two other observations by Raychaudhuri resonate with the performance histories and the material contexts that have been explored so far. First, while many educated Indians identified reason and rationality as the source of Europe’s superiority well into the third quarter of the 19th century, we may recall that Rammohun Roy’s plea for the introduction and encouragement of English was for the study of natural sciences (alongside the development of ‘skill’ and ‘capital’) and not for literature! This project did not bear fruit in ways anticipated. Second, as Raychaudhuri emphasises, during the last two decades of the 19th century and ‘in the aftermath of the anti-partition agitation . . . 304

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a profound emotionalism informed all social initiative and religious quests,’ eventually leading to a coming together of religiosity with intense self-sacrificing patriotism.50 Many public figures who eschewed the institution and its visible manifestations still maintained a visceral link with performance. Detractors and defenders all saw in the theatre the potential of a new age medium to reach out to the educated elite as well as those who comprised the sarvasadharan, the general public. In the long and varied list of the bhadralok who invested in performance practices, especially in their articulation of gender roles, there remained the possibility of acting out aspirations and anxieties as colonised subjects. Yet, even half a century of working together rarely yielded in-depth understanding of a co-worker’s life or brought about any radical change either in theatre practices or in discourses of representation. Few amongst either camp could move out of an essentialised conception of woman as subject. Or, find ways of according a place to the erotic within and without the conjugal. Or, propose models of masculinity beyond those constructed either in opposition to attributed effeminacy or in line with muscular Christianity. Or, resolve anxieties about commercialising art and diluting socially conscious missions. This study has taken ‘representation’ to include self-representation, expressivity, intelligibility, and understanding the self as an acting subject. At the level of mimesis, women playing themselves were ‘realistic’ by their very presence on stage, according to the new norms of representation made visible in proscenium performance. A section of the audience, cutting across classes and castes, were being exposed to these norms, but – it needs reiteration – they were equally receptive to other existing (and changing), representational codes. The colonial urban provided a fertile field of analogous, even contradictory representational codes. We needn’t underestimate the individual’s capacity to switch from and into different ‘ways of seeing’, as they did, and do, with languages and linguistic registers. European/English actresses performing on segregated stages but appearing in shared print space were viewed with mixed feelings. On the whole, they were seen as models for emulation, perhaps even as objects of desire, cleared by their fairly recent legitimisation.51 By early 20th century, the ‘foreign’ (bideshi) actress featuring as a model of refinement in theatre magazines and admired for her success, customarily meant those who had made their mark on the Continent or in North America, rather than those who resided for extended periods in or travelled through British India. Physical (and racial) distance made it easier to waive the morality question, only adding glamour to a 305

Figure P.4 Binodini cross-dressed in Upendranath Das’s Sarat-Sarojini Source: Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 16, 2 Falgun 1331 BS/1924. Author’s collection

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celebrity status in global circulation. The implicit rationale was that the stage after all, was not the real world, and the site of theatre was a strongly demarcated space, especially in terms of race and gender. Moreover, the presence of women who were not ‘household females’ on the Bengali stage, paradoxically served to distinguish theatre from jatra and other indigenous performance practices. The latter continued to be perceived as low, vulgar and rustic, no matter that the public theatre fed on many conventions and themes from jatra, as seen in the exegesis of ‘manbhanjan pala’ in Chapter 3. As audience expectations, particularly on the commercial circuit of Calcutta, created an inexorable demand to have only women play themselves, efforts to replace them with boys failed spectacularly. Business-wise, actresses were seen on all counts as a better investment, particularly in comparison to the boy-actresses. Girls were more disciplined, willing to put in long hours for low wages; intellectually, they matured early and were able to comprehend the roles. Besides, they learnt or already knew some dancing and singing – central to the all the genres in the public theatre’s repertoire. Their living quarters would have nestled alongside or within red-light areas, contiguous to professional entertainers of various strata. Actresses were open to liaisons with men whether from within the theatre world, or patrons or babus who comprised the theatre-going crowd. They were perceived to be sexually available, and would be pressured to be so. The female performer was economical at another level: girls could play both male and female roles up to a certain age, a practice that continued into the film era of the 1930s. The medium and changing technology would, of course, make for differences in erotic appeal. This was nothing like the breeches part, central to western theatrical tradition. Assuming that only girls or women would fit the bill, and despite frequent admissions by theatre managers and directors that actresses possessed all the professional qualities essential for ticketed performances to succeed in the colonial metropolis, how was their preeminence evaluated in relation to womankind, streejati, as a whole? The dominant paradigms of ‘femininity’ that commentators fell back on in delineating the prostitute-actress were those of natural artifice and/or a biological compulsion to be promiscuous. Seduction skills come naturally to many women who hone their skills (chhalana) for seducing the new public, including potential patron-lovers, whose mistresses they become. They make successful actresses because acting or dissimulation comes naturally to them. They may have come from ‘respectable

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homes’ but, inevitably, they join the clan of actresses who become the most public of public women. The conflation of actress, the prostitute and the courtesan was ensured in this continuum. In this paradigm, chhalana was drained of any positive quality of playfulness; it could only mean heartless deception with the intent to loot or disgrace. Absent in the new semantic currency of the word was the erstwhile strong link of chhalana to the trysts of Radha-Krishna as being an integral category in their ever changing, eternal loveplay as lila. The confessional actress-story played on her ungovernable appetite that, despite being reigned in intermittently, could never be made subservient to nature or culture. The historical existence of a large number of high-caste women, especially widows, who often became prostitutes, was thus rendered inseparable from the ‘naturally’ permissive qualities attributed to women. Most commonly expressed was the indignation or outrage against actresses being ‘manifestly’ mired in the category of immoral women, yet presuming to play superior characters (unnata charitra). Many found this anomaly a travesty of the ideal woman, and the contrast too sharp to arouse the appropriately pure or transformative emotions in the audience. Diverse spokesmen for this stance expressed disgust at the perceived contrast, a sentiment pointedly articulated in the Congress campaigns at the end of the century. If actresses in their very being and lifestyle were not the ideals that the nation-in-the-making upheld; why should they (how dare they) impersonate ideals such as Savitri, Sita, et al, or avatars of Vishnu such as Chaitanya, or exemplary devotees such as Prahlad? Several decades later, pioneering filmmaker ‘Dadasaheb’ Phalke (1870–1944) expressed similar outrage in the course of his struggle to make films for a ‘family audience’. In a speech titled (in translation) ‘Ladies from cultured families for acting in films’ he asked: Can you tolerate others laughing at these travesties of our ideal women? . . . The inborn cultured behaviour and the glow of marital bliss that these ladies would emanate, will automatically give a halo to the characters they would portray and . . . would ultimately pervade the atmosphere in and around the studios.52 A fairly strong counterargument that consolidated during the run of devotional plays on stage maintained that prostitute-actresses playing these superior roles would have (faith-fully) studied and internalised the virtues they impersonated, and would evolve – either in the course 308

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of the performance or through repeated experiences – into ‘superior characters’ themselves. A loose woman may play a saint to perfection not only because of her acting skills, but because in the very process of impersonation she has found a vehicle for her repentance and, therefore, redemption. This trajectory deriving from Vaishnav concepts of bhava and raganuraga bhakti allowed for an extreme and passionate conversion narrative through the intensity of performance. It was almost a performance that had to be staged. I have argued that this trajectory did have a radical edge, as it did not fix the subject forever in a social-spiritual slot. I have also pointed out that the spiritual praxis of single-minded concentration and channelised desire, expressed as sadhana, actually overlapped with the exigencies and work-ethic of commercial production. The same energies required for commercial success or individual glory could now be harnessed for a greater cause, and not for lucre or profit alone. But this potentially liberating refashioning of vaishnav aesthetics, moving beyond the discourse of a gendered ‘natural’ deceitfulness, was premised on an individual emotional act of transformation. It led to the subject being conceptualised in an ahistorical temporality, uninformed by the socio-economic contradictions of a colonial society and the pressures of an educated beleaguered class. Rather, imitation as a mode of self-improvement was augmented by the spectacular effect on the general public of the prostitute-actress’s ‘live’ transformation through impersonation. Here, the impact was twofold: the audience was not only moved by the representation of virtues in the ‘character’ being played, but also by the actual ‘transfiguration’ of the actress playing the role. It was held that a domino-effect conversion process would be enabled, even in the artificial alienating space of the theatre hall. Ironically, the impact would emanate in part from the star status of the actress and in part from the passion of performance, the latter harnessed to assuage concerns of commodification. A related argument that surfaced intermittently was in favour of reformation of the acting woman through performance practice. The process underlined here was not that of spiritual transformation. The intention was to show how commercial theatre afforded the otherwise ‘lost’ woman the chance of a relatively independent professional livelihood. In turn, this would contribute to a jatiya cultural and, hopefully, a political identity. Acting was therefore distinguished from or was considered at least a step above prostitution. This socioeconomic perspective rarely extended either to a study of wages or in conceptualising the actress as a wage earner, responsible for herself and her family, that is, being able to sustain herself on the wages of 309

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performance alone, without requiring the support of any other protector or benefactor figure. This last concern had a strong presence in the lives of the actresses themselves, and is repeatedly emphasised in their personal narratives. Should we then conceptualise stage actresses as highly visible, highly publicised ‘labour at the margins’?

Temples of theatre If we were to chart popular representations of the public theatre we would find a linear and unilateral conversion of the theatre from ‘this delightful hell on earth’ to the new ‘pilgrimage centre’ (used with or without sarcasm), and, even a ‘temple to culture’. History offers a mass of slightly more messy material. For one, the construction of the public theatre as a ‘national project’ was fraught from its inception. As an illustration of the impossibility of using any polarised categories of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ or the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’, we may consider the affiliations of the word mandir (temple), chosen both as a proper name and as signifier of a practice. Here, it refers both to performance and the appropriate approach to that performance as sacred, a mode of worship. The desire to invest public spaces with some of the connotations of a temple signals also at a rarely articulated loss of the erotic in everyday life. The temple is not a sacred space devoid of the sensuous, the erotic. Let us turn briefly to the Natya-mandir then being jointly edited by Girishchandra Ghosh and Amarendranath Dutt. The magazine was devoted exclusively to theatre and sold primarily through subscription. Contemporary usage of the term ‘natya-mandir’ clearly place it in the literati’s nationalist agenda, as for example, in the poet Nabinchandra Sen’s (1847–1909) letter to Girishchandra where he enjoined the latter to write a ‘comicotragic [sic] play’ in the ‘service of the nation’ that would be ‘a beautiful spire to [your] natya-mandir’.53 Girishchandra himself, in his long and eloquent editorial to the first issue of the magazine, glosses the name primarily to refer to the [ideal] stage, and only by extension, to the journal itself. In the course of the editorial, Girish does not use ‘natya-mandir’ to refer exclusively to the ‘Indian’ (meaning, Bengali) stage, but also to the ‘British natya-mandir’ and the ‘French natya-mandir’. It seems that he was not using the religious purely as a marker of national (regional) cultural identity. By emphasising throughout the essay the historical growth of such a cultural marker in tandem with talent and training, Girish sought both to historicise his own role in the founding of the ‘Bengali natya-mandir’ and 310

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to place it at par with other ‘civilised nations’. The cover image of the first issue of the magazine is powered by this internationalist aspiration: the statuesque sari-clad woman twirling the globe is centrally placed within a proscenium frame, a landscape of cypress, lake and hillocks unfolding in the backdrop (Figure P.7). Quite in contrast is Abhinashchandra Gangopadhyay’s claim that with the staging of Chaitanya Lila, ‘The Bengalis began to greatly respect and look upon the natya-mandir with devotion, regarding it as the dharma-mandir.’ He was emphasising with the broadest of strokes the conversion of the theatre from a den of iniquity to a temple.54 Here, the ‘sacred’ is both nostalgic and literal. Bipinbehari Mukhopadhyay’s ‘Rangamanch: Shiksha-mandir’ (The stage: A temple to education) gave a major turn to the idiom of ‘mandir’ in early 20th century. He held that theatre provided a public platform and was a more powerful medium than either speeches or the print media. Referring to a recent meeting held at the YMCA on College Street that sought to protect students from the pernicious effects of theatre, the writer contended that theatre could provide ‘clean entertainment’; but he shifted the onus onto the audience.55 Why not nurture a better-educated audience? Why not specifically target those most prone to succumb to the lure of theatre (or, the allure of actresses) – schoolboys and their teachers?56 Mukhopadhyay was in a minority for seeking to educate and reform select sections of the audience, instead of being fixated on the actress. Still evident is the larger anxiety about vulnerable students, expressed a quarter of a century earlier in the Somprakash editorial, cited at the beginning of Chapter 1. But Mukhopadhyay’s polemic is a reversal of the obsessive gaze that we have seen directed at the acting woman across the discourses this book has traversed. The dialectic of student – actress will need further elaboration than has been possible in this study. But perhaps my research has revealed the centrality of this constellation in conceptualising a public sphere. Also being questioned was the binary between education and theatre and how, if at all, would one conceptualise performance as art or kala. The fraught agenda of the company called the Thespian Temple has already been mentioned. The search for a ‘national theatre’ was to culminate in Sisir Kumar Bhadhuri’s founding of the shortlived Natyamandir in 1926. As Subir Roy Choudhuri wryly observes, it was one of the few Bengali theatres that did not have an English name.57 In England, where a very different battle was raging between drawing-room dramas and a ‘drama of ideas’, it was George Bernard Shaw who envisaged the theatre as ‘A factory of thought, a prompter 311

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of conscience, an elucidator of social conduct, an armoury against despair and dullness, and a Temple of the Ascent of Man’.58 The crux of the entertainment versus education debate may therefore be posed in several ways: How was the ‘educational’ to be defined? English education may have made glorified clerks of (Hindu) Bengalis with their B.A. and M.A. and given them an edge over other communities in colonial bureaucracies in other regions, but as we have seen, the ‘eju’ were themselves often the chief targets of mainstream theatre. Was formal education being pitted against lok-shiksha, for the people? (A mantle that neo-jatra would later claim.) Do we find a nostalgic pull at providing a shared fare of myths, legends, fantastic tales – as the puranas and the dastans in the Indo-Persian tradition, had done for centuries? Without presuming to offer answers to all of my questions, I return to one of the seminal figures of the founding decades. Girishchandra Ghosh’s involvement with performance from a very young age and his desire to use the stage for more than ‘mere entertainment’ have been recorded beyond dispute. Nor can one gloss over the intensity and impact of Girishchandra’s difficult relationship with Ramakrishna in the last years of the life of the latter.59 But, it is equally impossible to gloss over either the class, caste and gendered origins of theatre or the fragmented nature of the enterprise to educate the masses. The business of the stage, even in ‘the golden age’ of the Bengali theatre was always an unstable one, negotiating an uneasy alliance between ideals of regenerating the Bengali jati and between what would sell those ideals to an emergent heterogenous audience, without provoking the wrath of the colonial government. Girishchandra has recorded quite extensively in his essays the contradictions within which he was forced to operate, and he was too astute a manager not to keep an eye on the public. In his words: ‘The theatre hall is not to be confused with a drama school and what may be good for artistic development does not make for good business.’60 An even more frank avowal of the exigencies of writing is found in his colleague Amritalal Bose’s comment that the theatre managers have been obliged to cater to the patrons and turn into ‘play-writers’, with the result that it was ‘no entry for outsiders’. He frankly admitted, ‘We do farces and pantomimes the way you want us to do them.’61 The staging of Bhakti in the proscenium theatre, it must be remembered, was related as much to the pressure exercised by the businessmen-owners on playwrights such as Girishchandra, as it was in response to the personal crisis that the latter underwent. Bhakti plays brought a hitherto missing section of the public – middle-class women spectators (with children) – into the theatre halls. The era of 312

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the ‘family play’, ushered in by an advertisement such as the following, signals also a new more compact version of the family: THE PEERLESS PROVAS Fathers, come with Children! Husbands come with wives!62 The return to the family or domestic plot was also in response to the owner Pratapchand Johuree’s request that Sita’s twins Lab and Kush be brought in again in Girish’s new play, since child characters appealed to the women in the audience. This appears to be a pan-Indian phenomenon. A performance of the Ramayana, Bal-kand, Part II was singled out for praise by the Marathi newspaper, the Dnyanprakash, on 30 November 1885. The dramatic company concerned – the Sanglikar Hindu Natakkar – was commended on several counts: for their performance, the discipline in the company, and not the least, for the separate seating arrangements, i.e. prostitutes were seated separately. As late as the mid-1950s, the child Krishna proved similarly effective in attracting Marwari women spectators to the theatre in Calcutta. Recounting the shows staged by the Moonlight Theatre Company, owned by the businessmen Mehta brothers, the legendary actor Master Fida Hussain (1900–2001) recalls how women thronged to see plays such as Krishna Lila.63 Such productions with familiar and safe subjects not only had a ready-made constituency, but they served also to legitimise all profitmaking ventures. It was surely not chance that the period of Bhakti revival (1880s – 1890s) and the attraction of women spectators to the Bhakti plays coincided with the virtual disappearance of the ‘women’s question’ in the public sphere.64 The stage as a sacred site constitutes the origin myth of natya in classical Sanskrit drama.65 So is the mandate to entertain mortals and devas (gods) alike. I am however postulating a specific need for the practitioners of the public theatre in the 19th and in the 20th centuries to reiterate the moral worth of theatre, in a way that those of more traditional indigenous forms such as the krishna jatra or the katakatha did not feel obliged to. In tracing this need we posit a historical continuity, as well as a displacement and re-location of this discourse of redemption. The hypothetical though not imaginary genealogies outlined in this book raise questions about the possibly emancipatory and/or reifying process that is set in motion with a hybrid institution such as the Bengali public theatre, in view of its specific metropolitan origins 313

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and continued base in the metropolis on the one hand, and its ‘truly national aspirations’ on the other.66

Choices in impersonation The practice of boys playing female roles met with different levels of tolerance, depending on the site of performance, the amateur or professional status of the performance context and also the caste, class and education of the ‘boy-actress’. One can only point to the complex nature of the impact of English education in schools and colleges, the varying responses this elicited among the boys, their teachers and guardians, the investment in education and the changes within this configuration over a century. If we turn to the situation in Bombay, where the Parsi community became enthusiastic founders, members and patrons of amateur dramatic clubs, two distinct faces of modernity are revealed. The move to professionalise in the latter instance did not result in the entry of Parsi women on stage, though Parsi women were considered by the British and other Indians to be amongst the most progressive. Rather, it led to the predominance of boys/men playing the female roles. As late as the 1930s, two gifted sisters who were persuaded to join the Bombay film industry were targeted by conservative sections of the Parsi community. Eventually, singer and music composer Khorshed Minocha-Homji (1912–80) had to take on the rather literal stage name of ‘Saraswati Devi’ while her sister Manek, who became an actress in Bombay talkies, was renamed ‘Chandraprabha’. Another fundamental difference was that in Bombay, students often went on to become entrepreneurs themselves and were instrumental in fashioning professional companies. Members of the Marathi intelligentsia had also critiqued the ‘acting craze’ in the 1860s, but they appear to be fairly lone voices. With G.G. Agarkar’s series in the Kesari in 1881, unequivocally defending theatre, Meera Kosambi identifies a ‘paradigm shift’ marking acceptance and pride in the sangeet natak.67 No such clear break can be indicated in the history of Bengali theatre. There was not only a marked ambivalence about male students performing in Bengal, but, for almost a century, Bengali youth continued to be seen as ripe for corruption by the public theatre. By the 1860s and 1870s, it was considered ‘bad’ for boys to play female roles since it aroused ‘unnatural feelings’ amongst the male peer group at school. Critics of theatre rarely articulated these feelings as homoeroticism. From within the theatre community, Girishchandra simply maintained that acting female parts marked the boy actor for life since he would continue to ‘play’ a woman into adulthood, outside of the 314

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stage.68 Bipin Chandra Pal’s essay on ‘The Bengalee Stage’ addressed the issue directly: ‘I think it may be safely said that both the beauty and the morality of the Greek Theatre distinctly improved with the replacement of the boys by the hetaera.’ This contentious statement aside, Pal had a more insightful observation about the ‘relations of vicious wealth with the boy-actresses of jatra troupes’ as ‘with the girl-actresses of our present national stage’. He suggested thereby that it was not the sex of the performer that mattered, but the objectification and commodification of the performer by the wealthy patron/ consumer that needed rethinking.69 The chief zone of contradiction lay in impersonations of modernity: women playing the ‘girl of the period’. Was it at all poignant, or ironic, for an actress to play the ‘modern miss’ in a farce? Act as a ‘monstrous’ woman who has abandoned husband and home (and womanly modesty) for a ‘public life’? Perhaps, our invocation of irony is itself suspect – a retrospective act of recuperation by the scholar. Dramatists frequently wrote up manifestoes of emancipation and ‘free love’ to emblematise such women, which the latter proudly proclaimed in songs. Here was a twist given to powers of impersonation, considering that the lives of actresses actually epitomised many of the attributes of modernity rehearsed in the preceding chapters. One of the attributes of the modern/new woman was her formal education, often interchangeable with westernisation. Was woman wily by nature (stree budhhi), or did education sharpen and distort her natural wiliness? Did class, caste and a low socio-economic status reinforce these ‘natural’ attributes? One cannot read the diatribe against the actress purely as class hostility. The shikshita bhadramahila, if she was mobile, visible and vocal, was liable to be labelled promiscuous and immoral as well. The other of the beshya-abhinetri was not always the bhadramahila. To recapitulate, in public debates on morality the actress and the male student-citizen were pitted one against one other. Did the demand for the ‘shikshita abhinetri’ or ‘cultured ladies’ from the early 20th century onwards then, reflect a shift from the popularity of mysogynist farces? Possibly, it was only a minority who wished to reform the stage by marking out a continuum between the respectable educated woman and the imperatives of performance as high art. Education was seen as a charm or antidote against illiterate/ immoral woman, or girls who were pure at heart, but had no recourse to a pure livelihood. Sukumari Dutta’s Apurva Sati was an early exposition of this thesis, but problematised by the trajectory of the actressplaywright’s life. The question was: would the putative educated girl/ woman ever choose to enter the stage as a professional, given the poor 315

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reputation of the public theatre? What might be the incentives? In what ways did theatre work overlap with or feed into the ‘glamour and sex’ industries, especially after World War I, which saw a new regime of commodity circulation and the branding that went with it? The debate on representation was made inseparable from ascriptions of morality: it was framed and contested in a rather distinct manner in the public theatre of Bengal, with its emphasis on redemption. The praxis was different both from contemporary England as well as from generic assumptions about acting and licentiousness, of which one may find any number of examples across time and cultures. In our context, the terms of the debate were primarily mediated through definitions of ‘acting’. By which I mean that many of those from within the theatre world who contributed to the debate or were its subject, drew on philosophical discourses and spiritual disciplines to posit theories of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. The internalisation of bhava and the theory of interactive faith were both critical to this process, although as we have seen in several chapters, it was usually manifested in monologic ways. The grand transformation scenes of pantomimes wrought of special effects and machinery were strategically replaced by ­transfiguration – of both performer and the spectator-participant through the corporeal prism of the lowly actress. The public theatre was really the only locus of metropolitan life which could place the triad of occupational identity, gender and sexuality squarely within the women’s question. It was here that issues of modernity and gender roles, occupational identity and caste, education and class, religious belief and secular performance conditions, continued for long to be in complete disjunction. But the incessant attention was on the kalanka – the blot, the stigma, that was the actress. The talented, the wise and the learned write in order to educate people, to do good to others. I have written for my own consolation, perhaps for some unfortunate woman who taken in by deception has stumbled on to the parth to hell. Because I have no relations, I am despised. I am a prostitute, a social outcast; there is no one to listen or to read what I feel within! That is why I have let you know my story in pen and paper. Like my own tainted and polluted heart, I have tainted these pure white pages with writing. But what else could I do! A polluted being can do nothing other than pollute! —Translated excerpt from Binodini Dasi’s autobiography 316

Figure P.5 Binodini Dasi, Amar Katha/My Story, 1912, p. 110 Source: Courtesy of Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, Calcutta

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A strange man and stranger women On this occasion too, the theatre was completely packed. There were many who had to stand for lack of space even after buying tickets for Rs 2 each. The acting was splendid.70

The epigraph is an excerpt from a review of Upendranath Das’s SaratSarojini (1874), a play in six acts, which was first staged on 2 January 1875. This was the fourth performance of the play with a ‘completely packed’ theatre hall, indicating its huge popularity. (Rs. 2 would roughly translate to Rs. 2000 or more today.) In the interim, the colonial state had pronounced Lord Northbrooke’s Dramatic Performance Ordinance, followed by the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876. Talented actress Golapsundari who took on the stage name of Sukumari after one of the heroines, contributed a great deal to the play’s success. For a young girl who had begun as an obscure kirtaniya to play the wealthy, witty and spirited heroine, it was nothing short of a giant leap. We find her on 11 March 1876 playing Sarojini (advertised as ‘Sarajini’) to realise funds ‘For the benefit of distressed Actors’ – i.e. those jailed under the new Act. Upendranath Das (c. 1848–c. 95), a committed social reformer and an outspoken critic of the British Raj, arranged Sukumari’s marriage with a young man named Goshtobihari Dutta under the 1872 Marriage Act. In the play, Goshtobihari Dutta had played the part of ‘Scientist Haridas’ who is obsessed with evolution. Upendranath’s turbulent life and his attempts to radicalise the stage, whether in the content of his plays or in rethinking social hierarchies, particularly, the status of actresses, his relationship with Sukumari and his own marriage to a widow deserve separate study.71 I only signal here to the conjunction of actors in history – the coming together of unlikely individuals, theatre as a fledgling but powerful institution, and the colonial state. Sarat-Sarojini is usually praised for its explicit anti-Raj sentiments, its revolutionary politics (santrasbadi rajniti).72 Its anti-British sentiment included staging violent physical assault on oppressive whites. (Nil-Darpan had set the trend in this respect.) Sarat, a young and nationalist zamindar, lives with his sister Sukumari and Sarojini, a young woman who has been raised in their home. Unsurprisingly, Sarat and Sarojini fall in love. Surprisingly, the play ends with a happy union of the lovers. Both Sarat-Sarojini and the banned Surendra-Binodini (also by Upendranath Das) are characterised by a self-reflexive quality, claiming the stage as a platform for commentary on contemporary social fabric – not just the British, but like a mirror turning inwards. In 318

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Act I of Sarat-Sarojini, men and women discuss contemporary books, journals and plays. Upendranath’s resolution of the women’s question appears radical if utopic, both on stage and off, from what one may gather of his own life.73 The two heroines of Sarat-Sarojini, suited, booted and educated, well beyond the marriageable age as per scriptural sanctions, are not the monstrous ‘modern misses’ who take up so much disproportionate space in the public discourse about women in Bengal. They anticipate by half a century Rabindranath Tagore’s stage heroines, immortalised in Chirakumar Sabha (1926) – a text which began as a novel at the turn of the 20th century and mutated over decades into a play. It was even staged with professional actresses performing at the Art Theatre in 1925!74 Sarat-Sarojini and SurendraBinodini – both as dramatic texts and for their production histories – lay claim to a more seminal place in theatre history. In Sarat-Sarojini, Das moves out of the available stereotypes of the wanton and the chaste to create women who are gentle and generous, ‘yet’ full of vigour and agency, especially Saroj, who is a fit mate for Sarat. Sukumari and Sarojini, all of sixteen or seventeen years, appear to have worked out social roles with men outside of the immediate family. They treat their servants without a trace of class consciousness. They make use of the income from their brother’s zamindari to help any one who asks for aid. The play’s radicalism is punctured at this vital point. Das is obliged to fall back on a hero whose primary source of income is revenue from landed property. The play’s modernity cannot deal with some of the fundamental contradictions of a landed gentry, created by and functioning within a colonial economy. At any rate, Upendranath Das’s Sarojini could not be more different from the self-immolating Rajput heroine of the same name, celebrated by Jyotirindranath Tagore in one of his early and popular plays for the public theatre.75 And Das does not spare Sarat, his noble ultrarationalist and nationalist hero, on the patriotism question. Sarat is made to eat his earlier words where he posited an either/or: romantic love versus love for one’s country. Though written at two entirely different moments in Indian history, from this point of view, Upendranath’s play previews a central theme in Rabindranath Tagore’s subtle and searing critique of patriotism and terror in his last novel, Char Adhyay (Four Chapters) (1934). The play’s denouement underlines that love between a couple need not necessarily mean forgoing love of one’s country (swadesh prem), or refraining from any attack on evil – whether it appear in the guise of the Indian tyrant, the zamindar Motilal, or the rulers – the racist and corrupt British. The romantic and the political may co-exist. Indeed, they must. 319

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Figure P.6 Condensed images of popular 19th-century woodcut illustrations of Vidya-Sundar Source: Collage by author. Courtesy of Naveen Kishore. Every effort was made to trace copyright holders of these images, and the author and publisher welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to locate

A triptych Through these decades of research into performance histories, it has been difficult to extrapolate acting from dancing, singing and music, the dancer from the dance. In relating genealogies of performance forms to representations of gender, a host of practices, some of which go back several centuries, have demanded an engagement with their specific vocabulary and grammar. A shifting horizon requiring a lifelong receptivity for one who is herself not a performer. The contours of at least three broad comparative terrains have emerged. They may be visualised as a triptych or a folding screen with some motifs reappearing but in a different location, inviting a different perspective from the viewer. The ‘second city’, the ‘imperial trade circuit’ and the ‘alternative locale’ – these make up my triptych. The present study has delved into some 19th-century interpretations of dharma from the praxis of a mixed and unequal group of men and women, of ‘doing’ theatre within specific parameters of a modernity unrealised in colonial conditions. It enquires into the making of specific strands of religiosity, the conflation of ‘the popular’ with ‘the people’, and the latent possibility of interrogative ethics not realised. 320

Figure P.7 Cover, Natya-mandir, 1910 Source: Cover page of the first issue of Natya-mandir, Sravan 1317 BS. Courtesy of Natya Shodh Sansthan

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It graphs the feverish and frustrated search for ideals of womenhood and manhood as refracted in representation. It has dwelt on the translation of dharma, deeply inflected by gender and caste, in prescriptive roles for women. What threatens to be an overwhelming negative

Figure P.8 Within and without . . . Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Sanchita Bhattacharyya

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energy, of prescription, proscription, critique and censorship, is partly relieved, even undercut, in the enlivening glimpses we have had of the workaday life of the acting woman. She or he could be the ‘native’ actress or the ‘regimented’ tommy who brought alive myths, farces, burlesques and pantomimes, on different sides of the colonial divide. The heterogeneity of Calcutta, its multiple radial points within and without British India, has been outlined here; merchantile, cultural and political relations across global circuits only hinted at. These roads not taken are tracked in another monograph on ‘The Trade Routes of Theatre’. Overlapping with both these histories and simultaneously disavowing many of the rules of the game are the twin centres of SantiniketanSriniketan, generating a dialectic of art, education and agriculture. They comprise the site of Rabindranath Tagore’s experiments for over four decades, seeking to nurture an international crucible in rural Bengal. This ‘third text’ speculates on the nature and scope of an alternative locale, located outside the ambit of commercial theatres in Calcutta, but inevitably having to negotiate the space, audience and professional dimensions of the latter in showcasing new art and in fund-raising efforts. The drive was to present new cultural configurations for the vast subcontinent that was British India, moving towards a contested nationhood. The triptych is an effort to think through some of my concerns on gender and performance, art and social ascriptions and their political imperatives. To capture the thrill of performance for new publics as experienced by the girl or woman actress hired for her skills and labour. For the boy or girl discovering his/her own feminity in dance or sangeet. Inhering in memory muscle movement. In the sinews of words still appearing in momentarily effaced and perhaps recovered digital spaces.

Notes 1 Sushil Kumar Mukherjee has a note on ‘Hindi theatre’ in Calcutta in The Story of the Calcutta Theatres: 1753–1980, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1982, pp. 520–1. 2 Ibid., pp. 517, 523. 3 Subhas Mukhopadhyay, ‘The City’s Heartbeat’ in Geeti Sen (ed.), The Calcutta Psyche, New Delhi: Rupa & Co and India International Centre, 1990–1991, p. 175. 4 Miss Shefali, Sandhya Rater Shefali (Shefali, the Evening Star), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2014. 5 Kenneth McPherson, The Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta, 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974, Preface, p. ii.

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6 Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 20. Thanks to Debjani Sengupta for bringing this book to my attention. 7 McPherson, The Muslim Microcosm, p. 13. 8 Ibid., Preface, p. ii. 9 Sonia Nishat Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education in Colonial Bengal’ in Krishna Kumar and Joachim Oesterheld (eds), Education and Social Change in South Asia, New Delhi: Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd, 2007, p. 226. 10 Bharati Ray, Early Feminists of Colonial India: Saral Devi Chudhurani, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 42–56. 11 The play draws on the 1872–73 peasant riots in Sirajganj (in present-day Bangladesh); unexpected touches individuate the larger socio-economic indictment of class and race. For example, Act II, Scene 1, opens with the peasant wife stitching a kantha (a thin rag-quilt) as she tells a friend about her husband’s abduction by the zamindar’s henchmen. 12 These include Marda Gaji’s Grabu Khela Prahasan (1885); and only the names of writers such Kalu Miya and Chiddik [Siddique] Ali. Jayanta Goswami, Samajchitre Unabimsa Satabdir Bangla Prahasan (Social Contexts of 19th Century Bengali Farces), Calcutta: Sahityasree, 1974, pp. 1245, 1257. 13 Baidyanath Mukhopadhyay (ed.), Samsad Bangla Natya Abhidhan (Bengali Theatre Directory), Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 2000. 14 Dhananjay Mukhopadhyay and Bishnu Basu (eds), Bangiya Natyashala (The Bengali Stage) (1316 BS/1909) repr. Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1998, pp. 23, 57–63. 15 Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’ in Bharati Ray (ed.), Women of India: Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods, New Delhi: Sage, 2005, p. 8, note 17. Several of these absences have recently been addressed in Lakshmi Subramanian and Sagnik Atarthi, ‘The Scholar Musician and the Seni Ustads: Exploring and Exhibiting the Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury Collection’, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Archive Series 8, December 2017. The monograph accompanied a rigorously and imaginatively conceptualised multi-media exhibition held at the Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre (JBMRC), Calcutta. 16 Sukanya Rehman, Dancing in the Family: An Unconventional Memoir of Three Women, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 4. 17 For Gangabai in Binodini’s memoirs, see Rimli Bhattacharya (ed. and trans.), Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and ‘My Life as an Actress’, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998, pp. 63–5. On Jadumoni, see Das Gupta, ‘Women and Music’, pp. 29–30. 18 Amit Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati (Theatre and the Bengali Nati), Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2004, p. 443. 19 On Indubala’s training under Gauhar Jan and several ustads, Ibid., pp. 614–14. See also Samsad Bangla Natya Abhidhan, p. 65. 20 Samsad Bangla Natya Abhidhan, p. 63. 21 Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998, p. 193, note 10. A summary of spatial distribution over a century, of prostitutes in the city, is found in pp. 83–8.

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22 Mekhala Sengupta, Kanan Devi, The First Superstar of Indian Cinema, Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2015, p. 22. 23 Das Gutpa, ‘Women and Music’, p. 16. 24 Entry dated 8 November 1902 in The Fred Gaisberg Diaries, Part 2: Going East (1902–1903), (Compiled and ed.) Hugo Strötbaum, p. 14. www.recordingpioneers.com/docs/GAISBERG_DIARIES_2.pdf (accessed on 1 June 2017). 25 Ibid., pp. 15–23. 26 Both Golapsundari of the first generation, and Narisundari from the next, had strong links to kirtan singing, even though they were versatile in other forms of sangeet, including comic songs. In early 20th century, Radharani Devi trained first under a kirtaniya and then under a Muslim ustad with links to the erstwhile Murshidabad court before she was hired as a singer actress in Calcutta, Samsad Bangla Natya Abhidhan, pp. 314–15. 27 Ray, Early Feminists, pp. 49–50. 28 Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education’, p. 231. 29 Ray, Early Feminists, p. 44. 30 Amin, ‘The Idea of Women’s Education’, pp. 22–226. One might assume that with the turn to Bangla and the flourishing periodical culture, women readers would probably have been consumers of printed plays, theatre magazines and/or songbooks, even if they did not indulge in theatre-going. 31 Statesman & FOI, Friday, 1 February 1884. 32 Shankar Bhattacharya, Bangla Rangalyer Itihaser Upadan, 1872–1900, Calcutta: West Bengal State Book Board, 1982, pp. 381–2. 33 Ibid., pp. 344–5. 34 Ibid., p. 377. 35 Kathryn Hansen, ‘Languages on Stage’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 2003, p. 389. 36 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 7 December 1915, Cited in Maitra, Rangalaye Banganati, p. 231. 37 Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, ‘Adhunik Bangla Natak’ (Modern Bengali Drama), Mahila, 1st year, No. 1, 5 Baisakh 1331 BS/1924, pp. 23–6. 38 Mukhopadhyay, Bangiya Natyashala, p. 29. 39 Ghatak’s film is based on Advaita Mallar Barman’s (1914–51) posthumously published novel of the same name. 40 Harper’s Bazaar XL (December 1906), p. 1000, cited in Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre, 1890–1920, New York: Praeger, 1984, pp. 61–2. 41 Bhattacharya, Binodini Dasi, p. 67. 42 Introduction in Andrew Beck (ed.), Cultural Work: Understanding the Cultural Industries, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 5. 43 Meera Kosambi, Gender Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema Before Independence, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015, p. 213. 44 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 October 1909, p. 3. 45 Swapna M. Banerjee, ‘Down Memory Lane: Representations of Domestic Workers in Middle Class Personal Narratives of Colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 3, Spring 2004, p. 681. 46 Nikhil Sarkar, ‘Calcutta Woodcuts: Aspects of a Popular Art’ in Ashit Paul (ed.), Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983, pp. 18–19.

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47 Manomohan Bose, ‘Jatiya natyasmajer samvatsarik utsavkale Manomohan Bosur byoktrita’ (Speech by Manomohan Bose On the Occasion of the Anniversary of the National Theatre Society), Madhyastha, Part 2, No. 28, Paush 1280 BS/1873, pp. 613–26. 48 Ramananda Chatterjee’s speech given at the Allahabad Brahmo Samaj was published in the Indian People, Allahabad, 22 December 1904, p. 4. 49 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘The Pursuit of Reason in Nineteenth Century Bengal’ in Rajat Kanta Ray (ed.), Mind Body and Society: Life and Mentality in Colonial Bengal, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 56. 50 Ibid., p. 61. 51 The 1880s in England are usually seen as a turning point in the social acceptability of actresses. See Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 6. 52 Talk by D.G. Phalke, c. 1930. http://wiki.phalkefactory.net/images/0/01/ Chapter_Four.pdf (accessed on 8 May 2017). 53 Nabinchandra Sen’s letter to Girishchandra Ghosh, cited in ‘Introduction’ in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1986 (1971), Vol. 2. 54 Abinashchandra Gangopadhyay, Girishchandra, 1927, repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, n.d., p. 289. 55 As the name indicates, College Street in North Calcutta is home to the major educational institutions, affiliated hostels and bookshops in the city. 56 Bepinbehari Mukhopadhyay, ‘Rangamanch: Shiksha-mandir’ (The Stage, a Temple to Learning), Rangamanch, Drishya 3 & 4, Aswin-Kartik 1317 BS/1910, pp. 125–6. 57 Subir Roy Choudhuri, Bilati Jatra Theke Swadeshi Theatar (From English Jatra to Swadeshi Theatre) Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 1971, p. 75. 58 George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, London: Constable & Company, 1932, Vol. 1, pp. viii–ix. 59 Girishchandra’s account of his crisis of faith and the resolution offered by Ramakrishna is found in ‘Paramhamsadeber shishya sneha’ (Paramhamsadeb’s Love For His Disciples). Originally read at the Ramakrishna Mission and subsequently printed in Udbodhan, 7th year, 1 Baisakh 1312 BS/1905. 60 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Nat-churamoni swargiya Ardhendushekhar Mustafi’ in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1991 (1975), Vol. 5, p. 351. 61 Arun Kumar Mitra, Amritalal Basur Jibani o Sahitya (Amritalal Bose’s Life and Literature), Calcutta: Nabhana, 1970, p. 80. 62 Indian Daily News, 24 March 1888. 63 Pratibha Agarwal (ed.), Master Fida Hussain: Parsi Theater Men Pachas Varsh (Fifty Years in the Parsi Theatre), Calcutta: Natya Shodh Sansthan, 1986, pp. 57–8. 64 Samik Bandhopadhyay, ‘Girishchandra Ghosh: Parinato Parba: Bhaktabhaktimahatva’ (The Final Phase: The Greatness of Devotion and Devotees) Proma, October 1980, pp. 109–19. 65 In the Pali suttas, the Gamani Samytta (from the Samytta Nikaya 4.2.) the chief of the actors submits to Buddha the common belief, referred to by Bharata at the end of the Natyasastra that an actor performing his art

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reaches heaven (emphasis mine). See V. Raghavan, ‘Performance in Ancient India’ in Rachael van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon (eds), Sanskrit Drama in Performance, Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1981. 66 I owe my framing of the problematic in these terms to Loren Kruger’s discussion of the politics of an ‘authentic’ South African theatre that is both postapartheid and national in ‘Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York’, Diaspora, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1991, p. 200. 67 Kosambi, Gender Culture and Performance, pp. 21–2. 68 Girishchandra Ghosh, ‘Purush angshe nari abhinetri’ (The Female Actress in Male Roles), in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), GR, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1986 (1972), Vol. 3. 69 Bipin Chandra Pal, ‘The Bengalee Stage’, (in English) (The Hindu Review, February 1913, pp. 40–7), rpt. in Chittaranjan Ghosh (ed.), Bohurupee Natya Patrika, No. 42, Special Issue, March 1974, p. 57. 70 Review (in Bangla) in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 Falgun 1281 BS. 71 Sukumari Dutta, Sukumari Dutta evang Apurva Sati Natak, Bijit Kumar Dutta (ed.), Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1992. 72 Pulin Das, Banga Rangamancha o Bangla Natak, 1795–1920 (The Bengali Stage and Bengali Drama), Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons Pvt Ltd, 1963, Vol. 1, pp. 150–3. 73 See for example, the Introduction by Mahadebprasad Saha to his critical edition of Upendranath Das, Sarat-Sarojini o Surendra-Binodini, Calcutta: Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, 1993. Saha relies on Sivnath Sastri’s Atmacharit for his account of Das’ life. 74 The dramatised adaptation with the now familiar title was published in 1926; it also became a favourite production in women’s colleges. 75 Jyotirindranath Tagore, Sarojini ba Chitorakraman natak (Sarojini or the Attack of Chittor) (1875). Jyotirindranath shifted considerably from his initial conservative position on women over the years.

327

APPENDIX

Saudamini: an actress’s autobiography I have deliberately kept secret the name by which I am known on the stage. Because, while no one will stand to gain by knowing the name, there is certainty of some harm befalling me if they do. In my childhood my parents called me ‘Sadu’. Sadu, of course, is a diminutive of Saudamini. You will know me as Saudamini. My natal home is in a certain village of Bardhaman district. My father was a householder of considerable means. But, let that be. When I was five years old, I was married off in Bankura district. I do not remember anything of those days. Does one remember what happens in early childhood? But I do recall faintly that they took me away by force to my in-laws. There they kept me captive for a couple of days. Finally, when they were unable to stop my tears they sent me back to my natal home. I now feel that had they forcibly kept me with them and had not sent me back to my parental home, then . . . but, let that be. Two years after I came back from my in-laws, some sort of a quarrel between my father and my in-laws caused such bitterness that my mother-in-law and father-in-law even stopped uttering my name. Another three years went by in the same manner. I began enjoying myself, laughing and dancing all day long in my parental home. Not for once did I remember or think of my in-laws. I had grown up by then; I heard there was no place for me at my in-laws and I was happy to learn this. When I think of it now, the tears burst forth from my eyes. I sit by myself and weep, wiping my eyes with my sari-end every now and then. Is any other path left to me? When I was 12 years old, a cholera epidemic struck our village. My mother had already died – I had forgotten to say this; now, Father and

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my two brothers followed my mother. There were only three of us left in our household, my elder brother, his wife and myself. With time grief becomes quite tolerable. It was so with us. Daily life went on as usual. Gradually, my body began to surge with the stirrings of youth and my mind was filled with a strange ferment. Every morning and evening when I would go to bathe in the ghat [by the river or pukur], I felt that I might suddenly encounter him on the lonely path – he whom my heart sought out every moment. And my whole body would immediately thrill with excitement. It was in such a condition that, all too easily, I fell under the power of a characterless youth. He painted for me such a happy picture of my future, that, quite overwhelmed, I left my home and accompanied him. He brought me to Calcutta. I had never before left the village. So I was delighted when I first got on to a train! I felt that the person with whom I had quit my home was a veritable god. Then, when we got off at Habra [Howra] Station and got into a carriage, crossed the Pole [across the river] and got into the [city] streets, I could only look around me with a dazed and admiring gaze and my heart danced with extreme happiness. It was indeed a dream! I looked upon my companion reverently. I think he understood what I was feeling. He turned to me and gave a crooked smile. I did not understand then the meaning of his smile; if I had done so, I might have . . . Anyway. After traversing several broad avenues and many narrow streets our carriage turned into an extremely narrow alley. A little later when the carriage stopped before a two-storied house, he who was then the ‘pole star’ of my life, held my hand to help me down the carriage, paid off the coachman and we entered the house. I was trembling violently. Upon this, the man gripped my hand more forcefully and laughed out loud, using such language – the meaning of which I truly did not comprehend then – that I stood gaping and staring at his face. Then, whatever befalls women such as myself who have left their homes, befell me. That companion of mine spent a week with me in that brothel-mansion (baranganapuri) and simply pushed off one day. I was yet to internalise my situation. So, when I learnt from the mistress of the house that he would not ever come again, I burst into tears. But I could not believe that what she had said was the truth. I could only think, I’ve not done anything – why would he desert me . . . he must have gone out somewhere and will be back any moment; these people are frightening me for no reason. I passed a sleepless night and spent the next morning searching everywhere, but I could not spot him anywhere. I was truly terrified then. What was I to do now? This was

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someone else’s home, how was I to stay here all by myself? I did not know my way around the streets: how was it ever possible to return home? I stood before the mistress of the house and said tearfully, ‘I want to go home, I don’t want to stay here; please ask someone to take me back home.’ ‘Ha, Ha!’ laughed the mistress of the house. What fearful laughter it was! When she had stopped laughing she said, ‘Forget about that home of yours. They won’t let you enter home; they’ll kill you if you ever go there. From now on, this is your home. If you listen to what I say, things will go well for you.’ That day too passed and whatever the mistress said turned out to be true. I got a room in her house. I drowned myself in an ocean of sin. And so went by another three months. Then, one day – it was evening, and I left this place with my babu [patron] and have never had to go back. A garden house in Behala [in the suburbs] was made ready for me. There I set up my household all over again. Babu fixed up two teachers for me. one of them taught me music and singing, and the other looked after my general education. I spent three years in some happiness. I acquired some education and became quite an expert in music and singing. One day, Babu told me, ’I’ve sold off this house; you will have to leave tomorrow.’ Based on the experience I had gained in these few years, I understood that Babu had satisfied his whim: ‘Selling off this house’ was just a story to get rid of me. I sighed deeply and said, ‘All right.’ My conjecture proved correct. He did not care for me any more. He did not wish to tell me so directly. I had some money saved; therefore, I was not quite a destitute. Amongst those who lived in the place that I then sought out as a refuge, were two theatre actresses. With their help I found a job in the theatre. My life as an actress began from this day onwards, and this is how I have been earning my livelihood up to the present. What a terribly hard life it is! I do not speak about the lives of other actresses; I speak of my own. Because I do not know what lies in the heart of others. How much pain I have had to endure with this body and this heart. It is beyond me. To fulfill the desires of my heart is beyond my abilities, but to meet the wants of my body? So, when I simply cannot endure any longer the demands of the body, I stifle my heart and fulfill the needs of the body. I shall explain this. About a year after I got admitted to the theatre I was to appear in a play as a wife who had been abused and abandoned by her husband. A chaste (sadhvi) wife who had silently endured all – her husband’s indifference, 330

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his abuse – how she sacrificed her life contemplating the dust of her husband’s feet. All this I had to bring out and show in my acting. When I finished my performance and entered the greenroom, my heart rang out with despair. I sat there for a long time, my face cupped in both my hands. Then, sighing deeply, I slowly got up and with trembling fingers began taking off my costume. I could only think, Alas, wretched woman, what is this you have done? I too could have sacrificed my life, like the chaste wife in the play, contemplating all the while the dust of my husband’s feet. Oh! What have I done! Now, that path was no longer open to me. I had blocked that path myself. It had been a day of great exertion for me. Until this time, I had never acted a part surrendering thus my heart and soul to the role. I came back home my body and mind numbed. Entering my bedroom, I flung myself on the milk-white bed. It felt as though someone was piercing my body with a thousand thorns. In the throes of an unbearable pain the next moment I left my bed and threw myself on the floor. The agony of the body seemed to diminish somewhat. After lying in this manner for a while I suddenly picked myself up, and then, walking drunkenly towards the open door, I slammed it shut and lay down beside it! A little later there was a mild knock on the door, then, heavier knocks, and finally a violent battering of fist and kicks. I lay there by the door, silent and unmoving, and did not reply. Night turned to morning and I lay there without food or sleep. I was up early the next morning and resolved that I would go and see my husband, the home he lived in. I would smear the dust in his home all over my sinful body, and on my return would perhaps not continue with this life. There was no other path for me but this. Having made up my mind, I took leave of the theatre for seven days. Accompanied by a young gentleman who was enamoured of me, I journeyed to that place – that most sacred of pilgrimage sites for me. A sort of an intoxication had seized me. I did not care for anything. I could only think of reaching the spot and have my fill of seeing him. As to what I would do after I did so, the thought did not once cross my mind. In due course I reached my husband’s home. We are creatures skilled in art and artifice. It was not at all difficult for me to deceive the simple village housewives. Introducing myself as somebody else, I became quite friendly with the women. I found everyone at home to be hospitable. They treated me and my companion – believing him to be my brother – with special care and concern. I could not sit still even for a moment. In this way almost two hours went by but I had not yet had a glimpse of my husband. Where was he, was he well . . . I was intensely 331

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eager to know, but I lacked the courage to voice any such thought. This was the one instance where the artifice so intrinsic to our being proved incapable of finding expression. I was totally silent on this matter as I waited for an opportunity. My hopes were fulfilled at last . . . I had a vision of my god. It was harvesting season; he had gone to the fields in the early hours of the morning and had just come back in the blazing afternoon sun after he finished his work. His dark-skinned bare back glistened with sweat. His legs were caked in mud up to his knees. I felt an intense desire to cast away all shame and run towards him, to wipe his sweat away with my sari-end and to wash his feet with my own hands! What an intense desire it was, what an irrepressible urge! But wretched me! with great difficulty I buried my grief in my heart and sat there like a statue of stone. But the stone shattered and the water gushed out. ‘Ma, why are you crying?’ asked my mother-in-law, drawing me close to her. Ma! Ma! That call to a daughter drew forth a fresh flood of tears from my eyes! I could not restrain myself. I buried my face at my father-in-law’s feet and wet them with the tears from my eyes. Eventually, after asking one question after another, I found out that six months from the time I had left home he had married again. My co-wife was not yet 10; she lived with her parents. In speaking of this my mother-in-law referred to me most abusively and said, ‘Not for a single day had I imagined that the wretched woman would blacken her family honour (kula); even if the master [she meant her husband] had quarrelled with her father, would we have kept our bride away for ever? After her father died, we did send for her; her brother would not send her. Had he done so, would the family have been so dishonoured?’ A fire raged in my head. I felt like running away and drowning myself in a pond or a river, if only I could put out the fire within. But just as all my desires have joined hands with death as soon as they have been born, so it was this time too. I grew restless even as I sat there. When the agony had somewhat subsided, I swept away all my reservations and asked, my voice trembling, ‘If that daughter-in-law of yours were to come back now, would you give her a place in your home? ‘Listen to what this girl says!’ exclaimed my mother-in-law, her hand on her cheek. ‘If she were to come back, we’d see her off with a broom; hasn’t she lost her caste? How would that hussy dare to come here?’ I did not say another word. What else was left for me to say? Did I not know that a kulta, a woman who has stained her lineage, has no place in her husband’s home? I had known this; but was it possible to give up all hope so easily? Therefore, I had tried, for one last time. 332

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I started for Calcutta that very night. At the appointed time I went to the theatre and began working. But there were some changes in my lifestyle. As soon as I got back I chased away my man. Whatever money I got from my acting was sufficient for my food and lodging. I decided that I would spend the remaining days of my life all by myself in this manner; and I did spend a couple of months with this resolution. I overcame many an enticement, but finally, I had to subordinate my mind to my body. Whatever I was earlier, not a week passed that I did not become the same again. Then, I mastered myself with strong determination. Once again, three months went by reasonably well. And then, once again, it was the same situation. Even now, my days pass in the same manner. But whatever this feeble creature might do to meet the demands of her body, her thoughts will rest in that little corner of a far-off village. Only the Omniscient one can say how I will live through this accursed life. ‘Saudamini (Abhinetrir Atmakahini)’, Anon., Roop o Rang, 15 Kartik 1331 BS/1924, pp. 66–8. Translated by Rimli Bhattacharya

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Samples of various categories of the actress-story in Natya-mandir and Roop o Rang. The title is invariably followed by a specific category such as galpa (story), atmakatha, atmakahini, jibankatha (autobiography), and satyaghatanamulak galpa (story based on real life).

I. Writings/speeches by contemporary actresses Binodini Dasi, ‘Abhinetrir Atmakatha’ (An actress’s autobiography), Natyamandir, Aswin-Kartik 1317 BS/1910. ‘Star Theatery Smriti Sabha’ (A memorial meeting at the Star), Srimati Sushilabala, Srimati Ranisudari, Srimati Narisudnari, Srimati Basantasundari, Natya-mandir, Aswin-Kartik 1319 BS/1912. Binodini Dasi, ‘Amar Abhinetri Jiban’ (My life as an actress), Roop o Rang, 9 Magh 1331–26 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, in 11 installments.

II. Biographical sketches of contemporary actresses ‘Suprasiddha Abhinetri Sukumari Dutta’ (The famous actress Sukumari Dutta), Visheshagya Rachit [by an expert], Natya-mandir, Aswin-Kartik 1317 BS/1910. Atulkrishna Mitra, ‘Prabina o Nabina’ (The old and the new) [Sukumari Dutta and Tarasundari Dasi], Rangamancha, 1317 BS/1910. ‘Jagater Annatama Sreshtha Abhinetri’ (The most outstanding actress in the world) [Tarasundari Dasi], Nachghar, 15 Jeystha 1332 BS/1925. Anon., ‘Swargiya Sushilalabala’[Obituary], Roop o Rang, 15 Kartik 1333 BS/1926. Anon., ‘Duiti Abhinetri’ (Two actresses) [Srimati Teenkari Dasi o Sushilabala], Natya-mandir, Falgun 1317 BS/1910.

III. Atmakatha/Atmakahin/Jibankatha: ‘Auto/biographies’ of actresses Phanindranath Pal, ‘Abhinetri’, Roop o Rang, 18 Aswin 1331 BS/1924. Anon. ‘Saudamini (Abhinetrir Atmakahini)’ (Saudamini; an actress’ autobiography), Roop o Rang, 15 Kartik 1331 BS/1924. Phanindranath Pal, ‘Arundhati (Amar Abhinetri Jibaner Pratham Anka)’ (Arundhati; the first chapter in my actress life), Roop o Rang, 22 Kartik 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Dayi ke? (Akhyata nartakir jibankatha)’ (Who is to blame; the life story of an obscure dancer), Roop o Rang, 29 Kartik 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Ei Nari – ero ei parinam! (Gayikar jibankatha) (Even this woman meets such a fate! The life story of a singer), Roop o Rang, 14 Agrahayan 1331 BS/1924.

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A ppendix

Anon., ‘Charam Shiksha (Bismirta abhinetrir atmakatha)’ (The ultimate lesson; the autobiography of a forgotten actress), Roop o Rang, 28 Agrahayan 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Biswas-hantri: abhinetrir etotuku kahini’ (The betrayer: a trifling story of an actress), Roop o Rang, 2 Falgun 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Dan-patra (Abhinetir atmakatha)’ (Testament of gift), Roop o Rang, 16 Falgun 1331 BS/1924.

IV. Stories (galpa)* indicated in the subtitle Monilal Bandyopadhyay, ‘Abinaye Prem’ (Acting out love), Natya-mandir, Magh-Falgun 1319 BS/1917. Munindraprasad Sarbadhikary, ‘Natir bibah’ (An actress’s wedding), Natyamandir, Magh-Falgun 1319 BS/1917. Srimati Nandarani Devi, ‘Nirupam (galpa)’, Roop o Rang, 14 Agrahayan 1331 BS/1924. Srimati Nandarani Devi, ‘Kaifyat (galpa)’ (Excuse), Roop o Rang, 21 Agrahayan 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Parajay (galpa)’ (Defeat), Roop o Rang, 7 Falgun 1331 BS. Srimati _____, ‘Nartaki Amala (galpa)’ (A dancer), Roop o Rang, 25 Magh 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Pagalini (galpa)’ (The mad woman), Roop o Rang, 23 Falgun 1331 BS/1924. Anon. ‘Nutan Abhinetri (galpa)’ (The new actress), Roop o Rang, 14 Chaitra 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Abhinetri Parul (galpa)’ (Parul, the actress), Roop o Rang, 21 Chaitra 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Abhinetrir Pran (satya ghatanamulak galpa)’ (The heart of an actress, story based on real life), Roop o Rang, 11 Magh 1331 BS/1924. Anon., ‘Abhinetrir Bibah (Bileti galpa)’ (An actress’s wedding; an English story), Roop o Rang, 9 Jeystha 1332 BS/1924. Batakrishna Ghosh, MA, ‘Abhinetri (galpa)’ (Actress), Roop o Rang, 16 Jyeshtha 1332 BS/1925. Batakrishna Ghosh, MA, ‘Shesh Chithi (galpa)’ (The last letter), Roop o Rang, 13 Bhadra 1332 BS/1925. ‘Bismrita abhinetrir atmakatha ba charam shiksha’ (The autobiography of a forgotten actress or the ultimate lesson), Roop o Rang, 28 Agrahayan 1331 BS/1924. Nirmal Dutta, ‘Natir janma’ (The birth of a nati), Roopmancha, 8th year, No. 7, Kartik 1355 BS/1948, pp. 27–33.

335

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival material in Bangla Anon. ‘Baidhabya jibaner chitra’ (A picture of widowed life), [by] ‘A Hindu widow’, Antahpur, Magh 1309 BS/1902, p. 193. Anon. ‘Bangiya Natyashalar Itihas’ (The history of Bengali Theatre) (bisheshagya likhito/by a specialist), Natya-mandir, No. 9, Chaitra 1319 BS/1912, p. 681. Anon. ‘Bidhabar Nirananda (nari likhito)’ (The unhappiness of widows, written by a woman), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 27, 18 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, pp. 545–7. Anon. Madhyastha, Part 2, No. 28, Falgun 1280 BS/1873, pp. 706–14. Anon., ‘Miss Bankimbinodir Patra’ (Letter from Miss Bankimbinodini), Majlis, Vol. 1, No. 2, Ashar 1297 BS/1890, pp. 21–3. Anon. ‘Swargiya natyakar Atulkrishna Mitra’ (The late playwright Atulkrishna Mitra), Nachghar, 4th year, No. 8, 30 Ashad 1334 BS/1927, pp. 31–3. Bandyopadhyay, Bhupendranath. ‘Sanjibanir chhatfatani’ (Sanjibani in a tizzy), Natya-mandir, 2nd year, Nos. 7–8, Magh-Falgun 1320 BS/1914, pp. 613–17. Bandyopadhyay, Jogendranath. ‘Rangalaye Barangana’ (Prostitutes in the theatre), Aryadarshan, Bhadra 1284 BS/1877, pp. 226–39. Bandyopadhyay, Monilal. ‘Abhinetrir Kaifiat’, Natya-mandir, 1st year, No. 7, Magh 1317 BS/1910, pp. 536–42. Bandhopadhyay, Monilal. ‘Sanjibanir antardaha’ (Sanjibani’s fulminations), Natya-mandir, 1st year, No. 9, Chaitra 1317 BS/1910, pp. 731–2. [Introduction] Bandyopadhyay, Monilal. ‘Storm in a tea cup: Sanjibani and amateur performances’, Natya-mandir, 4th year, No. 5, Agrahayan 1320 BS/1913, pp. 400–5. Bandyopadhyay, Rakhaldas. ‘Adhunik Bangla Natak’ (Modern Bengali drama), Mahila, 1st year, No. 1, 5 Baisakh 1331 BS/1924, pp. 23–6. [Postscript] Basu, Debendranath. Editorial, Roop o Rang 1st year, No. 1, 18 Aswin 1331 BS/1924, pp. 1–2.

336

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Bose, Manomohan. ‘Jatiya natyasmajer samvatsarik utsavkale Manomohan Bosur Byoktrita’ (Speech by Manomohan Bose on the occasion of the anniversary of the national theatre society), Madhyastha, Part 2, No. 28, Paush 1280 BS/1873, pp. 613–26. Brahma, Monilal, ‘Nati’, Nachghar, No. 38, 24 Falgun 1335 BS/1928, pp. 6–7. Chakravarty, Gnyanendranath. ‘Abhinetrir prem patra’ (An actress’s love letter), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 14, 18 Magh 1331 BS/1924, pp. 279–82. Chakravarty, Gnyanendranath. ‘The business of films and Indian ladies’, Roop o Rang, No. 26, 12 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, p. 525. Chakravarty, Gnyanendranath. ‘Jiban rahasye narir saundarya’ (Woman’s beauty in the mystery of life), Roop o Rang, No. 46, 3 Aswin 1332 BS/1925, pp. 982–4. Chatterjee, Ramananda. ‘Untitled’, Indian People, Allahabad, 22 December 1904, p. 4. Chattopadhyay, Lalitmohan. ‘Jatra’, Natya-mandir, 2nd year, No. 5, Agrahayan 1318 BS/1911, pp. 325–30. Chattopadhay, Lalitmohan. ‘Theatar Bidwesh’ (Hatred of the theatre), Natyamandir, 3rd year, Sravan 1318 BS/1911, p. 18. Deb, Sudhindrakumar, ‘Abhinetri’ (Actress), Nachghar, 2nd year, No. 38, 21 Falgun 1332 BS/1925, p. 7. Editorial, Somprakash, 17 Paush 1279 BS/1872. Editorial, ‘Theatar o Banga Nari’ (The theatre and Bengali women), Antahpur, 7th year, No. 2, Jeystha 1311 BS/1904, pp. 41–3. Editorial, Ray. Amarendranath, Ranga-darshan, 1st year, 28 Agrahayan 1332 BS/1925, pp. 3–4. Ghosh, Gajendrachandra. ‘Nari o Jatir Bhabishyat’ (Woman and the future of the nation/race), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 25, 5 Baisakh 1332 BS/1925, pp. 502–3. Ghosh, Girishchandra. ‘Nritya’ (Dance), GR, Vol. 3, pp. 846–9. Ghosh, Girishchandra. ‘Paramhamsadeber shishya sneha’ (Paramhamsadeb’s love for his disciples), Udbodhan, 7th year, 1 Baisakh 1312 BS/1905. [Postscript] Ghosh, Girishchandra. ‘Purush angshe nari abhinetri’ (Women actresses in male roles), (Rangalay, 9 Chaitra 1307 BS/1900), GR, Vol. 3, Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1992 (1972), pp. 820–3. Ghosh, Girishchandra. ‘Purush angshe nari abhinetri’ (The female actress in male roles), full reference in Devipada Bhattacharya (ed.), GR, Vol. 3, (1972), Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, rpt. 1986. Ghosh, Girishchandra. ‘Streeshiksha’ (Women’s education), full reference, GR, Vol. 3, pp. 813–18. Mitra, Adharchandra. ‘Jatiya jiban o natyashala’ (National life and the stage), Dasi, Part 5, No. 10, October 1896, pp. 539–46. Mukhopadhyay, Bepinbehari. ‘Rangamanch: Shiksha-mandir’ (The stage, a temple to learning), Rangamanch, Drishya 3 & 4, Aswin-Kartik 1317 BS/1910, pp. 125–6.

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Mukhopadhyay, Damodar. ‘Natak o abhinay’ (The drama and acting), Prabah, Part 1, No. 3, Ashar 1289 BS/1882, pp. 70–7 & Part 1, No. 6, Aswin 1289 BS/1882, pp. 166–70. Ray, Amarendranath. Editorial, ‘Rangalay Alochona’ (Theatre criticism), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 2, 8 Kartik 1331 BS/1924, pp. 25–7. Saraswati, Prabavati Debi. ‘Abhinay o janasadharan: Sri [sic] Prabhavati Debi Saraswatir bichitra galpa’ (Acting and the public: Prabhavati Debi’s strange tale), Roop o Rang, 1st year, No. 29, 2 Jeystha 1332 BS/1925, p. 587. Sarbadhikary, Munindraprasad. ‘Natir Bibah’ (A nati’s marriage), Natyamandir, 3rd year, Magh-Falgun 1319 BS/1312, pp. 494–505. Sen, B.C., ‘Bilati theater o musik hall’ (The English theatre and the music hall), Natya-mandir, 3rd year, Jeystha 1320 BS/1913, pp. 836–46.

338

INDEX

abhinay 52, 76, 97, 202, 210, 214, 280, 294; natakabhinay 52, 53; natyabhinay 94n2 Abhinetrir Roop or The Charms of an Actress 21, 154 – 86 Abu Hossain 65 acting bug 16; craze 59, 314 acting woman 4, 5, 24, 169, 193, 250, 309, 311, 323 actor: bhadralok 215; boy 314; caste 4, 59; as director/dramatist/ impressario/manager/producer 128, 198, 257, 261, 264, 302; educated 54, 232; as Sairindhri 84; ‘stree-party’ 3; see also abhinay; bhadralok actress 4, 5, 24, 31, 46n99, 71 – 80, 81, 82, 130, 134, 169, 170, 215, 231; autobiographical speech 277 – 8; autobiographical writings 177, 210; biographers 89 – 90, 137; changed names 86 – 8, 91; chhala-kala/chhalana 64, 83, 177, 214, 307 – 8; -courtesan 7, 92, 131; economic exchange 294; emotions about 5; genealogies 52 – 101; hierarchies 78 – 80; hyphenated identity 5, 24, 74, 84, 301; -narrator 256; professional identity 14, 21, 82, 91, 118, 269; related genres 209; sadhana 129, 132, 137, 309; as sadhika 34, 137; and salvation 106, 115, 123, 128, 203; second-generation 214, 215, 256; siddhilabh 132,

137, 153n103; spiritual mobility 5, 15, 131 – 32; stage names 86; transformation 302, 309; as writer-manager 59; see also education; nati actress-story/abhinetri-kahini 6, 22, 87, 90, 191 – 239 Adarsha Sati 75 advertisement 9, 17, 20, 24, 26, 32, 44n70, 67, 69, 85, 90, 92, 120, 167, 175, 198, 199, 207, 209, 220, 280 – 81, 294, 298, 302, 313; benefit night 224; bilingual 8, 9, 155; bioscopes 230, 239n69; of farces 292; Female Theatre 252, 254; of film actresses 231, 232; Gramphone Company 239n76; for harmonium 233 – 4; for ‘household female’ 264; for ‘Mughal Romance’ 300; for Nala Damayanti 294; names and roles 86, 88; by women doctors 182 Ahalya 129 Ahalyabai 55, 57 amateur theatricals 18, 26, 30, 36, 38n7, 61, 73, 92, 109, 182, 202, 282, 314 Amrita Bazar Patrika 88 Anderson, Mrs 90 androgyny 32 Anglo-Indian 4, 87, 167; community 291; ladies 231 Annals and Antiquities 57 Antahpur 197, 207

339

INDEX

anti-theatrical 15, 18, 34, 58, 170, 202, 204; Puritan 58; see also Brahmo Apurba Sati 59, 69, 215 archetypal lovers 83 army 7, 38n7, 199; regimental theatres 7, 65 Arnold, Edwin 17, 41n32, 115 – 16, 148n36 ‘Arya nari’ 55 – 7, 140; Aryan woman 233 Arya Samaj 15, 25, 43n51, 250; Arya Mahila Samaj 251; Mahila Arya Samaj 252 Ashcharjamayi Dasi 294 audience 1, 4, 52, 73, 86, 87, 91, 105 – 50, 127, 181, 240 – 90; composition 113, 121, 142, 167, 197, 302, 308; experience of Chaitanya Lila 103; new publics 242, 323; sahriday 52; ticketbuying 5, 18, 30, 31, 52, 60, 104, 121, 243, 292, 294, 296, 318 Australia 3, 90, 100n115 Awadh (Oudh) 10 ‘Ayesha’ 1, 224 babu 59, 67, 166; ‘Bengali Baboo’ 59; -brahman 266; ‘civilised-’ 240; -culture 161, 175, 251; essay by Bankimchandra 132; ‘literature’ 132; -narrative 163; nouveau176; as patrons/protectors of actresses 89, 179, 215, 228, 302, 307; ‘peg-drinking’ 116 Balidan 76 Bamabodhini 62 – 3, 197, 232 Bamarachanabali 197 ‘Bandmann circuit, The’ 18 Banerjea, Surendranath 222, 255 Bangiya Natya Parisat 19, 282 – 3; Sahitya Parisat 257 Bangladesh 15, 41, 42, 66, 69, 292, 324n11 Baptist Church Maidan 265 Basak, Nilmoni 55; see also Nabanari Basantakumari 256, 272, 274 Basu, Rajnarain 95n18 ‘Bellary Raghava’ 3, 17, 39n9

Bellick Bazar 68, 91 Belur Math 29, 128 Benares see Kashi Benazeer-Budramuneer 8, 298; Vadra Munir Benazir 43n60 Bernhardt, Sarah 20, 91, 122, 222, 223, 224, 238n59 bhadra 205, 305; citizens 59; family 232; household 4; -nati 24, 231; -samaj 229, 261 bhadralok 10, 21, 36, 79, 136, 180 – 2, 213; constituency 104; discourse 94, 273; fear of finance 180; as patron 89 – 90; protests 265 bhadramahila: and actresses 140, 272; construction of 35, 196; ‘genuine’ 91 – 2; identity in print 196; and kulanari 73, 83; as mother 66; Muslim question 197, 296; petition 251; and prostitutes 253; shikshita 315; see also education; women Bhaduri, Sisir Kumar 23, 142 Bhakti 6, 33 – 5, 75, 105, 127, 139, 203, 262, 276, 312 – 13; allegorical character 126; -rasa 126, 151n81, 296; staging 111 – 19, 312; Yoga 115, 128 bhakti: brand of 81, display of 150n62; plays 118, 126, 221, 245, 262, 272; poet 106; prem113 – 14, 126 – 7; raganuraga34, 47n108, 245, 277, 309; vocabulary of 273 Bharat 57; Bharatiya 82; Bharatmata 221; Bharatvarsha 197; Utsav 70 Bhattacharya, Bidhayak 107 Bhattacharyya, Manoranjan 136, 152n100 bhava see bhakti; emotion; rasa bibi 62, 67, 159 Bilwamangal Thakur 76, 146n9; film 199 Binodini/‘Nati Binodini’: autobiographical writings of 22, 34, 85, 104 – 40, 193, 198, 215, 220, 256, 279 – 326; as Chaitanya 102 – 31; cross-dressed: as Nitai 274, as Sahana 224; Nati Binodini

340

INDEX

productions 147n23; Star Theatre 148n27; see also Ghosh, Girishchandra Bishad 126 Bishbriksha 115 Boccaccio 54 body: bhadramahila 234; display of 303; language 172; new uses of 94 Bombay 17, 38n7, 87, 109, 198, 238n57, 252, 253, 294, 302, 314; Presidency 59 Bose, Amritalal 21, 64, 65, 84, 119, 128, 132 – 4, 199, 257, 274, 280, 312; interview with 262 Bose, Manomohan 67, 304, 326n47 Brahmo 58, 59, 62, 65, 76, 80, 81, 250, 251, 266, 292, 304; marriage bill 15; reformer 116; Samaj 15, 250 Brahmoism 62, 80, 120, 127, 139, 304; Brahmika Samaj (women’s wing) 250 Bristow, Emma 38n7 Buddha 115; Buddhacharit 115; Buddha Lila 231; Light of Asia 115; Sakyamuni 56 Burman, Madanmohan 119; ‘Madan Master’ 140 Byron, Lord 83 business 53, 312; and actress 91, 307; entertainment 291; magnate 70; -men 180, 302, 312, 313; -minded/professional 53; partners 65; show business 138, 209, 291; -skills 179; of the stage 312; of theatre 21 – 2, 53 – 4, 115, 199, 262, 275, 293; ventures 17 ‘businessman’ type 89; see also Rai, Gurmukh Calcutta 241, 243, 251, 254, 265 – 6, 302 – 3; Congress session 263; factories 244; heterogenous residents of 180, 259, 291 – 2, 296, 298, 313, 323; Maidan 242; migration 293; Missionary Conference 260; port 199; redlight district 178; School Book Society 259; topographical shift 177; Town Hall 259, 261;

University Institute Hall 283; visiting actresses 198, 245 Carson, Dave 198 cartoon 4, 160, 166, 248; -ist 250, 284n6 Chakraberty, Keya 109, 153n111 Chapal Bhaduri/Rani 38n5 Chaitanya/Chaitanyadeb/Gaur Hari/Nimai 102; Binodini as 77; image of Shadabhuja 104; ‑ism 34; Mahaprabhu/Patitapaban Gaurango 176; see also Vaishnavism Chaitanya Lila 77; in the 1880s 111 – 28, 296, 311; in the 1990s 150n62 ‘Charulata’ 157 Chatterjee, Ramananda 261, 304, 326n48 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 88, 159, 197, 222; Bangadarshan 197; heroines/novel-nayika 67, 84, 181, 187, 224; historical romances 157 – 8, 300 caste: breaking away from professions 303; Chaitanya as saviour 126; Dasi/Debi 88; differential status 92; groups 10 – 1; hereditary 53; jat vaishnav 88, 215; kulinism 87; male actors/founders 4, 14; mobility 259; Nautch dancers 1; new status 11; patit (fallen) 76; of professional mourners 246; promiscuity 156; traditional perfomers 59; see also actress, Eklavya; widow Chirakumar Sabha 219 Chitpur 113, 302 Christian 81 Christianity 30; muscular 305 circus 254, 264 college 204, 314; -going 59; reunion 70 College: Fort William 73, Jagannath 265, St Xavier’s 124 College Street 311 controversy 29, 65, 250, 286n32; Dufferin, Viceroy 65 comedy 64, 119

341

INDEX

costume 67, 130, 173, 177, 191, 217, 218, 267, 300, 331 cross-dressing 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 224; cross-dressed women 167; Parsi theatre 99n102; ‘spiritual cross-dressing’ 103 curtain 76, 120, 162, 212 Dacca 41, 87 Dakhineswar 133 Daksha Yagna 24, 75, 113 Damayanti 55, 221, 263, 272 darshan 24, 156, 170, 184, 190n64 Das, Upendranath 86, 257, 264, 318 – 19 Dasgupta, Bina 107, 109, 111, 129 – 30, 148n28, 150n62 Datta, Michael Madhusudan 36, 68, 82, 134, 136, 137, 153n104; Krishna Kumari 36 Dey, Brajendra Kumar 85, 103, 107, 109, 127, 132 dharma 24, 129, 138, 275, 301, 320, 322; Girishchandra’s explication of 77; -guru 272, 276; ‑mandir 311; Nagendrabala Dasi on streedharma 239n75; of the sati 57; see also actress; stree Dhruba Charitra 113, 262 disease 183, 184, 216; -ridden race 237 Dramatic Performances Control Act of 1876 26, 246, 318 Draupadi 55 drishti 24, 159 Dufferin; memoirs of Lady 65, 96n55 Durga Puja 18 Durgeshnandini 1 Duse, Eleonora 20 Dutt, Amarendranath 21, 86; autobiographical references 156, 181, 186n5 Dutt, Utpal 134 – 8, 147n21, 152n99, 153n104 Dutta, Goshtobihari 318 Dutta, Ketaki 38n5, 109

Eden, Emily 61 education 34, 35, 315; agenda 54 – 99; eju 60, 312; and female sexuality 156, 225; job 285n18; and religion 36; and theatre 59, 138, 203; and women 43n58, 55, 57, 61, 62, 66 – 7, 97n49, 158, 247, 250; ‘shikshita abhinetri’ 24, 62, 73, 203, 231, 315; Victorian men 242; English/western/formal 5, 15, 35, 58 – 9, 60, 133, 134, 138, 240, 242, 292, 311 – 2, 314 Education Gazette 205 educational: credentials 207, 209; institution 18, 54, 59, 326n55; instructor 265 Ekakar Or The Social Chaos 118 Eklavya 270, 275, 278, 288n85 Ekshan 107 Ellis, Clara 198, 236n13 Elokeshi 25, 57, 189n42 Elokeshi (actress) 1 ‘Emerald Bower’ 70, 71 emotion: abhiman 24, 166; aroused by Chaitanya Lila 117 – 40; in the audience 308; and Bengal 53, 166; collective 77; extreme 228; language and 64; in playing Chaitanya 114; tapos 246; and woman spectator 170; see also bhakti; bhava emotional: act of transformation 309; bonding 305; exchange 269; links to country 240; memory 219; spiritual resonance 283 emotionalism 305 England 13, 38n7, 58, 78, 90, 164, 209, 212, 215, 242, 244, 252, 311, 316, 326n51; early modern/ Elizabethan 58, 239n78, 248; Victorian 9, 128, 176, 178, 219 English: ‘classics’ 59; curriculum 58; translation into 156, 196; literature 95n15, 95n17; newspapers 29, 218, 252, 293; novels and plays 63; reviews of Durgeshnandini 21; Vidya-Sundar 60; theatricals 198, 218; trade 69; translations from 94n8, 206

342

INDEX

‘Englishing’ 17; see also education; language Englishman, The 29, 114, 198, 236n12 European: amusements 198, 264; garden retreat 181; ‘ladies of the station’ 38, 65; marginal 87, 260, 288n66; meetings with Indians 259 – 60; photographs of 218; spectator 17, 44n69; stage 20; theatre 23; trained by 303; women 3, 305; see also Calcutta exemplar figures 7, 75, 81, 127, 278, 283; Guhak Chandal and Yavana Haridas 81; Prahlad, Dhruba/boy devotee 76, 86, 113, 308; ‘Prahlad-Kushi’ 86; see also Eklavya exhibition: ‘Empire of India Exhibition’ 115; International Exhibition 18 exhibitionism 173, 248 farces (prahasan) 5, 7, 25, 64, 68, 97n62, 118, 175, 189n56, 213, 248, 292, 302, 312; against the amateur 182; against the babu 97n56, 57, 60; on the ‘educated Miss’ 63, 67, 84, 158 – 9; illustrated 57; print run of 45n81; ‘red-light areas’ 237n40; on topical issues 225, 251; on widows 281, 315 female roles/parts 1, 4, 41n32, 281, 314; see also actor; jatra; stree Female Theatre 49, 254 film actress 222, 231 films: Aamaar Katha: Story of Binodini (A Text of Betrayal) 148n24, 218; Bamboo Flute 42n41; Bhavantarana 46n97; Charulata 157; Khayal Gatha 31; Pyasa 139; Sant Tukaram 106; Swamiji 106 folk: dance 13; lore 30, 46n102; tales 74, 77; traditions 16 – 17 Fort William Band 31

Gaisberg, Frederick W. 1, 38n2, 294, 296 Gandharva, Bal 3, 39n11 Gandhi, M.K., 253, 286n39, 286n40 Gangabai/Gangamoni 294, 324n17 Ganguly, Kadambini 62 Ganguly, Khetramohan 84 Gauhar Jaan 207, 293, 324n19 genres: bedona-gatha 279; Bilap 280 – 81, 289n103; geetabhinay 7, 8; geetika 66; geetinatya 7, 26, 67, 75, 167, 175, 293; and gender 178, 242; hybridity 7; marsiya 244; naksha 7, 175; shok-gatha 279; shok-natika 280; shraddhiki 288n82; varta 217; see also folk; music Ghare-Baire 64, 228 Ghose, Sisirkumar 123, 150n67; plays on Chaitanya 127 Ghosh, Girishchandra 21, 23, 69, 310, 312; on acting female parts 314; ‘Bengal’s Garrick’ 128, 255, 261; and bhava 221 – 2; on Binodini Dasi 111 – 14; on dance 76; ‘Girish Yuga’ 199; as mentor 122; puranic plays 113; on ‘Streeshiksha’ 66; and the Town Hall 128; on women impersonating a saint 64, 103; see also Bhakti; Chaitanya Lila Ghosh, Saratchandra 31 Golap/Golapsundari/Sukumari (Dutt/a) 1, 59, 73, 85, 86, 95n22, 99n100, 215, 275, 289n89, 315, 325n26; as ‘Motibibi’ 224 Goswami, Bijoykrishna 127 Goswami, Krishnakamal 113 grace (kripa) 34, 77, 78, 81, 84, 103 – 4, 107, 131, 136, 139, 272 Gujarat 17; Gujarati 3, 16, 180, 291 Gwynn, Nell 210 hijra community 32 historical: ‘model-couples’ 109; pala 140; play 7, 113; romances 157, 300

343

INDEX

historiography 7, 20, 139, 292; absences in 20, 36, 216, 292, 324n15 history 20 – 30, 34 – 5, 131 – 2, 143; of Bengali theatre 3, 6, 18, 23, 53, 68 – 9, 135 – 8, 140, 191 – 205; of neo-Vaishnavism 127; of theatrical discourse 61; of the vernacular 60 Hooghly 10 housewife 75, 83, 135, 143, 157, 160, 173, 178, 184, 227 Howrah 244 Hurrish Chundrer 298 Hussain, Fida 313 Hussain, Mir Mosharaff 73, 292 icon 5, 19, 20, 25, 29, 63, 67, 156, 170, 175, 220; iconic 107, 122, 130, 156, 221, 224, 250, 272, 300; iconicity 85; iconised 6, 103; iconography 128 – 32, 139, 166 Inder Sabha 291 Indian Daily News 1, 280, 298 Indian Mirror 74 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)/Gana-Natya movement 23, 136 Indubala 254, 294, 324n19 Jadumoni 257, 294, 324n17 Jagattarini 21 jatra 1, 13, 18, 30, 31, 42n43, 52, 82, 86, 95n19, 105, 119, 126; ‘boy-actress’ 314, 315; jatratical 108, 111; Krishna- 36; Neelkantha Adhikari as Vrindaduti 172; neo- 23; pala 113, 117; theatrical- 23, 141 – 3; troupes 12; see also ‘Manbhanjan’/‘Giribala’; Nati Binodini; sakhi Jorasanko Tagores/Thakurbari 31, 70, 74, 157, 232 Kalidasa 77 Kalighat paintings/patas 85, 97n56, 159, 160, 220, 234; patuas 166; see also sundari Kannada 17 Kapalkundala 45n73, 67 Kar, Radhamadhav 199

Kashi 177 – 8, 189n47 Khakhar, Bhupen 32, 47n106 Khash Dakhal 64 ‘Khata’ 213 Khetramoni 65, 172 Kironbala/Kiran Bala 100n110, 122 Krishna 30, 75, 76, 104; see also jatra Kulinkulasarvasya 64, 74 Kusumkumari/’Prahlad-Kushi’ 86 labour see work Lafont, Father 123 – 4 Laila-Majnu 298 language 82, 272 – 3, 296; abuse 276; bilingual playbills 8, 155, 221; cautionary 213; and emotion/bhava 64, 121, 133, 241; of excess 227; hagiographical 137; ‘Mata Bangabhasha’ 281; melodrama 132; multilingual 7, 16, 291; ‘Musalmani bhasha’ 16; mythic founders of 55; national 68; of patriarchy 56; policies 17; regional 58; rhetorical 211, 248; of surplus 163; theatre and Bangla 279 – 80; vernacular 60; versatility 296; of Vidya-Sundar 66 livelihood 6, 14, 58 – 64, 82, 92, 111, 123, 163, 168, 225, 230; alternative 302; choice of 283; and city 215 – 17; education 315; and identity 231 – 2; professional 309 Macbeth 48 mad: ecstatic/divine 83; Jobi 76, 270; Pagalini 272, 274; with love of Krishna 75 – 6 Madras 15, 115, 148n36, 219, 253; Congress session 266 Mahabharata 115, 141, 247, 270, 285n14, 288n85 Maharashtra 14, 87; MaharashtraKarnataka region 16 Maitra, Heramba Chandra 19, 45n74 Majlis 157 malini 21; Hira 66

344

INDEX

‘Manbhanjan’/‘Giribala’ 157 – 86, 211; manbhanjan 166; opera 167; -pala 9, 166 – 7, 172, 307 mandir 310; dharma- 203, 311; griha- 252; natya- 177, 310 – 1; ranga- 137; shiksha- 203, 311; ‘Temple of the Ascent of Man’ 312 Maniharan 293 Maratha 9 Marathi 11, 51, 64; newspaper 313; plays in Bombay 17; playwrights 251; theatre 3, 16, 23, 59, 64, 302; themes in Bengali drama 300 Marwari 17, 89 meeting 31, 102, 128; ‘A Strange Meeting’ 240 – 90 Metiaburj (Garden Reach) 10, 40n23, 293 Meye Monshter Miting 67, 248 minstrel shows 59; ‘Bengalee Baboodom’ 95n25; Koi-Hai Amateur Christy Minstrels 8; minstrelsy 7, 40n19, 251 Miss 189n59; ‘Bankim-Binodini’/ BB 154, 157 – 65; Bino Bibi B.A. 67; Julie Op 224; Mary Odette 221; Nari Sundari 88; Shefali 291; for visiting actresses 90, 198 miss 88; ‘educated’ 5, 63; modern 67, 315, 319; see also farces Mitra, Atulkrishna 67, 75 Mitra, Dinabandhu 67, 173, 222; Sadhabar Ekadoshi 67, 68 Mitra, Kishorichand 56 Mitra, Umeshchandra see widow remarriage Mohapatra, Kelucharan (Guru) 30, 46n97; see also films meeting 4, 102; memorial 6, 128, 287n51; monster 19, 45n77; political 19; ‘strange meeting’ 9, 240 – 83; see also Town Hall Mookerjee, Syama Prasad 21 ‘Motibibi’ 224 mourning 6, 303 Mukhopadhyay, Apareshchandra 134, 137, 201 Mukhopadhyay, Shambhucharan 114

Mumal-Rano 32 Murshidabad court 12 music: and bhakti 119 – 21; Carnatic 16; composer 280, 314; ‘concert’ 31, 120; hall 117, 209; Hindustani ‘classical’ 17; hybrid 31 musical 13, 61; accomplishment 232; ‘Comic Sketch’ 8; compositions 219; extravaganzas 299; forms 53; instrument 25, 26, 207, 234, 239n78; knowledge 294; play 70, 167, 293; practices 10; training 80, 84 musician 9 – 10, 26, 61, 232, 298 mysteries (genre) 156, 178, 179, 188n38, 213; gupta katha 213; The Mysteries of London 178 Naba Natak 31, 74 Naba-nari 55, 57 Nala-Damayanti 115, 141, 221 Narisundari 88, 256, 269, 271, 273, 274, 289n87, 325n26 Nashtaneer 157 Nasiram 127 nati (actress) 4, 5, 24, 31, 46n99, 71 – 80, 81, 82, 130, 134, 169, 170, 215, 231, 237n41, 267, 273 Nati Binodini jatra 85, 103 – 8, 127, 140 Natya-mandir 19, 65, 78, 107, 192, 198, 201, 204, 206, 210 – 11, 220, 254 – 6, 273, 282, 310 Natyasastra 153n103, 105, 326n65 nautch 114 – 15, 230, 293; campaign against 15; dancer 1; girls 14, 294; nautanki 14, 57; nautchnees 41n32 Nil Darpan 26, 84, 262, 318 ‘Nimchand’ 67 Noorjahan, Empress 56 novel 63, 64; ‘-natak’ 63; nayika 67, 157; see also Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra; English Odissi 30 Olcott, Col. Henry Steel 29, 114 – 16, 123

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INDEX

opera 167, 168, 293, 302; ‘fairy’ 7, 8; Hindi 298; operatic 161; Pollard’s Juvenile Opera Company 90 oriental Barbie doll 220; ‘Oriental character’ 121; Orientalism 118; Orientalist settings 299 Oxford Mission 65 Pal, Bipin Chandra 21, 315 pala (musical narrative) 9, 109, 111, 130, 140, 142, 161, 166, 167, 172, 307; -writer 107, 113; see also jatra Palashi (Plassey) 10 Palsaert, Francisco 11 pantomime/panchrangs 7, 8, 32, 68, 82, 118, 304, 312, 316, 323; X’mas 8 Parsi: community 87, 180, 261, 314 – 15; company 3, 87, 199, 264, 291, 298, 300; Parsee Elphinstone Dramatic Club 199; playwright 298; theatre 87, 186n3; Victoria Natak Mandali 23 performance forms: bohurupee 32; katakatha 313; khemta 12, 42n43, 296; kirtan 17, 119, 296; jhumur 12, 168, 296; lai haraoba 30; lavani 11, 17; ojha-pali 12; sadir nritya/ bharatanatyam 11, 41n36; tamasha 11, 41n34; see also sangeet natak performance map 9 – 11 performing communities: baul 12; devadasi/nityasumangali 14, 15, 42n39, 43n52, 43n53, 61; domni 79; kalavantula 11; kirtaniya 12, 68, 80, 139, 168, 318, 325n26; lavani dancers 13, 14, 41n29; nachni 12; ‘nautch girl’/ nautchnee 14, 41n32, 42n43, 43n48; neri-kobi 12, 68, 139; mirasis 74 Permanent Settlement Act 10, 298 Phalke, Dadasaheb 308, 326n52 Pisan, Christine de 54 – 5 prahasan see farces purana 7, 55, 73, 75, 82, 221, 312

puranic/pauranic 75, 76, 86, 109, 113, 118, 127, 129, 140, 279 Querelle des Femmes 54 Radha 9, 30, 75, 83, 103, 104, 139, 145n3, 161 – 74; Radha ki Sati 75; SriRadha geetinatya 167; see also Krishna Radhamoni 60 – 1, 88 Rahasya Sandarbha 76 Rai, Gurmukh 89, 91, 132, 180 railway 7, 69; railway town 3; ‘railway trains in motion’ 9 Raja o Rani 286n47 Rajbala 254 Ramabai, Pandita 57, 251, 252 Ramakrishna Sri/Paramhamsadeb (Gadadhar Chattopadhyay) 29, 33 – 4, 76, 81, 102 – 39, 261 – 2, 312; Math 29; Mission 184; Patitpaban 79 Rambagan Female Kali Theatre; Nari Samiti 254; see also Indubala; Rajbala Ranisundari 256, 270 – 1, 274, 275, 294 rasa 52, 97n62, 162, 167, 187n13, 240; adi- 16, 61; bhakti- 126, 296; karuna- 116; kavya- 53; sringar- 187n10; ‘Tableaux Vivants of’ 97n62 Ratnabali 31 Ravi Varma, Raja 221 Reis and Rayyet 29, 114 – 15 Romance narrative 35 roop 154, 205 – 6 Roop o Rang 78, 192, 198 – 222, 253; ‘character photo’ 22; ‘emotional states’ 238; female body 220 Roy, Raj Krishna 264, 266 Roy, Rammohun 166, 304 sabha (association, meeting) 128, 242 – 3, 247, 250, 261, 282, 285n18; bichitra 255; Hindu Mahasabha 207; shok- 9, 255, 257; smriti- 241, 255, 257 Sahityadarpana 72

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INDEX

sakhi 31, 78, 85, 119; -bhava 30, 47n106; -nritya 12 Sakhibhav 32 Sakuntala 31, 55, 221 Samvad Kaumudi 90 sangeet 7, 323 sangeet natak 3, 11, 16, 59, 293, 314; see also Tilak, Bal Gangadhar Sanjibani 19, 65, 252 sankirtan 76, 77, 84, 120 – 1, 123, 126, 133, 134, 149n56; Harinam 120; lithograph 149n53; nagar120, 150n57, 159 Sarala Devi Chaudhurani 252 Sarat-Sarojini 86, 284, 318 – 19 Sardou, Victorien 122 Sastri, Sivnath 15, 80, 116, 120, 149n56 sati: Apurba Sati 205, 315; -kulanari 184; plays on 75, 79; representation of 98n82 Saurabh 197, 219 Savitri 55, 75, 115, 272, 308 schoolboy 53, 58, 59, 247, 311; homoeroticism 314 Sen, Jatindrakumar 66; see also cartoon Sen, Keshubchandra 62, 81, 120, 150n56, 250, 251 Sen, Nabinchandra 310 seva (service) 63; discourse of 267; samaj- 252 Shakespeare, William 58 Shikshita Patitar Atmacharit 79, 99n90, 252 Simha, Martha Saudamini 56 Sindh 17 Sinha, Kaliprasanna as Bhanumati 31 Sinha, Saratchandra 89; ‘Rangababu’ 89, 142 Sita 55, 75, 85, 263, 272, 280, 308, 313; Sita ki Asati 75; Sitar Bibah 113 Shah, Wajid Ali 10, 293 Somprakash 52, 54, 58, 311 ‘Special Drama’ 3 speech 5, 9, 18, 66, 74, 80, 90, 123, 169, 172

speeches 6, 57, 58, 126, 184, 207, 229, 250, 241 – 83, 284n10, 287n47; see also actress; women Statesman, The 9, 65, 100n115, 128, 199, 251, 254, 162 stree (female): -bhumika 4, 84, 199; -buddhi 315; dharma 216; -geet 17; jati 307; -party actor 3; preksha 98n66; -shiksha 5; see also education; women student 16, 29, 58; chhatra samaj 59, 282; Parsi 59, 71; see also schoolboy Sufi 12; Sufism 31 sundari (beauties) 85, 159, 220; lithographs 99n99 ‘Sundari’ Jayshankar 3, 291 Sur, Dharmadas 199, 257, 287n51 Sushilabala ‘the divine Sushila’ 256, 262, 267 – 9, 274, 279, 287n48 sutradhar 46n99, 73, swadesh prem 319 swadeshi 57, 153n109, 221 Swadeshi era/movement 66, 140, 172, 252 – 3, 257, 262; mother tongue 66 Swarnakumari Devi (Ghoshal), 158, 236n10, 251, 252, 285n25 Swarnamayi, Maharani 69 Tagore, Dwarkanath 17 Tagore, Jyotirindranath 31, 70, 319, 327n75 Tagore, Rabindranath 70, 71, 72, 73, 133, 154n74, 154 – 74, 213, 219, 222, 228, 251, 255, 261, 286n47, 319; critique of ‘mahilatheatre’ 29; Santiniketan/Bolpur asram 71, 232, 284n1 Tagores, Pathuriaghata 70, 121, 124, 257, 323 Tarasundari Dasi 137, 181, 198, 224, 275, 280 – 2, 298, 299; ‘the Divine Sarah of Bengal’ 281; see also Vidyasagar, Pandit Isvara Chandra Tarkalankar, Madanmohan 62 Tarkaratna, Ramnarayan 73 – 4 Tarubala 28 technology: and bhava 221 – 2; bioscope 222, 230, 238n57,

347

INDEX

239n69, 256; gramaphone 22, 207, 294; phantasmagoria 230; recording studio 296 Teenkari Dasi 89, 122, 137, 274, 275 Terry, Ellen 20, 222, 224, 238n59 Thanjavur (Tanjore) 15 theatre: company 3, 38n8, 14; commissioned social reform plays 41, 70, 73, 74, 225; defections 281, 289n109; halls in Calcutta 19; halls in Dacca 298; names: ‘B’ 91; Bengal 19, 31, 265, 281, 298; Bijon 108; Chowringhee 70; Classic 69, 201, 294, 296; Corinthian 291; Emerald 99, 126, 265; Kalika 105, 146n16; Marvel 69; Minerva 19, 48, 271, 293; Natyamandir 311; Oriental Theatre in the Oriental Seminary 16; Sans Souci 70, 124; Star 9, 19, 65, 91, 105, 111, 112, 114, 118, 133, 151n83, 201, 240 – 90, 298; Vina 263 – 64, 281; patronage by royalty: 45n73, 65, 66, 68 – 9, 97, 255, 291; political meetings 18, 45n77; see also Parsi; sangeet natak theatrical: all-female travelling company 14; community 262; companies 199; conceptualisation 221; discourse 5, 13, 61, 76, 78, 202, 203, 209, 227; entertainment 253; experience 166, 174; families 215, 303; fraternity 243, 254; grief 170; make-up 267; practice 221; production 280, 293; romance 213; Surabhi 3, 38n8; venture 199; see also antitheatrical theatricality 154, 157, 159, 161 Theodora, Empress 131 – 2 Theosophy: Theosophical Society 114, 115, 148n36 – 37, 251; theosophist/s 9, 29, 149 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 266 Town Hall 6, 19, 128, 236n13, 241 – 79 transvestism 32

Tree, Viola 209 Tukaram 106 Udbodhan 29, 146, 286n32, 329n59 Union Bank 17 Upadhyaya, Brahmobandhab 240, 284n1 vaishnav 125; aesthetics 80, 166, 272, 309; akhdas 76; dancing 9, 119, 126, 127, 296; ‘interiorisation’ 276; literature 167; lyrics 168; ‘saint’ 114; vaishnavi (boshtomi/neri kabi) 12, 68; see also sankirtan Vaishnavism: ‘conversion narrative’ 309; discourse of 245; Gaudiya128, 221, 241, 261, 276; jat vaishnav 88, 215; neo- 64, 66, 112 – 51, 244, 245, 276; popular 113 – 14, 126; Pushtimarg 217; sakhi bhava 30; see also bhakti: raganuraga Valmiki Pratibha 70 Vidyabhushan, Upendranath 89 – 90, 137, 138, 139, 280 Vidyasagar, Pandit Isvara Chandra 55, 106, 109, 242, 257, 279; Vidyasagar 281 Vidya-Sundar 60, 61, 62, 66, 320 Vivekananda, Swami 19, 104, 106, 136, 178, 189n46, 261; Naren 145n5 Voltaire 83 Vrindavana 76, 167, 170 Walker, Charles H. (Reverend) 65 widow 193, 207, 308, 318; remarriage 44n70, 74, 87, 225, 250, 281 Williams, Monier 73 women: autobiographical writings of Bengali women 196; classification of 52 – 101; confessional voice 6, 90, 159, 191 – 233; exemplary: Exemplary Biography of Females 55; historical/legendary/mythical

348

INDEX

31, 57; and ideology 216; model women 54 – 7; and reform 196; school for 55, 62, 251; as satis 75; streeshiksha 5, 66, 250; in theatre journals 197, 198, 219; as warriors/virangana 55, 57, 94n13, 271; writings by 197; see also education; Sita; speech; widow wages 172, 206, 231, 303, 307, 309; see also livelihood woodcut 25, 26, 61, 157, 159, 320; artist 303; typography 8 work 3, 13 – 14, 21 – 2, 69, 80, 87, 89, 156, 171, 176, 206, 215 – 16, 231, 244, 270 – 1, 282 – 3; class 82; cross-generational 303; -ethic 309;

gendered 74; karya 77; and leisure 15, 156; spiritual salvation in 262; working woman 36, 47n113, 196, 277 workplace 54, 82, 156, 176 – 86, 216, 224 – 5, 275, 300 – 2 World War I 191, 316 World War II 91, 106 Yavana Haridas 79, 104; see also exemplar figures ‘Young Bengal’ 59; ‘The Extravaganza Young Bengal’ 67 Yugavdevata 29, 105 – 6, 147n16 Zamindar Darpan 73, 292

349