By Donovan Roebert
M.V. Dhurandhar (1867-1944) was a highly gifted, academically trained Indian artist, often rated second in skill only to Raja Ravi Varma. He studied under John Griffiths at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay until graduating in 1895, in which year he was also awarded the gold medal from the Bombay Art Society. He later returned to his old school as a teacher and became its headmaster in 1910. His style was delicately realist, with an emphasis on body-language and the elegance of the human form. He achieved great success throughout his lifetime, during which he was the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 1930 he was appointed Officiating Director of the Sir J.J. School of Art.
In this article I will be concentrating on his work only insofar as it represents the Indian dancers and singer-dancers of his time. In this regard, his art is bound up with two interesting books, both of which enjoyed considerable success between 1910 and 1930, and for which he created the illustrations. These are S.M. Edwardes’ By-Ways of Bombay (1912) and Otto Rothfeld’s Women Of India (1920). Both of these books have chapters dedicated to Indian dance and dancers, and it is in these that several of the best known Dhurandhar depictions of dancers are found. Both books also contain passages of interest on the subject of and attitudes to dance in India in the early 20th century, and Rothfeld’s writing includes a reference to a passage on the sexual aspect of the devadasi system written by the early ‘sexologist’ and eugenicist, Havelock Ellis.
Otto Rothfeld (sometimes given as ‘Rothfield’) was a longstanding career official in the colonial administrative service. In a 1924 article on The Progress of Co-operative Banking in India, he mentions ‘the last 25 years that I have myself served in India’. This means that, by the time he published Women of India, he had been a civil servant in that country for 21 years. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, Registrar of Co-operative Societies, and a contributor to the Journal of the Royal Society for Arts. It is therefore no doubt the case that he knew Dhurandhar personally. He harboured and disseminated progressive views on the colonial system and on socio-political matters generally. In his chapter on dance his progressivism is evident in his implied as well as his explicit criticism of the anti-devadasi movement that was steadily gaining momentum in the 1920s.
The chapter addresses Indian dance from various regions of the subcontinent, and these styles are depicted in Dhurandhar’s illustrations.
Here are some passages in which Rothfeld voices his concerns:
‘For the women of India, it may almost be said, there is only one independent profession open, one that is immemorial, remunerative, even honoured, and that is the profession of the dancing girl. There is hardly a town in India, however small, which has not its group of dancing girls, dubious perhaps and mediocre; and there is not a wedding, hardly an entertainment of any circumstance, at which the dancing girl’s services are not engaged. And it may be added that there is hardly a class so much misjudged or a profession so much misunderstood …
‘But in the literature of Europe the bayadère, to use a name corrupted from the Portuguese, has also been a frequent and a luxurious figure. In the romantic fancies of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, she was, both in France and Germany, a personage on whom poets lavished the embellishments of their art. Her hazy outlines they bespangled with the imagery of fiction and the phantasies of invention. She was a symbol for oriental opulence, a creature of incredible luxury and uncurbed sensuousness, or tropic passion and jewelled magnificence. From her tresses blew the perfumes of lust; on her lips, like honey sweet, distilled the poisons of vice; hidden in her bodice of gold brocade she carried the dagger with which she killed ….’
‘Divest her of poetic association. Rob her of the hues cast by the distant dreams of romanticism. Strip her even of the facts of history and the traditions of the Indian classics. Yet she remains a figure sufficiently remarkable. Not tragic and certainly not gay, she embodies in herself so much of India, both its past and present, that without understanding her life and significance it is impossible to comprehend the social whole which she explains and commentates …
‘… dancing remains the most living and developed of existing Indian arts. In the Peninsular school above all, India has a possession of very real merit, on which no appreciation or encouragement can be thrown away. It is something of which the country can well be proud, almost the only thing left, perhaps, in the general death-like slumber of all imaginative work, which still has a true emotional response and value. It sends its call to a people’s soul; it is alive and forceful …’
‘All the more tragic is it, a very tragedy of irony, that the dance—the one really Indian art that remains—has been, by some curious perversion of reasoning, made the special object of attack by an advanced and reforming section of Indian publicists. They have chosen to do so on the score of morality—not that they allege the songs and dances to be immoral, if such these could be, but that they say the dancers are. Of the dances themselves no such allegation could, even by the wildest imagination, possibly be made. The songs are pure beside the ordinary verses of a comic opera, not to mention a music-hall in the capital of European civilization, Paris. The dancing is graceful and decorous, carefully draped and restrained. But the dancers, it is true, do not as a rule preserve that strict code of chastity which is exacted from the marrying woman. How the stringency or laxity of observance of this code by a performer can possibly affect the emotional and even national value of her art and performance has not been and cannot be explained. Art cannot be smirched by the sins of its followers; the flaws in the crystal goblet do not hurt the flavour of the wine …
‘… In certain castes the profession is hereditary, mother bringing up daughter in turn to these family accomplishments. In other cases, as in the great temple of Jejuri in the Deccan, children are dedicated by their parents to the service of God and left when they reach a riper age to the teaching and superintendence of the priests. Twice a day, morning and evening, they sing and dance within the temple to the greater glory of God; and at all the great public ceremonies and festivals they play their part in the solemnities. Teaching is imparted by older men, themselves singers, who take in hand the training of small groups of girls. In some cases a form of marriage is performed, for the fulfilment of traditional religious obligation, with a man of the dancer’s caste, with an idol, or even with a sacred tree. But the ceremony entails no ethical obligations, such as apply to the real married woman. The dancers are regarded, being independent and self-supporting, as freed from the code which applies to women living in family homes and maintained by the work and earnings of a father or a husband. It is their right to live their lives as they will, for their own pleasure and happiness, unrestrained by any code more stringent than that of an independent man …’
‘Modern opponents of dancing, however, with their influence on a population which has few artistic tastes and a marked bent for economy, have already done much to degrade the profession and are gradually forcing girls, who would formerly have earned a decent competence with independence and an artist’s pride, into a shameful traffic from very want. Day by day the number of those women is growing less who alone preserve the memory of a fine Indian art. And, as they lose the independence earned by a profession, day by day more women are being thrust into the abysmal shame and destitution of degraded womanhood. An Indian proverb already sums up this peculiar item of the “reform programme” thus: “The dancing girl was formerly fed with good food in the temple; now she turns somersaults for a beggar’s rice.” ‘
Rothfeld’s chapter has this epigraph taken from Havelock Ellis’s Sex in Relation to Society (1910):
‘Nowadays Indian ‘reformers’ in the name of ‘civilization and science’ seek to persuade the muralis (girls dedicated to the Gods) that they are “plunged in a career of degradation.” No doubt in time the would-be moralists will drive the muralis out of their temples and their homes, deprive them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched outcastes, all in the cause of “civilization and science.” So it is that early reformers create for the reformers of a later day the task of humanizing life afresh.’
In fact, the last line in Havelock’s original text speaks not of ‘humanizing life afresh’ but of ‘humanizing prostitution afresh’, in the context of sacred courtesanship and of alternative sexualities in general. Rothfeld’s misquotation probably represents an unwillingness on his own part to spread the idea of ‘prostitution’ abroad in the already fraught atmosphere of the anti-nautch activism about which he was obviously well informed. He had probably also read Ellis’s The Dance of Life, in which, in the chapter titled The Art of Dancing, Ellis writes as follows about the devadasis:
‘In India … the devadasis … are at once both religious and professional dancers. They are married to gods, … they figure in religious ceremonies, and their dances represent the life of the god they are married to as well as the emotions of love they experience for him. Yet, at the same time, they also give professional performances in the houses of rich private persons who pay for them. It thus comes about that to the foreigner the devadasis scarcely seem very unlike the ramedjenis, the dancers of the street, who are of a very different origin, and mimic in their performances the play of merely human passions …’
Ellis gives a commendatory footnote referring the reader to Rothfeld’s work, and it is clear that these two social commentators were in agreement as to the wrong-headedness of the anti-devadasi reformist program.
In the writing of S.M. Edwardes the approach to the dancers is sympathetic, but in a different way. Edwardes was Commissioner of Police in Mumbai at the time he wrote By-Ways of Bombay, which purports to relate a variety of episodic personal encounters with Indians in that city in the early 1910s. Two of the stories are about dancers, and both are illustrated by Dhurandhar.
The story of Imtiazan is intended to arouse the reader’s sympathy and sense of pathos for a young women who has been driven into the profession of dance by injustices committed against her by her parents, and later by the musician who marries her for her beauty but, impoverished, deserts her for a famous Lucknow dancer. It is a slight piece, unconvincingly sentimental, and one is left wondering whether it is founded in truth at all. What is notable is that Edwardes’s attitude towards her plight is not at all castigatory. What he wants to elicit on Imtiazan’s behalf is a comprehending and forgiving compassion. By the end of the little tale we discover that Imtiazan has adopted a little daughter whom she is determined to keep away from the profession of dance.
Edwardes’s attitude is surely understandable. His father had been a clergyman, and he himself is said to have been intimately acquainted, as Commissioner of Police, with all sides of life in Bombay. It is clear that he really did attend performances of dance in private settings, since he mentions that the dancers are taught by the masters of ‘kath-thak’, and he shows himself well acquainted with the musical instruments and the dance itself. It appears that he was particularly concerned with the welfare of women in India, and he is known to have represented India at the Geneva Conference in 1921 on ‘traffic in women and children’.
The other story about dance in By-Ways of Bombay is that of the singer-dancer ‘Nur Jan’:
Again we are presented with the tragic case of a girl and her sister from a good family who, through sudden misfortune, are cast on their talents for singing and dancing, which they acquired at their home. When asked by the narrator whether she would not prefer to be rescued from this life by marriage to a kind and generous husband, she replies, ‘I cannot live again behind the screen, for too long have I been independent. The filly that has once run free cares not afterwards for the stall and bridle. It has been an evil mistake, Saheb, but not one of my making …’
Edwardes puts the question, ‘By what caprice of evil fortune had she come to this -, hiring out her voice and her nimble feet to enhance the pleasure of a chance entertainment, far from her own people and from her northern Indian home?’ Thus, in the cases of both of the dancers, the sense conveyed is of entrapment in a life-style not of the woman’s own choosing but rather as the product of a social and familial malaise.
By the time Dhurandhar had illustrated these books, he was already gaining recognition for his art in many quarters. He had been exhibited several times and in 1927 was honoured with the title ‘Rao Bahadur’, and, more colloquially, with the appellation ‘Artist Dhurandhar’. Among the commissions he received were those for the murals at the Imperial Secretariat in New Delhi, for sixteen murals at the ‘Chota Udaipur Palace’, and for two paintings commemorating the Diamond Jubilee Darbar of the Maharaja of Baroda.
In 1927, he made this watercolour-wash painting of a singer-musician-dancer:
The title of the painting has a double meaning as the name for the musical instrument but also of the notion of ‘heart-ravishing’. It is clear that for Dhurandhar the ideas of the female performer and that of an enticing, alluring feminine beauty are artistically inseparable.
Dhurandhar continued to work until his very last year, when he painted this picture of a South Indian dancer:
The delicacy and charm of his approach to the dance are unmistakable. The wit in the dancer’s facial expression and studied smile immediately call to mind the half-amorous, half-elusive abhinaya of the experienced nayika. It is interesting, too, to note the details of costume, the final design of which had not yet been settled when this dancer was painted.
Dhurandhar seems to have liked her enough to produce another version of the painting:
It was probably much earlier, in the 1920s, that he produced this tentative study of a kathak dancer, on which his name and position as ‘Art Master’ are imprinted.:
It is at any rate clear that his fascination with Indian dancing figures was not diminished by the disapprobation with which dancers were viewed in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and probably rather beyond that date.
His engagement with the whole controversy of female instrumental, vocal and dance performance is suffused throughout with reticence, wit, and a certain humorous wryness, unwilling to condemn the predicaments and wiles of human nature that were surely reflected as much in the dance economy of his time as in any other area of human relationship.
One espies his wily humour as early on as the beginning of the twentieth century, when Dhurandhar was one of several artists regularly involved with the Ravi Varma Press. This subtle note of knowingness and impartial but compassionate engagement with his subjects informs all of the hundreds of depictions he created in his very productive lifetime.
Artist Dhurandhar turned his hand to many forms both of pure and commercial art, but always with the aim of making a statement that was at once both realistic and charming. He turned out work for tourism and railways, including posters, labels and advertisements, as well as illustrations for books on social and religious topics. His pictures were made into postcards and calendars, and his popular appeal did not wane. He died in his own home in 1944 at the age of 77.
Notes:
- Passages from Otto Rothfeld are taken from Women of India, Taraporevala Sons & Co., Bombay, 1920.
- Quotations from Havelock Ellis are from Sex in Relation to Society, being vol. 6 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, F.A. Davids Company, Philadelphia, 1910, and from ch. 2, The Art of Dancing in The Dance of Life, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1923.
- The quotation from S.M. Edwardes is taken from By-Ways of Bombay, first published serially under the pen-name ‘Etonensis’ in The Times of India, and later in book form by Taraporevala Sons & Co., Bombay, 1912.
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Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History 