In the summer of 1925, when dancer Jane Sherman boarded the SS Jefferson in Seattle for a tour of Asia, she had no idea what awaited her. She was just 17, leaving home to be on the road for nearly a year and a half.
Sherman was a rising star in the dance company of the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, an academy founded by modern dance pioneers Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. Her troupe was set to travel to Japan, China, Singapore, Burma (then a part of British India), India, Ceylon, Java and the Philippines before sailing back to the United States.
During the tour, the Americans learned local dance forms and improvised on them. India was their longest stop.
India’s peculiarities did not always endear it to Sherman, who found its living and travelling conditions challenging. She maintained a diary throughout the journey and regularly wrote letters to her mother, which were later compiled into a book titled Soaring: The Diary and Letters of A Denishawn Dancer In the Far East, 1925-1926.
Male attention
The dance company spent Christmas and New Year in Rangoon, before boarding the British India Steam Navigation Company’s SS Ellora for Calcutta. By this time Sherman seemed to have tired of places like Singapore and Rangoon, where she said “there wasn’t so much of startling interest to see, study or do”. In a letter to her mother from the ship, she said the shopping and “gadding” were fun but tended to get boring.
“But I’m learning all I can and looking forward to the smaller towns in India where we can really study the native life,” she wrote. “The three-day trip from Calcutta to Bombay ought to be exciting, but if we don’t get to see the Taj Mahal, I’ll die!”
Throughout the tour, Sherman was hit on by Western men. India was no exception. “Now, darling, India must be insidious but this is how it affects me: It makes me all soft and sentimental inside, perhaps silly and romantic,” she wrote to her mother. “But it enthuses me so that I get scornful of whatever man I may be with. I get idealistic, and heaven help the man if he tries to thrust his personality into the picture because I just don’t see him. I seem to get more and more in love with love, and more disgusted with men!”
Sherman particularly did not find Englishmen charming, calling them “the funniest things”. She wrote, “Have you ever noticed how an Englishman will nerve himself to do something he thinks dashing and devilish and then, if baffled, ruin the entire effect by explaining everything to death? They’re a scream!”
The Denishawn troupe would often socialise in places that were frequented by Westerners in India, and this is where Sherman would have to deal with male attention the most. Her letters and diary entries were full of mentions of advances by men and marriage proposals from people she had little interaction with.
She summed up Calcutta in two words: parties and poverty. “Every morning I got up very, very early and walked, all alone, seven miles in the cool of the day all around the Maidan,” Sherman wrote in her diary. “These were the hours when Indians padded to work, when Britishers took their exercise on polo ponies, because later it was much too hot. The heat the whole time we were here was dreadful.”
Rough ride
The Denishawn troupe took the first of its many train rides in India from Calcutta to Bombay, travelling in second class. The compartments had two tiers and the berths were bare benches with no upholstery. “We have our own WC, and each of us has a bedroll which we rented from the American Express for the duration of our stay in India,” Sherman wrote. “We are to open out these bedrolls and spread them on the narrow wooden benches at night – our second-class Pullman!”
On their first train ride, the company members carried just fruit, cheese and crackers, hoping to eat full meals at railway stations. But when they found the food unappetising at station canteens – Sherman called it “inedible” – they ended up taking a portable stove and cooking themselves. On the few occasions they did find American canned soups and other food products at railway stations, they would happily buy it up and stockpile for later.
“The nights in our bedrolls on this long trip were tolerable although we didn’t sleep very soundly on those hard benches in the bumpety-bumpety carriage,” Sherman wrote. “But the days were impossible – so hot that we had to hang wet bath towels across the open windows in order to cool the breeze a little and also to keep out the powdery dust that blew in and seeped into every nook and cranny. No way to bathe, of course, so we sponged off as best we could in the primitive WC which often, between stations, ran out of water.”
Since the troupe was warned against drinking unboiled tap water, it survived on hot, bottled lemon squash.
The company travelled mostly by train across the subcontinent, going as far as Quetta in Balochistan. Its last train ride was the Indo-Ceylon Express or Boat Mail, which it took from Madras to Dhanushkodi, with a break in the journey to see Madurai.
High life
Very few early 20th-century accounts of Bombay can match Sherman’s descriptions in what she calls her “literary notes”:
“A tawny moon in a deep blue sky rises low on the horizon, changing to silver as it soars to the starlit heavens. It hangs like a shimmering lantern over an Italian garden, touching with a fairy wand of light the white marble, the graceful palms. The lapping of the Arabian Sea, the air cool and fragrant with tuberoses and jasmine. Suddenly a young girl’s distant laughter breaks the silence like a silver thread of sound.”
“The arch of the Gateway of India frames the slanting sails of the fishing boats as they skim across the smooth, green water and cut through the rosy haze. The sun rises in robes of fiery clouds from behind the low, violet hills on the opposite shores. Smoke from large steamers at anchor wreathes up into the glory of the dawn. Bird notes drift on the cool breeze, and life seems suspended until King Sun designs to show himself…”
“Whitest white and greenest green and a world brilliant with heat. The Bay simmers and the hills fade into mist under the cruel, dominant sun. The streets are deserted except for a few ‘natives’ in their bright soiled turbans, jackets and saris. One is depressed by the glaring brilliance where rounded domes stand starkly white against the blue, blue of the sky.”
The Denishawn company stayed at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which was the stark opposite of a second-class train ride, and Sherman relished her time there. She said the city had an American community of around 50, including a young member of the Wrigley family.
“Bombay and its drives out to Malabar Hills was beautiful, but hot, hot, hot,” she wrote. “We could hardly keep our makeup on through a performance. Our white body paint could be seen flying off in great droplets as we whirled and leaped on the stage.”
Among her other experiences was a drive to Juhu Beach, which she described as “a lovely sandy stretch miles long lined with palms along the Arabian Sea”. She also visited the Tower of Silence in Malabar Hill, calling it hideous and adding that the burning ghats (of which she was no fan) were better.
Happier days
Among the places Sherman liked in the subcontinent was Quetta: “cold, sunlit and refreshing after the enervating heat of the plains”, she explored it by bicycle. Karachi and Lucknow also left an impression on her, as did Cawnpore (“nice sprawling little place on the Ganges River”).
In Delhi she had a scary brush with a creepy English army officer. The army officer pleaded with Ted Shawn to allow him to take the young dancer to the railway station in his car. “We started out, following Ted’s cab,” she wrote. “But soon we were off down a dark side street, no taxi ahead of us. Hiding my concern, I protested and asked where we were going. My Captain said he was going to drive around all night until I promised to marry him!”
Afraid of being kidnapped or missing the train, she urged the officer to take her to the station. What worried her even more was that he behaved this abominably while sober. At some point her appeals worked and the officer dropped her at the station, just minutes before their train departed. But the ordeal left Sherman terrified: he held her hand and kept repeating how much he loved her.
Nothing made the young American happier than seeing the Taj Mahal. “One of the happiest days of my life. I have seen the Taj!!,” she wrote in her diary.
She visited the monument in the late afternoon as soon as she got off the train in Agra. “When I saw the white domes over the hill, my heart skipped a beat,” Sherman said. “We stopped, walked through the arched gateway, and there it was against the turquoise sky at the end of a long pool.”
At that time, people were apparently allowed to climb up a minaret and the teenager wasted no time doing so. “We climbed up one of the four minarets, up the slippery marble circular stairway in smothering dark,” she wrote. “Then out on to a small round porch and all that beauty at your feet. The sun was setting in a golden haze. A grey cloud in the shape of an eagle with outspread wings swept over its face. Castles of cream clouds reflected gold and rose ribbon on the still, blue-green river. Boatmen were hauling in their nets, their songs coming faintly to us. The land spread flat to the horizon, old Agra fort standing up against the west. As the sun died, the muezzin gave his evening call to Allah. It was the last perfect touch. I don’t think I could have stood anything more.”
Body image
Sherman’s visit to Agra was in March, just before the subcontinent normally becomes oppressively hot. The Denishawn company continued to travel extensively over the next couple of months, and the rough journeys, combined with the heat, wore Sherman down.
She gained weight and was constantly reminded by Shawn and others to slim down. “They are CRAZY on the subject of fat and good figures,” she wrote in a letter to her mother from Madras.
When it was time to go to Ceylon, Sherman, the youngest Denishawn dancer, was fatigued and unhappy. In a letter, she wrote, “Over five months of work in that country [India] is too much.” Thankfully for her, the calm across the Palk Strait was the respite she needed.
Jane Sherman lived a long and fulfilling life, making a name for herself as a writer and composer. She passed away at the age of 101 in 2010.
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.
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