The Tropic Trapeze: Circus in Colonial India
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The Tropic Trapeze: Circus in Colonial India Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München vorgelegt von Anirban Ghosh Kolkata, India 2014 1 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Christopher Balme Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 24.01.2014 2 Acknowledgements No labour of love is achieved single-handedly and this dissertation needed a lot of blessings from a lot of wonderful (if not exotic) people. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Dr. Christopher Balme for his immense patience and generosity in handling my requests. His written suggestions were invaluable along with the conversations we had over these three years. Nic, the Co-ordinator for our project, was a genie for all of us. I would also like to thank Gero for innumerable evenings of serious discussions. Lisa, who is going to be the one of the best performance studies scholars, I thank for being my soul sister among other things. This dissertation is truly transnational because of its constant travels to Munich including the final stages of writing and no amount of gratitude can alleviate my debt towards Louisa in this regard. Atig, Anirban, Amitava and Neha and Priyanka were my pillars of strength (despite their cynicism). I would like to thank the numerous curators in the archives and museums where I worked. Special mention should also be made of Dr. William Rodenhuis who helped me navigate the labyrinths of Haartman’s Circus Collection in Amsterdam. Mr. Gille, from the Hagenbeck archive, was very helpful in locating exact Indian themes in the archive. The staff of Victoria and Albert Museum and the British library in London, I am thankful to. Special thanks also to Mr Sreedharan Champad and his encyclopedic knowledge of the circus. Finally I would like to thank my mother and other family members for putting up with my tantrums during my writing. I dedicate this dissertation to my father, Amal Kumar Ghosh, who passed away before this could see the light of the day. Last but not the least; I declare that all errors in this thesis are mine. The arguments and views expressed in this thesis are solely mine. 3 Contents Pages Introduction 6-29 Chapter one: The early circuses of Colonial India 30-83 The backdrop 30-31 The texts 32-34 Questions about beginnings 35-36 The pioneers 37-42 Intermingling, offshoots from main circuses and other ventures 42-44 Transnational context of Indian themes 44-48 First contacts 48-49 Lone wolves in transitional spaces: Indian performers outside India 50-55 Individual native performers and famous tricks 56-65 Foreign troupes travelling in India 65-67 Ethnographic exhibitions and other spaces 68-71 Patrons of the circus 71-72 Tent spaces and networking 72-75 Circus publicity 75-76 International tours of Indian Circus companies 76-79 Last circuses in India 79-81 Postscript 82-83 Chapter Two: Race, Gender and Cultural mobility 84-119 1. The Woman’s question: Appropriation and Transgression 84-94 1. 1 Shabira, the powerful 84-85 1.2 Sushila Sundari 85-89 1.3 Mrinmoyee 89-91 1.4 Rukmabai 91-93 1. 5 Shantibala 93 4 1.6 Chatre’s wife:The first femme fatale of Indian circus 93- 94 2 The X-(wo)men of Colonial Circus: Race and Gender 94-104 2.1 The ‘not quite’ whites 94-97 2. 2 White performers and British respectability/responsibility: The ‘quite’ whites 97- 102 2.3 Up in the air: The problematic aerialist 102-104 3. Where the wild things were: Deconstructing the ‘abnormal’ and the ‘freak’ 105- 115 3.1 Authenticity of the ‘displayable’ body 105-110 3.2 A first 110-111 3.2.1 Subcontinent freak show: Indian and global probes 111-115 4. Characters marked for death: love, longing and exile in circus life 116-119 Chapter three 120-146 A. Escape from Europe: Abandonment, trafficking and mobility in Colonial circus networks A.1 The networks and details 122-123 A.2 The rite of passages 123-127 A.3 Diplomacy 127-129 A.4 Fresh off the boat and not quite so: Indian travelers’ experience abroad 129-141 B. The Animal Kingdom and its masters B.1 Sources, stories and estimates of the animal world 132-141 B. 2 The Hagenbeck Firm: Origin, Network and ideological insights 142-146 Concluding remarks 147-154 Bibliography 154-159 List of figures 160-163 5 INTRODUCTION In this dissertation, an attempt is made to historically understand the circus within a colonial landscape and how it affected human attitudes towards ideas of performance and entertainment in general. For the sake of logistics, a temporal period of 1880 to 1940 is fixed, keeping in mind that origin stories and distinct breaks are but narrative devices of control. This introduction will touch on several aspects of the circus and circus histories before expanding them on a larger scale in the subsequent chapters. The obsession of the nineteenth century was History, ‘with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world’1. The hierarchy of time over space ceases when, as Foucault prophesizes, that ‘the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed’2. The reality and comprehensibility of a space is structured and Heidegger’s thesis reveals the transformation of the perceptual world into a sensible framework or unit, where a picture is a matrix of co- ordinates represented by the mathematical system of linearity and perspective and is explained as a scientific and mathematical mode.3 The map excels over time in its disciplinary and capillary manifestations of power. Space assumes an important marker of categorization and knowledge production; within this framework the discussion of the circus, as a spatial phenomenon, is very important. The circus invented a new space, a space of dissent as well as a site of construction of new identities and the reproduction of old ones. The circus space was a bounded yet extremely malleable space. From disembodied and fluid spaces of entertainment (namely plays, vaudeville, burlesque and other nineteenth century theatrical works) circus emerged into a space, which was named and mapped. Even when the circus moved on its route from one place to the other it had a specific place to inhabit. For the audience, experiencing and understanding the circus space was completely different from their daily ‘crossings’ and ‘movements’ in different zones within the urban landscape. ‘Spectators are confronted by an unusual density of thresholds as if it were, mutatis mutandis, a private home. Access and paths are regulated, as is the time at 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986): 22. 2 Ibid. 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question concerning technology and other essays, Trans. William Lovitt (New York, London: Garland Publishing Inc,1977), 116. 6 which some gates can be crossed under specified conditions. The spectators navigate a new geography through corridors bordered by forbidden zones.’4 The circus transformed a daily, ‘everyday’, ‘comprehensible’ pedestrian space into a complex site full of alien signs and mysterious alleys. The original space, that was easily navigable, was now strewn with metaphors and real signs that precluded easy movement. And when the audience is seated in case of a houseful intimate spaces are destabilized among audience members. The audience is bound in a binary bind with the circus players. To return to the reified space of the circus, the performative acts of the circus created a periphery. In pre-colonial/religious/pre-industrial times Performance as entertainment was connected within a socio-religious framework and the regime of work and play was not strictly separated; the performers also did not serve as periphery markers within the societal fabric. The circus acts, denoted as rituals, consolidated the creation of boundaries; by performing these rituals the performers were separated and alienated from the rest of the societal imagination. The spatial feature of the circus consolidates and appropriates performances which were/are disembodied and scattered by concentrating them within a single site, geographically strict and ‘really’ comprehendible, the act of performance and the performer himself/herself gets deified within a specific zone. And the acts symbolized leisure and play or rather defined that their ‘work’ was play for the audience. Therefore, suggesting the division of work and play within a societal structure be strictly separated; implying further that the labour of the circus performers was in the consumption regimes of the ‘working’, ‘paying’ audience. By rendering the labour of the circus performer into a commodity the society sought to manipulate and represent the circus according to their wishes. The circus was a market of objects that worked according to the desired ‘demand’ of the customer. This in turn erased the violence that went into providing for the ‘supply’ to that demand.5 The zones from where the circus operated were reflective of the dichotomous nature of the circus’ existence within the societal imagination. Away from the ‘normative’ daily 4 Paul Bouissac, Semiotics at the Circus: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton,2010) , 15. 5 When Marx exclaimed about the quixotic nature of the commodity (here the circus performer), he was referring to its existence within the form of exchange, and this distinct phenomenon is articulated by the advertisements of a particular commodity (because, according to Marx, the exchange value of the commodity assumes an independent existence and hence more manipulability).