By Donovan Roebert
The three artists whose depictions of dancers are presented in this article were all present in the Bengal Presidency in the period of shifting governerships from Hastings and Amherst to William Bentinck. The European presence in Calcutta in those years was not very large, amounting to some 3200 ‘English’ in the city itself. The marauding East Indian Company had by now established itself as a corporate colonial rulership within a larger political imperial State. By 1820 the grand edifices of company rule had been built or re-built: Fort William, the Writers’ Building, Government House, the Town Hall, and several churches. The European contingent, if they had sufficiently enriched themselves, erected grandiose and eccentric dwellings. British and other Europeans who had not succeeded lived rather more poorly, often in ‘mixed’ areas of the city, having in some cases taken Indian wives. The city itself had become a hive of commercial, political, military and cultural activity. The EIC had, by 1803, 260 000 Indian soldiers in its employ and some 250 clerks to record its varieties of commercial transactions.
In addition to governing, the EIC also meted out justice in its own Supreme Court, and the city had at its disposal numbers of British professional men, including lawyers, doctors, engineers and artists. It was an expensive place to live, and those who had acquired their fortunes were expected to live and entertain on the lavish ‘nabob’ scale. An indispensable part of these entertainments were the ‘nautch girls’ who performed at a variety of private parties as well as on religious festivals that were celebrated with great pomp in the sumptuous dwellings of wealthy Indian and European ‘nabobs’ alike.
The three artists with whom we are here concerned all made portrayals of dancers which appear in books written by them in the period under review. They were by no means the only artists present in the Bengal Presidency at that time, but I have chosen to deal with them in a single writing because their illustrations of dancers are accompanied by their own descriptive texts. These descriptions, together with the images, may serve to give us some idea of the dancers, and of the dances that were performed.
Sophie Charlotte Belnos (1795-1865) was born and raised in Calcutta. She married the French miniaturist Jean-Jacques Belnos, who established the first lithographic press in the city in 1822. In 1832, with the assistance of Alexandre-Marie Colin, she produced her first book, Twenty-four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal. She later went on to establish her own lithographic press in Calcutta in 1847, producing then another collection of her illustrations titled The Sundhya or Daily Prayers of the Brahmins in 1851. It is in her Twenty-four Plates that we find her watercolours of both male and female dancers, together with brief descriptive passages.
These are described as dancing at the wedding feasts of ‘the middling classes of Bengallees, Mussulmen and even Black Portuguese’ and as being ‘not so expensive as a set of Hindoostan dancing girls’. Their movements, Mrs Belnos tells us, are more animated than those of the dancing girls, while they dance and sing with ‘often shrill and disagreeable’ infantile voices. They wear rich costumes and are often the sons of the musicians. When they reach the age of fifteen or sixteen, they become too tall to perform in the guise of girls, and then join the ranks of the musicians or take up some other work, such as domestic service in European homes. They are ‘generally of the Mussulman sect’.
Of these three dancers Mrs Belnos writes:
‘This Plate exhibits the different figures of the Eastern Nautch, their steps are slow, their motions dignified, and their figures graceful, generally indicative of the different passions described in the song, which accompanies the dance ; the musicians sometimes follow the dancing girl, but often remain stationary in a line behind. Europeans who do not understand the meaning of each figure, find their dance insipid and dull, but the Natives who perfectly comprehend every motion are passionately fond of these Nautches. The rich Hindoos and Musselmen often pass many hours in the enjoyment of their favorite amusement. Natives of both sexes of respectability will never dance themselves, it is considered derogatory to their dignity. The dancing girls represented here, are of the Musselman sect, as also the musicians. Some of these girls are very young, beautiful, and much fairer than the Bengallees, being natives of Delhi, Agra, and other rich provinces of Hindoostan. They are rewarded very liberally by the rich natives at their feasts and marriages, etc. They are covered with rich and expensive jewels of gold, pearls, diamonds, and other precious stones, their upper garments are of gauze or very fine muslin bordered with gold and silver ribbons very deep, their trowsers are of satin.’
With this plate we are given a lively description of the atmosphere of the entertainment:
‘Three days previous to throwing the image of their goddess Doorga into the river Ganges, the rich Hindoo Baboos and Rajahs give most splendid fêtes at their magnificent palaces in Calcutta and its vicinity, when cards of invitation are sent to all the ladies and gentlemen of the first circles in the settlement who honor the feast with their presence. The crowds of natives on these occasions are immense, and not agreeable to push through, but on entering the magnificent saloon, the eye is dazzled by a blaze of lights from splendid lustres, triple wall shades, candle brass etc. ; superb pier glasses, pictures, sofas, chairs, Turkey carpets, etc., adorn the splendid hall; these combined with the sounds of different kinds of music, both European and Indian, played all at the same time in different apartments; the noise of native tom-toms from another part of the house; the hum of human voices, the glittering dresses of the dancing girls, their slow and graceful movement; the rich dresses of the Rajah and his equally opulent Indian guests; the gay circle of European ladies and gentlemen, and the delicious scent of utter of roses and sandal which perfumes the saloon strikes the stranger with amazement; he fancies himself transported to some enchanted region, and the whole scene before him is but a fairy vision. Some of the rich Rajahs go to considerable expenses at these festivals of the Doorga Poojah which lasts several days, they entertain Brahmins by hundreds, and distribute alms to some thousands of poor Hindoos: besides the entertainment given to the Europeans, it is not uncommon to see in one part of the house Hindoo Poojah going on, and at another, a long table laid out with ham and turkey, and all the luxuries of Europe and the East, spread out for the refreshment of their Christian guests; at which only the black Portuguese and Musselmen servants attend : the best wines, liquors, and even Champagne is served at pleasure at these fêtes. Sometimes in another apartment a band of European musicians procured at a great expense strike up waltzes and quadrilles, and not unfrequently a quadrille party has formed and danced with great good humour and spirit till a late hour. These Nautches continue three nights successively.’
Here Mrs Belnos gives us an insight into the personal exchange between dancer and audience:
‘Having already described a Nautch in the preceding plate, this one is added merely as an illustration of the various figures. The dancing girl here represented is sitting at the feet of the two ladies, and singing with all her might. A nautch girl sometimes, especially at the commencement of the evening entertainment, when few Europeans are seen in the magnificent saloon of the Rajah or Baboo, will venture to approach while dancing some ladies of rank, and kneeling at their feet, continues singing, and at intervals softly asks for a Buxees or present: the ladies generally give a few rupees, on which she retires satisfied, to the other end of the saloon and continues her nautch for some time when a new set of dancing girls and musicians relieve the first. A bouquet of flowers and utter of roses and sandal are always offered to the visitors at these nautches.’
We get some idea, then, of the magnificent scale of these entertainments, and of the festive and costly environment in which the dances were staged. It is clear, too, that the costumerie is of the first order and that the dancers are prosperous. Not only are they ‘expensive’ to engage, but further tips are solicited during the course of the performance. The dance itself is sedate and stately, and does not at all put us in mind of what we would recognize as Kathak today, though there is mention of the enactment in dance of the ‘different passions mentioned in the song’, a sure reference to the abhinaya-rasa element of which ‘the natives perfectly comprehend every motion’. It is interesting that Mrs Belnos, in referring to the dancers being much fairer than their Bengali counterparts, locates them at Delhi and Agra. These centres, together with Lucknow, were indeed the cities from which the dancers were brought to Calcutta. Much of the ‘nautch’ that one reads about in 19th-century company-ruled Bengal occurs on the Delhi-Lucknow-Patna-Murshidabad-Calcutta axis. It is not clear to me whether the dancers at the Hindu Durga Puja would also have been deployed from the Mughal dance community or whether these were Hindu dancers from a quite different tradition. Mrs Belnos makes no distinction between the two, though Balthazar Solvyns, in the text accompanying his etchings in Les Hindous (1808-1812), refers to the puja performers as ‘Ramganny’ dancers. It is worth noting, considering the relatively early date of her writing, that Mrs Belnos tells us that ‘natives of both sexes of respectability will never dance themselves; it is considered derogatory to their dignity’. Though she makes no reference to the courtesan aspect, it is clear that she is recording an indigenous prejudice against the dance long before the agitations of the anti-nautch movement were even heard of. Finally, the ‘black Portuguese’ mentioned by her were remnants of Afro-Portuguese slave communities in Calcutta, brought to the city in the capacity of servants for hire by a variety of European vessels which sailed to India via the Cape of Good Hope.
It is interesting to note that Mrs Belnos was at great pains to assure her readers that her representations were accurate. To this end she included prefatory matter from two members of the Royal Asiatic Society, confirming the authenticity of her illustrations. These witnesses were Graves C. Haughton, then honorary secretary of the society, and Rammohan Roy, the Bengali intellectual and reformer.
A little earlier than Mrs Belnos a company official named Captain Robert Smith had gathered his own set of drawings into an album first published in 1824 under the title Asiatic Costumes from Drawings taken during a Residence in India. Smith might have been an officer in the Bengal engineers who served in India between 1805 and 1830 (see note on ‘disentangling the Robert Smiths’ below), or he might have been the Captain Smith in the 44th East Essex Foot, which was in India from 1825 to 1833. Whichever Smith he was, his album contains several depictions of dancers, of which the first is again a ‘dancing boy’.
We are told that ‘when the boys are dressed for exhibition there is nothing whatever to distinguish them from the other sex. The same ornaments, such as necklace, bracelets, ear, finger and toe rings, decorate the boys as well as the nautch girls …’ These boys dance at festivals, Smith says, and concludes with the repetition that ‘a boy dressed in this fashion might easily pass for one of the other sex’. It is clear that the element of transvestitism was the central intention in presenting dancing boys, who, as Mrs Belnos says, were a less expensive alternative to the ‘nautch girls’, and were probably employed at functions less grand than those at which the female dancers performed.
Smith describes this dancer with musicians as follows:
Smith here describes the dholakist, sarangist and nattuvanar with talam cymbalettes, using the European terms that are familiar to him. Again the emphasis is on soft singing tones and sedateness of motion in dance. The reference to plate viii is to one of a series of musicians that are also depicted in the album but will not be shown here.
Here the accompanying text departs from the idea of the languid dance:
In this description we move closer to the kind of motion that is associated with Kathak, with the performers ‘spinning round with the velocity of a spinning top’. The transitions from subtle abhinaya-based mimetics to pure dance sequences including chakkars with rapid, intricate footwork will be recognizable to dancers and audiences viewing a Kathak performance today.
The accompanying text to this plate is as follows:
Here the emphasis is on splendid costume and the ‘soft and voluptuous’ nature of the performance. This abhinaya expression of love-yearning, usually in the form of the passionate desire of Radha for Krishna – a Vishnuite abhinaya practice that was tolerated throughout by the refined Muslim courts – is what precludes ‘Asiatics of any respectability’ from dancing themselves. The performance of dance is ‘quite inconsistent with propriety’ unless it is presented by the dancing class.
The text here gives an example of singing technique, but is mainly focused on costume and jewels:
Our general perception of the kind of dance that was performed in this period must be coloured by the fact that Wajid Ali Shah, who restructured and re-formalized a proto-Kathak dancing style, had not yet assumed the throne in Awadh. His rule, until his kingdom was annexed by the Company, endured from 1847-1856. Still we must assume that some kind of formalized choreography and dance design were known to the dancers and dance teachers in the period before the great Lucknow efflorescence under this highly cultured ruler. We see, at any rate, that descriptions of the steps and attitudes agree between Mrs Belnos and Robert Smith, and there are at least some clues as to the subtlety and vivacity, as well as the standardization, of the dance at the time of their brief observations.
The broader EIC ‘nautch’ context and economy is described by Grace E.S. Howard (see notes) as follows:
‘Many male British officials enjoyed nautches, as the British represented the performances and performers as the epitome of Eastern decadence … Indian courtesans became fixed in British male fantasies and were seen as signifying Eastern debauchery and institutionalized sensuality …
‘This image of the nautch and nautch-girls would be perpetuated by British narratives into the nineteenth century and become symbolic of the region. Anne Elwood (1796-1873), during her travels in India in the late 1820s, observed a nautch performance and described it as ‘so perfectly new and so completely Oriental, that I was much delighted.’
‘Elwood’s description of a nautch as ‘so completely Oriental’ demonstrates how the British had come to represent this form of cultural performance as the epitome of the exotic and erotic East. In addition to being symbolic of the East, nautch performances also represented the excessive and luxurious nabob lifestyle and the Orientalized Company servant …
‘Many rich British officials, as they increasingly emulated the luxurious lifestyles of Indian elites, maintained their own troops of nautch-girls in order to entertain their guests. The image of nabobs enjoying and experiencing nautches was integrally related to Orientalist understandings of Indian women as being sexually available to conquering and colonizing British forces. Subsequently, it was not unusual for a British nabob, who had his own troop of nautch-girls, to select one as his sexual partner as a ‘temporary bibi on a salary’ …
‘This demonstrates that nautch-girls, and the constructions that surrounded them as sexualized and racialized Others, played an important role in the representation of British nabobs in eighteenth-century colonial India.
‘Furthermore, the British outlook on India and nautch-girls was influenced by Enlightenment theories and the East India Company’s policy of non-interference in Indian culture and religious traditions. Owing to the lack of traditional British entertainment, such as balls, in India during the early colonial period, particularly before the nineteenth century, Company officials eagerly took part in Indian forms of entertainment, including the nautch.
‘The British continued to patronize nautch performances, which caused many courtesans to move to British settlements and stations. Nautch-girls were also employed by the British army as entertainment for the soldiers. The British viewed Indian forms of entertainment, such as the nautch, in an Orientalist manner, similar to their perceptions of Indian lifestyles.
‘The excess of the British nabob lifestyle was justified through Orientalist representations of India. Nautch performances were also politically significant for British officials to attend, as they demonstrated the adoption of cultural aspects the British associated with Indian forms and symbols of political authority …’
This summing-up is fair and shows at least one important angle from which the relationship between dancer and colonial audience in company Bengal could be construed. Yet one must concede at the same time that the element of sheer delight in the dance, however imperfectly understood it might have been, is also evinced in many contemporary writings, and does not preclude real admiration and, in some cases, real love too. Apart from this, it is worth recalling that multitudes of dancers were kept at the courts of wealthy Indian nawabs and that, when they lived in kothas apart from the courts in quasi-familial communities, they offered their services to all who were able to afford them. Again, contemporary writings often mention that these women were literate and cultivated, and skilled in the arts of poetry, music and dance.
One of the oddest of these contemporary writings is the long satirical poem, Tom Raw, The Griffin, by Sir Charles D’Oyly (1781-1845) and James Atkinson (1780-1852), the company surgeon and orientalist. The book was illustrated by D’Oyly with two depictions of the ‘nautch’. D’Oyly was born in Murshidabad in 1881 and, after completing his schooling in England, returned to India at the age of sixteen to spend most of the remainder of his life there in EIC employ. He was an amateur artist of high ability, who founded the ‘Behar School of Athens’ in Patna in 1824 and operated a lithographic press between 1828 and 1831, during which time several Indian artists, including Jairam Das and Shiv Dayal, were trained in the school’s’ western painting techniques.
The book was published in 1828 though its preface is dated April 1, 1824. The publisher was Rudolph Ackermann, a Bavarian lithographer who had set up shop in London, and who also published Smith’s Asiatic Costumes. Almost immediately after its release it was suppressed and withheld from periodical review – to such an extent that the introduction to the 2020 Cambridge critical edition refers to it as a ‘lost satire’. Its portrayal of the grotesque and farcical elements of Company rule and Company types was not appreciated by those whom it lampooned, together with their rough-and-ready idea of empire.
In the parlance of the time, a ‘griffin’ was, as D’Oyly himself puts it ‘a Johnny Newcome in the East’. The poem in twelve cantos puts Tom Raw through a series of bizarre experiences at the hands of opulently seedy Company officials and their indigenous facilitators, the ‘Baboos’. Descriptions of the dance occur from lines 3737 to 3825 and are depictions of an event which Tom Raw attends at the house of the wealthy local ‘nob’ (a comically shortened form of ‘nabob’, itself an anglicized derivative from nawab) named Kishen.
Though the poem is farce and satire throughout, there is a sustained pause from the purely ridiculing note when the dancers are described – with one or two comic asides. Rather than reproduce the entire section of the poem here, I will present it as a series of prose extracts:
‘See! How invitingly the creatures dance. What elegance and ease in every motion! … Their step is slow and measured … a grave devotion to time, and suppleness of figure’s taper … An ample robe of fine transparent muslin, encircling their slight forms, dependent flows o’er silken trousers loose and rustling, that scarce a little naked foot expose … Their hair no wreaths of gaudy flow’rs bedeck, but richly oiled and neatly parted too, meets in a knob above, or down the neck behind, falls, dangling in a plaited cue … What shall we say of nose-encircling rings, or the rich pendants of the loaded ear … but chief the bells they round their ankles wear, that to the motions of their well-made feet jingle in cadence to the native air, and mark the time – now solemn, and now fleet, as on the echoing floor they tremulously beat … Or how describe the graceful play of arms, which, beautifully waving as they move, reveals at every step a thousand charms, expressing terror, languishment, or love, while their dark, speaking eyes unceasingly rove o’er all around … with uplift arms her filmy veil is spread like a transparent canopy, and light as cobwebs on the lawn … Rolling from side to side her airy head, swift as the agile roe’s elastic bound, then, in a giddy evolution led, her full robes whirling gracefully around, she sinks amidst her sparkling drap’ry to the ground … Still, to the cadence of the sprightly air, her supple limbs and waving head she plies, now, drooping forward, bows with modest care; now, backward bending, flash her beaming eyes; and, midway now, her form is seen to rise till, once more standing, she resumes the dance … And many a varied attitude she tries, and many a winning smile and amorous glance, that … might even Mahomet entrance …’
It can hardly be denied that, taken prosaically out of its farcical context, D’Oyly’s description of the dancer and the dance reveals not only an intimate acquaintance with the art but a talent for lively representation of its expressive and kinetic qualities. Once again we are introduced to a richly attired and bejewelled performer whose dance, though charming and passionate, is marked by a modesty of presentation. Again, too, we see the variations in pace, with subtle abhinaya interludes punctuated by chakkars. To such an extent, indeed, are these switches in temperament and motion made present to us that we can almost see in them a Kathak recital as we know it today.
(It is worth observing the accuracy of depiction attempted by D’Oyly even in a satirical cartoon of this kind. The iconographic statuary shows Durga flanked on the left by Saraswati and Ganesha, and on the right by Lakshmi. In the foreground Durga’s mythical lion – sometimes replaced by a horse – is killing the evil demon Mahishasura. This is pure Shakti-ite iconography, yet the ‘Ramjunny’ (Ramjani) Hindu dancers are wearing costumes identical to those worn by ‘Mussulman’ proto-Kathak dancers as they were depicted at the time, and the dance-steps described are similar too.)
Apart from the cartoon-like illustrations for his satire, D’Oyly also made other depictions of dancers, one of which is used to illustrate Thomas Williamson’s The Costumes and Customs of Modern India (c. 1824):
Finally, there is his charming ‘Patna Nautch’, which provides perhaps a more serious pictorial version of the dance described in Tom Raw:
Several other artists, both European and indian, were producing pictures of dancers in this period, and from the three decades preceding it. These include such painters as Tilly Kettle, Emily Eden, Johann Zoffany, William Prinsep, Balthazar Solvyns and ‘the Gilbert artist’. Their pictures contribute importantly to our visual understanding of the dance economy in the Fort William Bengal Presidency and to its meaning in the colonial but still multicultural society in which it was presented and appreciated. These artists will be dealt with in a separate article.
Notes:
- Plates and text for Mrs S.C. Belnos are taken from Twenty-four Plates Illustrative of Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal, Smith & Elder, 1832.
- Plates and text for Captain Robert Smith are taken from Asiatic Costumes from Drawings taken during a Residence in India, 1851 edition, R. Ackerman, Repository of Arts.
- Plates and extracts from Charles D’Oyly and James Atkinson are taken from Tom Raw, The Griffin: A Burlesque Poem, R. Ackerman, 1828.
- For an insight into Company society in early 19th-century Bengal see P.J. Marshal, The White Town of Calcutta under the Rule of the East India Company, Modern Asian Studies vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 307-331, May 2000.
- The edited extract from Grace E.S. Howard is taken from Courtesans in Colonial India: Representations of British Power through Understandings of Nautch-Girls, Devadasis, Tawa-ifs and Sex-Work, c.1750-1883, pp. 41-45, University of Guelph, Ontario, May 2019.
- For the possible identity of Captain Robert Smith see J.P. Losty, Disentangling the Robert Smiths, British Library Blog, December 9, 2013.
End.
Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History 