Chapter 7
More Hereditary Performers: The Women
Because of the obvious link between the dance called kathak and the group of hereditary performing artists called Kathaks, it seems to make most sense to focus on the Kathak birādarī when looking into the history and origins of the dance. Yet, as demonstrated in Chapter 5, the great majority of dancers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century records are women, and one of the characteristics of the Kathak community is that the women do not perform. This exclusion is not only documented in the British census reports, but also visible today in the activities of the rural Kathavacak families where the women do not participate in public performances. The women documented in the iconography, treatises and travel writings of the previous centuries were therefore not Kathaks, yet as both musicians and dancers they played a central role in North Indian performance practice.
The role of women in kathak dance presents its own set of paradoxes. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the majority of stage performers and teachers both within India and in its diaspora have been women from middle- or upper-class backgrounds unrelated to any of the hereditary communities of performers. Most of the literature disseminating the dominant narrative identifies the presence of female dancers as something new, stating that in the past ‘male dancers [had] a hegemony in the temples and also in the courts’ (Narayan 1998: 25; see also Khokar 1984: 134 and Trivedi 2000: 297–8). A more current narrative presents kathak as a dance without gender hierarchies or divisions, in which men and women perform the same material. This is certainly true in training and performance practice today and arguably has been the case since the appearance of kathak as a classical dance in the 1930s and 1940s. There are attempts to connect this to historical evidence or ancient Sanskritic theory (as in Shah 1998, Morelli 2007: 107–8, Trivedi 2012: 182), but these seem somewhat forced and once again say more about the process of linking to ancient origins that anything solid about the dance’s history (see Chapter 9). On the other hand, the importance of examining kathak’s gender issues has formed a central part of the research of Pallabi Chakravorty who connects the history of kathak firmly to nineteenth-century women’s dance in Kolkata (2008). Certainly the glimpses of Kathaks as cross-dressers performing as women, the ascribing of certain material to men or women in Sarmāya-yi Iśrat, not to mention the dominant narrative’s continued insistence that the women appropriated the dance the Kathaks brought to the court makes a closer examination of the performance practice of hereditary female performers a crucial part of the story of kathak.
The prominence of women and comparative rarity of men in the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documentation was something that struck me in the initial stages of my research. The most common explanation I found for this disparity was that although the majority of dancers were women, they were taught by the men who were the holders of the tradition (see for example Devi 1972: 166 and Narayan 1998: 22). This is certainly in keeping with the descriptions in the census reports, but leads to questions about the choreographic material. The uncomfortable association of ‘dancing girls’ with the sex trade begs the question: if the Kathaks were the descendants of temple dancers and storytellers, what in their devotional repertoire would have been suitable to teach to the women? The dominant narrative deals with this by placing the blame on the women themselves, who are said to have taken the dance taught to them by the Kathaks and corrupted it into ‘a Kathak of their own – a style which while retaining the basic graces of the art, divested itself of much of its dignity and directed itself towards sensualism’ (Khokar 1984: 134). But these and other forceful assertions regarding the different contexts and purposes of kathak and nautch are contradicted by passages acknowledging the role of courtesans and nautch girls in preserving kathak after the collapse of court patronage. Khokar himself, six pages after the previous statement, wrote that although ‘the nautch girls as a class used dance not as an art but as an artifice to help them in their vocation … it must be conceded that there were some among them who were serious and highly accomplished practitioners of the art’ (Khokar 1984: 140). The short chapter entitled ‘Nautch-Girls’ in Volume III of Classical and Folk Dances of India (Baijnath 1963) offers a longer presentation of this argument, ending with the hope that ‘perhaps the debt our people owe to the hapless Nautch girls will come to be recognized for preserving the continuity of kathak style’ (Baijnath 1963: 20). These statements, although presented in a framework designed to reinforce hereditary male authority and ownership of the dance, nonetheless recognize a strong hereditary female presence in the dance’s past. Critically unpacking this part of the dance’s history, however, threatens the hegemony of the Kathaks and, with the exception of Chakravorty, scholars have only rarely attempted it.
There is, nevertheless, a lot of very good research on the role of women in Hindustani music history. Although most Indian and Western scholarship initially ignored or minimalized the presence of hereditary female musicians and dancers, Joep Bor (1986/7), Peter Manuel (1987 and 1989), Vidya Rao (1990 and 1996) Robert Ollikkala (1997), Jennifer Post (1989 and 2000), Regula Qureshi (2001 and 2006), Lalita du Perron (2007) and Pallabi Chakravorty (2008) have all contributed to the long-overdue recognition of the contributions of professional female performers to the development and preservation of North Indian classical art. Moreover, Veena Oldenburg (1984 and 1992), Amelia Maciszewski (2001a, 2001b and 2006), Fouzia Saeed (2002), Carol Babiracki (2004 and 2008) and Davesh Soneji (2012) have taken the step of talking to the performers themselves, allowing the women’s long marginalized voices to be heard at last. Generally, with the exceptions of Soneji, Babiracki and Chakravorty, scholars have concentrated on musical aspects rather than dance but since hereditary female performers by and large both sang and danced, the historical and contextual data is relevant to both art forms. This work is very current and ongoing and, rather than provide a comprehensive summary, the following seeks primarily to contextualize the question of the relationship between ‘nautch’ and kathak dance.
Professional Women in Hindustani Music and Dance
Before the twentieth century, professional female performers in India were, by and large, from hereditary classes and castes that occupied a liminal position in society, combining music and dance with some aspect of the sex trade. These hereditary groups formed an array of specialist communities ranging from street performers to temple women, called devadāsīs, and highly skilled courtesans known as 
awā’ifs or bāījis. Far from a homogeneous group, the women came from various communities, some of which were lineages of female performers and others which were groups containing entertainers of both sexes. Women therefore performed in a variety of artistic specialties and performance contexts, each having a place in the existing social hierarchies at a given time. In the Mughal period, groups of female performers included Kanchanis, who were ‘high class courtesans … allowed to enter the palace’ (Bor 1986/87: 82), Lolis, Lulis or Lolonis, who performed at me
fils in their own houses (Brown 2003: 139), and Domnis, Dharis, Natwas and Dafzans, some of whom performed only for women inside the aram (Brown 2003: 139; see also Manuel 1989: 49, Kothari 1989: 7 and 32, Nevile 1996: 35). According to Sharar, the courtesans of nineteenth-century Lucknow were divided into three groups: the Kanchanis, the Chuna Walis and the Nagarnt (1975: 146). The censuses also show a range of groups. Sherring wrote that the Gaunharin ‘are the natch girls or dancing women’ who ‘not only dance and sing, but also play on the Sarangi and Tabla’ (Sherring 1974a: 275). Nesfield placed Brijbasi, Gandharp, Kanchan, Tawaif, Nayak and Negpatar under ‘the common name of Kanchan or Paturiya’, and described them as ‘the hereditary prostitutes of Hindustan – an extraordinary function’ (Nesfield 1885: 7). Both Sherring and Rose clearly linked the women of the Kanchani, Kanjar and Ramjani communities with musical performance and prostitution, and identified the men of numerous other communities including the Kathaks, Bhairiya, Dharis, Dums, Mirasis and Nats as the accompanists or teachers of dancing girls and prostitutes (Sherring 1974a and 1974b, and Rose 1970 vols 2 and 3).
Throughout the centuries in North India, the women of the courtesan communities played as important a role as the hereditary male performers in the presentation and dissemination of North Indian musical tradition. During Mughal times, the awā’ifs or courtesans occupied a valued although still not quite reputable social role, and can often be identified by the surname Bai. Unlike respectable married women at the time, awā’ifs were literate and educated, enjoyed the legal right to own property and to inherit from their female relatives. Many managed to amass quite large fortunes principally through receiving gifts from wealthy male patrons and admirers. They were capable not only of singing and dancing, but also of reciting poetry, discussing politics and teaching young men manners and refinement. Wealthy and aristocratic men from high social positions sought the company of awā’ifs, in whose ko
hās or salons, they could relax and enjoy the pleasures of witty conversation, fine music, food and drink. Association with a famous awā’if could increase a man’s reputation and social standing; certainly he would be able to network with other important men at her establishment.
During the period of imperial decline between the death of Aurangzeb, the last of the ‘Great Mughals’, and the beginning of the British Raj in 1858, awā’ifs continued to fulfil this same role: hosting artistic evenings in their kohās, and performing music and dance. Courtesan performers are prominent in the cameos of Muraqqa‘-yi Dehlī, and Maūdan al-Mūsīqī contains the names of many female musicians, most of whom have the surname Bai. They are also visible in the colonial accounts of the same time, although subsumed under the label of ‘nautch’ or dancing girls. Although described in the censuses and travel writings as ‘public women’ and ‘whores’, it is important to realize that the awā’ifs were not simply prostitutes, available to anyone for further pleasures after the performance, but usually mistresses who were faithfully attached to one patron at a time (Post 1989: 98, see also Morcom 2013). Opinion is divided, however, as to how independent the awā’ifs really were. Some scholars see them as forming a sub-stratum that functioned as a form of covert resistance to the patriarchal domination of mainstream culture (Oldenburg 1992), whereas others argue that courtesans and respectable ladies or begums were two sides of the same coin, each kept in her place by social restrictions in order to fulfil different male needs (Rao 1996 and Saeed 2002).
The public performing art of the awā’if in the nineteenth century consisted of singing and dancing. They did not usually play instruments, but hired male musicians to accompany them and teach their daughters. The men most usually identified as the professional associates of the awā’ifs are the Mirasis, but from the information in the censuses, it seems clear that the Kathaks played a similar role. The courtesans sang classical genres like dhrupad and khyāl, but were in particular associated with the vocal repertoire now categorized as ‘light’ classical: ghazal, humrī, tappa and dadra. These songs, particularly the poetic genres of humrī and ghazal, used ambiguous lyrics that struck a tantalizing balance between devotional and sexual topics, and a set of rāgs or modes that allow the performer to shift, flirtatiously, to related but ‘incorrect’ patterns (Manuel 1989, du Perron 2007 and Qureshi 1989). To the best of our knowledge, in a typical late-nineteenth-century performance, the female performer initially sang while seated and enhanced her vocal performance with expressive gestures. She could improvise on any phrase, repeating certain words and lines of poetry while using gestures and eye contact to draw attention to the layers of suggestive meanings. When melody and meaning had been adequately explored, the tablā player would shift from the song’s rhythmic cycle (most commonly the 14- or 16-beat dīpcā
dī or cancar), to drut tintāl. The courtesan would then rise to dance, using expressive movements of her whole body including the postures identified as gat in the treatises and the gestures with her veil or skirt captured in the iconography.
Uniquely characteristic in this performance practice were the ways in which poetry, gesture, music and dance formed an erotic yet elegant synthesis and were, in effect, a single genre. Although individual women are described in Maūdan al-Mūsīqī and Muraqqa‘-yi Dehlī as particularly good singers or promising dancers, the art form itself comprised all four elements; dancing would have probably always included singing and singing certainly would always have included gesture that enhanced the evocative poetry. The colonial travel accounts are unanimous in describing slow, graceful dancing which favoured gliding steps, alluring eye-contact, and movements involving the dancers’ skirts and especially veils. Equally characteristic is the combination of singing and gesture, called adā, which was performed either as a dance or from a seated position. Twentieth-century writers popularly call this dance ‘kathak’ (whether or not it is considered a corrupt version), but contemporary accounts do not give it that name so its use is therefore anachronistic. The only named dance associated with female performers is the kaharvā, today a folk tāl, in which the dancer would wear a man’s turban and perform lively movements (Broughton 1813: 192). Other descriptions, of course, exist, but it must be reiterated that dancers in India were not a uniform group, and one must not assume that all dances or dancers were somehow related.
One of the reasons that so many styles and types of dance by women became so homogenized was the British use of the term nautch for all forms of female entertainment and nautch girl for all classes of performers. Faced with a cultural system more like the geisha tradition in Japan than anything in contemporary Europe, the British authorities, audiences and ethnographers made little attempt to understand the enormous differences between awā’ifs and street-walkers, and documented only dancing girls who were all by European standards prostitutes (see Bor 1986/87: 81–96). The British, as the evidence in the letters, travelogues and iconography shows, were fascinated by the nautch and although some of the writers felt bored and superior, many others showed their captivation by quite complementary depictions of the dancers and their ‘Hindostanee airs’ in words, paint and musical transcription. Moreover, many British East India Company executives, particularly before the Raj, were enthusiastic patrons and arranged nautch performances at their own parties and ceremonies (see among others Woodfield 2000: 149–80 and Khokar 1996).
The exotic allure of the nautch, however, faded as the nineteenth century progressed. As outlined in Chapter 2, by the early nineteenth century, still smarting from the loss of the United States of America, British authorities became increasingly wary of any sign of wavering or divided loyalties on the part of their Indian colonists. ‘Going native’, including patronage of indigenous arts, became actively discouraged as the policies and philosophies of Orientalism gave way to Anglicism. Mid-century, the environment changed still further. One of the first priorities of the Raj, formed in 1858 by British Act of Parliament, was to ensure that the population was under such control that the violence and rebellion of the 1857 uprising could never happen again. The annexation of princely states like Awadh now made wealthy and art-loving Indian patrons increasingly rare, and the initiation of controlling measures like health inspections, identity tickets and registration for ‘public women’ contributed further in lowering the status of professional women performers. The new customers were the soldiers of the British Army, and the Cantonment Act of 1864 encouraged the relocation of women to the bazaars near the regimental place of residence just outside the cities. The military, unlike the Indian aristocrats or the earlier ‘White Mughals’, had no understanding of musical performances or the subtleties of Urdu poetry and culture, and were interested only in sexual services (Oldenburg 1984: 133–42 and Rao 1996: 288–91).
Well-meaning missionaries, first-wave feminists and the increasingly politically active, British-educated Indian middle class further contributed to the demise of awā’if culture. Protestant missionaries had been effective in initiating social reforms in India since the East India Company passed laws banning widow immolation in 1829. Equally involved in social reform in the nineteenth century was the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu religious institution supporting monotheism that agitated against child marriage and for widow remarriage and education for girls. By the end of the century, Muslim reformers identified lack of education as one of the reasons Indian society had left itself open to foreign (British) domination, with some like Mumtaz Ali of Lahore advocating education for both men and women (Minault 1998). British women joined the fray, some traveling to India and others raising awareness of ‘the wrongs of Indian womanhood’1 back home in England. The goals and values of male and female, British and Indian reformers did not always coincide and radical and conservative factions often clashed. Religion also played a part as Christian, Hindu and Muslim social activists often held very different opinions on how Indian society should be improved. They all agreed, however, that the status of Indian women was one of the clearest symptoms of the deterioration of society, and that Indian women generally ‘needed to be rescued from ignorance and superstition and also from abuse’ (Minault 1998: 139). One of the most efficacious movements, supported by all the factions or at least not actively opposed by any of them, was the Anti-Nautch Movement (for more information see Oddie 1979, Forbes 1996, Sundar 1995: 236–56, Rao 1996, Minault 1998).
The Anti-Nautch
The Anti-Nautch Movement was officially launched at an open meeting in Madras in 1893. Initially focusing on the devadāsī system in South India and culminating in the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947, it rapidly gathered support throughout the country through newspaper articles, letters and petitions. Social leaders were asked to cease their patronage of events where nautch girls were part of the entertainment, and men were requested to take personal pledges that they would never visit establishments where nautch was performed. Advocates for the ban on nautch argued that they were fighting brothels and trafficking in women – all dancers were prostitutes and the performing arts of hereditary awā’ifs and devadāsīs were simply fronts for prostitution (Forbes 1996: 185). The enthusiastic participation of Indian agitators in this struggle can be understood in several ways. Unlike many of the other reforms, such as widow remarriage or the prohibition of child marriage, banning nautch did not call any deep-seated Hindu or Muslim customs or traditions into question. Furthermore, part of the resistance reformers had found to their attempts to educate girls was a perception that the only type of woman to be educated and literate would be a awā’if or a devadāsī (Oddie 1979: 106–8). The Indian participants in social reform and eventually nationalist politics were on the whole middle- or upper-middle-class men who had been educated in Britain. They had no immediate cultural connection to these types of performances, which had been patronized by the Indian and Anglo-Indian aristocracies, and they had also absorbed a certain amount of Victorian prudery along with their education. Lastly, this growing Indian intelligentsia had begun to ponder the fact of their occupation and to scrutinize Indian society for weaknesses that might have led to such a situation. Decadence, corruption and indulgence became some of the favourite failings, and the nautch-girls were handy scapegoats on whom to tack these social ills. Victorian morality combined with Edwardian suffrage and feelings of inferiority created an Indian need to purge society of immoral and backward elements (Sundar 1995: 245). Professional women performers were clear targets.
There is a tendency of authors like Baijnath (1963) and Nevile (1996) to write of ‘nautch girls’ as if they all suddenly disappeared. It is important to realize that, whereas the awā’if culture with its refined ethos and context did indeed fade and eventually die out through the first half of the twentieth century, the women themselves did not. Faced with enormous social disapproval and increasingly rare opportunities to perform for connoisseurs they adapted as they could. Some of the last remaining opportunities for aristocratic patronage for awā’ifs were eliminated by the 1957 parliamentary bill abolishing the rights of the aristocratic zamīndārs (Ollikkala 1997: 114–15), and the adjustments the women were forced to make eventually resulted in a division of professions and identities. The most musically skilled became musicians and actresses. Many of the early film stars were former awā’ifs and early recordings often feature singers with the surname Bai, although some performers can be heard announcing themselves as ‘amateur’ to distance themselves from any connection with a professional past (du Perron 2007: 61). Some married, and the most fortunate had sympathetic families who encouraged their continuing musical careers (Ollikkala 1997, Maciszewski 2001a and 2001b, Qureshi 2001). Many others, however, faced with increasing poverty, slipped further into prostitution and their artistic performances became simply a prelude to their actual occupation (Saeed 2002, see also Morcom 2013).
This period also saw a separation of singing and dancing. Scholars and dancers today sometimes cite a hierarchy of female performers that places those who sing only and are called Bai at the top. Next are women who sing and dance and are called Jan, followed by Kanji, the more general entertainers, and finally Khanagi or Khanki, who are the only ones clearly defined as prostitutes (Chakravorty 2008: 33 and Maciszewski 1998: 106). Yet, Indian courtesans through the ages have been described as performing dance-songs (Manuel 1989: 50–52), and from the accounts of individual performers in Maūdan al-Mūsīqī, it would seem that specialization was a matter of talent rather than an ascribed status. Indeed, Imam included female performers like Ghanda Bai and Khursheed Bai, whom he described as dancers as well as musicians (Vidyarthi 1959a: 22), and the surname Jan is not to be found. There is no indication of either hierarchy or surnames in Sharar (1975). By the early twentieth century, however, there was a stigma associated with female dancing that was not applied as rigorously to singing. It is unclear when the above social order appeared, but it stands now as a clear witness to a forced peeling apart of music and dance, which had long existed as a single art form. This rupture was a product of both the Anti-Nautch Movement, which connected all dance with prostitution, and the emerging nationalist sentiment, which increasingly viewed music as one of India’s great cultural assets. In order for music to ascend to the level of national treasure it first had to be forcibly separated from its past association with courtesans. Music was consequently ‘disembodied’, and dance, female dance, was made largely responsible for the immorality associated with the performing arts (see Post 1989: 104–5, Rao 1996: 305, du Perron 2007: 148 and 150).
The awā’if as an educated courtesan is not in the literature of the first half of the twentieth century where female dancers of preceding centuries are referred to only as nautch girls. Yet, the association of Kathaks with female dancers and the similarities of the twentieth century dance called kathak with nautch demanded some explanation. If nautch is corrupt, yet nautch and kathak are similar, the nautch dancers must have corrupted kathak, or so the argument goes (see, among others, Chatterji 1951: 131–2, Baijnath 1963: 19, Singha and Massey 1967: 131, Khokar 1984: 134, Massey 1999: 23). The former awā’ifs who remained on the concert stage and in the recording studio as singers ceased dancing and often distanced themselves from it, eschewing any sort of gesture or eye contact. Former courtesans as ‘amateur’ singers could begin to forge a new identity – as ‘dancing girls’, they could not. The women who were supposedly responsible for the degeneration of North Indian culture therefore became a nameless, faceless group of women from the past. The ‘nautch girls’, seemingly unrepresented in contemporary society, slipped even further from public view and eventually disappeared, carrying with them the responsibility of the supposed corruption of a temple dance called kathak (see Morcom 2013).
What must be kept in mind is that it was during these very years, the decades leading up to Indian independence in 1947, that kathak as a stage dance was conceptually and choreographically taking shape. As the hereditary female performers of dance were legislated and shamed out of existence, the hereditary male performers, the Kathaks, were taking their place on centre stage. History claims that an existing ‘kathak’ dance was corrupted by the courtesans, but preserved and eventually resurrected by the Lucknow Kathaks. Yet, the Kathaks themselves were the teachers of the dancing girls at least as far back as 1832. It is possible that the women of the birādarī used also to sing and dance publicly, perhaps before the group changed its name, and there is scattered evidence that Kathak boys and perhaps grown men, performed dressed as women. The appearance of postures and other choreographic material associated with the courtesan’s salon in kathak dance is not because the women somehow changed an earlier devotional dance, but rather because, as the hereditary women ceased dancing due to social pressures and prohibition, the entire body of repertoire was left in the hands of their accompanists – the Kathaks.
The legacy of courtesan performance practice in kathak forms a complex combination of influences. Certain aspects of the dance itself, in particular the swaying postures and use of the eyes, are the seductive inheritance of the former context. The stage dance’s most typical accompanying instruments are still tablā and sāragī, instruments closely associated with the kohā and certainly very visible in the iconography (Kippen 1988 and Qureshi 1997). The ‘Mughal’ kathak dance costume for women, with its full skirt, tight bodice and style of jewellery, brings early photographs, paintings and the descriptions of the travel writers to mind. A more unfortunate inheritance has been a continued association of kathak with brothels and misbehaviour. Even today, particularly in the diaspora, some parents are more likely to want their daughters to study South Indian dances – o
issi and in particular bharatanāyam – rather than kathak. Without an emphasis on the more devotional Sanskrit items like vandanā, kathak may still be dismissed as mujrā, the entertaining dance of the red-light district. Many dancers today omit the more obvious courtly repertoire, in particular the salāmi, with the intention of distancing themselves from the dance’s Muslim and courtesan past, and make a point of emphasizing the Hindu devotional aspects of the dance. Certainly, the belief that kathak was for a time distorted by ‘public women’ for immoral ends allows contemporary dancers and audience the comfort of reinterpreting the more sensual aspects of kathak dance in the safe realm of Hindu mythology.
The story that claims that the dance originated as a devotional performance art that was corrupted by female dancers therefore fulfils a crucial role in gentrifying those aspects of the dance which are the legacy of the hereditary women performers of the past. It is only very recently and still only in certain circles that it has become acceptable to speak not only of the connection between Kathaks and hereditary women, but also of the continued role of awā’if choreographic vocabulary in kathak. The separation of dance and music not only disenfranchised the hereditary women who performed both, but also allowed for the disappearance of both dance and dancers so that when the repertoire and the body language of the courtesan reappeared on stage, danced by a new group of non-hereditary female dancers, it was possible to claim that there was no connection (see Chapter 9). Precisely what dances and theatrical arts the migrating Kathaks brought west from Varanasi is not clearly documented probably because the Kathak birādarī then, as now, did not specialize in a single, identifiable art form. After the Kathak women ceased performing, the Kathak men seem to have continued with a combination of singing, dancing, playing instruments like tablā and sāragī, participating in various forms of comic and devotional drama, and accompanying hereditary female performers. Their removal through the Anti-Nautch Movement allowed the artistic material and legacies of both hereditary professional women and the men who accompanied them to combine in the early twentieth century to form a new dance called kathak.