Imaging and Imagining Dance: (Re)watching the 'Nautch girls' of 19th-century South India

The proposed project wishes to engage with select visual Occidental representation of the nautch girls or 'Devadasis' in South India during the 19th century; Pran Nevile's Nautch girls of the Raj (1996) and David Bate's Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissents (2003) being central to the study. The 19th-century South India saw the Eurocentric demand to expect the female colonised body as a sight of carnal pleasure and means of mere entertainment distancing them from the gharana of dance itself. The endeavour is to re-examine these politics resulting in the framing of the 'imagined orient' in the photographs and sketches of these two books and to support my critique with the help of interviewers or 'Site of Memory' (Pierra Nora) of surviving dancers in Davesh Soneji's Unfinished Gestures: Devadasi, Memory and Modernity in South India (2011). Very popular during the colonial period, devadasis used to perform in the public space of temples and big wedding halls with prominent rich male audiences. In the photographs, the anonymity of the dancers, emphasis on the extravagance of their costumes and semi-clad upper body, caught in posing as dancers rather than performing in it, all distance them from the dance and prioritise their inseparable erotic bodies over the aesthetics of dance itself. 

About the author

Aryama Bej is currently an undergraduate student at The Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests include Dance Studies, 19th-century Bengal, Philosophy of Body and Visual Aesthetics. Trained in Odissi and Kathak, she is presently a student of 'SRJAN Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra Odissi Nrityabasha' in Bhubaneswar and runs her own dance institute 'Kalpana' in Burdwan, with her mother.