Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 9789814968393, 9781003302834

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Western Texts on Indian Dance

Western Texts on Indian Dance An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930

Donovan Roebert

Published by Jenny Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd. 101 Thomson Road #06-01, United Square Singapore 307591 Email: [email protected] Web: www.jennystanford.com

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. Cover image: Postcard Illustration of a Madurai Temple Dancer, Musée Guimet, 1910. ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook)

Contents Preface Acknowledgements

1. Prelude: 1298–1711

vii ix

1

2. Sightings, Viewings, Explications, and Opinions: 1770–1830

21

3. Writings from the Bengal Presidency: 1813–1837

55

4. The Decade of Encounter: 1830–1840

85

5. The Beginnings of the Repetitive Narrative: 1840–1850

121

6. Beautiful Bodies, Graceful Dances, Moral Dilemmas: 1855–1860

139

7. Getting to Grips with the Bayadère: 1860–1870

155

8. A Royal Performance and Other Perceptions: 1870–1880

199

9. A Slowly Brewing Storm: 1880–1890

235

10. A Detour to the Ethnic Exhibitions and Shows: 1880s–1920s

273

11. Dancing in India in the Storm of Reform: 1890–1900

287

12. Loathing, Examination, Analysis, and Appreciation: 1900–1910

347

13. A Decade of Contradiction and Appropriation: 1910–1920

413

14. The Beginning of the End: 1920–1930

453

Postscript

511

Index

529

Preface In collecting and collating the more than 200 text extracts presented in this work, I have sought to be led by the texts themselves rather than by any intention to arrange them according to a predetermined plan or theoretical agenda. What I wanted to achieve in the first place was the vital flow of historically situated thought and sentiment about the ‘nautch girl’, bayadère, or devadasi, as she was spontaneously perceived or else consciously studied by the various commentators who wrote about her in the course of their sojourns in India or from abroad. It also seemed to me that the most useful way for sharing them would be to keep my own comments to the necessary minimum, allowing maximum space for the texts to speak for themselves, unclouded especially by historiographical or ideological opinions. In researching what I have called, for the sake of convenience, ‘Western’ writings on the dances, I haven’t stuck pedantically to texts written only by European or American writers. A number of the passages are drawn from Indian writers who were commenting on Indian dance from within their own country and cultural perspective, though always with a westernized slant. This is the case particularly with Indian writers who wrote on the anti-nautch controversy from the late 19th century onwards. The textual pattern that inevitably emerges is that of the fraught history of thinking and feeling about Indian dance that eventually led to its near extinction by the beginning of the 1930s. This entire history has been for decades now, and still is, the object of much frenetic and controversial speculation. The ongoing unearthing of new documents and perspectives also continues to shift the historiographic perspectives across numerous, often contentious and conflicting, points of view. My hope is that the presentation of these texts within the bounds of a single volume will be of use to students and general readers wanting to explore the primary written sources for themselves without being guided towards any particular theory

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among the several currently espoused by dance historians. I have wanted, that is, to present them in as unopinionated a manner as possible, and I hope that I have succeeded in doing so. The texts selected for inclusion here do not, of course, constitute an exhaustive list. Hundreds of shorter or longer references to Indian dance are found in the writings of explorers, travellers, soldiers, merchants, and especially of women and men resident in India as part of the colonial administration. In choosing passages for this book, I have been guided by a desire to provide as broad a scope as possible of the kind of comments that were made about the dance, and the dancers. Especially, I have wanted to strike a balance between writings that espouse a moral point of view and those that speak more impartially about the dancers and the art of dance itself. Whenever possible, I have included shorter or longer passages that attempt to describe the dance, whether in a secular context, such as a court or private performance, or in its ritual religious manifestations. My point of departure has been that the majority of readers interested in this collection of texts will be sufficiently familiar with the history of Indian dance, at least in outline, not to need a reiteration of that story running parallel with the quoted text extracts which serve to illuminate and document it. My method of choice, in this case again, has been to allow the quoted passages themselves to carry the story forward. Histories of the various dance forms and their vicissitudes during the period covered by this work are plentiful and readily accessible in a number of shorter and longer works, both in book form, and online. I hope that the effort of many months that has gone into the collection and arrangement of these texts will prove as useful and interesting to readers of this book as they have been to me in the course of searching them out and ordering them into a coherent whole.

Acknowledgements Almost all the texts presented here are in the public domain, and any copyright attached to them has expired, both by the terms of the Berne Convention and the copyright laws of the individual countries from which they originate, and this is the case with most of the illustrations too. My thanks are due to the British Library for permission to quote from two texts: P. Ragaviah Charry, A Short Account of the Dancing Girls etc., and Elizabeth Gwillim, Letters from Madras. Both of these texts in their full original form exist as sole copies at the library’s archives. My grateful thanks are also due to Mme. Michèle Fiès for permission to quote the full hand-written text that accompanies Jules Blum’s watercolours of the bayadères in Pondicherry, executed c. 1877. Acknowledgements for permission to use pictorial data are due to the Victoria & Albert Museum (‘Nob Kishen’s Nautch Party’), the Princeton University online archives (‘The Bayadères’), the Jerome Robbins Dance Collection at the New York Public Library (‘Dancing the Malapou’), the British Library (three etchings by L.H. de Rudder, being illustrations in Alexis Soltykoff, Voyages dans l’Inde), the Musée des colonies (photograph of Tanjore Gnyana), and Mme. Michèle Fiès (two bayadère watercolours by Jules Blum), and Madhurakkaran Karthikeyan (photograph of an unknown hereditary dancer in procession).

Chapter 1

Prelude: 1298–1711 The earliest Western writings on Indian dance with which this collection is concerned occur in the early Renaissance period, and involve travellers, explorers, and missionaries who visited India and recorded the religious, cultural and social systems of its inhabitants. In all of these earliest writers on the dance and the dancers, we find a mode of ambivalence that colours their narrative. On the one hand, they are impressed by the sheer beauty, grandeur, social status, and wealth of the practitioners of the dance tradition, but on the other, there is a constant bafflement and disapproval of the fact that these ‘immoral women’ are publicly celebrated, have intimate extra-marital relations with male partners, and are yet highly placed and honoured in the practice and life of the temple tradition. European accounts of temple dancers or ‘devadasis’ (in many variants of transcription), though they vary in underlying attitude, usually describe them in ambiguous terms. They are seen as religious ritualists with an accompanying sexual or wifely role, beautiful, charming, educated, prestigious, wealthy, artistically gifted—but also promiscuous, avaricious, duplicitous, and mysterious. This is a pattern of conceptualization that runs throughout the devadasi narrative from the late 13th century to the mid-20th. It is really only Jacob Haafner, among the earliest writers, whose account is wholly positive. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Figure 1.1 Cover illustration from the French edition of Abraham Rogerius’s Open Door to Hidden Heathenism. The picture depicts a semi-nude dancer performing in infernal flames.

In 1298, Marco Polo (1254–1324), who had been in India as emissary of Kublai Khan between 1292 and 1294, writes of the chief task of the temple dancers as being to reconcile the god and the goddess when they are at odds with each other, not enjoying sexual union, and therefore creating conditions for social disaster. The dancer’s task is to placate the divinities by ‘singing, dancing, leaping, tumbling, and every sort of exercise to amuse the god and goddess, and to reconcile them.’

Prelude

He tells us that:

They have certain abbeys in which are gods and goddesses to whom many young girls are consecrated; their fathers and mothers presenting them to that idol for which they entertain the greatest devotion. And when the monks of a convent desire to make a feast to their god, they send for all those consecrated damsels and make them sing and dance before the idol with great festivity. They also bring meats to feed their idol withal; that is to say, the damsels prepare dishes of meat and other good things and put the food before the idol, and leave it there a good while, and then the damsels all go to their singing and dancing and festivity for about as long as a great Baron might require to eat his dinner. By that time, they say the spirit of the idol has consumed the substance of the food, so they remove the viands to be eaten by themselves with great jollity. This is performed by these damsels several times a year, until they are married. The reason assigned for summoning these damsels to these feasts is, as the monks say, that the god is vexed and angry with the goddess, and will hold no communion with her; and they say that if peace be not established between them things will go from bad to worse, and they never will bestow their grace and benediction. So they make those girls come in the way described, to dance and sing, all but naked, before the god and goddess. And those people believe that the god often solaces himself with the society of the goddess …

Further descriptions of their ritual tasks are given, among others, by the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti (1395–1469) in 1420, who describes a Vijayanagar procession ‘in which are young women richly adorned, who sing hymns to the god, accompanied by a great concourse of people …’; by the Portuguese trader Domingo Paes in 1520, who tells us that ‘they feed the idols every day’ and that their wealth and prestige did not exclude their being of ‘loose character’; by another Venetian merchant, Gasparo Balbi (1550–1623), who speaks of them only

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as ‘harlots’; by the Danish soldier Jón Ólafsson (1593–1679), who observed the devadasis from the Danish fort in Tranquebar, and by Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), the Italian polymath, composer and early ethnographer, in 1623, who writes of their ritual dance that ‘their dancing was high, with frequent leaping and odd motions, sometimes inclining their haunches as if they meant to sit down, sometimes rising very high … always holding one arm stretched out before them …’ The passages in Niccolò de’ Conti which mention dancing are sparse and brief, and extracts are given here in the order in which they appear in the pages of Conti’s account of Indian customs to Poggio Bracciolini, secretary to Pope Eugenius IV, who wrote them down for publication in his work, The Travels of Niccolò de’ Conti. ‘Bizenegalia’ is Bracciolini’s transcription for ‘Vijayanagar’: In Bizenegalia also, at a certain time of the year, their idol is carried through the city, placed between two chariots, in which are young women richly adorned, who sing hymns to the god, and accompanied by a great concourse of people. Many, carried away by the fervour of their faith, cast themselves on the ground before the wheels, in order that they may be crushed to death—a mode of death which they say is very acceptable to their god … Thrice in the year they keep festivals of especial solemnity. On one of these occasions the males and females of all ages, having bathed in the rivers or the sea, clad themselves in new garments, and spend three entire days in singing, dancing, and feasting …

Their weddings are celebrated with singing, feasting, and the sound of trumpets and flutes, for, with the exception of organs, all the other instruments in use among them for singing and playing are similar to our own. They make sumptuous feasts both day and night, at which there is both singing and instrumental music. Some sing, dancing in a circle, after our manner; while others sing forming a line in single file, one after the other, and exchanging little

Prelude

painted rods, of which each person carries two, with those whom they meet on turning; the effect of which he describes as being extremely pretty …

Domingo Paes, writing on the dancers of Hampi in the Vijayanagar Empire in 1520, notes the practices: … When it is morning, the king comes to this House of Victory (i.e. the temple), and betakes himself to that room where the idol is with its Brahmans, and he performs his prayers and ceremonies. Outside the house are some of his favourites, and on the square are many dancing girls dancing … And the king withdraws to the interior of his palace… (and) the courtesans and bayadères remain dancing in front of the temple and idol for a long time … Every Saturday the dancing girls are obliged to go to the palace to dance and posture before the king’s idol, which is in the interior of his palace …

He also mentions the honour in which the temple dancers are held despite their being ‘of loose character’: … (the women attached to the temples) are of loose character and live in the best streets in the city. It is the same in all their cities; their streets have the best rows of houses. They are very much esteemed, and are classed among those honoured ones who are the mistresses of the captains. Any respectable man may go to their houses without any blame attaching thereto. These women are allowed even to enter the presence of the wives of the king, and they stay with them, and eat betel with them, a thing which no other person may do, no matter what his rank may be.

Gasparo Balbi voyaged in the East Indies on merchant’s business from 1579 to 1588, and published his account of the journey in 1590 as Viaggio dell’Indie Orientali. The work was translated into Dutch in 1706, and it is from this version that the following extracts are translated. Balbi tells us nothing about the dance or ritual of the devadasis, recording only that:

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In this city one sees a chariot having eight wheels, built up very high and gilded all over. At the top sits a huge, gilded copper idol, called Pagodo by the inhabitants. This chariot is provided with different sets of steps on which their Gioghi, or their priests and high priests, are seated, who serve the deity, and earn a living by this service. At the same time, certain unchaste women, who trade in their unchastity, sit on this chariot, and everything above their keep which is earned by their unchastity is given over to the idol, for which reason they are known as harlots of the pagoda …

It seems that Balbi is confusing the idea of the idol with that of the temple in his use of the odd proper name, ‘Pagodo’, for the deity. The Italian noun, ‘Gioghi’, which is left untranslated in the Dutch version ordinarily means a ‘yoke’ but might be Balbi’s transliteration of ‘yogin’. The city to which he refers is ‘Negapatan’ (Nagapattinam), and he continues: … there is a certain secluded area where more than four-hundred harlots dwell, who, in order to have their share in the paradise after death, as they conceive it, share the proceeds of their whoredom with the idol. The origin of these many harlots comes about through their parents’ offering them to the temple, and training them up from their childhood to bring honour to the idol through this practise.

The Icelandic Danish soldier Jón Ólafsson served in South India in the early 1620s and was posted as a guard of the Dansborg Fort of the newly acquired Danish territory of Tranquebar. The record of his experiences in India was first published in 1661, and his account includes several references to ‘temple harlots’, the term by which the devadasi dancers were by that date regularly described. In the first extract, he provides a picture of the dancers in a temple procession: … And when the evening drew on, this chariot with its idols and all the aforesaid pomp was dragged to its usual place opposite the temple doors. And when they approached

Prelude

with it, all the harlots came out of the church, pàgoda sìrke or temple harlots, to dance before the gods, and with them their master, who is called baldor. He hires them out every day for money, both to the soldiers and the bachelors in the town, and this money is put into the treasure-house of the temple and is used for its upkeep; but the harlots get their keep out of the revenues of the temple, paid to them by its wardens.

The priest, who usually sits by the church door, and is called brameni, also goes out to greet the gods with great humility and obeisances, and then they are carried in, in great honour, by three picked men among them, the sons of the priest, with much beating of drums and loud blasts on the trumpets, and other music, and also with the dancing of the temple harlots in their finery, which between whiles, when they are not serving the gods, is hung up in the church. Their costume is as follows. They have, like others, drawers of gold brocade studded with precious stones and pearls and with much money, and a splendid kerchief’ costing a very great sum over their breast, with other rings and precious stones of surpassing value, placed about their body and taken off as is convenient. At last, their toil being over, every man returns to his own house. These aforesaid temple maidens dance always before the gods every night from nine o’clock till midnight, and about the twelfth hour of the night, that is midnight, each of the twelve gods is carried up one street and down another, in a chariot, with torches, fireworks, trumpetblowing and dancing, also the beating of drums and other such marks of honour. We who were standing on guard on the walls of the fortress used to hear this every night.

His next description concerns the arrival of an important priest of the temple, whom he designates as a ‘bishop’, and whose arrival is greeted by a number of ceremonies, including a performance by the dancers:

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… messengers were sent before him, so that he might not come unawares. At once there was a great commotion in the town. All the temple harlots set to adorn and deck themselves in their usual finery, and all the fighting men of the town to make ready, also all the temple servants and priests. All this host with many drums and trumpeters went a little way down from the town along fair sands, which are as smooth as could be, and so beautiful when one is walking in the eye of the sun, that one grain looks like the most beautiful gold, and the next like silver. And when this chief priest, with a great company, crossed the river on an elephant, he reclining in a palanquin made of ivory, gilded and adorned with the most costly work, in the which he was carried, all this host began to display their usual pomp with drums, trumpets, dancing of harlots and sleights of hand exhibited by the soldiers, and this noise and rejoicing lasted all the way back to the town, until he reached the temple. Then all the drums were beaten, trumpets pealed and the women flung themselves about in strange dances, according to their manner, and as their baldor taught them. He has all authority over them daily, and has a resounding copper disc, with a clear note, in his left hand, which he struck with a very beautifully wrought steel hammer, and every stroke on it was a sign to them, what figure of the dance they should begin. Soon afterwards he [the bishop] entered the temple and was there a long while worshipping the gods …

The last brief mention of the dancers occurs in the context of the arrival of a European military figure, a General, for whom a festive dance is also performed: … The next following day all the Indian merchants who lived in the city went out to the ship to welcome the General. And when he came on shore they had ordered all the church hussies and their baldor, and all the soldiers of Trangobarich to meet him as soon as he landed, dancing in their accustomed manner.

Prelude

The editor of the 1932 English edition of Ólafsson’s memoirs informs the reader, with reference to the first of the excerpts above, that the writer is speaking about ‘temple dancing-women’ or ‘devadasis, who are professional harlots’, and recommends for further reading on the subject a section in the 1893 Madras Manual of Administration, in which the following brief article on the devadasis appears: Every temple according to its size entertains a set of them, to the number eight, twelve, or more. They perform their religious duties at the temple to which they belong, twice a day, morning and evening; they are also obliged to assist at all public religious ceremonies; at private entertainments they come for payment [nautch]. They are reared to this life from their infancy; they are taken from any caste, and are not unfrequently of respectable birth; the life to which the daughter is destined brings no disgrace on the family; until recently in the native population these women were the only females who were allowed to learn to read …

In some places there exists two kinds of dancing girls, the dancing women differing from the pagoda dancers; these are distinguished as dausy and devadausy. Dancing girls when performing are accompanied by two men singers, who while singing also play the cymbals [jaulry]; one or more old women join in the song, and clap their hands during the performance; these are generally dancing girls who have given up the profession from age or other causes … Nautches are given at marriage ceremonies, at feasts, and on other public occasions; among zemindars are of almost daily occurrence; dancing girls frequently receive valuable presents in money, shawls, gold bangles, or rings, which are bestowed on them during performance. Devadausis are without exception prostitutes; they receive a fixed allowance out of the temple endowment [devadauyam]; some are the concubines of one of the priests or of some native of consideration, while others are common women, as are all who do not serve in the temple; they are not allowed

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to marry. Their male children usually call themselves moodellies … and pillays …, if in good circumstances; and have no difficulty in acquiring a proper position in society; the female children are generally brought up to the trade of the mothers; it is customary with a few castes to present their superfluous daughters to the pagodas with a view to their being brought up as dausies [bhogam jauty] …

The editor also informs us that Ólafsson’s ‘baldor’ is taken from the Portuguese ‘bailadeira’ meaning dancer. This implies that the male ‘master’ of the devadasi group was a dance teacher or nattuvanar. Our next encounter with the dancers is given by Pietro della Valle, and comes from the same years in which Ólafsson was in India. History tells us that he travelled to the East to cure himself of a broken heart resulting from unrequited love, which had almost driven him to suicide. He was in India in 1623 and 1624, where he visited Surat, Goa, and Keladi in Karnataka. His several recollections of various dancers are among the richest that we have from the 17th century. In the following passage he describes a set of dancers of Kali (Colè) in Ikkeri in ‘Portuguese India’: I saw going along the streets several companies of young girls, well cloth’d, after their manner, with some of the above-mentioned wrought and figur’d Silk from the girdle downwards; and from thence upward either naked, or else with very pure linen, either of one colour, or strip’d and wrought with several, besides a scarf of the same work cast over the shoulder. Their heads were deck’d with yellow and white flowers form’d into a high and large Diadem, with some sticking out like Sunbeams, and others twisted together and hanging down in several fashions, which made a pretty sight. All of them carry ‘d in each hand a little round painted Stick, about a span long, or a little more, which they struck together after a musical measure, to the sound of Drums and other instruments, and one of the skilfullest of the company

Prelude

sung one verse of a song, at the end of which they all reply’d seven, or eight, times in the number of their meter with the word, ‘Colè, Colè, Colè,’ which signifies I know not what, but, I believe, ‘tis a word of joy. Singing in this manner they went along the street, eight or ten together, being either friends, or neighbours, follow’d by many other women, not dress’d in the same fashion, but who were either their Mothers, or Kins-women. I imagin’d it was for some extraordinary Festival, and I was willing to have follow’d them to see whither they went and what they did; but, being in the company of others, I could not do so, nor had my Companions the same Curiosity, as indeed the Portugal are not at all curious. I understood afterwards that they went to the Piazza of the great Temple which is moderately large, and there danc’d in circles, singing their songs till it was late; and that this was a Festival which they keep three dayes together at the end of a certain Feast in Honour of Gauri, one of their Goddesses, Wife of Mohedaca; and therefore ‘tis celebrated by girls … … in a close place opposite to the Temple, I saw one of those very great Carrs, or Charriots, wherein upon certain Feasts they carry their Idols in Procession, with many people on it and Dancing-women, who play on musical instruments, sing and dance …

These are Shivaite dancers, and ‘Mohedaca’ signifies ‘Mahadeva’ or Shiva. Della Valle espies the same group of dancers again at evening: That same evening I saw the companies of girls again, and, following them, I found that they did not go to the Piazza of the Temple, as they had done the two nights before, but into one of the King’s Gardens, which for this purpose stood open for every body and is nothing but a great field, planted confusedly with shady and fruit bearing Trees, Sugar Canes and other Garden plants. Hither almost the whole City flock’d, Men and Women. and all the companies of the flower’d Virgins, who, putting

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themselves into circles, here and there danc’d and sung; yet their dancing was nothing else but an easie walking round, their sticks alwayes sounding; onely sometimes they would stretch forth their legs, and now and then cowre down as if they were going to sit, one constantly singing, and the rest repeating, the word Colè, Colè. There wanted not other Dancing-women, who exceeded the former in skill and dexterity. In conclusion, they gather’d into several companies to supper, with the other Women that accompany’d them …

He next gives an account of an agile public dancer presenting a private performance for the son of his host, the petty Rajah of Ikkeri: With those that came to fetch him came also a publick Dancing-woman, who perform’d a pretty piece of agility in his presence; for, standing upon one foot, when the Drums and other instruments sounded, with the other she swiftly turned round in the Air a large Iron Ring, about a span in Diametre, without letting it fall off her great Toe, and at the same time with one hand toss’d two hollow brass balls, catching one in her Hand whilst the other was aloft, and so alternately and very nimbly without ever letting them fall; which indeed was great dexterity, to be imploy’d at the same time with the foot and the hand, standing firm all the while on the other foot without support and yet attending to the Musick and this for a good space together: during which an old Man with a white beard and bald head who brought her stood behind her, crying all the while, ‘Abid, Abid, Abid’, which in their language signifies ‘Yes’, and in this instance as much as Good, Good, Good …

Then comes a brief description of a ‘religious dance’ performed in the course of a palanquin procession: Before the Palanchino march’d a numerous company of Souldiers and other people, many Drums and Fifes, two strait long Trumpets and such brass Timbrels as are

Prelude

used in Persia, Bells and divers other Instruments, which sounded as loud as possible, and amongst them was a troop of Dancing-women adorn’d with Girdles, Rings upon their Legs, Neck-laces and other ornaments of Gold, and with certain Pectorals, or Breast-plates, almost round, in the fashion of a Shield and butting out with a sharp ridge before, embroyder’d with Gold and stuck either with Jewels, or some such things, which reflected the Sun-beams with marvellous splendor; as to the rest of their bodies they were uncover’d, without any Veil, or Head-tire. When they came to the Piazza the Palanchino stood still, and, the multitude having made a ring, the Dancing-women fell to dance after their manner; which was much like the Moris-dances of Italy, onely the Dancers sung as they danc’d, which seem’d much better. One of them who, perhaps, was the Mistress of the rest danc’d along by herself, with extravagant and high jumpings, but always looking towards the Palanchino. Sometimes she cower’d down with her haunches almost to the ground, sometimes, leaping up, she struck them with her feet backwards, continually singing and making several gestures with her Hands; but after a barbarous manner and such as amongst us would not be thought handsome.

Della Valle gives a more detailed description of the dance itself in the following final passage: Neither were there wanting about the Idols many of their Priests, or Ministers, of the Temple who accompany’d them; particularly one who seem’d the chief and Archimandrita of the rest; besides abundance of Torches whose light dispell’d the darkness of the Moonless night. In this order they came into the Piazza, and there, after they had made a large ring, the dancing began; first two Dancingwomen, one from one side of the circle, and another from another, yet both with their Faces always turn’d towards the Idols, walk’d three steps forward and then three backward; and this they did innumerable times. I suppose

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it was a way of saluting the Idols. After the said two Dancers alone had done thus two others from the several sides joyn’d with them, and they did the same again, three and three. This Salutation, or Preamble of the Ballet, being many times repeated, they began to dance, namely two that danc’d better than the rest, one on the right side of the circle, and the other on the left, both with their Faces, never with their backs, towards the Palanchino of the Idols, though often in the Dance they retir’d backwards as well as went forwards. Their dancing was high, with frequent leapings and odd motions, sometimes inclining their haunches as if they meant to sit down, sometimes rising very high and causing the skirt wherewith they are cover’d from the girdle downwards to fly out, and always holding one Arm stretch’d out before them, wherewith they now and then made as if they were thrusting, or fencing; besides other mad gestures which were all accompany’d with words which they sang, and sometimes with cries more apt to give horror than delight. Hence, while all the other Dancing-women (that is those who were uncover’d and loosed for dancing) danced all in a company together further distant from the Idols, striking their little sticks and singing, being guided by a Man who danced with them and was their Master, the other Dancers who were cloth’d stood about the Idols, but danced not, nor ever moved from their place; onely they accompany’d the Show, very fine with Ornaments of Gold and Jewels, and some of them having Flowers, others leaves of Betle, or other Odoriferous Herb, in their Hands.

This Dance being ended, the Procession went forwards with the same Pomp and a numerous Train of Men and Women of all sorts. They went not round the great Piazza in front of the Temple but within the outermost walls of the Temple, which is surrounded by very large street, inhabited for the most part by the said Dancers, or publick Strumpets. The circuit of the Procession began from the right Hand as you come out of the Temple, which

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comes to be the left as you enter in … This procession stop’d at several places in the streets through which it past; and at every such stopping, the above-mentioned Dancing, Perambulations and other performances were again repeated; whence the Show lasted a good while and concluded at length with the last Dance in the Piazza before the Temple-Gate; which ended, the Procession with the Idols re-entered the Temple, where it being replaced according to their accustomed Ceremonies, the solemnity ended and all the people departed.

About thirty years later, in 1651, the work of Abraham Rogerius (1609–1649) was published under the title De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom (‘The Open Door to Hidden Heathenism’). Rogerius was a Calvinist missionary and translator for the Dutch East India Company who resided in Surat and later at Pulicat (Pazhaverkadu) on the Coromandel Coast. He writes as follows: Now when the idol has been carried (in procession) through the public streets, it is brought back to the temple. Once arrived there, certain whores are at hand who are consecrated to the temple, whose vocation is to dance before the idol of Vishnu and Ishwara. When these women dance, songs to the honour of the idol are sung, with blasts of trumpets and beating of drums, and the god is shown every honour and offered all the pleasures and entertainments that are given to the greatest personages in the land. It seems to me a very strange affair that, while these Brahmins consider the temples to be holy places, and the idols themselves so sacred that the sudras may not touch them, they also place immoral women at the service of these gods. They allow these women to dance even though they are openly immoral, and even though their promiscuity is known to everyone. It seems to me a strange matter, but it will not seem so strange if one understands how they feel about these women. Once,

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when I spoke with the Brahmin, Padmanaba, about these whores, he said that, though these prostitutes lived so promiscuously, there was that within them which made them blessed. This comes about when they remain faithful to their lovers and do not break the agreements which they have made with them. By serving and treating their lovers well, they too will attain their reward in the life to come …

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689), a gem dealer and traveller who purchased the famous ‘Tavernier Blue Diamond’, later re-cut into the ‘Hope Diamond’, published his Travels in India in 1676. In these he makes some allusions to the devadasis, for whom he uses his own nomenclature, calling them ‘baladines’: At the March full moon there is a solemn festival for the idol which has the form of a serpent, of which I have spoken in the first book of this account of India. This festival lasts nine days, and while it lasts both men and beasts remain idle: the majority of the latter are ornamented with circles of vermilion around the eyes, with which the horns are also painted, and when there is any special love for the animal leaves of tinsel are added. Each morning the idol is worshipped, the girls dancing round it for an hour to the sound of flutes and drums, after which all eat together and enjoy themselves till the evening, when they again worship the idol and dance round it a second time …

Tavernier describes a temple, about six miles from Cambay (Khambhat) in Gujarat, which most of the courtesans in India used to visit: When the old courtesans have amassed a sum of money in their youth, they buy with it young slaves, to whom they teach dancing and lascivious songs, and all the tricks of their infamous trade. When these young girls have reached the age of eleven or twelve years, their mistresses take them to this pagoda, and they believe that it will

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be good fortune to them to be offered and abandoned to this idol.

He also emphasises the popularity of the dancers and their performances for the Indian public, both high and low, in these three brief excerpts: … On the 12th, the gunners not having omitted to repair to the tent of the Nawab, he ordered them to be paid for three months, and promised them at the close of the current month to pay the fourth. They had no sooner received this money than they treated one another, and the baladines carried off more than half of it …

Immediately on the lieutenant returning to the Raja, he himself came to meet me, and assuring me that I was welcome, told me that he wished me to halt at a place which he indicated under certain trees, a coss and a half from where we were, and that he would not fail to come to drink with me. He came towards evening, and we remained there two days together to amuse ourselves; the Raja having caused the baladines to come, without whom the Persians and Indians do not think they can enjoy themselves properly … The English also were present at our small parties. And they entertained us two or three times as pleasantly as they could, having baladines, of whom there is no lack in this country, always present after the repast …

In 1711, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), a missionary sent to Tranquebar by the Danish King, records that ‘the Dewataschigol (devadasigal) or servants of the gods whose duties consist in singing and dancing … have to learn to read and write … (and are) the cleverest and finest maidens … They should have flawless bodies, and are not allowed to get married. They are well-adorned and can immediately be recognized by their external appearance for who they are …’ Nevertheless, he concludes, they are also to be seen as ‘whores’. Ziegenbalg was a close observer and student of Hindu customs and religious

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practices, noting that the devadasi has her origins in the courts of heaven: As the heathens think, Svarga, the heaven of the gods, to be like the court of an earthly king, only much greater and grander, they ascribe to the gods also different kinds of attendants and servants (among whom are) Devadasis, the female dancers and courtesans of Svarga …

… The large pagodas have large cars, on which the images of the god are carried about once a year … At festivals, when they are dragged along, they are adorned with shells and other things; and on every one of them there are (besides the idol) Brahmins, dancing girls, and musicians.

… Subhramanya … is said to be very fond of the fair sex and music. Wherefore, also those girls who serve in the pagodas, the so-called Devadasis, or dancing girls, are betrothed and married to him, and then not allowed to marry men, though by no means prevented from prostituting themselves …

The Devadasis of Svarga, the world of the gods, correspond to the dancing girls in the temples; for just as these dance before the images of the gods, and are embraced by their devotees, so those are said to dance before the gods of Svarga, and to be embraced by them. The most celebrated among them are Urvasi, Rambha, and Tilottama. Originally the celestial Devadasis were daughters of Brahma, and then reproduced by the churning of the ocean of milk; and a certain number of them … were the incarnated wives of Krishna.

There are several mentions by Ziegenbalg of devadasis dancing during festivals, and these brief allusions to the ‘dancing girls’ all resemble the following short excerpt: At the conclusion of the festival they take the idols from the temples, and carry them in pomp to the place where the cattle have been again collected. The girls of pleasure, named Devadasis, who are found at all ceremonies, are

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also not wanting here. They march at the head of a great concourse of people; now and then making a pause to exhibit their wanton movements and charm the audience with their lascivious songs. … The festivals form a principal part of their divine worship; but, in reality, they are nothing but sports, made up of diversion and amusement, and accompanied by dances, shows, and lewdness; but just because they are such, the Hindus are exceedingly fond of them, and not willing to exchange their system of gross idolatry …

We see then, in European attitudes from the Renaissance period onwards, a lingering bemusement and sometimes heavyhanded condemnation of non-normative female sexuality from both the Catholic and the Reformist Protestant side. This attitude tends to soften somewhat, particularly on the French side, in the late 18th century when the socio-political notions of the French Enlightenment begin to bear on the worldview of travellers and explorers, and the approach to foreign cultures becomes more formal and more rational. This attitude is maintained into the early 19th century, though the stigma of ‘lewdness’ tends to remain. In the early period dealt with in this section, we are confronted by the Western Renaissance worldview whose tenor is split between the humanist thirst for knowledge about civilizations outside of Europe and the abiding influence of the Christian moral code. The dancers of India are viewed as beautiful and strange, as part of a religious system that both fascinates and repels, and finally written off as immoral women because their sexuality fails to conform to the European norm of monogamous conjugality. This is a pattern that accompanies Western observation of the hereditary temple and court dancer throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, though it is varied in many cases where Christian morality is not taken into account. The devadasi, both as a ritual practitioner in the temple context and as a secular artist, becomes the object of a variety of ethical and aesthetic interpretations, and is seldom absent from any written or pictorial account of life in India.

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References 1. Polo, Marco & Yule, Henry (transl.), The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, Newly Translated with Notes, Maps and Other Illustrations, London: John Murray, 1875. 2. Bellemo, Vincenze, I viaggi di Niccolò de’ Conti: Risconstrati ed Illustrate con Proemio Storico Documenti Originali e Carte Geografiche, Milan: A. Brigola & C., 1883.

3. Bracciolini, Poggio & Jones, J. Winter (transl.), The Travels of Nicolò Conti in the East in the Early Part of the Fifteenth Century, as Related by Poggio Bracciolini in his Work entitled ‘Historia de Varietate Fortune’, Lib. IV—in Major, R.H. (ed.), India in the Fifteenth Century; Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India in the Century Preceding the Portuguese Discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, London: Hakluyt Society, 1857. 4. Sewell, Robert; Nunes, Fernao & Paes, Domingo, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): a Contribution to the History of India, London: S. Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., 1900.

5. Balbi, Gasparo, Aanmerklyke Zee en Land Reysen Gedaan door Caspar Balby, Venetiaans Koopman, naar Oost-Indien: Van’t Jaar 1579 tot het Jaar 1588, Leiden: Pieter Van Der A., 1706. 6. Phillpotts, Dame Bertha (transl.), The Life of the Icelander Jón Ólafsson, Traveller to India, Translated from the Icelandic Edition of Dr Sigfús Blöndal, London: Hakluyt Society, 1932.

7. Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency, vol. 3, 1893, C.D. Maclean (ed.), New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1990.

8. Della Valle, Pietro & Havers, G. (ed.) & Grey, Edward, The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India: from the Old English translation of 1664; edited, with the Life of the Author, an Introduction, and Notes, vol. 2, London: Hakluyt Society, 1892.

9. Rogerius, Abraham, De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heidendom, ’s-Gravenhage: W. Caland, 1915.

10. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste & Ball, V. (transl.), Travels in India, London: Macmillan & Co., 1889. 11. Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaeus & Metzger, G.J. (transl.), Genealogy of the South Indian Gods, Madras: Higginbotham and Co., 1869.

Chapter 2

Sightings, Viewings, Explications, and Opinions: 1770–1830 In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, several European writers dealt in their writings with the ‘dancing girl’ of the temple and court. Again, these were travellers and explorers, or employees of the East India Company, or Christian clergymen working to convert the Indians.

Figure 2.1 A dancer with musicians. Illustration by Pierre Sonnerat for his work, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, etc., 1782. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Pierre Sonnerat (1784–1814) was sent to India by royal command to study Indian customs, social life, and religion, and his work remained influential for decades after publication. He made close studies of his subject in various parts of India between 1774 and 1781. His approach was a ‘scientific’ one, in which accuracy of description was valued above subjective perceptions. In addition to his text, he also made several drawings of devadasis dancing in a variety of settings, including rathotsava processions and weddings. Sonnerat writes about the devadasis he encountered in Surat: Surat is celebrated for its bayadères, of whom the true name is devadasi … they consecrate themselves to the honour of the gods, and to the following of processions, dancing and singing before their images. A worker usually destines to this profession the youngest of his daughters, and sends her to the temple before she is marriageable. They are given to the masters of dance and music: the Brahmins cultivate their youth while robbing them of its innocent beginnings, and they end up as public women. They then form a corps among themselves and associate themselves with musicians for the purpose of dancing for and amusing those who call on them. They dance and sing to the sound of the tal … and the matalan … which animate them, put them into action, and regulate their rhythms and their steps. The one who plays the tal leans at the side of the dancers, and seems to communicate with them, judging by the way they stamp their feet, and the passion conveyed by their gestures and in their postures. The movement of their eyes, which are half closed while they sway their bodies negligently and soften their voices, reflects the greatest voluptuousness. Other men at the rear chorus the refrain of every verse. The bayadères are at great pains to prepare themselves when called: they perfume themselves, cover themselves with jewels, and change into garments woven of gold or silver …

From Sonnerat we turn to Jacob Haafner (1754–1809), whose approach to the devadasis is altogether kinder and more understanding. He was something of a rationalist with strong

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anti-imperialist and anti-Christianizing leanings, and it did not hurt his sympathies for the dancers that he fell deeply in love with Mamia, who was one of them. Of the imperialist mindset he had this to say: ‘Scoundrels, spendthrifts, criminals, bankrupts, and other bad people; everyone runs to the Indies, to oppress the poor Indians, to plunder them, and to kill them’. His love for Mamia was conceived in 1786 but ended tragically with her early death, after which, in 1787, he returned to Europe. Haafner precedes his chapter on the devadasis with the note that ‘one does find, here and there, descriptions of these dancers by travel writers, but the little that they say is not sufficient, and then mostly incorrect, or of no consequence, so that I have no doubt that a diligent and ample description of such an indispensable and necessary class of women in this country will be welcomed by the reader’. He then proceeds on a lengthy and detailed account of the types of dancers he has encountered, which is not given in full here, but whose outlines are fairly reflected in the following extracts: There is a big difference between the devadasis or dancers of the pre-eminent temples and those who are called to dance at Natches (festivals) and on other occasions to entertain the guests.

Among the latter there are several sorts and classes … some of these live together independently in troupes of ten or more, travel from place to place and share their profits with their fellow performers and the musicians who accompany them. Others are under the supervision of Daiyas, or old ex-dancers who take the profits and feed and house the dancers in return. Others again are really mere slaves of such old women who, in their youth, have obtained very young girls through purchase or adoption, and have taught their art to them as a means of ensuring their own support in their old age. … But those who are called devadasis differ greatly from all of the abovenamed. There are two types of devadasis; those of the first rank are in the service of the foremost deities, Vishnu and Shiva …

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They live in the precincts of the temples of these deities, which they have entered in their childhood, and have been trained in music, dancing and singing. They are also taught reading and writing, including reading of the puranas, which is forbidden to respectable women and girls …

This first class of devadasis are not permitted to leave the temple premises without the permission of the chief priests or purohits … but when the idol of their deity is taken out in procession through the streets—then they are required to dance before the same, and to sing in praise of their deeds.

The devadasis of the second class are in the service of the lesser gods … they do not live in the temple precincts but have their residences in the town or city, and have perfect freedom to act, and to come and go, as they please, as long as they perform a certain number of daily services in the temple, which they carry out by turns. At certain solemn sacrifices and processions they are also duty bound to appear in order to lend lustre to the ceremonies …

Their paramours … are more generous and wealthier than the Brahmins … (but) among these dancers one does not encounter the shamelessness, the offensive and disgusting manners … which one associates with their counterparts in Europe … They do not, like those in Europe, seek to rob … and ruin … their lovers, and to leave them for others when there is nothing more to be had from them. No! They are content with a moderate allowance and are generally very faithful, and there are many examples of these dancers who have committed themselves to the flames together with their deceased lovers.

… A young and beautiful dancer in her full attire, with her unforced and easy attitude, and her proud step, is indeed an enchanting and seductive creature. Her simple headdress, the moderate exposure of her beautiful bosom, her rounded arms with the tight-fitting bodice … in a word, the whole dress of these girls is perfectly calculated

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to enhance their natural attractiveness … every movement of their limbs shows them at their loveliest … so that their whole figure is visible to the eye in the most alluring, but also in the most modest way …

The devadasis of the first and second rank are treated with reverence and fine courtesy … They stand under the protection of the public and enjoy many privileges … They are seen as indispensable ornaments in religious services and at special festivities, and at the gatherings of eminent personages …

Figure 2.2 ‘Devedaschis’. Illustration of two dancers by Jacob Haafner in his work, Reize in eenen Palanquin, etc., 1808.

Describing the dances themselves, he continues:

Her dances are so very different from ours. Some of those exist in agile and rapid movements of the limbs, which are however controlled and graceful; others again, in airy and artful leaps and steps. They are excellent pantomimes.

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With a prodigious accuracy of posture and gestures, they can, while singing and dancing, express a love-story, or any other subject—even a fight—and they have brought the art of expressing such passions to such a pinnacle that our dancers and extras would figure but very poorly on stage with an Indian dancer, with their cold, meaningless gestures, turnings of the body and breakneck jumps.

At once they uncover their faces and let the veil fall. Now they step forward, and form into rows; one with astonishing skill and art; they spin through one another, or dance in groups, or in pairs; her eyes, her arms and hands, and even the fingers of all her limbs, move with astonishing agility, grace and art; the Chelimbikaren, while playing on his little cymbals, follows close on her heels, encouraging her by his voice and gestures, and Dayas, or old dancers, clap their hands to the beat, and sing therewith. Especially in private and special groups mostly, they display all her art and ability. The sweet emanation of perfumes and flowers; the seduction of charms which they reveal in an artful manner for the beholders, the singing, the music—all combine to bring the passions into motion, and to fill the heart with lustful affections. Meanwhile, in public they show the greatest modesty and restraint, and mimic so well the virgin shame that one would hold them all to be Vestals …

Haafner should by rights be treated as an earlier observer than Sonnerat since the former had begun his observations in India by 1771 while the latter arrived in the country only three years later. But Haafner’s work had to wait until 1806 to be published, initially in German, almost two decades after he had left India, and three years before his own death. His illustrations of the dancers—probably influenced by Mamia herself—show the sprightly romantic spirit with which he encountered the whole of Indian culture, but especially the devadasi way of life. James Forbes (1749–1819), a writer for the East India Company, arrived in India some years earlier than either Sonnerat or Haafner, at the age of sixteen, in 1765. He remained in India for eighteen years in various posts and localities, but spent much

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time in Gujarat. Forbes spent most of his spare time compiling notes or letters that would later be collected in his four-volume work, Oriental Memoirs, published in England in 1813. Apart from his real abilities as an observer of natural and social life in India, Forbes was also a talented illustrator. Two pictures of dancers occur in the first volume of his work, and again he is dealing with dancers in Gujarat: These singing and dancing girls are hired at festivals and grand solemnities, among all sects and professions in India. Many of the dancing girls are extremely delicate in their persons, soft and regular in their features, with a form of perfect symmetry; and, although dedicated from infancy to this profession, they in general preserve a decency and modesty in their demeanour, which is more likely to allure, than the shameless effrontery of similar characters in other countries. Their dances require great attention, from the dancers’ feet being hung with small bells, which act in concert with the music. Two girls usually perform at the same time; their steps are not so many or active as ours, but much more interesting; as the song, the music, and the motions of the dance, combine to express love, hope, jealousy, despair, and the passions so well known to lovers, and very easily to be understood by those who are ignorant of other languages … Another kind of dancing girls are dedicated to the principal Hindoo temples; these are supplied by their parents, who are taught, that the presentation of a beautiful daughter to the deity is highly acceptable: they dance and sing at the festivals … They seldom leave the place of their initiation, looking upon themselves as wedded to the deities; but as they frequently have children, who partake more of a terrestrial than a celestial origin, the boys are taught to play on musical instruments, and the girls are early instructed in the profession of their mothers …

All the large cities of Hindoostan contain sets of musicians and dancing-girls, under the care of their respective duennas, who are always ready to attend for

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hire at weddings, and at other festivities; or to finish the evening entertainment of the Europeans and natives; and many of them accompany the Asiatic armies to the field …

Figure 2.3 Illustration of a dancer with musicians by James Forbes, from his work, Oriental Memoirs, etc., 1813.

Turning now to the Abbé Dubois, we note immediately the castigatory tone of the serious moralist. The Abbé Jean-Antoine

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Dubois (1765–1848) served as a Catholic missionary priest first in Pondicherry and later in Mysore from 1782 to 1823. He was a pragmatic proselytizer, who adopted local dress and manners, including vegetarianism, in order better to identify with his Christian converts. Like missionaries before and after himself, he made great efforts to understand and systematize local religious and cultural customs, and set down his knowledge in his book, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, first published in French in 1813. His work has several references to ‘dancing girls’ in their many appearances and roles in society, but he sums up the vocation and character of the devadasi as follows: The courtesans or dancing girls attached to each temple take their place in the second rank; they are called devadasis (servants or slaves of the gods), but the public call them by the more vulgar name of prostitutes. And in fact they are bound by their profession to grant their favours, if such they be, to anybody demanding them in return for ready money. It seems that at first they were reserved for the exclusive enjoyment of the Brahmins. And these lewd women, who make a public traffic of their charms, are consecrated in a special manner to the worship of the divinities of India. Every temple of any importance has in its service a band of eight, twelve, or more. Their official duties consist of dancing and singing within the temple twice a day, morning and evening, and also at all public ceremonies. The first they execute with sufficient grace, although their attitudes are lascivious and their gestures indecorous. As regards their singing, it is almost always confined to obscene verses describing some licentious episode in the history of their gods. Their duties, however, are not confined to religious ceremonies. Ordinary politeness (and this is one of the characteristic features of Hindu morality) requires that when persons of any distinction make formal visits to each other they must be accompanied by certain numbers of these courtesans. To dispense with them would show a want of respect towards the persons visited, whether the visit was one of duty or politeness.

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These women are also present at marriages and other solemn family meetings. All the time which they have to spare in the intervals of the various ceremonies is devoted to infinitely more shameful practices, and it is not an uncommon thing to see even sacred temples converted into mere brothels. They are brought up in this shameful licentiousness from infancy, and are recruited from various castes, some among them belonging to respectable families. It is not unusual for pregnant women, with the object of obtaining a safe delivery, to make a vow, with the consent of their husbands, to devote the child that they carry in their womb, if it should turn out a girl, to the temple service. They are far from thinking that this infamous vow offends in any way the laws of decency, or is contrary to the duties of motherhood. In fact no shame whatever is attached to parents whose daughters adopt this career. The courtesans are the only women in India who enjoy the privilege of learning to read, to dance, and to sing. A well-bred and respectable woman would for this reason blush to acquire any of these accomplishments.

The deva-dasis receive a fixed salary for the religious duties which they perform; but as the amount is small they supplement it by selling their favours in as profitable a manner as possible. In the attainment of this object they are probably more skilful than similar women in other countries. They employ all the resources and artifices of coquetry. Perfumes, elegant costumes, coiffures best suited to set off the beauty of their hair, which they entwine with sweet-scented flowers; a profusion of jewels worn with much taste on different parts of the body; graceful and voluptuous attitudes: such are the snares with which these sirens allure the Hindus, who, it must be confessed, rarely display in such cases the prudence and constancy of a Ulysses. Nevertheless, to the discredit of Europeans it must be confessed that the quiet seductions which Hindu prostitutes know how to exercise with so much skill

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resemble in no way the disgraceful methods of the wretched beings who give themselves up to a similar profession in Europe …

The Abbé’s passage on the dancers is important because the view of the devadasi which he propounded continued to echo throughout the 19th century, and beyond, and is found reiterated in one form or another in many subsequent delineations of both a popular and a scholarly kind. We find a milder form of criticism and rebuke in the description written by Innes Munro, a Scottish soldier in the 73rd Highland Regiment. It is in the course of his military memoirs, published in 1789, that we find his reference to the dancers in the context of an unspecified festival which he attended: … An harsh kind of music from a tom-tom or drum, accompanied by a loud rustic pipe, sounds from different parties throughout the throng, while expert cudgelers exhibit in the style of ancient gladiators, and dancing girls who display amazing agility and grace in all their motions. These women stroll about the country in quest of employment, and are allowed to dispose of themselves to the opposite sex at pleasure. Some great men also entertain companies of them for the amusement of their concubines in the zenana. Six or eight girls compose a troop: they are very gaudily dressed, and ornamented with jewels and other precious stones set in rings, that are worn in the nostrils, round the neck and arms, and also upon the ancles and toes; having small tinkling bells fixed to their ancles and elbows, which I think have rather an unpleasing effect. When these damsels begin to dance they do not hop and skip like our stage dancers in England, but strive, by slow and graceful motions, to display the agility and elegance of their bodies and limbs, which are formed by nature in the most perfect symmetry. These they twist into the most wanton postures imaginable, moving in excellent time, though the music is never above one measure successively repeated. The dancers also accompany the music with amorous songs and a palpitation or heaving of the bosom, calculated to

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excite in the spectators correspondent desires. In this they are generally very successful, continuing their lascivious gestures till, by the force of imagination and the heat of exercise, they become almost frantic with ecstasy, and sink down in the most inviting attitudes motionless with fatigue. The conclusion of this scene is unnecessary to describe …

We see, in Munro’s writing, the quasi-humorous judgment on the perceived promiscuity of the courtesan-dancer, and at the same time a limited appreciation for the ‘agility and grace’ of their art. This tone of reluctant admiration coloured by a standard moralizing over the dancer’s lack of normative virtues in the area of her alternative conjugal life runs through the narratives received from the 18th and 19th centuries, but with some exceptions, as we shall later see. By the late 18th century, the dance and vocation of the bayadère was increasingly coming to popular and scholarly attention in Europe, as travellers brought back stories and descriptions of these half-mythical beings with the strong air of seductive power evinced by them through their art, and with rumours of the high positions they held both in the temples and courts of India. The Mercure de France, (‘Mercury of France’) in August of 1784, reports on the dancers in the court of Tipu Sultan: The court of Tipoo Sahib is now the most brilliant in India. His troupe of performers has no equal in that part of the world, not only on account of their wealth but also on account of the bayadères who are the women to whom Tipoo gives all preference … the directrice of the troupe … chooses and purchases the most beautiful among the girls of four or five years old, who, once they have been marked for the profession, are given to the teachers of dance and music, where they are taught all the talents and perfections that can inspire the prince and the court with a love of the voluptuous … They begin to perform in public at the age of about ten or twelve years. They generally have very delicate features, large black eyes, the most beautiful eyebrows, petite mouths,

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and superb teeth … These are the young girls whom the Orientals prefer above all others … the bayadères are always shrouded in a fine gauze garnished with a rich embroidery of gold, and they are covered with jewels … at their noses hangs a small diamond which lends them an air of highly seductive finesse.

The dramas which the bayadères enact are all pieces of intrigue. They represent for instance women conspiring to dupe a husband, or young girls to deceive their mothers. It is impossible to surpass their facility and natural ease in playing these roles. Their songs are gay and agreeable … These dancers are superior in their execution of acting and singing, and they would surely give great pleasure at the Theatre of Opera in Paris. Everything is expression when these young girls dance: their heads, their eyes, their arms, their feet, and their whole bodies seem to move only to excite amazement and admiration. There is an infinite force and lightness in their legs, turning on one foot and then lancing themselves forward with a surprising agility. They show great precision in their movements, with the little bells at their feet keeping time to the music … and all their gestures are full of a pleasing grace … The dancers at the court of the prince are not older than seventeen years. After this age they are returned to the provincial temples to which they are attached …

In articles such as this one lie the beginnings of the European fascination with the person and art of the bayadère that would result in Goethe’s poem, The God and the Bayadère, and in at least two operatic and balletic productions which attempted to mimic the Indian dancer in the years before the arrival in France of the authentic Sadir dancers from Pondicherry. In 1798, the German Magazin von merkwürdigen neuen Reisebeschreibungen (‘Magazine of Remarkable New Travel Descriptions’) reports on a travel to India by the Italian missionary Fra Paolino da San Bartolomeo, a Carmelite monk, who understands the role of the devadasi as one which compounds intrigue with the temple priests:

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… On another side (of the temple buildings) live the so-called female servants of the divinity. These last are called Devadasi, from Deva, or god, and Dasi, meaning servant or maid. Their tasks consist in cleaning the temple, lighting the lamps, and in perpetrating promiscuity with the pilgrims. These females, however, should not be confused with those dancers who accompany the processions, and who represent the place of the maenads. These last are called bailadeiras in Portuguese. With the help of these females the Brahmins discover all the conditions of the pilgrims so that, when they appear in the temple, the priests can with the greatest precision recite their circumstances, how they live, what vicissitudes they have encountered, and so on. These pilgrims then cannot marvel enough at this and become deluded into believing that the gods have conveyed this information to the priests in a miraculous way …

By the early 19th century, dance in South India was so well attended by British ladies and gentlemen employed in East India Company administrative posts that one P. Raghaviah Charry took it upon himself to write a ‘short account’ of the art of dance in Madras, and of the artists: The habitual politeness of English Gentlemen ever induces them to accept the attentive invitations of the Natives, to partake the pleasures of a nach, or the feats of Dancing Girls; an entertainment common throughout Hindostan, nay India; but I am inclined to think that many of the Gentlemen, and more particularly Ladies, who are not acquainted with the Poetical part of the Native Languages, in which the Songs are composed, must remain contented with the information of the eye; without that more rational relish of which the understanding is susceptible—this is the case even with many natives. It may therefore be useful to have translations of Songs, the meaning of which are represented by the dancing women, in various motions; at the same time adding

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a short Sketch of the general principles on which they are founded.

Without involving myself in the scientific and technical system of Hindoo music, which would render what I propose abstruse and comparatively useless to the purpose, I intend this as a sort of hand bill for the respectable persons whose affability and natural goodness has given a ready acceptance to my request of witnessing a Tamasha. Men are inquisitive in the first instance and that very properly, to know the history and character of the objects presented to their view, before other considerations which may lead to an inquiry into their accomplishments and profession.

I therefore proceed to relate an account of the origin of the Dancing Girls, a race of public women in all parts of India, regularly bred up for dancing and singing—Why the like does not exist in Europe, may be easily accounted for—the Ladies of all ranks and families in Europe, are indiscriminately taught to read and write, and initiated in the art of music and dancing.

It is but doing justice to say, that the arts of music and dancing are more perfect in and about Madras than in any part of Hindostan. The old kings of Trichonopoly and Tanjore and the Rajahs of Pondeman and other Poliguery country, have for ages devoted their time and fortune to the culture and improvement of these entertaining arts—but since the empoverishment of these princes, the seat of Musical learning was transferred to Madras where an increasing Population and the introduction of lucary keep them in demand. Bharata sastra or the art of dancing was originally invented by Seva or Mahadeva; and brought to perfection by the sage called Bharata, after whom the Saster was named—besides, the word bharata is the compound of ideas, modes, or tunes, and time—thus Bha for ideas, ra, is meant for Raga or modes, or ta for thàlum, or the time.

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It is related in the Brummanda Poorana, that Mahadeva and Parvaty were enjoying the felicity of conjugal happiness on the sacred mountain Kylàsa, their established seat of Residence; but a misunderstanding having once taken place between this fond pair—it was the intention of Sivan to offer some entertainment to regain the favours of his spouse—he then began to dance, singing melodiously and keeping time with the movement of his feet; while he aptly expressed, the meaning of the Poems he sung by various appropriate motions.

This casual act of Shiva established an art, which was taken up by 32 of our Gods, who wrote separate treatises each differing a little in detail.

… It is stated that Bharata Nateya or dancing should be composed of five angàs or parts—first natà (the ticta man who regulates the time) 2nd Midenga (a small drum) 3rd Pataca (the singer) sruty (the Bellows which blows the easy tunes) and Patra the actress.

An actress should be young and healthy—the females of Sata Goharjara and Sourastra, are said in the Poranàs to be beautiful. The breed of Carnata and virà ta, are pretty and the girls of Dravida are of ordinary kind, we are unfortunately situated on the last division of the Country so that it is no wonder, our dancing girls are not remarkable for personal beauty. I premised that Bharata Sasto is composed of Ideas, mode and time. The ideas or feelings are nine in number, divided into three Classes, which relate to Love, Fear, and Hatred, viz. Veara Ràsa or the sense of honor and glory. Dayà Ràsa of Compassion and Affection. Carona Ràsa of Mercy. Srungara Ràsa of Love and pleasure. Haseya Ràsa of Mirth and sprightliness. Bhayanaca Ràsa of Fear and terror. Rowdra Ràsa of Rage, accompanied with tears. Bhibhutcha Ràsa of Apprehension and confusion. Adbhuta Ràsa of Excellence and wisdom.

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All subjects which relate to human nature contain some of these passions, and the whole is represented by 37 hastas, or as many different changes of hands, and thirteen of the head. Of the 37 hastas and 13 heads, I give a few samples here.

1: Pathaca hustra, or Flag shaped hand; to denote excellence, approbation, friendship, and point out sides, corners, &c.

2: Ardhapataco, or half flag shaped; to point out females, the Ear rings, Mountains, Trident, &c. 3: Tripathaca, the same as the first, with the exception of the third finger holded, to express conjugal attachment, gallant intercourse and others, as Ardhapataca.

4: Mayura, or Peacock shaped, to mark Peacocks and other birds; sapphire, garlands, and rows of pearls, &c. 5: Ardhachundra, or half Moon to signify, Ancosa, half Moon; the waist of a woman, to chastise, &c.

6: Soocatundum, the beak of a bird, to denote Bows and Arrows, Elephant, several war implements and birds.

7: Soochy Mookhum, or the Needle’s end; expressing trifles, writing, pointing out objects, &c. 8: Pudra Cosa, or the bird of loters.

9: Senha Moekhum, or the head of a Lion.

10: Moograshurshum, or the head of an Antelope.

The remainder may be conjectured to be of the same kind. The motions of the head are,

1: Acompetum, or the head in an erect position, very slightly shaken occasionally, to denote solemn expression; to make a demand, point out objects, expressive anger or to give a negative answer.

2: Compitim, heaving head, this marks approbation, contemplation, deep thought of a lover, and pleasing circumstances.

3: Dhotem, nodding head; expressing contempt, sorrow, surprise, &c.

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4: Vidhotum, shaking head; to express indisposition, fever, terror, and the desire of driving away. 5: Parivahacum, leaning on one side; expressing surprise, satisfaction, recollection, &c.

6: Anchitim, leaning on one side, but to shake often; feigning to be fainted, expressing indisposition, sorrow, &c.

7: Oaeshiptem, to have the head up; on marking dust, in pointing objects above heaven, &c.

I forbear to proceed on these scientific atoms further, for they will tire the Reader, and they rend to no great use—The changes of hands and heads, the whirling of the Eyes, with an appropriate attitude of the same, sufficiently explains the meaning of the songs … I think the Hindoos in this respect excel all other nations.

The Ragas or modes are many, but 32 principal ones, are much in use. Each of these Ragas has its peculiar property of pleasing the ear, and the difference is formed by variations of Swaras or notes, which are 8 in number. Sà ri ga ma pa dà ni sa

We have 7 Talems, or measures regulating the time. 1st—Dhruva tala measuring 14 syllables. 2nd—Matteya for 10 syllables.

3rd—Aathala for 14 syllables. 4th—Rupaca for 6 syllables.

5th—Jumpa for 10 syllables. 6th—Triputa for 7 syllables.

7th—Yacathalum for 4 syllables. 8th—Aditalum for 4 syllables.

In dancing these syllables are formed of hard constructed technical language called Sula and this is pronounced with a loud, sometimes harsh voice by the Ticta fellow, viz.

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Tha tha, Dindà thà, thè thà, thà thà, Dinda tha; are the Soolas for 12 instead of 10, but this encrease and decrease originates from the number of gooroo and lagho Matras, an explanation of which, like the rest, must be left to a large treatise on Music. It is now time to begin with the proceedings of the Dancing set, when entered on the courtyard.

With the Girl in front, the Natuvas (generally two) one on each side, and the small drum with the sruti bellows, and the Singer together with the old mother on the rear, the scene commences. Natuva expresses first of all the technical syllables of Dim Dim in honour of Sambho, the first inventor of the art, and commemorates Brumma with similar unmeaning sounds.

An invocation to Venayaka or Pelliar follow: ‘O Venàica, the son of Paravaty and Elephant faced … let the Natuva or the time beater know him, and resound the technical syllable in his praise and attend particularly to the change of times.’ After Complimenting the Gods; an Hymn of Salam is sung in honour of some one of our ancient or modern Kings …

One copy of Charry’s text is preserved at the British Library, and is dated 3 December 1802, though it was published in Triplicane in 1806. The full writing is also found in the 1807 December issue of The Literary Panorama. The writer provides two translations of dance lyrics, of which only the second is given here: Pada—Second. Asavary Raga. Ata Thàla. ‘Màhà gàya, oh, Moova Gopaula Nivagalallah Màiàssàvà.’

‘Tis very surprising, O, Movo Gopaula all your gallantries, tis exceedingly pretty.’

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1st—‘To you I give the folded beetle, but you hand it over to that lotus Eyed’ (a pretty woman;) with whom the world laughs at your intrigues.’

‘Tis very surprising, &c.

2nd—‘I waste my entreaties on you, but you love her, whose eyes are beautiful as lotus. You freely express, a contempt of me, and the circumstance is ridiculed at the houses of those flowerlike framed women of delicate and elegant constitutions.’

‘Tis very surprising, &c.

Third—‘Throw myself etc. into your arms and take an interest in your amusements, oh, Mova Gopala, but you listen to malicious reports and live at variance, you hold me in disdain, and esteem her that female friend.’ ‘Tis very surprising &c. Observation.

It is almost needless to mention that the Naiky or heroine of the above song is a jealous wife.

She is termed Sweya and Vipraluboha or has the command of herself and was deceived, because she does not employ a third person to negociate the return of her lover’s affection and attachment; but she reproaches him, directly with bold language for his improper conduct. The Naika, or the lover is Ductshow or a gallant of changeable attachment.

The writing is given as it occurs in the original, with variants and eccentricities of spelling and punctuation, and with what may well be printing errors in some instances too. The enigmatic Mr Charry also wrote an extended article on Indian drama, which is titled A Short Explanation of Hindoo Plays, Exhibited at the Pandals of P. Raghaviah Charry, in Triplicane, 8th December, 1806. It would seem then that Charry was an Indian impresario

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who presented, either for love of the arts or for an income, both dances and dramas for Indian and British spectators in Madras. This is made clear by the editorial note appended in The Literary Panorama to Charry’s short account of dance. The editor wrote: The foregoing paper, received from one of our valuable correspondents at Madras, is not only curious, as containing the hand-bill of an entertainment given by one of the natives, who had invited the gentlemen and ladies of the Presidency to attend it, but it is interesting, as comprising an account of a profession which appears to have existed in Hindoostan from the remotest ages (and from thence no doubt it spread to other parts. We find it in David’s time in Judaea; and probably in Judah’s time, in Canaan). Whether the writer is not too favourable, in supposing that no such persons are found in Europe, may be submitted to those who are most versed in European manners …

Also from 1802, we have a remarkable description of a dance performance during a Pongol festival in Santhome, in Mylapore, Madras. It is elaborated in a letter written to her mother by Lady Elizabeth Gwillim (1763–1807). Lady Elizabeth was the wife of Sir Henry Gwillim, appointed in 1802 as a judge of the Supreme Court of Madras. Elizabeth writes of the dance she witnessed: … We went to a hostelry in a street near the square, before which hostelry there was a pandal erected, it being near to the Pagoda from whence the gods were to set out. They brought us scent & put garlands of flowers of a kind of white jasmine round our necks & from a silver ewer sprinkled our handkerchiefs with rose water giving each of us a ball of the same flowers as the garland to hold in our hands. These were like our cowslip balls. They then brought some of the best dancing girls who are very richly dressed, their hair is combed smooth, parted in front & sweeping round the corners of the

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forehead with a fringe of fine work in gold and small jewels edging this sweep of hair & lying on the forehead. They wear a conspicuous piece of jewelry on the middle of the forehead & various ornaments in the nature of clasps. One piece of gold like a small saucer finishes the back of the head & between that and the front ornament wreathes of coloured natural flowers were twisted several times round. The back hair is plaited & hangs down to a great length intermixed with gold & pearl & flowers.

Their ears are covered with ornaments, as many as possible are hung in the ears and others suspended from bands in the hair. The necklaces & chains they wear are very fine & cover their necks. Their arms have bands round the middle of the upper part of the arms & bracelets on the wrist innumerable. Their jewels are sometimes false but tho’ very heavy are not of the value they may be supposed to be as they are only of table diamonds & so thin as not fit for cutting. These women wear no shoes or stockings, but an immense weight of gold round their ankles in rings of small bells which sound as they dance.

Their dancing is very little like ours. They never step upon the toes but keep the knees bent & tread on the broad sole of the foot. They move in a very small space. Sometimes they sing as they dance. They dance coming forward in a straight line & retire, but at other times they dance for an hour within the space of a sheet of paper, the feet, however, all the while in constant motion. (I am speaking now of the dancing of single person). The chief display of their skill is in the motions of the hands and arms, the air of the head & the expression of the features. In these they excel & indeed the upper part of their figures appear (to) me to be better formed than the lower. They are not like Grecian figures, but are short from the waist downwards & dancing with the knees so much bent & the feet kept near the ground seems to encourage this defect. The action of the upper part of the figure is

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extremely graceful & sometimes voluptuous, but never affected.

They dance whether they recite or not to two or three very loud instruments, one of which of a sort of piercing sound is a piece of metal held by one hand & struck by another piece of metal held by the other hand. The man who plays this keeps his head close to the dancer & with a kind of eagerness seems to direct her very motion for he constantly repeats. He did this during a long performance by one dancer & she was only once relieved by one of the girls in the background. It was a story of Shiva, one of the gods, who in the habit of a pilgrim of great beauty, set all the women in love with him. Some Brahmins in the back take up the chorus …

The German artist and geographic writer, J.A.C. Löhr, gives the following summary of the dancers’ vocation in 1818: The art of dance is practised here almost exclusively by the devadasis (Devedaschis) or bayadères (Bajaderen) who are actually consecrated to the service of the god and the temple, and whose highest classes are held in great esteem. They are meticulously trained in song and dance, are allowed to read certain sacred books, and are also taught to write. They are most expensively bejewelled for the dance, and their ornaments might often be worth more than 20 000 Gulden. The lowest classes of these dancers travel about the country under the supervision of a matron, and are everywhere hired to entertain at great festivals and functions for eminent guests. The matron often receives 100 Gulden per virtuoso dancer for a single performance, and usually more than twenty are hired for one occasion. At large festivals they receive the arriving guests, handing out betel which is very often chewed here, together with rosewater and other refreshments. From the guests they often receive impressive and costly gifts, and some great personages maintain their own troupes of dancers, as is the case with our own great theatres.

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By the early decades of the 19th century, the bayadère or ‘dancing girl of India’ has become a fixture of general European knowledge, though her vocation and lifestyle are still largely misunderstood, and she remains an exotic female object of male perplexity, as F.A. Wiese reports on the basis of his reading of English texts: The next class of artists which presents itself to us, though unfortunately marked with some moral stains, rouses more pleasant associations. These are the renowned bayadères or dancing girls whom previous travellers regarded with astonishment and wonder … As objects of curiosity, they are by no means uninteresting, like the dancers of ancient Greece, whose attendance at social functions and festivities was indispensable … the bayadères are chosen for their pre-eminent beauty, the glowing vivacity of their temperaments, the lightness and grace of their figures and the prettiness of their movements … (Indian dancers differ from those of ancient Greece, whose dances were) accompanied by appropriate music. They expressed both the softer and the more passionate aspects of the excitements and emotions of the soul … The motions and gestures of the dancers were passionate, and together with this passion they mixed an indescribably deep experience, an enthusiasm, a poetic dignity and charm, that lent to the whole scene an expression of classical beauty.

In the Orient the opposite is the case. Here the object of the dance is the inflaming of sensuousness. They approach this goal in a straight line and arrive at it by unfathomable means. The whole drama of love is presented. The dancing beauty … begins with a series of postures and gestures … which are too coarse to please a refined taste. One has before one personified lust, and while the dancer follows the inflaming course of the music … her whole body trembles with desire, her eyes sparkle, her voice becomes unsure, and she displays every sign of a glowing passion. This picture especially applies to those dances which are performed either

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within the temple area or during the great festivals which are held annually in honour of the gods.

The dancing girls who practice their art at private festivities adapt their movements and mode to the character of those for whom they are performing. Here, as on public occasions, they appear in the company of musicians who accompany them on instruments resembling the violin and the guitar … (the appreciation of) their dance requires close attention because the dancer’s feet are hung with bells which ring in measure to the music …

… Usually two girls dance together … their pace is not as labyrinthine and active as ours, but much more interesting in that the song, music and motions of the dancers are aimed at the expression of love, hope, jealousy, despair, and all those excitements known so well to lovers …

Friedrich Adolph Wiese was a naturalist and ethnologist whose work is typical of early 19th century socio-cultural studies. It uses tropes drawn from the writings of earlier authors and collects them into a compendium of impressions and judgements whose main value is that they represent the general notions about Indian dance and Indian dancers then current in educated European circles. Nevertheless, this kind of writing still points to a growing continental interest in Indian dance, though that interest remains sensually romantic in its deeper nature and morally castigatory on the surface. By the time of the writing of Godfrey Charles Mundy (1804–1860) a blasé tone has already entered into the account of the ‘dancing-girl’ or ‘nautch-girl’, whose art was much attended by British military officers like Mundy himself, who was stationed in Bharatpur in Rajasthan in the 1820s: I have so often had occasion to mention this purely Indian entertainment, the nautch, that, though perhaps rather a hackneyed subject, I will describe it.

Each set of dancing-girls is usually furnished with an old crone of a woman, who takes care of their finery, their

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interests (and their morals, perhaps;) and a band of two or three musicians, generally consisting of a kind of violin, a species of mongrel guitar, and a tom-tom, or small drum, played with the fingers: sometimes a little pair of cymbals are added. The musicians also join occasionally their voices with those of the women— which are dreadfully shrill and ear-piercing—in this ‘concord of sweet sounds’. At the close of each stanza of the song, the girl floats forward towards the audience, by a sort of ‘sidling’, ‘bridling’, and, I may add, ‘ogling’ approach, moving her arms gently round her head, the drapery of which they constantly and gracefully employ in arranging and displacing; now mercifully concealing with the tissue one brilliant or languid eye (as the case may be), sometimes effecting a total eclipse; or allowing the whole head to be seen, in order to display the sevigné of pearl on her forehead (for this elegant ornament, now dignified by a place upon the fairer fronts of my countrywomen, is strictly oriental,) the massive and numerous earrings which disfigure the feature they are intended to adorn, or the heathenish and unaccountable nose-ring, the use of which (for it is certainly no ornament) it is hard to discern,—unless these dangerous sirens are furnished with them, like pigs, to keep them out of mischief! The lithe, snake-like suppleness of their arms, excites, at first, great surprise in the European spectator; but not more so, I suspect, than the horizontal evolutions of the nether-limbs of our opera nautch-women would astonish the weak mind of a suddenly imported Mussulman.

On entering the room, the dancing-girls and their followers salaam respectfully to the company, and then, amid a confused jingling of bracelets and anklets, and an all-pervading odour of attar, squat quietly down in a semi-circle until called upon to display.

For the applauding ‘Wa! Wa! Ka Khoob!’ (Brava! Beautiful!) of the spectator, they return a smile and a low salaam. Natives of rank sometimes give more solid proofs of their

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admiration, by ordering the two hands of the charmer to be filled with gold or silver coins.

The dress of the Indian dancing-girl is infinitely more decent than our French or Italian figurantes, the long silken trousers descending quite over the feet. The upper portion of the costume, however, I am bound to say is not always quite so impervious to sight as a boddice of more opaque texture than muslin might render it. European ladies not unfrequently attend these spectacles; and, when the dancers are warned beforehand, they only witness a graceful and sufficiently stupid display; but, if thrown off their guard by applause, there is some danger of their carrying the suppleness of their body and limbs quite beyond the disgraceful, and even bordering on the disgusting. The situation of a gentleman in this case is irksome and uncomfortable; and he sits in constant and not unfounded dread lest these fair liberalés in morality should commit some, perhaps unintentional, solecism against decency.

This tone of amused boredom is echoed by James Prinsep (1799–1840), the English orientalist and founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Writing about dancers in Benares in the 1820s, he proceeds as follows: Too much has been written and said on the subject of the Indian nách, to render any description here necessary. It were a pity to detract from the general illusion that prevails regarding the fairy forms and melodious voices which are wont to breathe seductive raptures amid the exhilarating gambols of the Hoolee festival! If, however, beauty and high vocal skill are comparatively rare, the witching influence of the arts and graces of these women is as much acknowledged and as powerful as ever. Examples are not wanting of large accumulations of wealth from the successful exercise of the skill and accomplishments of the profession: some of the best houses, and the handsomest temples of the city, have been erected by ladies of dancing notoriety. Their training

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commences in infancy: the girls being bought as children, are adopted into a partnership or taefa, to which their profits belong as a common stock: each rising in turn to the management of the general fund, as she acquires the right by seniority. In order to be freed from the shackles of this partnership, a sum of money to cover the expenses of board and education, and to compensate the loss of advantage from the acquired talent, must be made good to the association. They are parted with most unwillingly, and there is a reciprocity of affection between the members of each set, which makes them seldom wish to dissolve the tie forever.

According to the census taken in 1827, there were 264 Hindooee and 500 Moosulmanee professional nách girls in the town: not a very large proportion to the population …

The year 1828 saw the publication in France of L’Inde française (‘French India’), which became an extremely popular work of miscellaneous short passages on life, professions, customs and religious practices in French India. It was a profusely illustrated work with coloured plates by a number of artists, set by the lithographer C.E.P. Motte, and with a text by Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), a philologist at the Collège de France. In this work are found two passages on devadasi dancers, somewhat romanticized. Burnouf’s writings seem to me representative of the kind of simplistic general notions of the South Indian dance tradition that were widely held in Europe throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th. Burnouf writes of the dancer, Cammalatchi:

Cammalatchi, a bayadère aged 28 to 30 years, came to Pondicherry in 1824, on the occasion of the marriage of the grand Provost. She made herself remarkable among the bayadères who had performed at this brilliant ceremony by her elegant waist and her expressive physiognomy. Above all she excelled at the ‘dance of the sabres’, a dangerous exercise by which the Indians develop a singular dexterity and agility …

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the bayadères  carefully take up these sharpened blades and execute voluptuous dances, accompanied by singing, in honour of their gods …

Among the various jewels with which the dancers decorate their hair, ears and noses, one notices, suspended from their necks, the little ornament called a tali, which, in common with married women, they have the right to wear. It is the emblem of their mysterious union with the god to whose service they consecrate their talents. Like all the rich women of India they coddle themselves greatly to guarantee for themselves the ardours of the sun itself, rubbing all visible parts of their bodies with saffron … for lightening the tone of their skins …

Figure 2.4 ‘Cammalatchi’, illustration by C.E.P. Motte from Eugène Burnouf’s text, L’Inde française, 1828.

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In an illustration of a dance performance accompanying the text, some care has been taken to depict the  adavu  position of the feet, knees, arms and hands, as well as the facial abhinaya of the dancer. The nattuvanar is shown in lively and mobile rhythmic accompaniment with upraised talam. it seems clear, at any rate, that, despite the romantic touches in his narrative, the artist was working from a kacceri performance that he himself had witnessed. The accompanying text reads in part: The bayadères are called in Sanskrit devadasis, or slaves of the god, and in Tamil tevadial. The Hindus … may consecrate one of their daughters to the service of the temple. But there is only one caste, that of the weavers or kaikkolen, where this is a duty by law. Their daughters are offered to the god at a tender age, after certain ceremonies which signify the union between them. They are then raised in the temple complex under the eyes of an aged bayadère, who teaches them to read, dance and sing. Their functions consist in sweeping the temple, and in dancing before the idol at the hours of puja, at processions, and at great religious and civil ceremonies … Marriage is forbidden them, and the Brahmins, who represent their divine husbands, punish infidelities severely … Male children become temple musicians, while girls follow the calling of their mothers …

The Baron de Bougainville (1781–1846), whose passage on the dancers of Pondicherry concludes this section, was a French navigator who undertook a tour of the world in the frigate, Thetis, from 1824 to 1826. The Viscount de la Touanne accompanied him as the ship’s artist. Pondicherry seems to have been one of the first ports of call, so that the commentary probably dates from 1824. About the dancers encountered in Pondicherry, Bougainville writes as follows, beginning with a reference to their dancing at wedding festivities:

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There are banquets, numerous reunions, dances of the bayadères beneath the pandal on a stage constructed for this purpose at the side of the residence, and grandly and freshly decorated …

The devadasis who dance before the palanquin of the married couple and beneath the pandal are, according to some voyagers, attached in service to the temples; according to others they are public women and dancers hired to perform for payment. Most are richly clad, and their costumes … are always worn with elegance and lightness. On the streets they carry a large veil of white muslin in which their bodies are partially wrapped … At the moment of the dance they put these to the side, or take them up again in the manner of a shawl. The bayadères and their voices, a percussion instrument, an oboe, and two small metal cymbals used for sounding the rhythms of the dance, compose the whole of their orchestra. Their steps, not very complicated, amount not to much more than the slowing down and acceleration of cadences, following the delicate nuances of the songs … They are accused sometimes of bringing a lascivious character to their dances; perhaps this is the case in their houses, or in the interiors of their temples, but never before strangers or in public ceremonies …

In assessing the commentaries in this section, dating as they do from the 1770s to the first three decades of the 19th century, one sees how the surprise of the first encounters with the hereditary dancers of several traditions gives way to a sense of ordinariness coupled with a degree of disillusionment. Yet, in spite of the moral censure that colours most of these observations, and the growing sense that the myth of the bayadère does not quite square with the lived reality, there remains an air of mystery and enchantment with the idea of the temple and court dancer, even when she does not fulfil her legendary promise in the flesh.

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Figure 2.5 Pondicherry dancers by E.B. de la Touanne, from Baron H. de Bougainville’s Album pittoresque de la frégate La Thetis et de la corvette L’Espérance, etc., 1824–1826.

References

1. Sonnerat, Pierre, Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine, fait par ordre du roi, depuis 1774 jusqu’en 1781, Paris: Chez l’auteur & Froulé & Nyon, 1782.

2. Haafner, Jacob, Reize in eenen Palanquin, of Lotgevallen en Merkwaardige Aantekeningen op eene Rreize langs de Kusten Orixa en Choromandel, Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1808.

3. Forbes, James, Oriental Memoirs: selected and abridged from a series of familiar letters, written during seventeen years’ residence in India, London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1813. 4. Dubois, Abbé J.A. & Beauchamp, Henry K. (transl.), Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1906.

5. Munro, Innes, A Narrative of Military Operations of the Coromandel Coast, against the combined forces of the French, Dutch and Hyder Ally Cawn, from the year 1780 to the peace of 1784, London: T. Bensley, 1789.

6. Mercure de France, t. 127, July–December 1774.

7. Magazin von merkwürdigen neuen Reisebeschreibungen, vol. 15, 1798.

References

8. Charry, P. Raghaviah, A short account of the dancing girls, treating concisely on the general principles of dancing and singing, with the translations of two Hindo songs, Triplicane: Gazette Press, 1806. A single copy is found at the British Library (Shelfmark C.131.ff.11). The full text is reproduced in Soneji, Davesh, Bharatanatyam: A Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. 9. Charry, P. Raghaviah, Account of the Hindoostanee dancing-girls, treating concisely on the general principles of dancing and singing, with translations of two Hindoo songs, full text in The Literary Panorama, vol. 3, December, 1807, pp. 545–554.

10. Gwillim, Lady Elizabeth, Letters from Madras, preserved in the British Library (Shelfmark C.240/1). The full text of the letter from which the above extract is given can be found in Spear, Jeffrey, Gods and Dancing Girls: A Letter from 1802 Madras, The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 31, no. 3, (Summer, 2000), pp. 142–149.

11. Löhr, J.A.C., Die Länder und Völker der Erde, Leipzig: G. Fleischer dem Jüngern, 1818.

12. Wiese, F.A., Indien oder die Hindus, nach den neuesten und besten vorzüglich englischen Werken bearbeitet, Leipzig: Baumgärtners Buchhandlung, 1836–1837. 13. Mundy, G.C., Pen and Pencil Sketches, being the Journal of a Tour in India, London: John Murray, 1833.

14. Prinsep, James, Benares Illustrated in a Series of Drawings, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1831.

15. Burnouf, Eugène & Jacquet, Eugène, L’Inde française, Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1828. 16. De Bougainville, Baron Hyacinthe, Album pittoresque de la frégate La Thetis et de la corvette L’Espérance: journal de la navigation autour du globe pendant les années 1824–1826, Paris: Chez Bulla, 1828.

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Chapter 3

Writings from the Bengal Presidency: 1813–1837 Among the earliest commentaries on dance in the Bengal Presidency are those found in the work of Frans Balthazar Solvyns (1760–1824), whose etchings, which the commentaries accompany, were designed to provide images of characters from all walks of Indian and Anglo-Indian life, as well depictions of the environments in which they lived. Solvyns was a Belgian who came from a family of merchants but adopted the career of a marine artist. Finding this employment unrewarding, he went to India in 1791 to pursue a better fortune, and remained in the city until 1803. In 1794 he conceived a plan to create a set of 250 coloured etchings of ‘manners, customs and dresses of the Hindoos’. This was a task that he completed by 1796, though the album he published in Calcutta under the laborious title A Collection of 250 Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos met with little success. Having departed India in 1803, he reworked the etchings in Paris, increasing them to the final number of 288. These were published under the title Les Hindous in four volumes between 1808 and 1812. About the ‘ramjanny’ dancers of Bengal, Solvyns writes: It is to be observed that the dance represented … has nothing in common with that which is performed all

Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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over India, by women known by the name of Bayaderes, Baladeres or Bays; a description of which is found in the works of many travellers. As this amusement is foreign to the true Hindoos, and known only among the other Indians, the Mussulmen, Portuguese etc., it could not form part of this collection. But here is a short description of an original Hindoo dance called Nautch.

This dance is generally executed by three female dancers or Ramjannys, who are courtesans as well as the Bayaderes. It is opened by a single dancer who is joined successively by the two others in a great variety of motions, and of very graceful and often very lascivious attitudes. An European accustomed to look upon the dances of his own country as the perfection of the art, would be surprised to see the languid ease, the natural grace, the voluptuous suppleness, displayed in every movement of the accomplished Ramjanny. We must not wonder if this beautiful dance is but little known even to those who have resided some time in India; it is of late seldom performed by Hindoos, and is more in vogue among the Mussulmen and in the north of Hindoostan than in the south. It is besides now frequently danced by the Bayaderes who have corrupted it by so much obscene actions and attitudes, that its original character is no longer to be known. What has caused this diversion to degenerate still more, is its being sometimes danced by Hidgras (hermaphrodites), or by dissolute young men who accompany all their motions with the most libidinous and immoral songs. The instruments to which the Ramjannys dance the Nautch are the been, the sittar and others with cords; whereas the Mussulmen use only the sarinda, the tubla and the d’hola …

Formerly the princes and grandees of the country, kept troops of dancing girls in their pay, who attended them everywhere as part of their suite. This practice has now totally ceased. It is only at feasts that these women, who are generally prostitutes, are hired for money, so

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that no great beauty nor freshness can be expected in these miserable victims of debauchery.

At great festivals, such as the marriage of some rich person, or a poojah or durgah, twenty or thirty of these dancing girls, and from thirty to fifty musicians are hired. The Ramjannys move in groups three by three, and perform the Nautch in every part of their vast halls, often varying the spot, and following the company to the sound of the instruments.

Figure 3.1 ‘Ramjanny’ dancers from an Italian version of Balthazar Solvyns’ Les Hindous, 1808.

It seems clear that the ‘ramjanny’ designation refers only to Hindu dancers, with proto-Kathak  dancers from the Bengal Presidency usually denoted as ‘Mussulman dancing girls’. Solvyns himself writes that ‘they are employed in the Hindoo temples and at all festivals in honour of their numerous deities’. This decidedly places the ‘ramjannies’ as Hindu dancers, though their costumes and the descriptions of their dance steps by several contemporary commentators fully resemble those of the Muslim proto-Kathak dancers.

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The Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian dictionary quotes a passage from James Forbes’s  Oriental Memoirs  (1844) in which he refers to these dancers as follows: ‘I lived four years within a few miles of the solemn groves where those voluptuous devotees pass their lives with the ramjannies or dancing girls attached to the temples …’ and James Prinsep, in Benares Illustrated in a Series of Drawings (1831), though he does not use the ‘ramjanny’ appellation, certainly describes the costumes and ‘taefa’ practice of the Hindu dancers attached to the temples as though they were proto-Kathak tawai’f dancers. What exactly was meant by these ramjannies, how the name originated, and what they danced: these remain open questions. What he seems also to be saying is that the dance of the Hindu ‘ramjannies’ is something completely other than the South Indian dasi attam of the devadasi bayadères. It is almost as if he is implying that some form of proto-Kathak was being danced by Hindu dancers in the Bengal Presidency before it was largely taken over by the ‘Mussulman’ dancers, being ‘of late seldom performed by Hindoos’. What is more, he seems to make reference to an aboriginal form of dance that has been taken up and corrupted by South Indian ‘bayadères’, with further degeneration occurring through its adoption by the hijras and ‘dissolute young men’. At the same time, he acknowledges that ‘this beautiful dance’ (‘very graceful and often very lascivious’) is still being properly performed by a remnant of the ‘ramjanny’ dancers. It is hard to know what to make of all this. It is probably the case that Solvyns was confused as to the proper history and locations of the dance forms, though his own observations, and those of others, do seem to indicate that some form of ‘ramjanny’ dance, now apparently lost to us, was present at that time in Bengal. It is also worth noting the inability, probably wilful, of the Western mindset of his day to make its peace with the fundamentally erotic nature, in its various manifestations, of the language of Indian (and in fact all) dance. The other, and briefer, passage on dance by Solvyns concerns the ‘Bauluk, Dancing Boy’, who performs at the festival of the ‘Joolun-Jatrah’:

Writings from the Bengal Presidency

All the dancing boys, or Bauluks, have their faces painted in several places, particularly about the eyebrows, the foreheads and the ears: their heads are adorned with red flowers, peacock’s feathers in the form of a fan, or some other ornamental object. A large plate of metal, of gold, covers their breasts, and is inscribed with the names of the gods and goddesses, or some other sacred form: their back is covered with a small mantle of a bright colour, such as blue, yellow, or red: round their thighs are tied different pieces of muslin: their feet are covered with a variety of ornaments fancifully arranged and full of little bells which follow the slightest motion of the dancer, and produce the degree of sound they choose to impart. Their dance, like that of the Ramjannies, consists in graceful attitudes and difficult steps: they carry in dancing a small stick painted red, which they move round on every side, and which gives them an opportunity of displaying all the graces of their forms. Few Bauluks are to be met with except among the true Hindoos; at least I have not seen them with the other nations of Hindoostan; whence we may conclude that their costume and dance take their origin from the remotest antiquity.

The Joolun-Jatrah (Jhulan Yatra) festival is celebrated by devotees of Krishna and is imagined to take place in the garden of Vrindavan near Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, where Krishna is said to have been born. In the course of the feast Krishna and Radha are seated on a decorated swing which the devotees aspire to touch or keep in motion. The dress and colourful make-up of the ‘bauluk’ boy-dancers suggests that they are dancing the roles of peacocks, a bird associated with Krishna. Their dance would represent the amorous mating-play of these birds, representative of the sringara aspect of the Krishna-Radha union, as well as of fertility. Taken together, the passages given here show that dance in the Bengal Presidency was as various in its origins and manifestations as it was central to the life and consciousness of

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the Indian and Anglo-Indian society in which it was performed. Apart from its persistence at the centre of local religion, culture and entertainment, and its constant presence at the periphery of the Anglo-Indian experience of life in India, it also evinces a pan-Indian quality that is not found in other regions of the subcontinent in this period.

Figure 3.2  A ‘bauluk dancing boy’ from Solvyns’ Les Hindous, 1808.

The European presence in Calcutta in those years was not very large, amounting to some 3200 ‘English’ in the city itself. The East India Company (EIC) had by now established itself as a corporate colonial rulership within a larger political imperial State. By 1820 the grand edifices of company rule had been built

Writings from the Bengal Presidency

or re-built: Fort William, the Writers’ Building, Government House, the Town Hall, and several churches. The European contingent, if they had sufficiently enriched themselves, erected grandiose and eccentric dwellings. British and other Europeans who had not succeeded lived rather more poorly, often in ‘mixed’ areas of the city, having in some cases taken Indian wives. The city itself had become a hive of commercial, political, military and cultural activity. The EIC had, by 1803, 260 000 Indian soldiers in its employ, and some 250 clerks to record its varieties of commercial transactions. In addition to governing, the EIC also meted out justice in its own Supreme Court, and the city had at its disposal numbers of British professional men, including lawyers, doctors, engineers, and artists. It was an expensive place to live, and those who had acquired their fortunes were expected to live and entertain on the lavish ‘nabob’ scale. An indispensable part of these entertainments were the ‘nautch girls’ who performed at a variety of private parties as well as on religious festivals that were celebrated with great pomp in the sumptuous dwellings of wealthy Indian and European ‘nabobs’ alike. Writing in 1932 about the ‘nautch-girls’ and ‘nautch entertainments’ of this period, the historian Percival Spear (1901–1982) gives us the following documented overall picture: … (the) increased European influence was only one side of the picture. Parallel to it went the influence of the Indian environment, sometimes elaborating what already existed, sometimes taking new forms. Foremost among these Indian customs was the European addiction to the nautch. As soon as enough ladies arrived in India to make European dancing practicable, the whole community took to it with enthusiasm, but they retained their taste for the nautch as a spectacle. To see a nautch was something like attending the ballet in Europe, with the difference that the troop always came to a private house. In the transition period it was the substitute for the theatre. The difference between the Indian and English ideas of pleasure as consisting respectively in repose and action is in nothing better

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illustrated. ‘Villagers,’ says Hunter in his Journal, ‘were much surprised to see us dance, saying that it was very extraordinary that we, who could afford to have dancing girls, should wish to dance.’ The European taste for a nautch is further shown by the fact that it became the recognized form of entertainment for an Indian merchant to provide for his English guests. As so easily happens in India, it became traditional, and continued long after the European taste itself had disappeared.

‘When a black man has a mind to compliment a European, he treats him to a nautch,’ wrote Mrs. Kindersley in 1754, and the custom still existed at the time of Mrs. Fenton’s visit to Calcutta in 1826. During the transition period its popularity continued unchecked, and though some had doubts of its propriety, all acknowledged its charm.

‘It is their languishing glances, wanton smiles, and attitudes not quite consistent with decency, which are so much admired,’ wrote Mrs. Kindersley. Hart in 1775 speaks of ‘six or seven black girls being brought in after dinner’ when ‘they sang and danced well’, and in 1778 they were ‘still much admired by the European gentlemen’.

Their later history may perhaps here be summarized. In the civil stations they became gradually of less importance, though in 1794 it was still customary for ladies and gentlemen to be given a view of the nautch by friends on their arrival. After this time the English taste gradually changed from a slightly guilty appreciation or naive enjoyment to frank incomprehension, boredom and finally disgust. The chaplain Tennant in 1803 thought little of them, but advised attendance at these nautches, as a matter of courtesy. Lord Hastings in 1814 was contemptuous, while in 1826 Mrs. Fenton described a dancing girl as ‘an odious specimen of Hindustanee beauty’, who ‘made frightful contortions of her arms and hands, head and eyes. This was her poetry of motion.

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I could not even laugh at it’. De Jacquemmont summed up the matter when he appreciated the nautch, but said it was liked best by those who had forgotten European musical time.

In the army enthusiasm for the nautch continued till the end of the century, perhaps because of the lack of facilities for European dancing. According to Sir J. D’Oyley the influx of officers from 1778 led to the best sets going to the cantonments ‘until reason rode past on the wings of military retrenchment, and the Auditor General’s red ink negatives dissolved the charm’. The taste nevertheless continued, and at the different camping grounds the officers would be entertained by sets from the neighbouring village or pagoda.

James Mayer Holzman, in his 1926 Columbia University dissertation on the ‘Nabobs’ also alludes to the ‘nautch’: … A pretentious style of living was not so much vanity as necessity in a country which made pomp essential to government. The tedium of years among a small circle, far from home, was eked out by fortifying the gaming table and the bottle with the Nautch girl, or with more innocent, but equally outré pastimes …

And, in her well-known warning against the charms which the dancers exercised over young British males in India, Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851), the successful writer of children’s books and chronicler of her own stay in India, writes in her journal for the year 1812–1813: Whilst we were at Meerut, Chuny Laul, the Copra Walla, commonly called the Burrah Nauk Walla, the Great Nose Fellow, brought to our gates a party of dancers, Nautch girls, and asked me if I would like to see a Nautch. I was glad to have the opportunity, and had the party ushered into the long-room, whilst every child and servant in the compound were collected to see the sight. These Nautch girls are regularly brought up to the profession; some of them are probably slaves, often sold

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by their parents for the purpose; and the most beautiful girls, and those who have the finest voices, are selected. There is generally an old female at the head of the company—one who lives on the wages obtained in various ways by these unhappy girls—and there are men who attend in the household, and go out with them. When these girls travel, they generally go hidden by crimson curtains, in a car drawn by bullocks. Their education consists in singing, dancing, and playing on a sort of guitar, or small harp. Some of the higher ranks of them are taught to read, and on this account it is considered disgraceful for respectable women in the East to learn.

The influence of these Nautch girls, even over men who have been bred up in England, and who have known, admired, and respected their own countrywomen, is not to be accounted for; it is often kept up even when beauty is past. This influence steals upon the senses of those who come within its charmed circle not unlike that of an intoxicating drug, or what is written of the wiles of witchcraft, and is the more dangerous to young Europeans because they seldom fear it; for perhaps these very men who are so infatuated remember some lovely face in their native land, and fancy they are wholly unapproachable by any attraction which could be used by a tawny beauty. Of course the effect produced on me, a matron surrounded by her children, was not like this; but certainly I was astonished, fascinated, and carried, in fancy, to the golden halls of ancient kings. The nights at this time of the year were so very hot that I often got up and sat by the open window. There, night after night, I used to hear the songs of the unhappy dancing-girls, accompanied by the sweet yet melancholy music of the cithara; and many were the sad reflections inspired by these longprotracted songs. All these Englishmen who were beguiled by this sweet music had had mothers at home, and some had mothers still, who, in the far distant land of

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their children’s birth, still cared and prayed and wept for the once blooming boys who were then slowly sacrificing themselves to drinking, smoking, want of rest, and the witcheries of the unhappy daughters of heathens and infidels …

Sophie Charlotte Belnos (1795–1865) was born and raised in Calcutta. She married the French miniaturist Jean-Jacques Belnos, who established the first lithographic press in the city in 1822. In 1832, with the assistance of Alexandre-Marie Colin, she produced her first book, Twenty-four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal. She later went on to establish her own lithographic press in Calcutta in 1847, producing then another collection of her illustrations titled The Sundhya or Daily Prayers of the Brahmins in 1851. It is in her Twenty-four Plates that we find her watercolours of both male and female dancers, together with brief descriptive passages. The plates that have to do with dancers are numbers 15, 16, 17 and 18. Plate 15 is again a description of ‘dancing boys’, to whom Mrs Belnos refers as ba-yees. These are described as dancing at the wedding feasts of ‘the middling classes of Bengallees, Mussulmen and even Black Portuguese’ and as being ‘not so expensive as a set of Hindoostan dancing girls’. Their movements, Mrs Belnos tells us, are more animated than those of the dancing girls, while they dance and sing with ‘often shrill and disagreeable’ infantile voices. They wear rich costumes and are often the sons of the musicians. When they reach the age of fifteen or sixteen, they become too tall to perform in the guise of girls, and then join the ranks of the musicians or take up some other work, such as domestic service in European homes. They are ‘generally of the Mussulman sect’. Her ‘three dancing girls of Hindoostan’ are depicted in plate 16, about which she writes: This Plate exhibits the different figures of the Eastern Nautch, their steps are slow, their motions dignified, and their figures graceful, generally indicative of the different passions described in the song, which accompanies the dance; the musicians sometimes follow the dancing girl, but often remain stationary in a line

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behind. Europeans who do not understand the meaning of each figure, find their dance insipid and dull, but the Natives who perfectly comprehend every motion are passionately fond of these Nautches. The rich Hindoos and Musselmen often pass many hours in the enjoyment of their favorite amusement. Natives of both sexes of respectability will never dance themselves, it is considered derogatory to their dignity. The dancing girls represented here, are of the Musselman sect, as also the musicians. Some of these girls are very young, beautiful, and much fairer than the Bengallees, being natives of Delhi, Agra, and other rich provinces of Hindoostan. They are rewarded very liberally by the rich natives at their feasts and marriages, etc. They are covered with rich and expensive jewels of gold, pearls, diamonds, and other precious stones, their upper garments are of gauze or very fine muslin bordered with gold and silver ribbons very deep, their trowsers are of satin.

Figure 3.3 ‘Three Dancing Girls of Hindoostan’, Plate 16 from Mrs Belnos’ Twenty-four Plates, etc., 1832.

Plate 17 is a picture of ‘a Nautch’, to which is appended a lively description of the atmosphere of the entertainment: Three days previous to throwing the image of their goddess Doorga into the river Ganges, the

Writings from the Bengal Presidency

rich  Hindoo  Baboos  and Rajahs give most splendid fêtes at their magnificent palaces in Calcutta and its vicinity, when cards of invitation are sent to all the ladies and gentlemen of the first circles in the settlement who honor the feast with their presence. The crowds of natives on these occasions are immense, and not agreeable to push through, but on entering the magnificent saloon, the eye is dazzled by a blaze of lights from splendid lustres, triple wall shades, candle brass etc. ; superb pier glasses, pictures, sofas, chairs, Turkey carpets, etc., adorn the splendid hall; these combined with the sounds of different kinds of music, both European and Indian, played all at the same time in different apartments; the noise of native tom-toms from another part of the house; the hum of human voices, the glittering dresses of the dancing girls, their slow and graceful movement; the rich dresses of the Rajah and his equally opulent Indian guests; the gay circle of European ladies and gentlemen, and the delicious scent of utter of roses and sandal which perfumes the saloon strikes the stranger with amazement; he fancies himself transported to some enchanted region, and the whole scene before him is but a fairy vision. Some of the rich Rajahs go to considerable expenses at these festivals of the Doorga Poojah which lasts several days, they entertain Brahmins by hundreds, and distribute alms to some thousands of poor Hindoos: besides the entertainment given to the Europeans, it is not uncommon to see in one part of the house Hindoo Poojah going on, and at another, a long table laid out with ham and turkey, and all the luxuries of Europe and the East, spread out for the refreshment of their Christian guests; at which only the black Portuguese and Musselmen servants attend: the best wines, liquors, and even Champagne is served at pleasure at these fêtes. Sometimes in another apartment a band of European musicians procured at a great expense strike up waltzes and quadrilles, and not unfrequently a quadrille party has formed and danced with great good humour and spirit till a late hour. These Nautches continue three nights successively.

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Figure 3.4 ‘A Nautch’, Plate 17 from Mrs Belnos’ Twenty-four Plates, etc., 1832.

Plate 18 is again titled ‘A Nautch’, and here Mrs Belnos gives us an insight into the personal exchange between dancer and audience: Having already described a Nautch in the preceding plate, this one is added merely as an illustration of the various figures. The dancing girl here represented is sitting at the feet of the two ladies, and singing with all her might. A nautch girl sometimes, especially at the commencement of the evening entertainment, when few Europeans are seen in the magnificent saloon of the Rajah or Baboo, will venture to approach while dancing some ladies of rank, and kneeling at their feet, continues singing, and at intervals softly asks for a Buxees or present: the ladies generally give a few rupees, on which she retires satisfied, to the other end of

Writings from the Bengal Presidency

the saloon and continues her  nautch for some time when a new set of dancing girls and musicians relieve the first. A bouquet of flowers and utter of roses and sandal are always offered to the visitors at these nautches.

We get some idea, then, of the magnificent scale of these entertainments, and of the festive and costly environment in which the dances were staged. It is clear, too, that the costumes are of the first order and that the dancers are prosperous. Not only are they ‘expensive’ to engage, but further tips are solicited during the course of the performance. The dance itself is sedate and stately, and does not at all put us in mind of what we would recognize as Kathak today, though there is mention of the enactment in dance of the ‘different passions mentioned in the song’, a sure reference to the abhinaya-rasa element of which ‘the natives perfectly comprehend every motion’. It is interesting that Mrs Belnos, in referring to the dancers being much fairer than their Bengali counterparts, locates them at Delhi and Agra. These centres, together with Lucknow, were indeed the cities from which the dancers were brought to Calcutta. Much of the ‘nautch’ that one reads about in 19th-century company-ruled Bengal occurs on the Delhi-Lucknow-Patna-Murshidabad-Calcutta axis. It is not clear to me whether the dancers at the Hindu Durga Puja would also have been deployed from the Mughal dance community or whether these were Hindu dancers from a quite different tradition. Mrs Belnos makes no distinction between the two, though Balthazar Solvyns, as we have seen, refers to the puja performers as ‘Ramjanny’ dancers. It is worth noting, considering the relatively early date of her writing, that Mrs Belnos tells us that ‘natives of both sexes of respectability will never dance themselves; it is considered derogatory to their dignity’. Though she makes no reference to the courtesan aspect, it is clear that she is recording an indigenous prejudice against the dance long before the agitations of the anti-nautch movement were even heard of. Finally, the ‘black Portuguese’ mentioned by her were remnants of Afro-Portuguese slave communities in Calcutta, brought to the city in the capacity of servants for hire by a variety of European vessels which sailed to India via the Cape of Good Hope.

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It is interesting to note that Mrs Belnos was at great pains to assure her readers that her representations were accurate. To this end she included prefatory matter from two members of the Royal Asiatic Society, confirming the authenticity of her illustrations. A little earlier than Mrs Belnos a company official named Captain Robert Smith had gathered his own set of drawings into an album first published in 1824 under the title Asiatic Costumes from Drawings taken during a Residence in India. Smith might have been an officer in the Bengal engineers who served in India between 1805 and 1830, or he might have been the Captain Smith in the 44th East Essex Foot, which was in India from 1823 to 1833. Whichever Smith he was, his album contains several depictions of dancers, of which the first is again a ‘dancing boy’. We are told that ‘when the boys are dressed for exhibition there is nothing whatever to distinguish them from the other sex. The same ornaments, such as necklace, bracelets, ear, finger and toe rings, decorate the boys as well as the nautch girls …’ These boys dance at festivals, Smith says, and concludes with the repetition that ‘a boy dressed in this fashion might easily pass for one of the other sex’. It is clear that the element of transvestitism was the central intention in presenting ‘dancing boys’, who, as Mrs Belnos says, were a less expensive alternative to the ‘nautch girls’, and were probably employed at functions less grand than those at which the female dancers performed. Plate 2 in Smith’s album introduces us to the ‘Nautch Girl or Singing Girl’, and has the following text attached: The Nautch Girl here represented was considered one of the most celebrated singers in Bengal. Her voice was extremely sweet, but she sung in so low a tone, that it would have been impossible to hear a note unless within a few yards of her: but a powerful voice is not esteemed an excellence in an Indian singer. Her action was confined to merely extending one foot forward and drawing it back again at intervals, while one arm was occasionally stretched out, and the hand slowly waved backwards and forwards. Her dress was covered over with gold

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and silver embroidery. She had rings on every finger, even above the second joint, and on her toes also, besides numerous other ornaments of gold and silver about her person.

Each Nautch Girl is attended by her own musicians, who form themselves in a circle behind her, accompanying her voice with their instruments. The music is simple, but well adapted to the style of singing which it is intended to accompany; one beats time with his fingers on a small d’hol or drum, another plays on an instrument something like a violin, while a third plays on a sort of castagnettes. When the song is over the group retire in the same order they entered, and another takes their place.

Figure 3.5 ‘Nautch Girl or Singing Girl’, Plate 2 from Capt. Robert Smith’s Asiatic Costumes, 1851.

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Smith here describes the dholaist, sarangist and nattuvanar with talam, using the European terms that are familiar to him. Again the emphasis is on soft singing tones and sedate motions. His next ‘Nautch Girl or Singing Girl’ is depicted in Plate 3, and here the accompanying text departs from the idea of the languid dance: The dances of the Nautch Girls consist in sudden transitions. The movement is sometimes slow and graceful: then by a change of the music it becomes all life, and exhibits the most rapid succession of violent actions, the performers twirling round with the velocity of a spinning top, and for such a length of time that it almost makes a person giddy to look at them. These transitions are kept up without intermission until the actress is tired; when another group, a dancer or singer, and their attendant musicians, make their appearance and repeat the same tiresome performance.

The dress of this Nautch Girl consists of a muslin robe of the most transparent texture, lined with crimson silk, and trimmed with the same, edged with gold lace: the scarf is also of crimson silk, trimmed in the same manner: the drawers are of blue silk: and, like the rest of the dancers, she is loaded with ornaments of gold and silver.

In this description we move closer to the kind of motion that is associated with Kathak, with the performers ‘spinning round with the velocity of a spinning top’. The transitions from subtle abhinaya-based mimetics to pure dance sequences including chakkars with rapid, intricate footwork will be recognizable to dancers and audiences viewing a Kathak performance today. A third ‘Nautch Girl or Singing Girl’ appears in Plate 4, and is accompanied by a more general description of the dancers: The Nautch Girls are the singing and dancing girls of the East. They are gorgeously attired in embroidered robes of silk and muslin, and covered with jewels. They attend the public and private festivals, and entertain

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the company by their soft and voluptuous songs, and graceful attitudes. Throughout Hindoostan, among Hindoos as well as Moosulmauns, when an entertainment is given, the master of the feast sends for the public dancing girls and musicians to amuse his guests. The Asiatics of any respectability never dance themselves; that amusement being considered quite inconsistent with propriety, and the gravity of character which they generally preserve.

Figure 3.6 ‘Nautch Girl or Singing Girl’, Plate 3 from Capt. Robert Smith’s Asiatic Costumes, 1851.

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Here the emphasis is on splendid costume and the ‘soft and voluptuous’ nature of the performance. This abhinaya expression of love-yearning, usually in the form of the passionate desire of Radha for Krishna—a Vishnuite abhinaya practice that was tolerated throughout by the refined Muslim courts—is what precludes ‘Asiatics of any respectability’ from dancing themselves. The performance of dance is ‘quite inconsistent with propriety’ unless it is presented by the dancing class. The text accompanying the next drawing of a ‘nautch girl’ (Plate 5) gives an example of singing technique, but is mainly focused on costume and jewels: At a Nautch given by a rich native of Calcutta, the singer here represented was observed to put her finger frequently to the side of her nose; sometimes she pressed it firmly to the nostril, at others she gave it a shake, for the purpose of altering the tones of her voice, which certainly did not improve their sweetness. Her dress, like that of the other Nautch Girls, is very showy. Her robe is composed of silk bordered with silver lace, and a white muslin scarf trimmed with gold lace and fringe is thrown across her bosom and over her shoulders, forming a sort of hood behind, which is sometimes worn over the head. She also wears long wide drawers of silk or muslin; and her toes, fingers, and ears, are decorated with gold and silver rings.

Our general perception of the kind of dance that was performed in this period must be coloured by the fact that Wajid Ali Shah, who restructured and re-formalized a proto-Kathak dancing style, had not yet assumed the throne in Awadh. His rule, until his kingdom was annexed by the East India Company, endured from 1847–1856. Still we must assume that some kind of formalized choreography and dance design were known to the dancers and dance teachers in the period before the great Lucknow efflorescence under this highly cultured ruler. At any rate, we see that descriptions of the steps and attitudes agree between Mrs Belnos and Robert Smith and there are at least some clues as to the subtlety and vivacity, as well as the standardization, of the dance at the time of their brief observations.

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Postcolonial writings on dance often emphasise the exploitative aspects of the colonial ‘gaze’ turned on the dancer, yet one must concede at the same time that the element of sheer delight in the dance, however imperfectly understood it might have been, is also evinced in many contemporary writings, and does not preclude real admiration and, in some cases, real love too. Apart from this, it is worth recalling that multitudes of dancers were kept at the courts of wealthy Indian nawabs and that, when they lived in kothas apart from the courts in quasifamilial communities, they offered their services to all who were able to afford them. Again, contemporary writings often mention that these women were literate and cultivated, and skilled in the arts of poetry, music, and dance. One of the oddest contemporary writings on dance performances in Calcutta is the long satirical poem, Tom Raw, The Griffin, by Sir Charles D’Oyly (1781–1845) and James Atkinson (1780–1852), the company surgeon and orientalist. The book was illustrated by D’Oyly with two depictions of the ‘nautch’. D’Oyly was born in Murshidabad in 1881 and, after completing his schooling in England, returned to India at the age of sixteen to spend most of the remainder of his life there in EIC employ. He was an amateur artist of high ability, who founded the ‘Behar School of Athens’ in Patna in 1824 and operated a lithographic press between 1828 and 1831, during which time several Indian artists, including Jairam Das and Shiv Dayal, were trained in the school’s Western painting techniques. The book was published in 1828 though its preface is dated 1 April 1824. Almost immediately after its release it was suppressed and withheld from periodical review—to such an extent that the introduction to the 2020 Cambridge critical edition refers to it as a ‘lost satire’. Its portrayal of the grotesque and farcical elements of Company rule and Company types was not appreciated by those whom it lampooned, together with their rough-and-ready idea of empire. In the parlance of the time, a ‘griffin’ was, as D’Oyly himself puts it ‘a Johnny Newcome in the East’. The poem in twelve cantos puts Tom Raw through a series of bizarre experiences at the hands of opulently seedy Company officials and their indigenous facilitators, the ‘Baboos’. Descriptions of the dance

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occur from lines 3737 to 3825 and are depictions of an event which Tom Raw attends at the house of the wealthy local ‘nob’ (a comically shortened form of ‘nabob’, itself an anglicized derivative from nawab) named Kishen. Though the poem is farce and satire throughout, there is a sustained pause from the purely ridiculing note when the dancers are described—with one or two comic asides. Rather than reproduce the entire section of the poem here, I will present it as a series of prose extracts: See! How invitingly the creatures dance. What elegance and ease in every motion! … Their step is slow and measured … a grave devotion to time, and suppleness of figure’s taper … An ample robe of fine transparent muslin, encircling their slight forms, dependent flows o’er silken trousers loose and rustling, that scarce a little naked foot expose … Their hair no wreaths of gaudy flow’rs bedeck, but richly oiled and neatly parted too, meets in a knob above, or down the neck behind, falls, dangling in a plaited cue … What shall we say of noseencircling rings, or the rich pendants of the loaded ear … but chief the bells they round their ankles wear, that to the motions of their well-made feet jingle in cadence to the native air, and mark the time—now solemn, and now fleet, as on the echoing floor they tremulously beat … Or how describe the graceful play of arms, which, beautifully waving as they move, reveals at every step a thousand charms, expressing terror, languishment, or love, while their dark, speaking eyes unceasingly rove o’er all around … with uplift arms her filmy veil is spread like a transparent canopy, and light as cobwebs on the lawn … Rolling from side to side her airy head, swift as the agile roe’s elastic bound, then, in a giddy evolution led, her full robes whirling gracefully around, she sinks amidst her sparkling drap’ry to the ground … Still, to the cadence of the sprightly air, her supple limbs and waving head she plies, now, drooping forward, bows with modest care; now, backward bending, flash her beaming eyes; and, midway now, her form is seen to rise till, once more standing, she resumes the dance …

Writings from the Bengal Presidency

And many a varied attitude she tries, and many a winning smile and amorous glance, that … might even Mahomet entrance …

Figure 3.7 ‘Tom Raw at a Hindoo Entertainment’, illustration in Tom Raw, The Griffin, 1828.

Figure 3.8 ‘Nob Kishen’s Nautch Party’, illustration intended for Tom Raw, The Griffin, 1828. (By Permission of the Victoria & Albert Museum).

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It can hardly be denied that, taken prosaically out of its farcical context, D’Oyly’s description of the dancer and the dance reveals not only an intimate acquaintance with the art but a talent for lively representation of its expressive and kinetic qualities. Once again we are introduced to a richly attired and bejewelled performer whose dance, though charming and passionate, is marked by a modesty of presentation. Again, too, we see the variations in pace, with subtle abhinaya interludes punctuated by chakkars. To such an extent, indeed, are these switches in temperament and motion made present to us that we can almost see in them a Kathak recital as we know it today. (It is worth observing the accuracy of depiction attempted by D’Oyly even in a satirical cartoon of this kind. The iconographic statuary in the illustration made by him shows Durga flanked on the left by Saraswati and Ganesha, and on the right by Lakshmi. In the foreground Durga’s mythical lion— sometimes replaced by a horse—is killing the evil demon Mahishasura. This is pure Shakti-ite iconography, yet the ‘Ramjunny’ (Ramjani) Hindu dancers are wearing costumes identical to those worn by ‘Mussulman’ proto-Kathak dancers as they were depicted at the time, and the dance-steps described are similar too.) We now move westwards from Bengal to Delhi, where the ‘nautch’ and ‘nautch girls’ were highly prized, both by the rulers and inhabitants of the city, and by the British officials employed there in various East India Company positions. These ‘nautch girls’ were already being viewed askance by many European commentators as putting temptation in the way of Company officials and soldiers who were almost invariably strongly attracted to them, and in some cases were moved to marry them. They were regularly in demand in the wealthy houses and courts of Delhi, and the employment of a troupe of dancers was an indispensable part of any establishment that wanted to be held in high esteem. High-ranking citizens of the city, such as the Anglo-Indian soldier Colonel James Skinner, seem to have presented regular ‘nautch’ entertainments at their lavish homes. Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, Governor General from 1836 to 1842, mentions a visit and a ‘nautch’ at Colonel

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Skinner’s home during her sojourn in India in one of her letters, as follows: In the evening we went to a nautch at Colonel Skinner’s. His house is fitted up in the native fashion, and he had all the best singers and dancers in Delhi, and they acted passages out of Vishnu and Brahma’s lives, and sang Persian songs which I thought made a very ugly noise, but Mr. B, who speaks Persian as fluently as English, kept saying, ‘Well, this is really delightful—this I think is equal to any European singing—in fact there is nothing like it.’ There is nothing like it that I ever heard before, but certainly the words, as he translated them, were very pretty. One little fat nautch girl sang a sort of passionate song to -G., with little meaning smiles, which I think rather attracted his lordship, and I thought it might be too much for him if I forwarded to him Mr. B.’s translation. ‘I am the body, you are the soul: we may be parted here, but let no one say we shall be parted hereafter. My father has deserted me, my mother is dead, I have no friends. My grave is open, and I look into it; but do you care for me?’ The dancing is very slow and very dull, but the dresses and ornaments are beautiful.

William Fraser (1784–1835) came to India at the age of sixteen, and entered East India Company service as a ‘writer’, studying for this position in Calcutta. He became Agent to the Governor General in Delhi in 1823, then again from 1828 to 1829, and finally in his last years from 1832 to 1835. In 1835, he was assassinated over a matter involving a disputed case of inheritance, by an assassin hired by Shamsuddin Ahmed Khan, a minor nawab who was subsequently hanged for the murder. Both he and his brother were close friends of Colonel James Skinner, and William himself is shown in one portrait dressed in the uniform of ‘Skinner’s Horse’. Fraser also had an Indian wife, Amiban, from Rania, by whom he had three children, two boys and a girl. Fraser was deeply interested in all aspects of Indian life and culture, including the ‘nautch’. His brother, James, visiting

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him in Delhi, wrote about the dancers in a letter sent to his family in Scotland: After dinner we had a nautch. As we get more accustomed to the thing, it certainly improves on one, or at least becomes more intelligible and the songs are more followed. There were many sets of nautch women, some of whom were very fair—and the dresses were very rich. Some sang extremely well—and one named Malageer particularly excelled. I have ordered her picture to be done in one of her attitudes, and shall attempt it myself, getting her to the bungalow.

As to nature of the dance itself, we do not know much about it, and apart from the narrative descriptions found in early 19th-century European writings, there is not much to guide us towards a definitive understanding of the choreographies and steps that were used in performance in the decades under review here. There are strong distinctions to be made between the ‘nautch’ performances of North India in the 19th century and the ‘classical’ Kathak repertoire that is known today. The 19th-century style seems to have been rooted in mimetic pantomime, with sedate movement of the limbs in kinetic illustration of lyrics sung by the dancers themselves, although there were also interludes of pure dance or nritta. Much emphasis was also placed on facial expression, with special reference to the eyes, and use of a veil for covering and uncovering of these features in the course of the performance. Not everyone was equally enamoured of the the ‘nautch’, and some found the performances merely anodyne, as we can tell from the note struck by Bishop Reginald Heber (1783–1826), Archbishop of Calcutta, in recalling a dance performance he witnessed at the Raja’s palace in ‘Bullumghur’ (Ballabgarh), about 60 km south of Delhi, in the mid-1820s: After we had been here a few minutes, a set of dancing girls entered the room followed by two musicians. I felt a little uneasy at this apparition, but Dr. Smith, to whom I mentioned my apprehensions, assured me that

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nothing approaching indecency was to be looked for in the dancers or songs which a well-bred Hindu exhibited to his visitors. I sat still, therefore, while these poor little girls, for they none of them seemed more than fourteen, went through the same monotonous evolutions which I had heard my wife describe, in which there is certainly very little grace, or interest, and no perceptible approach to indecency. The chief part of the figure, if it can be called so, seemed to consist in drawing up and letting fall again the loose wide sleeves of their outer garments, so as to show the arm as high as the elbow, or a very little higher, while the arms waved backwards and forwards in a stiff and constrained manner. Their dresses were rich, but there was such an enormous quantity of scarlet cloth petticoats and trowsers, so many shawls wrapped round their waists, and such multifarious skirts peeping out below each other that their figures were quite hidden, and the whole effect was that of a number of Dutch dolls, though the faces of two or three out of the number were very pretty. Two sung each a Persian and a Hindoostani song with very pleasing though not powerful voices, after which, as the demands both of curiosity and civility were satisfied, I gave them a gratuity, as I understood was usual on such occasions, as a token of their dismissal.

This timidly virtuous note is negated, about ten years later, by the affirmative and enthusiastic appreciation of the ‘nautch girls’ expressed by an anonymous British soldier, writing in The Meerut Universal Magazine in 1837: Scarcely had the usual compliments been exchanged, ere a band of fierce barbarians with their villainous musical instruments, accompanied by a pair of remarkably handsome and splendidly dressed young nautch girls, began to sing and dance, with all their natural grace and elegance. My taste has not been corrupted by a long residence in India, as some will foolishly imagine, but rather it has been perfected. I think that the better

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order of nautch girls do show the highest grace and elegance in their fascinating movements. Let it be had in remembrance that the dances are invariably in minuet time, and that their motions are very slowly performed, and calculated in the highest degree to display the matchless beauties of the full formed female figure. The personal symmetry of some of them is beautiful beyond conception; and I have seen many girls who needed not have blushed to have been compared with ‘the statue that enchants the world’. In face, I conceive that their deficiency of expression, I mean of cultivated and feeling expression, leaves them far behind our countrywomen; but in figure he must indeed be a blind idolater, who will for a moment hesitate in giving them due precedence …

This note is typical of the more worldly soldiering class, in whose letters and memoirs one finds many instances of happy attendances of ‘nautch parties’ both in North and South India. But it is also true that there is little comprehension of the art itself, with most of the attention focused on the dancing body and its beauty. It was perhaps this focus that was one of the factors that led eventually to an increasingly censorious tone in describing the art and person of the ‘dancing girls’ throughout India.

References

1. Solvyns, Bathazar, Les Hindous, Paris: Chez l’auteur & Chez H. Nicolle, 1808–1812. 2. Spear, Percival, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India, London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1932.

3. Holzman, John Mayer, The Nabobs in England, a Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785, New York: Dissertation for Columbia University.

4. Sherwood, Mrs Mary Martha, The Life of Mrs Sherwood, written by herself; with extracts from Mr Sherwood’s journal during his

References

imprisonment in France and residence in India, Boston: American Tract Society, 1864.

5. Belnos, S.C., Twenty-four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal, London: Smith & Elder, 1832.

6. Smith, Capt. Robert, Asiatic Costumes from Drawings taken during a Residence in India, London: R. Ackerman, 1851.

7. D’Oyly, Charles and Atkinson, James, Tom Raw, The Griffin: A Burlesque Poem, London: R. Ackerman, 1828.

8. Eden, Emily, Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, London: R. Bentley, 1866.

9. Heber, Bishop Reginald, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829.

10. Anon., Hepatitis Hippobatees, or, marches in India by a sick soldier, from Bareilly in Rohilcund to Hurdwar and Simlah, and thence to Meerut; with a tour in Bundelcund, article in The Meerut Universal Magazine, vol. 4, 1837.

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Chapter 4

The Decade of Encounter: 1830–1840 The 1830s marked a new high-point in the Western encounter with Indian dance when a group of bayadères from Pondicherry was brought to France in 1838 by the impresario E.C. Tardivel. For the first time since writings about hereditary dancers from all regions of India had been filtering through to Europe, the educated public and the press were able to see these artists for themselves. This novel situation gave rise to a plethora of writings on the bayadères or devadasis, from popular reports to attempts at description of both the ritual and performative aspects. In 1835, three years before the arrival of the Pondicherry dancers in France, E.V.S. Jacquet’s work, Religion des Malabaren (‘The Religion of the Malabars’), was published. In the section on the Dévadáchi ou femme des pagodes (‘Devadasi or Temple Woman’), he describes the temple ritual dancer as follows: It is usually the weavers who consecrate their daughters to the service of the temples: the parents in no way ask for their consent, and do not wait until they are of an age to be given, for they are from their birth destined to the service of the gods. Great care is taken to prepare them in continuous exercise of dancing, singing, and plays of mimicry: a master is specially charged with the education of the young girls destined to the service of

Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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the temples. It is he who trains them for a long time in the ceremonies, until they become dévadáchi, which is to say, servants of the gods. Having barely attained the age of nine or ten, their fathers convene other castes to assist at the consecration of their daughters. They are solemnly conducted to the temple, and, before entering, give proofs to the public of their prowess in the arts of dance, singing, and mime. They are then offered gifts in proportion to their merits and the esteem they have earned. They then enter the temple, where they prostrate themselves before the gods; the Brahmins present at the consecration lift them up again, and the father then offers his daughter to the gods, saying: ‘Sirs, here is my daughter whom I offer to you. Deign to receive her into your service.’ The officiating Brahmin puts into the hands of the young girl a little tirounirou and some drops of water which has been used to wash the idol, and she then mixes these and rubs the mixture into her forehead, signifying that she has consecrated herself with joy to the service of the gods. This ceremony supposes that the consecration has been performed in one of the temples of Shiva. In effect, if it is a temple of Vishnu, the young girl signs herself with tiroundmam and drinks a little water in which has been soaked some leaves of a species of basil called toulachi. If it is elsewhere in one or another temple, the officiating Brahmin mixes in a copper basin a little sandal paste with water which has been used to wash the idol, and, by sprinkling some drops on the young girl with his fingers, completes the consecration. After this he places round her neck a garland which has been worn by the idol, testifying in this way that she is acceptable to the gods, and that she has been placed under their protection. Finally, he says to her that she is from this moment a dévadáchi and exhorts her enthusiastically to fulfil her duties towards the gods. The new dévádachi again prostrates herself before the idol, the Brahmin lifts her up, and orders her parents to conduct her to a certain house near the temple, where the parents present betel to the invitees and offer a repast to all the dévádachis. Young girls

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thus consecrated to the cult may never marry. They are not allowed to return to their families or to inherit; their profession from now on is to give themselves without reserve to the whole world. The Malabares are persuaded that it is a religious merit to take their pleasure with these servants of the gods. No one is superior among them, each (devadasi) creates her own household separately and in the way that pleases her. They derive their subsistence from the revenues of the temple, but it is not this that contributes to the upkeep of their luxury. The generosity of those who buy their favours is for them a very abundant source of wealth. Those who gain their fortune in this way take great care to dress themselves elegantly, adorning themselves with earrings, necklaces, and rings of gold, and covering their arms and feet with circlets of silver. The duty of the dévadáchi is to present herself three times daily at the temple, in the morning, at midday, and in the evening, at the times when the religious ceremonies are celebrated. There they sing, dance, and perform their plays for the entertainment of the gods, and they perform these same functions in processions and at wedding ceremonies.

In his 1836 work, Ost-Asien (‘East Asia’), the German academic geographer and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Karl Ritter (1779–1859), had written about them: … A Brahmin priest and a temple dancer followed (Bishop Heber) into his tent, to show him honour. This was the first southern bayadère (i.e. dancer) met by Heber, who had journeyed from Calcutta. These southern dancers differ from those in Bengal in that they are bought as children to be used in service of the temple. Their clothing is very scant, their dance very indecent, their features better than those of the normal, lower classes of the people. Their scandalous earnings are offered to the temple, and when they grow older and incapable of earning an income, they are mercilessly cast out by the Brahmins, though most of them perish in their youth. Here, Bishop Heber did not

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find that they were esteemed and honoured, as it has often been said they are: no man from any respectable class may marry them. Nevertheless, their gods are worshipped and their priests honoured, though they find the offerings of the dancers acceptable, this being a fearful delusion of the people …

One year earlier, in 1835, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) had published her book on ‘the history of the condition of women in various ages and nations’, and in this writing, too, the dancers of India are discussed: From the remotest antiquity, dancing has been associated with religion in India. The devedassees are young girls devoted to the service of the temple almost from their infancy; and this is considered so great an honour, that even the rajahs are anxious to obtain it for their daughters. They must be well shaped, of pleasing features, of good constitutions, and of very tender age; the parents are likewise required to renounce all further claims to the child. The devedassees, after bathing the novitiate in the tank belonging to the temple, dress her in new clothes and adorn her with jewels; the high priest puts into her hand an image of the deity, to whose service she devotes herself with a solemn vow; the lobes of her ears are then bored, and the seal of the temple imprinted on her with a red-hot iron. The great pagoda of Juggernaut contains five or six hundred of these girls. The Brahmins teach them to read, write, sing and dance. They must likewise be versed in the history of their gods; but they are forbidden to read the vedas. They take care of the temples, light the lamps, and sing and dance before the statue of the god, on solemn festivals. Some say the devedassees are entirely subservient to the pleasures of the Brahmins, who are exceedingly jealous of them; others say they are at liberty to choose any lovers, in or out of the temple, provided they be of the higher castes. The tips of their nails are stained red. The long braided hair, the neck, the naked arms, and the feet are covered with jewels; rings on the hand, rings on the feet, rings

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in the ears, and sometimes rings in the side of the nose … The silver chains and bells with which they decorate their ankles and feet, make a monotonous but agreeable sound, as they dance, that mingles pleasantly with the small drums, tambourines, and silver cymbals, to which they keep time. In their hands they hold wooden castanets, which they strike in cadence. At the end of each dance, they turn toward the idol, with their hands clasped before their faces. All make precisely the same movements and gestures at the same moment. When they become old, or the Brahmins, for any other reason, wish them to leave, they are dismissed from the pagoda. The temple where they serve furnishes them with food, clothing, and pay; but when they leave they are obliged to relinquish all articles of ornament. They are ever after received in society with peculiar respect, a degree of sanctity is attached to their character, and it is considered an honor to marry them. If turned out of the temple in their old age, they are liable to be in destitute circumstances, unless they have a handsome daughter to succeed them; if so, they may safely rely on filial kindness. There is another class of Hindoo dancers, called canceni, or bayaderes. They are avowedly courtesans, but not disgraced by assuming that character, as women are in Christian countries. They receive the same education as the devedassees, or sacred dancers; but they are not like them confined to the service of the temples. Wealthy men hire them at entertainments, and some grandees keep a whole company constantly in their service. They too are loaded with jewels, bracelets, armlets, carcanets, coronals, rings, earrings, nose-rings, bells and chains. The dress of a distinguished dancer often costs from fifteen to twentythousand rupees. They surround their eyes with a black circle, made with the head of a pin dipped in powder of antimony. Those who are accustomed to it think it increases beauty of expression. To preserve the comeliness of their forms, they cover the bosom with hollow cases of wood, linked together,

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and buckled at the back. These cases are made so very thin and pliable, that they move freely with the slightest motion of the body; they are plated with gold or silver, and sometimes set with gems. There is nothing loud or bold in the manners of these degraded women. They are all softness, gentleness, and coquetry; but their dances, and the songs that accompany them, in which the Orientals take unbounded delight, are voluptuous beyond description.

There is another genuine Hindoo dance, called nautch, that differs in all respects from the dances performed by the devedassees or the canceni. It is executed by three women, who display in their steps and attitude a degree of seductive gracefulness astonishing to Europeans. These dancers are called ramdjenies. Their dress is embroidered with gold and silver. They wear trowsers of very rich stuff, with a circle of bells around the ankles. Their lower garment is very ample, and becomes inflated like a balloon, when they turn swiftly …

In this passage, we note again the attempt to distinguish between the various kinds of regional Indian dancers, but are left none the wiser for that. A distinction is made between the temple and public dancers, to the latter of which Child apportions the bayadère appellation—though in fact, other writers, especially French, use bayadères interchangeably. There is a reference to the ‘nautch’ dance, which is probably being used here as a generic term denoting dance outside of South India, and again, in this context, there is a mention of the ‘ramdjenies’, which correspond to Solvyns’ ‘ramjannies’, a term which we find in a variety of spellings throughout Western writing on Indian dance. With the coming of the Pondicherry bayadères to Europe, a more concerted effort would be made to express at least the effects on the public of the dance and dancers of the South, and these commentaries are found in several European languages, in popular journals, newspapers, magazines, and in early ethnological compendiums.

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In June 1838, a group of five dancers and three accompanists, including the nattuvanar, were brought to Europe by E.C. Tardivel. The troupe was attached to the Perumal Temple in Tiruvendipuram. They duly signed a contract to perform abroad for a period of 18 months, and sailed to France from the port at Pondicherry. In France they were encountered with an admiration approaching, in some cases, to adoration, though there were a number of sardonic responses too. The most well-known eulogy of the dancers was written by Théophile Gautier, the French poet and belle-lettrist. The theatre reviews and newspapers were full of the exalted praises of the dancers, with due emphasis on their ‘authenticity’. In October 1838, they crossed the channel to England, where they made 55 appearances at the Adelphi Theatre alone between October and December. The English public gave them a mixed response, and the impresario, Frederick Yates, claimed to have lost money on the venture. Many of the reviews in English newspapers were, however, highly enthusiastic and it was supposed that no one in the city would care to miss the spectacular performance. They also appeared on the stage in Brighton. In 1839, they toured Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium, in none of which countries they met with much success. The reviews from these countries indicate that the bayadères were too exotic for local tastes. None of the articles written about them record their return to India, and there is speculation that one of them, Ammani Ammal, died in London sometime after the completion of the tour. The five dancers and three accompanists were named in many reviews, in some instances with varying spellings. Their ages, too, were stated in some articles, though these may not be correct. They were: Tille Ammale (Tillammal), aged 30 or perhaps somewhat older. She was the matron-duenna or taikkizhavi, known to be rather sour and very protective of the dancers. One review mentions that she fiercely opposed any attempts at Christianization of the girls.

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Amany (Ammani), aged 18, the niece of Tille. She was adored by all who encountered her, both for her beauty and her grace in dancing. She was the dancer most often mentioned by the reviewers, and the one who was doted on by Gautier. Saoundiroun (Sundaram), aged 14, daughter or niece of Tille.

Ramgoun (Rangam), aged 13, second daughter or niece of Tille.

Vedoun (Vedam), aged 6, granddaughter of Ramalingam Mudali, the nattuvanar. She is often described in the reviews as a sweet and mischievous little devil or imp. The members of the melam were:

Ramalingam Modeley (Ramalingam Mudali), 40 years old, though he is described as having a white beard. The six-year-old Vedam was his granddaughter, so it is likely that Ramalingam was somewhat older than he was said to be. He was described as a man possessing a noble countenance and bearing. Savaranim (Savaranam), aged 25 years, who played the flute or thooti.

Deveneyagorn (Devanayakam), aged 30 years, who played the percussion instrument or maddalam. They performed a six-part repertoire, having the following titles and sequence:

The Robing of Vishnu, danced by Sundaram and Rangam. The Salute to the Rajah, danced by Vedam. The Widow’s Lament, danced by Ammani. The Malapou or Dance of Delight, danced by Tille, Ammani, Sundaram and Rangam. 5. The Dagger Dance or Hindoo Widow’s Excitement to Death, danced by Sundaram and Rangam. 6. The Dance of the Carrier Doves, danced by Ammani, Rangam and Sundaram. 1. 2. 3. 4.

In some cases, this repertoire was added to or subtracted from, as well as varied. In the case of Yates’s spectacle at the Adelphi Theatre, for instance, the bayadères’ dances were embedded in a larger entertainment called A Race for Rarity, or The Bayadères, which added such titillations as Attack on the Temple by the Native Troops and Prevention of the Suttee or Burning Sacrifice.

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The dance movements of  The Robing of Vishnu were partly described in The Spectator as follows: … one action resembles the effect of a choking sensation, the upper part of the spine curving, the head poking forward, and the eyelids and brows being drawn upwards.

Nothing is said of the narrative tale represented by this item. The article goes on to describe some of the other dances: The pas de deux concluded, the sweet little Veydoun performs an elaborate dance termed ‘The Salute to the Rajah,’ her brilliant eyes and teeth of dazzling whiteness seeming to light up her infantine countenance with pleasure. The tall graceful Amany then steps forward, with a melancholy aspect, and an air of languishment, and rolls her lustrous eyes, that seem suffused with sorrow as if they would literally dissolve with melting tenderness: her movements are more grave and slow, for she is performing ‘The Widow’s Lament;’ and she chants audibly a measured strain of woe. The matron Tille, who all this while has not ceased waving the horse-tail fan before the image, now resigns that task to the infant Veydoun, and joins Amany and her daughter and niece, in ‘The Malapou, or The Delightful Dance;’ a sort of Indian quadrille, in which the four performers keep their respective places, and the principle movement is bending the body from side to side, and making the arms meet in a graceful curve above the head. Meanwhile, the two cousins have performed ‘The Dagger Dance, or The Hindoo Widow’s Excitement to Death;’ which is of a more theatrical character than any other, but without the vehement and startling action of ballet dancing …

Some commentators are of the opinion that the The Malapou was a pure dance item, perhaps a Tillana, and it is speculated that elements of the Tanjore dance margam were incorporated in the repertoire performed in Europe. The Dance of the Carrier Doves, not mentioned in The Spectator because it had not been performed on that night, represents a lovelorn girl writing to

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her beloved while her  sakhis  form, with their muslin scarves, a palm-tree on which sits a dove that will carry the letter for the girl. The French reviewers, on the whole, were more concerned with describing the delightful dancers, as can be seen in this extract from L’Entracte, Marseilles, 1838: … the priestesses of the temple of Tindivina Pourum … five females, dark-gold in colour … after a ‘salaam’ greeting … rest immobile among the group in the salon, as though submitting themselves to our inspection … they balance themselves in the most voluptuous way in the world on adorable little feet, the colour of coffee, like five shrubs attached to the sun while their heads incline themselves beneath the same breeze … their arms entwined by bracelets of a bizarre shape and by blue tattoos … rings of gold hang from their ears, their nostrils, and their lips … they wear at their necks an ornament in the shape of a heart that signifies marriage … I will describe, in two opposing genres, Soundiroum and Amany … The physiognomy of Soundiroum is of a piquancy of which it is difficult to give any idea: her eyes of an inflamed black, swimming in a bluish enamel, sending out looks that could damn a saint. The art of glances has resided with her since her childhood; all the coquettes of Paris would want to take lessons from this petulant bayadère … she professes the language of the eyes with a dizzying success … Amany’s physique is full of softness, tall and slender like a palm-tree, her smile is candid and dreamy … She is eighteen years old! Soundiroum is hardly fourteen …

The little Veydon, six years old, has the physique of a little devil. Ramgoun has some resemblance to Soundiroum, but without equalling her, in my opinion … Speaking of Tille, the grand priestess, the superior figure among these dancers … I am too enamoured of the truth to say that she is pretty … it is possible that she may once have been, but at her age, in India, youth and beauty are fled without leaving any traces …

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Writing in August 1838, the reviewer for L’Illustration  is a little less appreciative as he tries to make sense of the dances: The troupe of bayadères currently giving performances in Paris is complete. It consists of five dancers and an orchestra of three musicians … Indian music may be infinitely agreeable to the indigenes but it strikes us as singularly monotonous and barbaric, and has probably not progressed since its first origins … What can we say of the dances of the bayadères? … They entwine themselves with an extraordinary vitality and with strong movements of their arms and head … while their eyes have an expression whose powerful fascination may stir confusion in Hindu hearts, a type of pantomime that probably has a religious sense that escapes us … The monotonous music … is conjoined with the jingling of the ornaments which enlace the arms, legs, the heads and the bodies of the dancers … The Dance of the Doves is … the most original … Amany, the premier dancer of the troupe, tall and strong and of sensuous aspect, and having the majestic form of a priestess of the pagan goddesses, executes a pantomime full of voluptuousness, accompanied by lyrics which convey, no doubt, the desires that are devouring her … while the languorous and ardent looks of this dancer convey … emotions about which it is impossible to be mistaken, Ramgoun and Saoundiroun, her fellow dancers, execute at the same time, for a duration of about fifteen minutes, the rotating movement of which we have already spoken … while the soft muslin gauze which envelops them completely exposes their bodily forms to the spectators …

The artists’ community throughout France was on the whole completely besotted by the dancers and the atmosphere generated by their repertoire. Théophile Gautier, in his essay Les Bayadères, first placed in Caprices et Zigzags and later in L’Orient, wrote along the following lines: Let us hasten to confirm that (the bayadères) are charming, of an irreproachable authenticity, and that they perfectly conform to the idea that we have formed of them …

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Amany is about eighteen years old; her skin resembles in colour a Florentine bronze, with nuances of olive and gold, very cool and soft … she has blue-black hair, fine and supple … her hands and feet are of a petiteness and distinction in the extreme … her ankles are slender … her flanks, her belly, her waist can compete for delicacy and elegance with the most perfect art left to us by antiquity …

The men are of a grand beauty, with sparkling black eyes and aquiline noses, little moustaches and, for all clothing, pantaloons held up by a band … their headdress is a length of striped cloth gracefully rolled about the head … Ramalingam wears a white beard of a most picturesque effect against his dark body … a Homeric old man … he has three white stripes above his eyes, three others on his side and arms … it is he who intones the songs to which (the dancers) dance … he has two small cymbals, which he claps together for marking the rhythm …

… their dance has nothing in common with ours; it is rather a highly accentuated pantomime … a certain movement of the head … like that of a preening bird … which could not be more graceful, and whose execution remains incomprehensible to us … add to this certain incredible turns of the eyes … undulations of the hips and circlings of the arms of an extraordinary suppleness, and you have a very piquant and very original spectacle … a singular thing …

… after the dance the troupe retires, leaving behind them a soft perfume of amber and sandalwood. The gates are shut again, and from the temple of Pondicherry we fall again into Paris, into the Allée des Veuves.

Le Magasin Pittoresque published Barre’s drawing of his statue of Amany, together with the signatures of the five dancers and a quasi-educational review: … One knows that the bayadères receive an education more advanced than that of other women in their country

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… a rare thing among the people of the Orient, these girls know how to read and write … they speak Tamil, the habitual language of the country they inhabit … but they also very correctly read and write Telinga, which is also called Telugu …

Figure 4.1a Statuette of Amany made by Jean-Auguste Barre and featured in Le Magasin Pittoresque.

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Figure 4.1b The signatures of the Bayadères, featured in the article in Le Magasin Pittoresque.

These five dancers … are true  bayadères. The daily newspapers have … already described their singular dance, their enigmatic gestures, and above all their strange glances, which no French word will know how to express …

Ramalingom, the chief of the orchestra, and his daughter, Veydon, are of the weaver caste, as is Tille, the oldest of the five bayadères. The caste of the other three is not known to us. The two musicians are of the Agamoudiar caste …

The critic for La France Littéraire, in an article titled Les Bayadères au Théâtre des Variétés (‘The Bayadères at the Varieties Theatre’), mused along the following lines:

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The dancer’s costumes are very rich … a muslin  shali  is wrapped about the torso, allowing a section of the bare small of the back to be seen among its folds, while pantaloons of striped cloth supported by a tightly-fitted waistband … cover the legs down to the ankles. A cloth of silk embroidered with gold supports and restricts the breasts, that treasure of which the bayadères are so jealous … their mat-black hair is flattened on their heads and covered by a silver cap held in place, at the front, by an ornamental band of the same material, and falls into two long tresses to the shoulders. Jewels depend from their ears, silver rings from their noses, bracelets are worn on the contours of their arms at different points … the precious stones scintillate in their waistbands … finally, bells of gold, floating about their ankles, accompany the dance with their metallic rustling …

He added that the bayadères were essentially incomprehensible to the French because: … their blood is not the same as our blood, and their passion in no way resembles ours. All the forms, attitudes, movements and expressions which they spread out before our eyes are completely foreign to our ideas of beauty … we ought to press them to return to their own land … we should persuade them to go and rediscover their flowers, their carpets, their perfumes, their sun, and all that sensual poetry that is necessary to their existence, and without which their charm lacks completion … Because it is only there, in the environment of all these objects made for them, that they will be allowed to love and to be loved—only there will they be able to be true bayadères.

La Presse, again in August of 1838, attempts to describe some parts of the repertoire, but confuses Vishnu with Shiva in the second item: ‘Have you seen the bayadères?’ This is the question that has come to replace ‘How are you doing?’ … … their programme is:

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THE GREETING OF THE PRINCE, by Veydoun

THE ROBING OF SHIVA, by Saoundiroun and Ramgoun THE DANCE OF MELANCHOLY, by Amany

THE DOVES, by Amany, Ramgoun and Saoundiroun THE MALAPOU, Saoundiroun

by

Tille,

Amany,

Ramgoun

and

On the day of the début there was among the public an attention full of anxiety as to whether they would be able to go and see a thing so strange, mysterious and charming, a thing so completely unknown in Europe, a thing so utterly new! …

The movements of the dancers, so rapid and keen, resembled much more the skipping of surprised gazelles than any human postures, the prodigious glances where the blacks and the whites of their eyes disappeared in turn, the savage singularity of their costumes … were more surprising than charming to the public. But when the beautiful Amany danced the melancholy of her laments, the ancient beauty of her postures, the supple voluptuousness of her waist, the sorrowful languor of her gestures, the sad softness of her half-smile, raised great applause …

The Dance of the Doves was a prodigious success … one had difficulty conceiving how two dancers, pivoting around themselves with a frightful rapidity, were able to create a dove on a palm-tree by means of a large piece of white muslin … Saoundiroun and Ramgoun, when this feat had been accomplished, went gracefully to present it to the ladies occupying the front row boxes … The idea was a charming one: Amany danced the part of a girl writing a letter on a palm leaf to her beloved while her companions, Saoundiroun and Ramgoun, using their muslin scarves, created a dove which would carry the letter.

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The Malapou, or ‘amazing dance’ … had a vivacious and joyful movement, with the dancers sinking down onto their backs while raising their arms above their heads with an infinite suppleness …

Figure 4.2 ‘Dancing the Malapou’, lithograph. (New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Collection).

The reviewer at Les Lions du Jour, summed up the situation: Five  bayadères with three accompanists embarked from Pondicherry for France. the bayaderes are: first, Amani, aged 18; second, Saoundiroun, aged 14; third, Rangoun, aged 13; fourth, Veydoun, aged 6; and fifth, Tille, aged 30. As for the accompanists, they are Ramalingam, Savaranim, and Deveneyagorn … accompanying on the flute, the cymbals, and the drum … those who have seen their dances say that it is a marvellous thing, enough to cause one to dream of the paradise of Mahomet. Théophile Gautier alone has been found worthy to sing of these dancers, and Eugène Delacroix worthy to paint these beautiful, sensuous girls … their black hair adorned

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with a golden cap, rings in their noses, their naked feet, their uncovered waists, the eyes that make one swoon, the provocative twisting of their bottoms, their jewels and diamonds and bracelets, which are set in motion by every movement …

Though the arrival of the bayadères in London in October 1838 caused a public agitation and excitement similar to that which had occurred in France, the English reviewers were perhaps a little more measured in their responses to the dancers. The reviewer in The Spectator wrote:

The withdrawal of a curtain, veiling the sanctum sanctorum of a Brahminical temple, discloses the five bayadères grouped around an image of Vishnu, which they are fanning with red and white coloured horsetails; the platform on which they stand glides forward, and the features of this strange sight then become more apparent …

They are all dressed alike … the kirtle of silk fastened round the waist, falling on one side a little below the knee, and the corset … overlaid with plates of gold set with gems—the breasts being enclosed in pliant cup-shaped cases—are almost concealed by a voluminous scarf of white muslin passing over the left shoulder, and crossed under the right arm so as to pass round the body; the long and ample ends almost enfolding the lower limbs: in addition they wear loose trousers of red-striped silk, and a little red bodice; so that only a small part of the left side remains uncovered; the throat and arms are of course exposed, and the feet are bare, and the outline of the form is visible beneath the drapery; but there is nothing in their appearance to alarm the most sensitive modesty … They scarcely stir from the place they occupy, and their principal bodily movements consist of turning round and crouching down, and in this position throwing out first one leg and then the other, resting on the heel: they

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use the heel as much as the toes. The prevailing movement of the arms is horizontal, crossing the face, and seeming to touch the nose; the long slender arms, and tapering fingers pointed with sharp nails, darting to and fro with angular action. There is very little … of flowing and serpentine movement of the limbs: nearly all is abrupt and rectilinear, but continuous. The inflections of the body are graceful, but its twinings are not developed by corresponding movements of the limbs …

… this Hindoo dancing … is the pantomime of emotion— exhibiting the flow of soul, not of the animal spirits. Regarded as one style of the poetry of motion, it is … what we suppose the Greek music to have been in comparison with modern times—rude and limited, but withal expressive.

The article in The Mirror advises the public:

On Monday, October 1, 1838, they were presented to the British public … and were received, as they deserved to be, with the greatest applause. There are five females and three males in this company, forming a complete Indian ballet …

The females’ … long raven hair is plaited from the top of the head and hangs down over the shoulders … a cap composed of brilliant and polished metal is placed on the top of the head, and they have an ornament in the form of a heart round their necks. They wear two pairs of costly earrings and their noses are also decorated in like manner. Their teeth are of exquisite whiteness, very even, and contrast admirably with their dark skin. They wear a string of bells just above their ankles, the sound of which mingles with the steps of their dance … The whole is a very curious and characteristic exhibition of the Indian national manners, and is certainly very different from anything we are accustomed to see on the stage …

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Figure 4.3 ‘The Bayadères; or Dancing Girls of India’, illustration in The Mirror, 1838.

There were also some controversial reviews and incidents, such as the booing of the performance by a group of Christian fanatics who were quickly ejected from the auditorium by an irate audience. And there were coarse reviews that relied for their impact on bigoted and racist fulminations, such as this piece which appeared in the December 1838 edition of the New Sporting Magazine: What utter—abominable—inexplicable nonsense. Yet again, what clear—nice—perfect managerial humbug! It is quite clear that the blacks will be slaves; Inkle, Mr. Yates—Yarico! Miss Bayadere—‘White man don’t leave me’—and depend upon it my dear Saundorouna, Ramgoun, Veydoun, Amany, and Tille—as long as white men can get one single farthing out of your dingy persons and most unpoetical postures—white man will not leave you. Money, and money alone, will, according to the proverb, make the bayaderes to go, as well as the mare.

But to the ladies with the veritable India rubber complexions—their arms are like those of all Indian

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women, fine—warmly brown—long, round, and well pendant—pliancy too, instead of strength, is the nature of Indian limbs, and in this character of the form of the bayadere consists the merit, as well as the defect of the style of their dancing. All the beauty, such dirt and water as it is, depends on their pliancy, and not on their vigour. They are Taglionis in their arms, but not in their legs; and we are the more confirmed in the notion that they are convinced of our estimate of their powers, by the fact that their arms are circled with gold and otherwise naked, displaying their round and lithe symmetry—and that their feet are trousered, muffled, and booted, so as to expose only muscleless stamping—and sinking and unreliable knees. The thing is a dead failure as a dramatic exhibition.

… Dun was the colour of the performers—dun was the result upon the audience … To me, everything seemed something like repetition. The robing was extremely like the salute—the widow’s excitement to death was, perhaps, a little more piteous than her lament, and the delightful dance was a mere exhibition of five Indian loins in full turn. So disreputable an attack on the gullibility of the English public has not been attempted since the man advertised to enter into a quart bottle, at the Haymarket theatre … I wish I had my entrance money safely back in my pocket again.

The appearances of the bayadères in Germany and Austria were not received with any great enthusiasm. The German reviews from the period are inclined to provide (rather flawed) information about the devadasi system, and then to move on to a brief review of the actual performance. Here is an example of one such review from the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung (‘General Theatre Magazine’) of 20 June 1839: The bayadères belong to two large classes, of which each has several sub-categories. To the first class belong those in service to the temples and the gods, to the second those who travel freely about the country dancing.

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The first class, called devadasis or servants of the god, are distinguished according to family rank, of the worthiness of the deity whom they serve, and of the dignity and riches of the temple to which they belong … When they are sufficiently trained, they must attend the festivals and processions, serve and praise the deities’ victories and dance before them. Furthermore, they are to weave the floral garlands with which the gods are festooned, to bind the flower arrangements which are used for offerings and decoration of the altars, they must clean the temple and the priests’ cells in the inner temple court, and perform all wifely duties for them, and clean the wool from which the deities’ garments are woven …

Having discussed the devadasis, the article concludes rather dismally: … but, whether that which in India is regarded as natural, meaningful and characteristic, now torn out of its own environment, will bring happiness to our theatres I rightly doubt. The dance of the bayadères will definitely not grant artistic satisfaction, but will in any case afford delight to those who, free from prejudice, love to observe the ways of foreign peoples.

It is not clear to me what became of these dancers and their melam after their 18-month contract with Tardivel had expired. There seem to have been rumours that Ammani committed suicide by hanging herself in London. If this was the case, it would mean that she must have returned to England after the failed performances in Germany and Austria. Whatever the real facts may have been, we do find her death mentioned in an article written for Le Pays by the critic Paul de Saint-Victor in 1849, in which he remembers with whimsical sadness: … that poor Amany, whose light was suddenly snuffed out in the fogs of London like a blazing lamp carried into a cave. I saw, suspended among the waistcoat-trinkets of a certain English gentleman, a bell that had trembled

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on her sonorous nostrils, marking the rhythm of the sacred dances. The Englishman was proud of this sacred relic for which he had paid five guineas. I hear again the chiming of that soft Buddhist bell, so completely out of place on that protesting waistcoat. All the religious and voluptuous clamour of India came alive for me in that feeble echo. Alas! That bell was then ringing the funeral knell of that young priestess who died so far away from her own gods and her own sky.

In the wake of these sensational press reports, some sober attempts were also made to present an account of the dancers and their vocational art, as in this article in the mini-encyclopaedia, Le Moniteur Indien (‘The Indian Monitor’), written in 1838 by Jean-Ferdinand Depeuty-Trahon: Bayadères: This is the name which the French give to the celebrated dancers of India, whose fame has reached as far as Europe … in Sanskrit they are called Dêva-dâsî, which is to say servants of the divinity. In Hindustani they are referred to indifferently as Râmdjenny, Kantchény and Naoûtchy.

The bayadères can be divided into two classes; those who are attached to the service of the temples, and those who, enjoying personal freedom, practice their dance at the houses of those who ask for them. The bayadères of the Hindu temples are young girls presented in infancy by their parents, who are persuaded that dedicating one of the children to the divinity is a meritorious and agreeable act. Many lower-caste Indians offer one of their daughters, but this is not obligatory except in the case of certain classes of artisans. Beauty is an express condition of admission; those who are denied this advantage are pitiably refused. The service of the bayadères consists in singing and dancing every day in the temples, before the idol of the god to whom they are consecrated, and, also, at all religious ceremonies. Their number varies in accordance with the importance of the temple; there are usually eight to twelve. Marriage

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is prohibited to them, but as they are all courtesans in the towns it is not rare to see them becoming mothers. Their male children usually become musicians, the daughters, if they are pretty, themselves become Kantchénys.

The dancers not attached to temples are under the direction of a woman called a Daïyâ (a ‘mother’), who hires them out for entertainments. The wealthy have them present whenever they hold reunions, and there is not a marriage, festival or solemnity where the pleasure of a Nâtch will be forgone. Princes and grand personages, both Hindu and Muslim, have numerous companies of dancers in their own pay. One also finds them among the camp-followers of armies, but these are those who make up the most inferior classes of their profession.

The bayadères, who are no less remarkable for the perfection of their figures than for their beauty, take great care in dressing themselves … The dance of the bayadères cannot be compared with that of the dancers of Europe … they show themselves far superior in the exquisite grace which they employ in all their movements, and by the expressions which they use in their pantomime. Their soft abandon, the movements of their undulating arms, their suave postures all breathing voluptuousness, render them truly admirable. They excel at representing the desires, the agitations, the jealousy and the despair of love; they also execute with a complete grace a dance called ‘the dance of the shawl’ … Two Kantchénys usually dance together, often accompanying their dance with very pleasant songs. They are assisted by four or five musicians, of whom two play a kind of violin, while the others keep the rhythm with tambourines or on small resounding cymbals. These instruments serve to slow down the dance, or to make it more animated, and to mark a lively time … and, while these have charm for the Asiatic ear, they do not always produce the same effect on those of the Europeans.

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The substance of this piece, such as it is, was reiterated with variations in a number of similar articles in German, French and English publications. Its main statements are found embedded in much of European thought about Indian dance found in subsequent travel books and reminiscences of India. One of the most complete and positive descriptions of the dancers, their art and their tradition, is found in an October 1838 edition of The Fly:

Figure 4.4 ‘The Bayadères’, possibly a lithograph made for The Fly. (Princeton University).

The Bayadères … form a separate class amongst the Hindoos, and live under the protection of the government, according to their own particular rules. The Bayadères are all attached to the service of the Hindoo deities, for which they are dedicated by their parents, or purchased very young, and brought up with a degree of care seldom bestowed on the females of India, or of any other class … Their costume is lighter and more elegant than

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that of the Nautch dancers, and their general appearance is far from immodest, being quite as unexceptionable as the women of the lower classes in their country. No religious ceremony or festival is thought to be performed with requisite order and magnificence, unless accompanied by dancing. This custom is of the very highest antiquity among all the eastern nations—the Jews themselves adopting it in their solemn rejoicings. In fact these Bayadères are a sort of priestesses auxiliary to the worship of Vishnu, and those acquainted with classical history will recognize between them and the female attendants of the temples of the Greek mythological deities, a striking resemblance.

In the annual processions which are made to one or another of the Hindoo temples, a troop of these Bayadères, chosen from amongst the youngest and most beautiful of their number, is always conspicuous. Their necks and arms are covered with precious stones, and their long black hair perfumed with the rarest essences. At the sound of their rude music, they form figures, characteristic of the divinity they celebrate, and retrace in the evolutions of their dances the traditions of their ancestors.

The dress of these females is the most gorgeous and picturesque imaginable. They are sometimes loaded with jewels from head to foot, for they occasionally wear rings on their toes. Their necks are adorned with carcanets, their arms with bracelets, and their ankles with chains of gold and silver, enriched with precious stones. They also wear nose jewels, that have at first an odd appearance, but to which the eye soon becomes reconciled. They have a peculiar way of preserving the shape of their breasts, which they enclose in a pair of hollow cups or cases, made of very light wood, exactly fitted to them and buckled at the back. These at once prevent the breasts from becoming too large, and yet, by their pliancy, play so freely with every motion of the body, that they occasion no inconvenience to the wearer. The outside of this curious stay is overlaid with thin gold or silver

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plate, set with gems &c. They form a black circle round their eyelids, by drawing a bodkin between them while closed, in order that both lids may receive the tint of the powder of antimony which is placed on the bodkin. This powder is called Sturma; it refreshes the eye, excites its lustre, and increases its darkness.

By way of petticoat, they wear the Lungee; a long piece of silk or cotton stuff, which is girdled round the loins, and comes down to the middle of the leg. The upper part, fitting closely, marks with great accuracy the roundness and swell of the figure; and tapering away to the legs gives that loose flow to the lower part of the Lungee, which the Greek statuaries were so fond of expressing in the drapery of their nymphs, whilst the jewels and chains with which their ankles are adorned have somewhat the appearance of the tragic buskin. Loose silk or cotton trousers are attached to the waist by a rich girdle; they also wear an open vest, which leaves the arms exposed nearly to the shoulder, and descends halfway down the breast. The space between the girdle and the border of the vest is uncovered, and nothing can be more beautiful than this partial view of their bronzed and polished bosom—so smooth and shining that it might be taken for a satin corset. The chemise is a luxury perfectly unknown to the Bayadères. A scarf of fine muslin, ornamented with flowers and gold embroidery, surrounds the girdle, and falls gracefully before and behind over the left shoulder. These scarfs are of various colours, according to the fancy of the wearer.

The sacred poets give to these girls an extremely romantic origin. They say that Shiva, one of the three persons of the Hindoo Trinity, in one of his descents upon earth, fixed his abode in Persia. There, under the appearance of a powerful Rajah, named Devendren, he took, agreeably to eastern license, a number of mistresses of great personal beauty, in whose society he led a life of love and happiness. Wishing, however,

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to prove the sincerity of their affection, he feigned to be on the point of death; and calling to him the ladies of his zennana, promised to espouse her who would swear to sacrifice herself after his decease. Although his mistresses amounted to the very oriental number of 1,100, not one amongst them could be found willing to immolate herself, until a young dancer, piercing through the crowd, offered her life for the honour of being for one instant the spouse of the Rajah. The nuptials were immediately celebrated, and a few hours after Devendren expired. Faithful to her vow, the devoted spouse caused a pile of aromatic wood to be raised, and, placing herself beside the body of her husband, with her own hands lighted her funeral pyre. But at the instant when the flames began to envelope them, Devendren arose; and, having proclaimed his divinity to the people, disappeared with his bride, not however until he had commanded, to perpetuate the memory of that event, that, in future, troops of dancers should be attached to the service of his temples, that their profession should be honoured, and that they should take the name of Devadasis, or, favoured of the deity.

… The great charm of their dances consists almost wholly in those elegant attitudes which they allow the dancer to display. You see no prodigious springs, no vehement pirouettes, no painful tension of the muscles, or extravagant contortions of the limbs—none of that studied precision of step and pedal dexterity which constitute the chief excellence of European artists. You see no violent sawing of the arms, no unnatural curving of the limbs, and no bringing of the legs at right angles with the trunk. The Bayadère advances gracefully before her audience, her arms moving in unison with her tiny naked feet, gliding through the evolutions of a simple figure, without any of that exertion inseparable from our dances, as exhibited before a public audience. She occasionally turns quickly round, by which the loose folds of her thin petticoat are expanded, and the heavy silk border with which it is trimmed opens into a circle

References

round her, showing for an instant the beautiful outline of her form, draped with the most becoming and judicious taste. Although in description the perfections of this style of dancing may appear but negative, their effects are nevertheless positive on the beholder; because these artists endeavour, by their motions and their looks, to portray some powerful emotion to the mind. Thus, when an accomplished Bayadère gives utterance to a sorrowful complaint, the antique beauty of her attitudes, the graceful flexibility of her action, the melancholy languor of her gestures, and the mournful tenderness of her dark eyes, awaken in our bosoms a novel but indescribable sensation, which we eagerly seek to renew. In the expression of joy, hope, love, and jealousy, she is equally felicitous and interesting.

… Their orchestra is simple and patriarchal to a degree. An old man, who acts as poet and chorus-master, marks the measure with a pair of small cymbals, and chants a poem, of which the dance is the pantomimic interpretation, while the other two musicians accompany him on cymbals of brass and iron. These latter are young and handsome men, about 25 years of age. The dresses of the five Bayadères are similar to those we have already described, with some trifling variations, but AMANY appears to show more taste than her companions in the choice and arrangement of her toilette.

One of the greatest wonders relative to this singular group is, how the religious prejudices of the Brahmins could have been so far overcome as to permit them to quit the temple to whose service they were bound. Nothing but the cupidity of the priests, and the enormous sum of money which they and all the relatives of the girls received, could have effected it.

The article demonstrates the growing interest in making comparisons between the temple dancers of India and the hierodules or religious prostitutes of the ancient Greek temple of Aphrodite. In rather vague terms, this approach eventually

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leads also to the equation of the ‘nautch-girl’ with the hetaera or ‘comfort woman’, the literate sexual companion, of the Hellenistic world. The European preoccupation with Grecian classicism comes to see the bayadère as a living remnant of the ancient world, and eventually seeks to place her also in the context of the old phallic religious practices. As regards the ‘enormous sum of money’ mentioned in the article, we find, in volume 5 of the 1838 collection of editions of the Musée des familles; Lectures du soir (‘Museum of Families; Evening Lectures’), a copy, presented as something of a journalistic ‘scoop’, of the terms of the contract entered into between Tardivel, the dancers, and the accompanying musicians, as well the local facilitator, one ‘Canagambalam’: The 1st named Tille-Ammale, daughter of Covindin, aged 30 years, of the weaver caste; 2nd named Amany-Ammale, aged 18 years; 3rd named Ranga-Ammale, aged 14 years; 4th named Soundra-Ammale, aged 13 years; all three daughters of the name Vengadassala-Poullé … attached to the Tirouvendy-Pourham temple … The said TilleAmmale etc., dancers, as well as the said Ramalinga Modeley, engage themselves to bodily accompany to Europe the said M. Tardivel … The said individuals engage to present themselves at all the theatres indicated by M. Tardivel and to execute the customary dances and the accompanying music … They may not, on any pretext, refuse to carry out the orders given by M. Tardivel concerning their exposure to the curiosity of the public … They may not demand to return to India before the expiry of 18 months dating from the day of their embarking at Pondicherry … The said M. Tardivel engages on his side to defray all costs of travel outgoing and returning, and to accommodate the aforesaid during the whole of their absence … He engages furthermore to pay monthly to the aforesaid individuals forming the troupe 10 rupees (27 fr. 70 c.) to each, in total the sum of 70 rupees (193 fr. 90 c.) from the day of their departure from Pondicherry to the day of their return … while also paying independently to each the sum of 500 rupees (1, 385 fr.) amounting to a total of 3,500

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rupees (9, 695 fr.) before embarking … The said M. Tardivel further engages to reserve for payment to them a further amount of 3,500 rupees to be paid after the return of the said troupe to Pondicherry … In recognition of the good services of Canagambalam, son of Vengadassalam, of the Cavare caste … aged 38 years, the said M. Tardivel undertakes to pay him on the evening of the departure of the troupe, the sum of 500 rupees, and, eight days after the return of the said troupe to Pondicherry, an equal sum of 500 rupees (1,385 fr.) … And for the execution of these presents, concerning the effecting of the payment before embarkation, the said Tille-Ammale, Ammany-Ammale, Ranga-Ammale, Soundra-Ammale, Ramalinga-Modeley, Savaranapoullé, Devanayagapoullé and Canagambalam recognize having received from the said M. Tardivel … the sum of 4,000 rupees (11,080 fr.) counted, numbered and delivered in the sight of the notary …

What is striking about all of the articles written about the bayadères is that none of them make any effort to understand their art or anything of its history. There is no reference to the structure of the margam or to any of its integrated item movements, such as the padam, varnam and tillana. No effort is made to assimilate the music, on which the dance is squarely based, and which the European ear was content smugly to despise. There is no insight into the theory of rasa or its elicitation on the bhava-abhinaya continuum. No grasp is evinced of the sringara rasa, except insofar as it is interpreted as mere ‘voluptuousness’. Neither is there any allusion to the innovation and re-structuring of Sadir by the Pillai Quartet in Tanjore. Whatever is written about the dance is offered as a purely subjective experience, whether positive or negative, in a tone that usually leans heavily towards the romantic, or, when negative, to the dismissive. In the spirit of romanticism, there arose from the appearance of the bayadères in France an apocryphal tale about a group of Pondicherry dancers who had supposedly been kidnapped off the coast of Pondicherry in the previous century, and brought to

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France. This tale, it seems, was put about by a trustworthy lady of Paris, and it was re-told in many publications in 1839, eventually reaching even America, where it was published in The New Yorker: The captain of a French vessel on the point of setting sail for India on his return to France, captured three Bayadères and conveyed them by force aboard his ship … Unfortunately the voyage was long and perilous. The poor Indian girls soon sunk under the fatigues of the passage … and from the grief occasioned by their constant contact with the profane inmates of the ship … One of them, eighteen years of age, pined to death; and the second, fifteen, precipitated herself into the sea, with the corpse of her companion. Bebaiourn, the youngest, was but six years old … and she arrived safe and well in Paris. The captain hastened with her to Paris and solicited Madame Dubarry’s permission to present to her the singular gift of the daughter of a Rajah, for he judged it best to ennoble the origin of the little girl … and to exhibit her as the daughter of a powerful chief. The favorite (of the King of France) eagerly granted the audience … and, in the presence of the assembled court, the little Indian was introduced … She sang, and bounding with wonderful agility, did her best to give an idea of the dances of her companions; then, at the recollection of her two sisters … she suddenly burst into tears.

The caresses lavished upon her soon soothed this brief emotion, and she resumed her playfulness. Then the evening was passed until the captain, munificently recompensed by Louis XV., made signs for her to follow him … Bebaiourn replied to the command of her master by the strongest manifestations of fear, and threw herself into the arms of a young princess … This princess was Madame Louise-Marie de France … (and) nothing could induce Bebaiourn to quit the protectress she had chosen; she clung to her dress … and wept bitterly, till Madame Louise-Marie declared she would receive her, and requested the captain to leave her in her care … Her

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extreme intelligence and earnest desire to give pleasure to her new mistress, soon enabled the young Bayadère to express herself in French … Madame Louise (availed herself of this progress) to instruct her pupil in Catholicism, and in one year from her arrival in France, Bebaiourn, receiving the name of Louise, was baptised by the Archbishop of Paris.

… Finally she became the secretary, confidante, and intimate friend of the princess. When the daughter of Louis XV., renouncing the world, quitted the Court to take the Carmelite veil in a convent … Louise also bade farewell to the world and followed her mistress … In short, on the 11th of April, 1770, all the Court assembled in the Carmelite convent of St. Denis, witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a Princess Royal and a Bayadère kneeling side by side at the altar, to receive the veil of the initiate … Yes, the daughter of Louis XV., and a child born in a pagoda on the borders of the Ganges … passed seventeen years of their lives in the solitude of a cloister … Madame Louise, now become Sister Thérese, was the first to sink under these austerities. The ill health of the poor Bayadère occasioned by her grief for the loss of the only being in the world who loved her, obliged the Superior of the Carmelites to remove the Indian nun to purer air … … She was sent to St. Germain, to Madame la Princesse de Beauveaux, who welcomed her as the friend of the daughter of Louis XV.

The superiority of her manners, the elegance of her mind, her extensive knowledge, charmed the new protectress of sister Louise … When she went to reside with Madame de Beauveaux, she had scarcely attained her twenty-ninth year: her features, regular, and expressive of much sweetness, formed a contour remarkable for its ingenuousness and vivacity … there remained, in the expression of her large black eyes, in the outline of her slight and supple figure, in the softness of her whole bearing, a strange character of voluptuousness which

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recalled to us the Bayadère, and which a residence of twenty years in France, and the mortifications of the cloister, had not been able to efface.

… The Revolution broke out, and the poor Indian, deprived of her protectress, was reduced to the necessity of toiling for her existence. She supported courageously this new trial; and having established a pensionat at St. Germain, she succeeded not only in procuring a competency, but even amassed a little wealth. Thus she lived till the year 1806, when she expired surrounded by the friends procured by the elevation of her mind, and the sweetness and rare equanimity of her character.

Meanwhile, far away from the spectacle and sensationalism of the bayadère performances in Europe, Julia Charlotte Maitland was writing her ‘letters from Madras’, in the thirteenth of which she describes her experience of a local ‘nautch’, apparently a rendering of a Hindustani Natyam item: … First, then, came in an old man with a long white beard, to play and sing to the vina, an instrument like a large mandoline, very pretty and antique to look at, but not much to hear. His music was miserable, just a mixture of twang and whine, and quite monotonous, without even the pretence of a tune. When we were quite tired of him, he was dismissed, and the Nabob’s dancing girls came in: most graceful creatures, walking, or rather sailing about, like queens, with long muslin robes from their throats to their feet. They were covered with gold and jewels, earrings, nose-rings, bracelets, armlets, anklets, bands round their heads, sévignés, and rings on all their fingers and all their toes. Their dancing consisted of sailing about, waving their hands, turning slowly round and round, and bending from side to side: there were neither steps nor figure, as far as I could make out. The prettiest of their performances was their beautiful swan-like march. Then they sang, bawling like bad street-singers—a most fearful noise, and no tune …

References

… Then we had a Hindoo dancing-girl, with the most magnificent jewellery I ever saw: her dancing was very much like that of the Mahometans, only a little more difficult. There was a good deal of running backwards and forwards upon her heels, and shaking her silver bangles or armlets, which jingled like bells: then glissading up to me, waving her pretty little hands, and making a number of graceful, unmeaning antics, with her eyes fixed on mine with a strange, unnatural stare, like animal magnetism. I think those magnetic actings and starings must first have been imitated from some Indian dancing-girl, and in fact the effect is much the same; for I defy anyone to have watched this girl’s dull, unvarying dance long, without going to sleep …

References

1. Jacquet, E.V.S., Religion des Malabares, Paris: Chabrelie, Editeur, 1835.

2. Ritter, Karl, Ost-Asien, Berlin: Reimer, 1836.

3. Child, Lydia Maria, The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations, Boston: John Allen & Co., 1835. 4. Spectator, vol. XI, 1838.

5. L’Entracte, Marseille, 1836–1840. 6. L’Illustration, August 1838.

7. Gautier, Théophile, Les Bayadères, in Caprices et Zig Zags, Paris: Victor Lecou, 1852.

8. Le Magasin Pittoresque, Édouard Charton, March 1838. 9. La France Littéraire, 1838.

10. La Presse, 19 August 1838. 11. Les Lions du Jour, 1838.

12. The Mirror of Literature and Amusement, no. 916, 1838.

13. The New Sporting Magazine, vol. 15, no. 92, December 1838.

14. Allgemeine Theaterzeitung für Kunst, Literatur, Musik, 20 June 1839.

15. Le Pays, 1849.

16. Depeuty–Trahon, Jean-Ferdinand, in Le Moniteur Indien, Paris: Fèlix Locquin et Coup., 1838.

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17. The Fly, London, October 1838.

18. Musée des Familles; Lectures du Soir, vol. 5, 1838.

19. The New Yorker, vol. 6 (July 1838–June 1839) New York: H. Greeley & Co., 1839.

20. Maitland, Julia Charlotte, Letters from Madras, 1838–1839, London: J. Murray, 1846.

Chapter 5

The Beginnings of the Repetitive Narrative: 1840–1850 The decade from 1840 to 1850 demonstrates the start of a pattern of writing on Indian dance that, apart from presenting repetitively superficial descriptions of the devadasi system, with some glances at the courtesan dance tradition of the North, tends now to draw the reader’s attention to the purportedly immoral and promiscuous or ‘lascivious’ role of the dancer in temple and public life. These sometimes scathing reports probably exercised an influence not only on public opinion in Europe but also on East India Company officials in India, and their French counterparts in Pondicherry. From the article, Oriental Dancing Women, which appeared in Bradshaw’s Manchester Journal in 1841, we can see that attempts are already being made to collate knowledge of the Indian ‘dancing girls’ from various sources. The piece recalls articles already presented in previous sections, especially those by F.A. Wiese, the Abbé Dubois, and Capt. Robert Smith, as well the writings of Balthazar Solvyns. The writer is in a temporary quandary as to whether or not the dancers are as immoral as they are often said to be, but comes down in the end on the side of the censorious: The dancing girls of India are generally called Bayadères. They are commonly selected for their great personal

Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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beauty, their sparkling vivacity of temper, the elegant contour of their limbs, the lightness of their form, and the ease and gracefulness of their movements. The style of dancing which prevailed among the females of antiquity seems to have been of a very different character from that of the present day. Regulated by a superior music, it expressed by a variety of movements, light, rapid, and beautiful, all the more delicate and powerful emotions of the soul … In the East all this is reversed. There the acknowledged object in view being to inflame the passions, they proceed directly, and by the most obvious means, to this end. The whole drama of love is represented. The dancer discarding, as unworthy of her art, the husk of passion, commences with a series of attitudes and gestures, sometimes wholly indelicate, and always too gross to be pleasing to a refined taste. She is the very personification of a wanton delight; and as she follows, with impassioned eagerness, the inflaming strains of the music, suiting her indecorous postures to the suggestions of the notes, her whole frame quivers with desire, her eyes sparkle, her voice falters, and she exhibits every symptom of passion. This description applies more particularly to those dances which take place before the idols either within the precincts of the temple or during the festivals commonly celebrated in honour of the gods. The dancing girls who perform at private entertainments, adapt their movements to the taste and character of those before whom they exhibit …

Respecting the dress and appearance of the dancing girls who exhibit or rather perform on these occasions, there is a remarkable discrepancy in the statements of different writers. Bishop Heber, speaking of the girls of Northern India, observes, that ‘their dresses were rich, but there was such an enormous quantity of scarlet cloth petticoats and trowsers, and such multifarious skirts peeping out below each other, that their figures were quite hidden …’

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The Abbé Dubois, describing the Bayadères of the South, says, ‘Perfumes, elegant and attractive attire, particularly of the head, sweet-scented flowers, intertwined with exquisite art about their beautiful hair, multitudes of ornamental trinkets adapted with infinite taste to the different parts of the body … such are the allurements which these enchanting sirens display to accommodate their seductive designs’ …

A lively account is given by Mr. Wallace, of the dancing girls of Calcutta. Speaking of the Dorrga Poojah, he says ‘… The dancing girls are gorgeously dressed, and covered with ornaments. Their dances consist of sudden transitions; the movement is sometimes so slow that one would think they were falling asleep; then, by a change of the music, it is all life, and exhibits the most rapid succession of violent actions. Now they break up their robe, and fold it into various shapes, then they let it go, so that while they turn round like a top, this garment forms a circle resembling a peacock’s tail, and this circulation is continued so long as to excite the wonder of the beholder.’

The testimony of Mrs. Heber would lead to the conclusion that the general charge of licentiousness must be restricted, or else that they accommodate their dancing to the taste and character of their patrons. Speaking of one of these nautches on a different occasion, she observes, ‘As the crowd was great, we adjourned into a small room opening out of the upper gallery, where we sat listening to one song after another, devoured by swarms of mosquitoes, till we were heartily tired, when the dance was taken by the nâch or dancing girls—if dancing that can be called which consists of strained movements of the arms, head, and body—the feet, though in perpetual motion, seldom moving from the same spot. Some story was evidently intended to be told from the expression of their countenances, but to me it was quite unintelligible. I never saw public dancing in England so free from everything approaching to indecency. Their dress was

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modesty itself; nothing but their faces, feet, and hands were exposed to view.’

But although it is principally at private festivals that these dancers display their accomplishments to the greatest advantage, yet their primary duty is of a religious nature—if the worship of the fantastic gods of India, and the superstitions connected with it, deserve the name of religion. A certain number of them are attached to every temple of any consequence: at Conjeveram one hundred are kept for the honour of the deities and the amusement of their votaries. Besides attending the temples morning and evening, it is their duty to receive every person travelling on account of the government. They generally meet him at a distance from the town, and conduct him to his residence with music and dancing. In India, as well as in Egypt, the dancing girls form a separate caste. The person who performs on two small cymbals is the chief of the set: sometimes, when he cannot otherwise obtain them, he will purchase handsome girls, to instruct them in dancing. These girls are always at the service of the Brahmins, and also of the officers of the revenue, whose wives are generally extremely beautiful; but the insipidity of their conduct, from a total want of education and accomplishment, makes the dancing women sought after by the natives with great anxiety, many of whom lavish away upon them a great part of their income. From the more official character with which they are invested as being the ministers and instruments of Hindoo heathenism, and from their ministering to the passions of a licentious priesthood, it is probable that they will still be found in India long after they have disappeared from all other parts of the East. Much detailed information may be obtained from ‘The Modern Egyptians’ and ‘The Hindoos’, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, to which

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latter work we are indebted for many of the particulars embodied in this brief sketch.

Figure 5.1 Illustration for Oriental Dancing Women, in Bradshaw’s Manchester Journal, October, 1841.

While the writer for the Bradshaw Journal has his qualms and reservations, he shows himself conversant with at least some of the articles written on Indian dance in previous decades. He discusses the question of the dancers’ sexuality with a certain reserve and hesitation. Not so in the case of the lengthy article by Jouffroy d’Eschavannes published by the Société orientale de Paris in the Revue de l’orient (‘Review of the Orient’), in 1843 In India, every temple has its bayadères … who, on festival days, execute their lascivious dances in honour of the idol to which they have consecrated their talents; they are called devadasis. The name bayadères is used only by the Europeans, and it is taken from the Portuguese ballaideras, dancers. These women, destined solely to

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the amusement of the Brahmins, receive part of the benefices which the credulity of the faithful share with these ministers of religion. They live in the precincts of the temples, never going out from there, and having no commerce with strangers, whom they regard as impure. The populace holds them in great esteem.

Every Indian whose daughter is not yet nubile is free to send her to the temple to be turned into a devadasi, the weaver caste being the only one in which the father is obliged to consecrate one of his daughters to this profession. Subjected then to the authority of an old woman in the sanctuary, they are instructed in the duties of the religion, and do not leave the service of the divinity except to enter into a class of bayadères called narteguis, of which I will speak later.

One can have no idea of the scenes of libertinage which take place in these religious solemnities. The Brahmins, having changed only into a light loincloth, which hardly covers the lower parts of their bodies, dance while brandishing a sword with which they make dexterous evolutions. The devadasis join in with their revolvings, while adopting postures of the most lascivious kind; priests and women, bathed in sweat, intoxicated with debauchery, roll themselves, interlace themselves, heckling themselves with obscene challenges, and go as far as to consummate, in plain sight of the people, acts of the most revolting cynicism. These public saturnalias do not end until the whole troupe, exhausted with fatigue, retire to the interior of the temple, soon to recommence, in the shelter of the sacred garret, the most disgusting scenes all over again. Vestals who have made a vow to debauchery, the sacred devadasis observe this vow scrupulously, and woe to those who do not respond to their ardours and their needs, because the abandon of the Brahmins and the contempt of their companions will deliver prompt justice. One should not confuse the devadasis with certain women who, in spite of having the same name, are far from

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taking part in the same conduct; I am speaking about the widows who choose to consecrate themselves to the temple instead of immolating themselves on the corpses of their husbands. The work of these is a kind of domestic service, such as sweeping the temple, lighting the lamps, and, in a word, keeping in good order everything associated with this cult.

The narteguis constitute another class of bayadères, lower than the first. Deprived of the prestige of sanctity, they devote themselves to the amusement of the public. Some of them live alone, but most of them reunite and live communally under the direction of a matron, who, from their infancy, instructs them, one might say, like horses in a riding school. As soon as this education ends, they begin their vagabond excursions, and go from town to town exercising their industry. A troupe of narteguis does not remain longer than some days, and they have hardly left before they are replaced by others.

The narteguis are recruited from all the classes, in all the provinces, and any town or any community has its banal female collective where sufficient numbers of these females are kept for occasions of public rejoicing. It is here where the wealthy Indians, the rajas, the nambiars or lords, in spite of the abundantly provided harems, furnish themselves with women for dignified celebration of their grand solemnities. It is their greatest pleasure, and they devote prodigious sums to it.

Often, after a long period at the temple, some devadasis may find that their outdated charms no longer satisfy the lubricity of the Brahmins, and they obtain the freedom to enter the narteguis class. But this seldom happens, and those dancers are preferred who belong to the schools of the matrons, who are very scrupulous about their choices, seeking not only physical beauty but also a certain intellectual aptitude among those whom they train. Here debauchery is no longer a vice, but an art, and all the lessons are directed towards this end …

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If one considers the domain in which our European actresses practice their art, one can hardly be surprised at the success which the bayadères enjoy in India. An actress in our world has only to excite the passions, and beyond that her role ends. A bayadère has also to satisfy the desires which she has inspired, and surpasses in the dispensing of these favours all the dreams that the imagination of the spectator can conceive. … I have said above that debauchery is in their eyes an art rather than a vice, and this should not alarm scrupulous consciences. In effect, under the burning skies of India, there where all beings are disposed to love, where the perfumes hold the senses in continuous intoxication, can anyone conceive it possible to put out the fire once it has been ignited? Rather, it is for the bayadères to continue the illusion to the very end, and, certainly, there is an art in this study of human sentiments, in this desire always to be loved, to excite enthusiasm, and to occupy themselves ceaselessly in preventing the disgust that gives birth to satiety …

The dances of the bayadères are sufficiently gracious, but one has to have seen the country to grasp the whole of their charm. The devadasis convey in their gestures and poses a poem written in honour of the divinity, and the narteguis take, for the subject of their pantomimes, a passion, a movement of the soul, so that it could be said that they dance a romance. Sometimes it is a timid virgin anxious at being surprised at a rendezvous which her heart has not been able to refuse, sometimes it is an old woman seeking to interest a coquette in favour of a despised lover, or it may be the despair of a guilty woman being snatched away from her seducer … All these situations are rendered with a finesse of talent that exceeds appreciation; the undulations of the body, the poses of the arms, the play of the face and eyes, all are expressive and vivacious …

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The avarice of the dancers is proverbial in this country, and their science reveals itself in all its ugliness when one considers that these enchantresses will not provide their services without levying payment upfront from the purses of those who adore them …

And now a story about a bayadère from the Malabar coast, whom I present as an honourable exception, and who has never had any imitators, despite the recompense of which she was the object.

A Portuguese vice-admiral by the name of Antonio da Silva Figueroa had, among other extravagances, dissipated his fortune on one of the most celebrated bayadères, by whom—a very rare case—he had had a child, and saw himself quickly reduced to a situation dishonourable to his standing and birth. To add to his misfortune he received an order from the viceroy immediately to equip his squadron. The impossibility of preparing all the needful, and the feeling of his dishonourable position, plunged him into a profound melancholy, of which the enquiries of his mistress could not discover the cause. One night Don Antonio let drop, during a dream, the subject of his disgrace. On his waking, his mistress told him that she knew everything and then abandoned him in a way that led him to believe that, in the customary way, she had left him due to the loss of his fortune. This next stroke of misfortune increased the young officer’s despair, and he resolved to kill himself. After some minutes he saw his mistress returning with a case of diamonds and purses of gold to the value of 80 000 livres, which she asked him to accept with all the grace which she had relied on before for ruining him. This little tale, running like wildfire, came to the ears of the King of Portugual, who sent a letter of legitimation to the son which the bayadère had had by Don Antonio.

The article has about it a strong flavour of the same false pudeur that it imputes, probably on the basis of outrageous hearsay,

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to the devadasis about whose persons and systems it pretends to inform the reader. It may be that the writer has confused the practice of the hereditary dancers with that of the joginis and jogatis, who really were temple prostitutes. But this is by no means evident from the way in which he describes the bayadères and the narteguis (probably nartakis, or secular public dancers), whom we are to recognise from his description as dasi attam ritual artists and dancers of Sadir. The Count d’Eschavannes (1820–?) was the secretary of the Oriental Society of Paris, which makes his concocted analysis of the devadasis and their way of life just as surprising as the fact that it was published in the society’s journal. At the same time, it makes clear how shoddy were the research and intellectual proceedings of these kinds of societies at that time. Eschavannes’ true field of interest and expertise seems to have been French heraldry, and there is no record of his ever having visited India. But this did not prevent the developing trope which emphasised the ‘debauchery’ of South Indian dancers from influencing public opinion, especially in the areas of early anthropology and sociological thought. It was this kind of writing, composed by ostensible ‘experts’, that would contribute heavily to the eventual persecution of the hereditary dancing class and the enactment of legislation that began to be aimed at it in the 1860s, with the introduction of the bill prohibiting the procurement of minors for temple service. In 1843 and 1844, the Belgian typographer Auguste Wahlen (1801–1875) produced an encyclopaedic work on the ‘customs, traditions and costumes of all the peoples of the world’, a kind of popular ethnological work very much in vogue in that era. In the section on India, there is an anecdote about a ‘nautch party’ in Calcutta, apparently narrated by an unnamed voyager: Though the babus of Calcutta derive pleasure from fêting their co-religionists and English guests at all times of the year, there is one month during which the performance of the nautch is more frequent and more contagious. This occurs on the 9th, 10th, and 11th of October when the festival of Durga Puja is celebrated. Then the whole

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of Indian Calcutta is a carnival … in the Nautch Hall there is an image of the divinity, seated, sculpted in wood, and richly decorated …

Once, during the festivals, I did not stop myself. I went along the streets of the town … and, eventually, to a natch given by a rich babou. We arrived at the façade of his palace, brilliantly illuminated and full of curiosities. We were brought into a vast hall, in the interior of which two galleries were erected. The upper gallery was for the wives of the babou, who took pleasure in what they could see from behind the grille. The other was at the disposal of the visitors. Two stucco columns supported these two galleries, and this immense hall, lit by crystal candelabras, opened on a scene magical to behold. There, at the moment of our entrance, was the celebrated Nickie, the Catalani of the orient, modulating Hindustani airs accompanied by a rather unmelodious orchestra. When the little song ended, the natch commenced. The natch is an entirely Hindu dance which has nothing in common with those dances executed by the bayadères, devedassis, canceni, and other servants of the temples. The dancers of the natch are the zum-djenies: they group themselves in threes, and, instead of affecting the lascivious attitudes of the bayadères, they project in all their movements with as much reserve as grace. Their costume is in the same tone as the dance; instead of a light skirt which allows the semi-nude figure to be seen, the zum-djenies wear long robes embroidered with gold and silver: the lower vestment is very loose: it inflates itself like a balloon while the dancers spin about vigorously; long pantaloons fall to their ankles, and their feet, decorated with bells, serve to mark the cadence. Sometimes the nautch dancers confine themselves to undulations and steps without any precise character; but more often they act out pantomimes with a great veracity of postures and gestures.

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Figure 5.2 ‘Eine Bajadere’: Illustration in Auguste Wahlen, Moeurs, usages et costumes, etc., 1843–1844.

What we notice immediately is the repetitive nature of the account. But there is also evidence of a growing tendency to separate North Indian dancers and their art from their ‘lascivious’ counterparts in the South. There is also another variation of Solvyns’ term ‘ramjanny’, which is used to distinguish between Hindu and Muslim dancers of Bengal. It is the ‘ramjannies’ or ‘zum-djenies’ who dance at the Hindu festivals such as the Durga Puja. This distinction, already being made several decades

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before the anti-nautch controversy was begun, went some way towards protecting the North Indian ‘proto-Kathak’ dancers from the worst of the storm when it arrived, though it did not exclude them from the charges of prostitution that were eventually levelled at the Indian dance economy as a whole. The year 1848 saw the publication of Haussman’s Voyage en Chine, Cochinchine, Inde et Malaisie. This was a commercial voyage funded by the French government, for which Auguste Haussman (1815–1874) was the representative of the Mulhouse Chamber of Commerce. The ship called in at numerous ports, including Pondicherry, where Haussman made an excursion to the Villianur temple, where he encountered some devadasis: I was invited to see the interior of the sanctuary. Our visit had excited the curiosity of the Brahmins and the bayadères, their lovable companions. Two or three of these ladies placed themselves near the statue of Shiva, and by their giggling and their air of presenting themselves with much complacency, attracted our admiring contemplation, until a severe and suspicious figure of a priest ordered them to go back inside …

We walked in circles in the sanctuary of the servant of the God, and our avid curiosity was pricked above all by the pretty priestesses who kept ceaselessly coming and going with a very casual air about them. Nothing is as rich and graceful as the costume of these bayadères. A light gauzy scarf is wrapped about their bodies, and then drawn up over the left shoulder to float down their backs. Their fine curved waists revealed themselves admirably beneath a djama or short, narrow skirt with gold lamé. Silk leggings, richly embroidered, descend to the ankles, leaving completely uncovered their delicate feet, the most precious treasure of the bayadère, for whom dance is religion, glory, and life. Their glittering black hair, which they knit together in a braid behind the head, is dotted with gold disks and fresh flowers of frangipani, whose perfume the Indians adore. Their bare arms are covered with bracelets, their necks are ornamented with necklaces, and rings of gold hang from

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their ears and noses. Their vestments of gauze, which allow some parts of the body to be seen, their black and animated eyes, this gold, these bodies tinted in such living colours, though deeper and darker; all of this makes up a ravishing ensemble.

The dance of the bayadères consists of steps less rapid and less marked than the dances of our countries, but accompanied by graceful gestures, frenetic stamps of the feet, burning glances, and indescribable movements of the arms and hips. There are a thousand postures of an admirable voluptuousness; it is a pantomime full of passion through which they by turns convey desire, jealousy, despair. The most well-known dances of the bayadères are those of the dagger and the dove. This last consists in flouncing out the skirt by the rapidity of the spins.

There are two classes of bayadères: the one is attached to the temples and consecrated to divine service, the other is sent to particular houses where they are in demand on the occasion of certain festivals. The first are customarily recruited very young, from the weaver caste. Every family of this caste having four daughters is obliged to consecrate one to the temple. Many parents of the lower classes also spontaneously offer their daughters, but none are admitted except those who are remarkable for their beauty. The occupations of the bayadères in the temples consist of executing frequent dances in honour of the gods. When the Brahmins no longer find them to their taste, they are returned to the public. It is often these rejected bayadères who take up the calling of public dancers under the direction of a woman whose task is to hire them out for the entertainment of the wealthy. It is considered very good taste, at the homes of powerful nawabs and rajas, to have in their pay a certain number of bayadères.

Whereas the first part of Haussman’s narrative is clearly drawn from a first-hand meeting with the dancers, his description of the ‘classes’ of dancers is obviously drawn from earlier

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writings. In his account, though it does refer in passing to the ‘admirable voluptuousness’ of the dancers’ postures, there is no hint of moral censure, and no mention of ‘lasciviousness’ as part of their essential character. Haussman was a businessman with no interest in perpetuating the tone of moral censure. His meeting with the devadasis is a breath of fresh air, and it is clear that they fascinated rather than disgusted him. His work was quoted by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Champagnac (1796–1858), a prolific writer of travel books and other works for young readers. The section on India includes a short passage on the bayadères: Though we are obliged to write discreetly, we cannot pass over in silence the renowned bayadères who, attached to the temples in dependence on the Brahmins, make up, through their dances, an essential part of the cult. There are, M. Haussman says, two classes of bayadères …

He writes as though, strictly speaking, the bayadères are not a fit subject for youth to know about, and confines himself to reiterating Haussman’s brief allusion to the two kinds of bayadères, itself taken from the inaccurate writings of previous commentators. What is notable about the texts from this decade is that most of them were written by French travellers and general writers. This fact no doubt points to a public memory of the bayadères who toured France in 1838, but must be due in part to the written accounts of numerous French and other travellers to India, among whom the Russian-Frenchman Prince Alexis Soltykoff (1806–1859), known as ‘the Indian’, was probably the most well known. Soltykoff’s attitude to the dancers is most clearly summed up in his angry reaction to an incident involving a group of dancers (bayadères) who are deeply upset by a certain Englishman’s attempts to get them to join him in a waltz. About the devadasis and public dancers depicted in his drawings he does not have much to say, and the little that he offers by way of commentary is given in the context of his illustrations, the first of which is a portrayal of an encounter

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with priests and devadasis at the Ramalingeshwara Temple at Rameshwaram in June 1841.

Figure 5.3 Dancers at Rameshwaram, Alexis Soltykoff, 1841. Lithograph by L.H. de Rudder. (By Permission of the British Library).

Figure 5.4 Madras dancers, Alexis Soltykoff, 1841. Lithograph by L.H. de Rudder. (By Permission of the British Library).

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Figure 5.5 Dancers at Kanchipuram, Alexis Soltykoff, 1841. Lithograph by L.H. de Rudder. (By Permission of the British Library).

Soltykoff spent three days at Rameshwaram, where he examined the interiors of the temple, remarking on the richness of the architecture, statuary, and temple jewels. He notes that certain precincts were forbidden him, but in which, in dim light, he could see the devadasi girls ‘gliding in obscure and secret areas where they gather with a sad step’ until they are called upon by the priests. He tells us that he regarded this sojourn as rather ‘lugubrious’, and we get the sense that he viewed the vocation of the devadasis as a generally dismal one. While he expresses great admiration and keen interest in all aspects of the temple itself, including its treasures, he is not much impressed by the dancers who, ‘though young, are not particularly beautiful’. He relates the unpleasant episode in which one small dancer ‘writhed about in a horrible manner, while her mother, a gross, dark-skinned shrew, bullied her about’. He expresses his disgust at the bullying woman while expelling her from the chamber, then gives some rupees to the young girl to comfort her. He writes that he intends to speak to Lord

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Elphinstone about the matter, so that ‘the ardour of this old woman in instructing the young ones will be caused to be made more moderate’.

References

1. Bradshaw’s Manchester Journal, vol. 2 (1841–1843), Saturday, 16 October 1841.

2. d’Eschavannes, E. Jouffroy, Count, Bayadères in Revue de l’orient, t. 2, 1843, Paris: Société orientale, 1843. 3. Wahlen, Auguste, Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peoples du monde d’après des documents authentiques et les voyages des plus récents, Brussels: À la libraire historique-artistique, 1843–1844.

4. Haussman, Auguste, Voyage en Chine, Cochinchine, Inde et Malaisie, vol. 1, Paris: G. Olivier, 1848.

5. Champagnac, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph, Le Voyageur de la jeunesse dans cinq parties du monde, Paris: Belin-Leprieur et Morizot, 1850. 6. Soltykoff, Alexis, Voyages dans l’Inde, Paris: Garnier Frères, 1858.

Chapter 6

Beautiful Bodies, Graceful Dances, Moral Dilemmas: 1855–1860 Texts from various sources in the 1850s tend to stress the differences in attitudes towards Indian dance, both in the South and in the North. Those who write on the subject come at it from different angles and occupations, from British missionaries to German natural scientists, with a few amateur commentators thrown in. As the title of this chapter suggests, the preoccupation of most of these writers was with the physical beauty and charm of the dancers rather than their art, and they coupled that beauty with what they perceived to be an immoral and lascivious way of life. J.H. Stocqueler (1800–1885), a British journalist with a sustained interest in India, writes about the ‘nautch’ in dryer terms than are found in other descriptions from this decade: The Nautch is an Indian entertainment, of which dancing forms the chief element; not, however, where the guests dance, but where they witness certain evolutions dignified by the appellation of dancing.

The native of India does not condescend to Terpsichorean indulgence. He prefers to be a spectator of the gesticulations of others, who make a trade of the ‘light fantastic,’ and are called nautch girls. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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These girls are of different kinds. The most respectable, according to the author of the ‘vade mecum’, are the meeraseens, sometimes called doominca; though the real doominca exhibit in public before men, which the meeraseens never do. The word meeras means an inheritance, and meeraseen an inheritress, from the custom, in certain families, of never changing the set. As the meeraseens are never accompanied by male minstrels, they seldom play on other instruments than drums of different kinds, such as the tabla, dholuk, and munjeera; though the meeraseens never perform before assemblies of men, yet the husband and his sons may be present. They are modest and chaste in their manners and dress; but notwithstanding this, it sometimes happens that a fair meeraseen attracts the attention of the male part of the family. The kunchenee are of an opposite stamp: they dance and sing for the amusement of the male sex, and in every respect are at their command. They are attended by male minstrels, to whom they are often married. It is said these women always consider their first lover as their real husband during the rest of their lives; and, on his death, though they should be married to another, they leave off their pursuits for a prescribed period, and mourn agreeably to the custom of widows. They do not consider any part of their profession either disgraceful or criminal.

There are many other kinds of dancing women, such as hoorkenees, bazeegranees, dharees etc. etc. In dancing the nautch girls present very picturesque figures, though somewhat encumbered by the voluminous folds of their drapery. Their attire consists of a pair of gay-coloured silk trousers, edged and embroidered with silver or gold lace, so long as only to afford occasional glimpses of the rich anklets, strung with small bells, which encircle the legs. Their toes are covered with rings, and a broad, flat silver chain is passed across the foot. Over the trousers a petticoat of some rich stuff appears, containing at least twelve breadths, profusely trimmed, having broad silver or gold borders, finished with deep fringes of the same.

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The coortee, or vest, is of the usual dimensions, but it is almost hidden by an immense veil, which crosses the bosom several times, hanging down in front and at the back in broad ends, either trimmed to match the petticoat, or composed of still more splendid materials, the rich tissues of Benares. The hands, arms, and neck, are covered with jewels, sometimes of great value, and the hair is braided with silver ribbons, and confined with bodkins of beautiful workmanship. The ears are pierced round the top, and furnished with a fringelike series of rings, in addition to the ornaments worn in England; the diameter of the nose-ring is as large as that of a crown-piece; it is of gold wire, and very thin; a pearl and two other precious gems are strung upon it, dangling over the mouth, and disfiguring the countenance. With the exception of this hideous article of decoration, the dress of the nautch-girls, when the wearers are young and handsome, and have not adopted the too-prevailing custom of blackening their teeth, is not only splendid but becoming; but it requires, however, a tall and graceful figure to support the cumbrous habiliments which are worn indiscriminately by all the performers. The nautch-girls of India are singers as well as dancers; they commence the vocal part of the entertainment in a high, shrill key, which they sustain as long as they can; they have no idea whatsoever of modulating their voices, and the instruments which form the accompaniment are little less barbarous; these consist of nondescript guitars, and very small kettle-drums, which chime in occasionally, making sad havoc with the original melodies, some of which are sweet and plaintive. The dancing is even more strange, and less interesting than the music; the performers rarely raise their feet from the ground, but shuffle, or to use a more poetical, though not so expressive a phrase, glide along the floor, raising their arms, and veiling or unveiling as they advance or describe a circle. The same evolutions are repeated, with the most unvarying monotony, and are continued until the appearance of a

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new set of dancers gives a hint to the preceding party to withdraw.

The passionate fondness of the natives for the nautch has in it something extraordinary. Many Europeans also were formerly so excessively devoted to it as to excite the special ridicule of a distinguished satirist. A few lines of his diatribe occur to us— Shrilly she shrieked, and high above The music of her fiddles three, Rose the romantic strain of love, Chota, chota, natchelee ! And then she danced ! for so they call, Tinkling her anklets while advancing, With many a horrid squeal and squall, With twirling hands and sudden kicks, Her charms of person much enhancing; People may patronise such tricks, But shouldn’t, surely, call it dancing.

Stocqueler is writing about North Indian dancers, probably from Bengal, where the charge of licentiousness was seldom as severe as it was to become in Tamil Nadu. He intends to be informative but inevitably adopts the ironic approach which relegates the ‘nautch’ to the sphere of trivial entertainment. The French travel writer, Ferdinand de Lanoye (1810–1870), recounts his experience of a dance performance in Bombay, probably in the early 1850s: When we entered we were encircled by a choir of dancing bayadères dressed in muslins of pink, white, lilac or cerise, hemmed with silver or gold … loaded with rings and chains on their bare feet, these brown but gracious creatures produced, tapping the floor with their heels, a silvery noise like that of jingling spurs. The rhythm of their dance is so different from all that I have seen before, so ravishing with grace and originality, their songs are so melancholy and so wild, their gestures

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so soft, so voluptuous and sometimes so lively, the music which accompanies them so discordant, that it is very difficult to convey any idea of it.

When one tries to assess this dance, of an unknown signification, going back probably to a very remote antiquity, and which these girls are now performing, without considering the value of what they are doing, that the pantomimes they are dancing were performed three thousand years ago before the chief divinities of their ancestors, one goes lost in the profound dreams on the mysteries of this marvellous India. I have never seen in Europe any professional dancers having more decency in their costumes and attitudes than these bayadères. But the present masters of the country have little appreciation of these things, and the end of the mystical dances was brusquely disturbed by a young Englishman, who, without any regard for his host, and believing that he was making a charming pleasantry, wanted to draw these Hindu Terpsichores into the prosaic turbulence of a waltz. The dancers were so frightened by this proceeding that they threw themselves crying to the floor, and insisted that they wanted to go away.

The air is that of the charming French gentleman, who despises the crassness of the British. The atmosphere of the romantic orientalist is present in Lanoye’s poetic appreciation of the scene before him, and especially of its antique associations. His brief allusion to the antiquity of the dance reveals a real sensitivity towards and subjective appreciation of the art, which nevertheless remains for him unfathomable. The German anthropologist and director of the Dresden Royal Library, Gustav Klemm (1802–1867) writes in well-worn terms about the ‘bayadères’, making little distinction between north and south, and probably only repeating a limited set of descriptions found in the anecdotal writings of others: The girls who consecrate themselves to the vocation of the dancer are destined from the youngest age by their parents for this profession. These always belong to

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the lowest castes, who count it an honour when their daughters are deemed worthy to dance before the idols of the gods or in the processions, in their honour. They remain their whole lives in the temple if they do not leave the profession themselves to perform in private houses, where they entertain the guests for payment. These temple servants are all Hindus, are accommodated and clothed by the temple, and live for the temple alone. They perform scenes from the epic tales, which, accompanied by flute and drum, they present in plastic form, in which, especially, the precision of the performance based on prescribed movements is truly admirable. This dance, though, is the only form of art to which the women of India are restricted. Apart from the temple dancers there are throughout India those profane dancers which the Europeans call bayadères after the Portuguese nomenclature. These dancers too, among whom are many Mahomedans and members of the lower castes, are dedicated to their profession from their earliest youth. Many of them are children of dancers, or else bought from their parents, and even stolen. From their childhood they are kept and trained in their profession, always far away from their homes.

The person who keeps the dancer sees to the provision of her clothing and food, which sometimes, even at the courts of the princes, can be quite meagre. Beautiful dancers, on the other hand, often accumulate wealth and there are some who wear considerable quantities of gold and jewels. The costume of these dancers is very rich. Head, neck, ears, nose, wrists and ankles, as well as fingers and toes, are covered with rings and trinkets. Their long black hair hangs down in long plaits. The nape and breast are draped with the finest muslin, which is used in several ways in the course of the dance. Sometimes they appear with a male co-performer. The most beautiful bayadères come from Benares; proud of their birthplace, they travel to the furthest reaches of

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India … They are much loved by the people, and are protected by the priests. When they travel through the streets in pretty bullock-carts, dressed in their rich, colourful costumes, the people rejoice at the sight of these beauties travelling in a group of rare grace and charm, and letting the shapes of their bodies, as delicate as they are full, shimmer through the fine fabrics which they wear. To this is added a melancholy and monotonous singing, accompanied by a tambourine and a little drum. The dancers of Delhi wear small white jackets which are open at the bosom and hang down in front over the breasts; silk, mostly red, wide leggings, which almost cover the ankles decorated with rings and bells. Around the body there is a silver girdle with tassels, a little red dress, and about the head a broad scarlet or green veil, reaching down to the floor. With this veil they often cover their faces, while tilting their head to the side with a languishing air, only to draw it back with a roguish expression to stare at a stranger with their sparkling black eyes. After they have danced a little distance forward, with decorative movements of their hands and feet, they suddenly let themselves sink down, and make an elegant pirouette …

These dancers travel continuously from place to place, performing in private houses for smaller or bigger assemblies of guests, their dances, pantomimes, and little dramas. They often outrage the sense of propriety of European audiences. The lot of these bayadères in old age is often that of poverty and want, if in the bloom of their lives they have not found secure shelter in a royal court.

A distinctly harsher tone is taken by the English divine, George Trevor (1809–1888), writing about religious festivals in South India: (Hindu festivals are) attended by indecencies which cannot be described. A prominent feature is the nautch,

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or dance performed by native girls, of whom a number are attached to most of the temples in the south, and whose wretched trade is but thinly disguised under the appellation of wives of the gods. Professor Wilson says that dancing-girls are not known in Hindustan, but are confined to Southern India. He adds, that ‘the cars with the indecencies upon them are restricted to Bengal and Orissa; and the temples in Hindustan are free from the gross representations which disgrace some of those in the south.’ He further contends that such objects ‘have no warrant either in the Vedas or the Puranas, and are as foreign to genuine Hinduism as to every other religion.’ These are statements which cannot be gainsaid, and it is a reproach to the British government that public decency should continue to be outraged by such exhibitions. The authority which felt bound to legislate against the destruction of human life, under pretence of religion, by suttee and female infanticide, should have no scruple in interposing the arm of the law for the protection of female purity, and the morals of society.

In writings such as this one, we recognize the early beginnings of the offended Christian moralism that would later play its part in the establishment of the anti-nautch movement, with its emphasis on the ‘nautch-girl’ as the epitome of social evils perpetrated by and against women in the practices of Hinduism, and by the tenets of the religion itself. The American writer, J.W. Palmer (1825–1906), recalls his attendance at a ‘nautch party’ given by an Indian ‘babu’ in Calcutta in the mid-1850s: First of all came the nautch girls, arrayed in barbaric drapery and jewelled in profusion—bells on their ankles, and rings on their toes, and bright ribbons of silver braided in their hair, confined by golden bodkins. Transparent veils, dyed like the mist when the red sun goes down behind it, enfolded them from crown to toe, and pearl and sapphire-studded vests of amber satin flashed through and through. From their delicate ears,

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pierced in twenty places, were suspended, softly tinkling, as many rings; and a great hoop of gold, supporting a central pearl and two rubies, hung from the nose and encircled the lips, so that the jewels lay upon the chin.

When they began to dance it was easy to forget the obdurate guitar, the abused tom-toms, and the heartwrung pipe, in their poetry of motion, the pantomime of tender balladry—the devotion, the anguish, the patience, the courage, the victory of love, related in curved lines of grace and beauty, in the brown roundness and suppleness and harmonious blendings of soft, elastic limbs, serpent-like in lyric spirals. It was not dancing, speaking Elsslerwise or Taglionicé—they neither leaped nor skipped, neither balanced nor pirouetted, there were no tours de force or pit-astounding gymnastics; they glided, they floated, in the melody of action; and when one sweet young singer lifted up a fresh but well-trained voice in the artless plaintiveness of Taza Bu Taza, our hearts were filled with the Indian ditty that Sir Walter Scott so loved.

The Austrian naturalist, Georg Ritter von Frauenfeld (1807– 1873), was a leading scientist with the expedition of the frigate Novara, which docked in Madras in January1858, and where the writer witnessed devadasis dancing in the course of a religious procession: Two musicians went ahead of it, with two types of drums, some nasal flutes, and a blaring clarinet. The music was of a kind that children make with toy instruments, making the most confusing racket. Behind them came a rider on a festively decorated and ornamented ox, and then twelve girls with rich jewels in their hair, with earrings and nose-rings, bracelets and anklets.

… From time to time the procession halted, the girls formed themselves into two ranks, and began to move, while singing a monotonous chorus in praise of the gods, in a sort of dance that moved up and down,

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forwards and backwards, now close together, now turning about, while gesticulating with their hands. All these motions were very graciously carried out …

Figure 6.1 Etching of Madras dancers by Joseph Selleny, from the Novara expedition, 1858.

The natural scientist, Karl Ritter von Scherzer (1821–1903), also a member of the Novara expedition, remembered the same occasion: The most substantial part of the festival, however, was fortunately not confined to the interior of the temple, but took place in the streets, through which, during the period the festival lasted, immense processions of Hindoos, praying, singing, and dancing, used to pass every evening about 11.00 p. m. on their way from one temple to another, so that we were in no want of picturesque objects. First, a band of musicians would lead the way, with the peculiar little drum or tom-tom, whining pipes,

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and blaring clarinets. It was more like the noise of a lot of children’s instruments than music. Next came a Hindoo riding on a gaily-bedizened ox, after whom appeared a number of girls and bayadères, dressed in white clothes, their hair richly dressed, and with rings through their nostrils, while the lobes of their ears were adorned with richly-gemmed ear-rings hanging down to the neck, and moving both hands and feet as they danced before the sacred figure, which was drawn along by 24 sturdy believers in Vishnu.

Figure 6.2 Pencil and aquarelle painting of a Madras dancer by Joseph Selleny. From the Novara expedition, 1858.

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At a more personal level, Henry A. Leveson (1828–1875), known as ‘The Old Shekkary’ (The Old Hunter), recalls the serenity evoked by the dancers of Hyderabad: The European stranger who does not understand the language, and is unacquainted with the habits and customs of the country, may look upon a nautch as a monotonous and unmeaning performance; but to one who can understand and appreciate the beauties of Sadi and Hafiz, it has an inexplicable and alluring charm, and many a live-long night have I passed most delightfully, whilst my regiment was quartered in the Nizam’s dominions, in the kiosk—(or garden house) of one of my native friends—an Emir of Hydrabad, where, lulled by the sounds of gurgling waters and flowing fountains, which cooled the air, deliciously impregnated with the fragrance of groves of roses and jessamines, I have remained until grey dawn broke, listening with rapture to the flowery language of the Persian poets, and gazing on the elflike forms that flitted before me. The ordinary costume of the Moosulmaunee dancing–girls consists of a ‘cholee’ or boddice, fitting tight to the form, and cut low in front down the breast, with short sleeves. It is generally made of bright-coloured silk, richly embroidered with gold, and is supposed to answer the purpose of stays, corsets, and all such abominable gear with which European damsels are in the habit of distorting their form …

This was of course the ‘manly’ way in which, Levenson implies, the nautch should be enjoyed after a hard day’s hunting or battle. And it is indeed the case that dancers were often summoned to entertain troops and officers in the wake of battles, and on ceremonious military occasions. Writing near the end of the 1850s, the Protestant missionary in India, Edward Jewett Robinson, is concerned with the role played by the dancers in preventing other Indian women from becoming literate:

Beautiful Bodies, Graceful Dances, Moral Dilemmas

As may be inferred from ancient dramas and poems, and from examples like that of Ouvvay, mental culture was not always denied to women. One of the paintings on the walls of the caves of Ajunta, represents a female school, in which women are engaged in reading and writing. Yet, from time immemorial, they have been generally deprived of this just advantage. From China to Constantinople almost restricted to courtesans, a literary education is certainly in India the glory and shame exclusively of the nautch and temple women. It has come to be the badge of a class trained partly to compensate for the mental deficiencies of their virtuous sisters. The lords of creation could not entirely dispense with the charm of intellectual conversation and equality on the side of the ladies. Therefore a few females are taught letters in every district. Consecrated to the gods from infancy, they are kept in connection with every great temple, to sing the praises of its idol, dance at the head of its festival processions, and give an attraction to its common services. There are even temples of consecration and training expressly for such persons, whence they issue to supply surrounding temples, as Jesuits have found to their convenience, and to meet the demands of the general public. Only in such women is found the attraction of education. Only in such female company may the gods be worshipped. Foul spot on the religion of India, sad blight upon her homes, heavy curse upon her daughters, harlotry is a sacred institution! No greater insult can be offered to females than calling them dancing women. The literary attainments of such persons are regarded as inseparable from their profession and character. Learning is therefore avoided, in other cases, to avoid disgrace.

As has been said, this approach to the ‘dancing girl’ and her vocation and lifestyle was to become more strident as the 19th century progressed, and this kind of interference from colonial missionaries and other social activists would take the place of the sort of administrative interventions by the East India Company

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that had led to the terrible Indian Revolt (or ‘Sepoy Mutiny’) of 1857–58. As a way of preventing any future administrative decisions or legislation that might be incendiary to the feelings of her Indian subjects, Queen Victoria issued, in 1858, the proclamation of non-interference that would inform the new Crown Government of India which replaced the preceding administration of the presidencies by East India Company officials: We disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects. We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we do strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure.

The proclamation was no doubt an expedient one, aimed in the first place at preventing a recurrence of the events of the previous two years. It had the effect of making colonial administrators more cautious and circumspect in their disregard for Indian cultural and religious practices, though it did not prevent the enactment of some laws which had in view the protection of the rights of women and girls, and which had a direct impact on the devadasi system, including the traditions of the hereditary dancers, as well the dancers of the North Indian kotha and court tradition. In terms of the quality and profusion of Western texts, we have seen how 18th-century interest in the dancers or ‘bayadères’ had led to their being introduced into European writings, as well as theatre productions, such as the operatic ballet, Le Dieu et la bayadère (‘The God and the Bayadère’), based on Goethe’s poem. In 1838 this interest reached a highpoint with the European tour of the Tiruvendipuram dancers, though it was of a theatrified, sensationalist nature. Some attempts were subsequently made to understand the devadasi system, its ritual and its art, at least

References

in broad outline—but these attempts are regularly coloured by a socially and religiously correct moral opprobrium. These tendencies would form the basis of further writings about the hereditary dancers in the decades to come.

References

1. Stocqueler, H.J., India: its history, climate, productions, and field sports; with notices of life and manners, and of the various travelling routes, London: G. Routledge and Co., 1853. 2. de Lanoye, Ferdinand, L’Inde contemporaine, Paris: Hachette, 1855.

3. Klemm, Gustav, Die Frauen: Culturgeschichtliche Schilderungen des Zustandes und Einflüsses der Frauen in den verschiedenen Zonen und Zeitaltern, Dresden: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1859.

4. Trevor, George, India; its natives and missions, London: The Religious Tract Society, 1859.

5. Palmer, J.W., The New and the Old; or, California and India in Romantic Aspects, New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859.

6. Frauenveld, Georg Ritter von, Meine Ausflüge in Madras während des Aufenthaltes der k.k. österr. Fregatte ‘Novara’ daselbst, Vienna: reprinted from the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological-Botanical Society of Vienna, April,1860.: 7. Scherzer, Karl Ritter von, The Narrative of the Circumnavigation of the Globe by the Austrian Frigate ‘Novara’, vol. 1, London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1861–1863.

8. Leveson, Henry A., The Hunting Grounds of the Old World, London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1860.

9. Robinson, Edward Jewett, The Daughters of India: their social conditions, religion, literature, obligations, and prospects, Glasgow: T. Murray, 1860.

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Chapter 7

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère: 1860–1870 In the decade dealt with in this section, efforts were made on a number of fronts to gain a better understanding of the devadasi system as it related to the hereditary temple and court dancers. At the same time, in spite of Queen Victoria’s proclamation, two laws were enacted in the 1860s, which, though they were not in the first place directed at the dancers, were used against them from time to time when the courts found it necessary to do so. These were articles 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibited the buying and selling of girls under the age of seventeen for purposes of prostitution. The other was the law on contagious diseases which came into effect in 1868, and was primarily intended to protect British soldiers from sexually transmitted diseases. Again, though not aimed at the devadasis, this law could be used to intervene in their system, the more so as the general view then was that hereditary dancers were a community of prostitutes. The dancers of India, and their sexual and conjugal traditions, were a cause of great perplexity to Western observers. On the one hand, some were able to recognise the place and aesthetics of their art and at least part of the meaning of their temple praxis. What was not acceptable to them was the perceived sexual immorality that was practised together with the art and the ritual. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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For some, however, none of this mattered: the ‘nautch-girls’ were a charming part of the Indian experience, and they were content to leave it at that. As will be seen from the text extracts given in this section, the ‘nautch-girl’ or ‘bayadère’ evoked as many responses as there were audiences either to appreciate or to deplore her art and lifestyle. For Captain Alan Newton Scott (1824–1870), in 1861, they were fitting subjects for his photographic experiments. He was an officer in the Madras Artillery during the two years of the Indian Rebellion (1857–1858) and afterwards. Not much seems to be recorded about his military career: a gazette from 1856 mentions him as ‘to be promoted Captain’. His relative fame in his own time was earned not by military exploits but by his prowess as an early amateur photographer, a part-time vocation that he is said to have adopted partly on account of the ‘monotony’ of military life in India. Scott’s many photographs of various subjects in the Hyderabad area were collected as mounted albumen prints in his 1862 book, Sketches in India. Among the subjects presented in this work there are several photographs of ‘nautch girls’ about whom, describing the several photographic plates in which they occur, Scott writes as follows: These sketches represent a party of these celebrated girls during their performances. The dancing or nautch girls of India are all of a servile caste, and are sold at a very early age to women who train them to dance, or rather, as will be seen by the second and third photographs, to go through a series of attitudes more remarkable as illustrative of extraordinary suppleness than for grace or elegance. Contemporaneous with this training, is another of a religious nature, every girl being made to attend some temple of Vishnu for a certain season, at the expiration of which, she is cauterized with a mark on her shoulder by the officiating Gugangar, or churchwarden, who pays a fee of ten pagodas to the girl’s keeper for her services in connection with the temple. These consist principally in singing at festivals in honour of the heathen deity. The

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

girl now subsists partly from the fees allowed her from the funds of the temple or pagoda, and partly by engaging to dance at houses. She also obtains rice-balls, cakes, and whatever else may be offered to the heathen deity, in large or small quantities, as also sandals, garlands of flowers, etc. If she is attached to the temple of Siva, she only receives a share of rice-balls, and a portion of the offerings made by worshippers to the god on festivals. The distinctive feature of the girls serving in the temples of Vishnu is a circle stamped on their shoulder, and that of those attached to the temple of Siva, the figure of a bull impressed on the hand. These dancing girls are extravagantly fond of ornaments; all wear a profusion of bracelets, armlets, and anklets, and many jewels in their nose; they have also a great passion for playing at cards, the game being a kind of whist, very complicated, as there are eight suits, and eight honours in each suit of Hindoo cards.

Figure 7.1 Photograph of kalavantulu dancers near Hyderabad. From A.N. Scott’s Sketches in India, 1862.

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He continues his commentary by describing a photograph of the dancers in acrobatic postures: The performance represented in this plate and LXXI consists in the girls first turning backwards, their hands resting on the ground. These are kept stationary, while their feet, moving to the time of the music, describe semicircles to each side; and when the body has reached the extreme of possible extension to one side, it is brought back by a twist of the wrist, which appears to result in little short of dislocation. The movement of the feet however again commences, and is continued as long as strength endures. The only music to these performances is a monotonous song, without words, by the women behind, accompanied by a drum, tenor, and bass, and two drones—tenor and bass—which seem to be wanting on the present occasion. The time is admirably kept, and assists the dancers very considerably.

Turning to the next plate, he goes on:

This represents one of the foregoing girls, whose body is arched, with her face turned towards the spectator. The length of time that one of these girls will remain in this position is extraordinary, and can only be explained by their being trained from a very early age to distort their bodies into all possible attitudes.

And finally describes a photograph of the dancers at rest:

The perfect lassitude apparent in these girls after having gone through their performance, compared with their appearance before it, as shown in Plate 69, makes it evident how severely their muscles have been tried during their dancing exhibition. Many of them in a state of repose would make admirable models for the sculptor.

Scott’s remarks on the photographs demonstrate a positive tone not usually encountered in 19th-century Western writing on ‘nautch girls’. The analyses are crisp and factually descriptive of the kalavantulu practice and training as Scott himself understands them. The only telling epithet that he allows himself is the reference to the dancers as ‘celebrated’.

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

Axel Lind von Hageby (1829–1888) was a Swedish officer, amateur artist, and travel writer. In his Travel Pictures and Sketches from India, he recounts his experience with dancers on the outskirts of Jaipur, which probably took place in 1859 or 1860: We had erected our tents outside of the fort, not far from the city, which I often visited. One afternoon I saw the nautch girls dancing their alluring dance. There were six almost naked young girls with perfect figures, on which the goddess of beauty had seemed to imprint her stamp. The actual dance was confined to plastic attitudes, and a languid bending and inclination of the body, in which the lively play of facial expressions presented a continuously changing set of expressions. Their clothing consisted only of a transparent colourful shroud, sometimes cast in graceful folds about the breasts, sometimes ornamentally woven through their shining hair, treated with sweet-smelling oil, which fell in waves down to their knees. The music for this dance consisted of a drawn-out, monotonous singing, accompanied by the shrill tones of a zither and a drum; the first of these instruments played by an old man, the second mishandled by a boy. Had these dancers been able to divest themselves of their Indian ornaments and exchanged their yellowbrown skin colour for that of the delicate white of our Northern women, they would have surpassed all the women in Christendom by their grace and comeliness. But their painted faces, their lips and teeth stained by the use of betel, their over-bejewelled noses, ears, arms, legs, and toes, robbed them of all natural feminine grace. The striving of these priestesses of pleasure to present only one side of life through their smiling and caressing glances seemed to me wholly misleading because, behind the transparent veil of this art, there lies concealed a deep depravity, evoking heartfelt sympathy rather than approbation.

Here again are the moralizing notes that persist throughout the 19th-century Western encounter with Indian dance and dancers, though not in every case. Jules Gérard (1817–1864) was

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a hunter, explorer, and brigadier, whose sense of the dancers was typically romantic and masculine, though he does allow himself the regularly used epithet ‘lascivious’ to describe the dance itself: The tinkling of bracelets and of grun-groos (ornaments and bells attached to the dancers’ ankles) were now heard, and around forty dancers dressed in charming costumes entered the circle and gracefully greeted the company. A half dozen of the youngest and most beautiful advanced to hang double garlands of jasmine about our necks … The music, which until this moment had been monotonous, now sang out in joyful accents the magnificent Persian melody of the immortal Hafiz: Taza be taza … and each of the beautiful singers sang the words of the song in turn, which soon became a general chorus; then, in a similar way, one by one, they began their graceful and voluptuous balancing until everything became fused in movement, and soon the charming forms of these beautiful sylphs were spinning before us like a vision … a strange and delicious sensation of ravishment softly penetrated all my senses, like nothing I had ever known before …

Their lovely features, their soft skins, their large swimming eyes sparkling across the shining tresses of their masses of black hair … offered to my eyes an attraction that had never been presented to me by the colder beauties of the northern climates. Have you, my fellow teacher, every visited the land of the sun? You, too, will be bound to remark on the languishing and expressive voluptuousness which is sent out from the gazelle-eyes of these girls, and for which you would search in vain in other lands less favoured …

But let us return to our senses. The ordinary dance of these bayadères consists more in flowing changes of position than in steps or precise figures: they compose themselves into elegant attitudes and graceful postures by which they advance and retreat, their hands, feet,

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

necks and eyes moving in unison with the music. I think that they should be called singers rather than dancers because their dance is nothing more than a graceful accompaniment to their singing, which generally treats of nothing other than love of the kind which often lends a lascivious character to their postures …

Much of the remainder of Gérard’s anecdote about the bayadères is plagiarized from Henry A. Leveson, so one can’t tell whether he actually attended this performance or whether the episode is sheer romantic fantasy. Alfred Grandidier was a naturalist and explorer of independent means who undertook a voyage around the world, at first with his brother Ernest. After 1860, now travelling alone, he journeyed to China and India, where he arrived in 1863. About his experiences in India he wrote the work Voyages dans les provinces méridionales de l’Inde (‘Voyages in the Southern Provinces of India’) which was published in 1870. It naturally included some passages on the bayadères: The dance of oriental countries is completely different from that of ours. It is simply a mime most often accompanied by songs whose rhythm is monotonous and drawling. Three men, with a drum and some cymbals, accompany the movements of the dancer while her companions squat on the floor, clapping their hands to the cadence and singing in chorus. There is usually only one dancer, striking the ground with feet overladen with ankle-bells, and she is content, while turning in on herself, to sketch by means of her arms and her whole body an undulating movement that is in reality rather stranger than it is harmonious … The costume of the bayadères is rich and it is very decent, more decent than that of the women seen on the streets …

He goes on to say that, in his own country, the viewing of dances is a fatiguing thing, while in India: … the performances given by the bayadères do not cause any kind of fatigue; plunged halfway into a soft somnolence, one experiences lassitude neither of body

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or spirit, while being idly lulled by poetic tales of love, the usual subject of all the spectacles of this genre …

Figure 7.2 Illustration by Alphonse de Neuville in Alfred Grandidier’s Voyages dans les provinces méridionales de l’Inde, 1870.

We get a much soberer insight from James Kerr, principal of the Presidency College in Calcutta, who, writing in the 1860s, advocates the ‘nautch’ as an innocuously pleasant way of socializing with local Indians, and goes against the Christian moralists who want it unattended by their fellow Europeans: The essential part of the nautch consists of dancing; but it is altogether a different kind of dancing from what we are accustomed to. The Hindoo does not dance himself. He hires others to do it for him, while he looks on. One or two professional dancing girls appear upon the stage, accompanied by a musician of the other sex, who plays upon a kind of violin or guitar, and sings. The dancing girls are richly attired in a dress interwoven with gold and silver thread, and so stiff, that if placed on the floor it would almost stand alone. They are literally loaded with jewellery—earrings, nose rings, bracelets,

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heavy silver anklets, rings on every finger and on every toe.

On first making their appearance, they advance into the middle of the room, where they stand for a few moments with great composure. They then begin to move slowly forward, waving their arms, making passes, as it were, at the company, bending the body from side to side, and turning slowly round. All this is done with great gravity, and in a dreamy sort of way. The musician all the while plays on the guitar and sings. Sometimes the dancing girl will advance to where you are sitting, make a shuffling movement with her feet and a few languid passes, and then slowly retire. Sometimes she puts a little more life and mettle in her heels, and runs suddenly forward as if under the impulse of violent passion. But more frequently the movements are slow and languid. The dancing, according to our notions, is wanting in action and spirit, and has a drowsy mesmerizing effect on the spectators.

Nor is the music of a lively kind, or characterized by much variety of expression. The instrument used is generally a vina (a small violin or guitar). When there are several musicians on the stage, as sometimes happens, a small hand-drum and a tambourine play a part in the performance. The natives will sit for hours in dreamy silence, listening to this music. There is something in the languid movements of the dancers, and in the drowsy tinklings and monotonous cadence of the music, which seems to harmonize with their feelings.

It is sometimes said that the pantomimic gestures, which form an important element of the nautch, describe the passion of love in all its excess. People who think so must have a very lively imagination. The gestures are so obscure as to be absolutely without meaning to ordinary observers. If they represent love at all, it is merely certain phases of this universally interesting

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passion, beginning with the tender feelings and passing on to anger and jealousy. In this light, the nautch may perhaps be regarded as a mute drama describing the sentiment of love.

It sometimes happens that, after the dancing and music have ceased, native jesters are introduced to vary the entertainment. They go through a rude kind of comedy, for acting it cannot be called. The wit they display is not of the most refined kind, and may be aptly described as mere buffoonery. They endeavour to raise a laugh by making wry faces and hideous noises. So far as I have observed, there is little taste exhibited in these performances. It is usual for the sons or near relatives of the host to wait upon the guests during the evening. They go round among them and converse with them, now and then presenting them with flowers or sprinkling them with rose water.

Not unfrequently at nautches given by wealthy families, refreshments are provided for the European guests. Tables are laid in an anteroom, with a great profusion of cakes, fruit, and wine. The host himself, or one of his sons, is usually present, but without partaking of the repast. Though you may soon get tired of the nautch itself, you have an opportunity during the evening of conversing with the members of the family and other native guests, all of whom demean themselves on these occasions with the utmost propriety.

Different persons among the Anglo-Indian community take entirely different views of the Hindoo nautch. Some regard it in the light of a harmless and pleasing amusement, which brings the English residents and the respectable classes of native society together for innocent recreation and friendly intercourse. Others regard it as a Hindoo festival, in which are concentrated some of the worst elements of Hindooism.

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

Certain it is that these entertainments have of late years become less popular among the European residents. The severe piety of the present day frowns upon them. It is sometimes said that to attend a nautch, is to countenance idolatry. I cannot at all concur with this opinion. If we betake ourselves to India, we voluntarily place ourselves in the midst of idolators. But do we thereby encourage idolatry? Surely not. It is quite as likely that our presence here may have the opposite effect. And in the same way, by entering a native dwelling and being present at a native entertainment (in which there is really nothing symbolical of the Hindoo religion) it cannot be said that we give countenance or encouragement to idolatry. Are we to dwell in the Hindoo land, and have no friendly intercourse with the Hindoos? Are we to avoid the natives in all business affairs, and in all amusements, for fear of countenancing idolatry? If so, our first and greatest fault has been to come to India at all, and the sooner we quit it the better. I cannot but think that the growing disinclination on the part of our countrymen to attend nautches at the houses of respectable natives, is much to be regretted. It deprives us of one of the very few opportunities we have of an interchange of friendly feeling with our fellow subjects. It is in this way that we make ourselves foreigners in the land, and widen the gulf that separates us from the natives of the country of which we are so justly proud, and which may well be regarded as the brightest jewel of the English crown.

The Hindoo nautch is one of those amusements upon which the so-called Christianity of the present day is most anxious to fix a stain. For a Christian to attend a nautch is now denounced as impious. At one time it was otherwise. The nautch was once deemed a harmless entertainment, which Europeans might attend with the utmost propriety. This, I think, was the correct view to take of it. There is no reason why we should associate

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with it the idea of religion at all. It is simply social amusement, and offers one of the few innocent opportunities which Europeans have of mixing with respectable Hindoos in friendly intercourse.

Nautches are sometimes objected to by European moralists, on the ground that the dancing girls who play the principal part in these performances are persons of immoral character. I am inclined so far to agree with this opinion. The nautch girls are not generally considered persons of spotless virtue. They are not, in the same degree as the rest of the community, under the wholesome restraints of public opinion. In this respect they resemble our opera dancers, who may, in many instances, be very respectable, but who, as a class, are not regarded as models of severe virtue.

But I do not see on what grounds nautches can be considered as an idolatrous religious service. So far as I have observed they have nothing of this character. They are social entertainments, which in all their accompaniments are no more connected with religion, than a musical entertainment or an opera dance among ourselves. Nor am I aware that there is any foundation for another allegation, that the movements of the feet and hands of the dancers are a sort of pantomimic imitation of amorous passion. When you witness these pantomimic gestures, you are at first struck with a feeling of novelty, which soon gives way to mental weariness induced by the languid movements and monotonous music.

With Edward Sellon (1818–1866), we come to a rather more curious case. He was an illustrator of erotic works, who also wrote a book recounting his erotic escapades in India. The work we are concerned with here, however, is another, which purports to analyse the Hindu sacred writings, and which has this passage on the ‘dancing girls’: Dancing formed an important part of the ceremonial worship of most Eastern peoples. Dancing girls were

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

attached to the Egyptian temples, and to that of the Jews. David also, we are told, ‘danced before the Lord with all his might.’ And to every temple of any importance in India we find a troupe of nautch or dancing girls attached.

These women are generally procured when quite young, and are early initiated into all the mysteries of their profession. They are instructed in dancing and vocal and instrumental music, their chief employment being to chant the sacred hymns, and perform nautches before the God, on the recurrence of high festivals. But this is not the only service required of them, for besides being the acknowledged mistresses of the officiating priests, it is their duty to prostitute themselves in the courts of the temple to all comers, and thus raise funds for the enrichment of the place of worship to which they belong. Being always women of considerable personal attractions, which are heightened by all the seductions of dress, jewels, accomplishments and art, they frequently receive large sums in return for the favours they grant, and fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred rupees have been known to be paid to these syrens in one night. Nor is this very much to be wondered at as they comprise among their number, perhaps, some of the loveliest women in the world.

It has been said already, that among the classes from which a medium for Sacté is selected, is the courtesan and dancing-girl grade; they are indeed more frequently chosen for this honour than the others before enumerated. A nautch woman esteems it a peculiar privilege to become the Radha Dea on such occasions. It is an office indeed which these adepts are, on every account, better calculated to fulfil with satisfaction to the sect of Sacteyas who may require their aid, than a more innocent and unsophisticated girl. The worship of Sacti (as already observed) is the adoration of Power, which the Hindis typify by the Yoni,

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or womb, the Argha or Vulva, and by the leaves and flowers of certain plants thought to resemble it. Thus in the Ananda Tantram, c. vi., verse 13, we find an allusion to the Aswattha, or sacred fig-tree, (the leaf of which is in the shape of a heart, and much resembles the conventional form of the Yoni, to which it is compared).

In Ananda Tantram, chap. vii. 148, and other passages, reference is made to Bhagamala. She appears to be the goddess who presides over the pudendum-muliebre, i.e. the deified Vulva; and the Sacti is thus personified. In the mental adoration of Sacti a diagram is framed, and the figure imagined to be seen inside the Vulva. This is the Adhó-mukham, or lower face, ie. the Yoni, wherein the worshipper is to imagine (mantapam) a chapel to be erected.

Pierre-Eugène Lamairesse (1817–1898) was one of the first Europeans to take a simplistic but serious interest in the popular culture and traditions of South India. A civil and mining engineer in Pondicherry and Karaikal, he brought to his task of translating and commenting on the popular songs of South India the lucid traits of a practical man of affairs. In the course of writing about the lyrics, he mentions the bayadères who are uniquely associated with them: The bayadères are for India what the courtesans were for Greece, the most elegant, most instructed, and most agreeable women. They are the only women allowed to dance, and to mix in a friendly way with men. Entertaining a bayadère is not only a luxury in good taste at Indian homes, as at our homes we show off our horses, but it is also a meritorious act. The Brahmins often intone a verse, whose gist is that ‘commerce with a bayadère is a virtue that effaces sins.’ Like all others of their sex, without exception, they maintain an absolute reserve, and are treated with the same reserve themselves. … The dance of the bayadères is a very studied pantomime in which a single dancer usually performs accompanied

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

by music very primitive to our ears. In the temple this pantomime usually represents the diverse phases of an amorous scene sung by the musicians who accompany her …

When they perform for Europeans, the bayadères sometimes give themselves over to fantasies: I have seen them perform a very skilful parody of the dances and manners of our ladies.

Sometimes a group of bayadères comes together to execute certain dances which always consist in a play of attitudes performed in one place; never, as with our dances, in the execution of figures across a plane of space.

The dances of the Muslims, far more graceful and lively than those of the Hindu dancers, come closer to resembling ours, and have something in common with Spanish and Moorish dance …

He gives some translated examples of songs sung specifically by the temple and court dancers of which the following is a brief extract: SONGS OF THE HINDU DANCERS ATTACHED TO THE TEMPLES Song in the form of a dialogue:

Bayadère: Your lover is here, her eyes full of tears, seeking the object of her love; where are you going, my young king? Come, come, and give me a kiss. King: Wait, my beautiful one, my heart is with you. But my horse is delaying me. Do you think that I am forgetting you? Wait, wait; I am with you.

Bayadère: How treacherous the god of love is! He excites my flame, and then he delays you among others. You are cruel like the bee who starts by giving his honey, and then stings; cruel like the bee who quickly gathers pollen from new flowers, and abandons his old roses.

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(The king, having suffered many difficulties with his horse, arrives at the house of his mistress, and stands at the door. He enters to find her bathed in tears, and plunged in a mortal sorrow.)

King: Is it possible, soul of my soul, that you are in this deplorable state? You whom I have seen momentarily shining with natural grace? Tell me the cause of this unexpected change which pierces my heart. Bayadère: Alas! How inconstant lovers are! What can I say about the love that plays with men?

King: Speak more clearly, my beauty. Put an end to my just impatience. Bayadère: I see very well that you have given me a rival; that is the cause of my restlessness and chagrin. Etc.

There is no repetition in Lamairesse of the supposed sexual squalor of the devadasi’s way of life. His manual offers only what the art he is attempting to convey says about itself. This is not the case with Henry Bohan who was for many years attached to the French colonial judiciary as ‘King’s Prosecutor’ in Pondicherry. Details for his life and work are scant, and those that I have are drawn from the brief preface to his book, Voyage aux Indes orientales; coup d’oeil sur leur importance politique et commerciale (‘Voyage to the East Indies; A Glance at Their Political and Commercial Importance’), published in 1866, in which he is described as having spent ‘many years in India’ and as being much exercised with the questions of French colonial power, the ‘Hindu laws’, the inequitable status of women in the country, and the political and commercial importance of the East Indies colonies generally. His references to and illustrations of the devadasi dancers are found, in typical fashion, in the sections of the book that deal with Indian customs and religion. They give us nothing new in the way of description or analysis of the vocation or of the art attached to it. Likewise, the paintings, though produced by Bohan himself, will be seen to be as much reliant on the representational

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

clichés of the time as his very unoriginal text—again typical of the narrative attached to the devadasis by the vast majority of commentators in the late-19th century. He introduces his readers to the dancers as follows:

The bayadères are beautiful girls attached in service to the Indian temples. Their tasks are to entertain, please and charm on all occasions for a slight remuneration that brings profit to the priests and the temple. The bayadère is a dancer; she is the Indian Terpsichore, but how very much she differs from the Terpsichore of our opera! The circlings of the legs, the balletic leaps, the entrechats, the foot audaciously projected into space … in the eyes of the bayadère these would amount to the crazy motions of a mere juggler … For the bayadères … the balance and shifting of the hips, the quivering and soft undulations of the torso, the curvature of the waist, the swooning arms, the ardent, half-opened lips, the eyes alight with desire or languishing with satiety, the intoxication of love, and the most voluptuous of postures, these are what they excel at representing and conveying with a striking verisimilitude …

The bayadères, who are the incarnation of coquetry in India, evince a minute care and a great art in fashioning their beauty, in embellishing themselves and conserving their charms. To be pleasing is the whole of their occupation, just as their supreme happiness lies in achieving their marvellous plans of seduction. These practised courtesans give themselves over to pantomimes of love and passionate ecstasy, as much for the love of the art as for the interests of the temple and the priests who profit by it. And, certainly, of all the women who embellish the various points of the globe, there is none who is more accomplished, by the allure of her jewels, the refinement of her coquetry, and the élan of her passion, in obtaining all the advantages that derive from the practice of such a difficult art of seduction.

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More than 2000 years before our time, the  bayadères, as though their eyes did not have enough fire, or their glances were not sufficiently brilliant, had already the custom of encircling their eyes with a powder of black antimony. Poor ladies of Europe, did you know that your habit of making up your faces is derived from the bayadères of India? And that they still have so much more to teach you!

Figure 7.3 Henry Bohan, illustration from Voyage aux Indes orientales etc., 1866.

Figure 7.4 Henry Bohan, illustration from Voyage aux Indes orientales, 1866.

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

In this commentary, we see again the harping on the seductive beauty and charms of the  bayadère  that forms such a large part of European, and especially French, depiction of the South Indian dancer. In reality, Bohan, like most of his contemporaries, is merely regurgitating what he has learned from such writers on the devadasis as Pierre Sonnerat and the Abbé Dubois, tricked out with humorous asides for a contemporary readership. A matter-of-fact glimpse at South and North Indian dance is vouchsafed us by J.B. Rietstap (1828–1891), who, though he wrote several travel journals, was mainly a heraldist and genealogist. The first extract deals with a performance in the South, seen in the late 1860s: Our first overnight stay was at Nellore … One of the temples there is wealthy and maintains a number of dancers, who entertained us with a dance one evening. As soon as they appeared, a circle of indigenes formed around us. The musicians and dancers placed themselves in the middle of this circle, and the latter led off with the dance. They had a length of gold-fringed red muslin wrapped several times around their hips, with the remainder draped over the shoulder and hanging down over the breasts. They also wore a sort of gold-embroidered jacket, and gauzy violet pantaloons, wide at the top and narrowing to the bottom. Jewels sparkled on their hands, arms, necks, and even on their noses, and they wore metal rings around their ankles, that made a not unpleasant sound as they moved. A kind of singing, that gradually went over to the highest and shrillest tones, accompanied by a scraping eight-stringed violin and a tom-tom, made up the introduction to the performance. The dance consisted mainly of a series of sharply different positionings and twists of the hands, arms, and legs. The excellence of the art seemed to consist in changing places and describing little circles at the highest speed, first on the heels, and then on the toes.

The second glimpse is from Ongole in Andhra Pradesh, and involves a performance of early Kathak:

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The dances and dancers that we saw here were much better those of Nellore. Each group was made up of seven persons; three men played music in the background and only two women danced at a time, with a torchbearer on each side of them, lifting or lowering the light according to the movements of the dancers. The dancers’ costumes were exceedingly rich. They wore trousers of light-coloured silk, with silver lining and embroidery, fastened to the ankles above the ankle-bells. Over their bare feet ran crosswise a broad, flat silver chain, and the big toe was decorated by a ring. Over the trousers they wore a very wide pleated dress of an expensive stuff with wide seams and heavy fringes of gold or silver … hands, arms and neck were decorated with jewels and the hair woven through with silver-embroidered bands. The edges of the ears were set with a fringe of rings, and in addition they had nose-rings of thin gold wire, from which some pearls were hung, and these moved unbecomingly this way and that across the mouth. On the whole, though, the costume was very effective. The dancers, accompanied by a tom-tom and two guitars, sang together with these instruments, usually beginning with a very high note, which was held for as long as possible, and then descending to a lamenting and sorrowful melody.

Louis Jacolliot (1837–1890), a colonial judge and barrister, was also an occultist crank with interests in ‘oriental’ religions, about which he wrote a number of speculative works. His interest in the customs of women throughout the world was part of the reason for his voyage to India, which was undertaken between 1865 and 1869, when he visited Tahiti too. His period in India was described in his book Voyage au pays des bayadères (‘Voyage to the Land of the Bayadères’), first published in 1873. The book was illustrated by Édouard Riou. Speaking about the bayadère being ‘hunted’ and used as a sex-object, he tells us: … the bayadère will force the one, and elude the other, and will procure for herself numerous hours of liberty

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

… until, surprised in  flagrante  delicto  by the master, she is sent back to the temple where, from that moment on, she is free to give herself over to her own tastes in complete liberty.

If these excesses have been very public, she will no longer be received in the interior of the temple but is added to the category of the easy girls who give themselves to any caste. But, however low she has fallen … she will never share a bed with a pariah. It is exceedingly rare that a bayadère is thus hunted from out of the temple. She is allowed to have open commerce with people of the smallest caste, where she may be pursued by … some influential personage who, on account of his gifts and offerings, is able to make demands of many of the Brahmins. In general, these last always look with jaundiced eyes on consecrated girls who descend into the public domain.

The children of bayadères have no caste: the girls follow the profession of their mothers, the boys are taken up among the musicians of the temple. If, however, a supposed father arrives, sufficiently credulous to accept a doubtful parentage, he will take on himself the education of one of these children, though he is not required to accept the child into his caste or to leave to it any portion of his inheritance …

And, reminiscing romantically about the dance itself:

… four women, barely twenty years old, beautiful as are the races of the Himalayas, lascivious by temperament, of which all the gestures and attitudes are formed in childhood by a master skilled in the art of moving the senses. Four women, with black eyes open wide, with long, damp eyelashes, long, scattered hair, naked throats, the remainder of their bodies barely covered by a gauzy silk vestment fringed with gold … four fantastic apparitions … descended to reveal among men the lost secret of the purest of forms and the most exquisite beauty … they become incandescent in the dance …

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Figure 7.5 Illustration by Riou in Louis Jacolliot’s Voyage au pays des bayadères, 1889.

It is hardly necessary to point out, what has already been seen in several of the extracts above, the tendency in many 19th-century Western viewers of Indian dance to translate the experience as a sexual one, and here Jacolliot is no exception. A far more dry-eyed narrative is given by A. Esquer in his work, Essay on the Castes of India, published by the Government Printer in Pondicherry in 1870: The Dassys or Dévadassys are the bayadères, the dancers, the servants of the divinity. Slaves of the Brahmins, respected in spite of their dissolute lives, only they, with the Gourou, have the privilege of approaching princes, and being seated in their presence. Rigorously speaking, not every girl can become a bayadère; it is the prerogative of a caste which is not permitted to renounce it; once a bayadère, a Hindu woman has to follow this vocation until her death, or at least until, in very rare cases, she becomes legitimately married. Abandoned to prostitution, destined to the pleasure of the Brahmins, they give themselves without reserve to

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

the highest bidder, and those who have ruined the most lovers are the most highly regarded. At all times their character as servants of the divinity grants them privileged status in the public eye …

Once a young girl is destined to be a bayadère, she is presented, before attaining nubility, to the chief priest of the temple, who examines her to ensure that she is beautiful and well formed (beauty is one of the principal conditions of admission), and, after a plethora of ceremonies, initiated. She is then branded with a hot iron, with the seal of the temple to which she is admitted, and then placed in the hands of a dancing master. (After a decision made by the committee of Indian jurisprudence in January, 1832, there has long been a caste of bayadères, not properly speaking a member of any other caste). … These Nautch girls, as the English call them, are not worth seeing, unless for their charming costumes, with their silk pantaloons and skirts of gold-lined muslin, the sparking jewels that literally cover their heads, their necks and arms, the silver circlets around their ankles, their brocade waistcoats, their long tresses garlanded with flowers … they are thus very graceful and charming to see, but, alas! The nattoumouttoucara, the beating together of two little cymbals, the accordion entoning a whining prelude, the dance, rhythmic and with painful contortions; these commence, with the discordant sounds of the orchestra … and one quickly quits the theatre of this bizarre and graceless choreography … The bayadères form a special corporation which has as its standard an image of Manmàtha or Kama-déva, the god of love. Their male children, not belonging by birth to any caste, become musicians in the temples they are born to serve.

John Matheson (1817–1878), a cotton entrepreneur in Bombay, provides us with a more homely anecdote in his Narrative of Indian Travel (published in 1870):

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The occasion of our visit was a nautch party, given in our honour by Mr. N.A., with whom I had some business relations; and, as the nautch is still the popular evening entertainment of the country, and many Hindus as well as Parsees were present, we had thus the opportunity of seeing the ‘At home’ of a respectable native family.

… we were led to seats of honour, and presented with rose-water, flowers, and betel-nut, after which a nautchgirl was introduced, accompanied by her attendant musicians. This damsel was a young and well-favoured specimen of her class, clad in wide silk trousers, a red silk saree laden with silver ornaments, and a natural flower analogous to the Gardenia of this country (the celebrated sweet-scented Mogra) in her smoothly braided hair, which, of course, was black and glistening with oil. Her small bare feet, during the brief moments of their appearance, displayed ornamental toe-rings and anklets …

… the performer advanced to the centre of the room, and began a series of gentle movements with hands and feet, adapted to the rhythm of the dreary melody, which, combining an equal amount of spirit and variety, consisted of the continual repetition of about two bars. Presently she broke forth into song, or rather into the recitation of certain pathetic truths, during the progress of which her voice gradually rose, and her gestures increased in animation … This nautch-girl having fulfilled her part, another appeared, and enacted a similar performance …

The third part comprised the united action of both performers; and so on, if we had chosen, ad  infinitum, or at least throughout the night. Our party, however, had now seen enough of the nautch, and had even enjoyed it as a novelty, although of any amusement it may have afforded to the native guests solemnly ranged round the room, their blank faces gave no sign … and it may safely be added, that they were ready, if no

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

interruption had occurred, to sit quietly on for many hours throughout multiplied repetitions of the performance.

In 1869, John Shortt (1839–1932) made what seems to have been the very first attempt to compose a more ‘scholarly’ paper on the vocation and lifestyle of the South Indian temple and court dancers. Shortt was the Surgeon General Superintendent of Vaccinations in Madras, a medical doctor and polymath. Apart from his investigations into the devadasi system, he also wrote works on forestry and cattle in India. His paper on the ‘Bayadère, or Dancing Girls of Southern India’ was published in the London Anthropological Society’s memoirs of 1867, 1868, and 1869. Shortt himself was the local secretary for the Anthropological Institute at Madras. I give his article in full: Hindu girls of every known caste are dedicated to some of the temples, and brought up to the profession of dancing. They do not marry; but are permitted to prostitute their persons to any individual of an equal or superior caste to themselves, or to live in professional concubinage; such practice in no way degrades them from the right to caste privileges, provided they do not form intimacies, or cohabit, with outcasts. There are two kinds of prostitutes who practise the trade, and they are recognised by the vernacular designations of –1. Thassee; or, dancing-girl attached to a Pagoda, 2. Vashee; or prostitute; any bad woman. The latter, as a rule, comprise women who have left their husbands and gone astray, subsequent to marriage; or are young widows. They have no connexion with any Hindu temples, nor do they dance or sing; so that they choose their habitations in large populous towns, to enable them to practise their trade successfully, congregating in brothels, where, from two to six, or more, may be met with, living together in the vicinity of small Hindu temples, but more frequently inhabiting houses next to toddy or arrack shops; in fact, in some places an arrack or toddy shop is seldom seen without

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a brothel connected with it, thus proving or connecting drunkenness with prostitution. In our present paper, we purpose confining our remarks to the tribe termed ‘Thassee’, a body of dancing girls, who are either the daughters of such, among whom, like other Hindu castes, the profession descends by hereditary succession; or should these women have no children, which is more frequently the case, they adopt girls of a tender age. All girls intended for the profession of dancing are connected with some Hindu temple, to which they dedicate their persons; and, in confirmation of the same, a nominal marriage ceremony is carried out for the marriage of the girl to the presiding deity of the temple. Sometimes Hindus of the highest and best castes make a vow in sickness or other affliction, or when surrounded by troubles and trials, to give one of their daughters to some particular temple to which the vow is made, to be brought up as a dancing girl; the vow so made is scrupulously kept and religiously carried out at the proper time. In the selection of girls for adoption in this profession, good looking, well-made ones are chosen, and they are taught to dance at the early age of five. Older girls, when they adopt the profession, are also taught to dance. The lessons in dancing are given daily, two hours before daylight in the morning, one of which is devoted to singing and the other to dancing. In the evening, after 4 p.m., the same number of hours are devoted, so that each girl has to practise for four hours daily; and in about three years she is supposed to have mastered the arts of singing and dancing. There are generally six chief kinds of dancing: 1: Dancing or Audoogirathoo 2: Dancing or Ananeeum

3: Dancing or Kenchenee nateum

4: Dancing or Moodieydoo cirathoo 5: Dancing or Hereacoothoo 6: Dancing or Colu autem

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

At the same time the art of dancing or Abhinayaum is said to be exhibited in six different ways: 1: By the movements of the eyes

2: By the movements and action of the features

3: By the movements and attitude of the breasts and chests 4: By the movements and position of the hands 5: By the movements and action of the feet

6: By tumbling, performing somersaults, etc.

By these girls commencing their studies at the early age of five, they are able to make their appearance at about seven or eight years of age, very rarely earlier than that, and they continue practising dancing till they attain thirty or forty years of age, if not previously rendered unfit by disease or premature old age. When these girls are attached to pagodas, they receive certain sums as wages, the amount of which is dependent on the worth, sanctity, and popularity of the particular temple which they have joined. The money salary they receive is nominal—seldom exceeding a few annas, and sometimes a rupee or two a month. The chief object in being paid this sum as a salary is to indicate that they are servants of the temple; in addition to this one or more of them receive a meal a day, consisting merely of a mass of boiled rice rolled into a ball. They are required to dance six times a day, at the temple, before the deity, while the priests are officiating, but this duty is performed by turns. Dancing girls attached to pagodas are generally wealthy, and when they appear before the public are well covered with the usual gold ornaments—if poor, tinsel is used, or golden ones are borrowed from others. Their toilettes are costly and tawdry, whilst their heads, ears, nose, neck, arms, wrists, fingers, ankles, and toes are over-decked with jewels, and their hair frequently with flowers. The hair is divided in front along the centre, combed back and plaited into a single plait, resting loose on the back like a tail, averaging from two to two and a

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half feet in length, of course ornamented with jewels and flowers. Their dancing dress comprises usually the short jacket or choolee, a pair of string drawers tied at the waist, termed pyjamas—both of these are generally of silk, and a white or coloured muslin wrapper or saree: one end of the saree is wound around the waist, and two, three, or more feet, according to the length, is gathered and inserted into the portion encircling the waist, and permitting of a folding fringe or gathering of the cloth in front, and the other end taken after the usual native fashion over the left shoulder, and descends towards the waist, when the end, or moonthanee, is opened out and allowed to drop in front, one end of it being inserted in the waist on the side, and the other left free. This portion of the saree is usually highly ornamented with golden thread, tinsel, etc.—the free end descends to the middle or lower part of the thighs, the other free end of the saree hanging down towards the legs is now got hold of, passed between the legs and fastened to the tie around the waist at the back, and the whole encircled by a gold or silver waist belt. By this mode of dress a fold of the muslin saree forms a loop round each leg, and descends nearly down to the ankles, whilst the gathering hangs in front between the legs free. At home they wear the choolee and saree, with a petticoat or pavaday—this, in fact, is their usual dress, except when about performing they exchange the pavaday for the pyjama or sherai—the pavaday is made of chinz or silk, according to the means of the individual. A string of small brass bells, known by the name of shullungay or gedjum is tied around each leg immediately beneath the ankles. The dancing girl caste is so well-known all over South India, that they have peculiar laws of their own for adoption and inheritance—for instance, a dancing girl can adopt a daughter with the permission of the authorities of the pagoda to which she belongs, but she cannot adopt a son, for the transmission of property, it being immaterial whether she has a son or not. The adopted girl cannot share her mother’s property during

References

her lifetime, and, although she may be the heiress, she is not bound by the laws of caste to support her brother’s widow. Among dancing girls property descends in the female line first, and then to males as in other cases. In the failure of issue, the property of a dancing girl goes to the pagoda to which she belongs—a simple recognition on the part of a dancing girl, of a child as her daughter, in the presence of one or more individuals, is sufficient to constitute her claim to adoption. Dancing girls are respected by the several castes or sects of Hindus, and are allowed to sit in the assembly of the most respectable men, such honour not being accorded to their own wives and daughters. As a rule, it is seldom that these women have children of their own, unless, perhaps, they had lived in continual concubinage with some single individual, consequently they are always anxious to adopt girls, not only to become their successors in the temple, but that they may inherit their property likewise, which is no easy matter to effect now-a-days. Formerly a large trade was carried on by kidnapping good-looking girls from large towns and remote villages, who were sold to these women. As soon as a girl attains maturity, her virginity, if not debauched by the pagoda brahmins, is sold to outsiders in proportion to the wealth of the party seeking the honour, if such it may termed, after which she leads a continuous course of prostitution—prostituting her person at random, to all but outcastes, for any trifling sum.

The practice of kidnapping for prostitution is not uncommon, when the object is unattainable by the more palliative means, if I may venture to say so, of purchase or consideration. Foul means are resorted to as the only alternative—but this is now comparatively rare; money or other consideration generally suffices. In the Indian penal code, the definition is comprehensive, whilst a special enactment embraces the offence of selling or letting minors for purposes of prostitution, an enactment which meets even such a case as that of the begum of …

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in her dotage. Strange, but ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ as instanced in the matter of this old virago’s carnal desires, cherishing an unholy weakness for lads under eighteen who are regularly hired for the purpose. The practice of selling minors (girls) still obtains largely under suppression. An instance recently came under my notice in the Chittoor district. On the morning of the 13th July last information reached the police that two little girls, the daughters of one Ramalingum Moodelly, and another living in the suburbs of the town of Wallajapettah, were found to be missing; they were last seen playing together in the main street of the village (according to the statement of the complainants) the previous evening. Their friends, after a fruitless search all night in the town, returned home under the impression that they had strayed. From the inquiries of the police it was ascertained that a woman with two little girls, answering the description of the lost children, were observed crossing the river, apparently going to Arcot. The police, working by this clue, captured a woman with two little girls in the south side of the environs of Arcot. They seemed to be travelling from the place. The children were identified by the complainants before the police inspector. They looked like twin sisters, and, although well able to walk, etc., were, in fact, speechless in toto; and the complainants alleged that they were philtered. The woman’s (Cumma Lum’s) admissions and her antecedents stamp her unmistakeably as an infamous prostitute and a procurer. She is a native of Chittor, and was evidently on a kidnapping excursion. Some jewels were found in the cloth around her, which were removed from the persons of the little girls. It afterwards transpired that she had observed these children at play, and decoyed them away with sweetmeat, subsequently using some narcotic to effect her purpose of transporting them quietly, with a view of recruiting the dancing girl class at Chittoor. It is remarkable that the children followed her silently en transit to Arcot in the dark. This woman

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

was con­victed by the magistrate at Chittoor, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. The recent famine in Ganjam, Orissa, and Bengal, has been taken advantage of, not only by abandoned characters, but also by immoral native princes, for the basest purposes. I observe in the Friend of India that during the last criminal session (1866) in Calcutta two women were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment each, for having purchased a girl under sixteen years of age, for one rupee ten annas for the purpose of prostitution, and I have no doubt but that advantage has been taken of the recent famine in various parts of Southern India, to send agents out to purchase girls to recruit the dancing girl and other prostituting class. In some stations there are said to exist two kinds of dancing girls—the dancing prostitutes differing from the pagoda dancers. The latter are said to live in concubinage as a rule; they are a privileged class under the Arjala Santanam, or descent by the son-in-law, literally by the daughter’s children, or in the female line, and the law of Dhya applies to them, Dhya or Dhya Baga, or division by favour. ‘Merasi’ (heritage or right to official emoluments) operates as an inducement. These women are recognised as ‘dasrees’ and ‘dava dasrees.’ The dasrees or dancing prostitutes belong for the most part to itinerant bands, and are frequently made up of women of low caste, who keep brothels in the several large towns, but still practise their professional accomplishment, and prefer living in concubinage. The Siva temple of the Soournamookie, (Kalastry), a zemindary, in the North Arcot district, maintains a large establishment of what is termed dava dasrees, or pagoda dancers, forming a distinct community there (Audapapalu), who exclusively live in concubinage. Their sons, who know no father, pass by the appellation of Nagari kunraradas, or sons of the country, and are slaves to the Zemindar. Of the daughters, after supplying the vacancies in the pagoda staff, the remainder are brought in the list of drudges of the palace. The dancing master or teacher receives from fifty to five hundred

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rupees, with other presents, for teaching a girl the usual dances. This generally forms a contract which is greatly dependent on the wealth and position of the parties. The dancing girls are invariably accompanied by the following individuals, when about to perform. There are generally two men, singers, who are termed ‘Nuthuvan’ and ‘Padovren,’ who, while singing, also play the cymbals—these instruments are of two kinds and sizes. While the cymbal is played with the right hand, the left hand, open, is generally applied to the left ear, while they sing, bowing their bodies forward as well as from side to side, contorting their faces in like manner, and making grimaces. In singing they scream as loud as their voices and lungs will admit. One or more old women join in the song, and frequently clap their hands during the performance, and are generally dancing girls who have given up the profession from age or other causes. The following are the musical instruments played as accompaniments to the performance:

1. Drums. Of these there are two: a large oval-shaped one termed a dowl, and a smaller one of the same shape and make, called a malem, moorathungum, or mathalum. These are hollow wooden cylinders, stout or large in the centre, and narrowed at either extremity, and covered by parchment at both ends. 2. A wind bag, somewhat like a bagpipe, called thoothee or sanuoothee. This comprises the entire skin of a sheep or goat, freed of hair, and having all its openings closed, excepting two pipes of reed, one of which is inserted in the neck, and the other at one of the extremities, one to blow with, and the other through which the air issues, producing a low moaning sound. 3. Two pairs of cymbals, large and small, termed peria, and chinna, thalum. 4. A piccolo, termed poolankushul. 5. A small flageolet, called mogoveni. 6. A large flageolet, called peria malum mogoveni.

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

In addition, they sometimes have a clarionet, violin, tambourin, and guitar. These are innovations of late introduction. The performance of the dancing girls is well known, almost throughout the world, under the designation of nautch or dance. In the performance of the two dances termed avanerim and kencheenee nateum, their movements are combined with great agility, ease, and gracefulness, and with their nimble steps, the turning and twisting of their hands, eyes, face, features, and trunk agree, whilst they beat time with their feet. The feet are generally used flat as they seldom dance on their toes—the movements and position combine something of the waltz and Spanish cachucha—they advance, retire, whirl around, drop down and rise again with ease and rapidity, whilst the several movements are kept in order with the twirling and twisting of the arms, features, trunk, etc. Some portions of the step resemble the hornpipe and jig, whilst they hop and dance from one leg to another, keeping time, now turning, now whirling, now capering, and now drooping, performing a coquettish pantomime with their antics, then affecting coyness, and dancing from the assembly, by suddenly turning away as if careless of their allurements, but returning to the attack with greater vigour and increased blandishments. It is, indeed, surprising to witness their feats of strength and bodily powers of endurance, for, notwithstanding their frail make and delicate appearance, the amount of fatigue they endure, dancing as they do from nightfall to the early hours of the morning, is astonishing. Their dancing is perfection, and the bodily fatigue they must undergo, from the attitudes and positions they combine in their dances, must be great. In what is called the ‘Sterria Coothoo,’ athletic feats are performed, resting their hands on the ground and flinging their feet in the air with great rapidity, and thus twirling round and round successively performing various somersaults; lying full length on the ground with their hands

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and feet resting, contorting, twirling, and twisting their bodies in various ways, or whilst resting on the hands and legs, with their backs to the ground and their chest and abdomen turned upwards, drawing the hands and feet as close together as possible whilst their bodies are thus arched, they, with their mouths, pick up rupees from the ground. In this arched position, beating time with their hands and foot, they work round and round in a circle. During their performance they join their attendants in the songs that are sung, and regulate the various movements of their bodies to the expressions given vent to in the song.

Modiyedoocooroothoo, In this dance the word ‘modi’ is a term used to designate a craft or enchantment practised by a conjuror, who places or hides money or other valuables in a certain place, and often in the presence of his opponent, with the view of testing his ability, and challenges him to remove it, which the opponent endeavours to do by playing on a pipe termed ‘makedi,’ and if he is not equally skilled, he is struck to the ground in a mysterious manner, sick and ill, frequently bleeding from the nose and mouth profusely. The dance is in imitation of this by the girl playing on a ‘makedi,’ dancing at the same time and throwing herself on the ground. The right leg is stretched out at full length, forming a perfect angle with her body on one side, on the other, the left leg doubled under the knee, is stretched out in like manner on the opposite side, producing a most singular appearance, and as if there were no joint in the hips.

Colla auteum, or stick dance. This is performed by a number of girls of the same age, size, and dress, numbering from twelve to twenty-four, or more, each having two sticks, one in each hand, about eighteen inches long, well-turned, and painted with circular stripes of yellow, green, and red. Either to the roof, or a cross piece of wood raised in support for the purpose, a stout skein of thread in different colours is suspended, and, having

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as many strands as there are girls, the free ends of the strands are tied to the ends of the painted sticks which each holds. The dance begins with the usual song and accompaniment of music, when each girl striking her sticks dances a kind of jig, and hops from place to place, exchanging places with each other. This is done with such order and regularity that the several strands are plaited with the utmost regularity into a stout cord or tape of many colours, according to the design. At a sign from the conductor the same is undone, with equal order and regularity, the girls dancing and exchanging places with each other without a single mistake or false step, either in the plaiting or unplaiting of the strands of thread. The readiness, grace, and ease with which the several movements are effected are worthy of admiration. At some places on festive occasions, during the peregrinations of the deity around the town in procession, these girls continue to perform the stick dance on a platform, which is carried and precedes the deity. More frequently these and other dances are performed on foot in front and at some distance from the procession, which stands still at a certain distance to allow of it being properly carried out. Some of these girls are very good-looking, handsome, with open countenances, large sparkling eyes, regular features, and intelligent pleasing appearance. They are perfectly self-possessed in manner, verging on assurance, staring at one with their large intelligent-looking eyes, notwithstanding they possess a vast deal of courtesy and polish, tempered with languid grace and serene self-possession, whilst their manners are courteous, and their bearing unembarrassed, possessing all the teaching which experience of the worse side of human nature give, and they know but one form of pleasure, vice, in which their lives are spent—frequently their lives are truly vicious, when their countenances assume a sodden, pule, and unwholesome aspect. The majority are educated, that is, if I may use the word educated in the native sense. Many possess some natural gifts, although their education is not only limited, but of the worst description, for improving either

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their mind, manners, or morals; as to conversational powers, they seldom possess any beyond the usual laugh and giggle, and monosyllabic replies given to commonplace questions. Some of the Telugu girls are very handsome; they are of a light pale colour, somewhat yellowish in tinge, with a softness of face and feature, a gentleness of manner, with a peculiar grace and ease, which one would little expect to find among them. I have seen several of these girls in my professional capacity while they lived as mistresses with European officers, and have been greatly surprised at their lady-like manner, modesty and gentleness, such beautiful small hands and little taper fingers, the ankles neatly turned, as to meet the admiration of the greatest connoisseur. This is not to be wondered at when we call to mind how frequently European officers became infatuated with these women in days gone by. Even now, an occasional instance may be met with where these girls are preferred to their own countrywomen. Who can account for taste. A medical officer, whilst travelling, was called in to see a case of difficult labour, and, not having his instruments with him, sent for some dancing girls. He selected one with the smallest hands, and after a little instruction got her to do what was necessary. Her hands were made to act the part of a pair of forceps. The idea was a happy one, for by it the doctor was enabled to relieve a poor suffering creature at the moment successfully, with comfort to herself and without injury to the child. They can generally read and write their own language pretty correctly; some two languages; one girl at Conjeveram wrote three, the third was English, in which she wrote her name in a fair round hand, and spoke the language with some fluency. Tamil and Telugu were the other two languages, which she wrote tolerably well. She was said to have received her education in a mission school at Madras; notwithstanding all this, she did not appear ashamed of the profession she had adopted. The girls learn either Tamil or Telugu; to this paper I annex specimens of their writing, containing one or more verses of some of their songs,

Getting to Grips with the Bayadère

and which they wrote for me on the spot with the greatest readiness. Their songs generally comprise praises in honour of their several idols, filled with repetitions and unmeaning expletives. These songs are often vulgar and lewd, and sung, not only before assemblies of men, but even the deities, with a view of exciting the lasciviousness of the men, but in justice to them it must be said that they time the quality of their songs to suit the place and audience before which they have to appear. More frequently these songs comprise impudent flattery, and praise of the principal individuals present, or of the convener of the dance. These dances are termed nautches, and are given on all occasions of marriage ceremonies, feasts, and other public occasions. Among Rajahs, Zemindars, and others, they are almost things of daily occurrence. A few of these girls can play the native guitar or violin tolerably well, and some of their songs have a mournful and melancholy tune; but the harsh grating of the songs of the attendants, and the rattling of the wind instruments and tom-toms, are too much for European ears, but they seem sufficiently sweet and entertaining to charm that of the native for not long ago, it is said, a large party of native gentlemen assembled in a part of Madras to do honour to a dancing girl, and presented to her some valuable plate in token of their appreciation of her (vocal) accomplishments. When their services are demanded outside the temple, large sums of money have to be paid for them, the charge being increased according to the renown and position of the girl, as some few of them take a very high position in this matter, and will not give their services, however highly paid, to any one of small importance, unless a Rajah, or some such big person. Some travel to other districts, when their services are needed by petty Rajahs or Zemindars, and they are contracted for as many days as they have to perform, in addition to being well paid. Should they please the master of ceremonies, they frequently receive valuable presents in money, shawls, gold bangles or rings, and which are bestowed

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on them during the performance. Every village of importance has a temple with a few of these women attached to it, and in some of the large towns, possessing temples of repute for sanctity, these are filled with them. Instead of looking on this profession as an evil, the natives generally consider it an acquisition; it forms the chief magnet of Hindu society. The appearance of these women draws all eyes on them, to the utter distraction of everything else for the time being, whilst the poor deluded creatures themselves are under the impression that they have taken to a very honourable profession, by following which they are honouring their deities and are appreciated by them. Both bachelors and married men have intercourse with them promiscuously. A married man is in no way ashamed of such lustful proceedings, but rather thinks it an honourable act.

This conduct is even approved of by his wife and family, in consequence of its connection with their immoral and degraded religion. Wherever the Hindu religion predominates, there immorality and debauchery run riot. It is perhaps one of the worst institutions connected with Hinduism, from the recognition and support it receives from all classes of idol-worshipping devotees, the poor unfortunate women being the victims of such a system, recognised and patronised by their religion in every part of India where Hinduism predominates. These poor creatures are more sinned against than sinning themselves. They are taught to read and write their own and other languages, with a view to be better able to master their lewd and immoral songs; whilst their own wives, the mothers of their children, are deprived of learning of any kind, and are carefully shut out from society, not even allowed to appear in public before any assembly of men, and are allowed further to grow up in the greatest ignorance and superstition. This is carried to such an extent, that the few enlightened and really educated males forming heads of families are totally

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unable to cope with such superstition and bigotry on the part of their women, and the little light they themselves have imbibed is rapidly quenched in consequence. Superstition and bigotry run rampant in their families; but it is to be hoped that a better future is in store for the daughters of Southern India. To some extent female education and enlightenment are now penetrating the masses; and as the natives themselves are seeking it, they cannot but contrast the benefits they have derived from education, and the enlightenment and intelligence displayed by European ladies, and from which their own mothers, wives, and daughters have hitherto been secluded.

In the same year that Shortt presented his paper, the first case of procurement of a minor girl involving devadasis was heard in a Madras court. One of the defendants, a dancer named Padmavati, appealed her conviction, and, although the guilty verdict was upheld, had her sentence reduced from two years to eighteen months of ‘rigorous imprisonment’: Appellate Jurisdiction (a)

Criminal R. A. No. 406 of 1869.

Ex-parte PADMAVATI Appellant, (3rd Prisoner.)

The prisoners were convicted, the one of disposing of, and the other of receiving two children, females under the age of 16 years, with intent that such females should be used for the purpose of prostitution. The evidence showed that the children were disposed of and registered as dancing girls of a pagoda for the purpose of being brought up as dancing girls.

Held: That offences under Sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code had been committed, and that the prisoners were properly convicted.

Three women named Tayee, Rajam, and Padmavati were charged before the Session Judge of Chingleput, the charge against Tayee being that she, on or about

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the 14th day of July 1869 at Triporoor, disposed of her daughters Mangal and Marakalam, then being minors under the age of 16 years to Rajam (2nd prisoner) and Padmavati with intent that such minors should be used for the purpose of prostitution, and that she had thereby committed an offence punishable under Section 372 of the Indian Penal Code, and the charge against Rajam and Padmavati being that they obtained possession of the minors with the like intent under Section 373 of the Penal Code.

The 1st and 3rd prisoners were convicted and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for two years. The 2nd prisoner was acquitted. The evidence shewed that the 2nd and 3rd prisoners were dancing girls of the Soobramania Swamy Pagoda of Triporoor; that the 3rd prisoner took the two daughters of the 1st prisoner to the Pagoda to be marked as dancing girls; that they were so marked, and their names entered in the accounts of the pagoda; and that the 1st prisoner disposed of the children to the 3rd prisoner for the consideration of a neck ornament and Rupees 33. The children appeared to be of the age of seven and two years respectively. Evidence was taken which tended to prove that dancing girls (who never married) gained their livelihood by the performance of certain offices in pagodas, by assisting in the performance of certain offices in pagodas, by assisting in the performance of ceremonies in private houses, by dancing and singing upon occasions of marriage, and by prostitution.

The Calendar contained the following remarks of the Session Judge: ‘The result of the trial leaves no doubt in my mind that the children were deliberately sold by their mother, the 1st prisoner, to the 3rd prisoner for the purpose of training them as dancing girls, a class of notorious prostitutes.’ The 3rd prisoner appealed to the High Court.

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Miller, for the prisoner.

The Court delivered the following JUDGMENT:

The prisoners have been convicted of respectively disposing of and obtaining two children with intent that they should be used for the purpose of prostitution. The disposing to and the obtaining by Padmavati, a pagoda dancing girl, and the registration of the children as belonging to the pagoda, are undisputed, and the only question is whether the transaction is beyond all reasonable doubt such a disposing and obtaining as the section contemplates.

In consultation with the Judges who did not take part in the disposal of this the first case of the kind which has come before us, we directed evidence to be taken of the mode of employment of pagoda dancing girls.

The implicit admissions of the witnesses who resist the inference, no less than the direct evidence of those who assert that inference to be irresistible, renders it abundantly clear that girls so sold and so registered are brought up as prostitutes, and that one principal purpose of such a transaction is that they shall be so brought up. The Abbé Dubois and many other authorities had placed the matter beyond historical doubt.

The argument that the treatment of such a transaction as criminal is impossible, because the Hindu religion sanctions the practice and the Private Law recognizes private rights as flowing from it, is manifestly of no weight. An offence is every transgression of a Penal Law, and a rule of Penal Law is a rule of Public Law, and necessarily overrides every precept of Private Law and cannot be affected by any argument derived from that Law. With respect to the argument from religion, it is only necessary to observe that if the precepts of a particular religion enjoin acts which transgress the rules of Penal

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Law, these acts will clearly be offences. Where the Legislature intended that acts which would otherwise be offences should not be so because connected with religious observances they have expressed that intention. (Penal Code, Sec. 292.)

Feeling it impossible to draw any other inference than that the purpose of these transactions was the purpose expressed in the sections under which the prisoners were indicted, we affirm the conviction appealed against.

In this, the first case of the kind, we have reduced the sentences to 18 months’ imprisonment on each prisoner, being unable to say that one is more guilty than the other. Conviction affirmed.

Two things stand out in the reading of this document: the beginnings of the use of the law against procurement of minors against the devadasis, and the taking for granted that the community of dancers is made up of ‘common prostitutes’. And it is odd to see that the expert witness for this assertion is the Abbé Dubois, whose writings on the dancing class were published more than fifty years before the trial took place.

References

1. Scott, A.N., Sketches of India, taken at Hyderabad and Secunderabad, London: Lovell Reeve, 1862.

2. Hageby, Axel Lind von, Reisebilder und Skizzen aus Indien und dem letzten indischen Kriege 1857–1859, Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1861. 3. Gérard, Jules, Le Mangeur d’hommes, Paris: E. Dentu, 1863.

4. Grandidier, Alfred. Voyages dans les provinces méridionales de l’Inde, Paris: Ch. Lahure, 1870. 5. Kerr, James, The Domestic Life, Character and Customs of the Natives of India, London: Allen & Co., 1865.

6. Sellon, Edward, Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindüs, London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1865.

References

7. Lamairesse, Pierre-Eugène, Chants populaires du sud de l’Inde, Paris: Libraire Internationale, 1868.

8. Bohan, Henry. Voyage aux Indes orientales: coup d’oeil sur leur importance politique et commerciale; recherches sur différentes origines, Paris: Chamerot et Lauwereyns, 1866. 9. Rietstap, J.B., Reizen door Britisch Indië, Groningen–Arnhem, 1869.

10. Jacolliot, Louis, Voyage au pays des bayadères, Paris: Dentu, 1889.

11. Esquer, A., Essai sur les castes de l’Inde, Pondicherry: Imprimeur du Gouvernment, 1870.

12. Matheson, John, England to Delhi; a narrative of Indian travel, London: Longman’s, Green, 1870.

13. Shortt, John, The Bayadère, or, Dancing-Girls of Southern India in Memoirs read before the Anthropological Society of London, vol. 3, London: Longman’s Green, 1869.

14. Reports on cases decided in the High Court of Madras, vol. 5, 1869–70, Madras: J. Higginbotham, 1864–1876.

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Chapter 8

A Royal Performance and Other Perceptions: 1870–1880 The decade of the Prince of Wales’ tour to India is marked, not only by the role played in that visit by Indian dancers, of which the Prince met several, but by the various reactions to his dealings with them. These years reveal a growing obsession with the ‘nautch-girl’ as the sign of female degradation in India, as the first overt public writings about them begin to emerge in the press. Indeed, the Prince of Wales’ perceived patronage of Indian dance becomes the occasion for greater anti-nautch activism, including the first use of the tactic in which important public officials are attacked for witnessing dance performances. In this section I will deal first with the writings directly concerning the splendid performance given for the Prince in Madras, and then move on to other writings from the years both before and after that event. The reception for the Prince in the Royapuram Station Hall in Madras took place on the night of the 17 December, 1875. The Prince himself arrived late, around midnight, on account of the many other events that he had had to attend throughout the day and evening. The descriptions of those who wrote about the event leave us with the impression that it was of a grandeur that ran somewhat to excess. We see a gangway running to the stage on which are Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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seated numerous dancers and musicians bedecked with fine cloth, jewels and flowers—how many of them we do not know. But enough, certainly, to vary the entire performance with a pinal kolattam item, a lengthy varnam performed by Gnyana with musicians and a chorus of singers, a Carnatic vocal recital accompanied by the veena, as well as a four-act drama which would probably have involved much dance as well. George Pearson Wheeler, who was present among others who later wrote about it, describes it in his record of the Prince’s tour: The native entertainment held at the old railway station of Royapooram on Friday evening, December 17th, was one of singular beauty and picturesqueness. Native artists of Southern India had been employed to sheath the interior roofing with sparkling tinsel; so that, shining as it did in the radiance produced by many hundreds of lime-lights, the graceful curves and rafters looked as if jewelled with rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. From the ceilings drooped glass chandeliers, one immense one being placed immediately over the Prince’s chair. Behind his seat of gold were two richly apparelled servants, who wafted in the Prince’s face a gentle breeze with gold and emerald fans, shaped like shells. The hall, nearly two hundred yards long, was filled with princes, the Madras staff, and hundreds of ladies … The most enchanting portion of the scene was the stage with the groups of black-haired dancing girls attired in dresses of white and gold with shoulder-sashes of yellow and purple and scarlet, and armlets and bracelets of diamonds and all manner of precious stones. In their ears and noses there were rings which were simply constellations of diamonds. These ladies and their male accompanists, with tom-toms, fiddles and zithers, sang songs and shared in dances. It was a picture the strange beauty of which could not be eclipsed …

J. Drew Gay (1846–1890), the journalist and explorer, recalls the event in his diary too:

A Royal Performance and Other Perceptions

This is a native entertainment given to the Prince, managed by natives from the doors to the limelights … The program promises an entirely native performance … Kolattam or Plait dances, concerted pieces on the Saranthe, Sitar, Vinah and Dol, and a native drama in four acts … At last a dozen girls … walk up to the coloured ropes (to perform the kolattam) … they keep it up for nearly an hour … the stage manager orders forward a fresh supply of players, and a celebrated nautch girl named Gnyana, who is to dance a Carnatic pas seul … accompanied by six players … occasionally the girl ceased her dancing and (sang) too … for more than an hour she continued the same movement … it was now getting far into the morning … (and) there were five other pieces in the programme … as soon as Gnyana and her companions … moved off … a fresh set of musicians accompanied another and a darker girl to the foot of the dais … and she, sitting in their midst, began a Vinah solo … (she had not played for much more than ten minutes when) the Prince bowed, rose, and led Mrs Stewart to supper … this was a signal for another batch of Kolattam … dancers to gather round the coloured ropes; but when the Prince presently came back, he stayed for a few moments only and then took his departure … I never heard whether the programme was continued afterwards—whether the song by Krishna, the concerted piece, or the drama in four acts, were ever attempted … In the centre of the dais … sits the Prince of Wales, on a golden throne. His suite are clustered behind him. On his left is … the Governor of Madras, on his right Mrs. Shaw Stewart and the Maharajah of Travancore …, Sir Madava Rao of Baroda; also the Maharajah of Vizianagram, and the Prince of Arcot, all glittering with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and gold. On either side of the Prince, below the dais, is a great sea of upturned faces; in front of his Royal Highness is … a little table, bearing an immense gold casket, the lid of which is surmounted by a silver

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tiger, then an open raised platform, in the centre of which hang a dozen coloured ropes, fastened together at the top, while further back still is a stage, on which are squatted some fifty natives, male and female, all attired in the most fantastic fashion; a screen fastened to the wall in rear of them depicting a jungle scene and a springing tiger … the roof is one of extraordinary beauty, ornamented with flowers, stars, circles, and all kinds of devices by the artists, evidently of Tanjore. The gold, silver and crimson foil in this remarkable ceiling, as well as on the sides of the pillars which support it, glitter and glisten in the light which scores of chandeliers throw upon them …

At last the purple-robed stage-manager finds his troupe exhausted, whereupon he orders forward a fresh supply of players, and a celebrated nautch-girl named Gnyana who is to dance a Carnatic pas seul. I need not describe the appearance of this damsel. Had her charms only equalled her excessive vanity and astonishing powers of endurance, we might not have objected possibly to her prolonged gyrations. Nor would the everlasting drumming on conch shells, tom-tomming, pipe-playing, and fiddle-scraping which accompanied her movements have been so unbearable as they presently became had they not been accompanied by the hideous noise which the six players were good enough to call singing …

I am deliberately quoting from Gay in a very selective manner. What I am leaving out are his tiresomely elaborate passages of jingoist scoffing at what he perceives to be the poor quality and weirdness of the entertainment as a whole. I am confining myself in the chosen excerpts only to the remarks that have a practical bearing on the scale of the presentation. William Howard Russell (1820–1907) was Honorary Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales during the royal tour of India in 1875 and 1876, and was certainly in attendance at the reception in the decorated great hall of the old Royapuram Station where the grand dance performances were staged in the Prince’s presence. Here is Russell’s full account of the event:

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A square platform stood in the body of the hall, nearly at the level of the Royal seat; in the centre there was a gilt pole with coloured cordons, like ropes of artificial flowers, from the top. From this platform there was a gangway to a stage, whereon were seated the dancing girls and musicians—the former dressed in the richest and heaviest robes of kinkob, and stuffs of the brightest colours descending from the throat to the ankles, and leaving exposed only the arms, which could scarcely be called bare, as from shoulder to finger-tip these ladies wore armlets, bracelets, and rings—and, moreover, had in their noses and their ears sparkling diamonds— and, set with yellow flowers, in their thick, coarse, black hair, more diamonds, and on their toes rings of precious stones. Just beneath the droop of their crimson or scarlet satin trousers were revealed the sparkling anklets and bangles, which kept time to their movements and to the click of the castanets, with a sharp metallic tinkle as they danced. Each lady wore a scarf or shawl, in which she muffled herself up as she sat on the ground till her turn came to dance, when it was called into action and made to play an important part, being held over the head with extended arms, or thrown wide aside, or closely gathered round the figure, in unison with the sentiment to be conveyed by the dance. These were brought under the ordeal of most powerful lime-lights, which threw an intense white glare on the vast sea of turbans and faces, the uniforms and pale features of the Europeans, and caused the jewels of the Rajas and Nawabs on the platform to dazzle one’s eyes, and the enormous chandeliers suspended from the ceiling to pale their ineffectual fires. The Kolattam, which opened the entertainment, was simply such a dance as one has seen at stage representations of May-pole dances and merrymaking. The nautch girls advanced, each took one of the cords, and then they danced in and out and round the pole and each other till they had wound themselves into a nosegay-looking knot, and then they unwound themselves—this too often, perhaps, for the perfect

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enjoyment of those who had done so much in the daytime and who were now sitting into the small hours. The great feature of the entertainment was the performance of the famous danseuse Gnyana, for whose services 700/. — probably 70/. — or perhaps the former sum for all the dancers and musicians—was paid. The little woman, rather pretty and confident, executed a very long ‘piece’ with her feet to the music of the native implements and to the accompaniment of an intermittent chorus, aided by conch shells and solos, and at times illustrated by her own voice ; and as the dance appeared to give exquisite pleasure to every ninety people out of the hundred who looked at it, there would be presumption and insular arrogance and prejudice—probably ignorance of the true principles of art—combinations etc. of music, song and dancing—if one were to say that the performance seemed monotonous and exceedingly destitute of variety. When the player on the vina had fairly embarked on the solo, which was to be the musical gem of the evening or morning, it became evident that the enjoyment of the entertainment by the principal person had been sufficient, and he rose to go to the supper-room for a few moments, whence he emerged to drive back to Government House, leaving the native drama, in four acts, to be seen by those who were determined to see, and the songs by celebrated artistes, and the concerted pieces on the vina, dol, and zither saranthe, to be heard by those who pleased to stay …

E.H. Nolan, in his Illustrated History of the British Empire, saw fit to devote a paragraph to the performance: The great feature of the entertainment was a performance by the famous danseuse, Gnyana, who had been engaged at a high figure. The whole of the performers are understood to have been well paid. The little woman executed a very long piece with her feet to the music of the native instruments and the accompaniment of an

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intermittent chorus, aided by conch shells and solos, and at times illustrated by her own voice.

He adds that ‘the Prince had not been particularly charmed’, and that ‘it was … very probably such dancing that pleased Herod, and induced him to commit his atrocious crime of beheading John the Baptist’.

Figure 8.1 Tanjore Gnyana, who danced for the Prince of Wales in Madras in 1875. (Musée des colonies).

The writer for the Queensland Times seems to negate Nolan’s dismal conclusion in an article from 10 February 1876: The following is a description of one portion of an entertainment given before the Prince at Madras: It was

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a Carnatic pas seul danced by Guyana. Guyana was certainly very far from plain; she was most richly dressed, and was loaded with jewels. Her voice was harsh and rough, and the air she sang was anything but melodious. The movements, however, were graceful and the dancing was excellent. Indeed, so ‘telling’ was her action, that one could almost fancy the piece she was acting. First came a sort of prologue, consisting chiefly of salaams to the Prince. Afterwards came a series of slow steps and postures, which left no doubt that Guyana wished it to be inferred that she was parting from her husband or lover. Then her melancholy deepened, and she was very sad at the absence of the one so near and yet so far. Another figure showed, however, that her lover had returned, and with a lively step she rushed (to meet him) to the feet of the Prince, who could not suppress a smile at her well-expressed ecstasy. Then clasped as it were in the arms of her invisible lover she slowly retreated, and by an ingenious shaking of her anklets represented those delicious sounds which may be heard when Charlie from over the sea is on the balcony with Clara while papa and mamma are dozing, and Lucy is at the piano singing ‘My sister dear.’ It is worthy of note that during the whole of the pas seul Guyana never once turned her back on the Prince. Altogether it was a very clever performance, and at its close she was not only loudly cheered, but the Prince sent for her, and thanked her; and the profusion of jewellery about her was examined and admired by the ladies who accompanied his Royal Highness to the fête.

The quoted passages together show that there were seven items to be performed in the course of that night’s programme: 1. A pinal kolattam danced by ‘a dozen girls’. 2. A pas seul or solo dance performed by Gnyana, her nattuvanar and five musicians. This was probably a varnam.

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3. 4. 5. 6.

A veena solo. Another pinal kolattam. A Carnatic vocal item by the singer ‘Krishna’. A ‘concerted piece’ by an ensemble of musicians (probably violin, veena, tanpura and mridangam). 7. A drama in four acts.

It is interesting, too, to read the descriptions of the staging arrangements. For one thing, there is the sheer number of performers gathered on the stage (Howard’s account mentions a gangway between the square kolattam dais and the stage), though fifty may be something of an exaggeration. The other point of interest is the richly romantic painted backdrop with its depiction of a springing tiger. The lighting effects were magnificent to the point of bedazzlement, and it is clear from the accounts in both diaries that no expense had been spared on the costumes and jewels. The American writer on India, Julia A. Stone, recalled the event, at which she may have been present, or else for which she had her details from other ladies who were: A native entertainment was also given the Prince in the huge railway shed, which was transformed into a hall of wondrous beauty and glitter. An address was presented, to which the Prince briefly replied. A troupe of dancing-girls gathered about the Prince. They are thus described:

Their dress was exceedingly picturesque. Ropes and wreaths of jewels—chiefly pearls—encircled their heads; their long hair, encased in a thick covering of yellow silk crusted with jewels, hung down in one coil to their waists. Heavy nose-rings of pearls, scarcely— to unaccustomed English eyes—contributed to the enhancement of their jewellery. They wore short light jackets of embroidered silk in various colours. Their waists were girdled by a belt of elastic gold, supporting loose floating drapery of white muslin, with heavy borderings of gold, studded with jewels and bouquets

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of flowers. Around their necks hung great strings of pearls down on their bare bosoms; wrists and ankles glittered with jewelled bangles. Moving forward at the signal, they took their places for the dance, standing in a circle, and holding the silken ropes that hung from a common centre in the roof.

Sir Joseph Fayrer (1824–1907), Surgeon General of India, who would certainly have been invited to the reception, remembered it briefly as ‘a most interesting’ event: … the next entertainment, a reception, nautch, and supper given by the citizens of Madras in the great railway station, which had been fitted up into one grand hall, in which the Prince was received, and where a fête was held. The hall was beautifully decorated, and a nautch took place before the Prince, the Duke, the ladies, and most of the principal inhabitants of Madras. The girls were very pretty, and one, especially, danced with great spirit, all with the greatest propriety—one dance round a sort of maypole, where they held long coloured ribbons which they wove in and out as they danced to the air of ‘Bonnie Dundee’, was very pretty but scarcely oriental. One girl sang as she danced. There was a magnificent supper in another apartment, and the whole entertainment was most interesting.

These reports, positive on the whole, though laced with the snobbish cultural prejudices and misunderstandings of the time, gave rise to a lively debate in the press regarding the propriety or otherwise of the Prince’s patronage of the dance, and these sorts of cavilling article were written both in India and ‘at home’ in Britain. Two days after the Royapuram reception, the following report appeared in The Indian Mirror in Calcutta, apparently aimed at preventing the Prince from attending similar events when he and his entourage should arrive in that city: A Nautch, we contend, is not a Bengali institution, and essentially it is un-Hindu. In the first place the dancing

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girls come not from Bengal, but from the N. W. Provinces, and to exhibit them as bona fide Bengali women is wrong on principle. In the second Place most of them are Mahomedan women pandering to the vitiated tastes of Bengal. And in the third place they are immoral women, not even caring to put on a semblance of respectability. If the managers of the Belgachia Féte do not care about the third objection, and we are aware they don’t, they should, in order to give the Prince an insight into the corresponding Native Bengali entertainment, engage a company of Khemtawalies who are the real Nautch girls of Bengal. So far as moral purity goes they are not inferior to their upcountry sisters. The latter form of amusement we know will be unanimously set down as indecent, and unworthy of encouragement, We want to be told how and why a Hindustani Nautch is more worthy of encouragement, except it be that the women being generally more handsome-looking, tempt some of the spectators to a speedier course of immorality and ruin. The Bishop of Lincoln said the other day that the Prince’s Visit to India was for the encouragement of Christian Missions. Is there no public opinion among the sincere Christians of Calcutta that can put a stop to the public exhibition and dancing of courtesans for the amusement of a Christian Prince, and his Christian followers?

It was quickly followed by another anti-nautch opinion piece which ran in the paper on 26 December and alluded directly to the performance in Madras: We are glad that The Friend of India has drawn notice to our opinion on the subject of the Nautch. We are ready to acknowledge that for Europeans, attendance at a Nautch is not so mischievous as for our own people. In their case the harm mainly lies in the encouragement which their presence gives to an exhibition whose tendencies are acknowledgedly immoral. If, however, we are allowed the liberty to express our mind, we must

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say the prominent attention which His Royal Highness is said to have paid to the Nautch girls of Madras by examining their clothes and jewels, would be hardly consistent even with Hindu ideas of propriety. This involved a compliment to their personal appearance and adornment, which in the case of women of their character, was not calculated to produce a very wholesome impression upon the mind of the Native community in general. We hope His Royal Highness will be better advised in Calcutta.

The writer for the Madras Revenue Register, responded to the anti-nautch gripes in a February 1879 edition: … censorious critics who are always on the qui vive to pick a hole in any one’s behaviour—the more exalted the personage the better—have cavilled at the Prince’s attendance at wild beast fights and at the ballets of nautch-girls … I for one think that he was right to see all the native customs and amusements … Some great man has laid it down that every Englishman is bound to visit the House of Commons and witness a prize fight once. I have done both, and never wish to repeat the dose. I fancy His Royal Highness takes the same view of cheetah hunting, rhinoceros contests, and nautch dances.

In Britain, the question was hotly discussed, with Christians contending that the Prince had been ill-advised to take part in immoral presentations of that kind. A number of writers less concerned with morality than with the contingencies of public relations in the real social and political world, responded with sardonic disbelief in a number of articles collected in Public Opinion between January and June of 1876. The first appeared in the Daily Telegraph of 14 January: That the songs sung at these performances are sometimes indelicate cannot be denied, but this is by no means always the case, and we venture to add that a true description of the moralities and meanings of ‘La Traviata’, to which respectable English people demurely

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listen, would shock a well-conducted Hindu wife a hundred times more than the snatches of ghazal or terana which she catches through the tom-tomming and piping of an ordinary nautch. The dresses worn at these entertainments by the performers are decorous even to ugliness and the steps and figures much less objectionable on the score of propriety than in some European ballets; and, briefly, it would just as straitlaced to find fault with the Prince for witnessing such dances as were likely to be shown him as to attack the Princess of Wales for attending the opera at Copenhagen … we must thus rebuke the rebukers, and tell these Scotch divines that they indulge their Puritanism at the expense of fact …

There was another protest in The Globe, also on 14 January: We see that a Scottish Divine has been expressing disapproval of the Prince of Wales witnessing a performance of the Indian Nautch girls, of whose dances so much has been heard. No doubt the worthy divine expresses the feelings of a certain class of people who are anxiously following the Prince’s footsteps in order to see that he sets a good example to the poor heathens. Now, this strikes us as a very apt illustration of the proverb about ‘straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.’ According to the newspaper reports there certainly does not seem anything special, either for commendation or reprobation, in the dancing in question; in fact, it was rather a ‘slow’ affair, even with the novelty attached to it. The most striking feature seems to have been the amount of real jewellery worn by the dark ‘coryphées.’ The style of the dancing is such that, according to some accounts, it is mostly a shuffle, in which the feet are scarcely lifted off the ground. Moreover, the girls are dressed with a propriety which, taking the warmth of the climate where they perform into consideration, must be more commendable than comfortable. We would ask the reverend gentleman

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to turn for a moment his eyes from the East to the West-End, and take a look at our nautch girls. He will no doubt at once perceive a contrast; not only the colour of the skin is different (of which, by the way, he will have ample means of observing), but also the dancing-girls of the West do lift their feet—slightly. We have never heard of his Royal Highness being reproved for going to see our nautch girls perform. Why, then, should it be wrong for him to do the like in India?

Three days later, on 17 January, the writer for the Londonderry Journal named the ‘Scottish divine’ in a scornful piece: In days like these when politics and business appear to have ground themselves down to a routine of monopoly it is usual for a certain class of weakminded individuals to be seized with a kind of itch for distinction. We do not wonder then at the senseless harangue delivered the other day before the AngloIndian Christian Union at Edinburgh, by the Rev. Dr. Duff, a prominent ‘light’ in the Free ‘Kirk’ of Scotland. This clerical gentleman seems to think that the Prince of Wales is doing things in India which he should not do, namely, visiting idolatrous temples, and even looking upon the sacred ‘tooth of Buddha’, and also ‘witnessing the dancing by Nautch girls,’ which, in this high Indian authority’s opinion, was a most shocking thing for the Prince to witness! From the fact that this extraordinary deliverance was spoken in Scotland by a Scottish divine we do not wonder at the speech being listened to and applauded, but it is a matter of regret that people should turn a serious ear to foolish ecclesiastical babblers throughout the United Kingdom, who, because the Prince happens to be compelled to travel on Sunday or look at the pranks of a couple of elephants, excite their hearers to indignation against His Royal Highness for offending the religious purity end moral sensitiveness of the English nation.

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It seems clear then that by this date two schools of thought or opinion on Indian dance and dancers were already beginning to clash, both in public and in the private sphere where dances still formed a large part of the entertainments offered to Europeans in India, often at gatherings with Indian hosts, as well as at official functions. This rift would grow sharper as the century moved towards its end, with harsher words being exchanged between the two sides, coupled with a greater intensity of public activism. In 1871, the unnamed Dutch writer for the series De Aarde and haar Volken (The world and its peoples), exhibits a sympathetic appreciation for the dances he had seen at the Madurai Temple and recorded in his article, Eight Days in India: The music begins. The melody is sad, lamenting, pining, but does not by the way seem strange: it is not Chinese or Japanese or even Arabic. There are three dancers who perform in turn. The first has very regular features, and especially beautiful eyes, full of expression. We would have to call her dance a pantomime. She steps forward as if to express her love held within her with difficulty, her driving passion. The she moves backwards again, as if she were insulted or frightened by the confession of her feelings. The body moves to the rhythm of the music. Her alluring and telling gestures lend complete expression to her feelings and sufferings. It seems to me that she is striving to convey, through her facial expressions and her gestures and postures, all the sentiments of a love-drama: sympathy, fear, joy, happiness, anger, passion, shame, surrender, intoxicating voluptuousness, bitter regret … The second dancer, taking the place of the first, is much lovelier, though her face and movements are less expressive. The cap of flowers in her hair … form as it were a diadem around her plaited hair, which hangs down her neck … Her dance, not as expressive and dramatic as that of the previous dancer, is nobler and more elegant; a certain distinction is added to all her movements and gestures by her coolness …

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The third dancer is still a child. She is not unattractive, but has not yet reached the height of her art. While she dances, she glances stealthily, now at her friends, now at her mother, who has accompanied her and seems also to be her teacher.

I must add here that the dancers who belong to the sect of Shiva are consecrated to the god to dance at the religious ceremonies, but that they are compelled to remain virgins until they are married. It is different with the sect of Vishnu. It is remarkable that the priests and dancers of Shiva seem to compensate for the gross licentiousness of their beloved symbol by a relative purity in their own morals. When the dance was over, my friend wanted to do a portrait of one of the dancers. He moved towards her and reached out to touch her, to show her the stance he wished her to adopt. The dancer began screaming as though someone wanted to murder her. Then my friend put a chair at her disposal, and gave her a sign to sit on it, but this also did not go well. She had never in her life sat on a chair and refused absolutely to do something so ridiculous and unbecoming …

Writing in 1872, Albert Thenon, the first French consul in Bombay, had his own rather different opinions: When the music had finished, the dances commenced. One of the dancers placed her hand on her left hip, revolved her right hand very gracefully, looked into the whites of La Chance’s eyes, and advanced towards him with a number of little steps, then stopped, continuing to gaze at him while the orchestra played, after which she stamped her feet in a cadence on the floor that made her jewels resonate, and then turned about all of a piece and went to rejoin the other dancers. She performed exactly the same evolutions while gazing, first at Jacques, and then at André. While they danced, these ladies sang in horribly shrill voices a song devoid of melody …

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These dancers are a great attraction to the indigenes … who pass whole nights watching them. I … am mortally bored by them. These dances cannot be compared with the national dances of Europe …

Figure 8.2 Sketches of Madurai dancers from Acht Dagen in Indië, in De Aarde and haar Volken, 1871.

Whereas James Kerr, the principal of the Presidency College, whom we have met in the previous section, is still enjoying the local nautch entertainments in 1873: One evening I was present at a nautch given by Choeopah, quite a splendid affair and attended by several influential Europeans. There was nothing whatever to be seen in the least degree objectionable, or which could offend

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the most fastidious taste. The son did the honours of the evening in entertaining the guests, while the father kept more in the background, but spoke affably to those who came up to him. We had music and dancing (done for us) in the usual style, and were also served with wine and sweetmeats, and repeatedly sprinkled over profusely with rose-water.

In Women of the Orient, the American clergyman and author Ross. C. Houghton (d.1904) seems to offer opposing views in his descriptive narrative, quoting articles and writings demonstrating both censure and praise, including a passage from Rousselet: The term nautch-girl signifies dancing-girl; for so immodest is the act of dancing, in the estimation of a heathen Hindoo, that no respectable woman would practice it, especially in company with a man; and by the common consent of centuries past the Terpsichorean art has been regarded as pertaining exclusively to this class of social outcasts. Hindoo prejudices upon this point are exceedingly strong; and it will be many years before the ‘superstitious’ Brahmins and their followers will be won over to the beauties and excellencies of promiscuous dancing, which forms such an essential amusement in the best ‘Christian’ society.

These girls are taken from their parents while very young, and educated for their profession. They can read and write; they understand music, and are as skilful and immodest in the dance as any ballet-girl who delights a refined and cultivated audience in either Europe or America. They often speak English fluently; they can quote the Shasters and the native poets; they are witty and expert at repartee; they are skilled in the arts of dress and ornament, and are as bold in public as other women are timid and retiring. They are seen on the railway trains, and in all public places, challenging the

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attention of the opposite sex. No entertainment, either religious or social, is complete without their presence. At weddings and funerals and feasts and festivals they are invariably seen, their accomplishments and their frailty alike contributing to the attractiveness of the occasion.

In conformity to Hindoo custom, the Brahmins select the most beautiful little girls (usually from the lower classes), and, persuading the parents that it is a great honor to them and theirs, lead the innocent creatures away to a temple, where they are formally married to a deity, and then trained up to offer themselves to the frequenters of the shrine for hire; the funds thus secured going into the sacred treasury, and a great store of blessing in a future state constantly accumulating for the benefit of the consecrated harlots. They are always richly dressed in silks and jewels, and their general attractiveness makes them a means of great gain to their priestly owners.

On the occasion of my first visit to a Hindoo temple I witnessed a religious dance, which was not, however, especially remarkable. There were five nautch-girls, all young and beautiful, and elegantly dressed, in soft, rich silk and costly gems. Gay colors predominated in their attire, their chuddars being especially elegant, of purple silk heavily trimmed with gold. The dancing consisted of the most graceful, but sometimes immodest, movements of the hands and feet and the whole body in perfect time with the music. The singing, which was low and marvelously sweet, but somewhat monotonous, was all in praise of Krishna, but, as a friend assured me, entirely too indecent for translation.

Some little effort has been made by the British Government to suppress the traffic in little girls for the temples and other places of licentiousness, as will appear by the following incident taken from the Indian Public Opinion, early in the year 1875:

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‘A Hindoo woman has just been sentenced by the Bombay High Court to eighteen months’ rigorous imprisonment, for selling her own daughter, aged ten years, to a prostitute, to be brought up for a life of prostitution. The woman came to Bombay from her native village for the express purpose of making this bargain. The avowed reason was that she had too many children to support. She sold the girl for sixty rupees. The woman who bought the child received a similar sentence. Morally, there can be no comparison between the guilt of the mother and of the purchaser, and it would have been well if a much severer sentence could have been imposed. We know that native ideas differ very much from our own on this subject; that a woman who sells her daughter for such a life will not be put out of caste, and that caste distinctions even exist among prostitutes; and that no marriage entertainment is complete without the presence of some of this class to sing and dance, receiving often far more attention than the bride herself. But this only constitutes an additional reason why the crime should be treated as a very serious one, akin to murder. One province of law is to educate; perhaps the most important of the uses of law is just this, to give people correct ideas of what is right and wrong in human conduct; and it is very desirable that the axe should be laid at the root of those pernicious customs which Hindooism tolerates.’

Hindoo and Mohammedan gentlemen alike employ nautch-girls to entertain their friends, paying them according to their skill and celebrity in their profession … M. Rousselet thus describes a nautch in high life:

‘I had scarcely been a month in Bombay when one morning I received a card, announcing in letters of gold that my friend Purbutt Lallji, a rich battiah, was going to celebrate the marriage of his son that night, and that he would have a great nautch at nine o’clock, at which the favor of my company was requested. I took care not to forget this invitation, and at the appointed hour I arrived at the battiah’s residence.

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‘The street was brilliantly illuminated. An awning, from which superb lanterns were suspended, covered it as far as the door. There a mountain of flowers was piled up—a regular wall—behind which a noisy Portuguese orchestra was concealed. On my approach they struck up a military march, and Purbutt advanced to receive me. Taking me by the hand, he conducted me into a grand apartment, where the nautch was to take place. Large mirrors reflected the light of a thousand lusters; rich carpets, and sofas spread with cashmeres, covered the ground; and the magnificent costumes of the guests, and the number of servants waving fans, gave to the scene that theatrical appearance of which the Orientals are so passionately fond. 1 took my seat on a soft divan, and was immediately surrounded by servants who offered me sherbets and fruit, and sprinkled me with rose-water from great silver flagons. A few paces from me the dancing-girls, crouching down near their musicians and awaiting the signal for the dance, formed a striking group. These lovely girls, with pale complexions and large black eyes, covered with diamonds and precious stuffs, looked at me coolly, and without any appearance of curiosity.

‘Most of the guests having arrived, our host introduced us to his son—a child eight years of age—in whose honor he was giving the fête. These formalities at an end, he seated himself by me and gave the signal. Thereupon the dancers rose up, and, unfolding their scarfs and shaking their plaited skirts, they began jingling the little bells which were fastened around their ankles in the form of bracelets, and which served to mark the time. After a preliminary chorus, accompanied by viols and tom-toms, they formed a semicircle, and one of them advanced close to us. With rounded arms and her veil floating, she turned herself slowly around with a gentle quivering of the body, so as to make her bells resound; the music, soft and languishing, seemed to lull her senses, and, with eyes half closed, she seemed to be clasping in her amorous embrace some

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invisible being. All thus played their parts in succession— one feigning herself a serpent-charmer, or a luteplayer; another, ardent and impassioned, bounding and whirling around with great rapidity; while another, adorned with an elegant cap embroidered with pearls, addressed us with strange gestures, and followed the music with a coquettish movement of the body.

‘They concluded their performance with an animated round dance, accompanied with songs and clapping of the hands. In all this I saw nothing of that gross immorality which, from what I had previously been told, I expected to find in the pantomime exhibited by these women. Their demeanor was correct, though with some little spice of provocation, and their costume was more modest than that of women in general. I may add that in this entertainment you must not look for a dance in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Posturings, attitudes, songs, constitute the official nautch of the Hindoos. I say official, because I had afterward the opportunity of seeing dances of quite another character, to which strangers are rarely admitted. These are real ballets, somewhat like those of our operas, though impressed with the voluptuous ardor of the East.’

In Benares—the holy city of the Hindoos—I was told that one particular god had two hundred sanctuaries erected to his honor. The dancers in these particular temples are all young girls who have been widowed before becoming wives; and, to avoid the trouble of caring for them, and also the danger of their fleeing from their wretched widowhood to a life of common shame, the high caste families to which they belong have consecrated them to the service of this particular god. These constitute a sort of high caste among harlots, and lead a very retired life, so far as the general public is concerned, and never dance except in the temple or at strictly religious ceremonies. At the close of the rainy season, the orthodox Hindoos hold what is known as the feast of Dassara. It begins the

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7th of October, and continues ten days. During this feast great honor and attention are paid to the nautch-girls, and presents of greater or less value are bestowed upon all women who belong to this profession.

The Hindoos say that this strange custom originated in a promise made, ages ago, by Vishnu, which all the rajahs (or princes) especially are bound to observe. The god, according to the legend, one day came down to earth in the form of a beautiful youth. Night was falling, and finding himself near a village, he entered it to seek hospitality. He knocked at the door of a Brahmin priest, saying to himself that that holy man would surely welcome a poor traveler. But the Brahmin harshly repulsed him. He made the same application to all the inhabitants around, and everywhere met with rebuffs, and sometimes insults.

Weeping over the hard-heartedness of mankind, he left the village, and was on the point of quitting the earth, bent on annihilating it, when he saw a light beneath some neighboring trees. It came from a poor, small, thatched hut, whence also proceeded harmonious strains of song. Willing to make a last attempt, he stood outside and implored the compassion of the tenant of the cabin. A beautiful young dancing-girl came to the door, and, when she saw the traveler, admitted him, gave him a seat by her hearth, and busied herself in preparing a repast for him. When the young man had eaten, she charmed him with her songs, and finally offered him a share of her bed. The hospitality of the poor girl saved the world from destruction, and on leaving her next morning the god promised that, from that day forth, she should be respected by all, and protected by his descendants.

Pierre-Louis-Honoré Chauvet (1815–1880), who wrote on political topics as well as travel, spent two years on the Coromandel Coast, during which time he often attended dance performances. The tone he uses in reminiscing is sardonic, in

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typical fashion for colonial French writers of his time, but also harsh in his gossipy relation of what he considers the unsavoury ‘facts’: The dance of the bayadères is also a very popular spectacle. For our part, we have rejoiced twice a year at this entertainment which had the merit of being offered to us personally at the Government Residence.

The temples have their privileges which the Brahmins who serve them hold dear, and not without reason. These priests never let slip any occasion to show their hearts to the government, and every year, at the new year and on the day of the national festival, a delegation betakes itself to the palace, carrying to the governor’s wife a basket of flowers and fruit, and accompanied by musicians of the grand temple, and by the bayadères in their very rich apparel. The temple orchestra strikes up its monotonous tunes, and the bayadères begin to dance … the ballet is ended by the main dancer of the troupe, who, letting trail behind her a long piece of muslin … begins to rotate about herself …

It is evidently a tour de force, but one that, unvaried except by the rapidity of the rotations … one’s eyes follow it with a certain pleasure, a first and a second time, but, one’s curiosity satisfied, it no longer offers any attraction … … one knows what these bayadères really are, whose high reputation has reigned for a long time without contest. They are all young girls, very beautiful and very admirably made, recruited by the priests from believing families, and specially destined to the service of the cult.

… but the priests do not content themselves with initiating them into the sacred dance; they by no means consecrate them exclusively to the ceremonies of the temple; they also teach them the art of pleasure, and know how to attract by their beauty a not very delicate party …

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The training of the bayadères is for the priests a matter of personal satisfaction, somewhat like speculation. The rivalry that exists between the several temples leads to marvellous plans. The jewel, the precious stone, the diamond and the ruby above all, amount, in the eyes of the Hindus, to more than gold and money, and are the distinctive signs of wealth …

The temple that covers its dancers with the most beautiful ornaments is more holy and honoured than its rivals … the bayadères maintain a clientèle that stays faithful because they do not draw back from any excess whatsoever, because they show themselves the most intrepid in the orgies in which they take part, and because they audaciously flaunt the scandal of their eccentric lives …

On the other hand, Charles Reynolds Williams (1815–1905), brother of Monier Williams, then Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, writing in a letter from South India in 1876, notes in passing, and probably without himself noticing it, the conflict that already existed between the law criminalising the procurement of girls in the context of temple dance practice, and the presentations of dance as entertainment by colonial officials themselves: Another interesting and thoroughly Indian scene was enacted before us at Tanjore—namely, a Nautch. It was held at 8 o’clock at night, in the porte cochére of Mr. Thomas’s house, which formed a natural kind of theatre, as steps led up from it to the house. We all sat on chairs placed on the top step, and below, on the carpeted ground, the performance took place. No scene-painter was necessary. The magnificent aruns, bigonias and calladiums at the back and sides of the portico formed appropriate scenery, all lighted up with as many duplex and other lamps and candles as Thomas’s butler could stick on the steps of the portico. There were five girls and a number of native musicians and attendants. The girls were dressed in sparkling bodices,

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with gold-tissue skirts gathered up between the legs and falling full in front, brilliant satin trousers, and covered with real jewellery; head, neck, ears, nose and fingers were a mass of gold and precious stones. They danced set figures in Oriental fashion with great precision and effect, and good time was kept by bells fastened round their ankles. The dances over, we descended the steps of the portico and examined the girls and their jewellery. The jewels bore the examination better than the girls. Apart from their ornaments they would not pass muster; but the jewels were lovely and so Eastern. I longed to pocket them.

The value of each girl’s jewels was stated to be 700/. or 800/. Before they left, two or three of the girls came forward, and, in serious language, complained to Mr. Thomas of the article in the Penal Code, which prevents women of this character from bringing up their daughters as courtesans. They look on it as a profession, a legitimate and hereditary profession, in which they are entitled to educate their daughters. To judge from their jewels, it must be a paying one. It was another proof, added to the scene at the Palace and the appeal from the jester, of the power which the English collector is supposed to possess. The people think he can do anything.

The passage indicates at least one instance of the paradoxical situation in which the hereditary dancers were caught up. In this case they are performing for and appealing to a colonial official who is himself part of the administrative system that was framing the laws used against them. One of the problems with which the devadasis were faced was the traditional societal structure that allowed them no ingress for integration into the whole of society except under the customs which already obtained. In the following extract we see how marriage outside of the devadasi system was simply not recognized. In this court case, involving the right of the son of a

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Vellala women to inherit his father’s property, the first plaintiff, the woman herself, is accused of being a ‘dancing girl’ in order to defeat her objective: (The) defendants disputed the marriage of the plaintiff and the legitimacy of her son.

The statement of both defendants was that the plaintiff was a dancing girl, and, treating that status or caste as continuing, they both insisted that she could not be the wife of her alleged husband: that her son could not, since she was a prostitute, be the son of the late zemindar, and could not have any title to inherit, even had a marriage between the zemindar and the child’s mother been celebrated in fact. They denied that any marriage had taken place. It is unnecessary to repeat the very language of these statements, which, as translated, is coarse and unbecoming. It is plain that the case insisted on was that the plaintiff herself was a dancing girl, not merely the child of one, at the time when her connexion with the zemindar commenced, which the defendants represented as a connexion with a dancing girl, a prostitute by profession, attached to the temple service. The statement contains no information of her having abandoned that calling prior to the birth of these children, or at all. The language used plainly imports a continuing status; that the judge so understood the statements appears from the issues which he framed.

The term ‘dancing girl’ was not used in the answers. A fouler name was there used, and it seems to their lordships to have been designedly employed to mark a distinction between an intercourse with a concubine and one with a common prostitute, which might influence the decision of a question of filiation and legitimacy. The issues were:

First, whether the plaintiff was a Vellala or dancing girl.

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Secondly, whether the plaintiff was legally married to the zemindar.

The third issue was one of law as to the validity of the marriage, should it be proved …

In the event the case was resolved by showing that the plaintiff was not a ‘dancing girl’, but also made the point that, if she had been one, the marriage would ipso facto have been invalid: They also held that a de facto marriage was proved by the evidence, i.e. that the deceased zemindar had gone through the outward forms of a marriage with the first plaintiff, and they asked, ‘Can this marriage de facto be supposed an idle and, from a Hindu point of view, a profane ceremony?’ If the first plaintiff had been a dancing girl, then not only would the de facto marriage have been improbable, but even if gone through it would have been invalid. Their lordships held that the evidence did not prove that she was a dancing girl …

Similar disqualifications existed in other areas of social life, such as education, as the writer of this article from the Report on Public Instruction relates in 1877: In my report for 1876–77 I mentioned that government had decided that girls of the dancing-girl class should be admitted into government schools up to the age of puberty. A memorial protesting against this decision was submitted to government soon afterward by a large and influential body of Native gentlemen. They pointed out that ‘even before these girls attain the age of puberty their habits, their modes of thought and feelings, the language they speak, the company they keep at home, in short their daily life and their entire social and moral character are such as to render it a seriously dangerous thing for the innocent children of respectable parents to sit and associate with them.’ Government observed that the ‘remedy for the evils which the memorialists point out as possible should be found rather in the

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establishment of select schools for the education of girls by those who desire their children to be brought up in separation from those of the inferior castes, rather than in depriving certain of the lower classes of the use of government schools, to which all tax-payers contribute alike.’ The order complained of has therefore not been modified.

Though the order had ‘not been modified’, it is certain that the attitude taken by the ‘body of Native gentleman’ would in the end have been the one that prevailed, and this tendency would not have been ameliorated by wider public opinion throughout Indian colonial society. Writing in the late 1870s, Jules Blum, Chief of Police and Mayor of Pondicherry from 1874 to 1877, provides an insight into the scathing nature of the posture adopted by some colonial administrators in this decade: These debauched women, who publicly traffic their charms, are nevertheless persons consecrated in a special manner to the cult of the gods of India. Every temple of note has in its service a troupe of eight, twelve, or more. Their official functions consist in dancing and in singing, twice daily, in the morning and at evening, in the interior of the temples, and, what is more, at all the public ceremonies. They acquit themselves of the first with sufficient grace, though their attitudes are lascivious and their gestures lacking in decency. As to their songs, they are almost always pieces of obscene poetry, or are descriptions of one or another of the mischievous pranks of their gods.

Their ministrations are not limited to these allocations only. Decency and civility impiously demand that, whenever people of eminence gather to pay grand institutional visits to others, they have themselves accompanied by a certain number of bayadères, who, if they were to excuse themselves from doing so, would demonstrate a lack of regard …

They also assist at marriages and other family solemnities, deploying their talents at those events. All the time of

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which their diverse talents allow them to dispose is consecrated by them to an infinitely more infamous trade; it is not rare to see the very abode of their god become the theatre of their wantonness. From their childhood up they are trained to this disgraceful profession. One finds them among different castes, and there are those who belong to respectable families.

There are cases of pregnant women, who, conveniently enough, with a view to obtaining a happy deliverance, and with the consent of their husbands, go to deliver to the service of the temple the child whom they are carrying at their breasts, if it is a girl. No unfavourable prejudice attaches to the parents whose children embrace this way of life. These are the only women of India who have the privilege of learning to read, to dance and to sing. On these grounds, a decent and virtuous woman would blush at wanting to acquire these talents.

These kinds of priestesses receive a fixed salary for their sacerdotal functions, but this salary is modest, and they supplement it in a lucrative manner by the sale of their allures.

To make this commerce fructify, they know, perhaps more than is the case in other parts of the world, how to throw into this work all the resources and all the artifices of coquetry. Perfumes, elegant and sought-after jewellery, the hair-arrangements most fitted to bring out the beauty of their black hair, which they interlace with fragrant flowers, a profusion of jewels placed with art on diverse parts of their bodies, mincing steps and a voluptuous deportment: these are the ruses which these muses constantly employ to attract into their net those Indians who rarely demonstrate the same firm resolve that was shown in the case of Ulysses. Of all the women of India, it is the bayadères, and above all those who are attached to the temples, who are the most modestly attired; they place extreme attention

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on not allowing any part of their bodies to be seen uncovered. No doubt experience has taught them that the open display of their charms dulls rather than excites desire.

In the sects of Shiva and Vishnu one recognizes some types of priestesses, that is to say of women specially consecrated, who go under the name of the wives of the gods, in the service of one or another of these immortals; they are of a distinct class of the ordinary bayadères but actually exceed them in depravity. They are usually the unfortunate victims of the libertinism of the Brahmins. These women, who are in reality as good as concubines of the temple dignitaries, do not for all that enjoy anything less than a very large esteem in their sect.

Figure 8.3 Jules Blum, Album Indien, Bayadères, 1874–1877. (Collection of Mme. M. Fiès).

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Figure 8.4 Jules Blum, Album Indien, Bayadère, 1874–1877. (Collection of Mme. M. Fiès).

These words are hand-written in an album of water-colours of Indian ‘types’ made by Blum during his years in office, and called by him his Album Indien. They are not available in published form. Given the delicate quality of his paintings of the bayadères, one is surprised by the sharply negative tone of the accompanying commentary. On the basis of the visual data alone, something more sympathetic might be expected, but Blum stubbornly adheres to all the tropes that have come down to him from the years in India of Sonnerat and Dubois. In fact, he plagiarizes Dubois verbatim. One is left wondering to what extent his own understanding may have derived from his dealings with the devadasi system in his capacity as a high official, and whether he actually interacted in conversation with the dancers he portrayed at such close quarters and with such minute attention to details of costume, ornamentation,

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posture and features. But he makes no reference to any such dealings, even in his capacity as a law and order man. This section ends with a nod at the famously beautiful Kashmiri dancers, who entranced many Western travellers and artists, including William Simpson (1822–1899), the early Scottish war artist, who fondly remembered a nautch in the Shalimar Gardens: We had our bath, swimming about with the fountains showering on our heads as we passed under; and while we had our dinner in one verandah, the dancers were arriving and getting ready in the other, to which we went to have our coffee and cigars. ‘The valley’s loveliest all assembled;

All the bright creatures that, like dreams,

Glide through its foliage, and drink beams Of beauty from its founts and streams.’

The first performance which one sees of a Nautch in India may interest by its novelty, but that is enough; after this such exhibitions become weary, stale, and unprofitable, but although we had all witnessed them often before, the one we saw in this instance formed a remarkable exception. By some peculiar enchantment of the moment we all felt as though we had ceased to exist in the present period of time, and that our minds were thrown back, and lived and thought and felt as if at the time when Noor Mahal herself had sung in that very place: ‘And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth, It is this, it is this.’

In addition to the fairy-like scene, the girls were much whiter in the skin than those in the more southern parts of India; Gulee, one of the principal performers, had the rose—‘gui’ on her cheek as well as in her name, and the music had more melody in it to our ears than is usually heard in the East. We were gazing at what Moore has so deliciously described: all was tangible—a

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delightful dreamy reality, with at the same time a magical abstraction about it. The dancers, although real before us, had been by the associations of the place transformed into the Peris of Paradise. With our minds in this state, it was natural for the stories of the ‘Arabian Nights’ to come into our heads; and had a jin or a genie appeared, he would not have been considered out of place. Had we been asked if we believed in the whole of the wonders of the Thousand and One Nights, not one of us would have ventured to express a doubt. The spell was complete, and in my case at least it is not yet entirely destroyed; some lingering influences still remain when memory carries back the mind to that night on the Lake of Cashmere.

Figure 8.5 Illustration showing Kashmiri dancers in William Simpson, Picturesque People, 1876.

References

Though the dances and dancers of India remained for centuries confusing objects of praise and blame, their power to fascinate and intrigue is a steadfast recurrence in the narrative of all the Europeans who had either seen them at first hand, or only heard about them from others.

References

1. Wheeler, George Pearson, India in 1875–76: The Visit of the Prince of Wales, London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. 2. Gay, J. Drew. The Prince of Wales in India, New York: R. Worthington, 1877.

3. Russell, William Howard, The Prince of Wales’ Tour: A Diary in India, New York: R. Worthington, 1878.

4. Nolan, E.H., The Illustrated History of the British Empire in India and the East, from the earliest times to the suppression of the sepoy mutiny in 1859 (with a continuation to the end of 1878), London: Virtue, 1878–1879.

5. The Queensland Times, 10 February 1876.

6. Stone, Julia A., Illustrated India: Its Princes and People, Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1877. 7. Fayrer, Joseph, Notes of the Visit to India of their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh 1870–1875, London: Kerby & Endean, 1879. 8. The Indian Mirror, Sunday Edition, 18 December 1875, Calcutta: C.H. Manuel, 1861–1880.

9. The Indian Mirror, Sunday Edition, 26 December 1875, Calcutta: C.H. Manuel, 1861–1880.

10. The Madras Revenue Register, no. 10 (1876).

11. Daily Telegraph, 14 January, 1876; The Globe, 14 January, 1876; Londonderry Journal, 17 January, 1876; in Public Opinion, a weekly review of current thought and activity, London: G. Cole, January–June 1876. 12. De Aarde en haar Volken (Acht Dagen in Indië), Haarlem: A.C. Kruseman, 1871. 13. Thenon, Albert., À travers l’Inde, Paris: T. Lefèvre, 1872.

14. Kerr, James, Land of Ind: Glimpses of India, London: Green and Co., 1873.

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15. Houghton, Ross C., Women of the Orient: an account of the religious, intellectual and social condition of women in Japan, China, India, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Cincinatti: Cranston & Stowe, 1877.

16. Rousselet, Louis, India and its Native Princes, London: Bickers, 1882.

17. Chauvet, Pierre-Louis-Honoré, L’Inde française: deux années sur la côte de Coromandel, Paris: Challamel Ainé, 1877. 18. Williams, C.R., Letters Written during a Trip to Southern India & Ceylon in the Winter of 1876–1877, London: C. Roworth, 1877. 19. Madras Jurist, vol. 7, 1872.

20. Report on Public Instruction 1878–1879, Madras: The Govt.

21. Blum, Jules, Album Indien, c. 1877: collection of Mme. Michèle Fiès.

22. Simpson, William, Picturesque People; being groups from all quarters of the globe, London: Thompson, 1876.

Chapter 9

A Slowly Brewing Storm: 1880–1890 In the last ten years before the anti-nautch movement had consolidated its membership and begun to launch its activist programs in earnest, the hereditary dancers’ way of life was not seriously affected by persistent reference to their licentious lifestyles. We see records of their performances told by a number of Europeans, with varying degrees of appreciation, repugnance, and boredom, and writings begin to appear that show greater insistence on the ‘degradation’ of the dancing class. By this decade, the temple and court practice in South India had already been placed under financial and social strain by administrative and economic policies—including especially the effective deposition of Maratha royal rule in Tanjore—and dancers were in far greater numbers earning a livelihood by performing for secular and popular audiences. In North India, too, the moral stigma was becoming more deeply impressed on the courtesan tradition, and it is clear that matters were coming to a head. Meanwhile, as the 1880s slowly pass, we see from writings from both the European and Indian side, an increasing willingness to disparage the art, or simply to let it expire by means of its own perceived immorality and inanity. In 1881, we find Sivachanda Vasu (or, Shib Chunder Bose), providing a view into the internal aspects of Hindu life in The Hindoos as They Are, a book prefaced by a character sketch of the author written by W. Hastie: Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Babu Shib Chunder Bose is an enlightened Bengali, of matured conviction and character, who, having received the stirring impulse of Western culture and thought during the early period of Dr. Duff’s work in the General Assembly’s Institution, has continued faithful to it through all these long and changeful years. His extended and varied experience, his careful habit of observation and contrast, his large store of general reading and information, and his rare sobriety and earnestness of judgment, eminently qualify him for lifting the veil from the inner domestic life of his countrymen, and giving such an account of their social and religious observances as may prove intelligible and instructive to general English readers. Vasu describes the nautch dancers of Calcutta in the context of the Durga Puja: As regards the other amusements at this popular festival, a few words about the Indian nautch (dancing) girls may not be out of place here. These women have no social status, their principles are as loose as their character is immoral. They are brought up to this disreputable profession from their infancy. They have no husbands, and many of them are never married. The Native Princes, and chiefs, rich zemindars and persons in affluent circumstances, the capacity of whose intellect is as stinted as its culture is scanty, have been their great patrons. Devoid of a taste for reading and writing, they managed to drive the ennui of their lives by the songs of these dancing girls. Great were the rewards which they sometimes received at the hands of the Native kings in their palmy days. When a Principality groaned under extravagance and financial embarrassment, these bewitching girls were entertained at considerable expense to drown the cares of state-craft and king-craft. Even the most astute prince was not free from this courtly profligacy. Though these girls often basked in the sunshine of royal favor,

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yet there was not a single Jenny Lind among them either in grace or accomplishment. As regards their income, a girl has been known to refuse ten thousand Rupees for performing three nights at the Nazim’s Court. When Rajah Rajkissen of Sobha Bazar, the Singhee family of Jorasanko, and the Dey family of Simla, celebrated these Poojahs with great pomp, dancing girls of repute were retained a month previous to the festival at great cost, varying from 500 to 1000 Rupees each for three nights. Now that those prosperous days are gone by, and the big English officials do not condescend to attend the nautch, the amount has been reduced to fifty Rupees or a little more. Their general attire and gestures, as well as the nature and tendency of their songs, are by no means unexceptionable. These auxiliaries to sensual gratification, combined with the allurements of Bacchus, even in the presence of a deity, are the least of all fitted to animate or quicken devotional feelings and prayerful thoughts.

The dancers are seen from a completely different viewpoint by Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), the Italian neurologist and anthropologist, who was a guest at the Baroda Court in 1881, and wrote about one of their performances: The master of ceremonies showed me to a place in the first row, perhaps on account of the three medals that I wore at my neck, but which, among all these Asiatic jewels, made but a poor show.

Now the two famous bayadères or Indian nautches made their appearance. I examined them with a burning curiosity. They were small and fat, with oval faces the colour of ripe beans, very black, flashing eyes, and sensuous mouths, which smiled often to reveal their red teeth. Their hair glistened black and fell down their shoulders in a single gathered plait. Another plait of gold thread covered the first. They were gorgeously clothed in woven stuff of gold and silver, studded with

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jewels. In their noses they wore golden rings set with precious stones, and thick rings decorated their bare feet. Their bosoms were very visible, and of maidenly form, their breasts were broad, so far as their fresh youth allowed, and were made still more prominent by means of a band that ran down the middle and was tied in a knot in front. The parts around the navel were left exposed.

A shocking orchestra accompanied them. A little wind instrument, a double-sided drum played with both hands, a bagpipe with two pipes, and two men beating iron cups, created a barbaric, ear-shattering noise. And the unpleasant hammering and piping raged desperately round their instruments without once ceasing, while the two girls, in incredible fashion, wound and bent themselves: head, eyes, arms, rumps, legs; everything movable moved, bringing them from the depths of the hall, where the musicians were playing, to approach the silver canopy. The return was more elegant because, as they were not allowed to turn their backs on His Majesty, they withdrew with graceful, voluptuous motions. From time to time they entered into two circular movements, touching the ground with one part of their bodies, then rising again to make groups of little sticks, moving these rhythmically while they sang. Many a sirdar eyed them lustfully, and though I was not born in India and am no sirdar, yet there rose in me a completely new experience, like the yearning for some fruit so far unknown. When, however, I weigh it all up, I find that our European dancers are much more charming, though also lewder than these Indian dancers. I don’t know how long these cataleptic girls danced and sang. I only know that they were drenched in perspiration, but possessed by their own movements and full of holy fire for their art. At last the Raja made a sign to them to stop, and the music and nautch came to an end as if by a stroke of magic.

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The epithet, ‘cataleptic’ is, so far as I know, unique in the description of the dancers, and Mantegazza’s use of this neurological jargon may serve to emphasise how Europeans tended to view the dance and the dances in terms of their own professions or their general individual worldviews. The art is never understood on its own terms—no accurate investigation of its structure and dynamics had even been attempted since it was first encountered—and the vocation of the dancer is simply written off as that of one kind of prostitute in India. Westernized commentators such as ‘Kuppusvami’ were content to promulgate the same ideas: Dancing girls are the only women in India that are not allowed to marry. Although attached to the temple, taking part in almost all the services, and called ‘the servants of the god,’ they, in private, follow a profession which in every country is looked on with abhorrence.

It being necessary for them to be able to learn the songs which they sing while dancing, they were, till recently, the only women in India who learned to read; and in going into a girls’ school to-day it would often be found that all the pupils belong to this class, care not having been taken to exclude them, and respectable people naturally refusing to allow their daughters to associate with them.

They form a distinct and hereditary class. Their sons are usually trained as musicians, and their daughters, if sufficiently beautiful, as dancing girls. Their ranks are constantly recruited from other castes, it being not uncommon for a mother, if disappointed by the early death of her children, to seek to propitiate the god by vowing her next female child to the service of the temple.

Engaged, as these women are, in the services of the temples, and occupying a recognised social position, they are regarded with a certain amount of respect. Their free, open, unrestrained life gives to many of them a dignity and frank unconsciousness of manner,

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which contrast favourably with the immodest shyness of most other Hindu and Mohammedan women.

The last paragraph is a reference to another supposed difficulty caused by the dancers, in that the average woman or girl in India was thought to avoid the ‘scandal’ of literacy and general education because these accomplishments were exhibited in society only by the ‘nautch-girls’. Mary Hield, a writer of informative travel books for young people, gently insinuates the idea of the dancer’s entrapment in temple life, in her Sketches from our Indian Empire in 1882: On their ankles and wrists they fasten a number of little bells, which they cleverly contrive to ring so exactly in time to the music, that the effect produced is quite charming. As they enter the apartment where it is meant they shall perform, they seem to waft along with them a breeze of fragrance, for they perfume their long black hair with delicious scent, and, if possible, wear some of those lovely odorous flowers of which in India there are so many.

One of the prettiest of their dances is one which would suit our little English boys, for it is called the Kite Dance. In it the nautch-girls throw up their arms in imitation of a kite-flyer, all the time slowly dancing to the music. Perhaps you remember that Hannah, the mother of Samuel, dedicated her little boy to the service of God when he was quite a child; that is just what some of these Hindoo mothers do, although the religion they profess is so different to that of the Jewish mothers.

Willing to please the god they worship, they offer to him their little girls, and from that time the children thus dedicated are kept specially for temple festivities, and are considered sacred.

Her reference to the biblical parallel in the story of Hannah has, at least on one side of it, the intention to convey the idea of a primitive pre-Christian practice, though Hield is withheld

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from referring to the dancers’ sexual practices by the fact that she is writing for Christian children. There is no innuendo in the following passage by the American travel writer, Frank Vincent, though the performance is for him a ‘torture’: The nautch girls were the rajah’s private dancers, who danced before him nearly every evening, and were kept for his own especial amusement. They were dressed in wide-flowing trousers and long robes, or rather shawls, of heavy crimson silk, made perfectly stiff with gold and silver thread embroidery, borders, and trimmings. They were greatly overloaded with jewelry on the neck, arms, hands, legs, and feet. Large and curiously wrought rings hung from the lobes of their ears, and a perfect fringe of small rings dangled from holes pierced along each ear’s upper rim. This system of jewelry was made complete by dozens of armlets—bands of gold two or three inches wide set with vari-colored gems—several necklaces, some of them consisting of chains with gold coins attached; four or six rings on a finger; anklets strung with little bells; and even gold and silver toelets upon their naked feet. The distinguishable jewels were the topaz, onyx, carbuncle, agate, and carnelian. The movements of the dancers were very slow, being much hindered by their long robes. They scarcely seemed to raise their feet from the floor, the performance consisting rather of posturing and singing than what we understand by the single term dancing. In fact, no people of the East indulge in dancing-parties as do the natives of the West. Orientals of the upper class never dance themselves. It is not dignified, and they always hire others to dance before them. So fond are they of the diversion that the profession of a dancing-girl is both popular and lucrative, though it is not considered very respectable. These girls—some of whom are possessed of extraordinary beauty—generally lead an irregular life. One of the officers behind my chair remarked of

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a rather fascinating girl, who had been dancing for some little time, that she was a celebrated singer, and mentioned her unpronounceable name. I confess never to have heard such extraordinary screeching. She ‘sang’ at the extreme limit of her gamut, without the slightest attempt at expression or modulation, and, with short intervals for recuperation, as long as her strength lasted, when she was relieved by another, and afterward by another, and so the torture proceeded.

The musicians—four in number—stood behind the dancers, and followed their eccentric movements. The instruments were two violins, or guitars—one with steel wire strings—a tom-tom, or kettledrum, and a pair of cymbals. The guitars, shaped like very crook-necked squashes, were held before the body, supported by the waistband, and played with bows closely resembling those used with violins in more civilized countries. The tom-toms were two in number, fastened to a belt strapped around the performer, who played by drumming upon them with his fists and fingers. The cymbals were made of brass, and in action would answer perhaps to our castanets and triangle combined. The guitars were not incapable of producing melody, but the music extracted was entirely without tune, and hence rather monotonous, the same strains being repeated again and again.

On each side of the dancers and musicians were torchbearers, who followed them forward and backward in their evolutions, and were so stationed that the light exhibited the gorgeous dresses to the finest effect. These torches were made simply of greased rags, and emitted a thick, oily smoke, which soon filled the room and almost suffocated us. To my mind, nautch dancing is like the famous attar-of-rose essence—a little of it goes a great way.

In Vincent’s description of the nautch in Varanasi (Benares), there is the reaction of bored irritation that one also regularly

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sees in European and American writings recounting personal experiences of the dance. It is usually from these quarters, too, that we find writings expressing wry wonderment at the desire of reformers to do away with the nautch: they can’t understand what all the fuss is about. We find the same attitude in the writing of Prof. Julius Jolly (1849–1932), the German Indologist, who spoke about his experiences in India in Würzburg, in 1884: … the outward performance of the nautch-girls’ productions are free of all indecency, at least when they perform for Europeans. Unlike the case of a Western corps de ballet, the dancer’s costumes differ from those of other Indian women only in that their bodily forms are less exposed. The nautch that I attended in Benares was a given by a raja in honour of the wedding of one of his relatives. We were cordially received by the raja when we arrived at about eight-o’-clock, and were led by torchbearers to the verandah where the performance was to take place … Though the dancers now performing, with their clear complexions and regular features which would be considered beautiful in Europe, are tripping about the hall, to each guest in turn, with their musical accompanists, and with their most beautiful music and the most graceful movements of their arms, no European could stand this for more than half an hour …

With the exception of the kuli and peasant women, the nautch-girls are usually the only members of the female sex that a European normally sees …

Anna Harriette Leonowens (1831–1915) became famous as the teacher of the King of Thailand’s daughters, her story being fictionalized as Anna and the King of Siam, later made into the hit movie musical, The King and I. She was born in India but became a world traveller, writer, educator, and activist for women’s rights. She wrote about the ‘nautchnee’ in Life and Travel in India, with the scene here set in Bombay:

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After a few moments Sainah Bebee came in to greet the lady Kesinth. She salaamed most deferentially to us, and took her place on the floor. She was a woman about fifty and a native of Afghanistan, tall and finely formed. She spoke of difficulty in procuring respectable young girls to fill the places of those who ran away, were sold to certain rich admirers for wives or concubines, or died. It would appear that the lowest, or Cusban, class was largely increasing, whereas that of the Nautchnees was fast diminishing. On my questioning the old lady about the average life of the Nautchnees, she could give me no clear estimate, but intimated very decidedly that they generally died young.

At my especial request we were shown into the exercisingroom and almost over the entire establishment. There were over a hundred girls, of all ages, and all shades of complexion from dark-brown to a pale delicate olive, going through their exercises at the time. The hall was composed of bamboo trellis-work, and was light, spacious, and airy enough. From the roof hung all sorts of gymnastic apparatus, rude but curious—ropes to which the girls clung as they whirled round on tiptoe; wheels on which they were made to walk in order to learn a peculiar circular dance called ‘chakranee’ (from ‘chak,’ a wheel); slipknots into which they fastened one arm or one leg, thus holding it motionless while they exercised the other; cups, revolving balls, which they sprang up to catch; and heaps of fragile cords, with which they spin round and round, and if any one of these snap under too great a pressure, they are punished, though never very severely.

Altogether, it was a strange sight. Most of the girls from ten to fourteen had nothing on but a short tight pair of drawers; the older ones had tight short-sleeved bodices in addition to the drawers; and those under ten were naked.

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They were all good-looking; a few here and there were beautiful. The delicate and refined outline of their features, the soft tint of their rich complexions, the dreamy expression of their large, dark, quiet eyes, added to great symmetry of form, made them strangely fascinating.

The teachers were all middle-aged women, some of whom looked prematurely old. The girls are taught to repeat poems and plays, but no books are used.

The dormitories in this establishment were bare rooms; the girls all slept on mats or cushions on the floor. Each had a lota, or drinking-cup, a little mirror, and a native box in which to keep her clothes. The more finished and accomplished Nautchnees had rooms to themselves. I went into one of these. It was matted, and was very simply furnished. A tier of boxes in which her jewels and robes were kept, a cot, a few brass lotas, fans, cojas, or water-holders, with some tiny looking-glasses ranged along the wall—and this was all. I inquired for the beautiful Nautchnee who had interested me. Her name was Khangee; she was a Soodahnee by birth. The Soodahs are a military race or tribe inhabiting parts of the province of Cutch; they find their chief wealth in the beauty of their daughters, and for one of the Soodahnees a rich Mohammedan will pay from a thousand to ten thousand rupees. Rajahs, wealthy Mohammedan merchants, and proprietors of dancing-girls often despatch their emissaries to Cutch, Cabool, Cashmere, and Rajpootana in search of beautiful women. The fame of the Cashmerian and Soodah women has spread far and wide, and often some beautiful creature is picked up out of the hovels of Thur, Booly, or Cashmere, and transplanted to the gorgeous pomp of a royal harem.

The Rajpoots intermarry with the Soodah and Cashmerian women, and, being naturally a handsome race, they have

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preserved by this means that physical beauty of which they are so justly proud.

Very little was known of Khangee’s history beyond the fact that she was a Soodahnee by birth. She was bought at an early age from her parents, who were poor and occupied a hovel in the village of Thur in Cutch, and sold to this establishment when in her seventh year, and was almost as ignorant of her parentage as a newly-born babe. At the time of our visit she had been hired with a party of Nautchnees to assist in the marriage-celebration which was to take place at the house of a rich Bunyah, or Hindoo grain-merchant,

These Nautchnees often marry well, and become chaste wives and mothers of large families. The four requisites for a Nautchnee are bright eyes, fine teeth, long hair, and a perfect symmetry of form and feature. A small black mole between the eyebrows or on either cheek will enhance her value to an extraordinary degree.

The utter friendlessness, the quiet submission, expressed in the actions and faces of the young girls, and even of the little children, we had seen exercising and acquiring their different parts that morning, were very pathetic. There was none of the impetuosity of youth nor of the joyousness of childhood. It is a sad and dreary picture, these parentless children of the East living for some rich man’s pleasure, and dying as they live, often unloved and uncared for by any relative or friend. ‘Bayahdier’ is the name generally applied by the French and Portuguese to the dancing-girls attached to temples. They are distinct from the Nautchnees, and are held sacred as priestesses. In case of sickness, famine, or other individual or social calamity, Hindoo parents will repair to the temple and there vow to dedicate a daughter, sometimes yet unborn, to the service of Siva, provided the gods avert the threatened danger. Such vows are also made by barren women, who promise, if the curse of barrenness be removed, to dedicate to Siva their

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first-born daughter; and all such vows are religiously performed. When the child thus consecrated is born, the first thing that is necessary is for the father to repair to the temple and register her name as a devotee of the temple, break cocoanut at the shrine of Siva, and take from the hand of the Brahman priest a little holy oil, shaindoor, a sort of red paint, and mud obtained from the Ganges; with which he returns to mark the newlyborn child. From this moment she is looked upon as a priestess, and is exempt from all household or any other employment.

At the age of five she attends the temple daily, where she is taught by the priests to read, chant, sing, and dance in the schools attached to it. When the girl has reached womanhood she undergoes certain purifications. Holy oil and grated sandal-wood are rubbed over her person; she is then bathed, perfumed, fumigated, dressed in a robe peculiar to these priestesses—a full petticoat with a handsome border, short enough to show her feet and ankles, which are covered with jewels; a very short boddice, and over this is thrown a spotted muslin veil; the hair is ornamented with jewels of gold and silver, as are the neck, arms, and throat.

She then enters the temple, takes her place near the stone image of Siva; generally her right hand is bound to that of the holy image, her forehead is marked with his sign, and she confirms the vow made by her parents to dedicate her body to the service and maintenance of the temple. With some few advantages of education, this temple-service may be regarded as one of the most corrupt, and depraving institutions of the Hindoos— injurious alike to the moral and physical welfare of the community at large, and moreover debasing to the character of the Brahman priests themselves in their open recognition and encouragement of vice. These poor devotees often accept their fate with that stolid indifference peculiar to the Orientals, and are taught

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to believe that their immoralities are sacred to the god to whom they are dedicated.

The services on the death of one of these priestesses are peculiar. When at the point of death a mud idol of Siva is placed in her arms. Her mouth, eyes, nose, and ears are rubbed with holy oil, and then touched with flame obtained from a sacrificial fire, to purify from the taint of her impure life; in her hands are placed the toolsi flowers, and her body is robed in pure white; after which she is made to repeat a hymn praying that as she has consecrated her body to the service of the gods, so may her soul be freed from rebirth and reunited to the Infinite Soul. If she is too feeble to repeat this prayer, the priests chant it in her dying ear. When life becomes extinct she is carried to a quiet spot in the vicinity of the temple, burned, and her ashes buried then and there. Sometimes a fellow-sister will plant a toolsi or moghree tree on the site, but no monument ever marks the spot where these poor priestesses of passion are cremated. These devotees are never taken in marriage; they are looked upon as the brides of their various deities; they are generally childless. If a woman happens to have a child, however, she is sole arbitress of its fate, and in no instance has she ever been known to dedicate it to the life to which she has been doomed. She generally hands it over to her parents or nearest relatives as a substitute for herself.

There are hospitals and asylums for the sick, infirm, and aged of this class of women, though from all I could learn very few arrive at old age. The Cusban, or lowest class of dancing-women, is very largely recruited from runaways from these Hindoo temples, and it is said that in course of time they become the most abandoned and desperate of the native community.

It is clear that Leonowens, through the medium of her even and informative tone, intends to highlight the sorry plight of

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small girls drawn, by one means and another, into the dancing profession and class, and she casts an open frown on the temple tradition of South India. Joseph Moore’s account of a dance performance in Bombay, though it conveys little of insight or appreciation, is interesting because it mentions two dancers who had been part of the troupe brought to the United States by Augustin Daly in 1880. Moore himself was a member of a number of geographical societies, and travelled to India with the photographer George Herbert Watson: In the evening, after dinner, the manager of the bungalow sent for a bevy of Nautch girls, who came accompanied by two musicians. Strangely enough, two of them proved to be members of a band lately exhibited in New York. Having been told that they were to appear before American sahibs, they brought photographs of themselves by metropolitan artists, which they handed us with great delight.

With the baboo as interpreter, we heard the story of their experiences in the New World. The cold winter had caused them much suffering, and one of their number died. They earned comparatively little, having contracted for only a small monthly stipend; but the more experienced lessees had profited by their services. Having donned their finery in a rear apartment, the entertainment began. The costume, which concealed the entire figure, was of light materials in various colors and much ornamented with gold lace. Jingling anklets of silver, bracelets, and rings in the ears and nose constituted the jewelry.

The dance, if such it can be called, was as disappointing as that of the Egyptian Ghawazee; and the songs by which it is accompanied were shrill and monotonous. The movements are simply a series of postures, repeated over and over again.

The late 1870s and the 1880s were years during which many dancers were taken abroad to perform in Britain, Europe,

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and the United States in the course of colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows, as well as on privately funded tours. This aspect of the textual history will be dealt with in the next chapter. Jean de Pontevès-Sabran (1851–1912) was a military officer who visited India in the 1880s in the company of his friend, A.L. De Beylie, also an officer. It was De Beylie who, according to the dedication inscribed in the book about the journey, L’Inde à fond de train, written by Pontevès-Sabran, had instigated and planned the trip for the two friends who were treated to a paid performance of dance at the Villianur Temple, about which the author writes as follows: The daassis, with an almost imperceptible waddling movement, and, all together gutturally singing our praises (as someone explained to us) to the rhythm set by the orchestra, gracefully balanced their beautiful arms above their heads, which they encircled with their slender fingers while swivelling and twisting their hips, pivoting on their petite little feet, leaping forward, then slowing down their mimicry and singing. They approached us, moving away again just as they brushed the very tips of our moustaches, mirroring in our pupils their own long velvety eyes. So far from being nude like the dancers of Aden, the bayadères dancing before us are fully clothed—even too heavily clothed from an aesthetic point of view—so that the cloths of silk which veil them allow nothing but their extremities to be seen.

Their necks are hung with rich collars, their hair is woven through with an equipage of jewels and chains, at their left nostrils hang rings of gold with pendants of pearl and emerald; their arms are covered with bracelets, and their ankles, like their big toes, are encircled by silver rings. We noticed that their nails are well manicured, and painted pink. Gentlemen, these priestesses of Shiva deny themselves nothing …

One of the points of interest in Pontevès-Sabran’s account is his allusion to the nearness of the dancers to the spectators

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in the course of the performance, a feature that we also find in other records of dances given privately for paying individuals. The sense is created that the dancers were performing in a tone of intimacy that is absent of from larger, more public performances. And, as in other written records by Europeans, there is a bemused enumeration of the masses of jewels and ornamentation worn by the bayadères, a circumstance sometimes used to insist on their wealth and the high payments which they demanded for their performances, usually arranged by the temple priests.

Figure 9.1 Depiction of a Villianur dancer by Jean de Pontevès-Sabran, in L’Inde à fond de train, 1886.

Henri François de Valori-Rustichelli (1834–1898), the Prince of Valori, visited India in the late 1880s, and was much received

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by local royalty. His experience of the dance, though viewed in all the best circumstances, does not seem much to have impressed him: The costume of the dancers consists of brightcoloured silk pantaloons decorated with borders and embroidery of silver, long enough only to allow an occasional glimpse of the rich circlets around the ankles … the rhythm of the bayadères is exceedingly monotonous, and the dragging of their feet is graceless. Each dance tells a story in mime, with titles such as The Serpent Charmer, The Water Carrier (this one would be a success in Auvergne), The Flying Stag …

The tone is one of ridicule and even contempt, which was certainly one kind of reaction by European spectators, though it was far from being the only kind. Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), the well-known orientalist and Indophile known chiefly for his poem on the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, gives an impression quite different in his easy, gracious, and appreciative section on the nautch: On the evening of our visit to the city of Poona and to the sacred hill of Parvati, we were invited to a nautch dance at the house of an old pupil and most esteemed friend, Mr. Dorabji Pudumji. It is the custom on festive occasions to illuminate the gardens and house-fronts with numberless oil-lamps set on pyramidal stands, or suspended in the trees. A flood of light, therefore, welcomes the guest on arrival, and he passes into spacious apartments equally bright, with candles in brass buttis, or handsome glass chandeliers. There is nowhere greater grace or cordiality of greeting than among the educated families of India; but, in truth, this is the land of fine and noble manners, and, from the cultivated Parsee and Mohammedan to the peasant and the peon, the Western traveller may receive, if he will, perpetual lessons of good breeding. The ladies of my old friend’s family were ranged round the large central room in dresses of light gauzy muslins

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or silks delicately embroidered, and dyed with all the loveliest tints imaginable, rose colour predominating. The effect was like a garden of beautiful flowers. The gentlemen wore black coats and hats of the well-known Parsee fashion, with trousers of crimson or white. In the centre of the apartment sat the two nautch girls, Wazil-Bukhsh, a Mohammedan, and Krishna, a Hindu, both amazingly arrayed in skirts of scarlet and gold, with saris of bright hues, plentifully spangled, tight gilded trousers, and anklets of silver and gold bells, which make a soft tinkling at every movement of the small brown feet. Behind them stand their three musicians, one playing the saringi, a sort of violin, the other the tamboora, a deep-sounding kind of violoncello, and the third provided with a bass and treble drum tied round his waist on an ornamented scarf.

The girls rose to their feet, salaamed, and one of them began a slow pas, advancing and retreating with rhythmical waving of hands and measured beat of foot, which the other dancer then repeated. Next followed a song, or series of songs, delivered in high head notes, and principally of an amatory character. ‘My beloved is absent, and by day there is no sun in the sky, no moon for me at night! But he is coming, ‘ek kath Khali’—‘with one hand empty’—‘yet in that he carries me back my heart.’ Then Krishna sang the ‘Taza ba Taza,’ the musicians advancing and retreating with her tinkling paces, leaning over the absorbed performer, and seeming in the intensity of their accompaniment to nurse the singing and draw it forth note by note. After this the Muslim girl and her Hindu sister executed together a famous dance called the ‘Kurrar,’ which consists of a series of character pictures. They placed coquettish little caps of spangled velvet on their black hair, and acted first of all the Indian jeune amoureux, adjusting his turban, stroking his moustache, and pencilling his eyebrows. Then it was Govinda, one corner of the sari twisted up to represent the bansula, on which the

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light-hearted god piped to the shepherdesses, and Radha listening and singing. Next—to the same neverending rise and fall of the amorous music—Wazil Buksh became a love-sick maiden in the jungle, picking blossoms to fasten in her hair, and Krishna followed, enacting a serpent-charmer. Blowing on the beaded gourd that snake music which brings the hooded cobra forth from his deepest hole, she swayed her lithe body over the imaginary reptile, chanting the notes of the dreamy, bewildering, beguiling song; bent herself over the half-entranced snake, coaxing him out with long, low, weird passages of wild melody, until the charm was supposed to have triumphed, the serpent was bewitched and captured; whereupon Krishna rose to her feet and, drawing the glittering fringe of her sari over her forehead, expanding it with both hands, so as to resemble a cobra’s hood, she finished with the snake-dance, amid cries of ‘Shabash’ (well done), which were acknowledged with deep salaams.

We were favoured after this, upon special request, with the Holi and the Wasanta songs, albeit not of the season; for Hindu singing is always more or less religious, and there are certain of these melodies set apart for the time of year, and for the daylight, and others which must never be given except after the hour of midnight. When the first portion was concluded the mistress of the house hung ‘hars,’ or garlands, of sweet-scented blossoms on the necks and wrists of the nautchdancers, since it is the custom always to honour them in this way before any other guests. Nor does anybody slight or abuse these Deva-dasas, or ‘servants of the god,’ though their profession is perfectly understood. In Southern India the nauchnee is married solemnly to a dagger, by a ceremony called Shej, and lives afterwards as a bhavin, dedicated to the temple and the dance. But because many of them can read, write, and are in fact the cleverest and most accomplished, as well as the most generous of their sex, the Hindus have come to shudder

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at the idea of education for their wives, and this is one of the greatest obstacles to female instruction.

While they rested, and munched betel-leaf, a skilful player from Canara discoursed singular passages upon on eight-stringed sitar, accompanied by a boy upon the tamboora; and afterwards followed sweetmeats, and attar of roses, whereupon some of us had had enough, and we made adieux. The natives will, however, sit out whole nights, listening to such music, and watching the soft movements of the nautchnees, which are the more interesting, of course, the better they are comprehended …

Figure 9.2 Photograph of ‘Nautch Girls’ in Edwin Arnold, India Revisited, 1886. (Photographer: E. Taurines, Bombay).

The professional politician, Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Governor of Madras from 1881 to 1886, though he does not dwell much on the nautch, shares a little anecdote relating to the versatility of the indigenous dance practice. The incorporation into its repertoire of Western musical items would later be subsumed as nottuswaram dances: At a nautch this morning, in the Fort of the Mandasa Zemindar, Mr. Goodrich said to me, ‘Do you recognise

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the air to which they are dancing?’ It was ‘Malbrook se va-t’en guerre.’ Bussy taught it to the dancing-girls of Vizianagrum, and they to their neighbours.

From The Heathen Woman’s Friend, in an article from 1887, we get a picture of the common occurrence of dances in the streets of India, in this case in Kanpur: The service begins. The first prayer is being offered, when, suddenly, horribly discordant sounds bawd forth, nearly rupturing our ear-drums. It proceeds from a score of native musical instruments, such as horns, trumpets, fiddles, shells, cymbals, tom-toms, all braying their loudest, without reference to tune or pitch, but the time is perfect. This having passed along, the voice of the minister is again audible. Then a dog-fight begins in the distance, and nears the church. They are big, savage animals, and want a quiet place for a few ‘rounds,’ and so they rush into the church vestibule to finish the fray. The sexton manages to drive them out after a while. Shortly after this a child in the bazaar begins to howl and scream; somebody is beating it, for I hear the cruel blows fall. Someone interferes, and the child is dragged away. All is peaceful again for a time, and then another band strikes up. It belongs to a troop of itinerant nautch girls, who are dancing and posing before a crowd of spectators in front of the church. One of our native brethren goes out and finally persuades them to ‘move on,’ but not before some fifty of our congregation have rushed out to see the show …

Though discordant voices are muttering and threatening the whole tradition of dance throughout India, one sees from this kind of article how very much alive was dance in all its forms, from the temple, court and salon performances in wealthy homes, to manifestations in processions and in public spaces generally. In 1886, in an article apparently originally written for The Living Age, as an introduction to the dancers then performing at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, Devendranath

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Das provides the following level-headed account of the ‘nautch-girls’ of India: Nautch, or dancing girls, were beheld with great astonishment by the early European travellers in India; and, though now disparaged and neglected by Europeans, they form one of the greatest sources of amusement and diversion to the natives of India, and as objects of curiosity they are not destitute of interest. They are professional dancers, and belong to a particular caste, which is considered as similar to that of the snake-charmers and jugglers. Like the same class of women in Ancient Greece—where they were employed to enliven banquets and festivities at private houses—they are commonly selected for their great personal beauty, the elegant contour of their limbs, the lightness of their forms, the ease and gracefulness of their movements, the fineness of their voice, and the sparkling vivacity of their temper. They are all handsome, and some of them are possessed of extraordinary beauty. Their soft, dark eyes, and their flowing raven hair are bewitching; and many expert European dancers have been struck with astonishment at the wiry movements of their limbs.

These girls are taught their art from their childhood, and have to go through a severe course of training before they are allowed to appear at entertainments. Many of them hardly deserve the appellation of girls, as nautch girls are often seen in India performing with their grownup daughters. Most of them, however, are young and unmarried, and it is in the interest of the profession that they should remain in the state of maidenhood. The dancing girls generally sing as they dance, and they are invariably accompanied by musicians playing on instruments resembling the violin and guitar. Their dances require great attention, their feet being adorned with anklets and other ornaments, from which hang small bells, which act in concert with the music. Two girls usually perform at the same time. Their steps are not

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so mazy or active as those of the European dancers, but they are much more interesting; and their songs, the music, and the motions of the dance combine to express love, hope, jealousy, despair, and the passions well-known by lovers, and easily understood by those who are ignorant of their language. Their songs are often melodious, and there is a great seductive charm in their sweet languishing strains.

Respecting the dress of the dancing girls, a little difference is noticed as we descend from the north to the south of India. In general their dresses are very rich and gorgeous; and sometimes there is such an enormous quantity of coloured petticoats and trousers, so many shawls wrapped round their waists, and such a variety of skirts peeping out below each other, that their figures are almost entirely hidden. Perfumes; elegant and attractive attire, particularly of the head; sweet-scented flowers intertwined with exquisite art about their beautiful hair; a multitude of ornamental trinkets, adapted with infinite taste to the different parts of the body; a graceful carriage and measured step, indicating luxurious delight—such are the charms of these enchanting damsels. Some of the young dancing girls from Cashmere possess such surpassing beauty, grace, and elegant accomplishments, that it is difficult to convey by words any tolerable idea of them. As to the character of the nautch girls, there seems to be very little difference of opinion about it. There are many, no doubt, among them who are as respectable as any other class of women, and who are made to adopt their profession by compulsion; but the dancing girls in India generally bear a character that will not stand much examination. They lead an irregular course of life: respectable Hindoo women would not appear thus before the public. They have no social position, belonging to a low caste; and they lead a life which is exposed to the worst temptations and vices.

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Nautch girls are paid according to celebrity as to their beauty, fine voice, and skill in dancing. Their services are engaged at weddings and all principal festivals. Native princes have nautches at their palaces almost every evening; the maharajahs, rajahs, zemindars, and other wealthy individuals being their chief patrons. The liking for these dances is sometimes carried to an extreme point. Some of the Hindoos, as well as the Mahomedans, in a spirit of rivalry or infatuation, make the girls dance on extensive tables of elaborate workmanship borne on the shoulders of bearers of a very low caste, called Kahars. These professional female dancers used to earn incomes as high as those of the Ministers at the Courts of the native Kings in their palmy days. In modern times a girl has been known to refuse 10,000 rupees, or about 1,000 sterling, for performing three nights at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad. At some of the poojahs, or great religious festivals of the great Hindoo families of Calcutta, dancing girls of repute used to be retained a month previous to the festival, at a fee varying from five hundred to a thousand rupees each for three nights. But these days of pride and prosperity are fast passing away; and a nautch girl of not exceptional celebrity can now be engaged in India for an evening for fifty rupees or a little more.

It seems that Das was living in London at the time of his writing this piece, and, like most of the other Indian writers dealing with the dance in this period, and later, he shows a distinctly Westernized conception of the vocation and art, though he deals temperately with the moral aspect. The same is true of William Henry Davenport Adams (1828– 1891), the prolific English writer and journalist, who recalls the notion of the nautch in or about 1887 in an objective and blasé manner: A ‘nautch party’ is a recognized form of receiving friends; and evilly as it sounds in English ears, we are bound to say that the taste of the most fastidious spectator is seldom offended …

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Having taken our places on the seats of honour prepared for us, rose-water, flowers, and betel-nut are successively presented. These preliminaries happily over, a nautch-girl makes her appearance, at the head of a cortège of musicians. Three of the latter squat upon the floor, and proceed to elicit from a tom-tom, a triangle, and a two-stringed banjo, an exceedingly doleful, not to say discordant music, the characteristic of which is that it consists of a single two-barred phrase, continually repeated. The nautch now advances into the centre of the room, and moves her hands and feet, slowly and gently, to the plaintive cadence of the orchestral accompaniment. After a while, she breaks forth into a kind of recitative, which gradually increases in force and spirit, producing a corresponding acceleration of the movements of the feet and hands. This performance at an end, a second performer steps forward, and goes through very similar evolutions to those of her predecessor. Her dress is of a peculiarly gorgeous description, from which we infer that she enjoys greater distinction in her profession; and her performance is decidedly more dramatic, while the accompanying or explanatory recitative is given with much greater energy. This, however, may be accounted for by the difference of theme. She is narrating a story of love which has not run smoothly; while her companion had simply to moralize on the Divine compassion, as exemplified in the date tree, which drops its fruit to the ground for the benefit of the poor. At length the two performers advance together, and a kind of duet or dialogue ensues, in which the one solicits the love the other seems reluctant or coy to give. The pantomime is expressive, but it is still accompanied by a droning chant; and as we weary of it, the two nautch-girls are liberally rewarded and bidden to retire. If we have shown no great interest in the performance, the rest of the company have exhibited less, sitting all the time with blank faces, and in complete silence, as if they had no concern whatever in what was going on. This is not to be wondered at, when we reflect that no

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women are present, and that the nautch is an amusement which does not improve upon repetition.

If we are afterwards introduced to the ladies of the family, we observe that they are splendidly attired in Kashmir shawls, embroidered silks, and a profusion of jewellery. But as conversation is contrary to etiquette, and a silent interview has no particular charms, we are glad when, after a due exchange of salutations, we are at liberty to take our leave.

Lt. Gen. E.F. Burton of the Madras Staff Corps, recalls the sight of a ‘a plump of nautch-girls’ at Bhowani, around 1877, and gives another example of their adoption of European melodies, in this case the national anthem: The public bungalow, or rest-house, at Bhowany is a peculiar one. It was in reality a good upstory dwellinghouse, built upon the foundations of old walls appertaining to a temple, and was erected many years ago by a civilian of the old school. He lived in native style, as many people did sixty or seventy years ago, and he left his mark behind him, not only by building this house, but also by establishing a corps de ballet, i.e. set of Nautch girls, whose accomplishments actually extended to singing ‘God save the Queen’ (King it was, by the by), and this has been kept up by their descendants, so that in 1852, when I first visited the place, I was greeted by the whole party, bedizened in all their finery, and squalling the National Anthem as fervently as if they understood it, which they did not.

… Anon comes a marriage procession, or rather, among Mahomedans, a procession in which are carried the presents which are given on such occasions, the bride’s paraphernalia, &c., on brass dishes and trays covered with embroidered kerchiefs. The bearers are a long string of coolies, both men and women, with their loins tightly girded for fast walking, and are preceded by a party of musicians, making a most horrible discord (but to native ears sweet music) with horns and all kinds of tooting instruments, tom-toms, &c.

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Behind this straggling procession (for Indian file is the rule on such occasions) a plump of nautch girls are hurrying along, having been engaged for the delectation of the guests at the marriage. Their full plum-coloured or scarlet petticoats, heavily fringed with gold and silver embroidery, and their gay satin ‘cholees’ (tight bodices), and a whole jeweller’s shop of armlets and necklets which they wear, also the great gold plate which they wear upon the back of their well-oiled and wellpomatumed beads, are all hidden in the jealous folds of the muslin garment (answering to our ladies’ dust-cloaks) which wraps them round, and permits nothing of their charms to be seen but their bold black eyes and noses ornamented with slender gold hoops strung with jewels, and their ‘twinkling feet’ and ankles encrusted with strangely shaped silver rings and chains, and toe-rings also, to complete their equipment.

Figure 9.3 Original photograph of South Indian dancers used for the photogravure illustration in Gustave Le Bon, Les Civilisations de l’Inde, 1887.

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Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), who qualified as a doctor of medicine, was a man of many gifts and interests, including anthropology and sociology. In 1884 he was commissioned by the French government to travel to Asia and report on its civilizations. As a result of his travels in India in that year, he wrote the work Les civilisations de l’Inde, published in 1887, in which he writes about the South Indian dancers: As for the bayadères, they take part in all the religious and civil ceremonies of the Hindus. The poorer girls, of mediocre graces and very badly dressed, who for meagre payment come to dance among strangers in the salons of town houses or at the homes of certain wealthy (patrons), are not able to convey to the European the idea of those charming creatures enveloped in light gauzes and covered in sparkling jewels, whose pantomime-dance mysteriously and undulatingly unfolds itself in the depths of a temple in South India, and where their principle function is to dance before the gods …

A fond reminiscence of the dance in Calcutta is offered by Alfred J. Bamford, who, as he tells us in his preface, remembers his time in India ‘con amore’. In Turbans and Tails (1888), he sketches the following recollected midnight scene: About midnight a nautch-girl entered, followed by three men and a boy. It was an imposing spectacle. The men varied much in personal appearance, but they had this in common, that each was the ugliest man any of us had ever seen; i.e. each was ugliest when you looked at him. Look at number one, and a more ill-favoured man could not be found. But turn to number two, and he was more ill-favoured in direct view than number one in memory, so we gazed and marvelled. As for the boy, he gave promise, if time for growth were allowed, of qualifying for the place of any of the three who might become unfit for duty. The girl was pretty without qualification. She had good features, a pleasant expression, a graceful figure, and scarcely needed the foil afforded by her companions. Her dress was of a light

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flimsy muslin, as far as my uninitiated discrimination could judge, of a general red tone, and the style of dress gave the impression that she had begun to dress at the top with great care, proceeding downward and becoming tired and negligent. The jewellery that almost muffled up the head and arms was tastefully arranged, the drapery of the body and shoulders hung in graceful folds. Then came a skirt reaching about to the knees destitute of a single line of beauty, and then we passed from the negative to the positive, for below this was a pair of what may be best described as tinsel-treated water-hose of small diameter, but, judging by their horizontal folds, of enormous length, which were prevented from coming over the feet by two exceedingly clumsy anklets with bells, which we hoped would by their melody make some amends to the ear for the offence they were to the eye. Two of the men carried stringed instruments, the boy a pair of cymbals, and the third man, when he entered, appeared to be carrying a large baby. The bundle which so appeared when lowered into position, was found to contain two tom-toms and a pocket handkerchief of the size of a shawl or tablecloth. This pertained to the danseuse though from its size and weight there was an obvious advantage to her in letting her attendant take charge of it with his tom-toms.

And now the performance began. At first the girl stood perfectly still while the music indulged in some preliminary flourishes. After a while—it seemed to us a long while—she showed signs of movement, slowly, as an awakening serpent unfolds itself, both arms were extended—very gracefully; and then a few steps were taken forward very ungracefully, the feet being stretched along the ground, and then the heel brought down heavily to bring out the music of the ankle bells. A half dozen of these awkward steps and she unceremoniously turned round and walked back, making straight for the handkerchief. We thought that she had beaten a retreat

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in consciousness of failure, and pitied her, admiring her courage as she almost immediately faced round with as smiling an expression as the sternest necessities of her profession could demand.

Presently she started again and got a few steps farther with the same stiff and heavy gait, and again turned sharp round, walking back to her original position. This happened repeatedly enough to convince us that our thought of failure was a mistake and our pity misapplied. The ignominious failure had been a conspicuous success. For some time the nautch consisted in a succession of these advances followed by abrupt cessations of all rhythmic movement and quiet nonchalant walks back. In each advance the attendant musicians followed closely on the dancer, retreating backwards still playing when she retreated. After some considerable amount of this she broke out into singing, repeated the former movements to the same musical accompaniment, but with her own vocal efforts added. When we were almost satiated with this, a welcome change took place—welcome partly because it was a change—singling out one of the European ladies among the guests, she settled herself on the floor in front of her. Her exercises were now confined to the swaying of the body, the movements of the head, neck, and arms, and since all that was graceful in movement as in costume pertained to these parts of the body, we lost nothing by this change, but what could well be spared. This kind of thing continued much longer than our enjoyment in it, and we began to want to see if another girl would do as this one did. Eventually our curiosity on this point was gratified. A new group appeared in the doorway—as before in the matter of number and relative attractions. The second girl had not quite so good features as the first, but she made up for this in the possession of an exceedingly happy expression and an intensely mischievous twinkle in her eye.

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She was apparently a wayward, spoiled child, and if the men who accompanied her had ever tried to manage her they had doubtless given up the endeavour some time ago. The two girls met with a loving kind of smile, exchanged a few words in an undertone, during which eyes were flashing and facial muscles active enough to give us the impression that we guests were the subject of the hurried conversation, and that the subject was not being treated with the severe gravity that it demanded. This second damsel was dressed much as the other, except that the general colour of her costume was green instead of red, and that being younger, and probably a shorter time in the profession, she had not had as long an opportunity of loading herself with jewellery. She went through a set of promenadings and singings similar to that of her predecessor, and we went through the same successive stages of interest, indifference, and weariness, probably reaching the third stage sooner in this second case. The only added interest was that derived from occasional contretemps between the fair performer and the gentlemen who were acting as her guides, philosophers, and friends.

Now and then we saw one of them, indiscreetly as we judged, bending a little forward and whispering some suggestions. Immediately the little vixen’s face would catch fire, and she would turn a look on him as though it would be rather a pleasure to consume him. Generally the periodic appeal to the handkerchief gave her the private opportunity she needed of telling her friends what she thought of them, but once or twice, to the amusement of the spectators, she broke off in the middle of the song and dance and compressed into a pithy word or two a good proportion of her mind. We never supposed that what she did just after one of these little episodes was what had been advised, but it might have been. To her succeeded a woman of mature years, dressed in more matronly style, the sight of whom

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gave us quite a different feeling from that excited by these two girls. With regard to them, though we knew both that they were thus earning their living, and that it would not be pleasant to follow out in thought what, by a figure of speech, may be called their home-life, yet when we looked at their merry faces we could cheat ourselves out of serious thought, and could think of them as enjoying the dance more than many of the spectators of it. It seemed in them play rather than work, the exercise of surplus youthful vigour like the games of school children in their holiday hour. But this woman was past playing, she was obviously working, and with the full responsibility of womanhood on her. The way she went about her dancing, not with the vivacity of the others, but with a sense of duty sternly lined on her face, dispelled the previous happy delusion that it was all recreation; and enjoyment in the dance was no longer possible. Here the relation between the woman and the attendants was confessedly reversed. They made no attempt to control or guide her, but humbly listened for any hints she might quietly throw back to them under cover of resorting to the handkerchief, which, for her, as for the others, occupied a large part of the tom-tom performer’s luggage. This woman, at the request of one of the native guests, perhaps partly out of regard to her age and presumed infirmities, very soon seated herself with her musicians before one of the European ladies, so that we saw but little of her dancing and were not sorry. By this time we were tired of a performance presenting so little of variety, which had already stretched out till after two o’clock and which showed every sign of prolonging itself to daylight.

So we took a stroll into the gallery running round the open courtyard where we had left Professor Dashwood, looking down into which we saw that the guests there also were now being entertained with nautch

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dancing. Then we went along the gallery where the girls were accommodated—kennelled would almost seem the suitable term. The ground was partitioned off into squares by fences of pillows, cloths were spread, and there, on the ground, each party in its own square, sat or lay the unoccupied performers, Most of the men were availing themselves of the chance of a sleep, notwithstanding the noise of people coming and going, while most of the girls were sitting up, wide awake, and on the look-out for a chance of a flirtation with any of the guests who might indulge them …

Albert Davin (1846–1920) was a naval officer who visited Indo-China and India in the mid-1880s, and recorded his experiences in his work, Noirs et jaunes (‘Blacks and Yellows’), published in Paris in 1888. He writes about a dance performance viewed at the Villianur Temple: (The dancers) appeared at last, led in by the chief of the Brahmins … Covered in jewels and ornaments, robed in stuffs of silk interwoven with gold thread, their eyelids darkened with sourmah, (they) took up the first position, and, without further ado, the choir of matrons began chanting a nasal prelude. Daubed with ash and vermillion, the Brahmins accompanied them with the sound of the drums, a clarinet, and microscopic cymbals, which were frenetically beaten one against the other.

The dance of the bayadères consists in a succession of hieratic postures, analogues of those which one observes in the reliefs of the temples. Rather than representing a complete action or piece in several acts, as the dances of Cambodia and Thailand do, these dancers present only unconnected poses while the Brahmins execute a dizzying music and the choir chants a recitative taken from the Vedas or the Ramayana. These priestesses, whose role apparently consists in enhancing the religious festivals, reside within the temple precincts …

Davin interestingly states that the dance postures are imitations of the temple reliefs, usually seen in numbers on the

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gopuras. It may be the case that he is referring to the sculpted karanas, though this seems unlikely, as the Kameeswarar Temple at Villianur does not have these sculpted dance postures. His reference to the ‘unconnected poses’ is of course incorrect, though it is possible that he may have been witnessing a performance of nritta or pure dance, in which no sequence of representative drama is present.

Figure 9.4 Faded etching showing Villianur Temple dancers, in Albert Davin, Noirs et jaunes, 1888.

In 1889, Dayaram Gidumal (1857–1927), scholar, judge and reformer, refers briefly to the dancers in a reformist dialogue in The Status of Women in India: It is only the joylessness of a people, that could have made the Nautch a pleasurable mode of passing an evening. This result is a direct consequence of India having withdrawn, from the commerce of society, the element which Nature has provided to brighten, purify, and elevate it; and Nature, indignant at the affront, has retaliated by the infliction of the Nautch as the great national amusement. The Greeks had their hetaerae, and we have our Naikins, and the origin of the latter is the same as that of the former.

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A year later, the American Protestant minister, Rev. Edwin McMinn (1851–1923), wrote about the moral plight of the ‘nautch-girl’ in a story intended for young readers, Nemorama the Nautchnee: … The dancing was done by nautch-girls, hired for the occasion out of establishments in which they were carefully trained in all the arts necessary to make their performances pleasing to the eyes and ears of their audiences.

A nautchnee must have bright eyes, regular white teeth, long hair, and form and features of perfect symmetry. They were a class below caste, and mostly of unknown parentage, sacrificed to feed the licentiousness of men. Many of them were from Cutch, Cabool, Cashmere, and Rajpootana, having been taken from their homes when little children, and because of their beauty purchased to be trained for this kind of a life. Their beauty and culture often made them attractive to rajahs, or wealthy nabobs, who would pay as high as five thousand dollars for one to grace their harem. Admired although many of them were, for their beauty and skill, they were not happy. They were like lost waifs upon the sea of life, the better ones living in dread apprehension as they saw multitudes of their number going down beneath the waves of vice …

By the beginning of the 1890s, Sir John David Rees, a talented civil servant in Madras, official translator from Hindi, Persian, Tamil and Telugu, Under-Secretary in the Madras Government, and member of the Governor General’s Council, recorded in his diary of official travel an incident of public anti-nautch activism: Another address was received from a body of red-hot social and religious reformers, who wished to abolish religious processions among other things, which would have a serious effect, I imagine, on the Hinduism of the people. They also wished to abolish dancing girls, who,

References

they said, originally resembled the vestal virgins—a statement which, I think, would take a good deal of proving.

These small initial public agitations, encouraged by the writings of the Indian social reformers and their Western, largely Christian missionary, allies, would lead by the 1890s to the unleashing of storms of protest and activist tactics that would damage irreparably the substance and essence of the entire tradition of dance in India. Before turning to some texts that illustrate these developments, I will make a brief detour, in the next section, to the colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows in which Indian dancers became involved in the United States, Britain, and Europe.

References

1. Vasu, Sivachandra, The Hindoos as They Are: a description of the manners, customs, and inner life of Hindoo society in Bengal, Calcutta: W. Newman & Co., 1881.

2. Mantegazza, Paolo, Indien, aus den Italienischen von H. Meister, Jena: H. Costenoble, 1885. 3. Kuppusvami, Every-Day Life in South India; or, the story of Coopooswamey: an autobiography, London: Religious Tract Society, 1885.

4. Hield, Mary, The Land of Temples; or, Sketches from our Indian Empire, London: Cassell, 1882. 5. Vincent, Frank, Through and Through the Tropics: 30 000 miles of travel in Polynesia, Australasia, and India, New York: Harper & Bros., 1882.

6. Jolly, Julius, Eine Reise nach Ost-Indien, in Deutsche Rundschau, Bd. 39, 1884. 7. Leonowens, Anna Harriette, Life and Travel in India; being recollections of a journey before the days of railroads, Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, c. 1884. 8. Moore, Joseph Jr., The Queen’s Empire; or, Ind and her Pearl, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1886.

9. Pontevès-Sabran, Jean de, L’Inde à fond de train, Paris: Société anonyme de publications périodiques, 1886.

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10. Valori-Rustichelli, Henri François de, Don Carlos dans les Indes, Paris: Calmann Levy, 1886. 11. Arnold, Edwin, India Revisited, London: Trübner & Co., 1886.

12. Grant Duff, Mountstuart E., Notes Kept Chiefly from a Diary in South India, 1881–1886, London: J. Murray, 1899.

13. The Heathen Woman’s Friend, vol. 18–19, 1886–1888.

14. Das, Devendranath, Sketches of Hindoo Life, London: Chapman and Hall, 1887.

15. Davenport Adams, W.H., India Pictorial and Descriptive, London: T. Nelson, 1888. 16. Burton, E. F., An Indian Olio, London: Spenser, Blackett, 1888.

17. Le Bon, Gustave, Les civilisations de l’Inde, Paris: Firmin, Didot & Cie., 1887.

18. Bamford, Alfred J., Turbans and Tails; or, sketches in the unromantic East, London: Low, 1888.

19. Davin, Albert, Noires et jaunes: paysages, cérémonies, traits, Paris: Perrin, 1888.

20. Gidumal, Dayaram, The Status of Women in India, Bombay: Fort Print Press, 1889.

21. McMinn, Edwin, Nemorama the Nautchnee, New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1890. 22. Rees, Sir John David, Narratives of Tours in India made by his Excellency Lord Connemara G.C.I.E., Governor of Madras, 1886–1890, Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1891.

Chapter 10

A Detour to the Ethnic Exhibitions and Shows: 1880s–1920s In the late 19th century, Indian dancers were increasingly brought out to Europe, usually as performing artists taking part in wider colonial exhibitions or ethnic shows (Völkerschauen), but sometimes also by private entrepreneurs capitalizing on the new interest in the ‘nautch-girl’. In this section, I will look briefly at some of these events and the press reports that covered them in more or less stereotypical terms, or by the easier expedient of shared articles that appeared in several press publications at the same time. The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London which ran for almost six months, from 4 May to 15 October, had been the brainchild of the Prince of Wales himself. His expressed opinion of the venture was that it should ‘stimulate commerce and strengthen the bonds of union now existing in every portion of her Majesty’s Empire’. It was to be a far more ambitious undertaking than the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851, whose complex layout and sheer variety of exhibits would provide for visitors a view of Indian life, customs and, above all, commercial productivity fully representative of the realities obtaining in India itself. Though the chief aim of the venture was no doubt to stimulate commercial activities and investment in the colonies, and especially in India—whose production of fine crafts was particularly Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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appealing to the Morrisian ‘crafts movement’ in Britain at the time—the exhibition naturally also paid attention to various aspects of Indian culture, including, as always, Indian dance. The attitude towards Indian dance and dancers was by 1886 not only ambivalent but actually confused. On the one hand, the public was keen to see the ‘genuine’ dancer of India, about whose mysterious powers of attraction so much had been written in colonial accounts, and, on the other, there was the actual experience which involved such disparate responses as passionate eulogy, moral obloquy, and frank disappointment. But the mystique-bound curiosity remained, and it was reported in The Indian Mirror writing about the earlier ‘Liberty’s Indian Exhibition’ in November of 1885, which had been a resounding financial failure, that many visitors tried to touch the ‘bewitching dancers in doubt as to whether they were the real article …’

Figure 10.1 Arthur Hopkins, illustrations in The Graphic, 6 February, 1886, showing dancers who performed at the Colonial and India Exhibition in Kensington in that year.

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Much emphasis was therefore laid by the British press on the ‘authenticity’ of the Indian dancers who had already arrived in London by the winter of 1885, and who were scheduled to perform at the Albert Palace. As The Manchester Times put it in October 1885: The chief and crowning attraction of this invasion will be the nautch girls, who will pose and gesture, glide, duck and swim, which they call dancing—and why not?—all to the weird strains of native airs played on native instruments, tom-toms, and own cousins to zithers and such like …

The Pall Mall Budget, whose reporter interviewed a group of dancers brought to perform at The Gaiety and other theatres, and who had arrived at their lodgings in London at the end of 1885, featured an illustrated article: … On Saturday, the real Nautch girl, of whom so much has been heard, will make her first bow to a Gaiety audience—not one Nautch girl but quite a number of these dark-skinned beauties, who form part of the Indian dramatic company …

… Mr. Poole was kind enough to introduce me to Mr. Nazir, his acting manager, who in turn presented me to the Nautch girls and the several members of the company. ‘They have only been on English shores for twenty-four hours, and have not yet settled down; but I am sure they will be glad to see you.’ … I soon found myself in a dark, narrow passage, pervaded by a strong and overpowering incense, not of Eastern spices, but of Western onions (or it may have been garlic). Can it be that the far-famed Nautch girl eats …? But no, why spoil the illusion of my youth? And even Nautch girls must eat, for the fumes of food had crept up from the lower regions. … in a moment I found myself in a long, narrow room in which was a weird medley of Mahommedans and Hindoos … Two or three of the ladies were lolling about

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in the room, evidently not yet accustomed to their new surroundings, attired (they cast rather envious glances at the ulsters which the gentlemen wore buttoned up to their throats) in dark, flowing stuffs, relieved by straggling bits of white muslin, their jet-black hair done up in a neat coil and falling in a beautiful coil half-way down their backs.

… (we) proceeded up a flight of steps at the top of which the nostrils were assailed by an agreeable odour of musk, and the eyes were met by four of the Nautch young ladies in slight déshabille (not being prepared for visitors), clad in dark draperies and light Indian gauzes, with a look of curiosity in their great black eyes. Having been presented at the top of the stairs to the ladies with the jet-black hair, the gazelle-like eyes, the ivory teeth, with rings in their noses, rings in their ears, bangles on their wrists, and bells on their toes, I passed through the open door into another large room …

… Then one of the Nautch girls came in, carrying a really lovely Indian baby (rising two) in her arms, and made a salaam … We then held conversation together in stage whispers, which need not be repeated, and she was induced to execute for me one of those Nautch pas which were wont to delight the eyes of H.R.H and staff years ago. The fiddler then seated himself and tuned up, the drummer tuned his instrument and took a place on the floor, the Nautch girl entered, having changed her workaday garb for the ample folds of gauzy muslin and red stockings. She fixed the rings on her feet, and giving a motion to the orchestra began a sort of slow step dance, which she accompanied by a low, monotonous chant, rising as the music grew quicker into a loud but musical cry of great volume, the body moving in snake-like contortions, the motion of the neck and legs changing from time to time … The lady whose portrait appears on the preceding page hails from Tanjore, and is a famous danseuse …

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There can be no doubt from reports of the time, which speak of the dancers’ ‘soft dark eyes’, ‘flowing raven hair’ and ‘darkskinned beauty’, that their physical magnetism was largely valued above their performing art. They were viewed, in a word, as lovely curiosities by the male reporters who interviewed them and for some of whom they danced in private. The notion of their personal sensuous attractiveness was sometimes counterbalanced by reports that insisted on the respectability of the art itself. But the general tone remained of the kind that was struck by The Era in an article from December 1885, which noted that: … the nautch girl is a being of loveliness not entirely unassociated with impropriety and a lavish display of her ‘personal advantages’. There is a sensuous charm in her every movement, and by her voluptuous attitudes she enthralls the senses …

While The Daily News opined:

Touching the nautch girls at Langham-place, many visitors seem to be in doubt as to whether they are the real article … they appear to have expected something different—something more in accordance with the sensuous notions that have been poetically suggested by the Oriental dance …

Soberer articles appeared too, such as the piece on the dancers published in The Living Age carrying an article from the St. James’s Gazette, in March 1886: Nautch girls and their performers have often been described by European travellers in India. The following account of them is interesting as being written by a native gentleman, resident in London at present:

‘As the nautch-girls of India now exhibited at two or three places of amusement in London form one of the chief items of the Christmas bill of entertainments, it may not be amiss to devote a few lines to them for the delectation of your readers. These ‘nautch’ or dancing-girls were beheld with great astonishment by

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early European travellers to India; and, though now disparaged and neglected by Europeans, they form one of the greatest sources of amusement and diversion to the natives of India …’

Actually this article was written by Devendranath Das and was republished in his book, Sketches of Hindoo Life, from which the full extract has already been given in the previous section. It is unlikely that the dancers would not have had some idea of the image of lasciviousness imputed to them in the popular press, and this in itself would have been a distressing experience coupled with the general incomprehension of their art. In December 1885, the reporter for The Era opined of the ‘monotonous’ music that … as it strikes up the nautch girls begin to stamp, very much as a baby elephant does, to the music …

Such complacent ignorance, combined with imperial attitudes of patronization, is seen throughout the European experience of Indian dance whenever it was staged in the home countries, as in the case of the presentations of dancers in Paris at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. The Jardin d’Acclimatation is a 19-hectare amusement park in the Bois du Boulogne in Paris. It was opened in 1860 as the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation with the purpose of acclimatizing exotic animal species to European climate conditions. From 1877, under the directorship of Albert Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire, it turned its attention to the so-called ethnological sciences, and began to exhibit people of all races, mainly from territories under colonial rule. Saint-Hillaire had got the notion of this kind of ‘exhibition of peoples’ (Völkerschauen) from the Hagenbeck family, Carl and his younger half-brothers, Gustav and John. The Jardin d’Acclimatation, following their lead, and ostensibly in the cause of the popularization of ‘scientific’ knowledge, staged thirty-three such exhibitions of human beings between 1877 and 1931. In 1902, 1906 and 1926, the Jardin concentrated on India in the shows it presented on its grounds. These exhibitions involved the construction of fake Indian villages, together with

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pavilions for performances, orientalist copies of Indian temples, huts for housing, and workspaces for artisans, all open for inspection by the visiting public.

Figure 10.2 Poster for the ‘Les Malabares’ ethnic show at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, 1902.

In all of these exhibitions, dancers constituted a large part of the attraction, performing on open-air stages in specially devised spectacular sets that included spaces and equipment for such performers as jugglers, acrobats, snake-charmers and tight-rope walkers. The atmosphere was that of a greatly enlarged outdoor circus. The dancers, even as part of the larger spectacle, attracted much public attention, as can be seen in the report by Le Chenil of 14 August 1902: The Jardin d’Acclimatation, continuing its series of ethnographic expositions … presents a caravan of very high interest composed of fifty Malabars (men, women, children, acrobats, sorcerers, artisans, musicians etc.) Through these ethnographic expositions, on which the Jardin d’Acclimatation holds something like a monopoly, the public is able to encounter and get to know the most diverse and rare types of the human species …

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The great lawns of the garden, where the Malabares are encamped, has been excellently transformed into an Indian village, with original huts … here, the national stew is being cooked … there, a grave teacher gives lessons to the children in the rudimentary beauties of the Malabarese language … nearby, is a street where jugglers, acrobats and prestidigitators execute their marvellous tricks … Let us hasten to see the young and beautiful dancers, executing, to the soft sounds of a bizarre flute, their languid and capricious dances. Their coiffure, formed like a helmet, sparkles with gemstones. On the flexible neck, on the pretty hands, on the childlike feet, shining, in light and neat movements of mimicry, either lively or sleepy, jewels of silver or gold of a singular form. Flutes, castanets and drums die out in a sort of harmonious sigh, the dance ceases and one looks about again …

In its article of 6 September 1902, La France Illustrée has a photograph of two bayadères having their meal in the Jardin, mentioning that their regular repast is a stew of mutton and rice. About the dancers themselves, the article records the following: Their dancers are truly very pretty, resembling bronzes. They dance the classical dance of the singer-poets, the body immobile, the bare feet working so perfectly together that they seem glued to one another, the superb arms laden with heavy bracelets and extended to the front … The charming, adorned head moving from right to left and from left to right seems somehow out of kilter because it does not revolve at the same time as the black eyes which follow it, always deep and lustrous …

The second Indian project was realized by the Jardin in 1906 under the catchy title Caravane Indienne. It was really not much more than a repeat of the 1902 formula, a fact perhaps recognized by the reporter for Le Progres, whose article of

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18 August 1906 repeats verbatim the account of the dancers given by Le Chenil in 1902, but adds this extra paragraph:

Figure 10.3  Dancers at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, 1902.

In summary, their dance recalls that of the dancers who accompanied King Sisowath to Paris, and those Parisians who did not have the opportunity to applaud the dancers of Cambodia will be able to gain an idea of the Cambodian dancers by watching the dancers of the Indian caravan at the Jardin d’Acclimatation …

When again in 1926 the Jardin attempted to repeat the theme in an extravaganza involving 150 Indians, this time called the Village Hindou, but including the usual acrobats, jugglers, prestidigitators, snake-charmers, dancers and various artisans, the exercise fell flat, and although the show still turned a profit, it was clear that a large portion of the public was no longer fascinated by it. An article of 18 April 1926 from the communist newspaper, L’Humanité, offered the headline, A Hindu Village at the Jardin d’Acclimatation … Or Another Mode of Exploiting Colonial Workers.

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The article went on:

There is the same insipid music, the same loincloths, made of metres of red, yellow or brightly coloured percale, the same rings in noses and ears; the skins are bronze instead of black, but that is the only difference offered to our sight … this spectacle which lasts for barely an hour is hardly worth the trouble of mentioning … Under what conditions have these Hindus been engaged? It is difficult to know the truth. Their manager assures us, half in English and half in French, that he has ENGAGED these artists from different parts of British India, that he has signed with each one of them a contract granting housing, food and an appreciable salary … but he remains vague as to the precise terms … discouraged, we try to interrogate one of the Indians … and are able to establish that their costs have been defrayed but that their remuneration is poor, that they are cold, that they are not allowed to leave the grounds, that they regret their sojourn in France, in spite of the faded finery in which they are bedecked. We have perfectly understood that the matter did amuse them for some days but that they are now tired of the spectacle they are making of themselves, with the rabble arriving to contemplate them as if they were curious animals …

Other articles referring to the exhibition do so in a tired spirit of boredom, criticizing the repetitiveness, banality, and lack of proper preparations on the part of the Jardin. An article in L’Illustration of 24 April 1926 begins with the sardonic remark ‘Here it comes again … an exhibition that recalls an alphabet of images and living illustrations for The Swiss Family Robinson’ and goes on to enumerate the tricks of the acrobats and illusionists with the air of something encountered once too often. The dancers are not even mentioned. This is probably one reason why the 1926 event did not generate much press interest. The public had grown tired of

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these spectacles of India and other exotic lands, and the stagemanaged shows themselves would grind to a halt by 1931. Ethnic displays in Europe have a history that pre-dates by several centuries the shows devised by the Hagenbeck brothers. In the time of the Renaissance voyages of discovery—which involved their own share of many eventual forms of commercial and political exploitation—‘exotic’ people from newly discovered lands and continents were brought back to Europe to be shown to the royal courts and the public. Christopher Columbus himself brought back to Europe seven ‘Arawak Indians’, and this trend of shipping newly discovered native races home for display, sometimes as captives, was ongoing throughout that period. The first of the Hagenbeck Indian shows was staged in Berlin in 1898 and was preceded by much ingenious advertising and fanfare in true showman style. Posters for the event were specially designed by the graphic artist Adolph Friedländer, and were designed to convey a sense of the variegated richness of the exotic continent and its people. In almost every press report on these spectacles, the dancers were singled out for special praise, usually involving their physical beauty, agility, and the profusion of jewels they wore. The 1906 program for the Indian show in Amsterdam announced them as follows: … Even lovelier is the spectacle offered to us by the dancers of the princely courts. The dancers, totalling six in number, seem to be so many nymphs of the goddesses of the South. Their dance consists of movements of all the parts of the body, even of the toes and fingers, in accordance with prescribed patterns, designed to express the nature of the action which the dancer represents. Languidly and in stately fashion they move to the measure of the music; their dance is not based on a loose and rapid rhythm but in the adoption of decorative plastic postures which are calculated to accentuate their suppleness and the beauty of their physical forms …

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Figure 10.4  J. & G. Hagenbeck’s ‘Malabaren Truppe’.

There were several performance formats which depended on the type of venue or the preference of the individual event designer. These included set programs that visitors might attend at given times of the day or evening. A program from the Amsterdam Völkerschau gives an idea of the sequence of entertainments, and includes such events as ‘The Festival of the Raja’, ‘The Buddhists (Dance of the Fowls)’, and ‘Tricksters and Magicians’ before the appearance of ‘The Bayadères and Temple-Dancers’. Though these kinds of entertainments, involving jugglers, snake-charmers and prestidigitators were still well received in 1908, they soon became the object of bored and sardonic reports in the press in ways that the dancers never did, even though their own ‘nautch’ performances were usually embedded in programs involving acts of the circus kind. Public and press reaction to the notion of the Völkerschauen themselves showed little variation throughout the period when they were being staged, though there were also notes of dissent. A criticism of an earlier Somali show may serve

References

to indicate that not all those who attended these spectacles were taken in by them. In a novelistic memoir titled Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn nachdem er neunundvierzig Jahre alt geworden war (The Narrative of Gustav Anias Horn after he Attained the Age of ‘Forty-Nine’), the writer recalls that: … these interesting people were displayed behind barriers in a contrived landscape and imitation villages and huts that were supposed to fool us into thinking they were real … I despised them because they pretended to perform stage dances that were genuine … while in fact they were consumed by boredom … and they sold postcards and sugar candies …

The Völkerschauen began to decline in popularity after the First World War, though shows continued to be staged by the younger Hagenbeck brothers (Carl having died of snake-bite in 1913) until the mid-1930s, when John Hagenbeck was commissioned by the National Socialist government to devise an African exhibition. The decline and eventual collapse of the ethnic shows was in large part owing to the coming of the cinema. Documentary and other films set in faraway regions of the colonial world were able more easily and in more detail to satisfy the curiosity of a public wanting to experience the ‘otherness’ of non-European ways of life. The anthropological and ethnological sciences, too, with their new methodologies for in situ observation, outgrew their pseudo-scientific infancies and so rendered the ‘scientific’ value of the exhibitions obsolete.

References

1. Manchester Times, 24 October 1885.

2. Pall Mall Budget, 17 December 1885. 3. The Era, 19 December 1885.

4. The Daily News, 3 March 1886.

5. St. James’s Gazette, March 1886, in The Living Age, vol. 168, January–March 1886. 6. Le Chenil, 14 August 1902.

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7. L’Humanité, 18 April 1926.

8. L’Illustration, 24 April 1926.

9. Jahnn, Hans Henny, Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1959.

Chapter 11

Dancing in India in the Storm of Reform: 1890—1900 In the last decade of the 19th century, the activism of the antinautch movement became both much more intense and more organized than it had been in previous years. It not only developed a set of formulated arguments against the dance and the dancers, but also felt its way into tactics and a strategy that would serve to accomplish its aims. The anti-nautch aspect of the total reformist agenda, though it began as one of the lesser debates in the earlier activism and writings of the reformists, became in the 1890s one of the signature campaigns of their social actions. Though it was linked to other sides of the women’s question in India, such as female infanticide, child marriage, the plight of child widows, and prostitution generally, it soon ascended to being the issue that seemed to ride at the top of their agenda. It was a useful socio-political and public instrument because it could be deployed to attack colonial officials and upper-class Indians who routinely incorporated dance performances into their social and official functions. The dance or ‘nautch’ was therefore a highly visible sign—with its perceived pernicious effects on social morals as a whole—that could be used to popularize the reformist agenda while also serving as a sensationalist activist tool. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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The anti-nautch campaigns developed along several activist fronts, but showed themselves most effective when Hindu reform associations joined forces—though at a distance—with Christian missionary interests, and the records show that there was much cooperation between these otherwise fundamentally opposed religious and moral proselytizers. In the course of the agitations against the dancing communities, the art of dance in India and its traditional religious significance were neither taken into account, nor, as the textual records show, even much understood either by the Christian or the Hindu reformers themselves. Apart from the ignorance of the ritual and artistic intricacies of the various traditions of the individual dances themselves, not much discrimination was made between the very great differences between regional ‘classical’ and even folk dancers. And even when broad distinctions were made, these were of a kind that tended to conclude that, whether the dancer was a North Indian ‘nautchgirl’ or a South Indian ‘bayadère’ or ‘deva-dasi’, she shared with her counterparts throughout India a lifestyle of intolerable vice. Thottakadu Ramakrishna Pillai (b. 1854), a novelist, travel writer, and poet, who had met Lord Tennyson, does not omit mention of their immoral lives in his portrait of South Indian dancers and their custom of concubinage in his 1891 publication, Life in an Indian Village: Those who devote their time to a study of Hindu society and its institutions are very much puzzled to find Dévadasis, a class of women consecrated to God’s work, openly practising prostitution. These wretched people are required to sweep the temple, ornament the floor with quaint figures drawn in rice flour, hold before the idol the sacred light called Kumbharati, dance and sing when festivals are celebrated, fan the idol and do many other similar things. The word Dévadasi literally means servant of God, and it seems strange that a person dedicated to the service of God should lead a low and degraded life.

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Figure 11.1  Postcard showing a South Indian devadasi child, 1890s.

In Kélambakam there are two dancing girls, Kanakambujam (golden lotus) and Minakshi (fish-eyed). They are the Dévadasis of the temple of Kothundarama in the village, and they do service by turns, for which they receive an allowance from the temple endowment. Kanakambujam is the concubine of Rajaruthna Mudelliar, a burly, thick-necked zemindar of a neighbouring village, and Minakshi is in the keeping of our old friend Appalacharri, although at times the Brahmin has no scruples in acting the part of a go-between for some money consideration to those who may wish to buy his concubine’s smiles. There is a good deal of what is termed ‘professional jealousy’ between the two dancing girls, and on this account constant disputes arose between the Mudelliar and the Brahmin, which at last culminated in their being carried

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to a criminal court for settlement. The Mudelliar lodged a complaint with the magistrate against Appalacharri for assault and abusive language; and the Brahmin, knowing that his opponent would be cowed and willing to buy peace at any price, wantonly cited as his witnesses the zemindar’s wife and aged daughter, who lived in a neighbouring village and who therefore knew nothing of the dispute. The magistrate was well aware that the action of Appalacharri was simply vexatious, and was therefore unwilling to order their appearance in court, but the clever Brahmin insisted on their being called to give evidence, as they were the only witnesses that could prove his innocence. The poor Mudelliar had in these circumstances no other alternative but to withdraw his complaint. Appalacharri is even to this day continually harassing his enemy, much to the delight of his concubine, but poor Mudelliar simply bears all this as meekly as possible.

During marriage occasions, when a number of people congregate together to witness the ceremony, Hindu females will not attend on the brides and look after them for fear of being gazed at by the people. Hence the dancing girls act the part of bridesmaids. Their duty is to dress the bride, adorn her with jewels, conduct her to the bridegroom and adjust her posture on the bridal seat. They are also required to dance and sing before the villagers on these occasions.

The reference to concubinage is an important one because it was often misunderstood by reformers and especially by Christians as a form of prostitution in India, which was one of the chief objects of their socially purifying activism. The practice is seldom mentioned by those who refer to the dancers as ‘common prostitutes’, and when it is glanced at in passing, it is seen in itself as a vice, with the patron in at least one case referred to as a ‘paramour’.

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Figure 11.2 A group of dancers from Maharashtra, by Lala Deen Dayal, 1890s.

Throughout this decade one finds regular points in the textual record at which Western writers are simply enjoying the dance, or at least finding it interesting enough to witness and write about afterwards, as in this article in the Canadian magazine, Dancing, in 1894: So much public attention has been recently drawn to the native dancing girl of the East, by the publication and performance of the light opera entitled the ‘Nautch Girl,’ that a description of an actual nautch without occidental accompaniments, which I witnessed this afternoon, may not be without interest to the readers of ‘Dancing’. A pucka nautch is perhaps seen to the greatest advantage at a dazzling reception given in the bewildering palace of some opulent rajah, for surroundings have as much to do with the picturesque effect of the dreamy evolutions of the nautch as staging has to do with one’s impression of a play. But the nautch I saw this afternoon is no appendage to a State ceremonial; it was simply turned on, by a benign native gentleman, for my especial edification. It took place al fresco, in the inner court or quadrangle of the baboo’s bungalow …

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These particular girls belonged to Hyderabad, to the most important of the independent Indian native states. Fixed into holes pieced through the nostrils and upper parts of the ears they wore circular ornaments, enclosing a ruby surrounded by small pearls. Their dark brown skins set off these gewgaws as could no white complexions …

… After chanting another distich, the nautch girl placed one finger coquettishly on her lips and continued the jingling dance, varying it with some steps much akin to the toe and heel in the highland reel, followed by a succession of emphatic backward stamps. To get so far in the nautch took a considerable time, as there was much to droned, much to be reiterated on the tom-tom, and much deliberate clapping to be clacked. That which followed was more pantomimical. After an interval for rest, the danseuse either proceeded with the same raga or suited her steps to the melodic phrases of a ragini …

‘The Nautch Girl’ was a light comic opera first produced at the Savoy Theatre in 1891. It was composed in the vein of Gilbert and Sullivan entertainments, and bore the subtitle ‘The Rajah of Chutneypore’. Though slight in itself, it is true that it both stimulated and drew on an ambivalent interest in Indian dance whose currents remained present in the world of the Western theatre and dance practice. From the light-hearted interest evinced by the writer of the article, who was viewing a form of proto-Kathak dance in Hyderabad, we turn to the reality being acted out in the courts of the Madras Presidency, in which dancers are being charged with the procurement of girl-children for training as devadasis. This is an application to revise proceedings … discharging, under Section 253 … certain persons who were accused of disposing of a minor for the purposes of prostitution and of abetting such offences and to direct further enquiry into the said charges. The case for the prosecution is that the minor girl called Swornam was tied with a pottu and was enrolled in the books or accounts of the temple as a Dasi.

Dancing in India in the Storm of Reform

The defence is that no pottu was tied to the girl and that although the girl’s name was for a time borne in the list of the temple establishment, the purposes for which she was so borne on the lists and employed were innocent purposes such as can constitute no grounds for a charge on an offence of Section 372 of the Penal Code …

The admitted fact is that work of a certain kind in the service of the temple was taken or accepted from the minor from the 10th February to 29th May. Another admitted fact is that the mother (4th accused) of the minor as well as the sister are dancing-girls, i.e. professional prostitutes.

Among the proved, if not also admitted facts, are the following: the second accused … reported that Swornam the minor was competent to dance and sing and should be appointed in the place of Tirumalai, admittedly a Dasi (and) was to receive four maracals of paddy like other Dasis. Exhibit B … shows that orders were given to pay the minor’s salary with effect from the 10th of the previous month, as she had been doing duty … from that date. Exhibit C … shows that an advance of three months’ pay was made to the minor, and to the minor’s sister, admittedly a Dasi, on the occasion of the latter attaining puberty. Exhibits D and E, attendance registers, show that the minor Swornam was entered as attending the temple service on 13th and 14th May, 1890. Exhibits G and F … show that the minor was removed suddenly from the temple service on the 29th May.

… The learned pleader for the first accused, however, sought to support his argument by the classification of temple servants under the following headings, viz.: 1. Dasi; 2. Kovildiyals; and 3. Tiruvelaikarar.

The dancing girls, properly so called, appear under the first head, married women, not dancing girls, under the second head, and the minors appear along with a single male, under the third head of Tirulaikarar.

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Granting that this document appears to make a distinction between dancing girls, properly so called, of mature age, and minors, the fact remains that the minors are included among the servants attached to the service of the temple, that the document Exhibit A expressly speaks of the minor, as having the status of a Dasi, and that the work performed by the minor was work of a kind incidental to the office of a temple Dasi or Devadasi; if it were not such work, why, it may be asked, were the minors after a time be removed on the alleged ground that they were young, not tied with the pottu, and unfit to do work according to the Shastras?

… the question now narrows itself to this, whether her being so employed in the service of the temple was in the light of all the evidence available on the subject, an act which operated to bring about such a change in the circumstances of the minor as to be a disposal of her within the meaning of Section 372, Indian Penal Code. … In the case now before me … the minor … is said to have been or has actually been married since the institution of these proceedings. This circumstance cannot, in my view, affect the question before me. The marriage, if it were one, was admittedly performed for the purposes of, that is, with the hope of defeating this prosecution …

In the case now before me, the acts imputed and proved are the employment of a minor in the service on the grounds expressly stated that she was able to dance and sing and her association thereby with professional prostitutes, her enrolment in the list of salaried temple servants … that is, Devadasies … That the latter term means in its ordinary signification a dancing-girl in a temple has already been seen; that it meant a dancing-girl, in the present case … can scarcely … be seriously disputed …

That the calling of a Dasi on which the minor child had taken the initial steps of entering involves, if not necessarily, yet almost inevitably, a life of prostitution

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is scarcely disputed and if it is disputed it is, it may be said, too late in the day to admit of reasonable dispute. … In my opinion it is not open to reasonable doubt and I think it is reasonably clear that it was the intention of the parties that the minor should, when mature, lead an immoral life …

I accordingly direct that the magistrate do restore the complaint to the file … and proceed to make further enquiry into the complaint against the … accused and to dispose of such complaint according to law.

Figure 11.3 Three devadasis posed in front of a ratha processional chariot, 1890s.

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This restoration of the complaint to the file is dated 23 November 1891. It shows once again the a priori identification of the dancer with a prostitute, and takes no cognisance of the legal requirement to demonstrate this assumption in the case of individual dancers brought to trial. The Indian Jurist, however, is not content only to report on cases involving hereditary dancers. In its correspondence section in 1893, it makes clear its own views on the nautch-girl: Is the ‘common or garden’ nautch-girl a doomed institution? We hope so. Indian reformers appear to be attacking her in earnest, and if respectable persons generally decline to go when she is on view she must soon disappear. We do not believe that the Oriental dancing-woman can seriously affect the morals of the men who train themselves to sit out her silly posturings during the whole of a long night. But, here in India the nautch-girl’s appearance is tolerated, if not regarded as indispensable, by Hindoos not only in the Temple, where she may be said to be at home, but also on occasion in every dwelling-house in the land, and it cannot but be demoralising in a very high degree for honest women to be compelled constantly to rub shoulders with her. The ‘Indian obelisk’ as the Madras Law Times calls her, certainly ought to go, and quickly.

This opinion becomes the object of a little piece of judiciary humour, which finds itself unable to resist a smattering of lighthearted contumely in the editor’s reply: To the Editor of the Indian Jurist.

Sir, I cannot for the life of me make out the meaning of the joke you introduced into your last issue of the Law Times (Madras) calling the nautch-girl the ‘Indian obelisk.’ None of my friends in this out of the way jungle place can help me—will you please come to the rescue and explain? We are all quite sure there must be something very funny in it and we are burning to know.

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Ta-Ra-Ra

Boomdetatpur, 20th June, 1893.

(The jokelet is a very simple one. Writing about the threatened nautch-girl, our contemporary no doubt was in search of a fine phrase and having somewhere seen or heard the somewhat uncommon word ‘odalisque’ dragged it in by the shoulders spelling it ‘Obalisque’. This tickled us hugely. The more so, because the likeness of the Indian temple dancing women to the magnificent creatures who are selected for the semi-official post of concubine to the Sultan of Roum is as the likeness of Monmouth to Macedon—Ed. I.J.)

In the same year, when court judgements on dancers were proliferating and the anti-nautch movement was running red hot, a muddled article on Indian dancers was offered in The Sketch, a London ‘journal of art and actuality’: In Madras at this moment ‘the gossip tongue’s astir with the nautch girl’s life,’ and the Indian Magazine and Review, a very readable monthly, deals with the subject in its current issue. The nautch girl, we are led to believe from this article, is not the divine creature which Mr. George Dance—was not his name, by-the-way, very appropriate as the librettist of Terpsichore?—pictured at the Savoy Theatre a couple of years ago in the opera of that name. To Englishmen her performance is said to be dull, but nautch girls have been from time immemorial inseparable from native entertainments and many religious ceremonies. To realise how intimately the religious instinct of Oriental races has associated females with certain forms of worship it is necessary to revert to very early notions of ritual. The most remote mythological fables of the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hindus, of the Greeks and the Romans have sprung from ideas of the male and female principles being combined in the production of the evident phenomena of nature.

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The great principle of fecundity was deified by these nations as the supreme God, the principle by which all things capable of being are produced, and the earth, rendered pregnant by the flood of some mighty river, or the falling of seasonable rains, was worshipped as His consort. It is easy to comprehend that in the worship of these principles in concrete form, such as the vulgar and unimaginative could appreciate, the temples should require the service of both sexes, and that the myths invented by poets and priests should abound in illustrations of the potency of both the male and the female principle. Dancing before the gods, as a manifestation of rejoicing through faith, was considered meritorious by the Hindus, as also by the Greeks and the Romans. The ample earnings obtained by the dancing girl, and the comparative luxury in which she lives, unfortunately render the profession an attractive one. It is said, in reference to this class at Lucknow, that a first-class nautch woman may have jewels and lace of value from 1000 to 10,000 rupees, that her fee for singing is 15 rupees the evening, and that on the occasion of a birth or a marriage it may be as much as 200 rupees.

At most evening parties among well-to-do natives there is a musical entertainment, vocal or instrumental. and sometimes a nautch, and for visitors to the larger temples, who are willing to pay for it, such a performance is arranged. Native females of respectability do not always relish nautch parties. A very large number of different classes of singers and dancers exist at the present time throughout India. The numbers of the last census will have their significance. Actors, singers, and dancers are returned at 270,966, about half being female, and ‘disreputable’ persons 167,633, of which two thirds are probably women, reckoning upon the proportions shown in some of the provincial returns. Then a large number, no doubt, are unspecified. The large cities are responsible for most of the above.

References

This flippant writing from the metropole, intended perhaps to raise a cynical smile on the faces of its worldly readership, refers to the piece in The Indian Magazine and Review, which ran an anti-nautch article called ‘Indian Dancing Women’ by E.O. Walker: In May last, at a public meeting in Madras of the Hindu Social Reform Association, presided over by the Rev. Dr. Miller, it was resolved that the employment of nautch women at social entertainments has an unwholesome moral influence upon society at large as well as upon individuals, and that it is desirable that public expression should be given to this conviction with a view to the discouragement of the practice. This proceeding has attracted notice in the Indian papers, and has elicited a letter from the Bishop of Bombay, who urges that the performances of dancing women, who are, as a rule, professionally evil livers, involve violation of the sanctity of homes, and are fraught with grave moral issues. It is agreed among Englishmen that such performances are dull, and they are, as a rule, viewed with indifference by them; but they have been from time immemorial inseparable from native entertainments and many religious ceremonies, and though a strict moral sense may lead to the exclusion of nautch girls from the former, the course of Hindu worship does, and will for long continue to, require their presence at the latter, and the abolition of a professional caste, called into existence centuries ago, cannot be at once effected by the mere discountenance of a section of native society possessed of advanced ideas. To realise how intimately the religious instinct of Oriental races has associated females with certain forms of worship, it is necessary to revert to very early notions of ritual. The most remote mythological fables of the Chaldaeans, the Egyptians, the Hindus, of the Greeks and the Romans have sprung from ideas of the male and female principles being combined in the production of the evident phenomena of Nature. The great principle

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of fecundity was deified among these nations as the supreme God, the principle by which all things capable of being are produced; and the earth, rendered pregnant by the flood of some mighty river, or the falling of seasonable rains, was worshipped as his consort …

… the feast of the Floralia at Rome was famed for its shamelessness. To the fête of Diana at Bubastis both men and women voyaged, sang, danced, played the flute and cymbals, and quaffed wine. In India this corruption spread fast, and has never been eradicated; the countenance given to vice by the caste interested in the maintenance of idol worship, has no doubt reacted unfavourably upon the morals of the people. For hundreds of years prostitution has not been regarded as altogether disreputable, and some classes of dancing-women—for example, those of the Kanara and Dharwar districts—have been led to trace their origin to the Apsaras, or female celestial dancers of Hindu legend, and thus to become invested with respectability. The necessity for recruitment of these women led to an infamous practice. One of the first travellers in India who notices it is an Arabian, who wrote about the year 851 A.D. He says that in the part of that country which is known as the Dekhan there were public women, called ‘women of the idol,’ who have from their infancy been devoted by their mothers to the temples on their prayers for offspring being granted. These correspond to the ‘Deva-dasis’ of the Tamil people at the present day …

… It is said, in reference to this class at Lucknow, that a first-class nautch woman may have jewels and lace of value from 1,000 to 10, 000 rupees; that her fee for singing is I5 rupees the evening, and that on the occasion of a birth or a marriage it may be as much as 200 rupees. At most evening parties among well-todo natives there is a musical entertainment, vocal or instrumental, and sometimes a nautch, and for visitors

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to the larger temples, who are willing to pay for it, such a performance is arranged. Native females of respectability do not always relish nautch parties. A very large number of different classes—they can hardly be called ‘castes’— of singers, dancers, and prostitutes exist at the present time throughout India. To describe the distinctions between them would hardly interest the English reader; but bearing this in view, it is nevertheless to be regretted that, morally speaking, little distinction exists … Now, it is not fair to argue by comparing the statistics for India with those for European countries that the moral condition of the former is proved to be less favourable than that of the latter; very likely, in proportion to population, the vicious element is no more predominant in India than elsewhere; but what concerns society in that country is the fact that immorality in the case of performing women is not disfavoured; and, in connexion with religious worship, is positively encouraged. This shameful feature is one against which we might confidently expect that the educated generation of Indians would set its face, and if, as the Bishop of Bombay seems to think, enlightenment is becoming influential in this direction, the fact will gratify all well-wishers of the country.

The juxtaposition of these two articles is instructive in that it reveals a pattern of contrary approaches to the Indian dancer that was to weave itself in Western and Westernized writings on the controversy for the ensuing three decades, until ‘oriental dancing’ was smartly appropriated by occidental dancers who visited India. The article in The Sketch makes a joking reference to George Dance, who wrote the book The Nautch Girl, and appeals to readers who have little taste for the minority moralism that was then being foisted on the Indian dance economy. It follows the approach of the article in The Indian Magazine and Review in relegating the perceived viciousness of the dancers’ praxis and lifestyle to a sexual element last seen in Western religions in the antique ages, the point being that the Christian West has long since left behind this unenlightened aspect of its ritual religious practice.

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The idea is forcibly driven home in an 1892 article, Two Blue Brahmins, in the magazine Home and Country, in which the writer recounts his experience of a kind of strip-tease item called the ‘bee dance’, which was performed by ‘nautch-girls’ only for the ‘Brahmins’ and their initiated friends: … The lingam is the one God worshipped by the Brahmins, who are really Deists, while they cook up for the outside Pantheistic multitude a farrago of absurd legendary nonsense. Their own belief is simple enough, and their practices are probably highly similar to those obtaining in Sodom and Gomorrah. At the great feasts something of their nastiness crops out, as of secrets that cannot be kept, and the vulgar improve upon them, or go a little beyond their pious conscience keepers. Their very brains are permeated with the one idea, and their filthy imaginations seem to defile everything, however simple. Not only are their marriage ceremonies disgusting, but the rites which precede them are still more so. Of course, everyone knows about the infant marriages of Hindustan, after which the betrothed are separated till old enough to pair …

Now, with this sort of thing in common every-day, out-of-door life, one can easily imagine what sort of high-jinks go on when the inventors and supporters of this phallic worship get together in their secret dens. The second degree was conferred on a whole crowd of neophytes together (all of them, of course, as yet unmated husbands—married early, of course, but not paired), and partook of the tantalizing character of the tricks played on the five senses resorted to in initiating the youngsters into the first degree. They were not blindfolded this time, and the chief section of the entertainment was the performance of the bee dance, which is something as different from the regular nautch as described so many thousand times by travellers and ‘old Indians’ as chalk from cheese. It has the same mysterious significance underlying all this lingam worship, and shows its connection therewith in a very

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undisguised form before it is finished. The regular nautch is, as has been often described, a ridiculous shuffle of the feet, with tinkling anklets and waving of the arms, by a damsel often of mature years, painted up to the eyes like a Sioux on the war-path, with repoussé gold plates on her head and no end of nose-rings, ear-rings, bracelets, neck-chains, etc., etc.; clad in a wilderness of garments, and snorting in shrillest notes the famous ‘Tah-za-be-tah-za-now-be-now,’ or perhaps some other ditty, while the tom-tom plays and the surrounding air gets heavy with incense, perfumed smoke from hookahs—where the smoking mixture has less of tobacco than of cannabis indica and other pungent and deleterious ingredients—sandal-wood oil, lotos lilies, cape jessamines, and muttered ejaculations of delight from the seething crowd of natives.

The bee dance begins with plenty of clothes, but instead of one premiére danseuse concentrating all eyes on her, three or more engage in the bee dance, which is a livelier affair. A buzzing noise is made by the girls themselves (for this dance they really are young and beautiful), while the music is brisker. It is a sort of dramatic affair, or ought to be, and is supposed to represent the innocent enjoyments of three unsophisticated damsels, when their propriety is disturbed by the avatar of Krishna in the form of a bee—a bee as hard to catch as a flea; as impossible to frighten away as a fly from sugar—and then the clothes come off one by one, like the garments of a circus rider, while the search for this bee goes on, the girls busily helping each other in very close and particular investigation, and so on till there are very scanty garments left, and then none at all; and then one girl gets stung, lies down and dies, and the others, after unavailing attempts to doctor her, wrap her up and trot her off for burial, and that’s the end of the bee dance. It is singular, and not what might be recommended as a moral show, though perhaps, although so slenderly mounted, no worse in the long run than the Black Crook …

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‘The Black Crook’ was a musical entertainment first produced in New York in 1866, and famous for its scanty costumes. The writer of the article, in concluding his account with this reference, is signalling that, after all, the lusts of India are no worse than their counterparts anywhere else in the world, and especially in the world of the theatre. The tone, though harsh, is not to be taken seriously as in the case of the sober and righteous anti-nautch articles written by serious reformers. Twentieth Century, a New York publication which described itself as ‘a weekly radical magazine’ has an 1892 paragraph titled ‘Lustful Christians’: LUSTFUL CHRISTIANS—The ‘India Messenger’ of Calcutta, referring to an entertainment attended by Sir Charles Eliot and his party for the purpose of witnessing the nautch dance, says: ‘When will Christian governors refuse to be entertained with nautches?’ It adds that ‘the slightest indication of their wishes would put an end to nautches on such occasions.’ And ‘Unity’ adds ‘It is indeed a severe reproach to the “Christianized” inhabitants of India that one of the lowest forms of amusement should receive sanction at their hands, when the better portion of the native population perceives its pernicious effects and would do away with it.’

The paragraph is supposed to be read as a criticism, not of the nautch but of the Christians who find in it cause for scandal and offence. The ‘radical’ reader is encouraged to smile at a sect of hypocrites unable to see beyond their own immediate sexual reactions to the dance, and to condemn those reactions in others attending such performances. Many alternative readings of sexuality in Indian dance and the vocation of the dancers were offered by Western commentators who did not want to view them in the bald terms of promiscuity and licentiousness. One of the zaniest notions proffered (a favourite of Annie Besant) was that devadasis had originally been vestal virgins whose chaste ways had been obliterated by the introduction into India of Greek temple prostitutes, or hieroduloi, by Alexander the Great.

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The fact that many dancers had come under the purview of the Contagious Diseases Act, with its enforced ‘inspection’ of women deemed prostitutes, and its abhorrent ‘lock-hospital’ system, designed to keep British soldiers safe from sexually transmitted diseases, was a source of great outrage to many women’s rights activists, among them the proto-femininst Josephine Butler (1828–1906), who referred specifically to the case of the ‘nautch-girls’: There is a class in India devoted—in fact trained—for prostitution; it is the Nautch girls; they are instructed in dancing, singing, and other accomplishments; and they then become a class such as the Greek women anciently devoted to the worship of Venus. It is certainly a horrible thing to think of; but I am convinced that the life of these Nautch girls is by no means so degrading or wretched as the lives of poor English and Indian women, doomed to be under any form of C.D. acts. There is a certain amount of decency involved even in their dread profession, and they are not made as European women are, mere chattels or instruments. No doubt their periodical feasts are orgies of the most horrible description, but these things are confined to one class; none of the Indian races would tolerate prostitution as organised in European cities …

She goes on to berate the shameful cheapness of the entire system itself: … We know that there is a recognised class of prostitutes in India, but they are a class apart. These Nautch girls and temple girls are too well off to stoop to take the wretched four annas (less than an English fourpence) the ‘regulation price’ which a British soldier is commanded to pay to the half-starved slave who, under military rules, ministers to his lust.

H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society, saw the devadasis as elevated above the reach of the everyday sexuality, even when contrary evidence was present in the form of human offspring:

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The intimacy of the nautch-girls with the gods, which is generally accepted, cleanses them from every sin and makes them in every one’s eyes irreproachable and infallible. A nautcha cannot sin, in spite of the crowd of the ‘celestial musicians’ who swarm in every pagoda, in the form of baby-vestals and their little brothers. No virtuous Roman matron was ever so respected as the pretty little nautcha. This great reverence for the happy ‘brides of the gods’ is especially striking in the purely native towns of Central India, where the population has preserved intact their blind faith in the Brahmans.

Every nautcha can read, and receives the highest Hindu education. They all read and write in Sanskrit, and study the best literature of ancient India, and her six chief philosophies, but especially music, singing and dancing. Besides these ‘godborn’ priestesses of the pagodas, there are also public nautches, who, like the Egyptian almeas, are within the reach of ordinary mortals, not only of gods; they also are in most cases women of a certain culture. But the fate of an honest woman of Hindustan is quite different; and a bitter and incredibly unjust fate it is. The life of a thoroughly good woman, especially if she happens to possess warm faith and unshaken piety, is simply a long chain of fatal misfortunes …

This kind of orientalist romanticism, with its ambiguous stances and meaningless phrases, could not stand as a convincing refutation of the more concrete approach and terminology, and the making of simple, direct social appeals, that had characterized the anti-nautch campaign from the start, and was summarized as early as 1891 in a writing called The Women of India and What can be Done for Them: Nautches—The Subodh Patrika has the following remarks on this subject: ‘Not the least urgent of such subjects of reform is the institution of dancing girls among us. Stripped of all their acquirements, these women are a class of prostitutes pure and simple. Their profession is immoral and they live by vice. Being never

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married they can never be widows. Hence the wedding tie woven by these women is considered propitious and sufficiently potent to confer lifelong wifehood on the newly-married girl. Indeed their presence at marriage and other ceremonies is almost a necessity, and few persons who can afford the expense and are unable to disregard the opinion of their neighbours can forbear to call them to grace the occasion. The dancing girl is every where, it is she who crowns all merriment at all times. If it is a marriage, she gives the finishing stroke to the gaieties of the occasion. If you begin to occupy a house newly built, the ceremony of the day is only brought to a conclusion when the house rings to the noise of her anklets as the phrase goes. Nay, you cannot treat a friend or bid farewell to a departing Anglo-Indian except by her mediation.’ Her immoral influence is thus described:

‘She is the bane of youthful morality. In her rich dress, her trained voice, and the skilful manipulations of her hands and feet, she is the centre of attention to young impressionable minds. If their introduction to her is too early, there is yet no repulsion about it. And the favourable impressions thus early associated with her grow and develop with advancing years. Thus immorality is handed down from father to son.’

Some of the songs sung by the women are highly objectionable. That they should be lewd is to be expected; but this is not the only blot. The Deccan Times quotes the following specimen: ‘Darling, I do not know whom to admire most, God who made you or you who were made by God! No, no, you are the more loveable! The Almighty now repents that he has created you so beautiful, O envious, jealous God!’ &c.

… Little girls are being trained all over India for this immoral and cruel trade, and the police are powerless in presence of it. The editor of this review with other friends who knew, as all who care to know may do,

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that there were many such children being trained in Calcutta, had an interview some time ago with the Deputy Commissioner of Police, who refused to move in the matter, in the present state of the law.

The Calcutta National Guardian thus refers to ‘the traffic in girls carried on in this province’—or ‘the maiden tribute of Indian Babylon.’: ‘That a large number of girls, of a very tender age, are systematically allured away from their homes to minister to the lusts of the wealthy Minotaurs in Calcutta and the principal towns, is a fact on which opinion is not likely to be divided. But no one has yet made any attempt to ascertain the magnitude of this growing evil, which destroys peace and happiness in thousands of peaceful homes, brings disgrace and ruin upon thousands of respectable families, and places a premium on immorality and vice of a most revolting character. It is time we say that an attempt was made to estimate the extent of this organized traffic in girls for immoral purposes, which, to all accounts, seems to have attained alarming proportions.’

A correspondent in the Rast Goftar thus mentions the duty of Europeans with regard to nautch parties, and its probable effects: ‘It is the practice of Governors and Collectors, before accepting invitations to evening parties, to ascertain the kind of company that is invited to meet them. And if only the consequences of their presence at a nautch were plainly represented to them, I feel sure they would further insist on previously scrutinising the programme of entertainments. The moral effect of such an authoritative disapproval could not fail to be great, and we should then soon see the last of nautch parties.’ The Indian Spectator has the following remarks to the same effect: ‘Dancing is an honourable English custom, and it is therefore, I think, that Englishmen in India from the Viceroy down to the Mofussil Magistrate, think a nautch of dancing girls as harmless as dancing

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in the ballroom in the Viceregal Palace. But I think it is a clear misconception of the real nature of the Indian nautch that has led those women of ill-fame to have access into the houses of the highest families in the land, both Native and European. It is time for the Anglo-Indian official classes to realize that nautches are not as pure amusements as they have been led to believe. I wish the Viceroy and the Provincial Governors would be the first in setting an example in this respect by refusing to attend festivities in which nautches form one of the chief points. For the sake of all that is pure, nautch girls should be banished from respectable society.’

The substance of this tract is repeated in the Madras Christian Literature Society’s publication, Papers on Hindu Social Reform, which adds: European Encouragement: The foregoing extracts show how nautches are condemned by enlightened Native public opinion. It is deeply to be regretted that they are now largely maintained by the countenance of Europeans. Every right-minded man should consider it an insult to have a public woman dancing before him as if he enjoyed the sight. For a lady to sanction such entertainments by her presence, if she knew the character of the performers, would be most disgraceful …

It concludes with another passage from the Rast Goftar:

A correspondent of the Rast Goftar makes another appeal to Europeans to the same effect:

‘If now those European gentlemen, and what is worse, ladies, who are so civil as to undergo half-an-hour’s real martyrdom, sitting stiffly while the dusky girls writhe before them to the tune of their own cracked voices—if only they knew, as does every native in the hall including the host, the character of these women, and understood their lewd songs, how far, I wonder, would these same ladies and gentlemen feel grateful to their host. I know that in your Gujarati columns you

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have for years lamented the demoralising effect of nautch parties and the harm they do to the progress of Indian music. And not, indeed, without fruit. For the educated natives have to a great extent now ceased to attend such immoral exhibitions, while in Parsee houses, especially, nautches have happily become things of the past. I doubt if your denunciation against nautches uttered as it was in Gujarati, ever reached our European friends, and it is for them that you should now make a full exposure of the serious risks to public morality of attending nautch parties …’

Though the minds of the reformers were quite made up, the case of the hereditary dancers was not so clear to both administrators and officials of the judiciary, who had to make fine distinctions that could easily run to the paradoxical or the self-contradictory. The following extract from The Hindu Laws, published in 1893, discloses some of the difficulties in questions of the procurement of minor girls, the matrilineal system of inheritance, and the adoption of children to be trained in the devadasi vocation: … A suit by the dancing girls of a temple, claiming to have by custom a veto upon the introduction of any new dancing girls into the service of that temple, was held not maintainable, on the ground that the Court should not shut its eyes to the fact that by tasking the declaration prayed for it would be recognising an immoral custom i.e. for an association of women to enjoy a monopoly of the gains of prostitution, a right which no Court could countenance.

This ruling was held not to apply to a suit which was brought by a dancing girl to establish her right to the Mirasi of dancing girls in a certain pagoda, and to be put in possession of the said Mirasi with the honours and perquisites attached thereto, on the ground that the question of the existence of a hereditary office with endowments or emoluments attached to it ought to he inquired into, as that would materially affect the

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question of whether the plaintiff had sustained injury by the interference of the defendant … … The case of dancing girls in the Madras Presidency deserves to be noted at length. The law regulating the devolution of property among dancing girls seems to be peculiar to the Madras Presidency:

‘Prostitution is not only,’ says Mayne, ‘recognized by Indian usage, and honoured in the case of dancing girls, but the relations between the prostitute and her paramour were regulated by law just as any other species of contract … but prostitution even according to Hindu views is immoral and entails degradation from caste. It is quite clear, therefore, that no English court would look upon prostitution as a consideration that would support a contract … So it has been held that the procuring of a minor to be a dancing girl at a pagoda, or the disposing of her as such, is punishable under sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code …’

The Penal Code contains no provisions which expressly prohibit adoption by dancing girls or others, that the act prohibited by section 372 is the disposition of a minor for purposes of prostitution, and the reason of the prohibition is the protection of the chastity of girls under sixteen years of age … (but) it does not operate to prevent a dancing girl from adopting a daughter altogether … it should not therefore in the case of dancing girls be confounded with prostitution which is neither its essential condition nor necessary consequence, but an incident due to social influences … The policy of the Penal Code … is not to obliterate altogether the line of distinction between the province of ethics and that of law, but to protect the chastity of minors and to assure to them the freedom of choosing married life …

The extract, perhaps inadvertently, highlights the contradiction between the previously noted a priori assumption that to be a devadasi was to be a prostitute and the declaration that ‘it

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should not therefore in the case of dancing girls be confounded with prostitution which is neither its essential condition nor necessary consequence’. It also reveals the loophole by which girls could be adopted, though secretly paid for, in evasion of articles 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code. For the activists, however, the matter was much more straightforward: the evils of the dancing classes could be eliminated by prohibiting or boycotting their performances at official and private functions, as the Review of the Churches admonishes its readers in an editorial article in 1893: INDIAN MISSIONARIES AND NAUTCH ENTERTAINMENTS:

The Christian World of January 5th has the following interesting and important note: Should missionaries in India abstain from attending vice-regal entertainments because, at such, native dancing-girls dance and sing? A native gentleman, Mr. W. Raju Naidu, of Madras, now in England, asks this question in a long letter he has addressed to us, describing an entertainment recently given to the Marquis of Lansdowne at Madras, in which Anglo-Indian officials and also Christian missionaries, attended, and at which eight dancing girls performed. Our correspondent says this countenancing of open vice—for the nautch girls are, he declares, licensed traffickers—scandalises native Christians, and he quotes some strong language used in an ‘Address of Welcome’ to the Viceroy, presented by an ‘educated heathen’, in which these nautch girls are called ‘the dynamiters of the moral integrity of the Indian aristocracy.’ Our own opinion is that missionaries should abstain from such attendance, but it is more than probable they had no idea a ‘native nautch’ would form part of the entertainment. Would it not be better also if Anglo-Indian officials, from the Viceroy downwards, eliminated this questionable element from their social assemblies? We strongly agree with our contemporary, but would further say that missionaries have much to gain and very little to lose by abstaining from all attendance at

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official Anglo-Indian entertainments. The less they are identified in the native mind with the official Anglo-Indian caste, the better for them and their work.

The same edition of the Review has an article by Mr W. Raju Naidu, a prominent Christian in Madras, and the editor of the Christian newspaper, The Eastern Star. In the piece, which discusses the problems of social vice generally, Naidu writes of difficulties encountered with the stubborn colonial headmaster, Dr Miller: … As far as the resolution on State regulated vice is concerned, all would have gone well, except for the persistent action of Dr. Miller, who rose no less than four times, after the matter had been decided by the Chairman and the meeting, begging and praying that the resolution should be thrown out. Dr. Miller, the principal of the Madras ‘Christian’ College is a C.I.E. (Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire), and in the closest touch with the highest officials in India. He was on the ‘Reception’ Committee of the late Prince Albert Victor on his visit to Madras, and was present at a Nautch party provided by the Committee. He was also present at another Nautch party, with Lord Lansdowne, the present Viceroy of India …

It was probably this kind of recalcitrance on the side of officialdom, which was not keen to tackle the problem with all its associated and subtle ramifications, that led to the direct action undertaken by the Hindu Social Reform Association, whose members addressed a memorandum to the Governor of Madras and the Viceroy himself in late 1893: The humble memorial of the undersigned members of the Hindu Social Reform Association of Madras, and others, MOST RESPECTFULLY SHEWETH:

1: That there exists in the Indian community a class of women commonly known as nautch girls.

2: That these women are invariably prostitutes.

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3: That countenance and encouragement are given to them, and even a recognized status in society secured to them, by the practice which prevails among Hindus, to a very undesirable extent, of inviting them to take part in marriage and other festivities, and even to entertainments given in honour of guests who are not Hindus.

4: That this practice not only necessarily lowers the moral tone of society, but also tends to destroy that family life on which national soundness depends, and to bring upon individuals’ ruin in property and character alike.

5: That this practice rests only upon fashion, and receives no authority from antiquity or religion, and accordingly has no claim to be considered a National Institution, and is entitled to no respect as such.

6: That a strong feeling is springing up among the educated classes of this country against the prevalence of this practice, as is evinced, among other things, by the proceedings at a public meeting in Madras, on the 5th of May, 1893. 7: That so keenly do your Memorialists realize the harmful and degrading character of this practice, that they have resolved neither to invite nautch-girls to any entertainments given by themselves, nor to accept any invitation to an entertainment at which it is known that nautch-girls are to be present.

8: That your Memorialists feel assured that Your Excellency desires to aid, by every proper means, those who labour to remove any form of social evil.

9: That your Memorialists accordingly appeal to Your Excellency, as the official and recognized head of society in the Presidency of Madras, and as the representative of Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen-Empress, in whose influence and example the cause of purity has ever found support, to discourage this pernicious

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practice by declining to attend any entertainment at which nautch-girls are invited to perform, and thus to strengthen the hands of those who are trying to purify the social life of their community.

The memorandum sidesteps the problem of perceived individual guilt or innocence by asserting simply that the devadasis are ‘invariably prostitutes’. No quarter is given to deviation from this hypothesis. The Governor of Madras replied as follows:

GOVERNMENT HOUSE, Madras, 4th October.

Sir, In reply to the memorial recently received from the ‘Hindu Social Reform Association,’

I am desired to inform you that although His Excellency fully appreciates the good intentions which have actuated those who have joined with you in issuing the memorial, yet, he doubts if any advantage would be gained by his accepting the obligation which the memorial wishes to impose upon him. H. E. has been present on several occasions on which nautches have been performed, at none of which has he ever seen anything which might, in the remotest degree, be considered improper; and it has never occurred to him to take into consideration the moral character of the performers at these entertainments, any more than when he has been present at performances which have been carried out by professional dancers or athletes either in Europe or India. H. E., the Governor, therefore, regrets his inability to conform to the wishes expressed in the memorial.

The Viceroy, then the Marquess of Lansdowne, had sent a similar response: VICEREGAL LODGE, Simla, Sept. 23rd, 1893.

Sir, I am desired by His Excellency, the Viceroy, to acknowledge the receipt of a memorial signed by yourself and numerous other persons, in which you appeal to

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His Excellency to decline, for the future, to attend any entertainment at which nautch-girls are invited to perform. You base your request upon the statement that these women are invariably prostitutes, and that it is, therefore, undesirable to countenance, or encourage them, in any way.

The Viceroy desires me to say in reply that, although he recognizes the excellence of the objects upon which you have addressed him, he does not think that he could usefully make any such announcement as that which you have suggested. He has, on one or two occasions, when travelling in different parts of India, been present at entertainments of which a nautch formed a part, but the proceedings were, as far as His Excellency observed them, not characterized by any impropriety, and the performers were present in the exercise of their profession as dancers, in accordance with the custom of the country.

Under the circumstances, His Excellency does not, on the eve of his departure from India, feel called upon to take any action such as that which you have recommended.

These responses, obviously composed in consultation between the two high offices, were crafted to seem as officially dismissive as they actually were. The reformers were quick to point out that their excellencies, deliberately or otherwise, had missed the point entirely. On 14 October 1893, they fired back in the Indian Social Reformer: Both state that at the entertainments given to them they have witnessed nautches, but so far as their Excellencies could observe there was nothing improper in the performance. Both lay stress on the nautch-girls being professional dancers, and it has never occurred to them to look too closely into the moral character of these women … Now it was never suggested by the Memorialists that in the performance of the nautch there is any open impropriety visible to the casual eye. Even if it

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was there, it is hardly to be expected that it should be displayed before their Excellencies. Their Excellencies should not forget that they represent in this country a sovereign whose respect for purity and piety is as great as she is great. The people of India cannot but look with wonder on the representatives of Her Majesty being present at the performances of women who, as everybody knows, are prostitutes; and their Excellencies, hereafter, at least, must know to be such. Do they get prostitute dancers to perform at entertainments given specially in honour of the royalty in Europe? The nautch-woman is invited to perform, it must be remembered: which is a very different thing from people going to theatres or other places where people of bad character may be engaged to entertain the public. The nautch-woman, thus, gets a status in the company.

The Protestant missionaries, many of them American, showed their support in a series of brief articles resembling this laconic allusion in The Church at Home and Abroad: Nautch-dancing, by women who represent the immorality of Hinduism, has been an accepted feature of social entertainments in India. It is an evidence of the leavening influence of Christianity that the Hindu Social Reform Association of Madras has entered a crusade against the evil—Missionary Record.

A writer for the Boston Christian publication, Our Day, noted in the course of 1894 that: … Mr. Mozoomdar, whose name I speak with great respect, had referred to the Nautch girls as examples of ‘consecrated prostitution.’ That was his phrase, and he is a man who uses English with extraordinary exactness. I have here testimony from Prof. Monier Williams and half a dozen other experts, perfectly justifying Dr. Pentecost. What happened? Why, the next day a lawyer from Bombay, named Gandhi, made a lame reply. He said: ‘There are a few temples in Southern India where women singers are employed to sing on certain

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occasions. Some of them are of dubious character and the Hindoo society feels it and is trying its best to remove the evil. These women are never allowed to enter the main body of the temple; and as for their being priestesses, there is not one women priest from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.’

… All the missionaries that I conversed with in India had been misled if this reply is a correct one. You will notice that the answer is evasive on the whole, and does not touch the center of Mr. Mozoomdar’s testimony, nor of Dr. Pentecost’s, nor of Prof. Monier Williams. Perhaps Nautch girls are not technically called priestesses, but they are certainly connected with the Hindoo temples and are notoriously understood to lead lives of shame. John Short, M. D., Surgeon General of India, member of the Anthropological Society of London, says: ‘The Nautch girl is recognized and patronized by the Hindoo religion.’ It was a dexterous parrying of the blow, but this was all that was said in any form to invalidate that tremendous charge that Hindooism as a religion is implicated with infamy …

The reference to the Sanskrit scholar Prof. Monier Williams (1819–1899) is to his 1891 publication, Brahmanism and Hinduism: or, religious thought and life in India, in which the devadasis are spoken of as follows: I happened to visit Sri-rangam at the time of the annual festival celebrated on the 27th of December. This is the one day in the year on which the gate is opened, and on the occasion of my visit the opening took place at four o’clock in the morning. First the idol—bedecked and bejewelled to the full—was borne through the narrow portal, followed by eighteen images of Vaishnava saints and devotees; then came innumerable priests chanting Vedic hymns and repeating the thousand names of Vishnu; then dancing girls and bands of musicians—the invariable attendants upon idol-shrines in the South of India. Finally, a vast throng—probably fifty thousand persons—crowded for hours through the contracted

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passage, amid deafening shouts and vociferations, beating of drums, and discordant sounds of all kinds of music. Not a single human being passed through that strait and narrow portal without presenting offerings to the idol, and gifts to the priests. Many, doubtless, joined the surging throng from a vague sense of duty, or because their fathers and grandfathers had joined it from time immemorial; but the motive which actuated the majority was a firm conviction that the passage of the earthly heaven’s gate, kept by the priests, and unlocked at their bidding, would be a sure passport to Vishnu’s heaven after death.

I may mention in conclusion that most of the South Indian temples are sufficiently well endowed to maintain a band of musicians. That of Tanjore has fifty. The number and variety of their musical instruments struck me as extraordinary, though the resulting sounds at the time of morning and evening service, when a noisy orchestra is thought to contribute largely to the merit of religious worship, are productive, at least to European ears, of excruciating discord. All the temples also maintain troops of dancing girls. The Tanjore temple possesses fifteen, ten of whom danced before me in the court of the temple with far livelier movements than are customary among the Nach girls of Western and Northern India. There can be no doubt that dancing in the East was once exclusively connected with religious devotion, especially with homage paid to Siva in his character of lord of dancing …

Further, it is well-known that in ancient times women were dedicated to the service of the temples, like the Vestal virgins of Europe. They were held to be married to the god, and had no other duty but to dance before his shrine. Hence they were called the god’s slaves (deva-dasi), and were generally patterns of piety and propriety. In the present day they are still called by the same name, but are rather slaves to the licentious passions of the profligate Brahmans of the temples to which they belong. What surprised me most was the

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number and weight of their ornaments, especially in the case of those attached to the temples in Southern India. Some wore nose-rings and finger-rings glittering with rubies and pearls. Their ears were pierced all round and filled with costly earrings. Their limbs were encumbered with bangles, anklets, armlets, toe-rings, necklaces, chain-ornaments, head-ornaments, and the like.

One of the Tanjore girls informed me that she had been recently robbed of jewels to the value of Rs. 25,000. No doubt they drive a profitable trade under the sanction of religion, and some courtesans have been known to amass enormous fortunes. Nor do they think it inconsistent with their method of making money to spend it in works of piety. Here and there Indian bridges and other useful public works owe their existence to the liberality of the frail sisterhood.

Writings of this kind provide evidence of the deeper rift that existed between Hindu and Christian reformers, despite their common denunciation of the nautch. The Christians, after all, were not inclined to support the Hindu religion—their primary mission being to Christianize India. When the Hindu reformers are supported in Christian articles, these often refer to the ‘leavening’ effect of Christianity on the Hindu mindset. By the end of the 19th century these differences were made plainer in the statements of Mrs Marcus B. Fuller (see below), who made it clear that the basis of the devadasi problem as she saw it lay not with the women destined to the vocation but with the Hindu religion itself. This attitude is evident in the writing of the Rev. James S. Dennis (1842–1914), the American Presbyterian missionary, author and statistician, in his religio-sociological survey, Christian Missions and Social Progress, published in 1897: … Another missionary, referring to the transformations in public opinion, remarks: ‘Gradually Christian teaching and example are awakening public feeling against all licentiousness. Years ago the Hindu New Year, or Holi,

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was the occasion for a general indulgence in vice and obscenity. No woman was to be seen on the streets. The most filthy and disgusting songs were sung in public, and vile abuse was bandied from one to another. Now very little of all this is to be seen or heard in or about towns and cities. The respectable classes have risen against it, and common sentiment taboos the old objectionable custom. The public conscience has been touched, and higher and better conceptions of moral purity are commending themselves to the people.’—Rev. D. Hutton (L. M. S.), Mirzapur, India. ‘The lessons and examples of Christian morality are gradually changing the old idea of indulgence and slowly creating a conscience and a will for self-control, while it is Christian men who are leavening the country with a spirit of shame concerning the dancing-women.’—Rev. L. L. Uhl, Ph.D. (Luth. G. S. ), Guntur, India.

In The Indian Social Reformer for April 12, 1896, is the report of a lecture delivered by Mr. N. K. Ramasamayya, B.A., B.L., at a public meeting of the Madras Hindu Social Reform Association, upon ‘Morality in India, Past and Present.’ It is full of quickening thought, and pervaded by a sentiment of deep admiration, and even reverence, for pure morals. His words of instruction and exhortation to his fellow-countrymen are eloquent and uncompromising. Referring to the well-known scandal of the nautch, he remarks: ‘The institution of dancing- or nautch-women, shamefully called devadasis, attached to our temples is a standing monument of our moral degradation. In this connection I cannot but allude to the rites of Vamacharis, which are most infamous. Yet they are celebrated in the sacred name of religion.’ In a more hopeful strain he speaks of the present outlook for reform, as follows: ‘The moral tone of the people is now greatly elevated. The introduction of Western education has gone a great way in promoting good morals …’

A reform which is just now very prominently before Indian society is known as the anti-nautch movement,

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which originated some years ago at Madras among Hindus themselves. The agitation is vigorous, and, under the patronage not merely of Christians but of Hindus, forms part of almost every public discussion upon social questions. Influential natives of Madras have recently petitioned British officials to withhold their patronage of this institution.

The subjoined resolution on the subject, taken from the records of the Ninth Indian Social Conference, held at Poona in December, 1895, will serve to indicate the spirit with which this agitation is conducted. It was resolved by Mr. Raman Bhai, of Ahmedabad, and carried unanimously, as follows: ‘The Conference records its satisfaction that the anti-nautch movement has found such general support in all parts of India, and it recommends the various Social Reform Associations in the country to persevere in their adoption of this self-denying ordinance, and to supplement it by pledging their members to adhere to the cardinal principle of observing on all occasions, as a religious duty, purity of thought …’

Mrs Moses Smith adopts the same standpoint and states it roundly in her survey of Asian womanhood in the context of its religions, first read before the World’s Congress of Missions in Chicago in October 1893, and then published as a tract in 1898 with the title, Woman under the Ethnic Religions: Hinduism touches its lowest depths in the Nautch Girl, the degradation of woman in what the enlightened Hindu, Mr. Mozoomdar, called in the Parliament of Religions ‘consecrated prostitution’ of the Nautch or dancing girls in the temples. The subject is too delicate and too horrible for me to speak of in detail, but as it is a much honored part of this religion it cannot be omitted. The Brahmans claim that it is a most sacred service, having its origin in prehistoric ages in a promise made by Vishnu himself. In a few words the reason and method is this: Parents who have a son very ill will vow (a daughter) to some temple, and,

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as they are religiously taught, accumulate a store of blessing for themselves in a future state. John Short, M. D., Surgeon General of India, Member of the Anthropological Society, London, says: ‘The Nautch girl is recognized and patronized by the Hindu religion.’ There was a time in this fair eastern land when women were in a position of respect similar to that among the ancient Hebrews. Husband and wife were equal in all domestic, social and religious life. ‘The Brahmans have themselves preserved the record of women engaging in philosophical discussions, and disconcerting their most celebrated doctors by the depths of their objections.’ Some of the Vedic hymns were composed by women. By degrees the condition of woman has deteriorated until by the law of their religion she is ‘now consigned to a degradation probably without a parallel in the history of the race.’

Unmissable in Mrs Smith’s attitude is the note of early feminism that would be increasingly blended into women’s Christian mission work, and for which the hereditary dancer, pitied, blamed, misunderstood, and incomprehensible, would remain a central object of outraged fascination. The theme of reprobate Hinduism is taken up again in 1899 by Henry Theophilus Finck (1854–1926), an American music critic and musicologist with a scholarly interest in ‘physiological psychology’. His writing on the bayadères shows a tendency to regurgitate dilatory accounts of their origins, status, and eventual fate, gleaned in the first place from Louis Jacolliot, and with the blame placed again squarely on the ‘Brahman priests’: The Brahman priests, who certainly knew their people well, had so little faith in their virtue that they would not accept a girl to be brought up for temple service if she was over five years old. She had to be not only pure but physically flawless and sound in health. Yet her purity was not valued as a virtue, but as an article of commerce. The Brahmins utilized the charms of these girls for the purpose of supporting the temples with their sinful lives, their gains being taken from them as ‘offerings to the gods’. As soon us a girl was old enough, she was

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put up at auction and sold to the highest bidder. If she was especially attractive the bids would sometimes reach fabulous sums, it being a point of honor and eager rivalry among Rajahs and other wealthy men, young and old, to become the possessors of bayadère débutantes. Temporarily only, of course, for these girls were never allowed to marry. While they were connected with the temple they could give themselves to anyone they chose, the only condition being that they must never refuse a Brahman, (Jacolliot, 169-76). The bayadères, says Dubois, call themselves Deva-dasi, servants or slaves of the gods, ‘but they are known to the public by the coarser name of strumpets’.

Bayadères are supposed to be originally descendants of the apsaras or dancing girls of the god Indra, the Hindoo Jupiter. In reality they are recruited from various castes, some parents making it a point to offer their third daughter to the Brahmans. Bands of the bayadères are engaged by the best families to provide dancing and music, especially at weddings. To have dealings with bayadères is not only in good form, but is a meritorious thing, since it helps to support the temples. And yet, when one of these girls dies she is not cremated in the same place as other women, and her ashes are scattered to the winds. In some provinces of Bengal, Jacolliot says, she is only half burnt, and the body then thrown to the jackals and vultures. The temple of Sunnat had as many as five hundred of these priestesses of Venus, and a Rajah has been known to entertain as many as two thousand of them. Bayadères, or Nautch girls, as they are often called in a general way, are of many grades. The lowest go about the country in bands, while the highest may rise to the rank and dignity of an Aspasia. To the former class belong those referred to by Lowrie—a band of twenty girls, all unveiled and dressed in their richest finery, who wanted to dance for his party and were greatly disappointed when refused. Most of them were very young—about ten or eleven years old. Their course

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is brief; they soon lose their charms, are discarded, and end their lives as beggars.

The reference is to John Cameron Lowrie (1808–1900), the first American Presbyterian missionary to be sent to India. His passage about the ‘nautch-girls’, whom he refused to entertain or support, refers to a group of girl dancers in the Punjab encountered in the late 1840s, and reads as follows: In the afternoon, a company of Nach girls came to the place where our tents were pitched on the plain, wishing to exhibit their skill in dancing, in order to obtain a present. There were about twenty of them, attended by two or three men with instruments of music. All were unveiled, and were dressed in their richest finery. Nearly all were quite young, probably not more than ten or eleven years of age. As I did not wish to give them any encouragement, they went away apparently much disappointed. This class of girls is to be found in all the large towns and cities of India. Their profession, from which they receive their name, is that of dancing and singing; in which they are employed at all feasts and joyous occasions. The Hindus consider such amusements very disgraceful in themselves; though they take great delight in witnessing the performance of others. These poor girls are universally of disreputable character; and their number and style of dress afford one of many proofs, that impurity extensively prevails among this people. It is said that their songs and dancing are often very indecent.

This general subject is a painful one to every Christian mind, and requires the veil of silence to be drawn over most of its aspects. Yet it would be a want of faithfulness in missionaries not to advert to it at all; as thereby one of the most prominent evils of Heathenism would fail to be rightly understood. … it is the affecting truth that the great majority of this class are so very young. It not only shows that they are early initiated into the grossest vice, but that their course

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in it is brief. Soon they are discarded, wander about as beggars, and perish miserably.

Noticeably absent from all these moral analyses is any investigation into the hereditary dancer’s ritual significance within the agamic temple system, and, by extension, in the lives of the people who lived by its tenets. For these writers she is merely a ‘degraded’ woman whose real role is to gratify the lusts of the temple priests and any other male deemed caste-pure enough to demand her compliance for payment. The devadasi tradition of concubinage, though touched on here and there, does not detract from the general charge of common prostitution. And there is no consideration of the high art of dance itself that had been passed on for centuries by the dancing classes in a highly developed, structured, and ‘classical’ form. Even in those writers who, despite the storms of anti-nautch activism, continued to set down their positive and appreciative experiences of the art, there is little evidence of a trained apprehension of the subtleties of the abhinaya manifestations, or of the steps of the pure dance itself. In this regard, Edwin Arnold is an exception, as can be inferred from the following passage: … dancing is a serious and solemn matter with these people. And then she softly becomes a living embodiment of music and of the poesy of motion; dancing true scientific dances; expressing the very language—by gesture, gait, and eloquent sway and wave of hand and foot and arm and body—of that passionate or sorrowful Persian or Guzerathi song, which she sings in a high falsetto, full of minor keys and minutely divided notes. Perhaps you will not admire it until you understand it and have studied its marvellous antique grace and emotional significance. Perhaps the Western man will prefer, after all he sees and hears, to encircle a tight-laced waist, bound in fashionable silk or satin, and whirl it round to the better comprehended strains of Strauss or Godfrey. But the indolent passions of the Indian blood find their delight in this measured, sober, refined and soothing pas

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seul; and all night long, as dancer after dancer salaams and sits down, to be succeeded by another and another and another, these statesmen, warriors, merchants, and pundits of the strange Indian world will watch with undiminished interest the slow, quiet, musical passages of the Nautch.

I remember, in the days of the great mutiny, when a famous native regiment, the Twenty-fifth Native Infantry of Bombay, marched back to our station covered with glory for faithfully fighting their rebel brethren, I was commissioned to ask the senior jemadar what form of entertainment the men would best like to accept from the ladies and gentlemen of the station. The answer was a Nautch, and when we had hired the most famous dancing-girls of the district, and had pitched great shamiana tents on the plain, and had laid in plenty of betelnut to chew, they wanted no more. All night long those veteran soldiers, fresh from fierce and bloody battles, sat in large rings of scores and hundreds under the moonlight, wearing their fatigue dress of white cotton, and watching the dancers, while softly smoking their ‘pipes of peace.’ How different are the races of men!

Figure 11.4 South Indian dancers with musicians and nattuvanar, 1890s.

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Even in words as wistfully affirming as these, there remains the sense of the dance as an adjunct to some greater affair of which it constitutes the soothing conclusion, or brings the element of female charm into the rougher affairs of men, now ended. It is not valued as an art in itself, taken apart from its social uses. The following article from All the Year Round in 1894 goes to great lengths to convince the reader that the dancer of Tanjore has exceptional talents, and that her art is well worth witnessing and admiring: The members of the choral band vie with each other in establishing the honour of their native sanctuary, and the Nautch girls of Tanjore, who in distant ages made wars and ruled conquerors, carried the fame of their great Pagoda to every Court of India, chanting the praises of the historic temple in the sacred legends which varied the monotony of the dreamy dance. The rhythmical movements and graceful postures possess the weird fascination of ‘woven paces and waving arms’ with which Vivien cast her mysterious spell over the conquered Merlin, but the languid grace of the Tanjore Nautch soon sweeps into a very whirlwind of passion, and the audience hangs in breathless attention on every gesture, as the wild love-story approaches a tragic climax, or the storm of excitement dies away into the silence of despair.

The serpent dance winding through a sinuous maze of gliding measures appears almost a transformation or reincarnation of the performer into the cobra which she represents. Instincts inherited from bygone generations of Nautch dancers combine with close observation of nature to produce miraculous results. The Nautch girl lives to please, and labours for that end with the success which attends the unwearied pursuit of one absorbing object. Universal influence and fascination still belong to her, though in a narrower range than of old, and the dancer of Tanjore who concentrates the whole force of her genius upon the requirements of her

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art differs as much from the ordinary Nautch girl of India as a masterpiece of Raphael from the signboard which swings before a rustic inn.

Every feature of her mobile face reflects the passing sentiment of the moment in the drama delineated with consummate skill; the dark eyes flash with fury, fill with tears, or melt with tenderness according to the exigencies of the varying situation, and in the nervous energy which throbs and palpitates through every vein and fibre of the elastic and exquisitely proportioned frame, the tide of life seems to glow through the veil of flesh like some mystic flame, burning in a crystal lamp.

The Nautch girls form a distinct caste, and jealously retain their immemorial rights and privileges. They exercise their own laws and customs, with the independence of control gained by a wider experience of life than that permitted to their Indian sisters. Liberty often degenerates into license, and a virtuous Nautch girl, at any rate in modern times, is almost unknown in this community of proverbial frailty. The property of the vagrant sisterhood always passes through the female line, to show that it was accumulated by the mother, and not by the father of the child, a necessary proviso in a calling which frequently secures considerable wealth to the class recognised as an indispensable element in the diversions of Court and camp, town, and country, throughout the Indian peninsula.

When the brief hey-day of youth vanishes like a tale that is told, and the early maturity of the Nautch girl’s beauty fades in the burning sun of these Eastern skies, she frequently returns to end her days in peace where the temple of her childhood stands unchanged amid the tumultuous years like a solid rock in a surging sea. Old associations draw her as with a magnet to the spot from whence she launched forth on that ocean of time and change, which at length casts her back on the foam of an ebbing tide. Henceforth her simple wants are easily supplied, and the store of costly jewels, probably kept

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in old pickle-jars and sardine tins, seldom sees the light of day. The feverish dream of actual life is over, compressed into a few short years of luxury and vice, and nothing remains to her but the memory of her former triumphs, and the spoils of conquest hoarded through the dreary years of the premature decay which succeeds the early ripening of tropical womanhood. The transient beauty and freshness of youth fade like the glowing petals of some gorgeous flower in the heated atmosphere of passion and pleasure inhaled by the dancing girls of Tanjore, who plunge into a vortex of dissipation on the very threshold of their erratic course.

In the musical accompaniment of the Indian Nautch, semitones are divided into demi-semitones by a method of notation unknown in Europe. The wailing melody of this fantastic division constitutes the special charm of the weird Oriental music, and the discordant shrillness of flageolet, conch-shell, and vinâ, is forgotten in the dreamy beauty of those ancient dances of Tanjore to which the barbaric strains adapt themselves with dramatic accuracy.

Damadara, the highest authority on Indian music, describes the harmonic scale of seven natural tones as resembling the peacock’s screech, the parrot’s cry, the sheep’s bleat, the crane’s call, the koil-bird’s note, the horse’s neigh, and the elephant’s trumpeting. The Golden Precepts of Hindu theology embody the musical idea as ‘the ladder of mystic sounds through which the human ear hears the sevenfold voice of God.’ These sacred maxims were originally engraved on metal discs above the altars of the great temples, and the poetical beauty of the phraseology testifies to the power of the native imagination which vibrated to the mystic harmonies of Nature, and recognised her as the chosen interpreter of Divinity, ‘the Voice of the Silence.’ The following quotation shows the mysterious union which existed between religion and music in the early

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ages of India, and the intensity of feeling which realised the sacramental character of Nature. ‘Listen to the Voice which filleth all, thy Master’s Voice, the Sevenfold Breath of the One Soul, the inner sound. The first is like the nightingale’s sweet voice chanting a song of parting to his mate. The second is the sound of a silver cymbal awakening the twinkling stars. The third breathes the melodious plaint of the ocean-sprite imprisoned in her shell. The fourth is the chant of Vinâ. The fifth shrills in thine ear like the melody of the bamboo flute. The sixth changes into a trumpet-blast. The seventh vibrates like the peal of a lowering thunder-cloud, swallowing up all other sounds, which die and are heard no more. Thus shalt thou climb upward by the mystic stair to the Power Divine, and merge thyself in Him.’

Extracts like these, though they do evince the romantic atmosphere of orientalist appreciation of the art, still show in addition some understanding of its methodology, and a willingness to acknowledge the high degree of skill and hereditary training that inform the work of the consummate performing artist. A more subdued note is struck by the travel writer Frederick Diodati Thompson (1850–1906), writing about a dance performance he attended in the very year when the reformers were composing their ‘Humble Memorial’ to the high colonial officials: We arrived at Delhi at 4 P.M. and went to the Grand Hotel. In the evening I witnessed a fine performance of Nautch girls. These dancers are employed by the rajahs and rich Hindus to entertain the guests at weddings, festivals, and other celebrations. I was with a fellow-traveller, we being the only lookers-on. There were four girls, richly costumed, and covered with native jewellery— necklaces, nose rings, finger rings, and toe rings, and bangles on arms and ankles. The bangles on the ankles were covered with tiny bells, the tinkling of which made a pleasant accompaniment to the music produced by eight performers playing on native violins and tom-toms.

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The dances were graceful and modest, and I was much interested in the entertainment. The whole cost for the four Nautch girls and eight musicians was sixty rupees.

Sir Edward Braddon (1829–1904) arrived in India in 1847, and remained there in various posts, including service during the Indian Mutiny, and later as a district officer, until 1878. In Thirty Years of Shikar, he recalls the nautch of his own experience in the gruff register of the Anglo-Indian ‘old hand’: The nautch of my experience may be briefly described thus: Scene—the courtyard of the host’s house, covered in temporarily by an awning of some sort which has no pretensions to be water-tight. In the place of honour the host smoking a hookah, and all round the yard a dusky crowd of hookah-smokers, squatted upon the ground for the most part, but as to a few honoured with chairs. Behind the host and guests a score or so of retainers, whose mission it is to purvey pan supari when the entertainment shall be concluded, or to sprinkle dilated atta upon the more important of the people present, or to bring gools or chillums for the hookah, &c. In the centre of the courtyard, which is carpeted or matted for the occasion, the nautch-girls, with their attendant orchestra, find their stage. In front sit the girls when the exigencies of the dance do not claim their services; behind them the three or four makers of noises, who by a pleasant irony are described as musicians, and where the instruments (old-time as the pipes of Pan and Apollo’s dried-up turtle) consist of a stringed affair that rudely burlesques a Lowther Arcade fiddle, a reed arrangement potent of discord, and the tom-tom that a poet has dignified under the style and title of the Indian drum. The girls—the Bayadères of romance—are unprepossessing females who would be menials in some household if they were respectable: some of them fat and middle-aged; none of them remarkable for beauty. The musicians—save the mark!— are scoundrels to a man. and would be convicted by a jury of physiognomists of any crime charged against them.

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The smoke of a hundred hookahs rises and hangs as a pall over the throng. The musicians make hideous sounds, which have a sort of rhythm about them because of the time-beating of the constant tom-tom. A nautchgirl rises and proceeds to jingle music from her anklets by a monotonous shuffle round the stage, while she soars hither and thither and waves her arms, until she is relieved by another girl, who shuffles and sways and waves in the approved manner, and so da capo. Or, by way of change, a siren rises and emits vocal sounds of such power that when she brings out a high note (and she is as full of high notes as a confidential bank clerk) one sees the muscles of her throat throb again. And so the intellectual sport proceeds for hours until the regulation quantities of discord, smoke, and smell have been enjoyed. That is the Indian nautch.

Masculine and deprecating as Braddon’s reminiscence no doubt is, we are still left with the sense that dances in India in the 19th century, in all parts of the subcontinent, and on all occasions under all conditions, was an art completely inseparable from the quotidian experience both of indigenes and of colonial settlers. It could be dismissed, but never avoided. The rootedness and ubiquitousness of the art was one of the reasons why the anti-nautch agitators were moved to go to such extraordinary lengths to see the practice torn down with the ultimate intention that it should finally be abolished. Nowhere is this agenda made clearer in the 1890s than in the writings of Mrs Marcus B. Fuller (1851–1900), whose many articles on social reform were published in the Christian newspaper, The Bombay Guardian, before being collected in 1900 into a single volume called The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood. Jenny Fuller was attached to the Christian and Missionary Alliance in India, and arrived there in 1876. She served as a missionary at Akola with her husband until they were transferred to Bombay, in 1892, where they held the positions of superintendents of the Alliance Mission. It was in Bombay that she wrote her articles. She died in India of cholera in 1900.

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Her writings on the dance traditions and systems of India are heartfelt and straightforward. She writes as a deeply committed Christian intent on combating the many evils assailing Indian women at that time, including such issues as child marriage, child prostitution and so forth. She devotes three chapters to the problem of the nautch: one on the devadasi, one on the nautch girl, and one on the progress of the anti-nautch movement. In the first, devoted to the scandal of the devadasi, she tells her readers that: It is to these women that we wish to direct attention. Dubois says of them that, ‘next to the sacrificers, they are the most important persons about the temple.’ They are known by the name of Temple girls or devadasis. Notwithstanding these at Puree, and a few in other parts of India, the real home of the devadasi is in South India. The word means the servants or slaves of the gods. They receive a certain allowance, usually small and nominal, from the revenue of the temple. Their duty is to sing and dance before the temple gods, and in the idol processions. Madura, Trichinopoly, Srirangam, Shrirangapatan, Tripati, Kumbakonam, Udapi, and many other towns in Southern India, have large and ancient temples dedicated to various gods, and have devadasis connected with them. According to the Madras census report of 1881, there were 11,573 women ‘dancers’ in the Presidency. A friend writes to us as follows: ‘The gods in the Hindu heavens are not satisfied with having one or more wives of their own, they also have a number of public women, called Apsaras, who dance and sing and add to the comfort of the gods. According to Hindu belief, men who have performed meritorious deeds go to heaven, and their chief happiness consists in the enjoyment of the society of the Apsaras. The devadasis are the counterpart of the Apsaras on earth!’ … Whatever may, in the very beginning, have been the conception of thus devoting girls to gods and temple service, it is now, and has been for centuries, a most debasing custom. They are invariably courtesans sanctioned by religion and society. Dr. Murdoch quotes

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the dancing-girls of Orissa as saying, in a memorial to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, that they ‘are greatly needed in pujas and the auspicious performances, and the entertainment of them is closely connected with the management of temples and shrines; from which it is evident that their existence is so related to the Hindu religion that its ceremonies cannot be fully performed without them.’ He also quotes The Hindu as affirming ‘that the demoralization it causes is immense. So long as we allow it to be associated with our temples and places of worship, we offend and degrade our religion and nationality. The loss and misery it has entailed on many a home is merely indescribable.’

… These girls are the common property of the priests. Wicked men visit the temple, ostensibly to worship, but in reality to see these women. And what shall we say of the simple-minded, but well-to-do pilgrim, should he fall under their power? He will probably return to his home a ruined man. That a temple, intended as a place of worship, and attended by hundreds of simple hearted men and women, should be so polluted, and that in the name of religion, is almost beyond belief; and that Indian boys should grow up to manhood, accustomed to see immorality shielded in these temples with a divine cloak, makes our hearts grow sick and faint.

… In Western India there is another class called Bhavins, who are peculiar to the Konkon and Goa; and the name, says a Hindu writer, is ‘applied to women in the service of the idols in temples in Goa and places round about, and in parts of the Konkon. Some of these women are presented to the gods in infancy by their parents, as the muralis are. Their business is to attend the temple lamps, and keep them trimmed; to sweep and smear the floor; to turn the chauri over the idol; serve the hunka to the congregation; and to serve the visitors of the temple. They always trim the lamps with their fingers, and not with small sticks as other Hindus do. The trimming of the lamp with the fingers by any other

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than a Bhavin is supposed to bring poverty; and this is particularly observed in all Hindu houses. These women are descendants of pure Marathans, but of all these different classes of women they seem to be the lowest, and to be held in such contempt, that it has passed into a proverb; and because “they have degraded themselves to the post of temple cats, they have seats allotted to them behind the temples, while the Naikin or nautchgirl dances before the gods, in the gatherings of the great, and has a seat allotted to her before the gods” …

Some of them are in possession of landed property which has been given to them for their maintenance. These Bhavins, Muralis, Jogtins and others, seem to be considered a lower order of being than the devadasi or the nautch-girl; but, under whatever name these women pass, and however much the details of the customs among them may differ, the principle is the same in all, immorality under the shelter of religion and custom.

Fuller was concerned with acquiring as much information as she could, some by reading and much more by shared anecdotes, about the various types of female temple servants included in her diatribe. She takes some care to distinguish between them, and especially to separate the ‘bhavins, muralis and jogtins’ from the class of the hereditary temple and court dancer, the devadasi proper, but only to conclude that they are all of them in any case involved in ‘immorality under the shelter of religion and custom’. Their art and ritual practice are not approached in any systematic way. About the category of ‘nautch-girls’—by which she means dancers not from South India—she writes: … In South India the devadasi and the nautch girl are identical; but not so in Western and Central India, where these girls seem to form a separate class or caste called Kalawantin, and are identified with the temple service, but visit the temples only by invitation of the temple authorities for a performance. They are professional singers and dancers, and their performances may consist

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of singing and dancing, or singing alone. They are said to be invariably courtesans, and differ from the common public women, and even from the Murali, Jogtin, and Bhavins, who are also devoted to the gods, in that from time immemorial they have had a religious and social status given them, and are considered a necessity in the temple and in the home on marriage and other festive occasions. … The nautch-girl often begins her career of training under teachers as early as five years of age. She is taught to read, dance and sing, and instructed in every seductive art. Her songs are usually amorous; and while she is yet a mere girl, before she can realize fully the moral bearings of her choice of life, she makes her debut as a nautch-girl in the community by the observation of a shocking custom which is in itself enough to condemn the whole system. As a large proportion of these women are childless, their ranks are reinforced by adoption of little girls who are bought or obtained in other ways. Illegitimate children are often passed on to them, and in the periodical famines that occur in this country, large numbers of girls find a home with this class of persons.

Besides we are told that occasionally young widows go over to them. The young widow sees these dancing girls honored, gaily and richly dressed, with plenty of jewels, their presence propitious at weddings, while they, poor things, know that their own presence is often unpropitious and not desired, that they are not honored, that jewels and bright clothes are denied them, and it is not strange that they should be tempted to make this exchange of life.

For centuries dancing-girls had the monopoly of all the education among women. They were the only women that were taught to read and sing in public in the country; and hence these two accomplishments were so associated with the nautch-girl as to be considered disreputable for respectable women. In the early days

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of female education in this century, one of the stock objections of the opposers was: ‘It is not respectable for girls to be educated.’ Now and then, you may still find an old person that clings to that feeling and associates learning in his mind with the nautch-girl. Over twenty years ago, we called on the wife of a prosperous Brahman government official. She was a thorough woman of the old type, but she had a beautiful little girl of about seven, who gathered her skirts tight about her as we passed her, for fear they might touch ours. In the course of conversation, we asked the mother if the child might learn to read: and we shall never forget the look and tone of scorn of the woman’s reply at the suggestion. It embodied all that the words would have conveyed: ‘Do you think I am going to train my girl for a nautchgirl?’ And yet, strange to say, had this very mother been arranging to marry her little girl, she would have readily assented perhaps, that a nautch-girl should be invited to give touch and finish to the wedding festivities.

… It frequently happens that these dancing-girls are rich, beautiful and very attractive, besides being witty and pleasant in conversation; and they are the only women that move freely in men’s society in India. Dr. Murdoch quotes the Indian Messenger (a Calcutta paper), as saying: ‘We have seen with our own eyes these women introduced into respectable circles in open daylight, and men freely associating with them, while the ladies of the house were watching the scene from a distance as spectators and not taking part in the social pleasures going on before them, in which the dancinggirls were the only female participators. Could anything more detrimental to the cause of morality be conceived? In the Punjab, the dancing-girls enjoy public favor; they move more freely in native society than public women in civilized countries are ever allowed to do. In fact, greater attention and respect is shown to them than to married ladies. In the Northwest Provinces we have seen a dancing-girl treated with as much courtesy

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as if she were a princess descended from a distinguished royal line.’

… Many a family’s happiness has been ruined, and estrangement made complete between husband and wife, by the husband coming under the power and influence of the nautch-girl. But our readers may say that this may occur in any land. That is true; but the nautch-girl has a recognized place in society and religion that gives her a peculiar vantage ground. In South India she has her right and place in the temple. In Western India she is there by invitation; and in society, all over India, she is everywhere. Never having married, she can never be a widow. Hence her presence at weddings is considered most auspicious. And in Western India, in certain circles, if her presence can be afforded, she is the one that ties the wedding necklace; (equivalent to putting on the wedding ring with us), thus her defiled hands become a bright omen that the girl bride may never be a widow. Aside from weddings, she graces many another festive occasion, such as the thread ceremony, house warmings, and evening parties and entertainments.

… In view of the character of these women, it seems like the keenest irony to say that they are often in requisition to complete the programme to bid farewell to some government official, or to entertain the viceroy, governors and other officials, or to honor some European traveller. In extenuation we will say that many European ladies and gentlemen do not understand the real character of the nautch-girl who performs before them, or they feel it is a Hindu’s idea of giving them pleasure; and after he, their host, has gone to so much expense, they shrink from offending him by expressing displeasure. Besides they do not understand the songs the girl sings, and hence are not shocked. Quite a breeze was created last August at the entertainment of a high English official in Tanjore, when two nautch-girls began to sing a low song in English

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which called for a strong protest. If Europeans, both ladies and gentlemen, from the viceroy down, would refuse to attend any festivities in which the nautch was part of the programme, great courage and strength would be given to the cause of moral reform. We know of two friends in a lonely station who were invited to a dinner given by some Indian gentlemen to the officers of the district on tour. At the close of the dinner, as they returned to their seats in the tent, they found two nautch girls seated on the carpet while the players were thrumming and tuning their instruments. Immediately our friends arose to depart, and when pressed to stay, they clearly stated their reason for going. An English government official sitting near, whispered to the husband, ‘You are doing quite right in going. If my wife were here, I would do the same.’ These friends would not have gone to the dinner, had they known the nautch was on the programme. If a few high officials were to make inquiries before accepting invitations, and refuse to go unless the programme omitted the nautch, it would not only be a check to that kind of entertainment, but would relegate it to the place where it morally belongs—outside of decent society.

It is not necessary to comment at length on this extract, which speaks so clearly for itself. In addition to adducing mainly anecdotal evidence for the ‘immorality’ of the ‘nautch-girls’, it encourages the strategy of the anti-nautch movement in the matter of advocating the exclusion of dance performances from public and private functions. Its reference to Dr Murdoch is to John Murdoch, who was a missionary teacher in Sri Lanka and India, and who was appointed to deal with the printing and dissemination of Christian writings in India. It was he who composed the anti-nautch article, Nautch Women: An Appeal to English Ladies on behalf of their Indian Sisters, which was printed by the Madras Christian Society in 1893. In her chapter on the anti-nautch movement, Jenny Fuller informs us that:

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In 1892 there was organized, in Madras, an Anti-Nautch Movement by educated Hindus. The Indian Social Reformer supported the movement in its columns. The Lahore Purity Servant also advocated the cause; and, occasionally, articles appeared in other papers. The movement has done a great deal of good in educating public opinion, and in enlisting men to refuse to attend nautch parties, or to have them at the festivities in their own homes. Also, later, Anti-Nautch and Purity Associations have been organized in different parts of the country, a recognition of which is always found now in the resolutions passed at the annual Social Conference. The action taken in 1899 was as follows: In the opinion of the Conference, the Reports of all the Associations show that a healthy change is taking place, in all parts of the country, in favour of the Anti-Nautch and Purity Movements, including in the last, the condemnation of the practice of devoting girls, nominally to temple service, but practically to a life of prostitution; and it entertains no doubt that public sentiment favours both these movements, as tending to purify our personal, family, and public life.

She goes on to analyse the complacent ignorance of the British contingent in India: Most Englishmen look upon it as a Hindu custom that has existed from time immemorial, without a thought of its moral bearing on Hindu society. The fact is that English and native society are so widely separated, their customs, moral standards, and the position of women so different, that the average European fails to understand the struggle that has begun to right matters in India, since its contact with Western education and the Bible standard of morals. Many of them would watch a nautch performance, as they would a snake charmer’s feats, a travelling juggler’s tricks, as something novel and curious, or perhaps tiresome, and to be endured with the best grace possible. Out of sight it would be out of mind. But

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should an English host bring for their entertainment into the drawing-room a similar class of Englishwomen, they would leave the house scandalized and insulted. They would regard it as a recognition of immorality and vice that could never be endured. Is not what is immoral in England, immoral in India as well; and can any custom of the people make it otherwise? We are convinced that if the highest officials in India were to refuse to attend nautches on moral grounds, their action would be an object lesson in moral education to the whole country. Hindu hosts would soon be ashamed and drop the nautch from the programmes of their public entertainments. The fact that no protest is made, only encourages the idea that there is nothing wrong or disgraceful in the custom.

Again the nautch-girl is continually said by many to be only the counterpart of the European ballet-dancer. The ballet-dancer is not necessarily immoral, though it is true that by her profession she is thrown into great temptation before which character often breaks down. But the dancing-girl is a recognized immoral character, and launched into her career as such. Even if it were true that the ballet-dancer is invariably immoral, she has no religious or social standing; she never conducts any part of religious service; or graces any wedding or other festivity. Again, in her public capacity, the ballet-dancer can choose her profession, or if she wishes can leave it and enter into any other walk in life for which she is fitted; and lead a useful career. But the nautch-girl is born into her profession, and must follow it just as a carpenter, gold smith, or farmer is born into his caste and follows the trade of his father. If she is adopted into it, it is usually done while she is a mere child, and unconscious of what the life in its moral bearings is.

The nautch-girl is a recognized caste. This is the iniquity of it. We would not be hard on the nautch-girl herself, although she is a pest and bane to Hindu society, for

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she has been made such; and on Hindu society must rest the awful responsibility of these abandoned lives.

In the whole of her treatment of the varieties of Indian dancer, Mrs Fuller slips into several conflations that typify the anti-nautch philosophy. She does not make sufficient distinctions between the jogini and jogati types, who really were temple prostitutes, and the hereditary dancers, both in the South and in the North, whose conjugal arrangements, though outside of the acceptable Christian norms of the time, were often confined to concubinage with one patron for life. She also conflates the ritual practice with forms of phallic religion that involve putting the devadasi at the sexual disposal of the priests and other temple officials, a practice not generally shown to have existed, though it is of course possible that temple functionaries took sexual advantage of their positions of authority over the devadasis under their patronage. The dance itself is seen as only another aspect of the devadasi’s sexual promiscuity, and, together with the songs which accompany it, is condemned as merely another aspect of the ‘lewdness’ of the Hindu religion as a whole.

Figure 11.5 South Indian dancer with musicians and nattuvanar, 1890s.

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No thought is given, in any case, to the idea that abuses within the devadasi system might be corrected by reforms and regulations applied to the system itself, with help from religious officials and outside regulators, including, if needed, the judiciary. Neither is any care expressed for the perpetuation of the traditional forms of dance. The approach is far more direct and heedless of the gratuitous destruction of an important and highly developed form of dance art. In the view of the reformers, both Christian and Hindu, the only remedy lay in the total abolition of the entire devadasi and ‘nautch’ system, no matter what else must be destroyed in the process.

References

1. Pillai, T. Ramakrishna, Life in an Indian Village, London: T.F. Unwin, 1891. 2. Dancing, vol. 1–2, Toronto: Press of Terpsichore, 1894.

3. Indian Jurist; a journal of law reports, vol. 16, 1892–1893. 4. The Sketch: a journal of art and actuality, vol. 3, 1893.

5. The Indian Magazine and Review, no. 265–276, 1893.

6. Home and Country, vol. 8, July–October 1892.

7. Twentieth Century: a weekly radical magazine, vol. 9, July–December 1892, New York: F.C. Leubuscher, 1892. 8. Butler, Josephine, India in The Dawn, no. 16, June 1892.

9. Butler, Josephine, The Present State of the Abolitionist Cause in Relation to British India. A Letter to my Friends, London: Pewtress & Co., 1893.

10. Blavatsky, H.P., From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan, London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892.

11. Murdoch, John, The Women of India and What can be Done for Them, Madras: The Christian Vernacular Education Society, 1891.

12. Murdoch, John, Papers on Indian Social Reform, including a decision of character and moral courage etc., Madras: The Christian Literature Society, 1893.

13. Narasimha Aiyer, Nandival R. & P. Sama Rao, The Hindu Laws: the principles of Hindu Law, chiefly based upon Sir Thomas Strange, Mr. Mayne, Mr. Siroman’s Tagore Law Lectures and the decided cases

References

of the four High Courts in India and of the Privy Council, up to the end of 1891, Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1893.

14. The Review of the Churches, vol. 3, October 1892–March 1893.

15. Memorandum of the Hindu Social Reform Association; Response of the Governor of Madras; Response of the Viceroy, in Fuller, Mrs Marcus B., see below.

16. Indian Social Reformer, 14 October 1893, in Fuller, Mrs Marcus B., see below. 17. The Church at Home and Abroad, vol. 13–14, 1893.

18. Our Day, vol. 13, Boston: Our Day Publishing Company, 1894.

19. Williams, Monier, Brahmanism and Hinduism; or, religious thought and life in India, New York: Macmillan, 1891.

20. Dennis, James S. (Rev.), Christian Missions and Social Progress: a sociological study of foreign missions, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1897–1906.

21. Smith, Mrs Moses, Woman under the Ethnic Religions, Chicago: Women’s Board of Missions of the Interior, 1898.

22. Finck, Henry Theophilus, Primitive Love and Love Stories, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.

23. Lowrie, John C., Two Years in Upper India, New York: R. Carter and Brothers, 1850.

24. Arnold, Edwin, Wandering Words, London: Longman’s, Green & Co., 1894. 25. All the Year Round, ser. 3, vol. 12, 1894.

26. Thompson, Frederick Diodati, In the Track of the Sun; readings from the diary of a globetrotter, New York: D. Appleton, 1893. 27. Braddon, Edward, Thirty Years of Shikar, Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1895.

28. Fuller, Mrs Marcus B., The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood, New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement, 1900.

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Chapter 12

Loathing, Examination, Analysis, and Appreciation: 1900–1910 In terms of the texts at our disposal, the first decade of the 20th century displays again the varieties and differences in Western (and Westernized) approaches to the fact and nature of dance throughout India, and to the lifestyle and customs of the dancers themselves. Local Hindu and Christian reformers are still intensively working at their posts, and the situation of the devadasi and the ‘nautch-girl’ is being increasingly put before an international readership in missionary publications disseminated abroad, especially in America and Britain, under the general rubric of the predicament of women and girls in India. These publications and the ongoing activism in India itself would lead in these ten years to the abolishment of dance entertainments at government and other official functions. In 1905, the committee in charge of arranging the Prince of Wales’ tour to India would decide that no dance performances would form part of the royal engagements. In 1906–1907 the Geneva Conference on trafficking in women and children became bound up with the devadasi system in the process of its being endorsed in India, and would lead to several anti-devadasi bills being proposed in the Madras Legislative Assembly by 1912. By 1911 a directive had been issued enjoining avoidance by colonial Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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officials of all functions at which dance would be included. Public pressure continued to be exerted on wealthy and prominent Indians to stop hosting dance entertainments at their homes, and this pressure was extended to include customary dances at the Indian royal courts.

Figure 12.1 Madras dancers photographed by Frederick Dunsterville, c. 1901.

At the same time, as the decade progresses, we see the development of a growing impatience on the side of liberal humanists against the fundamentalism of the Hindu and Christian reformers, and there are several writings which speak not only of the beauty of the Indian dances themselves, but which reproach the reformist elements for their narrowness and wilful incomprehension of non-normative sexual practices that offend the jaundiced morality of the sexually repressed West. But there is also the jocular, raucous tone of things written about the devadasis by European men who had spent some time in India. A good example of this sort of banter is provided by Henri Gentil (1869–1955), a minor French artist and a friend of his more successful contemporary, Paul Bocquet. Gentil entered

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the French colonial administration and was sent to Pondicherry, where he arrived in May of 1899. It is from his time in French India that we have the illustrated letters which he sent to his friend Bocquet in France, and in one of which we find his depiction and description of a bayadère. Paul, dear chap, this red (background) may tire your vision and the (depicted) woman may not be to your taste, but I will present her to you anyway. She is a real, true devadasi. She does not come from the Batignolles suburbs of Paris (referring to the false orientalist ‘bayadère’ models in the city) and has never posed (for portraits) in the studios of the Rue Campagne Prussienne. She is of the Brahmin caste and is appointed to take part in the ceremonies which are carried out in honour of Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu. In spite of her religious character, she consents to traffic her charms when anyone supplies the price, and the money that is made by her kisses is used to buy jewellery in excess. In her is all the coquetry of the Indian woman in general. She is an untiring dancer; she can dance the whole night without cease. Her choreographic motions, it must be recognized, are simple enough, demanding of her neither violent physical exertion nor swaying of the hips, as is common in the tribal dances of Africa. All her mimicry consists in the gestures of the head, the movements of the eyes and mouth, and in the mudras made with the hands. Generally, the feet are kept together and immobile, and the dancer does not take flight as our operatic dancers do, who cover 300 metres in two goat-like leaps …

Gentil goes on to say that he himself has never had relations with a devadasi, but that he knows some who have, and is therefore able to report as follows: Look here, the devadasi is less appreciated by the European (male) than white (women) are. One tastes

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of the devadasi as one tastes at opium, just once, to see for oneself and perhaps to have a story to tell—but she does not have the advantage, as opium does, of procuring pleasant dreams. The temple dancer is hardly a voluptuary. She is avaricious before all else, and she knows how, in the old tradition of our own harlots, to acquire a fortune in the blink of an eye. How many wealthy Indians, including even rajas, have ended up on the dung-hill, having sacrificed their fortunes for these prostitutes! It seems that the devadasi knows very well how to provoke a passion in her dear client, yet refuses to consort with him until the last minute. When at last her host can no longer stand it and finds himself at the end of his tether, she will consent to give and abandon herself to him for barely a few seconds. As a last detail, the devadasi, being a woman of a given caste, will never consent to surrender herself to a pariah, and the same holds good for a European. These latter have to resort to unheard of artifices and to make promises of (huge) sums of money to possess the temple dancer. On the other hand, she is quite happy to have relations with the gurus and other sacerdotal persons of the Brahmin temple …

This, it seems to me, is the faux tone of a would-be Bohemian ‘rake’ keeping up a tone of sexual daring from an ‘exotic’ port. He knows that his friend at home in Reims will be put in mind of the orientalist dancers of the Parisian revue theatres, who often double as prostitutes by night. The ‘real thing’ encountered in Pondicherry, he seems to imply, is a rather more unattainable type of courtesan-dancer. In dealing with reformist activism in this decade, we must note immediately the harsh condemnation of the dance tradition in the 1901 article on the anti-nautch movement by Raghupathi Venkataratnam Naidu (1862–1939), a prominent member of the reformist group, founder of the Social Purity Association, and principal of the Mehboob College in Secunderabad at the time of his composing the essay:

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The Anti-Nautch Movement.

It was, perhaps, unfortunate, though evidently unavoidable as a beginning, that the purity movement was started in the concrete form of the anti-nautch agitation. Friends ready to further the cause failed in many instances to realise the basic principle; while persons startled by its novelty put upon it most fantastic constructions. One party traced it to a lurking hatred for the dancinggirl; another discovered in it a crusade against music; to some it appeared to be a graceless exposure of a small national weakness; to some others it was no better than a Quixotic attempt to cure the irremediable. Even among friends but few realised that to discourage nautch was to demand purity in other respects, and to decline to employ the dancing-girl’s entertainment was to disapprove open impurity wherever found. When, therefore, a seemingly superfluous memorial to a distant government disclosed a personal promise ‘to do likewise,’ enthusiasm cooled down and eloquence was hushed in not a few cases. When, next, it gradually came out that to condemn the nautch was to covenant for an earnest endeavour after purity in thought, speech and act, many more shrank from so heavy a demand. When, at a later stage, the principle that would proscribe polluted pleasure was sought to be applied to public life, some of even those that had been the most forward to attack were also among the foremost to sound the retreat. But the anti-nautch movement would be a huge cry for a trifle—almost a ‘much ado about nothing’— unless it presented itself as an inalienable part of a great problem, a particular aspect of an important principle, a concrete instance of a lofty, though seemingly new-born ideal. Its basis is not in fine manners, but in good morals; its aim is not mere elegant breeding, but pure living. If everyone espousing this movement has not realised this expectation, it is not the fault of the principle. Many are called, but few are chosen. Among all the countries with which India would wish to compete

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in morals and in civilisation there is not one that accords to open, flagrant impurity such recognition as this country gives to the nautch-girl …

… In the temple she has not only the free and ready admission of any other lay person, but, in innumerable cases, a position next only to that of the priest or the manager. No part of a town is too respectable for her residence; no circle of society too high for her invitation … The benediction on many a solemn occasion is of her chanting; the longevity of connubial life for many a hopeful bride is secured through the talismanic ‘black beads’ of her stringing. In religions processions hers is the lead, while the graceless priest with his unheeded jargon is exiled to a safe distance. Famine-stricken parents, albeit of high caste, may surrender to her care and profession the child that a foreigner, however pure and respectable, may not apply for. In times of ‘legal’ difficulties she may count upon the support of even some of the titled leaders of society privately to plead with the crude, stickling judge to do a little wrong in order to do a great right. But how has this come to be so …? … That these women have not always been thus patronised, is evident from ancient literature. They seem to have begun as virgins dedicated to the service of religion—vestals that forgot the world in the thoughts of Heaven … It is of that by-gone period those well-meaning friends of India really think who defend the modern nautch-girl by unfairly comparing her with the medieval nun! But nothing is so frequently, though in most cases so imperfectly, imitated as religion … (The exact number of these unfortunate women in India cannot be ascertained. According to the Census of 1891, those following ‘indefinite and disreputable occupations’ were returned as 1,562,981; and actors, singers, dancers and their accompanists numbered 270,956. Probably, several appeared under the respectable heading of temple-servants.)

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… As in the course of centuries custom favoured by convenience fossilised every profession into a caste, that encyclopaedic organisation—the Hindu Society, with its round-robin of castes—could accommodate professional lewdness with a plea and a place, just as it furnished the professional thief with a guide-book and a presiding-genius. What comes by birth-right need not be earned by accomplishments; and ‘the general notion,’ as the Census Commissioner observes, ‘of the employment (at present) is that expressed in one of the schedules from a town in the north as singing and enjoining sensual pleasures!’ Such have been the high origin and the low fall of a most unfortunate section of mother India’s daughters; who (in the words of Prof. Sir W. Mon.-Williams) were once ‘patterns of piety and propriety,’ but are now ‘slaves to the licentious passions of the profligate.’ Is not society bound to help them up to a pure course of life? ‘How is it,’ asks that eminent temperance-preacher and great friend of India, the Revd. T. Evans, ‘that the temple Priests and sacred Brahmins do not step to the front to reform such a degrading abuse as this?’ But the question is really an appeal to the heart and the conscience of all educated India … Further, the desire for repentance is generally proportionate to the social odium attaching to a sin. ‘That would be a reproach to your mother; you only name me,’ was the proud retort of a smart dancing-girl to a filthy epithet used by the voluptuous Sirajuddoula. What is labelled as a necessary profession by society, is rarely felt to be a degrading avocation; and the consoling thought that one need not be better than is expected of one, easily satisfies the random compunction. … Those who hastily compare her with the music-hall singer of the west, besides implying that two blacks make a white, decide the question on the ground of mere decency, forgetting that a ‘fast life’ is there an unacknowledged and incidental weakness, but here an

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avowed and necessary prerequisite. If Manu is justified in charging with destruction of life him who cooks the meat or him who eats it no less than him who kills the sheep, does not the guilt or the shame of the dancinggirl’s life fall to the account of those who accept her fallen condition as the passport to her profession as a singer or dancer?—Moreover, music, that divine art which ‘stooped so low as to soften brute beasts, yet mounted as high as angels’—that ‘inarticulate, unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the infinite and lets us for a moment gaze into that’—that food of love and incense of the soul, has been largely neglected and completely disreputed by its unholy association with open immorality.

… force of association has fastened a tarnished name to it; and so long as it is condemned to be the prerogative of the Circes and the Syrens of our society—and it must be so till we decline to be charmed by the murky music of a maudlin—it must be content to be the bondmaid of iniquity … sullying, degrading, debasing must be the effect upon all … of an entertainment in which, pretending to no secrecy and reserving no modesty, she who, of all female kind, is the only one to take a hire for her person—she who has forfeited the sweet name of sister—she who is nor maid, nor wife nor widow—she whose ‘heart snares and nets’ and whose ‘house is the way to hell,’ simulates a virtue she daily violates, or pleads for a pleasure she daily pollutes. … ‘To have a nautch at one’s own house is to give an object-lesson in immorality to the boys and the girls in the family, especially to the former. As long as nautch is fashionable among us and is freely indulged in, it is impossible that the morality of men should greatly improve, and our respect for women should increase.’ Wise words these that state the matter in a nutshell. With them, not inappropriately, may go Bishop Welldon’s thoughtful suggestion that ‘the cause of morality in

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India would seem to make a definite advance, if at the beginning of the new century the officials of government and the leaders of society were to make known their desire that nautches should not form part of any entertainment to which they are invited.’

Not many words can profitably be given to the question, ‘what next?’ when nautches are universally discouraged. It is not easy or safe to foretell the direction likely to be taken by the energies of a society passing through a great transition. To the strictly pure the simple consideration, ‘morals before art or pleasure’ would be quite enough; but it is, perhaps, too much to expect the majority to be fully content with this. There must be a sense of want for a time, as the old order changeth into the new. Promiscuous musical entertainments, barren of result in other countries, will grow obsolete. What with natural unsuitability to India and what with social discouragement, dance will lapse as a relic of the past. Weaned from its present low associations, music must become a commoner and more respectable acquirement—a profession with some and an accomplishment with many; and all the genuine pleasure to be derived from that noble art may, after a generation or two, be fully regained. Indian music, rich in devotional and unfortunately pretty full in the amorous element, will have to be considerably improved on the purely social side …

As to the particular community concerned; when deprived of the prestige of music, its hope will be chiefly in two healthy changes: (1) the allotment of temple-service (of course, wholly for sacred purposes) as the reward only of chastity—married life being no disqualification, and (2) the education and improvement of the male members of the community—now, mostly drones or parasites. No doubt, with many an unhappy woman the change will for a time be a ‘vision of Mirza’ bridge, through which she will drop into the current below. But if the present wealth and influence of the

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community be wisely utilised, the need of immorality may lie happily changed into the price of salvation …

What strikes the reader is the cold-hearted equanimity with which Naidu consigns the dancers and musicians to the looming fate of dislocation, unemployment, poverty, and social ostracism. The ‘vision of Mirza’ bridge refers to a writing by Addison, and the notion here is of a bridge with unseen trapdoors, through which the unsuspecting people crossing the ‘current below’ fall, and are simply destroyed and lost from public sight. The art of dance itself is reckoned ‘unsuitable’ for India, and is to become ‘a relic of the past’. This attitude foreshadows the complete indifference to the fate of the Indian dances made evident in the legislation that was finally to do away with the devadasi system in 1947.

Figure 12.2 Group of dancers photographed in Madras, probably by F. Dunsterville, c. 1901.

In the year in which Naidu’s essay appeared, the Presbyterian Assembly Herald, in a brief recommendation of Jenny Fuller’s writings (see previous section), points again not only to the moral and social problem, but to the inability—and probably unwillingness—of the colonial government to intervene, though,

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as we have seen, cases involving hereditary dancers were regularly heard in the courts: In ‘The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood’ Mrs. Marcus B. Fuller has told a thrilling and pitiful story. It is not pleasant to read of the woes of child-widows, the demoralization in Zenanas, the crime of infanticide, and the shameless immoralities of the Muralis and Nautch-girls. But these evils will never be abated until they are known. Only by reading the awful account will sympathy and indignation be stirred to ameliorating action. A heroic attempt is being made in India by missionaries and reformers to remedy these wrongs, but the contest is being made against tremendous odds. The English Government has done a great deal for India and is far more sympathetic on these questions than formerly, but it feels hampered by its policy of noninterference with the religious and social customs of the people. It must be remembered, too, that whereas immorality in Christian countries is under the ban of law and Church and society, in India it is sanctioned by ancient, social and religious custom.

In a 1904 publication by the Christian Literature Society for India, The Great Temples of India, Ceylon, and Burma, the reformist note continues to be struck, even in a work ostensibly devoted to architecture and temple tradition: There is one most disgraceful feature connected with some of the South Indian temples. Dubois, referring to them, says ‘Next to the sacrificers, the most important persons about the temples are the dancing girls, who call themselves deva-dasis, servants of the gods. Their profession requires of them to be open to the embraces of persons of all castes. They are bred to this profligate life from their infancy They are taken from any caste and are frequently of respectable birth. It is nothing uncommon to hear of pregnant women, in the belief that it will tend to their happy delivery, making a vow, with the consent of their husbands, to devote the child then in

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their womb, if it should turn out a girl, to the service of the pagoda. And, in doing so, they imagine they are performing a meritorious duty.

The infamous life to which the daughter is destined brings no disgrace on the family.’

According to the Puranas, there is a similar class in Indra’s heaven, the Apsaras, called Surangana, ‘wives of the gods,’ and Sumad-atmajas, ‘daughters of pleasure,’ who are common to all.

Two thousand years ago the Greeks had a religion somewhat like that of the Hindus. Their gods fought with one another, and committed adultery. The temple of Venus at Corinth had more than a thousand hierodouloi, ‘servants of the goddess’ who were the ruin of many a stranger who visited the city. For several centuries this went on unchecked. Well might it be said by Bishop Lightfoot, ‘Imagine, if you can, this licensed shamelessness, this consecrated profligacy, carried on under the sanction of religion and in the full blaze of publicity, while statesmen and patriots, philosophers and men of letters, looked on unconcerned, not uttering one word and not raising one finger to put it down.’

The same remark applies to India. Now, happily, through the Christian influence which is insensibly purifying Indian public opinion, a movement has spring up against nautch women, and their employment in temple services has been condemned …

The 1901 Missionary Review of the World carried an extract from the Indian Social Reformer, congratulating Lord Curzon on his avoidance of the dancers, and urging other officials to do likewise: We wish to note with great pleasure and thankfulness a unique feature of the Viceroy’s tour through Southern India—namely, that he was nowhere greeted by the nautch girl. She used to be everywhere at one time, on railway platforms, in processions, and in durbars.

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It seemed as if we had lost the faculty of rejoicing in anything without rejoicing in the sight of dancing girls. The band, nautch, and the betel formed the tripod of human existence in India. The nautch is a relic of the barbaric age, when greatness was measured by luxury and voluptuousness. It is altogether out of harmony with the spirit of a civilization which demands that woman shall no longer be a slave, and man, in whatever station born, shall be judged by his readiness to sacrifice the pleasures of the sense on the altar of duty. Lord Curzon has preached the gospel of work and righteousness to prince and soldier. It was peculiarly appropriate that the nautch girl should have been banished from his presence. It is devoutly to be wished that the precedent introduced in Lord Curzon’s tour may be followed in all future receptions of viceroys and governors, and that India may show to the world how she can honour greatness without dishonouring womanhood—Indian Social Reformer.

The eccentric tea-planter, social activist and miscellaneous writer, Herbert Eastwick Compton (1853–1906)—son of Colonel D’Oyly Compton of the East India Company—touches on the immoral lifestyle of the dancers in 1904: In all India, there is only one class of women which emerges from the fetters of ignorance, reserve, and abject submission. This is the nautch-girl, or dancing-girl. She is a professional prostitute, a public entertainer. It is necessary to educate her to fit her for her profession and duties, and so it comes to pass that she can read. She is early instructed in this, and also in singing and dancing, and all the accomplishments. She begins to chant lewd songs as soon as she has finished prattling, and for centuries has enjoyed the sole monopoly of education amongst Indian womankind. And—can it be believed?—the nautch-girl has not only a recognised, but an exalted, place in the religious and social life of the Hindus. No discredit attaches to her calling, but, on the contrary, a great deal of éclat. She

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is considered a necessary adjunct in the temple and the home. Her presence at weddings is auspicious, and she it is who fastens the wedding-necklace round the bride’s neck, an act which corresponds to the placing of the wedding-ring with us. In her professional capacity, she is invited to all native festivals, and to entertainments given in honour of guests.

To patronise her is considered meritorious, and she fills a place in the Hindu religion corresponding to that which the nun holds in Christianity, for she is consecrated to one or other of the impure Hindu deities. A proverbial saying declares that without the jingling of the nautchgirl’s anklets a dwelling-place does not become pure. She is a beautiful abomination who has lured thousands, and will lure thousands more, to ruin. Attractive, pleasing, and witty in conversation, she is the most accomplished of courtesans, and specially educated to play havoc with men’s morals and money. She is treated by all castes with the utmost deference, and even allowed to sit in the assemblies of the great by men who would not permit their own wives and daughters a similar honour.

She moves more freely in society than public women in civilised countries are allowed to do, and greater attention and respect are shown to her than to married women. In some parts of India, she is treated with the distinction of a princess. The earnings of these dancing-girls are enormous. In Bombay the ‘star’ nautchgirls command a fee of fifty pounds for a single night’s performance.

Aristocratic families lavish their wealth on them, and a British viceroy, who was memorialised by the Hindu Social Reform Association to discountenance them on the grounds that they were ‘professional prostitutes’, lowered the tone of society, tended to destroy family life, and brought ruin to property and character—a British viceroy answered that ‘he had seen nothing objectionable’ in the nautches he had witnessed; they were in accordance with the custom of the country, and

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he declined to take any action. Truly, great is ‘custom,’ and it will prevail!

To these educated courtesans, the Hindu gentleman habitually turns when he desires the companionship his own home cannot supply. And, be it noted, without any stigma or suspicion of wrong-doing. The nautch-girls are the only women who move freely in men’s society in India; they are the women who are honoured and courted most; for them alone is education decreed. They are the queens of native society. It is a salient commentary on the domestic life of the Indian Empire that the woman who comes last in the British estimate of the sex comes first in theirs.

Figure 12.3 Two dancers from Bombay, photographed by E. Taurines, c. 1900.

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Compton is remembered mainly as the Organizing Secretary of the Anti-Tea-Duty League, for his various publications, including some on India, and for the fact that he committed suicide on board ship en route to Madeira in 1906. In 1902, the barrister and secretary of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, William Samuel Lilly (1840—1919), who had been secretary to the Government of Madras but was forced to return to England owing to poor health, had also written about the dancing class: To say that Indian dancing-girls ‘are received with tolerance into even respectable houses’ is a most inadequate statement. They are invited, as a matter of course, to the homes of native gentlemen on all great occasions, such as thread or marriage ceremonies, birthdays, or house-warmings (as we should say). It is a proverbial saying, that without the jingling of their feet-bells, a dwelling-place does not become pure. And they are treated by all castes with the utmost deference, being even allowed to sit in the assemblies of great persons, who would not accord such an honour to their own wives and daughters. To call them ‘prostitutes’ is, of course, quite accurate. But it is quite misleading, also, to ordinary English readers.

Dancing-girls (dasis) are prostitutes indeed. But their profession is a recognised and respected one; and many of them (devadasis) exercise a religious ministry, and bear their appointed part in the worship offered in the temples. These occupy in Hinduism a place corresponding to that which nuns hold in Christianity. Just as nuns are consecrated to the God of Purity whom Christians adore, so dancing-girls are consecrated to one or another of the impure deities of the Hindu Pantheon. As nuns are termed the brides of Christ, so are dancing-girls termed the brides of the idol, or of the deity represented by the idol, in whose temple they perform their function. They dance before him several times daily, and sing hymns, generally of what we should deem an obscene

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character, in his honour; and they receive stipends from the temple endowments, varying in amount according to the income, sanctity, or popularity of the fane. ‘Their ranks are recruited,’ writes Mr Sherring, in his work, Hindu Tribes and Castes, ‘by the purchase of female children of any caste, and also by members of certain Hindu castes vowing to present daughters to the temple on recovering from illness, or relief from other misfortune. The female children of the dancing-women are always brought up to their mother’s profession, and so are the children purchased by them, or assigned to the temple service by the free-will of their parents.’

They are carefully educated in the arts of music and dancing, and are also taught to write and read: some of them not only sing, but compose songs. They have their own peculiar customs of adoption and inheritance, which the Courts uphold—it is a wonder that no fanatic has raised an outcry against this State recognition of vice— their property, which is often considerable, descending in the female line first, and then in the male, and going on failure of issue, to their temple, should they belong to one. No discredit attaches to their calling. They are ‘under the impression that they have taken to a most honourable profession, by following which they are honouring the gods, and are appreciated both by gods and men.’

And a man’s intercourse with them, so far from being regarded as flagitious, is considered an act of faith and worship, and, according to some religious writers, effaces all sins. Such are the dancing-girls of India and such they have been for more than two thousand years, a distinctive and most significant feature of Hindu civilisation …

Lilly shows greater tolerance in his more objective approach to the subject of the place of the devadasi in the scheme of Indian customary sexuality, but the tone remains one of dry bewilderment.

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In 1903, an article in the Times of India, showed up the hypocrisy of English writings against the ‘nautch-girl’ whose performances were actually for them a source of great fascination: Who has not heard of the nautch-girl of India? Music and dancing girls are the chief attraction to every social function in the East, and Anglo-Indians who hate the nautch-girl on paper listen with rapt attention to her song, and continually marvel at her elegant trot, wonderful nimbleness and leopard-like agility.

For a Protestant Christian writer like Caroline Atwater Mason (1853–1939)—a very minor American novelist, and public opposer of women’s suffrage—the situation of the devadasi was much more unequivocal and easier to state: The social and religious system of Hinduism brings in its train the dishonoring of women in a degree little understood by the western world. The service of the temples demands large numbers of dancing-girls, or priestesses, who are dedicated in infancy to this vocation. When arrived at womanhood, they give their bodies to the service and maintenance of the temple, and form one of the most fruitful sources of the depravity of the Brahman priesthood, to whose pleasure they are primarily devoted. These temple girls are called devadasis, meaning slaves of the god.

Another class of courtesans, more familiar to European travellers in India, are the nautch girls. The institution of the nautch is a very ancient one, based upon the example of the god Krishna, who sported with thousands of dancinggirls. Hence social custom sanctions their presence at all weddings, receptions, and functions of every kind. The nautch girl, being the only woman in India, until recent times, who had intellectual life or training, or any freedom in society, has held a somewhat honored place, corresponding in a way to the professional courtesan in the old Greek social fabric. All other women in India are strictly forbidden to dance, and education in a girl is still

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regarded in conservative Indian circles as a mark of loose morality.

The nautch girl is taught from earliest childhood to read, dance, and sing, and instructed in every art of seduction. These girls are usually beautiful and graceful, and they follow their profession with the characteristic submission of all Hindu women. They frequently acquire large fortunes, receiving extravagant gifts from wealthy Brahmans who come under the fascination of their wit, beauty, and accomplishments. The muralis are girls devoted by their parents in infancy to the god Khandoba, a deity of the Maratha country. The rites of this dedication are termed ‘being married to the sword,’ the weapon of Khandoba. These muralis are licensed by law and dedicated to impure lives in the name of their religion. If you ask what can justify such action on the part of the parents, you will be told by the natives, ‘It is our custom.’ Custom in India is indeed religion.

The notion of the ‘depravity of the Brahmin priesthood’ was one that was fast gaining ground in the struggle against the devadasi system, and, as in the case of Mason’s writing, was frequently drawn from the many anti-Hindu articles written by Jenny Fuller. Probably the most well-known Christian commentator to have dealt with the devadasi community at first hand in this decade was the Irish missionary Amy Wilson-Carmichael (1867–1951). Carmichael founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a sanctuary for displaced women and girls, which still exists today. In 1904, she wrote about her work among the devadasis in Things as They Are: … We have often tried to reach the temple women, poor slaves of the Brahmans. We have often seen the little girls, some of them bought as infants from their mothers, and trained to the terrible life. In one of the Mission day schools there is a child who was sold by her ‘Christian’ mother to these Servants of the god; but though this is known it cannot be proved, and the child has no wish

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to leave the life, and she cannot be taken by force. Sometimes we see the little girls playing in the court-yards of the houses near the temple, gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways, almost always more refined in manner than ordinary children …

In 1909 she commented more explicitly and in more detail about the devadasi problem as she found it discussed in reformist and other writings: … These brief notes of various kinds we offer in their simplicity … the letters were written by men of standing, living in widely scattered districts in the South. The evidence contained in them was carefully sifted, and in many cases corroborated by personal investigation, before being considered evidence: so that we believe these chapters may be accepted as fact. Dated quotations from the Madras Mail are sufficient to prove that we are not writing ancient history:

January 2, 1909: ‘The following resolution was put from the chair and carried unanimously: The Conference (consisting of Hindu Social Reformers) cordially supports the movement started to better the condition of unprotected children in general, and appreciates particularly the agitation started to protect girls and young women from being dedicated to Temples.’

May 8, 1909: ‘Once more we have an illustration from Mysore of the fact that the Government of a Native State are able to tread boldly on ground which the British Government in India are unable to approach. At various times, in these columns and elsewhere, has the cry raised against the employment of servants of the gods in Hindu Temples been uttered; but, as far as the Government are concerned, it has fallen, if not on deaf ears, on ears stopped to appeals of this kind, which demand action that can be interpreted as a breach of that religious neutrality which is one of the cardinal principles of British rule in India.’

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The agitation against it is not the agitation of the European whose susceptibility is offended at a state of things that he finds hard to reconcile with the reverence and purity of Divine worship; but it is the outcry of the reverent Hindu against one of the corrupt and degrading practices that, in the course of centuries, have crept into his religion.

In this particular instance the Mysore Government cannot be accused of acting hastily. As long ago as February, 1892, they issued a circular order describing the legitimate services to be performed in Temples by Temple women. In 1899, the Muzrai Superintendent … directed that the Temple women borne on the Nanjangud Temple establishment should not be allowed to perform tafe (or dancing) service in the Temple; but that the allowances payable to them should be continued for their lifetime, and that at their death the vacancies should not be filled up. Against this order the Temple women concerned memorialised H.H. the Maharajah as long ago as 1905, and the order disposing of it has only just been issued. In the course of the latter the Government say:

‘From the Shastraic authorities quoted by the two Agamiks employed in the Muzrai Secretariat, it is observed that the services to be performed by Temple women form part and parcel of the worship of the god in Hindu Temples, and that singing and dancing in the presence of the deity are also prescribed. It is, however, observed that in the case of Temple women personal purity and rectitude of conduct and a vow of celibacy were considered essential. But the high ideals entertained in ancient days have now degenerated … The Government now observe that whatever may have been the original object of the institution of Temple women in Temples, the state in which these Temple servants are now found fully justifies the action taken by them in excluding the Temple women from every

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kind of service in sacred institutions like Temples. Further, the absence of the services of these women in certain important Temples in the State has become established for nearly fifteen years past, and the public have become accustomed to the idea of doing without such services.’

…The high-minded Hindu—and there are such, let it not be forgotten—revolts from the degradation and pollution of this travesty of religion, and will abolish it where he can. But let it be remembered that, good as this law is, it does not and it cannot touch the great Secret Traffic itself. That will go on behind the law …

And she demonstrated her outrage at the principle of marrying girl-children to the deity so that they could be trained in immoral ways: Our first evidence consists of abridged extracts from the Census Report for 1901. After explaining the different names by which Temple women are known in different parts of the Madras Presidency, the Report continues:

‘The servants of the gods, who subsist by dancing and music and the practice of “the oldest profession in the world,” are partly recruited by admissions and even purchases from other classes … The rise of the Caste and its euphemistic name seem to date from the ninth and tenth centuries, during which much activity prevailed in South India in the matter of building Temples and elaborating the services held in them …

The daughters of the Caste who are brought up to follow the Caste profession are carefully taught dancing and singing, the art of dressing well … The daughter selected is taken to a Temple and married there to a god, the marriage symbol being put on her in a real marriage. Henceforth she belongs to the god. … Writing in 1904, a member of the Indian Civil Service says: ‘I heard of a case of dedication (three girls) at A. at the beginning of this year, but I could not get any

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evidence. The cases very rarely indeed come up officially, as nearly every Hindu is interested in keeping them dark.’

We, too, have had the same difficulty, and the evidence we now submit is doubly valuable because of its source. It is very rarely that we have found it possible to get behind the scenes sufficiently to obtain reliable information from those most concerned in this traffic. The head priest of one of our Temples admitted to a friend who was watching for opportunities to get information for us that the ‘marriage to the god is effected privately by the Temple priest at the Temple woman’s house, with the usual marriage-symbol ceremony. To avoid the Penal Code (which forbids the marriage of children to gods) a nominal bridegroom is sometimes brought for the wedding day to become the nominal husband. This Caste is recruited by secret adoption.’

A Temple woman’s son, now living the ordinary life apart from his clan, explains the very early marriage thus: ‘If not married, they will not be considered worthy of honour. Before the children reach the age of ten they must be married … They become the property of the Temple priests and worshippers who go to the Temple to chant the sacred songs.’

A Temple woman herself told a friend of ours: ‘The child is dressed like a bride, and taken with another girl of the same community, dressed like a boy in the garb of a bride-groom. They both go to the Temple and worship the idol. This ceremony is common, and performed openly in the streets.’ In a later letter from the same friend further details are given: ‘The child, who should be about eight or nine years old, goes as if to worship the idol in the Temple. There the marriage symbol is hidden in a garland, and the garland is put over the idol, after which it is taken to the child’s home and put round her neck.’

After this she is considered married to the god. A young Temple woman in a town near Dohnavur told us she had

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been given to the Temple when she was five years old. Her home was in the north country, but she did not remember it. She had, of course, understood nothing of the meaning of the ceremony of marriage. She only remembered the pretty flowers and general rejoicing and pleasure. Afterwards, when she began to understand, she was not happy, but she gradually got accustomed to it. Her adopted relations were all the friends she had. She was fond of them and they of her. Her ‘husband’ was one of the Temple priests.

… Always the one who is to dance before the gods is given to the life when she is very young. Otherwise she could not be properly trained. Many babies are brought by their parents and given to Temple women for the sake of merit. It is very meritorious to give a child to the gods. Often the parents are poor but of good Caste. Always suitable compensation and a joy gift is given by the Temple women to the parents. It is an understood custom, and ensures that the child is a gift, not a loan. The amount depends upon the age and beauty of the child. If the child is old enough to miss her mother, she is very carefully watched until she has forgotten her. Sometimes she is shut up in the back part of the house, and punished if she runs out into the street. The punishment is severe enough to frighten the child. Sometimes it is branding with a hot iron upon a place which does not show, as under the arm; sometimes nipping with the nail till the skin breaks; sometimes a whipping. After the child is reconciled to her new life, occasionally her people are allowed to come if they wish; and in special circumstances she pays a visit to her old home. But this is rare … As to her education, the movements of the dance are taught very early, and the flexible little limbs are rendered more flexible by a system of massage. In all ways the natural grace of the child is cultivated and developed, but always along lines which lead far away from the freedom and innocence of childhood. As it is

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important she should learn a great deal of poetry, she is taught to read (and with this object in view she is sometimes sent to the mission school, if there is one near her home). The poetry is almost entirely of a debased character; and so most insidiously, by story and allusion, the child’s mind is familiarised with sin; and before she knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the instinct which would have been her guide is tampered with and perverted, till the poor little mind, thus bewildered and deceived, is incapable of choice …

Closely related to missionary outrage was the idea, fast becoming a norm in Christian thinking, that local social reform in India was in the first place driven by the civilizing ethical effects of Western Christian ideology. We find it expressed in several writings, such as this one by the Rev. R. Thackwell, published in the Presbyterian Banner in September of 1907: Only very lately I read a remarkable letter written by a ‘Hindu’, calling the attention of Europeans to the objectionable practice, on their part, of attending native nautches. A nautch is a dance by disreputable women, whose gestures and attitudes are often most grossly suggestive of immorality, and yet it is said such dances are attended by high officials and non-officials, ladies and gentlemen; and I believe it, for many years ago I was invited by a high official to be present at the installation of a young Maharajah of a native State as a ruling prince, and among the items of entertainment was a nautch. I had never seen one before and I have never seen one since, and what I saw then was so revolting that I left the tent where it was being held, feeling it a degradation to be present. The ‘Hindu’ tells us that his purpose is to call the attention of the European community to the evil example they are setting by countenancing with their presence entertainments of which the nautch is a feature. ‘It may be assumed that those who attend such entertainments are ignorant of their nature or significance. Few Europeans find pleasure in the nautch; they are present purely out of courtesy to their hosts.

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It is a good thing to be courteous, but when courtesy involves doing things which are wrong morally, it has to be remembered that there are higher considerations that come into play.’ These words and much more to the same effect are the words of a Hindu, but of a Hindu whose mind is thoroughly permeated with pure Christian thought and Christian ethics.

In a ‘talk about India’, one of several collected in her book, Mosaics from India, Margaret B. Denning refers to ‘the whole tendency’ of Hinduism in relation to the hereditary dancer: The whole tendency is toward grossness and vulgarity. The very songs about the gods are obscene. The great attraction at many of these places is the Mira, or religious drama. This, too, can only be bad in influence, as the characters represented are corrupt, with nothing in the drama to indicate that this evil is deprecated. Besides the Jatra, there is usually a nautch, or dance, by the poor abandoned women who follow this profession. All tends to corruption and materialism. Only outward rites, the invention of priestcraft, remain, with selfishness and superstition, without love, purity or holiness …

Though published in 1910, the missionary memoirs of John Sharrock were the result of many years of prior evangelization in the Madras Presidency, where Sharrock would no doubt have encountered many dancers in the course of his own missionary labours. His recollection of them is one of expressed loathing of the system: … The fact that the deva-dasis, servants of the gods, must be present at all religious ceremonies of importance, and that these girls as infants have been ‘married to the god,’ fills our minds with loathing. Those who wish to know more of this painful subject should read Miss Wilson-Carmichael’s book, Things as They Are. … Parents hand over a little girl to such a life of infamy with a semi-religious motive, and the girls who grow up to such a life do not resent it, or see any harm in it,

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but look upon the whole matter as one of the general customs of their religion and country. We missionaries are always too ready, like bad chess-players, to look at the lives of others through our own eyes instead of from the others’ point of view. Of course there can be no palliation for vice of this loathsome kind, but we must beware of hysterical sensationalism. Our work is not simply to try and save one soul here and there from perdition, joyful as such an experience is, but to raise the whole tone of the country and so to make such a state of affairs impossible …

‘Have you no fallen women in London and Paris?’ they ask. Yes, unfortunately we have; but when our bishops and clergymen on some great occasion enter in procession into St. Paul’s Cathedral, they are not preceded by a number of immoral girls, dancing in honour of God. The difference is that Christianity condemns impurity, whereas Hinduism sanctions and embraces it.

These anti-Hindu sentiments were to be answered by both Indian reformers and their Western supporters by propagation of the idea of a ‘higher Hinduism’ from which the derelictions of priestcraft and popular religion were absent. One example of this approach is seen in the writing of T.E. Slater (1840–1921), himself both a Christian missionary and a student of Hinduism: … the standard of social morality has considerably improved in India in recent years, as seen especially in the anti-Nautch movement, which seeks to discountenance the performances of temple dancing-girls, whose presence at public functions and private entertainments has from time immemorial been considered indispensable. In connection with this movement, the necessity of something being done to reclaim this unfortunate class is being recognised, though the Indian reformers see no hope of help from their own people, and appeal to Christians.

Here the sentiment is one of active cooperation with the Hindu reformers, but, in other cases, such as that of Annie Besant

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(1847–1933), Hinduism itself was morally superior to Christianity if only it could be reclaimed from the corruption into which it had sunk. Of the dancing class in particular, Besant formed the following notion as early as 1901: … Apart from the ignorance and the immorality of the priesthood, there are other things that need to be changed in connection with some few of the Temples, though happily only found in comparatively few—animal sacrifice and nautch-girls. I know well—perhaps better than many of those who defend it—the hidden truth out of which animal sacrifice has arisen. But the slaying of animals as now performed is utterly indefensible …

So with the nautch-girls. Originally there existed in connection with the Temples a band of pure maidens, vestal virgins, through whose unsullied lips, from time to time, a God or a great Rishi would speak, warning or teaching the worshippers. Only a pure virgin could serve as such a vehicle, for the temporary embodiment of a great One whose physical body was far away. These virgins were guarded with the greatest care, and were looked on with the greatest reverence. Theirs it was to serve the priests ministering at the shrine and to weave the mystic dance with sacred garlands, moving to the measure of the music that they chanted, amid the fragrant smoke of incense, as the stately procession moved from fane to fane. As the priests degenerated they dragged down the Temple maidens with them, until now their name carries with it only suggestions of shameful vice. Little wonder that all good influences have fled where womanhood is thus degraded, and the highest spiritual uses have been changed into lowest sin …

These ideas about a golden vestal past from which the dancers had fallen was current in those years, and, whether she really believed in them or not, were put by Mrs Besant to her own uses in defending herself against Christian attacks, such as this one made by Jenny Fuller in the Bombay Guardian: The Indian Social Reformer of June 9th, 1894, asks very pertinently: ‘What has a prostitute to do in a marriage

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ceremony? How does her presence add grace or sanctity to such an occasion? A virgin-widow, pure as snow and innocent as the dove, is an unwelcome guest to a marriage pandal. But a shameless prostitute who has sold her all, must tie the mangala sutra round the neck of the bride. What monstrous inconsistency! What degraded notions of immorality! Has Annie Besant or Vivekananda naught to say to this? We say that the dancing-girl and the child-widow are the two great blots on our social system and our Hinduism.’

Still, the mainstream popular narrative continued to follow the missionary and reformist lines, as is seen in this brief extract from The New Encyclopaedia of Social Reform, published in 1910: Much has been done with a view to preventing girls from being dedicated by their parents to Temple Worship, which means to prostitution. The nautch-girl is the bane of India. Without any will of her own she has been dedicated to this life and is the most sinned against among the women of the land. And having grown up to womanhood she not only degrades the religious worship of the people but also becomes a curse in the social system of India. No Hindu entertainment is considered complete without her presence and brazen performances. During the last twenty years reformers have striven hard to discourage nautch-girl performances by rendering them unsavoury in the eyes of the Europeans. Not a little success has attended their efforts in this line.

In the same year, but in a sharper spirit, The HamptonColumbian Magazine, with reference to the growing group of followers of Swami Vivekananda in America, spat out the following lines: Thousands of girls, twelve thousand in South India alone, are dedicated as Nautch girls to the service of the temple priests in consecrated prostitution.

… Literally less than a cow, is a woman in India. For the cow is held sacred.

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And the soft-speaking priest from the land of the serpent who lures the Western women with his wiles, holds her also in like contempt. What did the Swami Vivekananda, returning to his native land, tell of his fair American proselytes? The missionaries say that he boastfully spread the impression that they were even as the Nautch girls of India.

The 1908 publication, Women of all Nations, compiled by the Fellows of the Royal Anthropological Institute, approaches the matter in a milder, more objective tone, befitting its status as a ‘scientific’ instance: To every Hindu temple of importance is attached a number of women or girls called Dasis. Dasi means servant. They are better known, perhaps, under the name of Nautch-girls, as it is from their ranks that the dancing-girls are drawn. The calling of the Dasi is generally acknowledged to be one of infamy in the eyes of Europeans, although no disgrace whatever is attached to it in the eyes of the Hindus. Some of the more advanced of the Hindu gentleman in the South of India are showing signs of disapproval of the exhibition of Nautch-girls at social entertainments, and would relegate them to their duties of ministering daily in the ritual of the temple.

From early childhood the Dasi is brought up at the temple, where she is to serve, even though her parents may be living in the neighbourhood. She is taught to read and write, to sing and to dance. As a child she is married to a tree or to the image of the god; hence the Dasis are sometimes spoken of as the wives of the deity. At an age when she should be entering her husband’s house as a happy young wife, she becomes the mistress of a man who is rich enough to entertain her in his zenana, and present an offering of some value to the temple to which she belongs. After a few months she returns to the temple to minister to the pleasure of the worshippers. Her earnings go to its revenues in

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return for the education and support she has received. There is no shame attached to her calling, and her office is sanctioned by her religion. A Dasi takes part in the daily pujah of the temple. She has to sing and dance before the idol, whilst it is being washed, anointed and garlanded. Her songs are often coarse and obscene, considered in the light of European opinion, though she sees neither coarseness nor obscenity in them; and her poses in dancing are calculated to rouse the worst passions in the Oriental, who does not fail to comprehend their meaning. She is bidden to every wedding and entertained at the houses of the rich. She is at the service of every worshipper at the temple who can afford the necessary gifts. Men and women still continue to give their daughters, often the eldest of the family, to be enrolled in the band of Dasis at the temple which they frequent …

The disapproving moral allusions are tucked away in the level tone of the text, in phrases such as ‘no shame attached’ and ‘coarse and obscene in the light of European opinion’, and ‘at the service of every worshipper’. Even in writings such as this ostensibly informative piece by William Eleroy Curtis (1850–1911), an American political journalist whose chief interest lay in the Latin American countries, we note the high-toned swipe taken at the devadasi system and the dancers whom it circumscribed in South India. Curtis’s article, Nautch Girls Are Dedicated for Life to Hindu Deities, appeared in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal as an extract from The Chicago Record-Herald in 1905, and the next year as a chapter in his own book, Modern India: While in Calcutta we attended the ‘Mohon-mela,’ an annual industrial exposition, given under native auspices in the exposition grounds of Calcutta. At the ‘Mohonmela’ a good deal of space was devoted to native amusements and sports, and several bands of nautch girls were dancing before large crowds of admirers in open pavilions.

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The nautches of India have received considerable attention from many sources. They are the object of the most earnest admonitions from missionaries and moralists, and no doubt are a very bad lot, although they do not look it, and are a recognized and respected profession among the Hindus.

They are consecrated to certain gods soon after their birth; they are the brides of the impure and obscene deities of the Hindu pantheon, and are attached to their temples, receiving their support from the permanent endowments, often living under the temple roof and almost always within the sacred premises. The amount of their income varies according to the wealth and the revenues of the idol to which they are attached. They dance before him several times daily and sing hymns in his honor. The ranks of the nautch girls are sometimes recruited by the purchase of children and by the dedication of the daughters of pious Hindu families to that vocation, just as in Christian countries daughters are consecrated to the vocation of religion from the cradle, and sons are dedicated to the priesthood and ministry. Indeed it is considered a high honor for the daughter of a Hindu family to be received into a temple as a nautch. They never marry and never retire. When they become too old to dance, they devote themselves to the training of their successors. They are taught to read and write, to sing and dance, to embroider, and to play upon various musical instruments. They are better educated than any other class of Hindu women, and that largely accounts for their attractions and their influence over men. They have their own peculiar customs and rules, similar to those of the geishas of Japan, and if a nautch is so fortunate as to inherit property it goes to the temple to which she belongs. This custom has become law by the confirmation of the courts. No nautch can retain any article of value without the consent of the priests in

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charge of the temple to which she is attached, and those who have received valuable gifts of jewels from their admirers and lovers are often compelled to surrender them. On the other hand, they are furnished comfortable homes, clothing and food, and are taken care of all of their lives, just the same as religious devotees belonging to any other sect.

Notwithstanding their notorious unchastity and immorality, no discredit attaches to the profession, and the very vices for which they are condemned are considered acts of duty, faith and worship, although it seems almost incredible that a religious sect will encourage gross immorality in its own temples. Yet Hinduism has done worse things than that, and other of its practices are even more censurable.

Bands of nautches are considered necessary appurtenances of the courts of native Hindu princes, although they are never found in the palaces of Mohammedans. They are brought forward upon all occasions of ceremony, religious, official, and convivial. If the viceroy visits the capital of one of the native states he is entertained by their best performances. They have a place on the programme at all celebrations of feast days; they appear at weddings and birthday anniversaries, and are quite as important as an orchestra at one of our social occasions.

They are invited to the homes of native gentlemen on all great occasions and are treated with the utmost deference and generosity. They are permitted liberties and are accorded honors that would not be granted to the wives and daughters of those who entertain them, and stand on the same level as the Brahmin priests, yet they are what we would call women of the town, and receive visitors indiscriminately in the temples and other sacred places, according to their pleasure and whims. The traveler in India finds it difficult to reconcile these facts, but any resident will assure you of this truth.

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The priests are said to encourage the attention of rich young Hindus, because of the gifts of money and jewels they are in the habit of showering upon nautches they admire, but each girl is supposed to have a ‘steady’ lover, upon whom she bestows her affections for the time being. He may be old or young, married or unmarried, rich or poor, for as a rule it is to these women that a Hindu gentleman turns for the companionship which his own home does not supply.

There is a difference of opinion as to the beauty of the nautches. It is purely a matter of taste. There is no rule by which personal attractions may be measured, and doubtless there may be beautiful women among them, but, so far, I have never seen one. Their costumes are usually very beautiful, the materials being of the rarest and finest qualities and profusely embroidered, and their jewels are usually costly. Their manners are gentle, refined and modest; they are perfectly self-possessed under all circumstances, and, while their dancing would not be attractive to the average American taste, it is not immodest, but consists of a succession of graceful gestures and posturing which is supposed to have a definite meaning and express sentiments and emotions. Most of the dances are interpretations of poems, legends, stories of the gods and heroes of Indian mythology. Educated Hindus profess to be able to understand them, although to a foreigner they are nothing more than meaningless motions. I have asked the same question of several missionaries, but have never been able to discover a nautch dancer, who has abandoned her vocation, or has deserted her temple, or has run away with a lover, or has been reached in any way by the various missions for women in India. They seem to be perfectly satisfied with their present and their future.

In the writing of William Crooke (1848–1923) we have a decidedly more objective tone, with references to passages from earlier writers brought in to demonstrate both the antiquity and

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proper bearing of the devadasi system within the broader court and temple culture. Crooke was an Irish orientalist who had developed an interest in Indian culture while serving in the Indian civil service as magistrate and collector, and, apart from numerous journal articles, also wrote the four-volume work, Tribes and Castes of the North Western Provinces, and the two-volume work, Popular Religion and Folklore. The passage below is from his 1906 book, Things Indian: … The Kafirs of the Hindu-kush, again, are dancers in a different way. Sometimes they dance for mere amusement; but more generally for a solemn purpose. The war dance, performed by the women while their men are absent on a raid, is intended to give the warriors strength and courage, and to keep them wakeful lest they should be surprised by the wily foe. It is thus one of the forms of mimetic magic which is such an important element in their religion. They dance, again, to propitiate the gods, to celebrate the death of a clansman, or at the solemn erection of an effigy in his honour.

To an Englishman the modern nautch is destitute of interest or excitement, but the native never tires of this, his chief amusement. In Western India the performance is sometimes enlivened by the egg-dance, in which a number of eggs are attached to a wicker wheel on the dancer’s head, in slip knots kept open by a glass bead. The girl whirls round, and at each turn places an egg in a loop, and without breaking them withdraws them one by one as the dance goes on.

The nautch-girls are chiefly drawn from the professional dancing castes, but they are quite ready to welcome outsiders who voluntarily enter their community, or to kidnap little girls who are trained in the art. In former days, Seroda, near Goa, was one of their main centres, and romantic tales are told by travellers early in the last century of the beauty and accomplishments of the residents of this charming village. But now its palmy days are over, never to return. It is nowadays only

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in the courts of Rajputana that the nautch-girl holds a recognised place. ‘They are,’ writes Mr Val. Prinsep, ‘a kind of privileged people, and wander through the palaces unveiled and unmolested.’ They do all the shopping and commissions for the veiled ladies of the Prince, and their dancing is more interesting than the ordinary nautch. Mr Prinsep describes with admiration the dance at Jodhpur in honour of the hero Rajas of olden time, when ‘one hundred women dance round in a kind of stately measure, with woven paces and with waving hands. They keep beautiful time, and in the strong light and shade of torch-light, with the glitter of many a bangle, armlet, and anklet, the effect is most striking. Ever and anon the great drum in the centre gives a boom, when the women all throw up their arms together, and behind all the great moon rises over the dark trees. I never was more fetched.’

In South India these dancers in old times used to accompany armies in the field. In Malabar, Barbosa says: ‘Whenever there is war, according to the number of men-at-arms whom the king sends there, he likewise sends with them a quantity of women; because they say that it is not possible to bring together an army, nor carry on war well, without women. These women are like enchantresses, and are great dancers; they play and sing, and pirouette.’

P. della Valle describes one of these South Indian dances performed by the temple ballet at Ikkeri: ‘Hither almost the whole City flock’d, Men and women and all the companies of the flower’d Virgins, who, putting themselves into circles, here and there danc’d and sung; yet their dancing was nothing but an easie walking round, their sticks always sounding; only some-times they would stretch forth their legs, and now and then cowre down as if they were going to sit, one constantly singing, and the rest repeating the word Cole, Cole [Kali].’ The dress of the nautch-girl is highly decorous, but arranged with little elegance or grace. It often consists of

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skirts of scarlet and gold, spangled saris [Saree], trousers of silk brocade, and they wear masses of jewellery, the anklets of silver and gold with little bells making a soft tinkling as their brown feet move …

The costume of the Madura dancers baffled the comprehension of Lord Dufferin: ‘the front part hangs in petticoats, but the back is only trousers,’ in fact, a sort of divided skirt in a new and striking style. The dance itself is a series of slow posturings, with graceful movements of hand and arm representing in dumb show a love scene, the wiles of a serpent charmer, the motions of a lutist. ‘Nothing,’ writes Lady Dufferin, ‘could be more strictly proper, and nothing could possibly be more languid and gentle than the dancing, if dancing it can be called.’

… What is most remarkable is the wonderful sensitiveness to time, and the extreme tension in which every muscle is constantly kept, with the power of moving local muscles, while the rest of the body is motionless.

The English Illustrated Magazine, in 1907, demonstrates to its readers, in an article titled Dances of the East written by Thomas Hayes, that the only valid approach to the dances of India is the unprejudiced, objective one: The Hindu nautch-girls are consecrated to the service of the Hindu gods, the enriching of the Hindu temple.

It is as absurd and unfair to look upon the nautch-girls of the East through the medium of a European-trained conscience as it would be for a globe-trotter wearer of smoked spectacles to affirm that the Himalayan snows were black …

It behoves us to consider the Hindu nautch-girl very candidly, very calmly, and absolutely without prejudice, if we would be in any real way intelligent about the vital part she has played and is playing in Hindustani art,

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in Hindustani literature, in Hindustani refinement, and in Hindustan’s history.

… the Indian nautch-girl is accomplished and educated above the wives and the maidens of her race, is fair of person, soft of speech, and pleasing in manner. Unlike those frail artists of the Far East (they are indeed artists!), her office is an office of religion. She is the handmaiden of Brahma and of Siva, the priestess of Vishnu, and, above all, of Krishna, the best-natured of the Hindu gods, the Apollo of the Hindu Olympus. What precisely is the Indian nautch-girl? What is her influence on Indian life today? These questions are pregnant; the answers are full of interest. The whole subject merits close and dignified thought …

The nautch-girl takes her place in most religious processions and in almost all the temple ceremonials. She sings and dances at the houses of the rich and is gradually slipping into the female roles of the Hindu plays—roles which were always formerly resumed by boys. Her earnings are as a rule poured into the coffers of the temple to whose service she belongs. She calls herself a devadasi (servant of the god), and is so considered …

Here is a definite departure from the public censure of the reformers and missionaries, as well as from the moralizing tropes that were reproduced in popular writings about India. The writer goes on to describe the dance: We saw several of the famous ‘character dances’ that night. Bewildering song followed bewildering song; breathing picture melted into breathing picture— beguiling gesture of soft chinked, perfumed brown arms; gentle questioning of soft brown eyes; coaxing smile of crimson, gentle, curling, lip; slow swaying of slight, lithe body; float of light, spangled skirts, and, with all, the never-ceasing, never-hurried, rise and fall of the slow, crooning, amorous Hindu music!

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They danced bits of Indian story; they pictured India’s wildflowers; they personified the breathing creatures of the jungles. They laughed and sobbed and loved and fled, and all with slow dance motion, with languid lift of eye or droop of lid … Ah! Those dances of the East as I remember them! And, oh! shades of Siva the destroyer! as I have seen them burlesqued in Europe …

An article in the Boston Chatterbox magazine from 1906 maintains the same accepting attitude: The Nautch people are found all over India and are a striking instance of the survival of native customs in the East, and although Europeans see little more of them than the occasional party of singers and dancers, great numbers of the profession exist.

In native national life the Nautch play a large part, and legend has a great deal to say about them. In their way these performers have a strong religious element, and dancers, whether Hindoo or Mahommedan, never begin their performances without touching forehead and eyes with the strings of bells hung round their ankles, and saying a short prayer.

Figure 12.4 Two dancers performing on a terrace with musicians and nattuvanar, c. 1890.

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Tying on the bells for the first time is quite a solemn function, as it implies adopting forever the career of a Nautch dancer, from which no withdrawal is possible …

But the quiet opposition in official administrative circles to the loud persecution of the devadasi is best seen in a writing by Sir John Rees, whom we have met in Chapter 10 (1880–1900), and who was probably an influential figure on the Madras Governor General’s Council. Rees, it seems to me, encapsulates the ‘unofficial official’ stance in the following doleful criticism of the anti-nautch agitation: … Moreover, in spite of speeches, writings, and protestations, extremely little has been done by the natives themselves to bring about what is commonly called social reform, a subject as difficult to define in India as it is in England. Even when some person, greatly daring, marries a widow, he finds that he and his wife are lightly regarded, if not absolutely despised, even by those who have actually urged them to such action. Practically nothing has been done in the thirty years which have elapsed since first the subject was broached, and, instead of adhering to the main lines as laid down by the leaders in this behalf, the reformers of late have occupied themselves with anti-nautch demonstrations and endeavours to prevent dancing girls from taking part in festivals and celebrations. Women of this class are just now strongly denounced, and it is alleged against them ‘that they have cast down many wounded, yea, many strong men have been slain by them, that their house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.’

All this may be true, but immorality, like everything else in India, tends to become hereditary, and the position of the temple female attendants no doubt amounts to a publicly acknowledged profession, though it is subject to limitations, and is not on all fours with that of the ordinary prostitute. Objection is now taken to the presence of these girls at the solemnisation

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of weddings and on festal occasions, though their notorious association with students is an occasion for hard winking. Originally, they were dedicated as virgins to the service of religion, and they are now the handmaidens of the idols, of which the priests and others have long said with Horace ‘Ne sit ancillae tibi amor pudori.’ No doubt this custom and others are open to objection, but those who are busily occupied in preaching social reform are too apt to lose sight of what the domestic life of India really is, and from a perusal of tracts and pamphlets it would be readily imagined that it stood in urgent and exceptional need of drastic reform. No doubt it is capable of improvement, but, at the same time, it is probable that in many respects it is superior to that of other countries, and in few respects falls below normal standards …

Rees’s comments are tolerantly humorous, down to the quote from Horace: ‘Do not be ashamed of your passion for a serving maid’. His sense is clearly that the anti-nautch campaign is a distraction from the real and multifarious socio-ethical problems of India, while even these, in his opinion, are no worse than those encountered elsewhere in the world. His note is a pragmatic one with little credence in the idealism of the reformers. A more disgusted critique of the anti-devadasi agenda is delivered by Joseph Steiner Ph.D. in the American Journal of Eugenics, around 1908: … as a matter of fact, our moral code is based on a set of ecclesiastical canons which nobody who is fit to be outside of an insane asylum takes any stock in, and which cannot stand the test of scientific analysis. Hence their insane effort to impose the same upon all people, without regard to climatic or other conditions which are bound to render the code nugatory and … destructive to the people upon whom it is imposed. They fail to see that in the intercourse of the sexes, as well as in the matter of subsistence, what is extremely repulsive to one person, race, or people, may be a source

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of unflagging delight to others; so that, by the immutable law of compensation, if we insist upon forcing our habits and customs on the Orientals, we must expect to get some of theirs in return, whether we like it or not.

As to the missionary to whom he refers, I have to say that my experience with her class inclines me to take their statements with a liberal allowance of salt. They have a habit of painting the devil not in his true colors, but as black as they can make him. To hear them talk about the nautch-girls, one would suppose them to be the vilest specimens of the human family to be found on the globe; when really they are, with rare exceptions, the only females in India possessing any culture and refinement—a possession that is a primary requisite to their profession. In the eyes of the missionary, their heinousness consists in the fact that they practice venery as a religious accessory to phallic worship. To understand the nautch-girl, one must have seen them in their phallic temples during their worship of Priapus, when every pose is a poem and every gesture symbolizes a prayer as devout as that of any Catholic at the communion-altar. I realize how difficult it is for a mind filled with a sense of the obscene to grasp the feelings of a people whose minds from infancy have been trained in the opposite direction …

The sexual emblem everywhere conspicuous in the sculptures of the temples would seem to us impure in description, but no clean and thoughtful mind could so regard them while witnessing the obvious simplicity and solemnity with which the subject is treated. The same is equally true of what is known as the nautchdance, and those who condemn it simply cast the shadow of their own grossness upon the most solemn act to which we owe our existence.

Professor F. G. Carpenter, writing from India to the Evening Star of Washington, D. C., says: ‘Missionaries have spared no effort in trying to get nautch-girls in India

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to relinquish their profession, by offering them the most tempting inducements, and up to this writing they have not succeeded in a single case.’ Surely, if their manner of life were as revolting as these missionaries portray it, their proselyting efforts would not result in such flat failure. At this point I would ask the reader to compare the above statement of Professor Carpenter with that of Professor Larkin, in which he says that ‘85 per cent of the married couples of the United States now regret that they are married,’ and I think that he will agree with me that, as between such married women and the nautch-girls, the latter had the best of the bargain by no less than 85 per cent.

The early sexologist, Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), in Sex in Relation to Society, gives the following account: … The English brought prostitution to India. ‘That was not specially the fault of the English,’ said a Brahmin to Jules Bois, ‘it is the crime of your civilization. We have never had prostitutes. I mean by that horrible word the brutalized servants of the gross desire of the passer-by. We had, and we have, castes of singers and dancers who are married to trees—yes, to trees—by touching ceremonies which date from Vedic times; our priests bless them and receive much money from them. They do not refuse themselves to those who love them and please them. Kings have made them rich. They represent all the arts; they are the visible beauty of the universe.’ (Jul. Bois, Visions de l’Inde, p. 55).

Religious prostitutes, it may be added, ‘the servants of the god,’ are connected with temples in Southern India and the Deccan. They are devoted to their sacred calling from their earliest years, and it is their chief business to dance before the image of the god, to whom they are married (though in Upper India professional dancing girls are married to inanimate objects), but they are also trained in arousing and assuaging the desires of devotees who come on pilgrimage to the shrine …

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However inaccurate Ellis’s brief summary may be, with its obvious conflation of the jogati and jogini class with the hereditary Sadir dancers, it demonstrates a growing rift between Western intellectuals of the more ‘scientific’ kind—with their tendency towards disinterested study and acceptance of the varieties of global sexual and cultural manifestations—and the older school of social reformer with its unquestioning Christian leanings. The quoted passage is from Henri Antoine Jules Bois (1868–1943), the French occultist who became notorious for his writings on Satanism and magic. Bois was a friend of Swami Vivekananda, and was much taken with aspects of Hindu philosophy. His book, Visions de L’Inde has several impressionistic passages on the bayadère, which are not given here. He also worked on a romance to be called Le Roman de la Bayadère, but whether this work was ever published is unclear to me. The travel writer C.H.A. Forbes–Lindsay (1860–?), makes no reference to morals at all, except as touching the question of payment, in his brief glance at the temple dancers in 1903: Conjeveram, the Benares of the south, is one of the seven holy cities of India. There are two groups of temples, with fine gopuras from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high. The Hall of a Thousand Pillars in the great Ekambárah Swanír temple contains a number of carved and colored wooden images, which are carried in procession during the May festival. The Temple of Vishnu is the pride of Conjeveram. It is entered through a seven-storied gopura. The establishment includes a great many nautch girls, who are ready and anxious to perform for the amusement of the visitor, but not without an eye to their own profit. The same idea, mingled with the pride of proprietorship, induces the priests to produce the jewels …

The pattern of impartial observation finds it culmination in this decade in Edgar Thurston’s (1855–1935) well known work, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India, published in 1909:

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Deva-dasi:

In old Hindu works, seven classes of Dasis are mentioned, viz., (1) Datta, or one who gives herself as a gift to a temple; (2) Vikrita, or one who sells herself for the same purpose; (3) Bhritya, or one who offers herself as a temple servant for the prosperity of her family; (4) Bhakta, or one who joins a temple out of devotion; (5) Hrita, or one who is enticed away, and presented to a temple; (6) Alankara, or one who, being well trained in her profession, and profusely decked, is presented to a temple by kings and noblemen; (7) Rudraganika or Gopika, who receive regular wages from a temple, and are employed to sing and dance. For the following general account I am indebted to the Madras Census Report, 1901: Dasis or Deva-dasis (handmaidens of the gods) are dancing-girls attached to the Tamil temples, who subsist by dancing and music, and the practice of ‘the oldest profession in the world.’ The Dasis were probably in the beginning the result of left-handed unions between members of two different castes, but they are now partly recruited by admissions, and even purchases, from other classes. The profession is not now held in the consideration it once enjoyed. Formerly they enjoyed a considerable social position. It is one of the many inconsistencies of the Hindu religion that, though their profession is repeatedly and vehemently condemned by the Shastras, it has always received the countenance of the church. The rise of the caste, and its euphemistic name, seem both of them to date from about the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., during which much activity prevailed in Southern India in the matter of building temples, and elaborating the services held in them.

The dancing-girls’ duties, then as now, were to fan the idol with chamaras (Tibetan ox tails), to carry the sacred light called kumbarti, and to sing and dance before the god when he was carried in procession. Inscriptions show that, in A.D. 1004, the great temple of the Chola

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king Rajaraja at Tanjore had attached to it four hundred cheri pendugal, or women of the temple, who lived in free quarters in the four streets round about it, and were allowed tax-free land out of the endowment. Other temples had similar arrangements. At the beginning of the last century there were a hundred dancing-girls attached to the temple at Conjeeveram, who were, Buchanan tells us, ‘kept for the honour of the deities and the amusement of their votaries; and any familiarity between these girls and an infidel would occasion scandal.’

At Madura, Conjeeveram, and Tanjore there are still numbers of them, who receive allowances from the endowments of the big temples at these places. In former days, the profession was countenanced not only by the church, but also by the State. Abdur Razaak, a Turkish ambassador at the court of Vijayanagar in the fifteenth century, describes women of this class as living in State-controlled institutions, the revenue of which went towards the upkeep of the police.

At the present day they form a regular caste, having its own laws of inheritance, its own customs and rules of etiquette, and its own panchayats (councils) to see that all these are followed, and thus hold a position, which is perhaps without a parallel in any other country. Dancing-girls, dedicated to the usual profession of the caste, are formally married in a temple to a sword or a god, the tali (marriage badge) being tied round their necks by some men of their caste. It was a standing puzzle to the census enumerators whether such women should be entered as married in the column referring to civil condition. Among the Dasis, sons and daughters inherit equally, contrary to ordinary Hindu usage. Some of the sons remain in the caste, and live by playing music for the women to dance to, and accompaniments to their songs, or by teaching singing and dancing to the younger

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girls, and music to the boys. These are called Nattuvans. Others marry some girl of the caste, who is too plain to be likely to be a success in the profession, and drift out of the community. Some of these affix to their names the terms Pillai and Mudali, which are the usual titles of the two castes (Vellala and Kaikola) from which most of the Dasis are recruited, and try to live down the stigma attaching to their birth. Others join the Melakkarans or professional musicians. Cases have occurred, in which wealthy sons of dancing-women have been allowed to marry girls of respectable parentage of other castes, but they are very rare. The daughters of the caste, who are brought up to follow the caste profession, are carefully taught dancing, singing, the art of dressing well, and the ars amoris, and their success in keeping up their clientèle is largely due to the contrast which they thus present to the ordinary Hindu housewife, whose ideas are bounded by the day’s dinner and the babies.

The dancing-girl castes, and their allies the Melakkarans, are now practically the sole repository of Indian music, the system of which is probably one of the oldest in the world. Besides them and the Brahmans, few study the subject. The barbers’ bands of the villages usually display more energy than science. A notable exception, however, exists in Madras city, which has been known to attempt the Dead March in Saul at funerals in the Pariah quarters.

There are two divisions among the Dasis, called Valangai (right-hand) and Idangai (left-hand). The chief distinction between them is that the former will have nothing to do with the Kammalans (artisans) or any other of the left-hand castes, or play or sing in their houses. The latter division is not so particular, and its members are consequently sometimes known as the Kammala Dasis. Neither division, however, is allowed to have any dealings with men of the lowest castes, and violation of this rule of etiquette is tried by a panchayat of the caste, and visited with excommunication …

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… The Nattuvan, or dancing-master, instructs her for the first time in his art, and a quantity of raw rice is given to her by the temple authorities. The girl, thus married, is taken to her house, where the marriage festivities are celebrated for two or three days. As in Brahmanical marriages, the rolling of a cocoanut to and fro is gone through, the temple priest or an elderly Dasi, dressed in male attire, acting the part of the bridegroom. The girl is taken in procession through the streets.

The birth of male children is not made an occasion for rejoicing, and, as the proverb goes, the lamp on these occasions is only dimly lighted. Inheritance is in the female line, and women are the absolute owners of all property earned. When a dancing-girl dies, some paddy and five fanams are given from the temple to which she was attached, to defray the funeral expenses. The temple priest gives a garland, and a quantity of ashes for decorating the corpse. After this, a Nampiyan, an Occhan, some Vellala headmen, and a Kudikkari, having no pollution, assemble at the house of the deceased. The Nampiyan consecrates a pot of water with prayers, the Occhan plays on his musical instrument, and the Vellalas and Kudikkari powder the turmeric to be smeared over the corpse …

… There is no evidence that they are regarded otherwise than as respectable members of the caste. It seems as if the Basavi is the Madiga and Bedar equivalent of the ‘appointed daughter’ of Hindu law … Upon the whole, the evidence seems to establish that, among the Madigas, there is a widespread custom of performing, in a temple at Uchangidurgam, a marriage ceremony, the result of which is that the girl is married without possibility of widowhood or divorce; that she is at liberty to have intercourse with men at her pleasure; that her children are heirs to her father, and keep up his family; and that a Basavi’s nieces, being made Basavis, become their heirs. The Basavis seem in some cases to become prostitutes, but the language used by the

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witnesses generally points only to free intercourse with men, and not necessarily to receipt of payment for use of their bodies. In fact, they seem to acquire the right of intercourse with men without more discredit than accrues to the men of their caste for intercourse with women who are not their wives. It may be observed that Deva-dasis are the only class of women, who are, under Hindu law as administered in the British Courts, allowed to adopt girls to themselves …

Thurston certainly was a social and ethnological scientist of the period, graduating from Superintendent of the Madras Government Museum to Superintendent of Ethnography for the Madras Presidency, while also practising and lecturing in medicine. His lengthy section on the devadasis can’t be fully reproduced here, but is the best specimen of descriptive and analytical text on the devadasi system that we have from this decade. The last part of this section is devoted to written accounts of dance performances as they were experienced by a sampling of writers in the first decade of the 20th century, beginning with a piece of reminiscence by Mrs Herbert Reynolds, who looks back on the late-19th-century high life of colonial Bengal when no special occasion went unaccompanied by a ‘nautch’: A Hindu of good style and address, received us at the house-door, and, ushering us into a large hall, conducted us to tea. Two of his relatives then came, bearing silver flagons, from which one poured rose-water on my handkerchief ...

We then watched the Nautch, which was being danced in the centre of the hall by seven or eight girls. These girls shuffle their feet along the ground, and seem to move aimlessly, sometimes diversifying the monotony by twirling round two or three times, continuously bending their arms and hands, as if imitating the sinuous movement of a snake … this dancing and music represent the height of felicity and harmony; but they are not so delightful to an English audience; nevertheless

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the large hall was filled with interested spectators, both European and native …

… But to return to Calcutta, and the Nautch, which formed a very different scene from that to which I have just alluded. The principal danseuse was from Kashmir, and rejoiced in an exceedingly fair complexion: she and her companions were attired in very full skirts of variously-coloured muslins, interwoven with gold or silver thread, each robe having a deep border of the same. Underneath were flowing trousers falling over the ankle. A sleeveless jacket covered the body to the waist; arms, necks and ears being loaded with jewellery, and a gold ornament covered the top of the head. Later in the evening, the Lieutenant-Governor honoured the scene with his presence, when the dancing was renewed with fresh ardour, after which we bade adieu to our host and his festivities.

Albert E. Cook, writing in 1906 or 1907, recalls his own experience, with some anxious misgivings about the bewitching powers of the dancers: The whole place was beautifully illuminated. Under the tents a carpet was spread. At one end of the tent the guests—all men, of course—were gathering, and at the other end were the musicians. Between them were the dancing girls—nautch girls. The host, robed in beautiful loose and flowing garments, hair and cap carefully arranged, slippers and striped socks upon his feet, came forward to meet us with extended hands and a cordial welcome. With a face wreathed in smiles, with soft and gentle manners, he conducted my wife to his zenana and me to the tent. In the zenana his wife was delighted with her visitor, and conversation flowed freely for a while. As the music rose on the night air, the woman turned to my wife with a sad face and asked, ‘What do you think of the nautch girls?’

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As a rule these girls are beautiful. On their comely forms, beautiful filmy muslin, or silk, or other rich material, often with a border of gold or silver threads, three inches wide, interwoven, is gracefully draped. Their black hair is neatly arranged and interlaid with large gold jewels of fine work; jewels in their ears and noses, around the neck and waist, on the arms, wrists, ankles, fingers, and toes. Around the ankles were heavy silver-linked jewels upon which were several small silver bells which jingled as they struck the heel while dancing.

They are exceedingly graceful in their movements. From childhood they have been taught the art of gracefulness and attractiveness. So bewitching are some of them that many a wealthy man has squandered all his fortune upon them. After all they are what men have made them. They did not choose this life, it was forced upon them. Most of them, I believe, would prefer married life with a private home.

But to come back to the Mohammedan’s home. Think of the husband with his gay friends in the beautifully lighted front court, while his wife sits in a dingy little back room. She can hear the music as it floats out on the night air, and the voices of the dancing girls, the muffled sounds of a happy throng, but dares not show her face on the scene. That thing goes on till midnight, yea, until the small hours of the morning. To-night it is here, to-morrow night somewhere else. His wife sees him only when it pleases ‘his lordship’ to go to her, and then she would often be better pleased if he did not come … … Even the best natives do not hesitate to patronize the nautch girl, and sometimes she is treated with as much courtesy as though she were a princess. Some of the best people have been ruined physically, morally, and financially in this way. We personally saw a young Englishman fleeced of all he had within six months by a bewitching nautch girl …

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Another American, Lee S. Smith, recollects the ‘weirdness’ and the surprising recourse to English songs in a dance performance arranged for him at a hotel in Lucknow: Delhi seems to be the headquarters for the Nautch singing and dancing girls. We frequently met a group of them with their musicians in the streets, or at show places visited, seeking patronage for their weird performance. Speaking of these girls and their calling (which does not savor of either purity or virtue) an American lady who had lived in India for thirty years told me that the Nautch girls constituted a distinct class or caste, into which they were born and from which they cannot escape, and further, that they are the best educated of the native girls. Poor creatures, born with the mark of Cain upon them, with no thought or hope of rising above it. I asked our native guide if none of these girls ever reformed. He said, ‘No, they are born Nautch girls and cannot be anything else, because their parents were Nautch girls’ …

While in Lucknow, our hotel proprietor favored us with a purely Indian entertainment by the Nautch girls. There were two of the girls, with an orchestra of unnameable instruments which kept up a din called ‘music;’ to this the girls first danced, then the tune changed and they began to sing, introducing an occasional whirl of a dance. The strange part of their songs was that they took up the last word and repeated it over and over, again and again, apparently without limit as to the number, occasionally bringing in the entire verse, as they never give more than one. They sang two songs in pigeon English, ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’, and ‘When I was single,’ and seemed greatly pleased at their supposed mastery of English. Altogether, the entertainment, as considered along another noticeable feature of the dancing of both the Geisha girls of Japan and the Nautch girls of India, is

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the modesty of their costumes or dress, as there is no exposure of the person whatever. It is true, however, that the Nautch girls do affect the muscular movements of the abdomen and hips, to some extent similar to the Egyptian dancers …

Around 1906, yet another American, George Walter Caldwell (1866–1946), a medical doctor and sometime song-writer, remembered his dance experience in Delhi laconically enough, but seems to have appreciated its ‘rhythm and swing’: I have seen a nautch dance. In my boyhood I read the tales of travelers, and their descriptions conjured up in my imagination pictures of oriental luxury and delights that have never faded; therefore among the early inquiries I made in India was the question, ‘Where shall we see a nautch?’ Everyone said ‘Delhi is the place. Delhi, the ancient capital; the center of wealth, art, poetry and pleasure.’ I had pictured to myself a marble court with Moorish arches, splashing fountains, mellow lights, rich rugs, divans, draperies and the voluptuous odors of sandal wood and attar of roses …

… No, the room was not completely barren, for besides the European chairs, there were European chromos on the wall showing some highly colored horse races, and a lithograph giving us the cheering intelligence that ‘Splittz Beer is Best.’ In addition there was considerable bona-fide Asiatic dirt.

Ranged against the opposite wall were seven native musicians with strange instruments and an English concertina. When the music began, two girls appeared and lifted up their voices in song. They were wonderfully and voluminously appareled …

… The feet were bare, but were loaded with silver anklets and toe rings too numerous to count. Their heads and necks were roped with near-pearls and other jewels of more or less value. A shawl with golden fringe was twisted about the body, a corner of which was occasionally thrown coquettishly over the head …

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… they lifted up their voices in song. The song was not so bad, although we had no idea what it was about, but it seemed to possess the wild passionate thrill of an oriental love song. It had odd little quavers at the end of the measures, and considerable rhythm and swing. When they clasped their hands and rolled up their eyes, it was plain enough to me that they were making love, and I was enjoying it as such until the interpreter explained they were charming snakes. Then they danced the ‘Thread-Making Dance’ in which they carded imaginary wool, spun and twisted imaginary thread and made an imaginary garment. These nautch girls might be called pretty, with their round young faces, raven hair, rich dark complexions and languishing eyes, were it not for the betel nut habit …

The nautch dances were a series of posturings, attempts at dramatic expression, and while not lacking in grace, were, to us, ridiculous and monotonous. Doubtless they appeal to the oriental mind. They must do so; for they are the steady entertainment of millions of Indians, and have been for thousands of years. At last garlands of fragrant white flowers were hung about our necks, and the entertainment was over.

Even Henry Olcott (1832–1907), co-founder and first president of the Theosophical Society, recalled, between 1900 and 1910, his first ‘nautch’ experience, though with typical colonial ‘creevils’ and boredom: The Indian nautch is the most doleful of amusements, one to set a Western man yawning. Here were three pretty, young, and richly costumed girls and one old one, moving about to the sound of Indian musical instruments in an interminable series of posturings, floor-stampings with their little feet, and turnings about; with wavings of hands and snake-like motions of fingers, and the singing of inflammatory songs in Hindi, and lewd gesture eye-winking; until one felt the creevils all over and longed to get away to the garden for a quiet smoke.

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But the old Maharajah seemed to like it, and beamed benevolently on us all through his gold spectacles, so I sat and bore it as best I could …

Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) was an American abolitionist and freethinker, who edited the anti-slavery weekly, Commonwealth, in Boston, and wrote extensively on abolition. He was also a man of letters who counted among his friends such literary figures as Charles Dickens and Robert Browning. He spent the last four decades of his life in England and France, and visited India during this period. His published memoirs, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, was published in 1907. It contains his account of a South Indian dasi attam performance which he attended in Sri Lanka: Five Nautch girls entered with five male singers and musicians. The girls sat in a row on the floor facing us, and the men behind them—the plain white dress of the latter making a background for the rich costumes of the dancers. These Nautch costumes, though glowing with colour and laden with jewels, were not gaudy nor even gorgeous; they were somewhat barbaric, but had an antiquarian character very pleasing…

The Sinhalese Nautch girls are dressed with decorum. They are small of stature, several of them pretty, and the pearls and gold they wear—always excepting the nosegems—and the silver anklets above their bare feet well become their complexion. Soon after they had seated themselves on the floor, all—men and women—began to sing. It sounded as a chant with grace-notes at the end of each bar, and my host, who sat beside me, told me it was a hymn to Siva. I did not like it much. It impressed my ear as nasal, not to say whining, and monotonous.

Then followed a love-song, and for a few moments it sounded like the same tune over again, but as I listened more closely, and tried to detach the accompaniment of tom-tom, pipe, and viol, I perceived that there was more variety and more science in this music than my ear could easily take in. For the first time it occurred to

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me that part of the fault I found in oriental music might lie in my ear not being sufficiently cosmopolitan. But at the same time I felt sure that this music was not a product of art in the European sense of art; it was not a thing that aimed at beauty; it had ulterior purposes: to move the compassion of a god or lover—a cry wrung out of struggle.

It is a remarkable fact that all the ancient love-songs of India are uttered by women to men. My host, whose studies of such subjects have been extensive, told me that, judging by the ancient songs, the love-making used to be entirely on the part of women. These Nautch girls belong to the Hindu temple, and they sing and dance only these very ancient themes, transmitting them to their children with extreme literalness, precisely as they received them. The great piece of the evening was a long dramatic love-song of great antiquity, sung by all the performers, male and female, accompanied by full instrumentation and danced by the 1eading Nautch girl, who alone did not sing. Her gestures were very expressive, and I was at times reminded of the French saying, ‘What can’t be said can be sung, and what can’t be sung can be danced.’

The feet had little more to do with the dance than to bear forward and backward the swaying or undulating form—not at all the danse du ventre— while the arms were ever on the move and the fingers twisted themselves into many variations. None of these handmovements were the same, and each meant something. The opening scene pantomimed was the first glimpse of the beloved, told in embarrassment, meditation, and then the flinging up of the arms in appeal to the god of Love. Then followed the first coquettish attempt to fascinate him—now by coyness, next by a display of charms. Then follows dismay—the beloved makes no sign of requital. The maiden becomes melancholy, weeps; then she becomes passionate and confesses to him her love. He is still cold and she is jealous. Finding

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he loves no other, she asks if he is a man who is thus unmoved by woman’s love. He then proposes illicit love; this she refuses with indignation that turns to sorrow. Then she becomes angry, and when her anger melts, the heart of her beloved also melts. Then her finale of joy is danced. Much in this dance was touching, much was exciting, and it was all of absorbing interest; when the girl sat down breathless, it for the first time occurred to me that she had been dancing fifteen minutes without an instant’s pause. I might have enjoyed this dance a little more had I not had to act passively the part of the beloved object. The girl approached me, clasped her hands passionately under my obdurate eyes, kneeled to me. I dared not glance at the English ladies, who I knew were smiling behind their fans, and foresaw the narrative witty Mrs. Thwaites would send to our mutual friends in London. In an interval for ices and sherbets the Nautches came up in a perfunctory way to have their mystical ornaments looked at—armlets, bracelets, etc.—silent, impassive, and automatic during the process …

In 1907, the French entomologist, Maurice Maindron (1857–1911), composed a written account of a dance performance which he had witnessed in Pondicherry: … the bayadères arrived and began singing. There were five or six of them, young, quite petite, very dark, and dressed in a luxury that much surpassed their beauty … Then the head of the orchestra announced that the bayadères would not dance, and that because the chariot of Shiva was stuck in the mud … In effect, the dancers were not able to devote themselves to profane dances under the eyes of their god, who, according to his habit, was not shown without being covered with garlands of flowers up to his gilded nose. One of the hierodules now began a very graceful pantomime. Her natural gestures, her expressive figure, by turns desolate and then again delighted, showed to

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us that which is suffered by the lovers in Hindu poems, abandoned by their gods …

At last the bayadère ceased. She was given a wad of rupees on the part of the governor, I attached a sovereign to her frontage, and departed without hope of seeing the procession of the chariot of Shiva, now definitely blocked in the mud …

The recollection is in the French sardonic mode, and, on the whole, does not depart from other dance descriptions to which we have become accustomed. Maindron wrote another account of a dance performed by devadasis from Villianur, and this is found among his Letters Written from South India, published in 1907, and which are not given here. The finest attempt to appreciate and articulate what he was seeing and experiencing in a South Indian dance performance, probably a varnam, was made by Pierre Loti (1850–1923), a French naval officer, novelist and short story writer, who had visited India in 1899. I give the writing in full here on account of its exceptional attention to the details of what was being offered and absorbed: The young painted face, with eyes of excessive length, draws near. The young face with the impress of gloom and sensuality advances and draws back, very quickly and very lightly. The two pupils that roll, black as an onyx on a groundwork of white enamel, are fixed on mine unwaveringly, in these alternative advances of sensual appeal, and retreats into the shade, that are ever succeeded by a new and provocative advance. The young, bronze-coloured face is wreathed in precious stones, and a band of gold and diamonds surrounds the forehead and descends over the temples, concealing the hair, and in the ears and nose many diamonds sparkle. It is night, and everything is lit up, but in all this crowd I can only see the woman with the helmeted head whose shining point seems to exercise a fascination over me. There are many spectators gathered around watching her also, scarcely leaving room for her evolutions, only a sort of passage by which she can

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reach me and then draw back; but they have ceased to exist for me, and I only see the woman and her sparkling head-dress and the play of her black eyes and eyebrows.

She has a body lithe as a serpent, yet firm and plump; enchanting arms that seem instinct with assurances of embrace, and which twist and writhe like snakes loaded and encircled up to the shoulders by diamonds and rubies. But, no! the attraction lies in those eyes whose expression is ever changing, sometimes mocking, sometimes tender, and which look into mine in a way that makes me tremble. The jewels of her head-dress and the gems in her ears and nose shine so brilliantly, and the golden band forms such a brightly defined framing, that the face underneath, with its soft features and its dull and dusky skin, seems to have a nameless and far-off indefiniteness, even when it is quite close to me. The bayadère goes and comes; she seems to dance for me alone. Her dance is noiseless, and only the tinkling of the precious bracelets on her ankles is heard, for a carpet receives the cadenced impress of the little naked feet, whose expanded and mobile toes are burdened with rings.

All this takes place in an atmosphere so saturated with essences and the perfume of flowers as to be almost unbreatheable. I am at a fête given by the Indians who live here, the French Indians, and I am in the house of the most wealthy of them. On my arrival the host placed a many-rowed collar of jasmines of intoxicating odour round my neck, and sprinkled me also with rose-water from a long-necked silver flagon. The heat is suffocating. The guests are mostly seated—a row of dusky heads whose turbans are embroidered with gold thread. Above these heads great fans of painted palm are waved by naked and erect attendants—their nudity looking the more strange amongst this gaily decked crowd, where even the men wear diamonds in their ears and at their waists. The bayadère has been told that the fête was in my honour, so that it is to me that this comedienne,

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accomplished both by nature and inheritance, addresses herself.

She has come from afar for this evening, from one of the temples of the south, where she is in the service of Siva; her reputation is great, and her performances are costly. She sways backwards and forwards, waving meanwhile her beautiful nude arms, twisting her fingers into strange shapes, and her toes, which have been trained since her infancy to that purpose, into still stranger contortions, the great toe being always separated and maintained erect in the air. Between the gauze of gold that enwraps her loins and the corset in which her bust is held a close prisoner one sees as usual a little of her pale bronze body, a little of her vigorous and sinewy flesh; and the play of the lower part of her breasts and of her waist is exposed to our gaze.

Her dance consists of a series of expressive poses, a kind of acted monologue, with those oft-repeated advances and retreats, approaching towards me through the lane of human faces, coming quite close with her eyes riveted on mine; then, with a sudden flight, disappearing into the gloom that envelops the lower end of the hall. She depicts a scene of seduction and reproach. Behind, at the back, musicians intone the melody of this scene to an accompaniment of tambourines and flutes. She, too, sings as she acts, but only to herself, and in a little voice that is not intended to be heard. This, however, serves to aid her memory, and to allow her to enter more fully into the varied dramatic phases of her part. Now she approaches from the end of the hall that is shrouded in shadow, a creature glittering in gold and jewels; she darts towards me with an indignant air of accusation, and menaces me with expressive gestures that call heaven to witness the magnitude of the crime I have committed. Then suddenly the bayadère bursts into a fit of mocking laughter; she overwhelms me with bantering disdain and with extended finger, points me out to the jeering crowd. Her irony is, of course, factitious, just as

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were the superb imprecations with which she but lately encompassed me. But it is a marvellous imitation all the same. Her titter and somewhat sad laughter can be heard to resound in her heaving chest, and she laughs with her mouth, her eyes, and her eyebrows, with her bosom, and with her heaving and panting breasts.

As she withdraws, shaken with laughter, the effect is irresistible, and one must laugh with her. She withdraws backwards, as quickly as her little feet will take her, turning away her head in scorn, so that she may no longer see me. But now she returns with slow and solemn step; these sarcasms were but spite; her love is too strong, she returns conquered by the sovereign passion, stretching her hands out to me, imploring pardon, and offering her all in a final appeal. And as she again withdraws, with her head thrown back and her half-opened lips that disclose the pearly teeth glimmering beneath the diamonds in her nose, she wishes me to follow her, even seems to command it, she calls me with her arms, her breasts, and her languorous eyes; she calls me with all her being, as with a loadstone, and for a very little I should follow her almost involuntarily, for I am at last spell-bound by her fascinations.

Her promises of love are false, and like her laughter but part of the comedy. One knows it, and indeed it is no worse for that; perhaps even the knowledge of its unreality only adds a new and malignant charm. Whilst she acts, a sort of magnetic or invisible bond unites her to those two men who sing in the orchestra, and who, like her, go and come along the human passage; sometimes advancing, then taking three or four steps backward. They follow her when she comes near me, but are the first to draw back when it is time for her to retire; they never allow her to escape from out of their sight, and their burning gaze is fixed on her, whilst with widely opened mouths they ever sing in the high falsetto voice of a muezzin. With heads bent forward they, who are tall, look down on her who is short, and they have the air of being the masters by whom she is inspired and

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possessed. They seem to guide her with their voices, and to fan her with the flame of their breath like some delicate and glittering butterfly that they have tamed to their will, and there is an unknown something in this that seems perverse and uncanny. In the less brightly lit place where the orchestra is seated there are two or three other gaily-adorned bayadères who had already danced. One had struck me as being especially strange, a sort of beautiful, poisonous flower; tall and thin, with features that seemed too delicate and eyes that were too long already, without their unnatural lengthening of paint; blue-black hair, stretched in tight bands across the cheeks; drapery that was wholly black, a black girdle and a black veil with the slightest silver edging. Her ornaments consisted of nothing but rubies, rubies that covered hands and arms, and in her nose a bunch of rubies that fell over her mouth, so that the ghoulish lips looked as if a spot of blood had yet remained on them. But I forgot them all as soon as I saw that one, that queen, that star, make her sudden appearance between the musicians who stood aside to let her pass, that creature all decked in gold who had been kept for the last.

Her dance was long, very long, almost wearisome, yet I dreaded the moment when it would end and I should see her no more. Once more she repeated her reproaches and that irresistible laugh; once more I felt the mockery of her sparkling eyes and again the evermore despairing calls of love. At last she ceases and all is over, and I wake up and see the people gathered around, and find myself surrounded once more by the realities of the entertainment organized in my honour. Before retiring—and it is time—I go to compliment the bayadère. I find her wiping her face with a delicate handkerchief; she has been very hot, and the perspiration rolls down her forehead on to her smooth and dusky bust. In a manner that is now correct, cold, and indifferent, the tired and unconcerned comedienne

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receives my compliments with little bows of mock modesty, little bows made in the Indian style, hiding her face each time with hands on every finger of which she wears diamonds. What thoughts can there be in the soul of a bayadère of the old race and the pure blood? the daughter and granddaughter of bayadères, one who has been trained through descent, that has lasted for hundreds and thousands of years, to be a creature of naught but phantasy and pleasure …

Loti displays all the sensitive charm of the litterateur aesthete of the belle époque. He is as interested in the dance as he is in the person and nature of the dancer herself. Though still suffused with the romanticizing tendency of all orientalist perceptions of the dance, when they are positive, it remains a fact that Loti, and others like him, were capable of seeing beyond the moral screen thrown up by the reformers to the depth of the art that he was taking in.

Figure 12.5 Four South Indian dancer-musicians, photographed in Sri Lanka, c. 1905.

As the selection of texts from this decade shows, the reformers from all sides of the spectrum of social-moral activism were not the only voices that spoke about the dancer and her art. There

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were at least as many individuals and instances which did not view the system in simplistic ethical terms. The moral and ‘purity’ reformers, indeed, were a minority group, but one whose clamorous agitations were insistent enough to be heeded by the media and the people in power. By the end of 1910, their agenda was all but assured of final success. The dance economy in India was being shunned as an outcast anomaly, and public performances were becoming very difficult to stage. The Mysore court outlawed the gajjai puja in 1909, and would soon be followed by the court at Travancore. Public officials no longer dared to attend events at which dance was performed, and further activism was brought to bear with an eye on legislation that would finally abolish the system, and in the process almost destroy the art. The dancing class, though still active, was living and working under ongoing conditions of strain and terror.

References

1. Gentil, Henri, Letter to Paul Bocquet, in La Société française au tournant du XXe siècle vue a travers la correspondance de Paul Bocquet et Henri Gentil, Dossier pédagogique réalisé par le service éducatif des Archives de la Marne, 2017. 2. Naidu, R. Venkataratnam, Social Purity and the Anti-Nautch Movement in Indian Social Reform in Four Parts, C.Y Chintamani (ed.), Madras: Thompson & Co., 1901.

3. The Assembly Herald, vol. 3, no. 7, 1900–1901.

4. The Great Temples of India, Ceylon and Burma, London: Christian Literature Society for India, 1904. 5. Missionary Review of the World, vol. 24, pt. 1, New York: Funk & Wagnall’s, 1901. 6. Compton, Herbert E., Indian Life in Town and Country, New York: Putnam, 1904. 7. Lilly, William S., India and its Problems, London: Snads & Co., 1902. 8. Times of India, 10 November 1893.

9. Mason, Caroline A., Lux Christi: An Outline Study of India; a Twilight Land, New York: MacMillan, 1902.

10. Carmichael, Amy Wilson, Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India, London: Morgan and Scott, 1904.

References

11. Carmichael, Amy Wilson, Lotus Buds, London: Morgan and Scott, 1909.

12. Thackwell, R., Indian Reformers and Christian Missionaries in Presbyterian Banner, vol. 94 (1907–1908), Pittsburgh: Banner Publishing Co., 1907.

13. Denning, Margaret B., Mosaics from India; talks about India, its peoples, religions, and customs, Chicago, New York etc., 1902.

14. Sharrock, John A., South Indian Missions: containing glimpses into the lives and customs of the Tamil people, Westminster: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1910.

15. Slater, T.E., The Higher Hinduism in Relation to Christianity, London: E. Stock, 1906. 16. Besant, Annie Wood, Ancient Ideals in Modern Life: four lectures delivered at the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Theosophical Society at Benares, December, 1900, London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1901.

17. Bliss, William D.P. (ed.) & Binder, Rudolph M. (ed.), The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, including all social reform movements and activities, and the economic, industrial and sociological facts and statistics of all countries and all social subjects, New York: Funk & Wagnall’s Company, 1910. 18. Hampton-Columbian Magazine, vol. 27, Columbian-Sterling Publishing Company, 1909–1911.

19. Joyce, T. Athol & Thomas, N.W., Women of all Nations; a Record of their Characteristics, Habits, Manners Customs, and Influence, London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1908.

20. Curtis, William E., Nautch Girls in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, vol. 27, Chicago: Jameson and Morse, 1905; and in Modern India, Chicago: F.H. Revell Company, 1905.

21. Crooke, William, Things Indian: being discursive notes on various subjects connected with India, London: J. Murray, 1906.

22. Hayes, Thomas, Dances of the East in The English Illustrated Magazine, vol. 37, nos. 49–54, 1907.

23. Heath, Helena, The Music of the Nations, in Chatterbox, Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1906. 24. Rees, John D., The Real India, London: Methuen & Co., 1908.

25. Steiner, Joseph, article in American Journal of Eugenics, vol. 1, nos. 1–6, Chicago: M. Harman, 1907–1910.

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26. Ellis, Havelock, Sex in Relation to Society, vol. 6 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Philadelphia: F.A. Davids Company, 1910.

27. Forbes–Lindsay, C.H.A., India, Past and Present, Philadelphia: H.T. Coates and Co., 1903. 28. Thurston, Edgar, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Madras: India Government Press, 1909.

29. Reynolds, Mrs Herbert, At Home in India; or, Tâza-be-Tâza, London: Drane, 1903. 30. Cook, Albert E., The Bright Side and the Other Side: What India Can Teach Us, Cincinatti: Jennings and Graham, 1907.

31. Smith, Lee S., Round the World Toward the Westering Sun, Chicago: F.H. Revell, 1904.

32. Caldwell, George W., Oriental Rambles, New York: Roughkeepie, c. 1906.

33. Olcott, Henry S., Old Diary Leaves; the only authentic history of the Theosophical Society, London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1900–1910. 34. Conway, Moncure D., My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906.

35. Maindron, Maurice, Dans l’Inde du Sud (Le Coromandel) Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1907; and Lettres écrits du sud de l’Inde in Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. 34, no. 2, 1906.

36. Loti, Pierre, India, London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd., 1906.

Chapter 13

A Decade of Contradiction and Appropriation: 1910–1920 The decade of the First World War (1914–1918) sees Britain and the European colonial powers turn aside from socio-political and moral issues in India to focus on the moral catastrophe of their own propensities to violent conflict. In India, though the question of the ‘nautch-girl’ is still very much part of the local and missionary social reform agenda, it no longer yields any new controversies and is addressed in much the same terms that have obtained since the early 1890s. In terms of writings about dance in India, the contradiction persists between individuals and organizations that are struggling against the system, together with the art that it has created and continues to sustain, and those who are keen openly to express their aesthetic appreciation of the art. Indeed, this decade sees the gradual adoption and even appropriation of orientalist forms of creative dance by Western performers such as ‘Roshanara’ and Ruth St. Denis, who had presented her orientalist item, Radha, as early as 1906, and who later created other ‘Indian’ dance fantasies in the tradition of ‘The Nautch Girl’. Such adoptions and creative adaptations contributed to greater awareness in Western theatres of the potential for ‘Indian’ dance to bring new formalisms and vitality into the sphere of orientalist dance, and led to wide acclaim Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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for later creative Indian performers such as Uday Shankar and Ram Gopal, and, later yet, for genuine Sadir dancers like Tanjore Balasaraswati. From an academic point of view, an increasing openness to studies in sexuality places the devadasi as one focal point of the study of sexual practices in ancient Western religions, in which she is seen as a ‘modern’ instance of temple prostitution, albeit one that is about to disappear from the historical scene. Within India, we see the anti-nautch movement making headway, winning prominent social and intellectual figures to its cause, as seen in this 1911 text by Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963), the American Protestant missionary and intellectual Christian networker, who opens his article on the ‘nautch-girl’ with a quote from Mrs Marcus B. Fuller: What loneliness must fill a child-wife’s heart, when sent away from play with happy brothers and sisters, away from a loving mother’s care and sympathy … The nautchgirl often begins her career of training under teachers as early as five years of age. She is taught to read, dance, and sing, and instructed in every seductive art. Her songs are usually amorous; and while she is yet a mere girl, before she can realize fully the moral bearings of her choice of life, she makes her debut as a nautch-girl in the community by the observation of a shocking custom which is in itself enough to condemn the whole system.—Fuller

And continues:

... Try and put yourself in the place of this girl, and think what such a life would mean to you …

The Hindu customs which sanction the nautch, or dancing-girls, the Devadasis or ‘servants of the gods,’ who are married to the god for a life of religious prostitution, and the practise in western India of dedicating girls for a life of immorality to the god Khandoba, become a stream of poison in Indian society. A newspaper, The Hindu, affirms of this custom of the dancing-girls ‘that the demoralization it causes is

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immense. So long as we allow it to be associated with our temples and places of worship, we offend and degrade our nationality. The loss and misery it has entailed on many a home is indescribable.’ This custom of dancing-girls is connected with the stories of Krishna, and Bishop Caldwell says that, ‘the stories related of Krishna’s life do more than anything else to destroy the morals and corrupt the imagination of Hindu youth.’

The presence of the nautch-girl is sought at weddings and other ceremonies. She is the one who fastens the wedding necklace, which is the equivalent of the wedding ring of the West, and her defiled hands tie the marriage knot and pollute the very inception of marriage. The Hindu Social Reform Association of Madras in a petition to the government states ‘that these women are invariably prostitutes,’ and ‘that this practise not only necessarily lowers the moral tone of society but also tends to destroy that family life on which national soundness depends, and to bring upon individuals ruin in property and character alike.’ As Mr. Tagore says, ‘It is a canker that eats into the vitals of our national existence and which, if not removed, in time may lead to the degeneracy and decay of the whole race. In South India alone there are 12,000 temple women dedicated to the service of the gods.’

Their immorality constituted a part of the religious worship of the temple, polluting priests and people alike, until restrained by the British government … Our hearts go out to these poor defenceless girls in India. Miss Carmichael has begun rescuing little girls who are being sold to the temples for lives of shame. She has over a hundred beautiful, bright-faced children, who had been, or were about to be, sold to the temple and ‘married to the god’ for a life of immorality. For some she paid ten cents, others had been promised to the temple for as high as thirty dollars, while some she got free.

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… There is much that cannot be told. A poor helpless and defenceless widow who is at the mercy of the men of her household gives birth to a child. One of three things happens: the mother must go down the well, or the child must be put out of the way by infanticide, or it must be sold to the temple. Miss Carmichael herself tells the story of one of these bright-faced little girls. Married to the God:

‘I was coming home from work a few evenings ago when I met two men and a child. They were caste men in flowing white scarves, dignified, educated men. A sudden fear shot through me, and I looked at the men and they laughed. “We are taking her to the temple there, to marry her to the god.” The child turned once and waved her little hand to me. The men’s faces haunted us all that night. And now it is all over, and she is “tied” …’

Eddy, together with other missionaries of those decades, alludes to Amy Carmichael, who made it her task to rescue girlchildren from being bought and sold into the temple service, and in this case again we have the confusion between the jogini and jogati practices, and the dasi attam tradition of the hereditary temple and court dancers proper. It is this sort of confusion that leads us to find, in the same year, the wholly positive account by the Rev. St. Clair Weeden of a dance performance he witnessed and apparently enjoyed without qualms at the palace of the Gaekwad of Baroda. The dancers he saw would almost certainly have been Gauri and Kantimati, who had been brought to the Baroda palace as dowry for the Gaekwad’s marriage to the Tanjore princess Chimnabai in 1883: … The food was most delicious, and no spoons or forks were allowed. It was eaten from gold trays of exquisite workmanship, and the decorations were superb. We all enjoyed our dinner very much, besides giving the greatest amusement to Maharani Sahib and Indira, who laughed more that evening than they have ever done before in their lives. Afterwards we went down to the Durbar

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hall, where musicians and nautch-girls were waiting, and watched the best nautch-dance that I have yet seen. It was called the Cobra dance, quite unlike the ordinary nautch and very graceful. Two pretty Tanjore girls wound up a handkerchief to represent a hooded cobra and then danced round it with soothing, mesmerizing gestures to charm it. One of them pretended to be bitten and fell to the ground, but the other restored her to life, and finally they both danced in triumph round the snake. The dancing consists not so much in what we understand by the word, as in the movements of the body and gestures of the hands; the part played by the feet is comparatively unimportant. To European eyes it is curiously unattractive and monotonous, but there can be no doubt that it appeals very strongly to the native mind. The men playing the instruments get tremendously excited, and the faces of the spectators show absorbing interest; at first they remain quite motionless and silent, but as they come more and more under the influence of the rhythmic measure, their hands and then their feet begin to move unconsciously, as though they were themselves taking part in the performance. Even the Gaekwar becomes much more interested and excited than I have ever seen him at any spectacle in London. The dancing girls themselves have a proud look and haughty bearing, as though fully conscious of the extraordinary power which they exercise over others, and the fatter they are the more they fancy themselves …

Weeden was a personal friend of the Maharaja of Baroda, and had accompanied him on several European tours, as well as receiving visits from him in England. His writing shows no evidence of his being influenced by or even aware of the anti-nautch proscription of dance performances at the royal courts, and it is a fact that the Maharaja himself maintained his dancers at the Baroda Palace until the 1940s. The American Journal of Race Development in the same years (1911–1912) still follows the reformist line, and celebrates the

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ongoing changes in India in an article by John P. Jones (1847–1916), the author of India; it’s life and thought, published in 1908: … there is no need for discouragement. And it may be interesting to add here some of the notable changes which have recently taken place within Hinduism itself as recorded by the stanch Hindu reformer and able editor of The Indian Social Reformer:

‘The opposition had been steadily growing less, and ceased altogether rather suddenly about six years back. Certain journals and publicists, well known for their hostility, completely turned round. This is a development we owe to the growth of the sentiment of nationality. This, however, is a negative factor, though those who are in the thick of the struggle know that it is none the less important. It means that organized opposition to social reform has ceased, and that henceforth we have to contend chiefly against individual inertia.

‘On the positive side may be mentioned some changes which are the outcome of Western influences, among which the chief are education (directly) and Christianity (indirectly): (1) Higher standards of personal purity and dignity among men. (2) Integrity in public positions, and public spirit. (3) Higher valuation of female and child life …

‘Concubinage, which was esteemed as rather a manly fashion some twenty years ago, has largely disappeared among the more enlightened class; and even among the less enlightened it is regarded as a thing rather to be ashamed than to be proud of. It is no longer flaunted openly.

‘The anti-nautch movement has secured a firm foothold among a large section of the community, and is spreading every day …’

The optimistic tenor of Jones’s piece is somewhat dampened by an article in the Missionary Review of 1912, in which the colonial government is taken to task for its inaction on the perceived evils of the nautch and other matters of missionary concern:

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The policy of religious neutrality was inherited from the Old John Company of previous days. This was, however, more in theory than practise, for the government of India as late as 1840 was contributing Rs. 53,000 annually to the Puri Temple, and helped by grants in many other cases. From a Christian memorial presented to Parliament in 1857 we find that idolatry was subsidized, some of its immodest rites attended by government officials as the nautch is even to-day, and caste arrangements recognized for administering justice.

In many ways they were distinctly not neutral but favored the heathen religions and discriminated against Christianity. One would like to say this attitude has long since passed away, but it is not beyond the memory of many of us here to-night when a high official in India on more than one occasion urged the adherents of non-christian religions to stick to their old religious beliefs. Of such neutrality, it has been said that it stands up so straight that it leans over backward. The reiteration and enforcement of neutrality has been good if only to do away with favoritism to nonchristian religions. For my own part I have often tried to imagine where India would be to-day if there had been no neutral position, and if Christian rulers had governed as if they recognized the great benefits which had accrued to the British Empire or other Christian countries from accepting Christianity. I believe India herself would have welcomed a less neutral attitude than that which she has experienced at our hands.

But the Foreign Mail Annual, the organ of the Young Men’s Christian Association, remains positive about the reformist steps that have already been taken: From the social, economic, political and religious point of view, no year for several decades has recorded such far-reaching legislation, changes and developments in India. Four bills have been introduced into the Imperial Legislative Council which strike at the very root of some of India’s most pressing evils.

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Whether these bills become law or not, they index the new spirit of social justice … The leading Indian social reformer, Mr. Natarajan, speaks of the indirect influence of Christianity in higher standards of personal purity and dignity among men, integrity in public positions and public spirit, higher valuation of female and child life. Concubinage is disappearing among the more enlightened classes. The anti-nautch movement is spreading. The native State of Mysore has already abolished dancing girls from all its temples …

For S. M. Edwardes (1873–1927), Commissioner of Police in Bombay and Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, the ‘nautchgirl’ was an object of compassionate pity. In his collection of anecdotes, By-Ways of Bombay (1912), he writes about the dancer whom he calls Imtiazan, explaining how, through the schemes of an unloving family and a devious husband, she is eventually reduced to earning her living by dance: … The memory of the past and who knows what higher instinct helped her to withstand his sordid demands for many days; but at length, realizing that this was kismet and tired of the perpetual upbraiding, she consented to do his bidding. So for three weary years the waters closed over Imtiazan. One day she awoke to find that her husband had crowned his villainy by decamping with her valuables and all her savings. She followed and found him, and, pressing into his hand a little extra money that he had in his hurry overlooked, she bade him a bitter farewell for ever. She rested a day or two to get herself properly divorced from him, and then returned alone to the hated life in Bombay. … In response to the mute appeal in her eyes her husband bade her with almost brutal candour to prepare to adopt her old profession of dancing and singing … For two days Imtiazan tended by the musicians and their wives was a prey to the blackest despair, and then deeming it useless to protest, she set herself courageously to do her husband’s bidding and to dance as she had danced in the house of Gowhar Jan. But she little knew the

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true depths of her husband’s selfishness. ‘Money comes not fast enough’ was his perpetual cry …

Such is the life-history of Imtiazan, one of the most famous dancing-girls Bombay has ever known—a history that lacks not pathos. After her final renunciation of the profession of singing and dancing she might have remarried and in fact received more than one offer from men who were attracted by her kindliness of heart and by her beauty. But she declined them all with the words ‘Marriage is not my kismet,’ which is but the Indian equivalent of ‘my faith hath departed and my heart is broken.’—Surely the earth lies very lightly upon Imtiazan.

Figure 13.1 ‘Imtiazan’ by M.V. Dhurandar. Illustration in S.M. Edwardes, By-Ways of Bombay, 1912.

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Edwardes was a highly regarded official and administrator, who was sent as a delegate to the Geneva conference on human trafficking in 1921. His book Crime in India (1924) has a section devoted to prostitution, a lifestyle whose horrors he fully appreciated and wrote about with fairness and insight. The missionary publication, Helping Hand, shows, in 1914, how the reformist agenda and the nautch agitations are seen as political interference in the Hindu status quo. It reports on a conversation with an individual suspicious of the final aims of the reformist activism: ‘Yes, I have been surprised at the changes in them,’ replied the land-owner, ‘and I am waiting to see what the next move of the government may be. Will they educate these dogs to become learned freaks, in these degenerate times, so they will even outwit the holy Brahmans themselves? When they have educated enough of these out-castes, will their next move be war? The new religion is one of the worst features. The English people know that we are tired of our own religion, because we are ashamed of the gods, and the lives of many of the priests, and of the nautch girls; so they are using their religion to gain political supremacy …’

Meanwhile, in the realm of sexual theorizing, Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) attempts to ‘place’ the devadasi in the historical context of temple prostitution in his early work on ‘sexual science’, The Sexual Life of our Time and its Relation to Modern Civilization (1912): When later the divine beings obtained their own consecrated women in the form of the temple-girls, it was no longer necessary for a man to take his own wife or some other woman into the temple, for now communion with the deity could be obtained by means of intercourse with the temple-girls. In the case of feminine deities a fourth cause or influence comes into operation in the production of temple prostitution, inasmuch as the courtesans, on account of their extreme beauty and their remarkable intellectual powers, were often regarded as representatives of the goddess …

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The sacred priests of Venus, the ‘kade-girls’ of the Phoenicians, and the ‘hierodules’ of the Greeks, were the servants of Aphrodite, and dwelt within the precincts of the temple. Their number was often very great. Thus in Corinth more than 1,000 female hierodules prostituted themselves in the precincts of the temple of Aphrodite Porno, and even within the temple. India, where the primitive phenomena of the amatory life can best be studied, is also the favourite seat of temple prostitution, since the religious view of the sexual life is nowhere so prominent as in the Indian beliefs.

The temple girls of India are known ‘nautch-girls,’ or ‘nautch-women.’ Warneck writes regarding them:

‘Every Hindu temple of any importance possesses an arsenal of nautch-girls—that is, dancing-girls—who, next to the sacrificial priests, are the most highly respected among the personnel of the temple. It is not long since these temple-girls (just like the hetairae of Ancient Greece) were among the only educated women in India. These priestesses, betrothed to the gods from early childhood, were under the professional obligation to prostitute themselves to everyone without distinction of caste. This self-surrender is so far from being regarded as a disgrace that even the most highly placed families regarded it as an honour to devote their daughters to the service of the temple. In the Madras Presidency alone there are about 12,000 of these temple prostitutes.’ Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes, who are also known as ‘thassee’ …

The reference to Warneck is probably to the German missiologist Gustav Warneck, and John Shortt is also briefly alluded to. The idea put forward is that the devadasi is a modern remnant of ancient religious sexual practices in which unity with the deity was achieved through a sort of sacramental sex act, for which temple prostitutes were made available as concrete representatives of the female divinities.

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In his Omens and Superstitions of Southern India (also 1912), Edgar Thurston again offers a section on the devadasis, taken directly from his earlier work, but continuing the new tendency to approach the vocation in an ethno-anthropological vein: As a Deva-dasi (dancing-girl) can never become a widow, the beads in her tali are considered to bring good luck to those who wear them. And some people send the tali required for a marriage to a Deva-dasi, who prepares the string for it, and attaches to it black beads from her own tali. A Deva-dasi is also deputed to walk at the head of Hindu marriage processions. Married women do not like to do this, as they are not proof against evil omens, which the procession may come across, and it is believed that Deva-dasis, to whom widowhood is unknown, possess the power of warding off the effects of unlucky omens. It may be remarked, en passant, that Deva-dasis are not at the present day so much patronised at Hindu marriages as in former days. Much is due in this direction to the progress of enlightened ideas, which have of late been strongly put forward by Hindu social reformers. … a circular from a modern European official, which states that ‘during my jamabandy (land revenue settlement) tour, people have sometimes been kind enough to arrange singing or dancing parties, and, as it would have been discourteous to decline to attend what had cost money to arrange, I have accepted the compliment in the spirit in which it was offered. I should, however, be glad if you would let it be generally known that I am entirely in accord with what is known as the anti-nautch movement in regard to such performances.’ It was unanimously decided, in 1905, by the Executive Committee of the Prince and Princess of Wales’ reception committee, that there should be no performance by nautch girls at the entertainment to their Royal Highnesses at Madras.

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We note then how, by this time, the devadasi system and its practitioners have become the objects of an array of theories and investigations, ranging from sexuality and criminology to social, cultural and religious inquiries, in the course of none of which they are either consulted or properly understood. In 1914, the Christian sociologist Edward Warren Capen (b. 1870), is one of the first to indicate the desirability of legislation for dealing with them: The dancing girl has been the only means by which an Indian gentleman could entertain his guests. Women of this character are a necessary factor in every marriage ceremony. The marriage necklace, which corresponds to our wedding ring, has to be tied by such a woman, for she can never become a widow, and hence her presence is a good omen. The leaders in social reform in India have come out openly against this, and the anti-nautch movement has had a large growth. It was not until a comparatively recent period that the British officials began to take a stand against having their hosts entertain them by means of the nautch dances. This was the more natural, because their real significance is not apparent except to the initiated. The Indian Social Conference, in 1895, unanimously passed a resolution which read ‘The Conference records its satisfaction that the anti-nautch movement has found such general support in all parts of India, and it recommends the various Social Reform Associations in the county to persevere in their adoption of this self-denying ordinance, and to supplement it by pledging their members to adhere to the cardinal principle of observing on all occasions, as a religious duty, purity of thought, speech, and action, so as to purge our society generally of the evils of low and immoral surroundings.’ At this same time, influential citizens of Madras petitioned the British officials to discountenance such forms of entertainment. In 1896 Lord Elgin requested his host in Madras to stop a dance which had been provided

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against the protests of the reform element. Of a similar character to the nautch-girls, and in some regions identical with them, are the temple girls. These women are known under various names in different parts of the country. They are married in young girlhood to some god or to the dagger of the god Khandoba. They sing and dance before the god and perform on festival occasions. Their real life, however, is that of religious prostitutes, and they are thus used by the priests and other worshippers. The number of these is not accurately known, but it goes up into the tens, if not into the hundreds, of thousands.

The British Government has felt itself unable to remove this disgrace, but the agitation against it is bearing fruit, and within three years the government of the progressive native state of Mysore, in South India, has prohibited the performance of the ceremony of dedication to such a life in any temple within the control of the government. It is to be hoped that this is but the beginning of an earnest movement upon the part of native rulers to end this sacrifice of low-caste Hindu girls to lives of shame. Then, perhaps, the British Government will dare to take similar action. Already, at the last session of the Supreme Legislative Council, one of the Indian members introduced some drastic bills dealing with this whole question. Thus, a new day is dawning in India and it can be traced to the influence of the Christian thought of the West, which has revealed to the leaders of India the real character of their age-old customs. The whole ethical atmosphere of Africa and Asia is being purified, and the time will come when the ethical standards of Christ will prevail.

The American academician, James Bissett Pratt (1875– 1944), who lectured on intellectual and moral philosophy at Williams College, drives the point home in his brief allusion to the degeneracy of the Hindu priesthood in its relations with the ‘nautch-girl’:

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In short, the Brahmin priest has a very bad name in India … In Benares their reputation is exceedingly evil. Indian gentlemen in that city told me that the temples were sometimes brothels, and that the priests were not only dishonest and corrupt, but not uncommonly misused the confidence which Hindu women placed in them to deceive and betray them. In southern India conditions seem to be even worse than in the north. For in the large southern temples women as well as men are employed in the cult. There are two classes of these women: nautch girls who dance before the god, and the wives of the god—girls who in infancy have been given by their parents in marriage to the deity. I hardly need add that both these classes of women are in fact religious prostitutes, and that when a girl becomes the wife of a god, the deity is in fact represented by his faithful priests.

The position is set out in more detail by John Nicol Farquhar (1861–1929), the Scottish missionary who propagated the quasi-Hegelian theory that Christianity represented the ‘fulfilment’ of all other religions, including Hinduism: Until quite recently the cultivation of music in India was left largely to nautch-girls. Here also the new national spirit has proved creative. Keen interest in the best Indian music, both vocal and instrumental, is being shewn in several quarters. The Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, or Academy of Indian Music, was established in Lahore in 1901, but has now its headquarters in Girgaum, Bombay. Local musical societies have appeared in a number of places, one of which, the Poona Gayan Samaj, or Song Society, may be mentioned. Sir George Clarke, when Governor of Bombay, and also Lady Clarke, did all they could to encourage these efforts. Within the Christian Church, the Rev. H. A. Popley of Erode, in South India, has done excellent service in adapting the best Indian music to Christian uses. Several Europeans have recently written books on Indian music …

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… Every well-appointed Hindu temple aims at being an earthly reproduction of the paradise of the god in whose honour it was built. He and his spouse or spouses are there in stone, also his mount, his car, and all else that he needs. The Gandharvas are represented by the Temple-band, the Apsarases by the courtesans who sing and dance in the service. These are dedicated to the service of the god; but they give their favours to his worshippers. They are usually called Devadasis, handmaidens of the god, Hierodouloi; but in the Bombay Presidency each shrine has its own name for its women, Muralis, Jogavins, Bhavinis, Naikinis, Kalawantis, Basavis, Devadasis, Devalis, Jogtis, Matangis, Sharnis; Muralis being used in a general way for all. They dance and sing in the temple-services and also when the images are carried out through the town in procession. Hence the common name for them everywhere is Nautch-girls, Dancing-girls. The songs they sing are usually obscene. They receive certain allowances from the temple. Until recently they lived within the temple precincts, but now they usually occupy some street or lane close by. In North India they are not permanently attached to the temple. They live in the bazaar, practise music and dancing, and ply their trade. The temple-authorities hire as many as they require for each occasion. In some temples in the Bombay Presidency there are male prostitutes also. How foul the atmosphere is in which this custom thrives may be realized from the hideous sculpture visible on the gates and walls of many Hindu temples in Central and Southern India and from the following quotation: ‘And then again, it is not that only females are dedicated to the temples but also males who are called Waghyas or Khandoba Aradhyes of Ambabai, Potrajas of Dyamawwa, Jogyas of Yallamma, and who are forbidden to marry or to live the ordinary civil life and therefore lead a more or less dissolute life. Their number however is not so considerable as that of the female victims nor is their looseness so noticeable. There is a third class

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of devotees, who are neither male nor female but are mostly eunuchs. These hideous beings are more indecent than immoral and they naturally follow the trade of procurers, pimps, and such other disgusting and unnatural practices. Whether they are for some wicked purpose castrated or born defective and how they come to be connected with the temples cannot be said; but they are generally connected with the temples of the female deities Ambabai and Yallamma. Quite a number of them might be seen at any time loitering and dancing about the little temple of Bolai near the Sassoon Hospital in Poona.’ (Shinde’s Muralis, 4.)

Courtesan ministrants, in precisely similar fashion, lived in the temples of Babylonia, Syria and Egypt, and took part in the ritual; and thence the custom spread to Cyprus, the Greek islands and elsewhere. The Greek name for them was Hierodouloi, Sacred Slaves. To these facts is due the low estimate in which music and dancing, especially the latter, have been held in most countries of the East. Salome degraded herself to the level of a courtesan in dancing before Herod. The cultivation of music and dancing has never been a respectable art in India, but has always been left to Nautch-girls. A century ago these women were much more in the public eye in India than they are to-day …

… Hindus have also been accustomed to hire them to dance and sing in their houses at weddings, on other festive occasions, and even when entertaining European officials: their dancing and singing have been part of the programme, like the performances of jugglers. Missionaries have long protested in the name of morality and decency against the whole system, and have especially begged that European officials should give no countenance to such a thing. Brahmans and social reformers have joined in these protests. The presence of these women at the temple-services and in the great processions leads to a great deal of vice among young Hindus; and their introduction into the homes of the

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people on festive occasions has done endless harm. Their gestures in dancing are lewd and suggestive; and their songs are immoral and obscene. Many a man has spoken of the dire results such exhibitions have upon the young. Western example and education have had their influence upon the coarsest parts of Hinduism. The frightful obscenities which we hear about from eighteenth-century writers have almost altogether disappeared. What remains is bad enough, it is true; but the grossest things have been removed. Dancing girls are much less prominent in the temples of the West and the North than they used to be.

Lord Wenlock, who was Governor of Madras from 1891 to 1896, was the first prominent official who distinctly refused to countenance the nautch. His example has proved very powerful: so that nowadays one seldom hears of an English official consenting to be present on any occasion when dancing-girls are present. The majority of educated Hindus have also given up the custom of having them in their homes at weddings and such like. This is a reform of very great value indeed; and we may trust that in future things will go still further.

In many parts of the country it is customary to marry a girl to an idol, a flower, a sword or some other material object, in order that she may be free from the entanglements of a genuine marriage. In the year 1906 a large body of gentlemen, including many Hindus, approached the Governor of Bombay, calling his attention to the whole practice of divine marriage, and praying that measures might be taken by the Government to put down the dedication of girls to prostitution. The following is a brief statement: ‘The Memorialists ask that the attention of the Police shall be called to the infrequency of prosecution, and that they shall be directed to show greater vigilance in bringing offenders to account. They request that public notices shall be posted in many places, and especially at

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Jejuri, where the temple of Khandoba enjoys an infamous preeminence in this destruction of innocent children; and that temple-authorities shall be warned of their liability to prosecution as accessories to crime, if they permit such ceremonies to take place within the precincts of the temple.’

In the following year the Bombay Government issued a resolution on the subject. They feel the need of action but recognize that it is impossible to do much until public opinion is riper. They promise, however, to prosecute temple-authorities who take part in the dedication of girls; and they suggest that the Hindu community should provide orphanages or homes in which girls rescued by Government may be placed. Two years later Sir George Clarke, Governor of Bombay, issued a proclamation, calling the attention of District Magistrates to the powers of the law and to the necessity of enforcing them seriously. The Mysore Government next took action. In 1909 they issued an order, in which they prohibit the performance of any religious ceremony which has an intimate connection with dedication to the profession of a prostitute or dancing-girl. This prohibition applies to every temple under the control of the Mysore Government. About the same time, the head of the Sankesvara monastery, a modern representative of Sankaracharya, issued an order in which he declares that the custom of dedicating girls has not the sanction of any sacred book of the Hindus, and therefore must be put a stop to. Later still the Travancore Government took the matter up. But though the movement has thus made considerable progress, there are those who oppose it for various reasons. The first of these is the fear that the musical art may suffer if they are discouraged. How absurd this argument is, we need not say. Yet it had weight enough with certain Government officials to lead them to introduce dancing-girls into the Arts and Industries Exhibition at Allahabad in the winter of 1910–1911, and to give prizes to the most skilful of these artistes.

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As one might expect in such a country as India, Government example at once led to serious results. Here is what the Rev. C. F. Andrews of Delhi wrote to the press on the subject:

‘An intimate friend of mine, who was known by all the city to refuse under any circumstances to be present at a wedding where a nautch was a part of the ceremonies, was asked a few days ago to a wedding, and was on the point of accepting it, when he discovered that a nautch was to be held. When he remonstrated with some indignation, saying that his own abstention from nautches was well known in the city, the reply was immediately made that now things were different. The Government itself was encouraging nautches, and one was being held every night at the Government Exhibition.’

Fortunately, the press of India, whether European or Indian, almost unanimously condemned the action of those who had charge of the Exhibition; and public opinion was so clearly expressed that we may hope that little final evil will come of it. Fortunately, Lord Morley’s attention had been drawn to the whole problem; and, on the 3rd of March, 1911, he addressed a despatch to the Government of India on the question:

‘My attention in Council has lately been called to the various methods by which female children in India are condemned to a life of prostitution, whether by enrolment in a body of dancing girls attached to a Hindu Temple; by symbolical marriage to an idol, a flower, a sword, or some other material object; or by adoption by a prostitute whose profession the child is brought up to follow. I observe with satisfaction that an increasing section of Hindu Society regards the association of religious ceremonies with the practice of prostitution with strong disapproval. In Madras, where the Institution of Temple Dancing Girls still survives, an Indian District Magistrate, Mr. R. Ramachandra Row, has expressed the opinion that Temple servants have

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been degraded from their original status to perform functions ‘abhorrent to strict Hindu religion’; and in Bombay a society for the protection of children has been formed with the co-operation of leading Hindu citizens.

‘I desire to be informed of the probable extent of the evil; how far the provisions of the Penal Code, sections 372 and 373, are in themselves sufficient to deal with it effectually, and whether in your opinion, or that of the Local Governments, adequate steps are being taken to enforce the law as it at present stands, or whether any, and if so, what amendments of the law are required to give reasonable encouragement and suppress the grave abuse. The matter is one in which the weight of public authority may well be lent to the furtherance of reforms advocated by the enlightened leaders of the communities to which the children belong whom the law was intended to protect.’

The Society for the Protection of Children in Western India, which consists of men belonging to all faiths, keeps watch over the progress of events, and seeks to rouse public opinion, and to help Government in every way possible. The pamphlet on Muralis quoted above was published by them. As this book goes to press, the Government of India is passing a law for the better protection of girls …

The extract, which occurs in the chapter on ‘Religious Nationalism’ is interesting for its unusually close study of the varieties of temple prostitution in India, as well as its brief chronology of activist and administrative steps taken against the devadasis, including the hereditary Sadir dancers, by the time of Farquhar’s writing in 1914–1915. It is interesting also to note his reference to governmental absentmindedness in the matter of the 1911 Allahabad Arts and Industries Exhibition, at which Gauhar Jaan is known to have performed. It is clear from the disparate documents that the various ‘devadasi’ and ‘nautch’ systems in India were being approached as a single comprehensive social malaise. Little or no differentiation is made between hereditary or guru-shishya traditions obtaining

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in various regions of India, and the whole population of dancers is censured, without any explication from within the systems themselves, together with their art, which is generally condemned as ‘obscene’.

Figure 13.2 The Calcutta singer-dancer, Gauhar Jaan, who danced at the Allahabad Exhibition in 1911.

The 1915 Madras District Gazetteer gives us some insight into the problems developing within the Tanjore dance economy under the pressure of the anti-nautch agitations: Melakkarans number 4,585. They are chiefly found in Tanjore and Madura, but are more numerous in the former district. Their customs were investigated at Tanjore, Vallam and Orattapadu, and brief enquiries were made at Shiyali and Tirutturaippundi. The name

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means ‘musicians’ and, so far as Tanjore is concerned, is applied to two absolutely distinct castes, the Tamil and the Telugu Melakkarans. These two will not eat in each others’ houses; and their views about dining with other castes are similar. They say they would mess (in a separate room) in a Vellalan’s house and would dine with a Kallan, but it is doubtful whether any but the lower non-Brahman communities would eat with them.

In other respects the two castes are quite different. The former speak Tamil and in most of their customs resemble, generally, the Vellalans and other higher Tamil castes, while the latter speak Telugu and follow domestic practices similar to those of the Telugu Brahmans. Both are musicians. The Telugus are found only at Tanjore, and practise only the musician’s art (i.e the periyamelam), having nothing to do with dancing or dancing-girls, to whom the chinnamelam or nautch music is appropriate. The Tamil caste provides or has adopted all the dancinggirls in the district. The daughters of these women are generally brought up to their mothers’ profession; but the daughters of the men of the community rarely nowadays become dancing-girls but are ordinarily married to members of the caste. Dancing-women adopt and even purchase young girls belonging to non-Brahmin communities other than the polluting castes. At such adoptions the ceremonies are similar to those at the adoption of boys, but no rites accompany a purchase, which is termed rularpu.

The Tamil Melakkarans perform both the periyamelam and the nautch music. The latter consists of vocal music performed by a chorus of both sexes to the accompaniment of the pipe and cymbals. The class who perform it are called Nattuvans, and they are the instructors of the dancing-women. The periyamelam always finds a place at weddings, but the nautch is a luxury. Nowadays the better musicians hold themselves aloof from the dancing-women …

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… Nautch parties are given by rich persons on festive occasions. Moonlight dinner parties are a rarer form of entertainment.

Apart from the statistics and brief descriptions of caste customs, we are given to understand that there is a growing rift between ‘the better musicians’ and the dancers, and it is evident that dance as an indispensable part of social functions and entertainments is slowly on the wane, though the devadasis are still very much part of ritual village life, as we see from this brief extract from the Right Rev. Henry Whitehead’s (1853–1947) study of the Village Gods of South India, published in 1916: The waving of a lamp in front of an image of a god is an orthodox Hindu custom. It is also frequently observed in the case of kings and other great personages. The object is to ward off the evil eye and other harmful influences. It is performed only by married women or nautch-girls. The name of the lamp and of the act of waving is arati. (See Dubois, ‘Hindu Manners and Customs’)

… The Brahman priest presides over the worship for the greater part of the festival, which lasts for about three months, and during that time the people come almost every day and offer flowers, fruits, coconuts, camphor and incense, but no animal sacrifices. All this time, too, some nautch-girls come and dance in a booth erected in front of the image and work themselves up into a state of frenzy, during which they are supposed to be inspired by the deities, and utter oracles to the worshippers …

It is still the case, then, that despite the ongoing activism and reform, the devadasi is popularly viewed in village life as the ever-auspicious antidote to the evil eye. In the West, however, there is a growing antipathy to the increasing number of orientalist religious followers of the Hindu teachers who have begun bringing their doctrines to Europe and America, and even in this development the ‘nautch-girl’ operates as the warning sign, as we see from the allusion made by Oliver Bainbridge in his 1916 work, India Today:

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… living with the natives and referring to Vivekananda as ‘The Master.’ It is to the credit of the British Government that they watch these ‘Masters’ very closely in England. They imprisoned the ‘Tiger Mahatma,’ who said that he was ‘God, the all pure One,’ for attempting to assault an innocent young girl, and in September, 1911, another ‘Master’ who was spreading the ‘Higher Teaching’ in Liverpool, by snaring little girls and inculcating abominable practices. And these are the ‘Masters’ over whom some of the English and American women rave, ‘Masters’ whose sole object is their degradation and ruin. Is it any wonder these ‘Spiritual Teachers,’ who are ‘above the flesh’ and all ‘earthly things,’ return to India and tell their countrymen that the English and American women are as the nautch girls.

The Missionary Review, in 1917, complains about the number of ‘nautch’ clips included in travel films about India: Many travel films are available through the Educational Departments of the regular film companies, into which it is possible to read a missionary message. It is seldom, however, that a reel of such film does not contain something undesirable. The average reel on India has a disproportionate amount of Nautch dances. And there are few films of Japan that do not have a good deal of the dancing of the Geisha girls …

The story of the ‘nautch’ takes a new twist when it is appropriated by Western dancers, shorn apparently of all associations with its ‘obscene’ past. In 1917, Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), the Sri Lankan-British art historian and critic, much preoccupied with metaphysical inferences in the art of Indian dance, wrote a review of Roshanara’s interpretation of the ‘nautch’ in New York in 1917: … great art has always been fundamentally religious (in the essential, rather than the formal meaning of the word) and philosophic: under these conditions the theme is more important than the artist, and what we demand is

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a constantly repeated statement of the same ideas, until the art achieves a classic perfection. In the end, it is true, it may become a mere formula, like the Gothic formula of the present day: but in this world there is no passible condition of permanence, and those who accept the creation of an art must also accept its death. An ancient art may be a source of inspiration to us, it may guide us in matters of principle—since beauty is independent of time and place—but it ought not to be regarded as a model for our exact imitation. It is rather the theory than the practise of oriental art that has a real significance for us at the present moment. The practise should be authentic, sensitive and rare, like a beautiful museum specimen. But it is the means, rather than the end, that should be our guide to the achievement of ends of our own. Let us try to understand the Indian dance from some such point of view as this.

It is the gods who are the primal dancers of the universe; the ceaseless movement of the world, the speech of every creature with every other, and the procession of the stars; all these are the gesture, voice and garments of the supreme Actor who reveals Himself to men in Life itself. It is from the gods, too, that human art is learnt; it is designed to reveal the true and essential meaning of our life. And so those kinds of dancing are called cultivated or classic which, like a poem, have a definite theme, while dances that are merely rhythmic and spectacular are called popular or provincial. Here we shall speak only of the cultivated dance; for the folk-dances of any country, like the folk-songs, explain themselves. Indian culture—like that of the old Greeks—employs a single name for the common art of acting and dancing; and this word Natya, in its Indian vernacular form, becomes Nautch. Nowadays the old Indian drama scarcely survives upon the actual stage, nor has it ever been reproduced in Europe or America; but authentic Indian acting does survive in the Nautch, where instrumental music, song, and pantomime are inseparably connected. In Nautch dancing the song is

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sustained in the throat, the theme is demonstrated by the hands, the moods are shown by the glances, and the metre is marked by the feet. A set of one or two hundred bells is worn on each ankle. The construction of the dance is very definite—so many movements to so many beats; and, more than this, each gesture has a definite meaning. An Indian handbook of dramatic technique consists of a dictionary of gesture; we have twenty-four movements of the head, forty-four glances, six movements of the brows, twenty-eight single hands, twenty-four combined hands, and so forth. Each of these gestures, like a word, indicates an emotion, object, idea or action; so that a sequence of gestures makes a sentence, and an entire dance tells a story. As we said before, this gesture language is constructed on definite metrical patterns, like a poem: and by contrast with this, modern western acting and dancing exhibit the characteristics of prose.

The constant theme of the modern Nautch is mystical, the love of Radha and Krishna—Radha, a milkmaid of the little village of Brindaban, and Krishna, the Divine Cowherd. Radha and her companions, beautiful and passionate and shy, are the souls of men; Krishna, the thief of hearts, is the incarnation of God. As the milkmaids go about their daily tasks he lies in wait for them on the forest paths or by the ferry; the sound of his flute calls them to neglect the duties and pre-occupations of their world in order to follow him—and this drama of seduction, which is so near to the realities of life, and reflects the spiritual experience of Everyman, is the dominant theme of medieval Hindu painting, poetry and pantomime. Of American dancers, Ruth St. Denis has reproduced the atmosphere of Indian life and feeling with marvellous sensibility and art; but it is only Roshanara, associated with Ratan Devi, who has presented this season on the New York stage for the first time in America, what can rightly be called an authentic Nautch.

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Here is the story of Roshanara’s Nautch: Radha goes out to milk her cows; and as she trips along she hears the flute, and says to herself, ‘That must be Krishna.’ She describes him, but she does not see him. She finds the cows, and fills her bowl with milk and sets it on her head and takes her way to the market place in a mood of entire satisfaction with herself and with the world. But Krishna has followed her, and he takes a little pebble and throws it at the earthen bowl on her head and shatters it—for Radha must not feel secure in the possession of her worldly goods. The milk pours down on her, and she is very angry; she wipes her face with the end of her veil, and, looking up, she sees Krishna. He catches her by the wrist, but she breaks away and dances off unscathed. For the time she has escaped; but the drama is eternal, and there shall come a time for each of us when love is heard. It is in this way that the Indian dancer, in describing the mutual relations—in the narrative she is interpreting—of a hero and heroine, reveals an esoteric meaning to us in the gestures and posturings of her dances.

Figure 13.3 ‘Roshnara’ (Olive Craddock) in an ‘oriental dance’ sequence, c. 1913.

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Coomaraswamy’s article appeared in Vanity Fair, and was accompanied by photographs of ‘Roshanara’ (Olive Craddock), an Anglo-Indian exponent of the ‘nautch’, and of Ruth St. Denis and Ratan Devi (born Alice Ethel Richardson), then Coomaraswamy’s wife. The photograph of St. Denis has the caption, ‘One of the foremost among our exponents of East Indian dances … (who) has established a retreat for those who wish to follow in the steps of the nautch girls.’ Roshanara herself is described as ‘an exponent of Hindu dancing who has deserted the movies and is returning to the stage … Although Roshanara is English by birth, she has spent much of her life in India, and it was there she became a follower of the rhythmic cadences and the snake-like poses of the mysterious East.’ Coomaraswamy himself seems to justify the revival of the ‘nautch’ in the West in his preface to his 1917 translation of the Abhinaya Darpana, The Mirror of Gesture: … Most of the dances just mentioned, however, except the Rasa Mandala or General Dance last spoken of, are Tandava dances and represent a direct cosmic activity. Those of the Nrtya class, which set forth in narrative fashion the activities of Gods and Titans, or exhibit the relationships of hero and heroine so as to reveal an esoteric meaning, are for the most part Lasya dances performed by the Apsaras of Indra’s paradise, and by the Devadasis and Nacnis upon earth. It will be seen that in all cases the dance is felt to fulfil a higher end than that of mere entertainment: it is ethically justified upon the ground that it subserves the Four Ends of life … The arts are not for our instruction, but for our delight, and this delight is something more than pleasure, it is the godlike ecstasy of liberation from the restless activity of the mind and the senses, which are the veils of all reality, transparent only when we are at peace with ourselves. From the love of many things we are led to the experience of Union: and for this reason Tiruvenkatacari does not hesitate to compare the actor’s or dancer’s art with the practice of Yoga. The secret of all art is

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self-forgetfulness. Side by side with this view, however, there has always existed in India a puritanical disparagement of the theatre, based upon a hedonistic conception of the nature of aesthetic emotion; and this party being now in full cry, and the Nautch, on the other hand, being threatened by that hybridization which affects all the arts of India that are touched by western influence, the old Indian Natya is not likely to survive for very much longer. Probably the art of the theatre will now first be revived in Europe, rather than in India …

By 1919, though, the ‘nautch’ is still being addressed as part of the ongoing problem of Indian social reform in Frederick Bohn Fischer’s (1882–1938) India’s Silent Revolution, whose reformist premise is one of piecemeal and gradual change: The orthodox Hindu’s only alternative to finding and paying for a husband for each daughter has been to dedicate her to the gods at birth. Devadasi, they call her, a servant of the gods. We translate it dancing girl. Groups of these girls live in the important temples, and are nominally wives of the gods, dancing and singing at all important religious, political, and social functions. They are the only women who are allowed to learn to sing and dance. The more promising girls are educated, serving as courtesans to the priests and public; they correspond on a lower scale of culture to the Hierodouloi of ancient Greek civilization. Complete segregation of the Hindu wife from her husband’s social life leaves a large gap for the nautch or dancing girls to fill. A high-caste Hindu woman of orthodox circles never appears when her husband entertains in his own home. As a group of men cannot amuse themselves with eating and talking indefinitely, it has been customary to bring dancing girls into private homes for practically all parties. Formerly they took part at marriages and all other ceremonies, and as a mark of respect they accompanied prominent men on formal and state calls.

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The British Governor of Madras in the early nineties was the first official who refused to attend parties where nautch girls appeared, a precedent which is now generally accepted. This official attitude, combined with the work of missionaries and of Hindu societies, is producing a wholesome effect; but even to-day motion picture concerns still advertise in Indian newspapers: ‘Exhibitors before Rajas and Princes of India, their Excellencies Lord and Lady Willingdon. Work undertaken at marriage, nautch and evening parties.’

The Government policy of refusing to interfere with social and religious customs, as enunciated by Queen Victoria in her proclamation of 1858, has been in the main wise. The gradual evolution worked by education and by the example of the European and missionary communities accomplishes its reforms slowly but more surely than could be hoped for by enforced legislation. Only a few times has Government departed from this rule, first with its act against sati in 1829, again in 1856 with an act legalizing the marriage of Indian widows, and in 1891 with an age of consent law …

The confident hope expressed is that the institution of the ‘nautch-girls’ would, with time, be relegated to the primitive past, and the fad for the dances of the ‘mysterious orient’ in the United States would do nothing for the dismal fate of the hereditary and traditional dances and dancers in India, though it would serve as a stepping stone, in the persons of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn especially, for the later introduction of authentic Indian dances into the West. As in every other decade, there remained individuals who would be moved by Indian dance to the extent of recording the experience, and in this decade two such accounts stand out. The first is by Paul Bluysen (1861–1928), a French politician with strong family connections in Pondicherry, and Senator to French India from 1910 to the end of his life. In his work, Mes Amis les Hindous (1914), he records a dance performance seen in Pondicherry, of which a short extract is given here:

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At first it was muffled, simple; then the rhythm picked up, rolled out, shrill and jumpy, with a perfect regularity, with, for me, an irresistible charm: it accorded admirably with the mimicry of the statuette of metal and red silk, the bayadère, who followed it step by step … She drew close to us, to me; she made a brusque movement which seemed to dislocate her head, moving it horizontally to the right and the left; this was a salute. She came to a halt, her arms spread out, her little yellow hands with fingers outstretched, taking hold of her chin like pincers in the way of a child who kisses one, and then her face was mischievous, impish, appealing to our own faces, and to mine …

This bayadère had been a debutante. The one who came next, Krishna by name, was celebrated throughout the region; she was perhaps thirty years old, with fifteen years of accomplishment at her craft. She was dressed only in a white muslin saree, without jewels, a little coarse, a little stocky; she made one think at first glance of a belly dancer … but, with her very first steps she showed herself much more expert and longer accustomed to her science. She moved, with little steps, from one spectator to the other, and she said, ‘Why do you prefer above me another woman who has given you a potion?’ She said this with her torso, her hips, her lips, with her determined chin, with her eyes whose regard was warm, voluptuous, feminine … Then she, too, retired briskly to the back of the square laid out for the dance. And the illusion vanished, like its predecessor, leaving one with the sense of a bodily experience even more disquieting and durable, but without any gesture having been in the least lascivious …

The second, much longer extract, is taken from the writing of Albert Besnard (1849–1934), an accomplished French painter as well as a very capable writer. He was able, by means of impressionistic touches, to preserve accurately in a rich French prose the details of events that his artist’s eye had seen, analysed and remembered.

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Figure 13.4  ‘La danseuse rouge’, Albert Besnard, c. 1913.

Besnard, travelling with his family, visited India in the course of a nine-month tour of the East beginning in October of 1910. The written records of his experiences there were published in 1913 under the title L’Homme en rose—l’Inde couleur de sang. It is among these published records that we find his chapter on the Bayadère de Tanjore, at whose house he witnessed a night-time performance lasting about an hour. The chapter he wrote on this young Tanjore dancer is surely one of the most remarkable records of the encounter of a European of the colonial era with South Indian dance—in the form of the evolved Tanjore repertoire—for the very first time. Besnard’s acute visual memory shows itself in the detailed account he gives us of the atmosphere and immediate environment,

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but especially of the dancer, her costume and the hour-long repertoire that leaves the artist with a wholly revised vision of the art of the South Indian bayadère, towards whom he at first reveals an attitude of aversion on account of her very dark skin and the sinister feelings evoked in him by his general sense of this night-time event: A quick dinner at the bungalow, and we are on our way to see the bayadère! It is dark night … Nothing but the moon in the sky to guide us through this maze of little houses … The porches form black mouths under the roofs of their verandas. A little faint light under the doors: only the moaning of a clarinet, the muffled sob of a drum, indicate that someone is amusing themselves somewhere … At last, at the thirtieth pace, an open door spills out the golden light of a lamp onto a compact and silent crowd who seem to be waiting; and it is for us that they are waiting because this is the foyer of the bayadère. We enter into the circle of light and everyone spreads themselves out before the sahib and his family … This (place of pleasure) is without character. Four bare walls, lit high up by a petrol lamp whose cover concentrates the light to the sides, leaving the ceiling in obscurity. Four chairs of woven rush await us, where we seat ourselves under the eyes of the crowds massed at the doors and at two small window grilles … SHE is not there. Squatting or standing along the length of the wall are five musicians in the weary attitudes of people who eat little or have eaten nothing at all … The atmosphere is heavy … as if waiting for the denouement of a sinister event.

Ah! These places of pleasure are not cheerful! But suddenly something of brilliant appearance, behind the guard of phantoms who obscure it, opens the interior door. It is SHE. Like a bird of the night gilded all over she advances and with arms spread out leans down to face us …

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For a European ignorant of the Far East, a  bayadère  is an almost fabulous being, infinitely charming, of a dangerous grace, spreading abroad her heady perfume in an endless whirl. That at least is how I have always imagined the bayadère and I doubt whether this tiny being, weighed down with necklaces and bracelets, is about to prolong my illusion. She is, however, gracious on a close view, the child that comes towards us, but darkened by a skin as black as that of a bat, almost ugly, and the light which falls straight down on her petite forehead with eyebrows that meet in the middle works even more against her. Can she be even seventeen years old?

Her bayadère’s cap is supplemented at the rear by a garland of yellow flowers held by a comb which reveals between her two shoulders the line of the braid in which it is woven. Her neck is laden with necklaces and her slender arms with heavy bracelets. The very short, small bodice which houses the breasts of the young girl encircles the shoulders, fitted tightly to the arms … and it is of a black cloth embroidered with gold. The pantaloons of red silk dotted with gold descend to the ankles, where they are succeeded by rings and anklets made of an infinity of small bells which chime at the slightest quiver of her idol’s feet. … these bands of gold and silver shoot sparkles onto the floor in the shadow of her draperies.

The gold of a muslin robe enriched by tiny red designs is draped to the left side, encircling her waist and massing itself in numerous folds on the belly, so that it forms what is called here … ‘a peacock’s tail’, on account of the pleats which flare out towards the ground, reproducing the shape of the sumptuous mantle dear to Saraswati. … Suddenly out of the silence a weirdly muddled song arises, accompanied by a bizarre violin in the shape of

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a calabash, a flat but large drum, a flute, silver cymbals and two hands which mark the rhythm; such is the orchestra whose measure is obeyed by this fragile human marionette. And now she begins to move …

The manner of the movements is staccato, with jumps on the spot, with taps of the feet stamping on the floor which punctuate the clipped words pronounced in a low voice; then the twisting of the arms and the flexing of the neck. At the same time there escape from her throat various modulations that resemble cries. Then a leap in which she seems to cast herself to the ground in a gesture of humility … The strident notes of the violin and flute seem to overwhelm her into annihilation, and now, upon the floor, collapsed into her golden draperies striped with black and red, she seems like the abandoned corpse of some demon. It is a strange and impressive spectacle.

At the metallic call of the cymbals … the small trembling body suddenly recovers and, projecting itself altogether, in profile, the arms leading, now to the right , now to the left, bends one knee while the other launches the leg forward with the motion of a puppet, reproducing the hieratic silhouette of the temple figures. This is Indian, of sacred provenance, no doubt, and extremely beautiful. It is not what we imagined it would be; it is better, and, gratified by the surprise, we applaud.

Breathless, the little bayadère comes to a halt … She smiles at our compliments, which have softened the expression on her face, and, flattered, gives us to understand that she is not tired and that she will dance for us with pleasure for as long as we like … The modulations of the orchestra resume … As if inspired, gliding on the floor, the dancer advances again towards us with the air of heckling us, silent all the while, even though her lips are moving as though pronouncing words.

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From this moment on it is not only the dance that is inspiring her movement … Maurice Maindron … has described the gestures of a famous bayadère, by turns either passionate or savage. Our little bayadère, more modest, with youth for an excuse, has composed for herself a scenario fitted to her own measure. She is not without charm in her naiveté.

Here before us is the coquette, fickle, offering and refusing herself by a gesture of charming intent and very fine irony, feeling out the pulse of those who appear to desire her. And it is in us that it pleases her to suppose this sentiment, and, to accomplish the full pretence of action, she extends to my hand and that of my son, each in our turn, her thin shawl … This gesture is decent and infinitely delicate—but now the drama announces itself:

It turns on a young healer of whom she has become enamoured and whom she is underway perchance to meet. To attract his attention she has wounded herself at the wrist. She suffers, her body trembles: only he is capable of healing her, and it is to him that she addresses herself: he will procure for her, at the same time as her healing, the joy of seeing him often and the triumph of being loved by him. I would not know how to describe here the phases of a sentiment expressed only through the fluttering of eyelids and the gestures of hands as well as the rhythms of heels which rap on the floor.

Finally the healer heals her of her injury but imprudently has increased her passion … and when to thank him for his care she offers herself to him, he remains indifferent and even repulses her advances.

Despair, sobbing of a young girl who cannot understand the reason for this kind of treatment, she whom so many men have desired. The shoulders heave, the head lolls on the chest, the whole body slackens beneath the load of despair.

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But she struggles on! The pursuer of his glances, the cruel one, she shows him her eyes, which she brings close to yours (because—do not forget—you have become the young healer yourself), making you appreciate the richesse of her necklaces, of her bracelets.

But embarrassed before the coldness of the partner, she moves away disconsolately, cast down by shame at being thus despised, not without having devastated you with her contemptuous looks. At this moment the orchestra becomes more impassioned, moans, yells, and SHE, revived by the demon of the dance, moving back briskly to the back of the room, springs forward again as though to take flight, sinks back on her hands, then with her head lowered takes a few steps towards us, and with a powerful shift of her waist resumes an upright stance. In this way the dance of the little bayadère comes to a close.

Figure 13.5 ‘Bayadère de Tanjore’, Albert Besnard, c. 1913.

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Then, at last, I look at her sweet head with its prominent cheekbones, with lips wide apart, and I cannot prevent myself from admiring this sombre mask on which no emotion whatever any longer appears, but which has been, for the duration of an hour, as joyful as happiness, as sorrowful as despair, and as tragic as hatred.

Whatever may be our judgement of Besnard’s total experience, it seems clear that the Tanjore performance left him with an abiding aesthetic flavour or rasa. These potent expressions of deep human emotions infuse the lines and colours, the impressionist and expressive aspects, of all his Indian dance depictions.

References

1. Eddy, Sherwood, India Awakening, New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1911–1912.

2. Weeden, Rev. Edward St. Clair, A Year with the Gaekwar of Baroda, Boston: Dana Estes & Co., 1911. 3. Jones, John P., Conditions in India During the Past Year in The Journal of Race Development, vol. 2, 1911–1912.

4. Missionary Review of the World, vol. 35, 1912.

5. The Foreign Mail Annual, New York: Foreign Dept. of the International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1912–1919.

6. Edwardes, Stephen Meredyth, By-Ways of Bombay, Bombay: Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1912.

7. Helping Hand, vol. 39–40, Boston: Women’s Baptist Missionary Society, 1914. 8. Bloch, Iwan, The Sexual Life of our Time and its Relation to Modern Civilization, New York: Allied Books, 1912. 9. Thurston, Edgar, Omens and Superstitions of Southern India, New York: McBride, Nast & Co., 1912.

10. Capen, Edward Warren, Sociological Progress in Mission Lands, New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1914.

11. Pratt, James Bissett, India and its Faiths, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915.

12. Farquhar, John Nicol, Modern Religious Movements in India, New York: MacMillan, 1915.

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13. Hemingway, F.R., The Madras District Gazetteer, vol. 6, Tanjore, Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1915. 14. Whitehead, Right Rev. Henry, The Village Gods of South India, London: H. Milford; Oxford University Press, 1916.

15. Bainbridge, Oliver, India Today, London: H.J. Drane, 1916.

16. Vinton, Rev. Sumner R., The Value of Missionary Motion Pictures in Missionary Review of the World, vol. 40, pt. 1, January–June 1917.

17. Coomaraswamy, Ananda, Oriental Dances in America in Vanity Fair, vol. 7–8, January–June 1917.

18. Coomaraswamy, Ananda and Kristnayya, Gopal, The Mirror of Gesture; being the Abhinaya Darpana of Nandikésvara, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917.

19. Fischer, Frederick Bohn, India’s Silent Revolution, New York: MacMillan, 1919.

20. Bluysen, Paul, Mes Amis les Hindous, Paris: Éditions Jules Tallandier, 1914.

21. Besnard, Albert, L’Homme en rose: Inde couleur de sang, Paris: Bibliothéque Charpentier, 1913.

Chapter 14

The Beginning of the End: 1920–1930 By 1930 the fate of dance in India had more or less been settled. In 1922, Dr Hari Singh Gour, a member of the Madras Legislative Council, proposed that ‘This House recommends to the Governor General-in-Council to be so pleased as to enact a law prohibiting the wholesale traffic in minor girls for immoral purposes ostensibly intended as Devadasis but in reality used for indiscriminate immoral purposes.’ This proposal had only the limited effect of raising the legal age of dedication from 16 to 18 years. The process would only really begin to acquire potency in 1927, when the Council recommended that the central colonial government ‘undertake legislation at a very early date to put a stop to the practice of dedicating young women to Hindu temples, which has generally resulted in exposing them to an immoral life.’ Developments were watched closely by women activists in Britain, and a certain Miss Tenant was dispatched to Madras to collect signatures for a petition to abolish the devadasi system. In the years leading up to the adoption of the anti-devadasi bill in the Madras legislative assembly and the composition of the early draft of the law that would eventually abolish the devadasi system entirely, there was certainly no lack of views opposing those of the social reformers. The most articulate of these antireformist writings came from Otto Rothfeld, and was published in Bombay in 1920. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Rothfeld was a longstanding career official in the colonial administrative service. In a 1924 article on The Progress of Co-operative Banking in India, he mentions ‘the last 25 years that I have myself served in India’. This means that, by the time he published Women of India, he had been a civil servant in that country for 21 years. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, Registrar of Co-operative Societies, and a contributor to the Journal of the Royal Society for Arts. He harboured and disseminated progressive views on the colonial system and on socio-political matters generally. In his chapter on dance his progressivism is evident in his explicit criticism of the anti-devadasi movement: For the women of India an independent profession is a thing almost unknown. Here are no busy type-writers, no female clerks, no barmaids. The woman spends her whole life in a home, supported and maintained … In recent years changes in ideas, and still more changes in social economy, have produced a few women in regard to whose work it is possible to use the words ‘independent profession.’ There are even a few lady doctors, Parsis mainly, in whose case the imitation of European customs and the resultant obstacles to marriage have facilitated study and the adoption of a career …

There is only one independent profession open, one that is immemorial, remunerative, even honoured, and that is the profession of the dancing girl. There is hardly a town in India, however small, which has not its group of dancing girls, dubious perhaps and mediocre; and there is not a wedding, hardly an entertainment of any circumstance, at which the dancing girl’s services are not engaged. And it may be added that there is hardly a class so much misjudged or a profession so much misunderstood … But in the literature of Europe the bayadère, to use a name corrupted from the Portuguese, has also been a frequent and a luxurious figure. In the romantic fancies

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of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, she was, both in France and Germany, a personage on whom poets lavished the embellishments of their art. Her hazy outlines they bespangled with the imagery of fiction and the phantasies of invention. She was a symbol for oriental opulence, a creature of incredible luxury and uncurbed sensuousness, or tropic passion and jewelled magnificence. From her tresses blew the perfumes of lust; on her lips, like honey sweet, distilled the poisons of vice …

Regarded in its first elements, the dance is one means the more of marking the time of the melody. Throughout the Indian dance the feet, like the tuned drums, are means to mark the beats. The time is divided into syllables or bars and the dancer’s beating feet, circled with a belt of jingling bells, must move and pause in the strictest accordance. The right foot performs the major part, the left completes the rhythmic syllable. But further by her dance the singer’s art is to make more clear and more magnetic the meaning of her song. With her attitudes and gestures she accords her person to her melody and sense, till her whole being, voice and movement, is but one living emotion. Her veil half-drawn over her features, her head averted, a frown wrinkling her brow, she portrays modesty recoiling from a lover. With joined hands uplifted to her forehead, with body bent, and eyes cast upon the ground, she accompanies the hymns of worship and resignation to God’s will. With quickly moving gesture, she marks the harsher sounds of rage or mortified indignation … The dancer’s gestures and pantomime must be soft, rhythmic, and restrained. Like every other art, dancing too has its economy and its self-restraint. And the way to this ideal harmony is through the simplifications of convention and the discipline of a graceful technique. The dancer has to learn by painful practice …

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Indian dancing, like every art, must have its own conventions. But they are conventions finally based upon actual mimicry, simplifications, one may say, of natural movements. They are attained by the exclusion of all that is superfluous, leaving only the essential curve or contour of the movement. They are the actual made spiritual, by the excision of all excess, by the suppression of the uncouthness which defective material and stiff muscles force upon human action …

To the European the conventions are difficult to understand, as they presuppose a different training; and in him they do not readily awake the required emotion. For European art has for many centuries been in the main realistic, concerned above all with the material appearance of things and actions. The art of the East, on the other hand, has in all its leading schools sought the spiritual, striving with the jejunest outlines to interpret the significance which may underlie the outward clothing of form and colour and surface …

There are two great methods of artistic dancing in India which correspond to the main geographical distinction of the continent and can be called the Peninsular and the Northern. The Peninsular or Southern has its home and training-ground in Madras, where the temple dancing girls, the ‘servants of God’ as they are called in the vernacular, follow their fine tradition. The old Hindu city of Tanjore with its exuberant temple is the centre of the school, to which it has given its name.

The other or Northern method is at its highest in the cities of Delhi and Lucknow, more secular in its purpose, yet more austere in its expression. In the North where the girls, wearing an adaptation of the Mussulman dress, are mostly of that faith and have no bond with any temple or religious institution, the dance or gestureplay is strictly subordinate to the song. The artist moves back and forward a few steps as she sings, the feet of course always beating the time, while her hands are raised or lowered and her fingers grouped in a few

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conventional poses, gracefully artificial or simply decorative, but with no present actuality and little stimulus to emotion. The pleasure of the spectator is in the main intellectual …

The Peninsular school, on the other hand, gives the dance in and by itself a far higher value and more extended field. It is far more than the mere visible decoration of a sung melody. It has a life of its own, often wild and passionate; and has its own instant appeal to independent emotions. Often the dance is in itself the pantomime of a whole story, the meeting and love of Krishna and Radha, for instance, at the river’s side … The dancers move lightly and quickly over the floor, their steps diversified, their gestures free and natural. Upon their features play the lines of hope and joy, of sorrow and disdain. Then as the story closes, in a final burst of melody, their voices rise with the instruments that accompany in a last forte repetition of the refrain or motive.

Thus in the Peninsular or Tanjore school the art of dancing, though also, of course, dependent upon conventionalisms of gesture and movement, and significant of meanings which it suggests rather than imitates, has a more actual appeal to emotion and a less fettered freedom. It has a finer spontaneity, a freer flow of imagination. At its best, it is a splendid school of dancing, the only method perhaps worthy to be put beside, though below, the magnificent creations of the Russian ballet …

A good voice and some natural grace, with training only in technique, may make a pleasing enough dancer but cannot produce an artist. For any excellent attainment a higher cultivation is required. Another difficulty, peculiar to India, is that many experts will, from superstitious fear or jealousy, refuse to impart their secrets to a pupil or a novice. But worst of all by far is that lack of artistic sensibility, general in modern India, which is satisfied by the tricks of virtuosity and has no recognition of sincerity and deeper beauty …

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Similarly in the accompanying dance violent gestures, strained poses, or undue and difficult effort ravish praise that should more correctly be given to sincere emotion and an easy and natural rhythm. A dead conventionalism, emphasized and over-strained by difficult contortions, has repressed the development of the art, especially in the northern, more abstract method.

Another great drawback against which Indian professional dancing struggles is the lack of a public that itself is given to dancing … In villages among the lower classes there is also at stated seasons some rustic dancing, even with men, of a rough and boisterous kind. But generally speaking, popular dancing there is none. ‘No one dances unless he is drunk,’ the Indian gentlemen might mutter with the too grave Roman.

Still, granting these deficiencies of environment and allowing for all imperfections and desired improvements, dancing remains the most living and developed of existing Indian arts. In the Peninsular school above all, India has a possession of very real merit, on which no appreciation or encouragement can be thrown away. It is something of which the country can well be proud, almost the only thing left, perhaps, in the general death-like slumber of all imaginative work, which still has a true emotional response and value. It sends its call to a people’s soul; it is alive and forceful.

All the more tragic is it, a very tragedy of irony, that the dance—the one really Indian art that remains—has been, by some curious perversion of reasoning, made the special object of attack by an advanced and reforming section of Indian publicists. They have chosen to do so on the score of morality—not that they allege the songs and dances to be immoral, if such these could be, but that they say the dancers are. Of the dances themselves no such allegation could, even by the wildest imagination, possibly be made. The songs are pure beside the ordinary verses of a comic opera, not to mention a music-hall in

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the capital of European civilization, Paris. The dancing is graceful and decorous, carefully draped and restrained.

But the dancers, it is true, do not as a rule preserve that strict code of chastity which is exacted from the marrying woman. How the stringency or laxity of observance of this code by a performer can possibly affect the emotional and even national value of her art and performance has not been and cannot be explained …

In the Peninsula of India dancing and professional singing is first of all a religious institution, bound up with the worship of the Gods. To every temple of importance are attached bands of six, eight, or more girls, paid in free gifts of land or in money for the duties which they perform. They are recruited in infancy from various castes and wear the ordinary garments, slightly more ornamental, of the Indian lady of those regions. In certain castes the profession is hereditary, mother bringing up daughter in turn to these family accomplishments … The dancers are regarded, being independent and self-supporting, as freed from the code which applies to women living in family homes and maintained by the work and earnings of a father or a husband. It is their right to live their lives as they will, for their own pleasure and happiness, unrestrained by any code more stringent than that of an independent man …

Now when some Hindu reformers object to the employment of such women in the temples of God and deny the efficacy of song and dance as adjuncts of religious emotion, it would of course be impertinence for the follower of another creed to express an opinion. The rubrics of prayer are between the worshipper alone and his God … if they desire to bar the temple-door to women, who have taken no vow of chastity and hope for salvation without closing their ears to love, they are entitled to do as they like with their own, if they can obtain a consensus of believers. Observers of other creeds would willingly, if without impropriety they could have a voice, join in deploring

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the abuse, in some temples, of the custom of dedication; for girls thus dedicated, as at Jejuri, are often too numerous for the purposes of the temple-service and are thrown upon the world, without adequate artistic training, almost, one might say, with none, to make their way as best they can. When this happens, though Hindu society treats the devotees kindly and gives them easy admission to good houses, yet their dearth of artistic accomplishment, the refusal of support by the temple to which they are ascribed, and the pressing needs of sustenance must often force the unfortunate girl to a distasteful trade. But to include these among dancing girls in the proper sense is hardly fair … In the North, it has been said, the dancing girls have no connection with religious institutions, though, as it happens, their artistic conventions are more abstract and less sensuous. Mostly they are Mussulmans by belief or are Hindus who have adopted Mussulman ways and manners. They do not belong to colleges or groups but live alone and independently, earning their living by their art, without support from any temple …

In most Native States such dancing girls, two or three or four, are an appendage of the royal retinue, and are paid salaries or retaining fees on a generous basis. Such a girl will ordinarily get one hundred to one hundred and fifty rupees per month from the State—the salary of a Police Magistrate—with gifts on special occasions. In exchange she has to sing twice or thrice a week when the chief calls for her, but with his permission she may always perform at other houses where she can earn larger fees …

Modern opponents of dancing, however, with their influence on a population which has few artistic tastes and a marked bent for economy, have already done much to degrade the profession and are gradually forcing girls, who would formerly have earned a decent competence with independence and an artist’s pride, into a shameful traffic from very want. Day by day the number of those women is growing less who alone

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preserve the memory of a fine Indian art. And, as they lose the independence earned by a profession, day by day more women are being thrust into the abysmal shame and destitution of degraded womanhood. An Indian proverb already sums up this peculiar item of the ‘reform programme’ thus: ‘The dancing girl was formerly fed with good food in the temple; now she turns somersaults for a beggar’s rice.’

… Even apart from their art and its high imaginative value, as almost the only living art in India, they respond in a larger sense to a real need of society. To stifle a class of women, living their own lives in independence, graceful, accomplished, often clever, to degrade them, to make them outcastes and force them into shameful by-ways, is not merely to sin against charity; it is also a blunder against life …

Figure 14.1 ‘Mirzapur Dancer’ by M.V. Dhurandhar, in Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, 1920.

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Figure 14.2 ‘Mussulman Nautch Girl’ by M.V. Dhurandhar, in Otto Rothfeld, Women of India, 1920.

The same appreciative note is struck by the French intellectual, Robert Chauvelot (1879–1937), who travelled in and wrote extensively about the East, recalling a proto-Kathak dance performance he had seen: There is an Indian dinner: burning curries, ragouts of young partridges, bustards, and kids, ices of curdled milk, sprinkled over with pistachio nuts, betel leaves and small black seeds, of a spicy, somewhat camphorous flavor, the whole seasoned with popular music of the most fascinating effect. And then the dancing girls. The Maharajah has had them brought expressly from Agra. Their orchestra of viols and tom-toms accompanies them faintly. They dance, they sing. Their guttural voices cry out the lament and the suffering of love, and the contortions of their hands reveal the sharp pain of self-abandonment.

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For, if one may say so, they never move. It is a mute and half-immobile choreography, but how gripping and how expressive, when a sudden flame lights up the enigmatic shadows of their dark eyes! And I think of the strange destiny of these Asiatic ballerinas, with their eyelids smeared with kohl, who come before me, their heads covered with pearls and their bare feet with rings, so different from the dancing girls celebrated by our poets, from those who delighted us in Lakme, The King of Lahore, The Grand Mogul. With them all was convention.

These, on the contrary, spring both by birth and their artistic profession from the hieratical dancer, and by their habits and their private lives from the professional prostitute. They are both religious and symbolic. They incarnate in song and dance the fabulous personages of the old myths of the primitive theogony. They are adored and petted by the people and the Brahmans and also by the rajahs because they are portrayers, in speech and action, of the great national epics, the ancient dramas of the Sanskrit and Aryan mythology. Superior by far to the indolent and lascivious odalisque of the Levant, they are equally superior to the Nipponese Geishas, with their laughing eyes and little mincing gestures.

That bayadère there! Just watch her; she knows how to be by turns amorous, unhappy, ironical and terrible. Her chanting voice, accompanied by the faint tambourines and the diverse vinas, dear to the soufis—‘dying viols’ that gentle dreamer Mallarmé would have called them—a psalmody now high, now low, full of mysterious, disturbing and far-away melodies. Singling out one of the spectators, she undulates before him, fascinates him, and envelops him with her veiled song, with her almost motionless posturing. Presently, without any transition, she upbraids him, she curses him and then implores him, adjures him, with the desperate wringing of her hands and wrists, with the sobs of a stifled voice. It is beautiful and it is human, because she vibrates, laughs and weeps.

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Those powerful thinkers, the Hindus, have realized that this sort of woman, the national and religious aéde, ought to be protected, free, emancipated and venerated. Now I understand why the great potentates themselves bow down before this power, why they pay in gold—as much as three or four thousand francs for an evening—for the stirring pantomime of these courtesan dancers. It is because they seem to be what they are in reality, the superhuman invokers of love and death.

Even when the writing is not very appreciative, it remains clear at any rate that dance performances were still being staged in India by those rich and powerful enough to ignore the reformists’ propaganda, as Henry Woodd Nevinson (1856–1941) attests in 1925: At nine o’clock all the great Sirdars, or landowners, of Banda gathered to a durbar in the palace hall, and sat in white-clad rows, with Mahratta turbans of red and gold on their heads, and curved swords glittering across their knees. On the inlaid pavement before them a Madrasi nautch-girl danced without ceasing, to the inspiriting noise of three or four pipes and a little drum, all sounding their peculiar notes together but with random independence. The girl seemed to know what emotions they wished to express, for she danced forward with gestures that she felt to be suited to some imperceptible motive, her jewels flashing, and her heavy golden sash swinging over her trousers. Then, having reached her limit of advance towards the empty throne, she walked quietly backwards, softly clapping her little brown hands to some imperceptible time.

Suddenly from the palace garden came the thump of the tiny old guns which the paternal Government allows Native Rulers to retain for saluting purposes as evidence of regal power, and to the rear of this artillery the Maharajah entered, keeping step with the British Resident at his side. Behind him, stiff with scarlet and gold, stalked the officers of a British regiment quartered

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upon the State by the terms of an ancient treaty. Having the Resident upon his right, the Maharajah sat himself upon a purple velvet sofa, while the British officers settled into the topmost chairs, like a patch of poppies in a daisy field. The pipes and the drum never ceased, and the dancing girl continued to advance and retire with various alluring embellishments …

Nevinson, recording this performance at the palace of the Maharaja of Baroda, was a war correspondent of liberal tendencies, who took an active part in campaigns for women’s suffrage. Another account of a Sadir performance at the Lakshmi Vilas Palace is given in 1926 by Capt. Krishnarao Panemanglor, who was present during the viceregal visit to Baroda: But here in the Drawing loom, Lord Reading was minutely surveying the Tanjore Dancers who were giving an exhibition of ancient Hindu dances, the like of which he had never seen before. These dancers hailed from the South and the dances were peculiar too and required a tremendous amount of energy of which the dancers in spite of their age seemed to have plenty. They seemed to make as much noise as possible, now beating the floor with their feet, now turning to the left, then to the right, now making a sudden forward movement as if they were going to fall on the spectators but then suddenly stopping their progress and now and again making wonderful gestures to suit their weird music and quaint dance, while the persons who stood behind them with darkish faces but wearing gold and red turbans seemed to have absolutely no mercy on the instruments they held.

So wonderfully had they coloured, clothed and jewelled themselves that they became objects of admiration and their dances were loudly applauded. After showing several types of dances, Kanta and Ghoura as they are called gave imitations of the snake charmer and of kite flying and finished up by playing the Hindu mythological scene of Radha and Krishna, one playing the hero and the other the heroine. His Excellency had a huge smile

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as he evidently thought that a demonstration of this kind on an English stage might perhaps cause a sensation.

It is clear from other writings of this decade that dance performances were still being staged and attended throughout India, even while the anti-nautch agitations were steadily gaining ground, especially in the Madras Presidency, which became the main hub of activism radiating outwards to negatively affect the wider dance economy throughout the subcontinent. Those who wrote positively about the dance traditions and their experiences of dance in India were simply drowned out in the public clamour, as was the case with Lily Strickland. Lily Strickland Anderson (1884–1958) was an American composer and early amateur ethnomusicologist. In 1920, her husband, J.C. Anderson, was employed as a manager for an American company in Calcutta. Strickland joined him there and spent the next ten years in India, returning to the United States in 1930. She also travelled in Asia and Africa, writing reports on the music and dance that she encountered there. These were published in the Musical Courier and the Journal of the American Asiatic Association. Her two articles on Indian dance appeared in these publications in 1923 and 1925. The first of these, Nautch Dancing, appeared in the Musical Courier; the second, Nautch Girls and Old Rhythms of India, was published in the JAAA. Strickland was in some respects a typical American orientalist of the 1920s, interested in Indian culture and art, and in defending Indian traditions against Western, and especially Christian, criticisms and interventions. So far as the Indian dances are concerned, she was keen to show that they deserved attention and respect in their own right, quite apart from the moralizing aspersions that were then being made against them. Though she met Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn in Calcutta in 1926, and on the latter’s request composed the music for his orientalist ballet, ‘The Cosmic Dance of Shiva’, she remained convinced that indigenous Indian dance forms should be kept intact and unvitiated. Strickland begins her article with a reminiscence of a dance performance enjoyed in Bombay:

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To me she will always remain the ideal nautch-girl: I call her Jasmina; for the name fits her well. Never again have I seen one so petite, so sylphlike, so eloquent of the romance of those legendary nautch-girls, the Apsarases, who were the celestial dancers of Hindu mythology. As we sat there, in an open marble courtyard in Bombay, steeped in moonlight, mesmerized by music, she made her entrance with the dramatic effect of sheer simplicity and lack of self-consciousness. Costumed in shimmering silk and tinsel, she took the center of the stage and fell into the attitude that preluded her first dance. She was a small and graceful creature, with skin the color of old ivory. Her oval face was crowned with luxuriant masses of blue-black hair; the size of her eyes was enhanced with kohl, and her hands and feet were tinted with henna. What pleasanter setting for a real nautch than a moonlit night of April!

Our host, the Raja of a very wealthy Native State in India, whom we had met on our first voyage from Marseilles to Bombay, had arranged the party for us at the home of a rich Indian friend of his. During the passage he had displayed the greatest pleasure because of our interest in India and our excited expectancy over its wonders and mysteries. And now, among other entertainments, we were to be treated to a nautchparty, one of the accustomed phases of hospitality in the country. That this was a special nautch-party I knew at once; for the dancer chosen for our pleasure was quite, in an oriental way, the prettiest girl I had ever seen … The pulsing drums set the rhythm of the music, the plaintive flute began the elusive strain, and the sitar carried the melody … In prolonged cadences the melody swelled and then died away on an unfamiliar subdominant note that seemed to leave the theme in mid-air, waiting to be completed. We had not known that it was the custom

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for nautch-girls to combine dancing with singing; we were greatly surprised when Jasmina opened wide her red lips and burst into shrill and raucous tones. As she began her song, she turned directly toward my husband, who as a male guest of honor, was singled out for personal attention. She sang literally at him, to the growing amusement and delight of the Indian audience …

Whirling and swaying, Jasmina wove her spell on twinkling feet, her arms and hands fluent with the eloquence of her theme. Her dance began at the fingertips, each digit moving with deliberate meaning. Then the whole hand took up the rhythm, which gradually extended to the arms and on through the body until her entire form was one with the music. Her muscular control and coordination were admirable, as she worked herself up to the climax of her dance and then drooped gracefully to the floor.

I later saw many nautches. but never another Jasmina, never such cameo-like features as hers, such large and slumberous eyes and so dainty a form …

This passage leads on to criticism of a later dance presentation at the Maidan Theatre in Calcutta: The artificiality of the stage was accentuated by its profuse decorations of abnormal palms, variegated marble pillars, and garish cushions … The well-meaning manager had evidently gathered in his dancers … from the four corners of Bengal. The nautch-girls (‘girls’ is euphemistic), lumbering about the stage like a stray herd of buffaloes, looked awkwardly self-conscious and bewildered … The crude stage-setting, the raucous music, the obese Bengali dancers … gave the effect of caricature … No nautch performance can be seen at its best in a setting so artificial as the Maidan Theatre …

She uses this experience as the basis for her differentiation of the authentic dance from the orientalized version:

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The Indian nautch-girl is dignified, deliberate, and serious. Though she knows nothing about ‘artistic restraint’, she nevertheless has the natural restraint of the primitive— an elemental graveness and placidity. She is, above all, leisurely and takes no account of time. Her dance begins with almost imperceptible movements, gradually gathering momentum with the crescendo of the music. Her slow, undulating postures are graceful, sedate and instinct with charm. When she achieves a climax, it is genuine, because she works up to it naturally and in accordance with the development of her dance. Then she gives and gives freely, with the spontaneity of a wild bird’s song … The whole body of the dancer, even to flexible fingers and feet, responds to the decrescendo or crescendo of the tempo. She moves sinuously, en rapport with the minor cadences of the music, which continues in waves of unbroken sound …

Strickland then moves on to a consideration of orientalist Western dance: Occidental impressions of oriental dancing may delight the eye and enchant the mind, as do all art-forms fashioned by the imagination of idealistic exponents of beauty and rhythm combined. The stage-setting may be splendid, the music sensuous and the dancers themselves lovely, but the one thing is lacking, and that is reality. We are, after all, seeing ‘impressions’ of eastern dancing, shaped and modified to meet the understanding of the western mind—a very different thing from the actual nautch in India … A symphony orchestra cannot possibly be so effective for a nautch as one or two drums in the hands of inspired players in a natural, simple setting in India. The real nautch-girl needs nothing more …

Apart from making these distinctions, Strickland also discerns the relativism of morals as applied to the courtesan aspect of the dancers’ tradition:

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The Abbé J.A. Dubois, an unimpeachable authority on Indian customs, was very harsh in his criticism of the morals and manners of the temple-dancers of South India. But in some sense, morals, like manners, are a matter of geography. To the Hindu masses it is not strange that the devadasis are courtesans … A few Indians devoted to social progress now feel this ethical contradiction so strongly that they are supporting a program for the reform of the dancing-girls’ caste. These men and women successfully used their influence to prevent the appearance of nautch-girls at the Empire Exhibition in London last year …

It is interesting to note that the organizers of the exhibition were quite willing to have dancers performing in London, even while Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi’s own anti-nautch campaign was growing more strident in Madras. The allusion also serves to demonstrate once again that the zeal of the anti-nautch movement was quite willing to see the art of dance perish in the process of doing away with the temple service. Strickland concludes her 1923 article with the disclaimer: Not having gone to India as a missionary or an investigator with the purpose of spreading Indian propaganda in America, I make no attempts to gloss over unpleasant truths about India. My remarks on the characters of Indian nautch-girls must be taken as a mere statement of fact and not as an effort to injure the character of a class, or as indignant protestation. Art and so-called morality are, in my mind, in no way connected, and I am interested in Art …

Though flawed by its own presuppositions and prejudices, Strickland’s writings on ‘nautch’, for all their brevity, do evince a balance of thought and sentiment that was sorely lacking to the activists who eventually succeeded in destroying rather than properly regulating the practices of the hereditary dancers in India in 1947. Lest we be tempted to accuse her of compromise, though, consider this extract from her essay, In Praise of Heathenism, written in 1926, while she was still living in Calcutta:

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Much has been spoken and written about the difficulties of Christianizing the so-called heathen. One who has lived for any considerable time in the East, comes to have serious doubts about the desirability of doing so, even if it were possible … it would be tragic, if not criminal, to substitute for their satisfying philosophy the perplexities fostered by abstruse conceptions of convictions of sin … A philosopher has wisely said that man makes God in his own image. If that be true, what use have the Eastern heathens for the white man’s god? … Fear, induced by hysteria, is the door through which (Christians) would have men seek their salvation. If their pictures of hell are graphic and revolting, their interpretations of heaven are, to some of us, equally revolting … the pantheon of the Hindu is filled with real and human personalities, brought near to the heart by their very weaknesses and sublimated vices … The great temples of India … all have many attendants, musicians, bards and dancing girls who perform at the calendar festivals … A happy life must consist in expression, not repression …

The average intelligent visitor to India was quite happy to enjoy the ‘nautch’ on its own terms, not expending much thought on the minority activist preoccupation with the role of the devadasi and her art in the vast sweep of social reform. Paul D. Cravath (1861–1940), a prominent Manhattan lawyer and travel writer, records his experience and cursory knowledge of the devadasi tradition in 1925: At all Hindu temples dancing by girls known as nautch girls forms an important part of the ceremony. These dancing girls are not allowed to marry, and as they receive only a small honorarium from the temple authorities, they are allowed to supplement their income in the easiest way. It is said, however, that as a rule they are not promiscuously immoral and are faithful to the particular men with whom they ally themselves by contract for designated periods. It is fair to add that while we must have passed by houses occupied by

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hundreds of nautch girls, there was never a suggestion of public immorality. Indeed, that is true of all India. I do not remember our having encountered a single instance of public solicitation by women. I know of no European country of which as much could be said.

At Tanjore I was given an opportunity to see a rehearsal of some temple dancing accompanied by Indian music. The musicians and dancers were manifestly earnest and serious, but the results were not edifying to the western eye and ear. The principal dancing girl was light in color and rather good looking. Her dancing consisted very largely of undulations and gestures, all of which, I was assured, had ritualistic significance in the worship of the god Siva …

Closer to 1930, we have an account by the minor American novelist, James Saxon Childers (1899–1965), whose narrative of a ‘nautch’ sought and seen in Bombay is perhaps indicative of the extent of the struggle to which dancers throughout India were being subjected in the anti-nautch atmosphere spread abroad from Madras: My host put his glass aside. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen a real nautch girl, and I’ve been in India five years.’ ‘I can’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I left home with a keen desire to see the geisha girl of Japan and the nautch girl of India; there is almost as much poetry in dreaming of one as in dreaming of the other. In Japan the little geisha, adorable creature, is everywhere, but in India the nautch girl is almost legendary; one never sees her.’ ‘The tourist seldom does,’ my host agreed, ‘but they are here, plenty of them. The maharajahs have them around their palaces to dance and sing and answer their various wants. In southern India there are dancing girls in the temples, devadasis they are called, who are servants of the gods, who dance twice each day, fan the idol with Tibetan ox tails, and carry the holy light in the temple procession; besides these, they have other sacramental duties: they answer the amorous urge of the god

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whenever it is manifested by one of the priests; they are, in reality, harlots and little more. The institution of temple prostitution is a thoroughly rotten one, but it is limited to a very small part of India and enlightened Indians are making noticeable headway in their efforts to abolish it.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘I can’t become a maharajah, and I have no desire to become a priest, not even an Indian priest, yet I sincerely want to see a nautch girl dance. How do I go about it?’ ‘I’ve no idea,’ my host replied.

Three days later I asked another friend. He had no idea. A third and a fourth person were unable to tell me how to find a nautch dancer. So I called my servant and set out on a pilgrimage to that part of Bombay given over to ladies of no virtue, reasoning that among them should be one who could dance me a nautch. At the end of a long street my servant and I stepped from our taxi. We were greeted in nineteen different languages, none of which I understood, and by nineteen different gestures, all of which I understood. I passed on. Before one house sat a little girl whose skin was tinted like the blossom of the wild strawberry; she spoke to me in Arabic. Across the way, and from a balcony, sang a woman of Ethiopia, her hair coarse and untamed, her skin like sable, and two pearls swung from her ears …

We climbed three flights of smelly stairs and came to a balcony. Beyond an open door was a room in which sat nine men and one woman. Her hair, blue in its blackness beneath the light, shone with a heavy gloss. The nails of her fingers and the nails of her toes had been touched with henna. Her lips were red, and her eyelids were lustrous with kohl. Saffron made golden her skin. Mingled with scented oils of olives and cocopalms and sandalwood, there rose from her body the heavy scent of ambergris and musk, of frangipani and attar of roses. Her silken sari was blue, silver threads woven into it, small mirrors sewed upon it. There were bracelets upon her arms, jewels in her ears, and from

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her nose hung a loop of gold. A man rose and bowed to me. He pointed to a place on the floor. I sat down and he passed me a carved box in which was betel, areca-nut, and lime; he passed me cigarettes.

At one side of the room sat the orchestra; one man played the tabla, the hand-drum; another, the Indian flute; a third played the sitar, a stringed instrument. There was a second sitar, played by an old man whose beard was white and plentiful; just above the soft beauty of his beard, two empty sockets showed in his gaunt skull …

And as the flute and sitar sang the songs of ancient India, and the drums sounded their insistent beat, the woman bound her ankles with ropes from which hung scores of bells; and when she had fastened the ropes, she stood erect. Looking at no one, she raised her arms slowly until they were above her shoulders; and all in an instant she was no longer a woman, but a statue in bronze. Her body tense, her eyes locked, there was no motion except that periodically one fingertip quivered, one eyebrow tilted. Long she stood like an image from the temple, then gently she tapped one foot, and sounded her ankle bells. At first the bells murmured like fairy chimes in far-off chorus; then the set chord swelled and swelled and swelled until, like endless thunder, it closed in and pressed. And suddenly the woman was all motion, all a furious whirl. Her naked feet struck the floor in quick explosions, her arms were circles of grace, her body a pivot of passion. But only an instant she danced in ecstatic torment; then once more she was tense, her eyes locked, one finger-tip quivering. The flute and the sitar sang softly and the drum was a faint pulsation. Motionless the woman stood, until the flute and the sitar drifted into a dream melody, slow, like an old man praying. Then the bells sounded softly and the body of the woman swayed and sank in rapturous circles until at last she knelt. Kneeling, her body rigid, no muscles moved; then her eyebrows moved, dancing in exciting languor. And then her eyebrows were still and

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her hips dreamed with the sitar and the flute and the drum; they dreamed a voluptuous reverie, pleaded in amorous eloquence. From the body of the woman rose the perfume of ambergris and musk, of frangipani and attar of roses. The room was close and I was rising with Rembha from the foam; like foam I was floating with her to Mount Meru. I saw the Apsarases dancing before the god Indra. I knew the heavy drug of sensual beauty … My servant touched me. The dance was ended.

In the passage outside the room, an old woman, her face all wrinkled and skin limp at her throat, appeared with a candle. She held it above her head and led us along the balcony. Twice she turned to speak, and twice she said nothing. We descended the stairs. At the outer door she put her hand on my arm, her old withered face close to mine. ‘Once, sahib, me nautch. Me dance, sahib, like …’ She broke off into Hindustani. And as she babbled, she tried a dance step. She began it, but it ended grotesquely, for the joints were full of pain; the aged legs refused the rhythm that beat in her burning memory. She fell back against the door. ‘Money, sahib,’ she pleaded. ‘Money, money.’

The idea of the ‘obscenity’ of the dance, however, is still found in some accounts, such as the following one by the German writer Johannes Sauter, who, though he spent some fifteen ‘happy’ years in India, as he himself tells us, did not become reconciled to the ‘nautch’. The recollection is of a dance performance seen in Deoghar in Jharkhand and is found in Sauter’s 1922 book, Among the Brahmins and Pariahs, originally published in German: … In accordance with the sacred precepts, the High Priest must perforce prepare himself for the approaching festival by a two days’ fast. As he slowly paced toward the temple with his escort, the foremost of them flung himself upon the ground before him, but they durst not even so much as touch his feet, or he would be defiled, and the festival could not take place. For the same

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reason his escort was careful to keep back the crowd of worshippers. At length the High Priest entered the sanctuary; the four Brahmins standing at the entry followed him, and then he alone offered the Mahadeva the sacrifice of light. At the end of some fifteen minutes the ceremony was completed; the bells and conch-shells were heard once more, while the crowd shouted in a deafening chorus ‘Hari bol! Hari bol!’ … The musicians laboured at their instruments with might and main, and there appeared to one side of the temple, winding their way through the crowd, a score or so of temple girls who took up their position behind the musicians. Deoghar, like all the more important temples and places of pilgrimage, has its devadasi or temple girls. They are attached to the temple, and are commonly the concubines of the priests. But they are not forbidden intercourse with other men not attached to the temple. It is only on the occasion of the official festivals that their presence is obligatory; at other seasons they enjoy complete freedom.

The devadasis enjoy much greater consideration than women of their caste and calling in European communities. I really cannot share the glowing enthusiasm of the traveller through India for the beauty of the bayadère; to me they seem to fall very far short of the highest criterion of feminine beauty. Most of them wear a peculiarly soulless expression which almost borders on imbecility. This may be partly due to the fact that Indian etiquette requires the Hindu woman to allow as little as possible of her inward feelings to appear. There are still younger devadasis, who look like children with the experience of old women, and to me the general effect of their dancing, which consists principally of obscene oscillations of the body, was more painful than delightful. The end of the devadasi’s career is commonly this: if she has saved enough money she will open a disorderly house and become a procuress, or she will

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buy, with her savings, or with money provided by an old lover, a tobacco and betel shop …

Indeed, the notion of the ‘loose’ character of the dancer even penetrates to the pulp fiction of the 1920s, as in this short extract from a story set in India in the Adventure magazine in 1923: Out stepped the most beautiful, ravishing, marvelous, jeweled and scented nautch-girls the world had ever seen; and all the world that knows anything at all is familiar with the fact that the temple girls of Chatu Pegu are the loveliest anywhere. Are they not brought there when hardly old enough to toddle, and trained—and trained—and trained until they can not only dance all the intricate steps that the Gods used to dance in the old days when they lived on the earth among mortals, but can even look exactly like the Goddesses, whose portraits for comparison are on the temple walls? They had all seen the nautch-girls scores of times, but it was always a new thrill; and this being a merry occasion, it led, of course, to jokes …

Still, the fact remains that many intellectuals who had opportunity to view the dance for themselves were transfixed and often transported by its beauties, as this account by the German philosopher Count Hermann von Keyserling (1880–1946) shows: I have spent many hours to-day watching the dancers in the temple. They moved in front of me to the accompaniment of that strange orchestra which always plays during holy ceremonies, in semi-darkness, and the longer they danced the more did they fascinate me. The story goes that Nana Sahib, after he had ordered the massacre of the English prisoners, sent for four Nautch girls and watched their flowing movements during the whole night while he sat by without moving a muscle. I used to think that such a choice of relaxation, and such endurance of enjoyment required a special temperament. But to-day I know that mere understanding

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is sufficient; I too, in the presence of these girls, lost all consciousness of time, and found happiness. The idea underlying these dances has little in common with that which underlies ours. It lacks all great, broad lines, it lacks every composition which may be said to have a beginning and an end. The movements never signify more than a transient ripple on smooth water. Many begin and end with the hands, others flow slowly back into the quiescent, soft bodies, and if by chance a perfect arabesque is achieved, it disappears so rapidly that it only attracts momentary attention and does not lead to a continued tension. The glittering garments veil and soften the mobile play of the muscles; every crude curve is resolved into golden waves, in which their jewels are mirrored like stars. As an art, no matter how mobile it may be, this dance possesses no accelerating motive; for this reason one can watch it ceaselessly. Our dance means a definite, finite formation, which begins and ends in time; the onlooker enters into its play of lines, and in so doing he exerts himself, identifies himself with its meaning, and, when the design is completed, sinks back into himself wearily, because no one can live outside himself for long. It is impossible to watch the most perfect Western play of movements continuously. In the case of the Nautch it is different. Their contemplation does not take the onlooker beyond himself into a strange realm, it allows him, on the contrary, to be conscious of his own life; it simply exteriorises the intimate process of his life, as a clock does in moving its hands, and no one tires of this. Every rapid movement sinks back as soon as it has been shown, into the bathos of the calmly flowing stream of life, and this gives us a direct experience of its flow. For the stream of life as such is not felt by us; we do not notice the circulation of our blood; we become conscious of our duration only by means of the small events which, rising again and again to the surface, also set the lower layers of our being into gentle motion. That is exactly what the movements of Indian dancing aim at and achieve. They are just

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pronounced enough to make man conscious of himself, and to make it easy for him to feel himself alive. This is the significance of the Indian dance. It is the same significance as underlies all Indian manifestations; only the Nautch makes it unusually evident. In the plastic art this wealth of form is so confusing that the observer easily over-looks the underlying reason. In both cases it is the dark background of life which by itself is formless, unfathomable and unintelligible. It is not a rational principle or an idea, it is purely circumstantial. Regarded from the angle of the circumstantial basis, everything objective seems accidental, senseless, incoherent, lawless and without a purpose. It may, of course, be real as an appearance. But whoever enquires after its significance will be pointed by the Indians away from all reality into the nameless depths of Being, which sends all formations like bubbles to the surface …

Keyserling had a difficult friendship with Rabindranath Tagore, from whom he no doubt imbibed many of the orientalist tendencies which he brings to bear on his apprehension of this Tanjore dance performance, a comprehension which shows no signs of any appreciation of its lyrical content in terms of the musical and verbal accompaniment, or of its highly structured and conscious formalism. At the same time, we note the ongoing struggle on the part of Western commentators to define for themselves the notion of an hereditary ‘prostitute class’ in terms that avoid the censuring moralism of the reformist and missionary institutions. In S.M. Edwardes’s Crime in India (1924), in the section of book devoted to prostitution, we find the following attempt— largely based on the work of others—to make tolerant sense of the ‘nautch-girl’ and the devadasi traditions of alternative conjugality and sexual practice: In his Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Sir James Frazer has discussed at length the subject of religious prostitution, and traces its connexion with the worship of a great mother goddess, personifying all the reproductive energies of Nature. It is probable that the prevalence of sacred

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prostitution in India, which survives to the present day, is likewise based upon the cult of the Dravidian earth-mothers or mother-goddesses …

The sacred prostitutes attached to the temples were perhaps regarded as the wives of the god, and in their licentious intercourse they imitated the licentious conduct of the mother-goddess, for the express purpose of ensuring the fruitfulness of fields and trees, and of man and beast …

Although the system of religious prostitution is of great antiquity, the caste of temple-women seems to have first risen to prominence about the ninth or tenth centuries A.D., during which much activity prevailed in southern India in building temples and elaborating the services held in them …

They were the only women in India who enjoyed the privilege of learning to read, dance and sing, and as they drew only a small fixed salary for their duties at the temple, they supplemented it by selling their favours as profitably as possible. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were 100 girls attached to the temple at Conjeeveram; and even to-day at Madura, Tanjore and Conjeeveram, there are numbers who receive allowances out of the large temple endowments. Moor, when he visited Khandoba’s temple at Jejuri, near Poona, in 1792, found more than 200 sacred harlots, some of whom were very handsome: and despite the fact that the dedication of minor girls to temples is an offence under the penal law of British India, the number of Murlis dedicated to the god Khandoba is still considerable. The chief duties of the Devadasis and other sacred prostitutes have always been to dance in the temple, to fan the idol with Tibetan ox-tails, to sing and dance before the god, when carried in procession, and to carry the sacred light styled Kumbarti. In Travancore they also fast in connexion with the temple festivals. The Bhavin of the Deccan has to sweep and purify the

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temple floor, while the male members of the caste, who are styled Devalis, blow the temple horns to wake the god from his slumbers. A Devadasi is regarded by the lower classes as a bearer of good luck, because she can never become a widow. Hence she is often deputed to walk at the head of Hindu marriage processions, instead of an ordinary married woman, who, being liable to widowhood, is not proof against evil omens met on the road. Her tali (neck ornament) is also regarded as lucky; and some Hindus send the tali required for a forthcoming marriage to a Devadasi, who prepares the string for it and threads on it beads from her own necklet …

The lower classes believe that the Murli is possessed at times by the shadow of the god, and on such occasions they consult her as a soothsayer and lay money at her feet. These sacred prostitutes form a regular caste, having its own laws of inheritance, its own customs and rules of etiquette, and its own caste councils to see that these are observed. The act of dedication usually consists in marrying the girl to the idol or god, or to some inanimate object like a sword or dagger, the tali or necklet symbolizing marriage being tied round her neck by a male member of the caste. The caste is recruited in various ways. Sometimes the women themselves choose one or more of their children to succeed them as temple servants; others dedicate themselves, or are dedicated by their parents and relatives, in pursuance of vows made to the god; others again adopt female children with the object of dedicating them to the temple service …

… (following the) example of their governments and the teaching of the priesthood before them, it is hardly surprising that the general mass of the people of India should have learned to regard the trade of the courtesan and prostitute with considerable tolerance, and in some cases as almost worthy of respect.

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This notion was also addressed by Havelock Ellis, who had written in 1903 that: Nowadays Indian ‘reformers’ in the name of ‘civilization and science’ seek to persuade the muralis (girls dedicated to the Gods) that they are ‘plunged in a career of degradation.’ No doubt in time the would-be moralists will drive the muralis out of their temples and their homes, deprive them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched outcastes, all in the cause of ‘civilization and science.’ So it is that early reformers create for the reformers of a later day the task of humanizing prostitution afresh.

The idea expressed is that ‘sacred’ or ‘class’ prostitution should be an acceptable aspect of any society that conceives a religious or cultural need for it, and that the destruction of such systems where they are in place is a dehumanizing act. In 1923, Ellis revisits this theme in The Dance of Life:

But even religious dancing swiftly exhibited the same transformation; dancing, like priesthood, became a profession, and dancers, like priests, formed a caste. This, for instance, took place in old Hawaii. The hula dance was a religious dance; it required a special education and an arduous training; moreover, it involved the observance of important taboos and the exercise of sacred rites; by the very fact of its high specialisation it came to be carried out by paid performers, a professional caste.

In India, again, the Devadasis, or sacred dancing girls, are at once both religious and professional dancers. They are married to gods, they are taught dancing by the Brahmins, they figure in religious ceremonies, and their dances represent the life of the god they are married to as well as the emotions of love they experience for him. Yet, at the same time, they also give professional performances in the houses of rich private persons who pay for them. It thus comes about that to the

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foreigner the Devadasis scarcely seem very unlike the Ramedjenis, the dancers of the street, who are of very different origin, and mimic in their performances the play of merely human passions. The Portuguese conquerors of India called both kinds of dancers indiscriminately Balheideras (or dancers) which we have corrupted in Bayadères. In our modern world professional dancing as an art has become altogether divorced from religion, and even, in any biological sense, from love; it is scarcely even possible, so far as Western civilisation is concerned, to trace back the tradition to either source …

He adds the footnote:

For an excellent account of dancing in India, now being degraded by modern civilisation, see Otto Rothfeld, Women of India.

None of this, of course, had any influence on the Christian view, which is briefly exemplified in 1921 in the missionary writer J. Lovell Murray’s (1874–1955) book, World Friendship, Inc., laying stress on the idea of purity then gaining much ground in India: (The missionary) preaches the word of Christ that men and women must be not only virtuous in conduct but also pure in heart—otherwise they cannot see God. They must be moral or they cannot be religious … The missionaries must do more than preach. They must so far as possible safeguard their converts against the terrible appeal of this temptation, and not the converts alone, but the whole public as well. In lands where low ideals of woman and loose ideals of the home are current, where many of the public entertainments are frankly immoral, where the nautch girl in India, the geisha girl in Japan, and their professional dancing sisters in other countries are held in general favor, where prostitution flourishes …

The emphasis on purity is demonstrated from the side of the ‘higher Hinduism’ by the theosophical writer and scholar,

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Phillip A. Malpas (1875–1958), writing in The Theosophical Path in 1925: If Chandragupta had not come to India when he did, the Greeks in fifty years would have destroyed that great continent, for India is a continent. Not by arms—nothing so simple or even so honorable, if war is ever honorable. But their utter moral degradation filled the land with dead men’s bones and all rottenness. Greek girls figured very largely in the trade with India and they brought with them the seeds of all destruction. The sacred virgins of the temples (of which one is admirably pictured in the later stories of the girl Miriam in the Hebrew books, who at the age of fourteen became the mother of one of their reformers) had been pure and undefiled until the Greeks came. After that, they became the nautch-girls of whom so much is said in condemnation of the Hindu religion by the very westerners who are descended from the men who corrupted the purity of India …

Malpas, who spent a decade of serious study at the British Museum, wrote voluminously on esoteric Christianity, Buddhism, and other religious paths, and may have been one of the originators of the theory that the devadasis had been corrupted by Greek temple prostitutes. His investigation and theory of Western guilt were in any case of no interest to Christian missionaries who fiercely sought only to address the devadasi and ‘nautch-girl’ problem in the terms in which they perceived it. Matters came to a head in 1922, with the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which severely criticised the whole of Indian religion, culture, and society. Mayo (1867–1940), not herself a missionary, was a socio-political writer of bigoted and sometimes racist opinions, who viewed India as little more than a tumultuous scene of moral perversity. Of the devadasi system she writes:

… The general subject of prostitution in India need not enter the field of this book; but certain special aspects

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thereof may be cited because of the compass bearings that they afford. In some parts of the country, more particularly in the Presidency of Madras and in Orissa, a custom obtains among the Hindus whereby the parents, to persuade some favor from the gods, may vow their next born child, if it be a girl, to the gods. Or, a particularly lovely child, for one reason or another held superfluous in her natural surroundings, is presented to the temple. The little creature, accordingly, is delivered to the temple women, her predecessors along the route, for teaching in dancing and singing.

Often by the age of five, when she is considered most desirable, she becomes the priests’ own prostitute. If she survives to later years she serves as a dancer and singer before the shrine in the daily temple worship; and in the houses around the temple she is held always ready, at a price, for the use of men pilgrims during their devotional sojourns in the temple precincts. She now goes beautifully attired, often loaded with the jewels of the gods, and leads an active life until her charms fade. Then, stamped with the mark of the god under whose aegis she has lived, she is turned out upon the public, with a small allowance and with the acknowledged right to a beggar’s livelihood. … And she and her like form a sort of caste of their own, are called devadassis, or ‘prostitutes of the gods,’ and are a recognized essential of temple equipment. Now, if it were asked how a responsible Government permits this custom to continue in the land, the answer is not far to seek. The custom, like its background of public sentiment, is deep-rooted in the far past of an ultraconservative and passionately religiose people. Any one curious as to the fierceness with which it would be defended by the people, both openly and covertly, and in the name of religion, against any frontal attack, will find answer in the extraordinary work and in the too-reticent books of Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael.

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… Thus, when one measure came before the Legislative Assembly to raise the age of consent outside the marriage bond it was vigorously resisted by that conspicuous member, the then Rao Bahadur T. Rangachariar. His argument was, that such a step would work great hardships to the temple prostitutes. And why? Because, as he explained, the daughters of the devadassis cannot be married to caste husbands; so, ‘as these girls cannot find wedlock, the mothers arrange with a certain class of Zemindars … that they should be taken into alliance with the Zemindar.’

And the sympathetic legislator goes on in warning that if the girl’s age is raised, no zemindar will desire her, with the result that a good bargain is lost … Then followed the member from Orissa, Mr. Misra, with his views on devadassis or ordinary dassis or prostitutes: ‘They have existed from time immemorial … They are regarded as a necessity even for marriage and other parties, and for singing songs in invocation of God … Such a thing as procuring of girls does not exist and no gentleman, whether he be a Zemindar or a Raja or an ordinary man, would ever adopt such a nefarious means to procure girls … Why should we think so much about these people [minor girls] who are able to take care of themselves?’ Mr. Misra’s speech, although it dealt with simple facts, evoked another manifestation of western influence, in that it definitely jarred upon many of his co-legislators. However true, they did not want it spread in the record. Cries of ‘Withdraw!’ repeatedly interrupted him, and the words of other speakers gave ample proof of stirrings … of a new perception in the land. To translate intellectual perception into concrete act requires yet another subversive mental process, in a people whose religion teaches that freedom from all action is the crown of perfect attainment …

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In her later work, Slaves of the Gods (1929), she brings a series of quotations, most of them by Indian civil leaders and politicians, to bear on her own arguments: There are, I am sorry to say, many temples in our midst in this country which are no better than brothels: GANDHI. Quoted in Young India. October 6, 1927. P. 335.

Always the one who is to dance before the gods is given to the life when she is very young. Otherwise she could not be properly trained. Many babies are brought by their parents and given to Temple women for the sake of merit. It is very meritorious to give a child to the gods. Often the parents are poor but of good caste: AMY WILSON-CARMICHAEL. Lotus Buds, London, Morgan and Scott. First printed, 1909. P. 258. When the old devadasis become sterile, which they very often are by the nature of their profession, they buy girls from other caste-Hindus and so, every Hindu community [caste] at one time or other shares in the degradation and misery of such a life: DR. [MRS.] S. MUTHULAKSHMI REDDI. Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Governor of Madras. November 4, 1927. P. 416. It is revolting to all human feeling that a girl as soon as she is 6 or 8 or so years of age, and in a majority of cases before she obtains her puberty, should be exposed to this life-long vice [as prostitute at the disposition of priests and temple visitors]: HARI SINGH GOUR. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1922, Vol. 2. Pt. 2. P. 260.

No respectable person would dedicate his young girl or his young child to a temple, throw her to the tender mercies of regular prostitutes or put her in such unfavourable and loathsome environments except with the object of seeing her turned out as a prostitute: SIR MANECKJI DADABHOY. Council of State Debates, Simla, September 12, 1927. P. 1138.

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… A girl in her childhood is told to look upon prostitution as a career. Not only is she repeatedly told that it is her religious duty to follow this disreputable profession, and therefore cannot get married, but the atmosphere around her is so created that she hates marriage and married life: P. G. NAIK, Bombay Social Service League: Quoted in ‘The Pioneer’, Allahabad, November 10, 1928. The Devadasi community of Madras alone numbers two hundred thousand members: From the Manifesto to the Madras Government by the Members of the Devadasi Association, Aurora Press, Madras, 0927. P. 8.

Raising the consent age above 14 in extra-marital cases would be unfair to ‘devadasis’ as that would prevent their earning a livelihood: Testimony of Mr. Pandit, Assistant Commissioner of Belgaum. Age of Consent Committee, Poona Hearing. Associated Press despatch, Bombay Daily Mail, November 5, 1928. Also in Slaves of the Gods, she gives the reader a graphic anecdote about the rescue of a devadasi child from the clutches of the temple system, a rescue quite obviously based on similar narratives by Amy Carmichael, whom Mayo clearly admired: … In and out through the crowd she wove, knowing nothing of way or place, conscious only of the terror at her back. To run she dared not, lest someone ask her why. Yet, presently, seeing beyond the temple purlieus a wider, less peopled street, she darted toward it, in the instinct for space. But just as she cleared the press of traffic, some idler’s hand, snatching at her scarf, tore it away, exposing her tell-tale temple dress. ‘A deva-dasi! A Slave of the Gods! A run-away!’ shouted the idler, giving chase. And the pilgrim pack turned after him in full cry. Lakshmi ran-ran-ran as fast as fear could speed her. Her heart hammered cold in her throat. The world whirled around her … And then it happened. Out of a doorway stepped a lady—her face was white. Lakshmi saw the face—and

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with one last sobbing cry sprang into the lady’s outstretched arms. ‘For-the-love-of-our-Saviour-Jesus-Christ,’ she gasped aloud, and fainted dead away. The lady faced the crowd. ‘What means all this?’ she demanded. ‘It is a deva-dasi—a temple prostitute. She belongs to our gods. She has run away. Give her to us! Give her here! We will take her back to the Brahmans,’ shouted many voices, half frenzied, wholly threatening. But the lady seemed to grow suddenly tall. ‘This child has claimed my help in the name of Jesus Christ, my Lord,’ the words rang like a bell, clear and slow. ‘Fall back!’ For a moment she so confronted them. Then, for all their numbers and their fury, they faltered, broke and melted from before her till she stood alone, with the child in her arms.

… Lakshmi, now, is what you would have her—a happy, hearty, wholesome child, living in love-nurtured peace. As for the lady who rose in her path that night, she spends her life in the rescue of little Slaves of the Gods. But even today her work, because of the hatreds and dangers that surround it, must be done in the silence of namelessness, lest it be killed.

The writing of this later work serves to show how little moved Mayo was by the storm of debate and criticism to which Mother India gave rise, and how adamant she remained in her views about the ‘nautch’ and devadasi controversy. Reactions to Mother India came from both her supporters and her detractors in India and the West. Gandhi himself referred to her report as ‘(having) the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported on’. Annie Besant referred to the work as ‘a remarkably wicked book slandering the whole Indian people’. One of the voices raised against her was that of the theosophist educationalist Dr Ernest Wood, who had been principal of the Sind National College in what is now Pakistani Hyderabad, and who tells us at the outset that his book is intended to show of Mayo’s work that ‘as to facts … she is generally wrong, and as to deductions from facts, that she is almost entirely wrong.’

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About Mayo’s handling of the devadasi system, Wood writes: … I will conclude this chapter with Miss Mayo’s statement on prostitution in India. She avers in some parts of the country, more particularly in the Presidency of Madras and in Orissa, a custom obtains among the Hindus whereby the parents, to persuade some favour from the gods, may vow their next born child, if it be a girl, to the gods. Or a particularly lovely child for one reason or another held superfluous in her natural surroundings, is presented to the temple. The little creature, accordingly, is delivered to the temple women, her predecessors along the route, for teaching in dancing and singing. Often by the age of five when she is considered most desirable, she becomes the priests’ own prostitute.

As to all this Mr. Satyamurti says, ‘The caste of Devadasis exists. They sometimes adopt children. But the idea in this passage that people of other castes give their children to these people and allow them to develop into prostitutes has no basis in fact, and is a figment of the author’s imagination.’

I do not see that it is necessary for us to enter at length into this big question of prostitution. It has a form of its own in India, just as it has in Japan, in France or England, or anywhere else. From what I have heard of it, I should judge it to be very much more above board in India than in England or America. I do not believe that it exists on a large scale. The statement about the little girl of five must be fiction. Miss Mayo says it often occurs. She will be doing a kindness to India if she will point out the cases and give the police an opportunity to deal with them …

Wood’s reference is to S. Sathyamurthi, an orthodox conservative member of the Madras Legislative Council who staunchly backed the devadasis and worked to convince public opinion against Muthulakshmi Reddi’s proposed abolition bill. He would later be active in establishing the Musical Academy

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of Madras, one of whose tasks in the early 1930s would be the rescue of the art of dance from the depredations of the anti-devadasi bill. So severely was the insult of Mayo’s writings felt in India that they even drew fire from indigenous reformist circles, as in the case of Kamakshi Natarajan (1868–1948), the founding editor of The Indian Social Reformer, who responded by making a sharp comparison with prostitution and general moral laxity in the ostensibly Christian societies of Europe and America: Miss Katherine Mayo has here also allowed her imagination to run away with her. As for the institution of deva-dasis, originally corresponding to vestal virgins, but now mostly given to prostitution, this journal took a prominent share in the starting of the anti-nautch movement and has always pleaded for its abolition. But against Miss Katherine Mayo’s highly coloured picture of it, it is only fair to set the Abbé Dubois’ comparison of it with prostitution in Europe in his days. After a detailed description of the deva-dasis, the Abbé writes: ‘Nevertheless, to the discredit of Europeans it must be confessed that the quiet seductions which Hindu prostitutes know how to exercise with so much skill resemble in no way the disgraceful methods of the wretched beings who give themselves up to a similar profession in Europe, and whose indecent behaviour, cynical impudence, obscene and filthy words of invitation are enough to make any sensible man who is not utterly depraved shrink from them in horror. Of all the women in India it is the courtesans, and especially those attached to the temples, who are most decently clothed. Indeed they are particularly careful not to expose any part of the body.’ What would the Abbé have thought of the dress of fashionable European and American women in these days! Prostitution prevails, perhaps, to a greater extent in Europe and America than in India and the East generally. The peculiarity of deva-dasis, is that they have a place in the framework of temple-worship. This

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should not be, and efforts are being made to abolish the institution.

But has the Church no responsibility for evils which it does not officially recognise as part of itself? Christianity, like the ancient Pharisee, may thank God that it has no deva-dasis attached to itself in Hindu temples, but it is only by voluntarily forfeiting its claim to dominate life in all its aspects that it can escape responsibility for the commercialised or clandestine vice which is so notorious a feature of modern society.

Figure 14.3  Kamakshi (Kamukkannamal) Devadasi, c. 1928.

But Mayo had her supporters too, especially in the international mission and social justice fields, whose members continued to view the Indian dancer as the very symbol of Indian promiscuity. Among these was Harry Hubert Field (1897–1946), a sociologist and director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Denver, who publicly supported Mayo’s claims in his work, After Mother India, published in 1929:

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During a meeting that I attended in London, at which Mother India was the subject of discussion, the lately retired Bishop of Madras made a criticism identical with that which he expresses in the letter just transcribed. On that occasion, shortly after the Bishop resumed his seat, he withdrew from the meeting; whereupon a young Madrassee Hindu rose to his feet to deny categorically the very existence of devadasis in India.

‘It is not true that Hindu temples have girls who act as prostitutes to the priests and worshippers,’ he said in effect. This pronouncement was received with a gasp, which seemed to fill the room; for not only the Bishop but the majority of people in the audience had spent the best part of their lives in India. When the meeting was over two ladies of long Indian experience asked the Hindu spokesman why he denied the Bishop’s statement, which they themselves, from their own personal experience, knew to be the bare truth. The Hindu’s eyes dilated; his expression grew excited; at last he exclaimed, vehemently, ‘It’s true to you, but not true to me!’ And it was useless to point out to this young man that a fellow-countrywoman of his—herself a Madrassee—less than six months previous had proposed a resolution in the Madras Legislature …

… in her speech introducing the … resolution, Dr. (Mrs.) Muthulakshmi Reddi pointed out that thousands of young innocent children are condemned to a life of ‘immorality and vice,’ of suffering and disease, and finally of death, resulting from infections and venereal diseases contracted in the pursuit of their profession …

Not only has legislation intended to reform the temples failed each time it has been tried, but every attempt has been, and is, fraught with difficulties and dangers. Even in some States of literate America the masses still retain, to no small degree, their religious fanaticism; how much more, then, the masses in illiterate Hindustan, who are, as were the peoples of medieval Europe,

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ignorant, priest-ridden, and violently reactionable to religious excitation. A handful of devoted individuals are, however, at work endeavouring to rescue innocent devadasi prospects before it is too late.

These efforts are led by foreigners. Outstanding among them is a certain English lady missionary, who for over twenty years has devoted her life to this task, and, with her helpers, has saved several hundred Hindu children, boys as well as girls, from temple dedication. This is one of the many tributes paid to her child-sanctuary: ‘There was something in the place that could be seen only through prayerful eyes. The three hundred children lived in cottages, each cottage under an Indian girl with about a dozen tiny children.’ (In Proceedings of the Madras Legislative Council, official report, November 5th, 1927). … It neither can be nor is denied that licensed houses are still maintained even in some parts of the United States, while in London, at eventide, some streets are little better, and in other Western cities such places, if not openly licensed, are frequently only disguised under more innocent names, as massage saloons, baths, dance halls, or manicure parlours. The West, too, has its precocious, nature-offending children, its advocates of free love, and its large number of promiscuous women. We, too, have our white slavers and defilers of young children, among the many stains on our Western civilisation. But do we defend them? Defend them in the name of our religion?

… As has been shown, it was to the Hindu sacred writings and to the Hindu religious teachers that the members of the Devadasi Association referred Government for the warrant of their calling; and the sending out of ‘procurers’ to replenish their ranks—the buying of the widow’s daughter so that she may be ‘married to the gods’—is nothing better than our white slave traffic operating under the protection of a religious cloak …

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Figure 14.4  Devadasi dancers in a Kuravanji performance, c. 1925.

Figure 14.5 Unnamed devadasi dancer in a street procession, c. 1930. (Photograph courtesy of Madhurakkaran Karthikeyan).

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Both Mayo and Field refer to the writings and work of Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi (1886–1968), who was fast becoming the visible embodiment of the anti-nautch and anti-devadasi abolition axis throughout India. Reddi was a woman of several notable achievements in India. Her father was a Brahmin who had entered into an unorthodox marriage with a devadasi, Chandrammal, and was willing to allow his daughter to study in a men’s college. Reddi herself experienced deep and upsetting discrimination at school because of her devadasi heritage. Fellow students refused to associate with her, and at one point she had to be separated from the rest of the class by an improvised screen made out of a blanket. One teacher resigned on account of her ‘defiling’ presence. Nevertheless, she completed her medical studies, becoming the first woman House Surgeon in a government hospital in Madras. A keen and dedicated social reformer, she entered politics and became the first female legislator in Madras, being elected deputy president of the Legislative Council. Deeply concerned with women’s rights in India, and influenced in this direction by personalities as diverse as Annie Besant, M.K. Gandhi, and Margaret Cousins, she sought to improve the lot of women in India through a variety of reform programmes, including education, medical facilities, and legislation. Elected to the legislature in 1926, she quickly took up the devadasi question, pursuing it as a matter of urgency. Realising that articles 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code, which dealt only with the acquisition of minor girls for purposes of prostitution, were not sufficient to reform the system, she proposed a resolution for the outright abolition of the devadasi system in 1927. Though the resolution was adopted by the legislature, Reddi encountered much opposition and delay in the progress of her bill, as she recalls in her work, My Experience as a Legislator, in 1930. In August of 1929 she had written a letter to Young India, the weekly Gandhian journal, in which she expressed her frustrations with the recalcitrance of her opponents, and had a printed response from Gandhi himself: The indefatigable Dr. S. Muthulakshmi Reddi writes: ‘As you have been openly denouncing the Devadasi system

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in the Hindu temples, I make bold to appeal to you for help in the great task of getting rid of that evil. In this Presidency, I find it an up-hill task, as the so-called educated men and even some of the most prominent Congressmen oppose my reform measures and defend that infamous institution. My Devadasi Bill, which has now become an Act, deals only with the Inam-holding Devadasis, but there is a section of that community which practise dedication under the cloak of religion simply to make a living out of prostitution: This is nothing but traffic in children; because children are even bought and adopted (adoption by Deva-dasis is allowed by our Hindu Law), and at an age when they are innocent and cannot judge or act for themselves, are led into this abominable life from which they rarely escape.

‘I have had many memorials and petitions from the enlightened section of that community asking me to bring about legislation to punish such wicked people who trade upon the children’s souls and bodies. The Penal Code Sections 372 and 373 have proved ineffective. Hence, I have given notice of another Bill for the success of which I want your blessings. Some may argue that legislation is no good so long as the people do not realise the evil in that custom; but my contention is that a good section of our people perceive the injustice. ‘Now I myself feel that I could rescue many of these girls if I had some legal power to take away children from such criminal parents. Among the Devadasi community itself there is a great awakening, and they have been doing propaganda on a large scale, but I am pained to observe that the high-caste people do not help them in that community’s efforts to reform themselves. And further, our laws for the protection of children are almost nil in this Presidency compared with the protection that exists for the children of other countries and even the children of other provinces such as Bombay and Bengal.

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‘We know that in the advanced countries, health and moral reform always preceded the formation of public opinion in their favour as they were themselves educative factors. In this Presidency, we cannot blame the Government so much as the high-caste people who do not sufficiently realise that all children, irrespective of caste or creed, need our care and sympathy, and in this matter of rescuing innocent children from the prospect of a dreadful life, they should rise above their communal and caste prejudices.’

I heartily endorse the writer’s proposal. Indeed I do not think that the proposed legislation will be in advance of public opinion. The whole of the enlightened public opinion that is vocal is against the retention of the system in any shape or form. The opinion of the parties concerned in the immoral traffic cannot count, just as the opinion of keepers of opium dens will not count in favour of their retention, if public opinion is otherwise against them.

The Devadasi system is a blot upon those who countenance it. It would have died long ago but for the supineness of the public. Public conscience in this country somehow or other lies dormant. It often feels the awfulness of many a wrong, but is too indifferent or too lazy to move. But if some active spirit like Dr. Reddi moves, that conscience is prepared to lend such support as indifference can summon up. I am therefore of opinion that Dr. Reddi’s proposal is in no way premature. Such legislation might well have been brought earlier. In any case I hope that she will receive the hearty support of all lovers of purity in religious and general social life. M. K. G.

Reddi recalled these frustrations again in her 1930 work, My Experience as a Legislator: The next subject that engaged my attention was the Devadasi Problem. I have been feeling all along and

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feeling most acutely too that it was a great piece of injustice, a great wrong … a practice highly revolting to our sense of morality and to our higher nature to countenance, and to tolerate young innocent girls to be trained in the name of religion to lead an immoral life, to lead a life of promiscuity, a life leading to the disease of the mind and the body.

I gave notice of a resolution and I was anxiously waiting for the ballot result. Luckily for me, the ballot was successful and the resolution appeared under my name in the agenda of the 4th November. As usual, the vested interests became alarmed at my move and tried all their influence to dissuade me from moving the resolution but I was adamantine and I almost took a vow that I would never rest till I get the pernicious custom eradicated from this land. The resolution did come up before the Council and I had the honour of moving it … The full text of my speech has been already published in pamphlet form both in English and Tamil and is available …

(Many) made most eloquent … speeches in support of my motion but the then Law Member Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar on behalf of the Government while appreciating the very high object of the mover pointed out certain difficulties in giving practical effect to the resolution.

All the same, the original motion slightly amended was unanimously adopted by the council.

This Council recommends to the Government to undertake legislation or if that for any reason be impracticable, to recommend to the Central Government to undertake legislation at a very early date to put a stop to the practice of dedicating young girls or young women to Hindu Temples, which has generally resulted in exposing them to an immoral life. The local Government without trying in any manner to solve the problem simply communicated the above

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resolution to the Central Government. Therefore, with the help of a lawyers’ councillor I drafted a Bill to dispense with the Devadasi Service in the Temples and after getting the Government of India sanction for the same, I introduced it into the local Council, the very next year.

… My medical and educational work in the Council was very much applauded but not my social reform work. The people that had not the courage to oppose me openly in public began to work underhand and set up one or two bogus associations to write petitions to Government and distribute unworthy literature to the public to prevent my bill becoming law.

Therefore, I had to bring all the resources at my command to counteract such evil propaganda. I was constantly writing to the press on the subject, publishing and broadcasting little educative pamphlets and I was holding large women meetings in support of my work in the Council. To the credit of the Indian public it must be said that very soon the vocal public became converted to my creed …

She went on to express her dissatisfaction with the existing legislation, her intention to abolish the devadasi system entirely, and gave examples of support for her proposals from the community of devadasis itself: Even though there have been provisions in the Indian Penal Code sections 372 and 373 to punish dedication of minor girls to the temple it was made inoperable in most cases because of the temples continuing their service. Therefore the object of my bill was to totally abolish the system. It must be gratifying to the Indian public to learn that the native state of Mysore having realised the enormity of the evil, has done away with the system even as early as 1909 which was not possible in British India … While legislation for the prevention of child marriage met with much opposition throughout the country, my

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attempt to abolish the devadasi service in the temples had the cordial support of all sections of the people …

Even though the recognised leaders of the Hindu community had been condemning the system both through their writings and on the public platforms, yet the evil practice continued because of its associations with the temples. The vested interests had been jealously guarding the so-called rights of the temples in the name of sanctity while they were profaning the sacredness of the temple itself by their unholy practices and by their selfish appropriation of the temple income to unworthy objects.

The late leader of the non-brahmin party, the Raja of Panagal, had the courage to challenge the so-called rights and enacted a measure called the ‘Hindu religious endowment act’ to control and direct the management of the temples for the good of the public. As the above act has been put into practice and as the Government could therefore not take shelter under the plea of religious neutrality, I was able to introduce my bill as an amendment to that act.

The appreciation of that measure by those depressed communities who have been clamouring for this reform could be seen from the text of the address of welcome given to me on 3rd November 1929 during my visit to Bezwada: ‘Dear Madam, We the members of the Andhra Desa Kalavantulu community, beg your permission to avail ourselves of the opportunity granted to us by divine dispensation, to express our spontaneous and effervescing feeling of deep-seated gratitude … This community, long enchained in the thralls of a narrow superstition and shut off from the irradiating influence of the pure flame of social freedom has long been weltering in the mire of ignorance and treading in the path of social degeneration …’

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I am quoting below a sample of the many letters which I have been receiving from reform associations of the Devadasi community throughout the presidency.

‘Dear Madam, The news that your resolution regarding Cochin Devadasis has met with warm and kind reception in the Madras Council, in as much as it has been carried without a division, has given us unbounded pleasure …’

Objections submitted by a number of devadasi associations in the Madras Presidency had little effect on the reformers, with Reddi and others averring that, given the evils of the vocation for whose preservation the petitioners were pleading, they themselves were not worthy of being listened to. One such appeal or ‘memorial’ submitted by the Madras Devadasi Association in 1928, asks the question: … If the object of the measure is to suppress prostitution, why not check prostitution wherever it is found and by whomsoever it is committed? Why should anyone deal with Devadasis for that? … prostitutes come from all classes of society and prostitution is an incidence of social influences … If some of our members have gone astray from the path of virtue and rectitude, is the whole community to suffer? Similarly, as prostitutes are found among all castes and creeds it would follow that all castes and creeds should be condemned for the sins of a few. This … is neither logic nor justice.

And ends with the appeal:

… we beg to close this appeal to you not to pass any legislation suppressing or interfering … with our dedicating our lives … to religion and service … In trying to mend an evil do not end the institution … Encourage and foster our ideals of love and religion and service and our arts of music and dancing … Do not mistake the opinions of the few interested champions for public opinion …

In 1929, a similar petition was submitted without success to the regent Maharani of Travancore, who outlawed the devadasi

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practice in her own territory in 1930, and where in fact the practice had been proscribed since 1921, decisions always commended by Reddi when making her own case for its abolition in the Madras Presidency: Being a … group of women mainly depending on the profession of music, dancing and other fine arts from time immemorial fortified by religious sanctions and social traditions, we are looked (on) with disfavour by a very small section of Hindus who are social reformers having no respect for Hindu religion nor being respected by Hindus in turn. In the warfare of political interests of more powerful parties, our claims are not attracting the attention of the other communities who being in the fight for self-advancement remain lukewarm to our representations and we have not received any support in the Council during the past so many years. Further, we are women not having the disadvantages of the Hindu women but possess on the contrary all the privileges of the males in regard to property, special laws of inheritance, rights and privileges in temples with munificent endowments assigned to us by ancient kings and houses of aristocracy. Unless we are given special representation, there is the danger of our rights and privileges being swallowed by more noisy members of the other parties, besides the indirect effect of our religious customs being trampled under by unholy hands … It is disastrous and ruinous to the welfare of the community to be left alone to the care of the wolfish communities or parties now existing …

Dr Reddi, implacably seeking the complete dissolution of the system, could see no grounds—other than the justifiable need to ensure that devadasis would still enjoy their traditional inam land rights—for sustaining any aspect of the system, its ritual praxis and its arts of dance and music. She remained bent on the total abolition of the tradition as an integrated whole, and felt both grateful for and honoured by the support she had from Gandhi:

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Since I came to know of him intimately on the occasion of his visit to South India in the year 1928, I have been attracted to him and I am convinced to-day that he alone can cure the Hindu Society of all its ills. When I introduced my amendment to the Hindu Religious Endowment Act to enfranchise the Inam holding Devadasis and thus to remove the root cause of Dedication, I did not know that the above Act does not include certain temples within its operation, e.g., the Madras Temples and also the temples getting a very small income of Rs. 300 or so. I was also not aware that there is a class of Devadasis outside the temples who dedicate their girls not for service in the temples but with the sole object of making them trade on vice. Therefore to complete my legislation for the eradication of the evil I introduced a supplementary bill … which legislation owing to the dilatory motion of the Government has been indefinitely postponed.

Her insistence on the evils of the entire system is shown in her denunciation of the very fact that it had ever existed at all: The question of the dedication of Devadasis to temples has been engaging the attention of the whole of India for the last 60 years and there has been legislation in the past also to put down this evil. This same Council accepted a resolution asking this Government and the Central Government, to undertake legislation to abolish dedication of women to Hindu temples. A Bill has also been accepted to amend the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act, in order to do away with the Devadasi institution in temples, the object being that there should be no association of immorality with temple worship. We know there are prostitutes among the Devadasis. Of course, I would not blame them, because they imagine that religion sanctions such a conduct and the age-long custom is behind them … It is only in this Presidency that Devadasi practice is widely prevalent; not so much in Bombay and there is nothing of that kind in Calcutta; and recently in the United Provinces, they

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have passed an Act, called the Protection of Naik Girls Act …

… the Devadasi class would have become extinct long ago, if they had not been allowed to adopt children. They take hold of unclaimed children or sometimes they purchase beautiful children at heavy prices. When we know that prostitution is an evil, are we to tolerate such a practice and allow these children to carry on their hereditary evil trade? These children are trained even from their infancy to lead such a life … I would therefore request the Hon. the Home Member not to obstruct social reform and social progress. Sir, this is a very important amendment which would strike at the very root of the evil and rid the Presidency of this most ancient social vice …

Despite stolid opposition from orthodox instances, and feeling that public opinion generally was now on her side, Reddi introduced the Prevention of Dedication to Hindu Temples Bill in the Madras Legislative Council on 24 January, 1930, with the following statement of ‘objects and reasons’: Not only the inam-holding Devadasis but also other Devadasis dedicate a large number of girls to Hindu temples by going through Pottukattu or Gajje Puja or similar ceremony in Hindu temples. Whatever the origin of the practice in ancient days of the dedication of women as Devadasis in Hindu temples, it is unfortunately the case that the practice has now degenerated mainly into a method of initiating young women to a life of immorality and prostitution. The existence or otherwise of Shastric sanction to the practice of dedication as Devadasis is therefore immaterial. The Shastras are against vice and impurity of all kinds, and enlightened public opinion is against tolerating the continuance of a practice which, in the name of service to God, has condemned a certain class of women to a life of either concubinage or prostitution.

A Hindu woman who is so dedicated is considered by custom to be incapable of contracting a valid marriage

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thereafter. Therefore, it is highly desirable and expedient to prohibit the performance of dedication of girls to Hindu temples within the precincts of any Hindu temple and legalise the marriage of such girls when contracted after such dedication. There have been previous attempts at putting an end to this practice of dedication, but they have been, so to say, indirect and have not produced the desired result … The Mysore Government prohibited the dedication of Hindu girls in its temples by proceedings dated 28th January 1910, which runs thus:

The Government observe that whatever may be the euphemism by which the true nature of the ceremony is concealed, Gajje Puja has an intimate connection with dedication to the profession of a prostitute dancing girl. They are not prepared to allow the performance of such a ceremony in a Muzrai temple and are satisfied from the depositions and the opinion of the Muzrai Agamik on record that no hardship will he caused by the prohibition of the performance of Gajja Puja or any similar ceremony within the precincts of any temple under the control of Government in the Muzrai Department. If the British Government in India have not yet undertaken legislation on the point, it is probably out of a tender regard to alleged religious susceptibilities of Hindus. To show that public opinion is in favour of the abolition of the system, and in response to the appeal of several men and women associations and hundreds of members of the community of Devadasis themselves I have brought forward this Bill.

The Bill itself was formulated as follows:

A BILL TO PREVENT THE DEDICATION OF WOMEN TO HINDU TEMPLES IN THE PRESIDENCY OF MADRAS Preamble

Whereas the dedication of women to Hindu Temples results in such women adopting the profession of

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prostitute dancing girls, it is desirable and expedient to put an end to the practice of such dedication and whereas the previous sanction of the Governor General in Council has been obtained, it is enacted as follows: Short Title

This act shall be called the Prevention of Dedication Act, 1929. Dedication of Hindu Women to Temples Declared Illegal

2. The performance in the precincts of Hindu Temples or other places of worship of Pottukattu or Gajje Puja or any similar ceremony to a Hindu woman with a view to dedicate her is hereby declared illegal and shall be illegal. Dedicated Women May Contract Valid Marriages.

3. A Hindu woman who has gone through a process of dedication by the performance of Pottukattu or Gajje Puja or any similar ceremony may thereafter contract a legal marriage and it shall be recognised as valid notwithstanding any law or custom to the contrary.

Penalty for Dedication of Women to Temples.

4: Whoever permits, performs or takes part in the performance or abets the performance within the precincts of a Hindu temple of the ceremony of Pottukattu or Gajje Puja or any similar ceremony with a view to dedicate any Hindu woman shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year and shall also be liable to fine. Saving of Penalty Provided by Other Law.

5: Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prevent any person from being liable under Section 372 of the Indian Penal Code or under any other law, to any other or higher punishment than is provided by this Act; provided that no person shall be prosecuted under this Act if he was convicted under any of the provisions of law mentioned above.

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Later in 1930, Dr Reddi resigned from the legislative council in protest at the arrest of Gandhi, but continued pressing in public forums for her bill to be passed into law, and by mid-1930 the council actually issued an order stating that dedication of women to temple service was now considered a crime. But this step had only a limited effect as the practice continued secretively and by means of the use of various circumventions of the bill’s provisions. This confused and only partially effective situation would continue to obtain until late 1947, when Reddi’s bill, with amendments, attained the force of law (officially on 17 January, 1948). It became known as the Madras Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947, and did away in a conclusive manner with the devadasi practice in South India. The effects of these controversies and legislative steps rippled outwards to discourage and delegitimize dance throughout the Indian subcontinent, including the northern regions where forms of proto- or pre-Kathak dance had for centuries been performed outside of the Hindu temple context, and the art of dance itself was everywhere tainted with the miasma of vice and obscenity. The work of salvaging the art itself, by separating it from the temple tradition in the South and from the kotha and court context in the North, would be taken up in the 1930s, and would involve controversies around morality, minority rights and cultural appropriation that continue to trouble the Indian dance economy today.

References

1. Rothfeld, Otto, Women of India, Bombay: Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1920. 2. Chauvelot, Robert (transl. Eleanor Stimson-Brooks), Mysterious India; its Rajahs, its Brahmans, its Fakirs, etc., New York: The Century Co., 1921.

3. Nevinson, Henry W., More Changes, More Chances, New York: Harcourt and Brace Company, 1925. 4. Panemanglor, Capt. Krishnarao, The Viceregal Visit to Baroda, Baroda, 1926.

References

5. Anderson, Lily Strickland, Nautch-Girls and Old Rhythms of India in Asia: The Journal of the American Asiatic Association, vol. 25, August 1925.

6. Anderson, Lily Strickland, Nautch Dancing, The Musical Courier, vol. 87, no. 15, 1925. 7. Anderson, Lily Strickland, In Praise of Heathenism, The Open Court Magazine, June 1926.

8. Cravath, Paul D., Letters Home from India and Irak, New York: Cravath, 1925. 9. Childers, James Saxon, From Siam to Suez, New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1932.

10. Sauter, Johannes A. (transl. Bernard Miall), Among the Brahmins and Pariahs, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. 11. Adventure, vol. 43, 1923.

12. Keyserling, Count Herman von (transl. J. Holroyd Reece), The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, vol. 1, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924.

13. Edwardes, Stephen M., Crime in India: A Brief Review of the More Important Offences Included in the Annual Crime Returns, with Chapters on Prostitution and Miscellaneous Matters, London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1924.

14. Ellis, Havelock, Sex in Relation to Society, vol. 6, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Philadelphia: F.A. Davids Company, 1910.

15. Ellis, Havelock, The Art of Dancing in The Dance of Life, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923.

16. Murray, J. Lovell, World Friendship, Inc., New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1921.

17. The Theosophical Path; Illustrated Monthly, Point Louis, Cal: New Century Corporation, 1925. 18. Mayo, Katherine, Mother India, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922. 19. Mayo, Katherine, Slaves of the Gods, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929.

20. Wood, Ernest, An Englishman Defends Mother India, Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1929.

21. Natarajan, Kamakshi, Miss Mayo’s ‘Mother India’; A Rejoinder, Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 1927–1928.

22. Field, Harry Hubert, After Mother India, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929.

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23. Young India, vol. 11, August 1929.

24. Reddi, S. Muthulakshmi, My Experience as a Legislator, Madras: Current Thought Press, 1930.

25. The Humble Memorial of the Devadasis of the Madras Presidency in Soneji, Davesh, (ed.) Bharatanatyam: A Reader, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.

26. Devadasi Petition to the Government of Travancore in Devika, J., Are We Not Women Workers Too? The Devadasis Petition the Government of Travancore, online reading at Swatantryavaadini, September 2020.

Postscript In an afterword as brief as the one I intend here, nothing more can be given than a cursory outline of the developments that led to the Prevention of Dedication Act of 1947, which was Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi’s most personally cherished triumph. One of the pressing issues that arose in the immediate aftermath of her 1930 bill was the scramble by the so-called ‘Pro-Art’ lobby to save the art of dance from extinction in case the devadasi system should really be abolished, a final step that was in the early 1930s not yet a certainty, but was certainly looming large over the hereditary dance economy. The question was taken up by the Madras advocate, E. Krishna Iyer (1897–1968), who was an aficionado of the dance, and himself a dancer in theatrical pieces. In 1927 Iyer had convened the All India Musical Conference in Madras, a step which led to the founding of the Madras Music Academy in 1928, with Iyer as a founding secretary. Concerned with rescuing the art of dance from the depredations of the reformers, who by and large were content to see the art perish together with the devadasi system, Iyer arranged dance performances by hereditary dancers under the auspices of the Music Academy. Under Iyer’s direction the Academy staged a Sadir performance by the young hereditary dancers, Jeevarathnam and Rajalakshmi, the daughters of Kalyani Ammal, much to chagrin of Dr Reddi. The performance was sparsely attended but was a small beginning in the conscious process of separating the dance from the temple practice by establishing it as a secular art on the proscenium stage. Western Texts on Indian Dance: An Illustrated Guide from 1298 to 1930 Donovan Roebert Copyright © 2022 Donovan Roebert ISBN 978-981-4968-39-3 (Hardcover), 978-1-003-30283-4 (eBook) www.jennystanford.com

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Matters came to a boiling point in late 1932, when the Rajah of Bobbili in Andhra was elected Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency and had dancers performing at his inauguration. Unable to endure such bare-faced flouting of her code, Dr Reddi wrote a denunciatory letter to The Hindu in early December of that year: It has been reported that at the recent Madras entertainments given to the new Hon. Chief Minister of the Madras Government there were performances such as nautch, music and kolattam by Devadasis. If the report be true, it should be a matter of keen regret for all fair and progressive minded people. Besides we are deeply pained to note, in the list of the committee of hosts, a few of our friends who are staunch advocates of reform and who have given their unqualified support to the measure for abolition of Devadasi music and dance in the Hindu temples. Their clear duty on such occasions should have been one of walk-out and boycott, and certainly not one of tolerance at such reprehensible practices… It is not at all wise, on the part of our elders and responsible administrators, to invite these Devadasis to such functions and to allow them to advertise not only their arts but also their person. I need not detail to the readers the dangers involved in such unwholesome practice.

E. Krishna Iyer responded in a letter to the Madras Mail, where the controversy was allowed to develop by the paper’s sub-editor, G.A. Johnson, who was himself in favour of rescuing the dance. Addressing Dr Reddi directly, Iyer wrote: Few can quarrel with the doctor in her view that the Devadasi class as such should not be encouraged and that the arts should be allowed to serve as a mere advertisement for the person of the lady artist for immoral purposes. But the conscious or unconscious over-emphasis merely on the social reform aspect … has the result of making the art mistaken for the medium by which it is represented … The fact of the

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matter is that the muses have to thrive somewhere. They could not and would not die. Nor can they thrive merely on the hopes and pious wishes of the reformers of the destructive type. They cannot breathe or live in a vacuum between the total abolition of the Devadasi class and the doubtful coming up of respectable ladies to take to them … The legacy of the art of Bharatanatyam is too precious a treasure to be destroyed or dimmed by the confusion of purpose and methods of overenthusiastic reformers with no proper perspective of Indian life and its amenities.

Dr Reddi responded:

Surely no fair-minded person will advocate that any art, however great and unique, should be cultivated and encouraged at the expense of the universally recognised principles of social purity. As the teaching of dance to girls of particular communities has become at the present day identical with the training of such girls for a life of promiscuity, these communities themselves in their mass conferences of men and women have not only condemned the practice but have also demanded effective legislation to put down the evil.

Iyer, for his part, was having none of it:

… Dr Muthulakshmi Reddi would apply a sledgehammer and see both a class of persons and their Art go lock, stock and barrel, after which alone—according to her—respectable ladies would think of touching the Art … For my part it is no question of Art at the expense of morality, or even positive encouragement of the present day nautch girls as a class and never a justification for the perpetuation of the Devadasi class as such. The heavens would not fall and morality would in no way be jeopardised if one or two cases of very good Art is reluctantly tolerated in exceptional instances—without the associated vice—as a matter of temporary evil necessity, pending the coming up of better persons.

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Immediately, even in these earliest examples of Iyer’s thought—and possibly that of Reddi too —for the future of the dance as an art apart from the devadasis, one notices the not yet fully articulated intention to encourage its performance by ‘better persons’ i.e. by girls and women not belonging to the hereditary community. The idea expressed is that hereditary dancers such as the Kalyani daughters, Mylapore Gauri Ammal, and others, should be ‘reluctantly tolerated in exceptional instances’ until the climate is produced in which the art can be taken up by ‘better persons’ more morally acceptable to the reformers. M.S. Ramaswami Aiyer summed up this growing dilemma with the announcement that ‘Until … respectable ladies and gentlemen come forward to learn music and dancing, all we can say to the public is, enjoy the art if good from whatever source it may come and stop there.’ The public tussle between Iyer and Reddi led quickly to a Madras Music Academy conference, instigated by Iyer, on the subject of the adoption of dance as part of the academy’s programs and under its explicit tutelage. The discussion took place on the sixth day (28/12/1932) of the academy’s annual conference in the same December in which the public altercation had taken place. It opened with a reference to G.A. Johnson who had been invited to take part but was unable to attend: We thank you for the invitation contained in your letter of 27th December, to attend the proceedings of the Conference at noon to-day. Unfortunately this is an impossible time for either the editor or myself to get away and we regret we shall have to decline.

There is a point which has occurred to me in connection with these discussions which I submit might usefully be raised. This refers to the public performances of the nautch, which I understand many reformers wish to discourage. It is reasonable to suppose: (i) That if it is intended to reform the Devadasis they must be given an alternative profession. Public performances of the dance should provide them with a lucrative opportunity to display their talents.

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(ii) If the dance is to be freed from its less respectable associations, the encouragement of public displays appears to be the best way to do it. Private parties tend to encourage the notion of lack of respectability. Public, on the other hand, show the dance for what it is. Lack of respectability might best be removed by attendance at these public functions of respectable people.

The idea that the hereditary dancers might, in the process of reform, at least be enabled to earn a living by their art was seconded by other speakers during the conference, and it appears that, at this early date, this intention was still viewed as a feasible way for saving both the artists and the art. Dr Srinavasa Raghava Ayyangar opined that: The immediate task of art lovers should be to encourage the fine arts particularly among the reclaimed members of the Devadasi class, especially as their heredity in the art will be valuable. We should also support those who are interested in reclaiming the class by legislation and otherwise. The Devadasis might be induced to have regular married life and make an honourable living by the art.

Dr S. Krishnaswami Ayyangar agreed:

If you do not propose to give the present practitioners of this art an opportunity of attempting to make an earnest [probably ‘honest’] living, surely it would not be possible for them to retrace their steps without your help … I take it that the view of the majority assembled here is that we cannot begin under better auspices than by helping them towards this improvement.

In the event, as we shall see, this beneficent stance directed at rescuing the dancing class was not put into action in a sustained way. Though hereditary dancers appeared in the Music Academy’s programs throughout the 1930s, this trend was abandoned in the 1940s when dancers from non-hereditary communities were becoming more established and numerous. The conference proceedings are too lengthy to give here in full but addresses by two delegates may suffice to adduce some

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idea of the tone of the debate, which was unanimously in favour of Iyer’s ‘pro-art’ stance. Mr Muthiah Bhagavatar said: I wonder why we have to discuss this subject at all because bhavam is there already in everything that we do daily. It is a great pity that by force of circumstances, the art of dancing has come to occupy a low level at present. Everybody knows that there are two ways of relieving a patient—either by giving him medicine or by killing him outright. If the art of dancing is to be killed, we need not assemble here at all. Moreover it is an art which cannot be killed, being naturally present in everything we do. So, the only course now open to us is to mend it and bring it to a level which it ought legitimately to occupy. A high level of efficiency in this art of Abhinayam can be reached only if we teach it to our children while they are young.

Dr S. Krishnaswami Ayyanger, who had been specially requested by Iyer to contribute, gave his opinion as follows: Mr. E. Krishna Ayyar, our ex-Secretary, was very anxious that I should speak here today on this subject. Perhaps he wanted a little light as to what this art was like in former times and also perhaps, why it has gone down to an extent where we have now to say ‘let the dancing art live’ etc. We have come to this stage because there are a hundred and one other arts of ours or cultivated habits, which have come to the same position, and we have to bid for their existence simply because our culture and civilization have reached a condition of anarchy. Everybody claims to be a master, whether he happens to be young or old, with or without followers. Anybody’s freak finds a full field for play. We also make full use of the freedom allowed to us by the Press in the expression of our own views. Somebody says ‘let the art go’ and then follows a lot of correspondence. It is freely said that the art is objected to on the score that the practitioners, or some of them, at any rate,

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are leading lives, which fall very much below what a moral life ought to be—according to our own standards— and therefore, since the practitioners happened to be people not worthy of being associated with, on a level with others, the art might go as well as the immorality with it. It is just like saying that because I am in the habit of getting frequent colds, I must cut off my head.

The conference statements:

was

concluded

with

the

following

1. Bharata Natyam as a great and an ancient art being unexceptionable, this conference views with concern, its rapid decline and appeals to the public and art associations to give it the necessary encouragement.

2. This Conference requests the Music Academy, Madras, to take steps to disseminate correct ideas regarding the art and to help the public to a proper appreciation thereof.

3. This Conference is of opinion that it is desirable that, to start with, women’s organisations do take immediate steps to give proper training in the art, by instituting a course of instruction for the same. 4. This Conference is of opinion, that in order to make dancing respectable, it is necessary to encourage public performances thereof before respectable gatherings.

The resolutions were put to vote and carried unanimously.

These developments at the Music Academy were no doubt partially responsible for the flurry of anti-devadasi activity and writing that was renewed in the 1930s under the auspices of several social and political movements, including Gandhi’s Congress Party and the anti-casteist Self-Respect Movement under the leadership of E.V. Ramasamy (‘Periyar’). In this renewed atmosphere of obsession with the devadasi system, voices against it were raised both from within it and from without. Indeed, one of the most notable of these anti-devadasi writings was a novel composed in 1936 by the devadasi Muvalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar. The novel, titled

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Dasigal Mosavalai Allathu Mathi Petra Minor (‘The Treacherous Web of Devadasis or The Minor Grown Wise’) deals in the course of its semi-autobiographical narrative with the debasing aspects of the devadasi life and system as perceived by the author. In her preface she states that: My firm opinion is that, from ancient times, the temple priests, kings and zamindars … encouraged particular communities to engage in prostitution in the name of art … our women have been suppressed in all spheres … The legitimisation given in religion and the shastras is evident in the manner in which (our) women have been assigned the role of prostitutes …

She continues in an afterword:

… In no other country has prostitution been legitimized as a holy art blessed by God. Raising a group of women for prostitution only emphasises the animal lusts of our males … It is shameful to note that our national leaders defend the devadasi system in the name of preserving our tradition and art …

This sort of writing and posture emanating from within the devadasi system itself, and echoed by other devadasi reformers such as the Andhra Kalavantulu practitioner, Yamini Purnathilakam, would have had an understandable bearing on the ambiguously condemnatory attitudes of dance ‘revivalists’ like E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale. We find, for instance, despite Iyer’s harsh allusions to the immorality of the hereditary dancing class, a section devoted to the praise of some of them in his 1933 publication, Personalities in Present Day Music, in which he writes, among others, about the Kalyani daughters: A combination of appreciable abhinaya and considerable foot work in adavujathis mark the art of the Kalyani daughters … Of slender frame and dark brown complexion, her lithe, graceful figure with ever smiling face, large eyes and expressive features mark out conspicuously the younger sister, Jeevaratnam; and her art arrests the attention of the audience from the outset … they invariably

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display much of variegated adavujathis in scintillating cascades and they are vivacious in effect, though at times they are carried to excess.

The Hereditary Dancers Rajalakshmi and Jeevarathnam, in E. Krishna Iyer, Personalities in Present Day Music, 1933.

In a footnote to the article Iyer notes sadly:

Since writing the above article … the tragic news of the untimely death of Miss Jeevaratnam … by smallpox in June ’33 came to be known. It is a great pity that the cruel hand of death should have snatched away such a talented artist while still in the bloom of youth and with a great future and the art of dancing is the poorer for her loss.

In the same book, Iyer devotes the last section to an overview of the status of Bharata Natyam, in the context of an appraisal

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of Tanjore Balasaraswati, after the resolutions taken by the Music Academy: … She happened to be the first artist at Madras with youth, talents and other advantages, to catch the eyes of the public in general after they had been opened to … the beauty of a glorious art, and to ride on the tidal surge of popular enthusiasm for it, created chiefly by the controversy … in the public press over it and its culmination in the music conference resolutions, among other factors. … the art requires not only to be rejuvenated but also to be overhauled a little if it should have any real appeal these days. As it is, it is mostly confined to erotic songs … In addition to existing compositions of the desirable type, new compositions of good taste and quality may have to be brought out in ‘rasas’ other than ‘sringara’ as well …There is still something of a low atmosphere in a nautch performance in marriage and other private functions about which social reformers rightly complain. That is the very reason why the art should be taken out of private parties and given a respectable platform amidst respectable audiences when alone it can be shorn of its undesirable features. Above all, persons belonging to respectable classes must boldly take to it …

It was this kind of urging, expressing the rapidly developing doctrine that the dance could only be saved by its being transferred to ‘respectable classes’, that caught the attention of Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) after her interest in dance had been aroused by seeing a performance by Anna Pavlova in Bombay in 1928. Starting out with Western ballet lessons under Cleo Nordi, she was soon persuaded by Pavlova that her real mission lay in the ‘revival’ of the Indian dance forms, and especially of Bharata Natyam. There is no need to revisit the facts and fallacies of her legend here, except to note that she too was uncomfortably conscious of the debt owed by the new ‘respectable’ dancers to the hereditary Sadir tradition that had been supplanted by them.

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It is perhaps the case that Rukmini Devi meant to express this debt in her qualified tribute in 1971 to the deceased hereditary dancer, Mylapore Gauri Ammal, who had been roped in to teach at Kalakshetra, the school of dance that Rukmini Devi originally founded as ‘The International Academy of the Arts’ in 1936: To a certain extent, all her pupils have benefited from her. Yet there was something they did not capture. A particular posture of the body, a dignity of movement combined with grace and expressiveness of face which had an element of surprise all the time. These were some of the special features of her dance. Perhaps this comes from someone who has inherited by birth the quality which others are not able to have.

Rukmini Devi Arundale; first performance in the gardens of the Theosophical Society, Adyar, Madras, 1935.

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Rukmini Devi herself had been taught by Gauri Ammal, and then by the genius of the hereditary Pandanallur style of Sadir, Meenakshisundaram Pillai, who later parted ways with her and her budding school of dance. Whatever the path at which one arrives at the fact, and whatever the opinions one forms of her endeavour, it remains true to say that Kalakshetra became the chief instrument for effecting what Mohan Khokar later called the ‘Momentous Transition’ by means of which the dance of South India was transferred to mostly upper-class girls necessarily from outside the hereditary community. The choices faced by revivalists such as Iyer and Rukmini Devi involved in the first place the question whether the devadasi community and their art would find acceptance among the broader Indian public even if they were supported by institutions like the Music Academy. Given the history of perceptions documented in this book, that idea must have seemed very farfetched indeed. For one thing, the reformers were still agitating for the abolition of the devadasi system, and they were, by the mid-1930s, a formidable force. Other questions, both pragmatic and ostensibly moral in nature, would have revolved around the new ideal of making the dance acceptable as an art to be practiced by Indian women and men from the traditionally ‘more respectable’ classes and castes. Universalizing the dance in this way would have to involve the removal of the custom that made dance the property by inheritance of any single group; though even here it must be remembered that hereditary dance teachers were already teaching girls from upper-class backgrounds such as Kalinidhi Narayanan. Still, the stigma of the devadasi class would have to be driven into the background and become thoroughly dissociated from the idea of dance as an art for all in India to practice and enjoy. The easiest way forward must surely have seemed to leave the devadasi problem in the hands of the reformists while getting on with the job of transmitting the art to performers more morally acceptable to the general public. Recent historians have dealt with these and other questions in a variety of ways, and the debate is by no means yet over. What the history does show, broadly speaking, is that the reformists and revivalists had it their way for a number of obvious reasons,

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not the least of these being that they were able to find support from institutions created to serve their purposes and their narrative. The hereditary dancers, with the exception of a few extremely gifted interpreters such as Tanjore Balasaraswati, were increasingly driven into the background with little or no alternative sources of income or other support in their turn. By 1965 the process of the ‘Momentous Transition’ had to all intents and purposes been completed, with several other forms of Indian dance being recognised as ‘classical’ by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, whose bent was decidedly in the revivalists’ favour. As Mohan Khokar, looking back on these developments, put it in 1987: Even if belated, Dr Reddi’s relentless efforts finally bore fruit: in 1947 the Madras Legislative assembly passed a bill declaring the devadasi system unlawful. And with that was erased the last trace of a stigma that had been preying upon many a mind for years. But for a lingering dasi or two, Bharatanatyam today is wholly in the hands of women—men too!—outside the devadasi community.

By the time Kalakshetra was finding its feet, and ‘classical’ forms such as Odissi were still in the very early stages of being designed and promulgated as regional styles, the Tamil Nadu Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act was enacted on 9 October 1947. The Act, though it referred directly to the hereditary devadasi practice only in Tamil Nadu, had, in the long process of its incubation, from the first agitations of the reformists in the 19th century, touched the whole dance economy of India with the stigma of lewdness and obscenity. It was followed in subsequent decades by other similar acts in other regions of India, and, apart from completing the task of abolition for which the reformists had for decades been clamouring, it placed a seal of finality on the transfer of the dance from hereditary communities into the hands of all who wanted to take up the art. In outlawing the devadasis, it made the dance ‘respectable’. In this regard it is interesting and perhaps a little chilling to read the references to dancing that occur in the Act itself:

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… Any custom or usage prevailing in any Hindu community such as the Bogum, Kalavanthula, Sani, Nagavasulu, Devadasi and Kurmapulu, that a woman of that community who gives or takes part in any melam (nautch), dancing or music performance in the course of any procession or otherwise is thereby regarded as having adopted a life of prostitution and becomes incapable of entering into a valid marriage … are hereby declared unlawful and void.

… Dancing by a woman, with or without kumbhaharathy, in the precincts of any temple or other religious institution, or in any procession of a Hindu deity, idol or object of worship installed in any such temple or institution or at any festival or ceremony held in respect of such a deity, idol or object of worship, or in any marriage procession or other Procession taken out in public streets, is hereby declared unlawful. … Any person having attained the age of sixteen years who dances in contravention of the provisions … or who abets dancing in contravention of the said provisions, shall be punishable with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months or with (a) fine which may extend to five hundred rupees, or with both.

These pointed paragraphs make it hard to miss the degree to which, in the minds of the reformists and legislators, the art of dance itself had become inextricably bound up with the vocation of the devadasi. They also make clearer the increasingly perceived need on the part of the revivalists to disentangle the art from the community by which it had for centuries been nurtured and performed. At the same time, they demonstrate the radical leanings of the reforming class towards the kind of iconoclastic action that was content to destroy an art so that the perceived vice associated with its practitioners could be eradicated, even while real prostitution in other forms and communities persisted without effective remedy. It remains difficult for historians today to assess to what extent the collective condemnation of the devadasis, and by

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extension of the whole Indian dance economy, can be justified even by the ethical standards of that time. It is difficult to know what distinctions to make in this context between the varieties of religious dance systems and communities, and the class hierarchies that functioned within them. What does seem clear is that the undiscriminating collective approach resulted in gross injustices that still reverberate today. I give the last word to Charles Freer Andrews (1871– 1940), a friend of India and a prominent supporter of Indian independence who publicly deplored missionary excesses with special reference to Katherine Mayo’s anti-Hindu propaganda. A close friend also of Gandhi and Tagore, a teacher of philosophy at St Stephen’s College in Delhi, and an Anglican clergyman of acknowledged integrity and balanced views, he had this to say about the devadasi system in 1939, the year before his death: The devadasis, again, are one of those relics of that evil past; and their retention to-day, in connexion with some notorious temples, shows that the same passions still exist and are still shamefully encouraged. These poor girls have come to me, as their brother and friend, and implored me to help them. The elder ones among them have besought me to deliver their little daughters from their own inexpressibly miserable fate. I have sat with them hour after hour while they have mentioned, with bowed heads, this shame and wretchedness. All this I have told openly in the public press, making no reservation; and my words, written from a tortured heart, have never received a single word of condemnation from any Hindu, but only strong approval. Though myself a Christian and not a Hindu, I have been again and again asked to preside when this subject was being discussed in open conference; and my fellowship has been earnestly sought in helping to bring this gross evil, which is actually encouraged by debased religion, to an end. Mahatma Gandhi has naturally been able to go much further than I have ever done. He has refused time after time, as a Hindu, to step inside these notorious temples. He has called them temples of Satan. He has declared that God is not to be found in them while they

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allow such evil deeds to be committed under the cloak of religion. This he has continually done with the strongest approval of all right-minded men and with very little open protest from reactionaries …

Andrews’s account, though no doubt both heartfelt and informed, leaves us with no precise idea of the groups within the broader devadasi system to which he is specifically referring. The mention of ‘some notorious temples’ leaves the question even vaguer. Were the great temples of Tanjore and Madras, for instance, with their very numerous communities of musicians and dancers, included in his troubled considerations? And what about those temples which were not ‘notorious’? Which temples were they? To what extent were different regional devadasi systems, such as those in Maharashtra, Kerala, and Goa, included in his statement of the general problem? Where does his conflation, perhaps unconscious, of jogini, jogati, and other real temple sex-work practices with the hereditary Sadir court and temple artists begin and end? And to what extent, if any, were the Sadir artists themselves guilty of the practices with which they were being publicly and collectively charged? These are questions which still exercise both historians and activists looking back on the ‘Momentous Transition’.

References

1. Extracts from the Reddi-Iyer correspondence in The Hindu and the Madras Mail are found in Khokar, Mohan, A Momentous Transition, in Sangeet Natak, no. 84, April–June 1987. 2. Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, vol. 4, nos. 1–4, 1933, p. 113.

3. Ramamirtham Ammaiyar, Dasigal Mosavalai, extracts in Anandhi, S., Representing Devadasis: ‘Dasigal Mosavalai’ as a Radical Text, in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 26, no. 11/12, March 1991, pp. 739–746.

4. Iyer, E. Krishna, Personalities in Present Day Music, Madras: Rochouse & Sons, 1933. 5. Roebert, D., Twelve Photographs of Mylapore Gauri Ammal: c. 1945–1970, at the blog Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History, 17 January, 2021.

References

6. Khokar, Mohan, Ibid.

7. The Tamil Nadu Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, 1947; Act 31 of 1947.

8. Andrews, Charles Freer, The True India, a Plea for Understanding, London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1939.

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Postcard illustration of a Madurai dancer issued by the Musée Guimet, Paris, circa 1910.

Index abhinaya 50, 72, 74, 78, 326, 518 accompaniment 141, 166, 186, 189, 204, 253, 392, 401, 406, 435, 477 musical 265, 330 accompanists 91, 101, 352 acrobats 279–280, 282 actress 36, 72, 128 Adams, William Henry Davenport 259 adavujathis 518–519 Adelphi Theatre 91 Adventure Magazine 477 Aiyar, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy 499 Alexander the Great 304 Allgemeine Theaterzeitung 105 All India Musical Conference in Madras (1927) 511 All the Year Round 328 Amany (dancer) 92, 94–96, 100, 106, 113 ambergris 473, 475 American Journal of Eugenics 387 American women rave 437 Amsterdam 283–284 amusement 19, 31, 40, 56, 124, 126–127, 140, 164–165, 178, 209–210, 216, 236, 257, 261, 266, 277–278, 304, 325, 381, 390, 392, 400 Ananda Tantram 168 Anderson, Lily Strickland 466, 469–470 Andhra Desa Kalavantulu Community 502

Andrews, Charles Freer 525–526 Anglo-Indian 307, 309, 332, 364 Anglo-Indian Christian Union 212 Anglo-Indian community 164 Anglo-Indian entertainments, official 313 Anglo-Indian life 55 Anglo-Indian officials 312 Anglo-Indian society 60 animal sacrifices 374, 436 anklets 46, 118, 142, 147, 157, 178, 206, 241, 253, 257, 307, 320, 333, 382–383, 447 Anthropological Society of London 179, 318 anti-casteist Self-Respect Movement 517 anti-devadasi bill 453, 491 anti-devadasi movements 454 anti-nautch (Movement and activism) 69, 133, 199, 209–210, 235, 270, 287, 299, 304, 306, 321–322, 326, 333–334, 340–341, 343, 350–351, 386, 414, 417–418, 420, 424–425, 434, 466, 470, 472, 491, 496 apsaras 300, 334, 358, 428, 441, 467, 475 Arawak Indians 283 Arnold, Edwin 252, 255, 326 Articles 372 & 373, Indian Penal Code 155, 311, 496–497, 500

530

Index

Arts and Industries Exhibition, Allahabad 431, 433 Arundale, Rukmini Devi 518, 520–521, 522 Asiatic costumes 70–71, 73 Assembly Herald 356 Atkinson, James 75 Auckland, Lord 78 Austria 91, 105–106 Ayyangar, S. Krishnaswami 515–516 Ayyangar, Srinavasa Raghava 515 Bainbridge, Oliver 436 baladines 16–17 Balasaraswati (of Tanjore) 414, 520, 523 Balbi, Gasparo 3, 5–6 baldor 7–8, 10 ballet-dancer 342 Bamford, Alfred J. 263 bands of nautches 379 bangles 203, 276, 320, 331, 382 Barre, Jean-Auguste 96–97 Baroda 201, 416–417, 465 Baroda Palace 416–417 Baron de Bougainville 50, 52 Basavis 394, 428 bass 158, 253 bauluk boy-dancers 59 bayadères 5, 22, 32–33, 43–44, 48–51, 56, 58, 85, 87, 89–92, 94–96, 98–99, 101–102, 104–118, 121, 123, 125–131, 133–135, 142–145, 149, 152, 155–182, 184–196, 222–223, 227–230, 237, 250–252, 263, 268, 280, 284, 288, 323–324, 332, 349, 390, 403–406,

408–409, 444–450, 454, 463, 476, 483 Bebaiourn (dancer) 116–117 beggars 325–326 Behar School of Athens 75 Belnos, Sophie Charlotte 65–67, 70, 74 Benares 47, 141, 144, 220, 242–243, 390, 427 Bengal 47, 55, 58, 65, 70, 78, 87, 132, 142, 146, 185, 209, 324, 335, 468, 497 Bengal Presidency 55–82 Bengallees 65–66 Besant, Annie wood 304, 373, 375, 489, 496 Besnard, Albert 444–445, 450–451 Bhagavatar, Muthiah 516 Bharatanatyam 513, 517, 519–520, 523 bhavin 254, 335–337, 480 bigotry 193 Bishop of Bombay 299, 301 Bizenegalia (Vijayanagara) 4 black Portuguese 65, 67, 69 blaring clarinets 147, 149 Blavatsky, H.P. 306 Bloch, Iwan 422 Blum, Jules 227, 229–230 Bluysen, Paul 443 Bobbili, Rajah of 512 Bocquet, Paul 348 bodkins 111, 141 Bohan, Henry 170, 172 Bois, Henri Antoine Jules 390 Bombay 142, 177, 214, 218, 243, 249, 255, 299, 301, 317, 327, 333, 360–361, 420–421, 427, 430–431, 433, 453, 466–467, 472–473, 497, 504, 520

Index

Bombay Government 431 Bombay Guardian, The 333 Bombay Presidency 428 Bracciolini, Poggio 4 Braddon, Sir Edward 332–333 Bradshaw’s Manchester Journal 121, 125 bracelets 42, 46, 70, 89, 94, 99, 102, 110, 118, 133, 147, 157, 160, 162, 200, 203, 219, 249–250, 303, 403, 447, 450, 473 Brahmin/Brahman priest 87, 221, 247, 323, 379, 427 Brahmin temple 350 Brahminical temple 102 Brahmins 15–16, 18, 22, 24, 29, 34, 43, 50, 65, 86–89, 113, 124, 126–127, 133–135, 168, 175–176, 217, 221–222, 229, 268, 289–290, 302, 323, 389, 475, 482, 496 British government 146, 217, 366, 415, 426, 437, 506 British Library 39, 136–137 bronze 280, 282, 474 brothels 30, 179–180, 185, 427, 487 Burnouf, Eugène 48 Burton, Lt. Gen. E.F. 261 Butler, Josephine 305 Calcutta 60, 74, 79, 131, 162, 236, 259, 308, 466 Caldwell, George Walter 399 Cammalatchi (dancer) 48–49 Canagambalam 114–115 canceni 89–90, 131 Capen, Edward Warren 425

Carmelites 117 Carmichael, Amy Wilson 365, 415–416, 487, 488 Carnatic 201–202, 206 Carpenter, F.G. 388 castes official Anglo-Indian 313 professional dancing 381 servile 156 Tamil 435 celestial dancers (Hindu mythology) 300, 467 Census Report 1901 368 Champagnac, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph 135 Chandragupta 484 chariot 4, 6–7, 295 chariot of Shiva 403–404 Charry, P. Raghaviah 34, 40–41 Chatterbox (Boston) 385 Chauvelot, Robert 462 Chauvet, Pierre-Louis-Honoré 222 Chicago Record-Herald 377 Child, Lydia Maria 88, 90 child marriage 287, 334, 500 Childers, James Saxon 472 choolee 182 Christian reformers 320, 347–348 Christianity 165, 317, 320, 360, 362, 373–374, 418–420, 427, 492 Christians 19, 29, 165, 288, 290, 304, 313, 320–322, 333, 340, 344, 362, 373, 427, 466, 471, 483, 525 church 7, 61, 256, 312, 317, 357, 391–392, 492 Clarke, Sir George (Governor of Bombay) 431 cloister 117–118 Colè 10–12

531

532

Index

Colin, Alexandre-Marie 65 Colonial and India Exhibition in Kensington 274 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London 256, 273 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London (1886) 256, 273 Columbus, Christopher 283 Compton, Col. D’Oyly 359 Compton, Herbert Eastwick 359, 362 Conjeeveram 392, 480 Conjeveram 124, 190, 390 Contageous Diseases Act 305 Conway, Moncure Daniel 401 Cook, Albert E. 396 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 437, 441 Coromandel Coast 15, 222 courtesan dance tradition 121 courtesan-dancer 32, 350 courtesans 5, 16, 18, 29–30, 56, 89, 108, 151, 167–168, 171, 209, 224, 320, 334, 337, 360, 364, 422, 428–429, 442, 470, 481, 491 Cousins, Margaret 496 Craddock, Olive 440–441 Cravath, Paul D. 471 creevils 400 Crooke, William 380 Curtis, William Eleroy 377 Dadabhoy, Maneckji 487 Daily News, The 277 Daily Telegraph 210 Daly, Augustin 249 dance ancient Hindu 465 animated round 220 art of 34, 43, 86, 288, 344, 356, 470, 491, 503, 508, 511, 524

authentic 468 bee 302–303 capricious 280 circular 244 classical 280 cobra 417 creative 413 dagger 92–93 festive 8 hula 482 languid 72 lascivious 125 mystic 374 opera 166 oriental 277 orientalist 413 pure 80, 269, 326 quaint 465 ramjanny 58 religious 12, 217, 482 ritual 4 sacred 107, 222 serpent 328 tribal 349 true scientific 326 voluptuous 49 war 381 Hindoo 56, 90 Hindu 131 Indian 1, 21, 45, 55, 85, 90, 109, 121, 125, 139, 155, 176, 199, 235, 273–274, 278, 287, 292, 304, 347–348, 356, 413, 437–438, 443, 453, 455, 466, 479, 511, 523 Moorish 169 Western 469 dance economy 410, 466, 523 hereditary 511 Indian 133, 301, 508, 525 Tanjore 434 dance entertainments 347–348

Index

dance forms, indigenous Indian 466 Dance, George 297, 301 dance halls 494 dance of the sabres 48 dance postures 268 sculpted 269 dance practice 292 indigenous 255 dance presentation 468 dance teachers 10, 32, 74 hereditary 522 dance traditions 1, 256, 271, 334, 350, 466 dancers 1, 5–8, 10, 14, 17, 21–28, 31–34, 43–45, 47–48, 50–51, 57–59, 63, 65, 68–70, 72, 74–76, 78–81, 87–92, 94–96, 100–102, 106–110, 112, 114, 121–122, 125, 127, 129–131, 133–137, 139, 141–145, 150, 152, 155, 157–161, 163, 166, 171, 173–174, 176, 193, 196, 200–201, 204, 213–215, 219–220, 222–223, 230–233, 235–237, 239–243, 249–254, 256, 265, 268–269, 274, 277–284, 287–288, 290, 292, 296–298, 301, 304–305, 316, 327–328, 331, 334, 336, 347, 349, 352, 354, 356, 358–359, 361, 372, 374, 377, 380–382, 385–386, 389–390, 396, 401, 403, 409, 414, 416–417, 420, 433–434, 436, 443–444, 446, 455, 457–459, 465, 467–470, 472–473, 477, 482–483, 485, 511–512, 515 agile public 12 American 439 beautiful 24, 144, 280 bewitching 274

Cambodian 281 celebrated 107 court 19, 51, 155, 169, 179, 336, 416 courtesan 464 devadasi 6, 48, 170, 495 Egyptian 399 European 238, 257–258 folk 288 girl 325 group of 11, 135, 275, 291, 356 hieratical 463 Hindoo 89 Hindu 57–58, 69, 78, 169 Madras 136, 148–149, 348 Madurai 215, 528 Muslim 132 Mussulman 58 obese Bengali 468 occidental 301 old 26 opera 166 operatic 349 orientalist 350 pagoda 9, 185 Pondicherry 50, 52, 115 primal 438 professional 143, 257, 315–316, 482 prostitute 317 ramjanny 55, 57–58, 69 respectable 520 sacred 89 semi-nude 2 Shivaite 11 southern 87 stage 31 Tanjore 465 temple ritual 85 troupes of 43, 78 virtuoso 43 Western 437

533

534

Index

dancing boys 58–59, 65, 70 dancing girls 5, 9, 18, 21, 27, 29, 31, 34–36, 44–45, 57–58, 62, 65–69, 72, 80, 82, 104, 118, 121–123, 151, 157, 162–163, 166–167, 179–183, 185–187, 190–191, 193–195, 203, 225–226, 236, 239, 257–258, 270, 289, 293–294, 298, 306–308, 310–312, 318, 322, 324, 330, 337, 357, 359, 364, 386, 396–398, 417, 425, 430, 442, 454, 456, 460–463, 465, 471–472, 506–507 black-haired 200 Mussulman 57 professional 162, 389 sacred 482 temple 432 troops of 56, 319 young 258 dancing women oriental 121, 125 temple 9 danseuse 204, 264, 276, 292, 396 da San Bartolomeo, Fra Paolino 33 Das, Devendranath 256–257, 259, 278 Das, Jairam 75 Dasi attam 58, 130 dasis 34, 292–294, 362, 376–377, 391–394, 523 dasrees 185 dausies 9–10 Davin, Albert 268–269 Dayal, Shiv 75 Daya, Lala Deen 291 de Beauveaux, la Princesse 117 de Beylie, A.L. 250 de Bougainville, Baron Hyacinthe 50, 52 de’ Conti, Niccolò 3, 4

de Lanoye, Ferdinand 142–143 de la Touanne, Viscount Edmond B. 50, 52 della Valle, Pietro 4, 10, 13, 382 de Neuville, Alphonse 162 de Pontevès-Sabran, Jean 250–251 de Rudder, L.H. 136–137 de Saint-Victor, Paul 106 de Valori-Rustichelli, Henri François 251 degradation 235, 311, 322–323, 368, 371, 437, 482, 487 deities 6, 23–24, 27, 57, 88, 106, 112, 124, 181, 189, 191–192, 217, 237, 248, 362, 365, 367–368, 376–377, 392, 422–423, 427, 436, 524 heathen 156–157 Delhi 66, 69, 78–80, 331, 398–399, 432, 456, 525 Denning, Margaret B. 372 Dennis, Rev. James S. 320 Deoghar 475–476 Depeuty-Trahon, Jean-Ferdinand 107 d’Eschavannes, Jouffroy 125, 130 dévadáchis 85–87 Devadasi Association 494 Devadasi Bill 497 devadasi child 488 devadasi class 505, 512–513, 522 devadasi community 365, 488, 497, 500, 502, 506, 522–523 devadasi dancer 495 devadasi group 10 devadasi music 512 devadasi practice 504, 508 devadasi reformers 518 devadasi service 500–501 devadasi system 105, 121, 152, 155, 179, 224, 230, 344, 347, 356, 365, 377, 381, 395, 425,

Index

453, 484, 490, 496, 498, 500, 511, 517–518, 522–523, 525–526 devadasi traditions 326, 471, 479 devadasis 1, 4–5, 9, 16, 18–19, 22–25, 29–31, 33–34, 43, 51, 58, 85, 87, 106, 112, 125–127, 130, 133, 135–137, 155, 171, 173, 193, 196, 224, 288, 292, 294–295, 300, 304–305, 311, 315, 318–319, 321, 324, 334, 336, 343–344, 347–350, 357, 362–365, 372, 384, 386, 391, 395, 404, 414, 422–424, 428, 433, 436, 441–442, 453, 470–472, 476, 480–484, 488–493, 496–497, 500, 502–506, 512, 514–515, 518, 523–525 Devanayakam (musician) 92 Dhurandhar, M. V. 421, 461–462 diamonds 33, 66, 102, 129, 200–201, 203, 219, 223, 404–405, 407, 409 doominca 140 D’Oyly, Sir Charles 75, 78 dresses 24, 47, 55, 59, 70, 72, 74, 79–81, 87–90, 110, 113, 116, 122–123, 140–141, 167, 182, 188, 200, 207, 211, 216, 252, 258, 260, 263–264, 290, 325, 382, 399, 491 drums 7–8, 10, 12, 15–16, 31, 36, 39, 46, 71, 89, 101, 140, 144, 147, 158–159, 161, 186, 268, 280, 319, 382, 446, 465, 469, 474–475 Dubarry, Madame 116 Dubois, the Abbé 28, 29, 121, 123, 173, 195, 334, 436, 470 Duff, Rev. Dr. 212

Dunsterville, Frederick 348, 356 Durga Puja 130, 132, 236 East India Company (EIC) 21, 26, 34, 60–61, 74–75, 121, 151–152, 359 East Indies 5, 170 Eddy, Sherwood 414, 416 Eden, Emily 78 Edward Albert, Prince of Wales 199, 201– 202, 207–208, 209–212, 273 Edwardes, S.M. 420, 422, 479 egg-dance 381 Egyptians 249, 297, 299 EIC, see East India Company elephant 8, 37, 39, 212 Ellis, Havelock 389–390, 482 Elphinstone, Lord 138 emeralds 200–201, 250 emotions 44, 95, 103, 113, 122, 380, 439, 451, 457, 464, 482 English Illustrated Magazine 383 Englishmen 64, 297, 299, 308 Englishwomen 342 Era, The 277 Esquer, A. 176 ethnic exhibitions 273–284 ethnographic expositions 279 etiquette 261, 392–393, 481 Eugenius IV, Pope 4 Europe 19, 23–24, 31–32, 35, 41, 48, 61, 67, 85, 90–91, 93, 100, 107–108, 114, 118, 121, 143, 172, 215–216, 243, 249, 271, 273, 283, 315, 317, 319, 330, 385, 436, 438, 442, 454, 491 European accounts of temple dancers 1 European ballet-dancer 342

535

536

Index

European countries 301, 472 European experience of Indian dance 278 European ladies 47, 67, 193, 265, 267, 339 European musical time 63 European opinion 377 European taste 62 Europeans 28, 30, 41, 60–62, 66–68, 80, 90, 108, 125, 142, 144, 152, 165–166, 168–169, 173, 203, 209, 213, 215, 233, 235, 239, 243, 251, 257, 263, 278, 308–310, 340–341, 348–350, 367, 371, 375–376, 385, 396, 402, 427, 432, 443, 445, 456, 491 Evening Star (Washington) 388 Farquhar, John Nicol 427 Fayrer, Sir Joseph 208 feasts 3, 9, 11, 56, 66–67, 73, 191, 217, 220–221, 300, 302, 325 female dancers 18, 56, 65, 70 professional 259 festivals, religious 61, 145, 259, 268 Field, Harry Hubert 492, 496 Finck, Henry Theophilus 323 First World War (1914-1918) 414 Fischer, Frederick Bohn 442 Fly, The 109 folk-dances 438 Forbes, James 26, 28, 58 Forbes-Lindsay, C.H.A. 390 Foreign Mail Annual 419 Fraser, James 79 Fraser, William 79 Frauenfeld, Georg Ritter von 147 French Indians 405

Friedländer, Adolphe 286 Fuller, Mrs Marcus B. 320, 333, 336, 341, 343, 356–357, 365, 374, 414 Gaekwad of Baroda 416–417, 465 Gaiety Theatre, The 275 Gajje Puja 505–507 Gandhi, M.K. 487, 489, 496, 498, 503, 517, 525 Gauhar Jaan (Calcutta singerdancer) 433–434 Gauri Ammal (Baroda court dancer) 416 Gauri Ammal (of Mylapore) 514, 521 Gautier, Théophile 91–92, 95 Gay, J. Drew 200, 202 Geneva Conference on Trafficking in Women 347, 421 Gentil, Henri 348–349 Gérard, Jules 159, 161 Germany 105–106, 455 gestures dancer’s 455 pantomimic 163, 166 Gidumal, Dayaram 269 Gilbert & Sullivan 292 girls cataleptic 238 consecrated 175 darker 201 devadasi 137 Geisha 398, 437, 472, 483 Greek 484 Hindu 179, 506 low-caste Hindu 426 newly-married 307 poor Indian 116 Telugu 190

Index

temple 305, 334, 364, 422–423, 426, 476–477 unhappy 64 unsophisticated 167 upper-class 522 Globe, The 211 Gnyana (dancer) 200–201, 204, 205 Goa 10, 335, 381, 526 god, supreme 298, 300 goddesses 2–3, 11, 59, 66, 159, 168, 283, 422, 477 gods 3, 7–8, 15, 17–18, 22, 29, 33–34, 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 49, 59, 85–88, 105–107, 122, 133–134, 144, 146–147, 151–152, 167, 227, 229, 240, 248, 263, 288, 298, 302, 306–307, 324, 330, 334–337, 357–358, 362–363, 366, 368–370, 372–374, 378, 380–381, 391, 404, 415–416, 422–423, 437–439, 441–442, 455, 459, 471–472, 477, 482–483, 485–490, 492, 505, 518, 525 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 33, 152 gold 13–14, 22, 33, 42, 47, 59, 66, 70–72, 74, 87, 90, 96, 99, 105, 110, 118, 129, 131, 133–134, 142, 144, 147, 150, 162, 174–175, 182, 200–202, 207, 217–218, 223–224, 237, 241, 247, 250, 253, 262, 280, 383, 396–397, 401, 404, 406, 408, 447, 464–465, 474 Gopal, Ram 414 Gour, Hari Singh 453 government schools 226–227 Governor of Madras 315 Grandidier, Alfred 161–162

Grant Duff, Mountstuart E. 255 Graphic, The 274 Greece, ancient 44, 257, 423 Greeks 269, 297–299, 358, 423, 484 guitars 45, 64, 141, 162–163, 174, 187, 242, 257 Gujarat 16, 27 Gwillim, Lady Elizabeth 41 Gwillim, Sir Henry 41 Haafner, Jacob 1, 22, 25–26 Hageby, Axel Lind von 159 Hagenbeck, Carl 278, 284–285 Hagenbeck, Gustav 278, 284–285 Hagenbeck, John 278, 284–285 Hagenbeck Indian shows 283 Hampton-Columbian Magazine, The 375 handmaidens 384, 387, 391, 428 harlots 4, 6–8, 220, 350, 473 Hastie, W. 235 Haussman, Auguste 133–135 Hayes, Thomas 383 Heber, Bishop Reginald 80, 87 Helping Hand 422 hereditary dancers 51, 85, 130, 152–153, 155, 224, 235, 296, 310, 323, 343, 357, 372, 470, 511, 514–515, 519, 521, 523 Hield, Mary 240 Hierodouloi 358, 428–429, 442 Hindoo Widow’s Excitement to Death 92–93 Hindoos 38, 40, 55–56, 58, 65, 67, 73, 103, 109, 119, 148–149, 162, 164–165, 217–218, 220–221, 235, 247, 259, 275, 296, 385

537

538

Index

Hindoostan 27, 41, 56, 59, 65–66, 73 Hindostan 34–35 Hindous 55, 57, 60, 443 Hindu and Muslim dancers of Bengal 132 Hindu community 431, 487, 501, 524 Hindu customs 17, 414 Hindu festivals 132, 145 Hindu gods 383–384 Hindu laws 170, 394–395, 497 Hindu marriage processions 424, 481 Hindu reformers 288, 320, 373, 459 Hindu Religious Endowment Act 501, 504 Hindu Social Reform Association of Madras 299, 313, 315, 317, 321, 360, 415 Hindu society 192, 288, 341–343, 353, 432, 443, 460, 504 Hindu temples, dedication of women to 504, 506 Hindu Temples Bill 505 Hindu Social Reform Association 313 Hinduism 146, 192, 270, 317–318, 322, 362, 364, 372–375, 379, 418, 427, 430 Hindus 19, 30, 50, 58, 108, 144, 166, 178, 180, 183, 210, 223, 253–254, 263, 270, 282, 297–299, 310–311, 314, 320, 322, 325, 335, 339, 341–342, 344, 348, 358–359, 369, 371–372, 376–378, 383–384, 395, 400, 414, 424, 429–431, 441, 460, 464, 471, 481, 485, 490, 494, 503, 506, 512, 525 Hindustan 146, 302, 306

Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian Dictionary 58 Holzman, James Mayer 63 Home and Country 302 Hopkins, Arthur 274 hookahs 303, 332 Houghton, Ross C. 216 Hyderabad 150, 157, 259, 292 idol 3–6, 11, 13–18, 24, 50, 86, 89, 107, 122, 125, 144, 151, 191, 288, 300, 318–319, 335, 362, 369, 377–378, 387, 391, 430, 432, 472, 480–481, 524 idolatry 165, 419 Ikkeri 10, 12 India 55, 353 ancient 306, 474 Anglo-Indian experience of life in 60 British 282, 480, 500 Central India 306, 336 dance in 333, 413, 453, 466 dancers of 19, 88, 155, 274 dancing in 287–298, 300–344 French 48, 349, 443 government of 419, 432–433, 500 North 80, 235, 428 prostitutes in 239, 305 South 6, 34, 82, 90, 145, 168, 182, 223, 235, 249, 263, 334, 336, 339, 368, 375, 377, 382, 404, 415, 426–427, 436, 470, 504, 508, 522 western 335, 339, 381, 414, 433 Indian artists 75 Indian arts 458, 461 Indian audience 468 Indian ballet 103

Index

Indian dance depictions 451 Indian dance fantasies 413 Indian Jurist 296 Indian Magazine and Review 299, 301 Indian Mirror, The 209, 274 Indian Mutiny 156, 152, 332 Indian mythology 380 Indian newspapers 443 Indian obelisk 296 Indian ornaments 159 Indian Penal Code 155, 183, 193–194, 294, 311–312, 496, 500, 507 Indian promiscuity 492 Indian quadrille 93 Indian Revolt (Sepoy Mutiny) (1857–58) 152 Indian Social Conference (1895) 425 Indian Social Reformer 316, 321, 341, 358, 374, 418, 491 Iyer, E. Krishna 511–512, 514, 516, 518–519 Jacolliot, Louis 174, 176, 323 Jacquet, E.V.S. 85 Jahnn, Hans Henny 286 Jaipur 159 Jardin d’Acclimatation 278–279, 281 Jejuri Temple 431 jogtins 336–337 Johnson, G.A. 512, 514 Jolly, Julius 243 Jones, John P. 418 Joolun-Jatrah (Jhulan Yatra) festival 58–59 Journal of the American Asiatic Society 466

Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 48 Journal of Race Development 417 Journal of the Royal Society for Arts 454 kacceri 50 Kalakshetra 521, 523 kalavantulu 157–158, 518 Kalyani Ammal 511 Kalyani daughters 511, 514, 518–519 Kamakshi Devadasi 492 Kameeswarar Temple (Villianur) 269 Kanakambujam 289 Kantchénys 107–108 Kantimati Ammal (Baroda court dancer) 416 Karaikal 168 Kashmiri dancers 231–232, 245, 258 Kathak 57–58, 69, 72, 74, 78, 80, 133, 173, 292, 462, 508 Keladi 10 Kerr, James 162, 215 Keyserling, Count Hermann von 477, 479 Khambat 16 Khan, Shamsaddin Ahmed 79 Khandoba, god 365, 414, 426, 431, 480 Khandoba’s temple 480 Khangee (dancer) 245 Khokar, Mohan 522–523 Klemm, Gustav 143 kolattam 201, 203, 207, 512 pinal 200, 206–207 Konkon 335 Krishna (dancer) 201

539

540

Index

Kublai Khan 2 Kudikkari 394 Kuppusvami 239 La France Illustré 280 La France Littéraire 98 Lamairesse, Pierre-Eugène 168, 170 Lansdowne, Marquess of 315 La Presse 99 Le Bon, Gustave 262–263 Le Chenil 279, 281 Le Dieu et la bayadère 152 L’Entracte 94 L’Illustration 282 Le Magasin Pittoresque 96, 98 Le Moniteur Indien 107 Le Pays 106 Le Progres 280 Les Lions du Jour 101 L’Humanité 282 Leonowens, Anna Harriet 244 Leveson, Henry A. 150, 161 Liberty’s Indian Exhibition (1885) 274 Lilly, William Samuel 362–363 lingam 302 Literary Panorama, The 39, 41 Löhr, J.A.C. 43 London 91, 102, 106, 256, 259, 273, 275, 277, 297, 318, 323, 373, 403, 417, 470, 487, 493–494 London Anthropological Society 179 Londonderry Journal 212 Loti, Pierre 404, 409 Louis XV 116–117 Louise-Marie de France 116–117

Lowrie, John Cameron 325 Lucknow 69, 298, 300, 398, 456 Madras 34, 41, 118, 148, 156, 179, 191, 193, 209, 261, 425, 456, 470 Madras Christian Literature Society 309, 340, 357 Madras Devadasi (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947 508 Madras Devadasi Association 502 Madras District Gazetteer (1915) 434 Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act 504 Madras Law Times 296 Madras Legislative Assembly 347 Madras Legislative Council 453, 494, 496 Madras Mail 366 Madras Music Academy (1928) 511, 514 Madras Music Academy Conference, 28 Dec. 1932 514–515, 517 Madras Presidency 292, 311, 368, 466, 490, 503 Madras Revenue Register 210 Magazin von merkwürdigen neuen Reisebeschreibungen 33 Maidan Theatre, Calcutta 468 Maindron, Maurice 403–404 Maitland, Julia Charlotte 118 makedi 188 Malapou, the (Dance of Delight) 92 Malpas, Phillip A. 484 Mamia (dancer) 23, 26 Manchester Times, The 275 Mantegazza, Paolo 238–239 margam 115

Index

married to the gods 372, 415, 494 Mason, Caroline Atwater 364 Matheson, John 178 Mayo, Katherine 484, 487, 488–489, 491, 496, 525 McMinn, Rev. Edwin 270 Meerut Universal Magazine 81 Melakkarans 434–436 Mercure de France 32 Miller, Rev. Dr. 299, 313 minstrels, male 140 Mirror, The 103–104 Missionary Review 418, 437 Missionary Review of the World 358 Mohammedans 252–253, 379 Mohedaca (= Mahadeva) 11 Moore, Joseph 249 monks 3 moral dilemmas 139–148, 150–152 morality 47, 210, 321, 338, 354, 365, 429, 458, 470, 499, 508, 513 Morris-dances of Italy 13 Morrisian Crafts Movement 274 mother-goddesses 480 Motte, C.E.P 48–49 Mughal dance community 69 Mundy, Godfrey Charles 45 Munro, Innes 31–32 Murdoch, John 338, 340 Murray, J. Lovell 483 Musée des familles 114 music, monotonous 95, 166, 278 Musical Courier 466 musical instruments 11, 27, 81, 186, 378, 394, 400 native 256 musicians 18, 21–23, 27–28, 45–46, 65–66, 71, 73, 80, 95, 98, 108, 113–114, 147,

162–163, 169, 173, 175, 177, 200–201, 203–204, 207, 219, 222, 238–239, 242, 249, 253, 260–261, 267, 279, 318, 327, 332–333, 343, 356, 385, 396, 398, 401, 408, 417, 420, 435, 471–472, 476, 526 attendant 72, 178, 265 band of 148, 319 five 108, 206, 446 native 223, 399 professional 393 temple 50 musk 276, 473, 475 Mussulman Nautch Girl 462 Muzrai 367 Muzrai temple 506 Mysore 29 Mysore Government 367, 420, 426, 431, 506 nabobs 61, 63, 76, 118 Nagapattinam 6 Naidu, Raghupathi Venkataratnam 350, 356 Naidu, W. Raju 313 Nanjangud Temple 367 Narayanan, Kalinidhi 522 Natarajan, Kamakshi 491 National Guardian 308 Nattuvans 393–394, 435 nautch 9, 45–46, 56–57, 61–72, 74–75, 77–82, 90, 110, 118, 123, 130–131, 139–142, 145–146, 150–151, 156, 159, 162–167, 177–178, 187, 191, 201–203, 208–212, 215–221, 223, 231, 236–238, 240–243, 249, 252–263, 265, 267, 269–270, 275–278, 287–288,

541

542

Index

291–292, 296–302, 304–306, 308–310, 312–318, 320–324, 327–334, 336–342, 351–352, 354–355, 358–361, 364–365, 371–390, 395–403, 414–415, 417–419, 422–427, 429–430, 432, 435–443, 466–473, 475, 477–479, 483–484, 489, 512, 514, 524 Indian 309, 469 Madrasi 464 modern 352 native 371 ordinary 417 pucka 291 regular 303 nautch clips 437 nautch party 82, 130, 146, 259 nautch performances 80, 284, 331, 520 nautch systems 344, 433 nautch woman, first-class 300 Nellore 173–174 Nevinson, Henry Woodd 464–465 New Sporting Magazine 104 New York 249, 304, 437 New Yorker, The 116 Ninth Indian Social Conference (1895) 322 Nolan, E.H. 204 Nordi, Cleo 520 North Indian 132–133, 142, 152, 173, 288 nritta 80 offerings to the gods 323 Ólaffson, Jón 4, 6, 9, 10 Olcott, Henry 400 Ongole 173 opium 350

orchestra 51, 95, 98, 113, 177, 214, 238, 250, 276, 379, 398, 403, 407–408, 448, 450, 462, 474 oriental dance sequence 440 Orissa 146, 185, 335, 485–486, 490 Our Day 317 padam 115 Padmavati (dancer/defendant) 193 Paes, Domingo 3, 5 Pall Mall Budget, The 275 Palmer, J.W. 146 panchayats 392–393 Panagal, Raja of 502 Panemanglor, Capt. Krishnarao 465 pantomime 95, 103, 108, 128, 131, 134, 143, 145, 147, 169, 171, 213, 220, 260, 438–439, 455, 457 pantomime-dance 263 Patna 75 pavaday 182 Pavlova, Anna 520 Pazhaverkadu 15 periyamelam 435 Perumal Temple (Tiruvendipuram) 91 piety 165, 317, 319–320 pilgrims 34, 43, 485 Pillai, Meenakshisundaram (nattuvanar) 522 Pillai Quartet (Tanjore Quartet) 115 Pillai, Thottakadu Ramakrishna 288 pinal kolattam 200–201, 206–207

Index

pliancy 105, 110 Polo, Marco 2 Pondicherry 29, 33, 48, 50, 85, 90–91, 96, 101, 114–115, 121, 133, 168, 170, 176, 227, 349–350, 403, 443 Pondicherry dancers in France 85 Pongol Festival 41 pottu 292–294 Pottukattu 505, 507 Pratt, James Bisset 426 precious stones 7, 66, 110, 200, 203, 223–224, 238, 404 Presbyterian Banner 371 prestidigitators 280–281, 284 Prevention of Dedication Act 1929 507 priestcraft 372–373 priestesses 94–95, 133, 159, 228–229, 246–248, 250, 268, 318, 324, 364, 384, 423 priesthood 374, 378, 481–482 priests 6–9, 13, 34, 88, 106, 113, 126, 133, 136–137, 145, 171, 181, 214, 222–223, 247, 298, 319, 335, 343, 352, 374, 378, 380, 387, 390, 422, 426–427, 442, 473, 476, 482, 485, 487, 490, 493 high 6, 88, 475–476 temple 33, 251, 326, 353, 369–370, 375, 394, 518 Prinsep, James 46, 58 ‘Pro-Art’ Lobby 511, 516 prostitutes 16, 29, 56, 155, 167, 179, 184, 194–195, 218, 225, 239, 296, 301, 305–306, 311, 313, 316–317, 350, 362, 374, 389, 394, 415, 423, 431–432, 481, 485–487, 490, 493, 502, 504, 506–507, 518 dancing 185

Greek temple 304, 484 Hindu 30, 491 professional 293–294, 359–360, 463 religious 113, 389, 426–427 sacred 480 temple 130, 343, 423, 486, 489 prostitutes of the gods 485 prostitution 133, 155, 176, 180, 183, 185, 193–195, 218, 287, 290, 292, 294, 300, 305, 310–312, 341, 375, 389, 422, 430, 432, 479–480, 484, 488, 490–491, 496–497, 502, 505, 518, 524 religious 414, 479–480 temple 414, 422–423, 433, 473 Protection of Naik Girls Act 505 Pudumji, Dorabji 252 Purbutt, Lallji 218 Puri Temple 419 purity movements 341, 351 Purnathilakam, Yamini 518 Queensland Times 205 Radha 59, 74, 413, 439–440, 457, 465 raga 35, 38, 292 Rajam (dancer/defendant) 193 Ramalingam Mudali (nattuvanar) 92, 96 Ramalingeshwara Temple (Rameshwaram) 136 Ramamirtham Ammaiyar (of Muvalur) 517 Ramaswami, M.S. 514 Ramaswamy, E.V. (‘Periyar’) 517

543

544

Index

ramdjenies 90 ramjannies 56–59, 90, 132 Rangam (dancer) 92 Rast Goftar 308–309 Ratan Devi (Ethel Richardson) 440–441 Reading, Lord (Viceroy) 465 Reddi, Muthulakshmi 470, 487, 490, 493, 496, 498, 502–503 511, 513, 523 Rees, Sir John David 270, 386–387 religion 22, 85, 88, 124, 126, 133, 146, 151, 166, 170, 192, 195, 240, 314, 318, 320–323, 330, 334–336, 339, 352, 358, 365, 367–368, 373, 377–378, 381, 384, 387, 422, 427, 483, 485–486, 494, 497, 499, 502, 518, 526 Hindoo 165, 318 Hindu 192, 320, 323, 335, 343, 360, 391, 484, 503 non-Christian 419 Renaissance 1, 19, 285 Report on Public Instruction 226 revivalists 518, 522–524 Review of the Churches 312 Revue de l’orient 125 Reynolds, Mrs Herbert 395 rice-balls 157 Rietstap, J.B 173 Riou, Édouard 176 Ritter, Karl 87 Robinson, Edward Jewett 151 Rogerius, Abraham 2, 15 Romans 297–299, 390 Roshanara (Olive Craddock) 413, 439–441 Rothfeld, Otto 453–454, 461 Rousselet, Louis 218 Royal Asiatic Society 70 Royapuram Station ‘nautch’ 199

rubies 147, 200–201, 223, 292, 320, 405, 408 Russell, William Howard 203, 207 Sadir 115, 130, 390, 414, 465, 511, 521 Saint-Hillaire, Albert Geoffroy 278 sandal 67, 69 Sangeet Natak Akademi 523 sari/saree 182, 253–254, 383, 444 Sathyamurthi, S. 490 Sauter, Johannes 475 Savaranam (musician) 92 Scherzer, Karl Ritter von 148 Scotland 80, 212 Scottish divine 211–212 Scott, Capt. Alan Newton 156–158 seduction 26, 167, 171, 365, 406, 439 Self-Respect Movement 518 Selleny, Joseph 148–149 Sellon, Edward 166 Shah, Wajid Ali 74 Shalimar Gardens 231 Shankar, Uday 414 Sharrock, John 372 Shawn, Ted 443, 466 Sherwood, Mary Martha 63 Shiva/Siva 11, 23, 36, 43, 86, 99–100, 111, 133, 214, 229, 246–248, 250, 319, 349, 384–385, 401, 403–404, 466, 472 temple of 157, 185 Shortt, John 179, 318, 323, 423 silver 8, 22, 71–72, 87, 90, 110, 131, 140, 142, 146, 174, 201–202, 237, 247, 249, 252–253, 280, 383

Index

silver anklets 399, 401 silver threads 162, 396–397, 473 Simpson, William 231–232 singers 9, 36, 39, 72, 74, 141, 161, 186, 200, 207, 298, 301, 352, 354, 385, 389, 485 sitar 201, 255, 467, 474–475 Sketch, The 297, 301 Skinner, Col. James 79 Slater, T.E. 373 Smith, Lee S. 398 Smith, Mrs Moses 322 Smith, Capt. Robert 71, 73–74, 121 snake-charmers 257, 279, 281, 284 snake-dance 254 Société orientale de Paris 125 Society for the Protection of Children 433 soldiers 7–8, 78, 359 Soltykoff, Alexis 136–137 Solvyns, Frans Balthazar 55, 57–58, 60, 69, 90, 121, 132 Sonnerat, Pierre 21–22, 173 Soodahnees 245–246 Soundiroum (dancer) 94 Southern India, native artists of 200 Spear, Percival 61 Spectator, The 102 St. Denis, Ruth 413, 440–441, 443, 466 St. James’s Gazette 277 Steiner, Joseph 387 Stocqueler, J.H. 139 Stone, Julia A. 207 Strickland, Lily Anderson 466, 469–470 Sundaram (dancer) 92 superstitions 124, 192–193, 372, 424

Surat 10, 15, 22 Svarga 18 Swami Vivekananda 375–376, 390 Tagore, Rabindranath 415, 479, 525 Tamil 50, 97, 190, 270, 300, 435, 499 Tamil Nadu 142, 146, 523 Tanjore 35, 115, 202, 223, 235, 276, 319, 328, 330, 339, 392, 414, 434–435, 445, 450, 456, 472, 480, 526 Tanjore dance 93 Tanjore dance performance 479 Tanjore temple 319 Tardivel, E. C. 85, 91, 106, 114– 115 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 16 Tayee (dancer/defendant) 193 Telugu 97, 190, 270, 435 temple artists 526 temple ballet 382 temple band 428 temple buildings 34 temple cats 336 temple ceremonials 384 temple culture 381 temple dance practice 223 temple dignitaries 229 temple endowments 9, 289, 363, 480 temple festivals 480 temple festivities 240 temple gods 334 temple harlots 6–8 temple horns 481 temple income 501 temple jewels 137 temple life 240

545

546

Index

temple maidens 374 temple servants 8, 144, 293, 352, 367, 391, 432, 481 female 336 salaried 294 temple sex-work practices 526 temple worship 375, 485, 491, 504 temples 5–9, 11, 13–16, 18, 21–22, 24, 29, 32, 34, 43, 50–51, 58, 85–90, 92, 94, 96, 105–108, 110, 112–113, 121–122, 124–127, 131, 134–135, 137, 144, 146, 148, 151, 156–157, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179–181, 183, 191–192, 217, 220, 222–223, 227–228, 235, 239, 246–248, 254, 256, 261, 263, 268, 288–289, 292–294, 296, 298, 300–301, 310, 317–324, 329–330, 334–337, 339, 352, 357–358, 360, 362–364, 366–370, 373–374, 376–380, 384, 386, 388–392, 394, 404, 406, 415–416, 420, 422–423, 426–431, 442, 456, 459–461, 471–472, 474–477, 480, 482, 484–485, 487, 490–491, 493, 500–501, 503–504, 506–507, 524–526 ancient 334 ancient Greek 113 Egyptian 167 hereditary 19, 155, 336, 416 Hindoo 27, 57, 110, 217, 248, 318 Hindu 107, 179–180, 366–367, 376, 383, 402, 423, 428, 432, 453, 471, 492–493, 497, 499, 505–507, 512 historic 328 idolatrous 212 phallic 388

provincial 33 sacred 30 Tamil 391 Tenant, Miss 453 tenor 19, 158 Thackwell, Rev. R. 371 thassee 179–180, 423 Thenon, Albert 214 Theosophical Society 305, 400, 521 Theosophical Path, The 484 Thompson, Frederick Diodati 331 Thurston, Edgar 390, 395, 424 tillana 115 Tille Ammale (dancer) 91 Times of India 364 Tipu Sultan 32 Tiruvendipuram 91, 152 toes 31, 42, 71, 74, 103, 110, 118, 140, 144, 146, 159, 173, 181, 187, 250, 276, 283, 397, 406, 473 toolsi 248 torture 241–242 Tranquebar 6, 18 Travancore 201, 410, 480, 502 Travancore Government 431 Travancore, Maharani of 502–503 Trevor, George 145 Triporoor 194 trumpets 4, 7–8, 15, 256 varnam 115, 200, 206 Vasu, Sivachanda 235–236 Vedam (dancer) 92 veena 200, 207 Vellala 225, 393–394 Victoria, Queen-Empress 152, 155 Vijayanagar 3, 5 Villianur dancer 251

Index

Villianur temple 133, 250, 268–269, 404 Vincent, Frank 241–242 Vishnu 15, 23, 79, 86, 92–93, 102, 110, 149, 156–157, 214, 221, 229, 318, 322, 349, 384, 390 Völkerschauen 273, 284–285 Wahlen, Auguste 130, 132 Walker, E.O. 299 Warneck, Gustav 423 Watson, George Herbert 249 Weeden, Rev. St. Clair 416–417 Wenlock, Lord (Governor of Madras) 430 Western theatre and dance practice 292 Wheeler, George Pearson 200 Whitehead, Right Rev. Henry 436 whores 15–17 widows 93, 127, 140, 307, 339, 354, 386, 424–425, 481 Wiese, F.A. 44–45 Williams, Charles Reynolds 223 Williams, Monier 223, 317–318 women American 437, 491 Bengali 209 Cashmerian 245 consecrated 422 dancing 9, 34, 124, 140, 151, 297, 299 European 305 Greek 305

Hindu 240, 365, 378, 427, 503, 507 Mahomedan 209 married 49, 293, 360, 389, 424, 436 Mohammedan 240 respectable 24, 64, 337 respectable Hindoo 258 Soodah 245 temple 151, 365, 367–370, 415, 480, 485, 487, 490 Vellala 225 Western 376 women activists 453 women’s associations 506 women priest 318 women singers 317 women’s organisations 517 women’s rights 243, 496 women’s rights activists 305 women’s suffrage 364, 465 Wood, Ernest 489 World’s Congress of Missions (Chicago, October 1893) 322 Yallamma 428–429 Yates, Frederick 91, 104 zemindars 9, 185, 191, 225–226, 259, 486 zenana 31, 357, 376, 396 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaeus 17, 18 zum-djenies 131–132

547