From the abstract: “Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of
\nEurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one\u2019s
\nidentity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two
\nEurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget
\ntheir mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa\u2019if singers and
\nactors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within
\nthe wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level
\ncase histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an
\narena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture,
\nI shall extend our perception of historical \u2018archive\u2019 to include a varied set of materials such
\nas biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and
\nhistory. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider
\ndebates of migration and identity-making.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the abstract: “Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one\u2019s identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[83,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-history-tawaifs"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.huronresearch.ca\/courtesansofindia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}