Meera jee, a well-known Pakistani artist, graced Times Square with her dance performance to raise money for flood victims in Pakistan. I couldn't help but notice some of the comments about her left behind. One of them from a girl, "Mujre karke unko haraam khilao ajeeb jahil," lets read out another one, "naach ga kay paisaa akhty karne waali haraam ki kamayi" There should not even be a debate in the first place on women. This is about keeping the current disaster first. We are choosing to take out time to leave hateful comments when we could be utilizing that time to spread how we can help those affected by these severe floods in our ways. However, we can. one can't help but notice the usage of two words in the comments left under her Instagram posts. Both tawaif and the word mujraa. Let's go back in time to educate ourselves on how the terms tawaif & mujra evolved pre & post-colonial periods. Because they will open our eyes to how we were made to ostracize an entire art form simply because of our invaders, our colonizers deemed it a tactic to control our lands, our minds, our values, everything. They decided for us.
Let's start from the very beginning. This will not be a history lesson. I will try my best to give it a story pattern to help make sense, and also, at the same time, we will educate ourselves before throwing away terms for people simply trying to help the victims of a terrible climate disaster. Spending our time leaving nasty comments instead of sharing, volunteering, or donating speaks volumes about one's character. I want to give credit here. Thanks to Zara barlas' work titled The Art of Imperial Entanglements Nautch Girls on the British Canvas and Stage in the Long Nineteenth Century, I could delve deeper into history.
Let's begin with who the nautch girls were. The word nautch comes from nach, which our Urdu speakers know as dance. This was the sole term within the south Asian subcontinent given to all the devdasis, tawaifs, and the nautchwaalis. This term created many problems because we had Indian performers who were female acting as courtesans in the company of nawabs and rajas. They were prestigious in courts, temples, and private organizations. They were not surviving in the peripheries but were actively a part of the socio-religious roles they fulfilled within the subcontinent's culture. They learned the art of theatre and performance, including their hair, makeup, feet positioning, hand gestures, their costumes. When Islam spread during the Mughal rule, so did the new styles of dancing in the regions across Northern India connected to Central Asian, Persian, and Indian arts. Kathak was very popular amongst the Muslim audience. They were even invited to political events and mingled with the social elite. They were the face of Indian music; the first ever recordings of Indian music made were done by two nautch girls. The arrival of the British made it rather complicated because their imperialistic insertion made them exotic figures which were highly sexualized. How? We will get into that very soon.
It started in the early sixteenth century when European travel visits to the Mughal and Ottoman empires became frequent. Then we started witnessing the performance of nautch girls translated into various art forms. If you check what Edward Ziter had explored in terms of dancing girls of India being featured in the British arts, he mentions it in his work titled "The Orient on the Victorian Stage." And this was the time when photography was still an emerging field, so we had paintings and drawings; these were some accessible mediums for the British public to become accustomed to the nautch girls and their performances.
Now, what were some of these dance forms? We had Indian thumri. It's a light classical style derived from the Hindi word Thumakna which involves walking with dancing steps that make your ankle bells tinkle. There was the use of instruments like sarangi, which means "one hundred colors," denoting versatility. When British women, the memsahibs, came to the subcontinent, they started spreading this popular discourse that the nautch girls were immoral. Simply because they witnessed these Indian performers as a threat. The British men were fascinated and admired the grace with which nautch girls performed. And they used literature, so many books were produced labeling these female performers to pursue sexual relations with British men. The author of the book "I mean to win," Charan Kamal Kaur Jagpal made it evident that they felt the Indian woman was invading their governance in the domestic space; they were robbing the white woman of the right to be in command within their household. White feminism and its hidden agenda to reign were getting hindered by Indian female performers doing their job of entertaining in court. Despite the misrepresentation of British society, they continued to enjoy the company of the Nautch girls, including the royal family. In 1875, the Prince of Wales, King Edward VII, attended one of their performances. Notable newspapers, including the graphic covering their performances, a British weekly illustrated newspaper from the late 19th and early 20th century.
Now we see a turning point in the 1890s when John Murdoch, a literary evangelist, and a public preacher, announced the anti-nautch movement. Many were writing to destroy the image of nautch girls as performers by portraying them as prostitutes, ultimately blurring the line between performers of various professions. We have Mrs. Marcus B. Fuller's The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood, an account of the numerous ways due to which female Indian performers should be stopped from in reality exhibiting an art form. Fuller was, in fact, the wife of an English missionary in Bombay. So you see how Christian values were being interlinked with social practice. Christian beliefs became entangled with an attempt to reform women's roles. The nautch girls were being blamed for the destructive family dynamics of the British without paying any heed to how obsessed the British men were with attending these performances. They became infatuated, whereas the sole aim of these Indian women or girls was to exhibit an art form, dancing.
The hypocrisy lies in the reality that female performers in Britain were perceived differently. Ballroom dancing was acceptable. The acid-house era in the 70s, including rave dance moves, was acceptable. European ballet dancers had more freedom than nautch girls to practice and exhibit their profession publicly. But British women came up with this ideology to teach nautch girls to get the right form of education and become empowered in that sphere. So the white woman presented the brown woman in dire need of assistance. As if the brown woman herself presented herself as the victim. Our victim mentality today comes from years of colonial rule that made us accept ourselves as powerless victims. They invaded the cultural supremacy of the subcontinent by targeting female-empowered dancers. Imagine how desperate the colonizer was in hopes of invading the subcontinent. I made this statement because, statistically, out of a population of more than 286 million, 10,000 were known to be singers or dancers. This is according to the 1891 Census of India. Imagine their power, their influence that had jolted the British's cultural, political, and social setup.
I want to share the plot of this musical play by Charles Smith. It has been titled A Trip to Bengal. There is a zenana scene, and it begins with a male spectator Fitzpatrick who is made to believe that the Governor's lady is a nautch girl. She is, in reality, an Englishwoman who goes by the name of Fanny. This woman is dressed in a veil. She performs a song and dances, and perfumes surround her; there is a hookah, which you will see in many paintings of Nautch girls. A hookah is present. And Fitzpatrick agrees to marry this woman, thinking she is a nautch girl. The purpose of displaying this scene was to generate this rumor that the nautch girls were master manipulators who tempted young British men into falling in love by seducing them into being dishonest in a marriage. In the 1830s, devdasis (devdasis were the temple dancing girls who were to perform unwatched, and only was dedicated to the temple) and musicians went to Pondicherry to perform and show the audience the fascinating music that was celebrated in the subcontinent before the British invasion. It was the cultural difference, the language difference the British audience found themselves alienated or unfamiliar with the conventional mode of presenting music and art. They found it easy to call these performances dull, repetitive, and whatnot. Soon even the media became highly critical in London.
We have the era, a British newspaper from 1839-1939, which reported, "The performances of the Nautch women are generally exceedingly monotonous, consisting of a sliding, shuffling motion along the floor; the movement of hands, arms, and eyes; and the adjusting and the readjusting of the veil." Now since the reputation of the nautch girls was completely tarnished and their art form remembered that it was a means of earning for them. They had to succumb to occupying the role of the concubine of English men, ultimately fulfilling the agenda of the imperialist power.
Let's also talk about specific tools the British used, including media, books, photographs, paintings, and so much more, to discredit the history of nautch girls. You will find it in the book titled Music of the Raj by Ian Woodfield about how a Royal Navy officer Captain Thomas Williamson described this very famous nautch girl Kunnam in the following lines, "[A] haughty, ugly, filthy black woman [who] could, solely by the grace of her motions, and the novelty of some Cashmerian airs, hold in complete subjection, and render tributary, many scores of fine young British officers!". By calling her filthy and questioning her hygiene based on the color of her skin, another imperialist agenda was being fulfilled because, around the same time, British men in politics wanted to take steps in the Public health department.
Establishing the Contagious Diseases Act and Imperial Vaccination Act was just one of the many ways of making the brown woman feels inferior like we knew nothing and the white man would save us now. Moreover, there was a rising debate in paintings concerning the nautch girls and their femininity. Now there was this Irish painter Thomas hickey, who painted three women and expressed their broad figures, which were debated as rather masculine through his art. And even their gender was questioned at one point because they did not meet the conventional standards of Victorian beauty. They had dark skin. Sharp features. A piercing gaze. For the British audience, they were unconventional figures because they did not have fair skin, or a soft palette, with delicate features and avoided direct gaze. By fixating on their physical appearance, the white man rewrote our history of how we should look, more like the West.
Why were all of these tactics employed? The answer is simple—a superiority complex. The British felt threatened in terms of customs and religious settlement. They wished to not only disrupt the atmosphere in the subcontinent but also feel powerful in the process.
So what did they do?
They used their "civilizing" mission to root for improving Indian society, but in reality, they wished for ownership. In 1870, the 4th Viceroy and governor-general from 1869-72, Richard Bourke himself, said, "Teach your subordinates that we are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race."
It is so important to go back in time and try to dig deeper because there are exploitative systems we miss out on. When it comes to performative arts, mainly dancing and music in the subcontinent, it wasn't until the arrival of the British that dancing became an exoticized form of sexual display, a threat to Indian society as a whole.
Why?
Because it did not meet the standards of our colonizers since they felt threatened with the sexual freedom in the subcontinent they invaded and ruled over.