Month: December 2020

Spear, Jeffrey L., and Avanthi Meduri. “Knowing the Dancer: East Meets West.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 435–448.

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Abstract

The clean and the proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame.

-Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror

 The history we are sketching is one of boundaries double crossed between India and the West and between periods of the South Asian past. On one level our story is about an historical irony, how late nineteenth-century Orientalism resuscitated the romantic mystique of the eastern dancer in the West just as South Indian dancers were being repressed in their homeland by Indian reformers influenced by western mores. Within that history there is another dynamic that is less about crossing than about shifting boundaries, boundaries between the sacred and the profane and their expression in colonial law. We will be looking at these movements and transformations within the context of current scholarship that is historicizing even those elements of Indian culture conventionally understood to be most ancient and unchanging….

The story of how the devadasi, the temple dancer of South India, came to be abjected, consigned to the abyss, while her Vedic ancestor was being celebrated, is part of an ironic interplay between eastern and western ideas about the dancer and her dance. Of all the Hindu practices that the British invoked to mark their moral superiority to their Indian subjects, “temple prostitution” may well have been the most notorious after the pr?dations of the so-called “thugs” and the self-immolation of widows (sati).3 The West had no conceptual category for women who were at one and the same time unchaste and holy. The temple dancer’s combination of religious and sexual expression reminded Europeans of that abomination of the ancient Near East, ritual prostitution. (“Thou shalt not bring the wages of a kedesha… into the House of Jehovah,” Deut. 23.18 [Metcalf 102]). The devadasis – literally the slaves or bond-servants of god – were not, strictly speaking, a caste. Rather they had, as Saskia Kersenboom-Story (179) and Amrit Srinivasan note, a way of life or professional ethic [vrtti, murai, not jati]. One could be born into their community, but some girls were formally adopted after being offered, or even sold, to the temples by their families. They were trained in performance from childhood by male teachers from the community and, unlike members of a caste, could not officially perform without their ratification and approval. In contrast to the conventional, patriarchal system of arranged marriages, it was mothers in the community who dedicated their daughters in childhood to the temple god…

Vivek Taneja, Anand. “Begum Samru and the Security Guard.” Sarai Reader: Bare Acts, 2005, https://sarai.net/sarai-reader-05-bare-acts/.

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This article is available for free from the Sarai journal website.

Introduction

What does Begum Samru have to do with a cinema in Delhi?
Begum Samru’s palace was the site of many a nautch (dance performance) where the Indian and British elite of late Mughal Delhi would gather to watch the skilled singing and dancing of professional tawaifs (courtesans) in the heart of the Old City. The Mughal ruler Shah Alam (1759-1806) acknowledged Begum Samru as his esteemed protector, and the military strategists of the East India Company considered her crucial to theirterritorial ambitions. Her acquisition of tremendous political, military and economic clout has been documented. Her talent at diplomacy and her political wiles have been noticed, as have her instincts for survival and success.

Yet, none of these accounts
acknowledge the fact that she began her professional life as a young tawaif (courtesan) in Delhi. But in the elite enclaves where the nautch played out, there was always an awareness of the presence of a non-elite element in this play of pleasure and desire, the commodification of sexuality as/and spectacle: “No nautchni is expected to wear longer than three or four years, after which she exercises her art among the lowest of the low”.

Two centuries later, the grounds of her palace have become the crowded, bustling Bhagirath Place, the centre for the film distribution trade in Delhi, where over 100 film distribution companies operate. Brian Larkin, who has worked extensively on visual culture in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, while writing on cinema viewing in Northern Nigeria follows the historian and philosopher of modernity, Walter Benjamin, in viewing fantasy as the energy stored in the concreteness of objects.

My essay, drawing upon earlier work done by researchers of the Publics and Practices in the History of the Present (PPHP) project at Sarai, and my own fieldwork, attempts to look at the fantasy shaping the cinema viewing spaces of contemporary Delhi, a fantasy which has more in common with the Indo-British ‘gentry’ attending the nautch at Begum Samru’s palace than mere coincidence. My attempt is to establish parallels between these two phenomena, in terms of the ‘desirable’ audience for the display of sexuality and experience of pleasure, and to map a history of the imagination
of the ‘gentry’, a widely prevalent term in the Delhi cinema trade for an upper-class audience. This essay will map a rough and not-quite-ready historical trajectory of the city’s cinemas. The focus is on practices within and outside the law; of changing laws and shifting transgressions; of changing land use patterns, and of dispossessions that define the cinema today; a map of cinema that mirrors the larger transformations of the city. A map that increasingly represents “objects that were once new and symbolized modern life but whose historical moment has passed [and have] become inadvertent but dense signifiers in social structure”.