The Art of Imperial Entanglements Nautch Girls on the British Canvas and Stage in the Long Nineteenth Century
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The Art of Imperial Entanglements Nautch Girls on the British Canvas and Stage in the Long Nineteenth Century Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philosophischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg vorgelegt von Zara Barlas, M.A. Erstgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja Zweitgutachterin: Prof. Dr. Dorothea Redepenning Heidelberg, den 6. Mai 2018 Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 5 I Introduction .................................................................................................................. 6 Art and Imperialism ........................................................................................................... 9 Hypothesis and Premise ..................................................................................................21 Disciplinary Theory & Methods in the Arts: A Brief Overview ........................................22 Historical Processes .........................................................................................................33 Overview ..........................................................................................................................42 II Framing an Enigma: The Nautch Girl in Victorian Britain .............................................. 44 Defining the Nautch Girl ..................................................................................................45 The Nautch-Girl Genre .....................................................................................................59 The Nautch Girl, or the Rajah of Chutneypore (1891) ............................................................. 62 The Lure of the Nautch Girl .............................................................................................68 III Cultural Location: Authenticity and Difference ............................................................ 72 Any “Other” Name ...........................................................................................................76 Objects of Association .....................................................................................................80 Authenticities in Attire .....................................................................................................89 The Art of Performance .................................................................................................101 Music ...................................................................................................................................... 102 Dance ..................................................................................................................................... 129 Narratives of Difference on the Stage ...........................................................................135 Society and Religion .......................................................................................................138 2 Locating the Nautch Girl ................................................................................................155 IV Gendering the Nautch Girl ........................................................................................ 158 Establishing Gender, Making Meaning ..........................................................................161 Beauty ............................................................................................................................169 Sexualisation and Eroticisation ......................................................................................188 Objectification ...............................................................................................................206 Seductress and Manipulator ..........................................................................................212 Indolence and Idleness ..................................................................................................222 Traversing Spheres & Shifting Roles ..............................................................................226 The Power of the Nautch Girl ........................................................................................236 V Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 243 Transcultural Art and the Legacies of Imperialism ........................................................252 Appendices .................................................................................................................. 256 Chronology .........................................................................................................................256 Map of India in 1857 ..........................................................................................................260 Glossary ..............................................................................................................................261 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 264 Artworks .............................................................................................................................264 Books, Articles and Manuscripts ........................................................................................268 Newspaper Articles ............................................................................................................281 Webpages and Email Correspondence ...............................................................................282 Images ......................................................................................................................... 283 3 4 Acknowledgements For the completion of this thesis, I owe my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Prof. Dr. Monica Juneja and Prof. Dr. Dorothea Redepenning, who offered their dedicated guidance throughout my journey. It is thanks to their continued support and inspiration that I was able to persevere and to nurture my ideas. I am also grateful to all the staff and my peers at the University of Heidelberg, with a special note of thanks to the Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context, who enabled me to pursue my doctoral studies within a stimulating, inspiring and challenging environment. I am also thankful for the wealth of indispensable resources and support provided by various institutions in the UK, including the British Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate Library and Special Collections & Archives at the University of Kent. A special thank you to my best friend, Dr. Anna Maria Barry, with whom I’ve been fortunate enough to share an amazing adventure, within academia and far beyond. Finally, I am infinitely grateful to my family, for their unremitting love and support, and especially to my husband, for his unyielding encouragement, patience and belief in me. This publication was submitted to Heidelberg University as a doctoral dissertation. 5 I Introduction Culture and the aesthetic forms it contains derive from historical experience. — Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism Corresponding with dramatic shifts in global power relations during an age defined by “enlightenment”, imperialism, conquest and revolution, the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yielded increasingly complex entanglements between cultural, national and other categorical entities. These multifarious interactions were to manifest themselves in various manners, not only through political exploits, but also through societal and cultural practices, through which they could proliferate and gain further significance. In this regard, the power of works of art to present, emphasise and often encapsulate the thinkings of cultures and societies should not be undervalued as historical testimony. From the artist’s conceptualisation to the audience’s reception, as well as all the interlocutors involved in the process of artistic production and negotiation, it is apparent that works of art convey meaning, offering value to historical inquiry. During this age of imperialism, artists – amongst others – were plunged into a new space within which their works would be constructed, received, reconstituted and appropriated. At the same time, the colonised subjects of works of art were to experience a reconstitution their own respective spaces. These processes of entanglement and renegotiation 6 contributed to the shaping of new or hybrid socio-cultural spaces.1 In these hybrid spaces, the historically synthesised borders of nation state and other such locations could be surmounted, giving way to a process of transculturality that reflected interactions across traditionally defined borders and transcended traditional boundaries and binaries. The invasion of India by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC was to mark only the beginning of an extensively increasing interaction between India and what is conventionally (and problematically) understood as “the West”.2 With the continuous flow of interaction came a multitude of political, economic and social consequences, replete with burdened narratives that corresponded with monumental shifts in power and hegemony. The South Asian subcontinent had been no stranger to foreign presence and imperialism, from the arrival of nomadic clans from Central Asia in the tenth century to the arrival of the French, Dutch and Portuguese involved largely