How the colonial imagination of the ‘nautch girl’ was read back into Indian history

Nautch girls were significant cultural figures in pre-colonial India, though the term ‘nautch girls’ is a colonial construct, a possessive English word appended to thousands of years of tradition of many kinds. But we will use this colloquial term here, because it can be unwise to rename objects from the past. The use of the term ‘girl’ was diminutive, adding informality, indicating that she might be owned, softening and, as we shall see, disguising her agency.

Female dancers were typecast, grouped or categorised according to the dance and music training they received, their skills and, increasingly during the Raj, their sexual availability. There were two major traditions, the devadasi associated with ritual dances at Hindu temples, particularly in South India, referred to roughly on postcards like Hindu Nautch Girls.

The second, similarly sophisticated but more secular tawaif, who performed for feudal lords, often Muslim, in North India as shown in Dancing Girls. The courtesan was a symbol of pleasure and sophistication, of economic independence, and a source of moral danger and social decay in reformist and nationalist discourse around the turn of the century.

Mirza Hadi Ruswa, author of Umrao Jaan Ada (1899), among the very first Urdu novels, told the story of nineteenth-century Lucknow’s decline through the first-person narrative of a nautch performer’s life and sorrows (the novel was the basis for the 1981 blockbuster movie Umrao Jaan starring Rekha).

Munshi Premchand’s hugely popular novel Sevasadan (1919) told the story of a woman who becomes a courtesan due to economic necessity, an understandable but ultimately unsatisfying choice. She was linked to spiritual, artistic and pleasure-seeking behaviour, and the cultures that supported it.

There is little doubt that during the British period, as incorporated into the term ‘nautch girl’, the role was increasingly sexualised; many women had little choice, as economic pillars of more respectable activity were demolished by colonialism, like the feudal culture of Awadh and the Delhi court.

A popular anti-nautch movement emerged in the 1890s as a joint effort between colonial officials and Western-educated Indian elites to suppress dance performances by these women. In 1907, The Times of India declared:

“The nautch girls are recruited from a class of depraved females who eke out livelihood by the exchange of their womanly virtues for filthy lucre... The fact should not be missed that there can be no reclaiming a class that is steeped deep, from their childhood, in the worst practice of immorality and where its members are so lost to all sense of virtue and chastity as to be past redemption.”

The moral issue for Victorian social reformers was shared by educated Indians who saw the practices as degrading. The campaigns succeeded, to some extent, in constraining the space for women to be performers and singers. Nonetheless, the figure of the nautch girl flourished in popular media besides postcards – she appeared in abundance on textile labels (even on the fabric itself), on safety matchbox labels and on playing cards, all of which primarily served local populations.

Nautch performances drew both Indians and Europeans to the same physical venue, one of the few informal places where these two populations met. Whatever British morals on paper, the army openly provided for regulated brothels in cantonments around India, where nautch girls, too, performed. These were known as Lal (Red) Bazaars or ‘Red Light Streets’. European women, more visible in the colony after the suppressed 1857 Revolt, also came to watch nautch performances, in the same room as Indian men.

The singing may have been incomprehensible without translation, so dancers started relying more on hand gestures to convey meaning for foreign audiences. Liquor flowed, artistic display was the order of the day, desire permeated gatherings where one contemporary newspaper noted that ‘morality…evaporates.’ ‘The British represented the performances and performers as the epitome of Eastern decadence, luxury, and sexual excess,’ wrote one scholar.

The nautch girl was also well-known internationally by the late nineteenth century. One did not have to be in India to enjoy a performance, for there were troupes touring Europe. ‘Great fervour and intrigue emerged during the nineteenth century for the Indian dancing girl (one might even argue a fanaticism),’ writes Zara Barlas, ‘which continued for some decades, into the turn of the century.’

The figure of the nautch girl was, thus, well-known to the local Indian and wider colonial public. She represented temptation, requited or not, and political, criminal and racial danger.

Postcards

The origins of the postcard medium in India is inextricably linked to nautch girls. W Rössler, an Austrian photographer in Calcutta, offered a ‘Nautch Girl’ view as part of the colour four-panel court-sized lithographic postcard Calcutta in 1897, one of the very earliest postcards published in India.

In Bombay, the Ravi Varma Press, as owned by the great Indian painter, put out the postcards Tanjore dancing girl signed by its German lithographer Paul Gerhardt in 1899, and dancing girl around the same time. Gobindram Oodeyram in Jaipur offered an untitled collotype view of a bejewelled dancer with bare feet on a carpet among its very first series, possibly before 1900, as well.

The buying and sending of such a card could probably be considered a tacit endorsement of nautch performances. One Rössler card, Nautch Girl, with a photographic collotype of the same dancer who appears in the 1897 lithograph, is postmarked in Calcutta with the message, ‘Kind Remembrance. From Ellen. 18/11/03.’

The fact that this card was sent by a woman should not surprise us. Most postcards during the golden age were sent by, collected by and addressed to women. For European women who attended nautch performances, these appeared as the only spaces where Indian women literally held men in their sway. In the words of Yuthika Sharma, nautch women ‘were often seen by European women as a model of emancipation, free from restrictions of European family structures and domesticity and participant within the emergent public sphere of the bazaar.’

By the early 1900s, most postcard publishers offered nautch girl postcards, including Clifton & Co. in Bombay with the court-sized A Nautch Party. Among Clifton’s most popular views was Dancing Girl and Musician, a collotype postcard printed (not stenciled, hand-painted or lithographed) in colour using a German process called ‘Lichtdruck’ or ‘light print’. Layers of coloured ink were carefully laid over each other on a black-and-white print made from a glass plate. This postcard would come in numerous runs and colour combinations, with varied titles, including Hindustan Dancing Girl and Hindu Dancing Girl. Note the iconic way of holding up one’s dress, and the musician with his ancient dhol in front of the studio backdrop.

One of the first British-based publishers of India postcards, F. Hartmann & Co., offered A Nautch Girl and Musicians, a beautifully coloured card where the woman is again displaying her dress.

Together with A Benares Dancing Girl, a close shot of a young and bejewelled woman with a warm smile and raised arms; this view was adapted by other publishers. Raphael Tuck & Sons, the biggest British and global publisher, as part of its ‘Native Types of India’ series published ZUHOORUN (Nautch-Girl) around 1906.

It was the beginning of the individuation of the nautch girl, even if the other types in this specific Tuck’s series also have given names. It is a Muslim name and indicates how nautch representations were associated with Awadh’s rulers (1722-1856), known to be very fond of nautch performances, a legacy that continued even after they were deposed.

Sometimes the anti-nautch movement warnings were adopted by postcards. An example is Love’s New Victim, which shows the dancer as sly temptress with heavy jewellery around her neck, arms and feet, and a man’s hand resting on her leg. Both are distinctly of lower class, possibly made for the European customer to prove ‘native’ gullibility.

Witches of India presents the Kashmiri nautch girl as temptress. Kashmiri dancers were often considered the most beautiful, a perception that went back to some of the earliest albumen photographs of them.

By far the most prominent of the named nautch girls was Gauhar Jaan (1873-1930). Born of mixed Armenian-heritage parents, she appeared together with her mother, Malka Jaan, on the postcard Bombay Beauties around 1903 (the photograph was first published in 1899).

Among the very first Indian singers to be recorded on gramophone in 1902, her talent led to hundreds of recordings across two decades and widespread fame. On most postcards – by many different publishers – she was named Miss Goharjan. Sometimes she was simply referred to as Famous Nautch Girl. Customers would have bought her postcards as one does of today’s singers or celebrities.

Even if Lucknow was the heart of the courtesan culture in the nineteenth century, it was Jaipur’s leading Indian photography studio, Gobindram Oodeyram (active 1880s–1970s) that seems to have accounted for the most nautch girl postcards by a single Indian publisher in the early twentieth century. Flavours ran the gamut from the highly sexualised to the refined artisanal. This is not entirely accidental.

The city and the princely state of the Kachhwaha dynasty had a long tradition of trading – both amongst themselves and for a time with their Mughal overlords – dancers as slaves and possessions, some of whom became formidable political figures in various courts.

Dancing Girl - Jaipur is not their only postcard of a woman lying down in a suggestive fashion. Another reclining nautch girl postcard was titled in different print runs as Sleeping Hindoo Woman and Jaipur Woman. Note her uninhibited gaze.

Professional Dancing Girl was one of the most popular of Gobindram Oodeyram’s postcards, sometimes hand-coloured in bright pink with a black dupatta and gold borders (called Maina Dancing Girls). Here the dancer is looking across the viewer’s gaze, as if unreachable. Note her hand on her hip, a classic female dancer’s pose found on other postcards and cartes-de-visite.

In the 1920s, during excavations at the ancient Indus city of Mohenjo-daro, which pushed Indian history back some two millennia with the discovery of an unknown Bronze Age civilisation, a 10-cm bronze figurine with bangles and the same hand-on-hip pose was found. She was termed ‘the dancing girl’ shortly after being unearthed.

Whether rightly or not, the female nautch tradition was now read back into India’s earliest history. It may well be that this dancer’s pose has persisted for 4,000 years, it may also be that media like postcards and film – the first nautch women appeared in Indian cinema in 1914 – had so imprinted the pose into public consciousness that the statuette had no option but to be given this name.

Omar Khan is the author of Paper Jewels Postcards from the Raj (2018) and From Kashmir to Kabul The Photographs of John Burke and William Baker 1860-1900 (2002). He founded Harappa.com in 1995 and has researched early photography and ephemera of the subcontinent for over 30 years. His website, PaperJewels.org, is a growing index and repository of thousands of free, professionally-restored postcards from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and Myanmar (Burma) between 1892 and 1947.

This is an excerpt from the essay by Omar Khan from the book, Typecasting: Photographing the Peoples of India 1855-1920, accompanying the eponymous DAG exhibition now on view until February 15 at Bikaner House, New Delhi.