The Representation of the Figure of the Devadasi in European Travel Writing and Art from 1770 to 1820 with specific reference to Dutch writer Jacob Haafner

an exegesis

&

The Pagoda Tree

a novel

by Claire Scobie

BA (Hons) Cambridge

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctorate of Creative Arts at University of Western Sydney, Sydney February 2013 Statement of Authentication

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text, I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

Signed, Claire Scobie. 14 February 2013

Authority of Access

The thesis may be made available for loan after 14 February 2013 and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Gail Jones for her unwavering support from the start. Her wise insight and enthusiasm for my project have been invaluable throughout my candidature. I am fortunate to have had such a generous and understanding supervisor. Thanks also to Professor Ivor Indyk as a steadying hand and to Dr Mridula Chakraborty’s input in the early stages. It’s been a great privilege to be part of the University’s Writing and Society Research Group. Throughout my scholarship, I have benefitted from the range of seminars and particularly valued the time on the Creative Ecologies Retreat and with fellow post-graduates at Varuna. I am grateful to Nirmala Lakshman for assisting with foreign language elements of the text and to VR Devika for her advice on cultural aspects of the novel. I also greatly appreciate the scholarly discussions I’ve had with Joep Bor over the years. Thanks to Melinda Jewell for proofreading the exegesis. On a personal note, I would like to thank Suzanne Leal for telling me to keep going when I thought I couldn’t and most of all, to my husband Aden, for his encouragement, patience and belief throughout.

Note on Citations

This thesis follows the Chicago 15th B Style by implementing shortened citations in footnotes. Please refer to the bibliography for full reference details.

Table of Contents

Table of Illustrations ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Exegesis ...... 1-107 The Representation of the Figure of the Devadasi in European Travel Writing and Art from 1770 to 1820 with specific reference to Dutch writer Jacob Haafner ...... Illustrations of the Devadasi and Nautch Girl ...... 2-9 Introduction ...... 10 Methodology and Process ...... 17 Chapter 1 ...... 23 Pictorial Representations of the Devadasi and Nautch Girl in European and Indian art ...... Chapter 2 ...... 42 Representations of Difference in Eighteenth-century Travel Writing and Jacob Haafner within his Literary Context ...... Chapter 3 ...... 70 Multiple Representations of the Devadasi in the Writings of Jacob Haafner and his Contemporaries ...... Conclusion and Provocations ...... 92 Complete Bibliography ...... 100 Novel ...... 109-468 The Pagoda Tree ...... Part 1: Tanjore 1765 ...... 112 Part 2: Madras 1773 ...... 254 Part 3: Madras 1778 ...... 372 Part 4: Madras 1786 ...... 444 Coda ...... 466 Notes and Sources ...... 469 Further Reading ...... 471

i

Table of Illustrations

Illustrations of the devadasi and nautch girl ...... 2-9 Figure 1 ...... 2 Tilly Kettle, Hindu Temple Scene 1770-71 ...... Figure 2 ...... 3 Tilly Kettle, Dancing Girls (Blacks) 1772 ...... Figure 2i ...... 3 Close-up of Dancing Girls (Blacks) ...... Figure 3 ...... 4 Tilly Kettle, Dancing Girl with a Hookah in Faizabad 1772 ...... Figure 4 ...... 5 Captain Crockatt, A Nautch, Native Dancers at Nizugapatahi Coast of Coromandel East Indies 1801 ...... Figure 5 ...... 6 Charles D’Oyly, A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before an European Family 1810 ...... Figure 5i ...... 6 Close-up of A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before an European Family Figure 6 ...... 7 Anonymous Thanjavur artist, A Nautch Girl and Musicians c. 1805 ...... Figure 6i ...... 7 Close-up of A Nautch Girl and Musicians ...... Figure 7 ...... 8 Anonymous Thanjavur artist, Hindoostany Natch also inscribed Kunchinee (dancing girls) c.1828...... Figure 8 ...... 9 Jacob Haafner, A devadasi from the front 1811 ......

ii Abstract

This thesis examines the figure of the devadasi, or temple dancer, a familiar trope in European travel literature and art from 1770 to 1820. Comprised of two parts, the critical component of the work analyses the representation of the figure of the devadasi through a close reading of a selection of eighteenth-century texts. Historically specific and anchored within travel writing and post-Saidian Orientalist theory, I argue that despite the limitations of these accounts, in both form and content, they shed light upon the complex cross-cultural interactions of the period. The texts range from travel accounts, with a particular focus on Dutch author, Jacob Haafner, contrasted with English Company servant, John Henry Grose and French missionary, Abbé J.A Dubois, some eighteenth-century paintings, and two indigenous works—the erotic Telugu poetry of Muddupalani, an eighteenth-century courtesan and artist, and a little-known Sanskrit work, the Sarva-Deva-Vilasa. I propose that the textual paradoxes and tensions illuminate how the devadasi exercised agency and yet, how her apparent dichotomous nature—embodying the sacred and the sensual—would frequently complicate her representation in the West. The creative component, entitled The Pagoda Tree, is a historical novel set in eighteenth-century south India. Primarily told from the perspective of Maya, a temple dancer, it individualises the personal narrative of a devadasi and intersects her with the larger historical implications of imperial expansion. Informed by the conceptual framework of feminist and revisionist historians, and the recovery scholarship of the devadasi, this approach positions the temple dancer in the fictive space between history, archive and imagination. Together, the two parts of the thesis explore the contradictions and conflicting forces which empower and undermine marginalised figures within colonial discourse, and demonstrate how fiction may assist in their recovery.

iii

‘The body of a woman becomes the body politic and it all comes back to the body in the end’.1

‘The “Oriental Mirage” is thus a phrase that captures an important principle, a metaphor for the way travelling artists have an unstable view of their subject. . . . Try as they might to produce a mirror or reflection of the scene before them, Orientalists, like ethnographers, are limited by their ethnocentrism in attempting to gain knowledge about other cultures; whatever their expertise, the artists’ own culture invariably skews the image. The “Oriental Mirage” in this sense is the impossibility of any artist obtaining full knowledge of the cultural Other that forms his or her subject’.2

1 Mantel 2009, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. 2 Benjamin 2003, 7.

1 Illustrations of the Devadasi and Nautch Girl

Figure 1: Tilly Kettle, Hindu Temple Scene 1770-71

2

Figure 2: Tilly Kettle, Dancing Girls (Blacks) 1772

Figure 2i: close-up of Dancing Girls (Blacks)

3

Figure 3: Tilly Kettle, Dancing Girl with a Hookah in Faizabad 1772

4

Figure 4: Captain Crockatt, A Nautch, Native Dancers at Nizugapatahi Coast of Coromandel East Indies 1801

5

Figure 5: Charles D’Oyly, A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before an European Family 1810

Figure 5i: close-up of A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before an European Family

6

Figure 6: Anonymous Thanjavur artist, A Nautch Girl and Musicians c. 1805

Figure 6i: close-up of anonymous Thanjavur artist A Nautch Girl and Musicians

7

Figure 7: Anonymous Thanjavur artist, Hindoostany Natch also inscribed, Kunchinee (dancing girls) c.1828

8

Figure 8: Jacob Haafner, A devadasi from the front 1811

9 Introduction

This thesis examines how a selection of eighteenth-century texts represented the figure of the devadasi, a familiar trope in European travel literature and art from 1770 to 1820.3 Despite the limitations of these texts, I argue that certain accounts and a selection of visual images illuminate the complex cross-cultural interactions that existed in this period. In my methodology, I employ the overarching framework of ‘histoire croiseé’, or ‘entangled’ history, as a means to analyse the multiplicity of encounters, as opposed to a reductive model of self and other, and East and West.4 This transnational approach specifically focuses on how various relationships, individuals and objects intersect and the consequences arising from the point of crossing, ‘Histoire croisée is concerned as much with the novel and original elements produced by the intercrossing as with the way in which it affects each of the “intercrossed” parties, which are assumed to remain identifiable, even if in altered form’.5 While acknowledging the persistent economic and political impact of colonialism, which places Europe at the centre of cultural exchange, I adopt the view that an informational flow occurs from the centre to the periphery and back again. Histoire croisée recognises both this flow and the mutually beneficial and reciprocal affect in the crossing, ‘intercrossing’ and criss-crossing of cultures, ideas, individuals and practices. It also recognises the asymmetrical effects. If histoire croisée provides the foundation for my exegesis, several inter-related ideas from travel writing theory provide the scaffolding. In both form and content, narratives of travel regularly depict the moment when two cultures meet. I propose that this moment of ‘intercrossing’, reflected in anxieties and paradoxes within the accounts themselves, can present an alternative to colonial discourse. In this, I agree with Dennis Porter that, ‘far from the relatively homogenous products posited by discourse theory,

3 Within the work I will use the term devadasi interchangeably with temple dancer or temple woman, courtesan and dancing girl, noting that the word ‘devadasi’ was historically never a pan-Indian expression, and prior to the twentieth-century each region had its own term. See Apffel-Marglin 1985, 313. See also Soneji 2008, 284, who also notes that 'clevadasi' was widely used in south India when referring to temple women. '[This] is rooted in colonial attempts to classify data on such communities.' 4 Werner and Zimmermann 2006, 38, offer a detailed analysis of histoire croiseé and how it differs to the disciplines of transfer studies and comparative history. See also Kocka 2003, 39-44. 5 Ibid., 38.

10 the works of travel literature . . . reveal the tensions and contradictions that such a theory implies.’6 It is in the writing itself, Porter continues, that ‘the crossings-over and breeches of boundaries occur. . . . Just as there is a continual drift from “practical” into “poetic” language, so does the process of narrativisation shift from the emphasis from the classificatory to the dynamic’.7 In my close reading of the texts, I will analyse narrative forms, imagery, structure and metaphor, and I will situate them in their literary context. The identifying mechanisms I employ include, who holds the power, who holds the voice in a text and who holds the gaze in an image. My selection of texts is based on the criteria of content, rather than aesthetic form, as what I am particularly concerned with is the representation of the figure of the devadasi. A visible artist, whose cultural and financial independence empowered her within native society, the temple dancer of the south and the nautch girl in the north, appears in some of the earliest travel accounts of India circulated in Europe, among them, the writings of Marco Polo.8 By the seventeenth-century the term nautch girl, which is the Anglicized form of the Hindi word nach, meaning dance, was in wide usage. By the 1700s, the popularity of the nautch meant that dancers and entertainers who traditionally would have sought patronage from within indigenous circles began to find it among the British who adopted the custom of the Indian elite to show their hospitality with a performance of dancing girls. Since Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, in which he argues that through the inter-relationship of knowledge and power the West produced the East in a wide corpus of texts, considerable revisions and alternative critiques have challenged and developed Said’s hegemonic model.9 As Roger Benjamin so well argues, Orientalism neglected, ‘the element of exchange in the cross-cultural colonial relationship. . . . [The] power in the colonial situation is not exclusively one-sided, favouring the coloniser alone. The colonised . . . have a distinctive agency or ability to effect outcomes’.10 Of particular relevance to this study is the recognition that there are numerous representations of the Orient, and the acknowledgement that European accounts can

6 Porter 1991, 88. 7 Ibid., 88. 8 Bor 2007, 40-41. 9 MacKenzie 2012, 8-9; Kuehn 2011, 31. 10 Benjamin 2003, 32.

11 consciously or unconsciously represent the subaltern voice and native agency. I suggest a more nuanced and multi-vocal reading of travel accounts reveals that marginal figures, such as the devadasi, could present a challenge to colonial religious and moral authority, and even undermine it. Furthermore, in contrast to Said’s ahistorical approach, my analysis will be historically anchored. It is framed within the understanding that empire is not pre-determined and continuous, but uneven and inconsistent with conflicting and competing interests between regions.11 During the eighteenth-century, an era of exploration, scientific discovery and global maritime voyages, these travel accounts had a wide-ranging impact on political, philosophical and ideological debates. As travel theorists have demonstrated, such narratives once in, ‘the hands of the imperial author [could shape] the accepted history of the colony, the accepted identity of the colonised peoples’.12 By steering away from Said’s limiting binary theory and assumption of homogeneity, I argue that in its negotiation of cultural difference, these writings could encourage misunderstanding and perpetuate stereotypes, yet also promote new understandings and foster originality:

Nowhere perhaps as much as in the field of travel writing, is the fundamental ambiguity of “representation” more apparent. To represent the world is a political as well as an aesthetic- cognitive activity. It is an effort . . . to put oneself in the Other’s place abroad in order to speak on its behalf. One is at the same time representator and representative, reporter and legislator. And in all that one writes one also inevitably (re)presents, however, imperfectly, oneself.13

Within this extensive literary—and less literary field—the notable authors that I am examining are English Company servant Henry John Grose, French ‘orientalist’ scholar, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, French missionary, Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois, and Dutch writer, Jacob Haafner.14 The primary eighteenth century artists are Tilly Kettle, Charles D’Oyly and two anonymous Indian artists from the ‘Tanjore school’. When analysing the visual images, I will further employ discourse of the exotic as a means to interpret the implicit or explicit nature of the colonial gaze.15

11 Steven Clark convincingly argues that there was not one continuous imperial period as suggested by Said, instead ‘high imperialism occupies a relatively brief period from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth-century, see 1999, 7. 12 See introduction, Roberson 2002, xx. 13 Porter 1991, 14. 14 In order to differentiate, eighteenth-century scholars such as Anquetil-Duperron or William Jones will be described as ‘orientalist’. 15 See Kuehn 2011, 31, for her insightful reading of two female Orientalist painters and adoption of ‘the paradigm of “the exotic”’. This will be explored further in Chapter One.

12 Unlike other contemporary writers, such as Dubois, who adopted a judgemental attitude towards the figure of the devadasi, I argue that Jacob Haafner provided an alternative representation of the figure and attempted to understand her religious and cultural role within her native community. As an outsider, a member of the Dutch East Indies and prone to lyricism, Haafner may be seen as an unreliable narrator.16 However I propose that the theory of ‘entangled’ history is pertinent when reading two of his works, Travels in Ceylon (Reize te voet door het eiland Ceilon, 1810) and, in particular, Journeys in a Palanquin (Reize in eenen Palanquin, of Lotgevallen en merkwaardige aanteekeningen op eene reize langs de kusten Orixa en Choromandel 1808). Haafner’s account is the only one I have found of a European man writing about his intimate relationship with a named Indian dancer, Mamia. According to Mary Louise Pratt’s categorisations of travel writing, Haafner’s works fall within the sentimental genre. In this:

[D]ramatisation predominates and heroic paradigms are retained. . . . The traveller is the protagonist of the journey and the primary focus of the account. . . . [and there] are various encounters—often erotic ones—where indigenous inhabitants occupy the stage alongside the European.17

Despite this, I argue that through the author’s interracial relationship, and through the literary entanglement of his account—which seemingly blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, ethnography and fantasy—he offers a rare and significant glimpse into the life of one individual dancer during the eighteenth-century. In order to appreciate how the European construction of the devadasi differed from her representation within Indian culture, I will deploy the work of academics devoted to the recovery and rehabilitation of the devadasi tradition. Particular reference will be made to the ethnographies of Frédérique Apffel-Marglin and Saskia Kersenboom, and the studies of Davesh Soneji who combines fieldwork, archival research and subaltern self-presentation.18 Within Indian native discourse, the devadasi, was both a public persona, who led Hindu processions through the streets, and a cloistered figure, a

16 In a Dutch collection of travel writing, Rob Nieuwenhuys included Haafner as one of the authors who could shed new light on the Dutch colonial period, describing such works as ‘uncommon literary currency’, see 1972/1982, xviii. 17 Pratt 2002, 145. 18 See Apffel-Marglin’s, Wives of the God-King: the rituals of the devadasis of Puri; Kersenbooms’s, Nityasumangali: Devadasi Tradition in South India and Soneji’s, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India.

13 temple servant. Attached to both Shaivite and Vishnu temples, a devadasi was considered a nityasumangali or ‘ever auspicious female’ who, at a young age, was married to god, her eternal divine husband. An important figure within Hinduism, her sexuality was identified with the power of the goddess Shakti and believed to balance the ambivalent nature of the divine, ‘the devadasi-nityasumangali [was] a person guaranteed [as] “danger-proof”: she should be present in those critical moments of balancing the auspicious and the inauspicious’.19 Through her knowledge of sacred dance and music, she played a pivotal role in temple ritual as mediator between the deity and the devotees.20 In Hinduism, bhakti or devotion has traditionally been expressed through the individual falling in love with the deity. Therefore many of the love songs performed by temple dancers, ‘are considered allegories for religious devotion . . . [and] are often extremely direct in the portrayal of the relationship between lover and beloved’.21 During the seventeenth and eighteenth-century, a rich repertoire of Telugu poetry developed among courtesan scholars and male court poets which used the erotic to articulate religious meaning.22 Indeed, the devadasi was one of the few servants of the temple who also performed duties at the palace as the most talented of the women were invited to the royal courts.23 Well versed in the art of lovemaking, these women who were often poets, served kings as well as gods and their repertoire embraced, ‘two streams, sensual love and mystic union with the divine’.24 In this eighteenth-century court culture the devadasi as courtesan became a prominent figure within the higher echelons of south Indian society. This was largely due to their relationships with landowners and dubashes (middle men), whom they took as long-standing patrons and who paid for their services through generous donations to the temple.25 Often, these patrons were lifelong companions. Therefore as a counter-point to the European

19 Kersenboom 1987, xv, xix & 67. As temple dancers never married, they avoided the culturally inauspicious state of widowhood. 20 Guy 1997, 35. Orr analyses several interpretations of how the devadasi’s sexuality informed their ritual practice. One belief was that as temple women made offerings to the deity, she was a beneficiary of god’s grace, and therefore, ‘such a woman would thereby act as a kind of conduit of divine favour from the god to his (male) devotees.’ See Orr 2000, 16-17. Apffel-Marglin interprets temple women’s dance as a symbol of sexual union, see 1985, 70. 21 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 78. 22 Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994, 2. 23 Apffel-Marglin 1985, 129. 24 Vishwanathan 2008, 6. 25 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 71.

14 narratives and images, I will also examine a little-known Sanskrit work, the Sarva-Deva- Vilasa. Written anonymously in the late eighteenth-century, this illuminates the complex cultural negotiations between the East Indian Company (EIC or Company) servants, the dubash and the civic world of south Indian courtesans. I will also examine the poem, Radhika Santwanam, or Appeasing Radha, by Muddupalani, a courtesan from the Thanjavur court and almost certainly the first woman to write an erotic work in south India.26 I suggest that the devadasi stood at the intersection or ‘intercrossing’ of several oppositional European beliefs. To eighteenth-century travellers and Christian missionaries, dance could never be in service to god, nor could sacredness and sexuality co-exist easily. She was also unmarried and her independence—both socially and financially—empowered her. 27 These combined traits could pose a threat to the colonial establishment. Unlike the majority of British and Indian women devadasis, ‘were free to engage in sexual relations with any man of the proper caste without public censure . . . [and] were able to inherit property and bequeath it to their biological or adopted daughters’.28 While similarities between the Indian temple dancer, geisha of Japan and high priestess of Athens have been drawn, I suggest that it is the sacredness in concert with the devadasi’s erotic knowledge that has no parallel in the West.29 The cultural practice, as symbolised by the figure, is unique to the religious and cultural life of south India. By examining these travel accounts, historical sources and images within a framework of histoire croisée, this exegesis will examine how this inability to categorise and ‘name’ the devadasi contributed to the fascination of her, and subsequent anxieties within her representation. Despite the challenge that witnesses had when representing the figure, I argue that the devadasi’s agency—whether through dress, gesture, ritual or in language—is visible in the selected texts and provides a critique of colonial rule. By examining the range of responses—from judgement to bafflement, awe and abjection, ethnographic observation and romantic idealisation—I pose the question: did the temple

26 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 6. 27 Kersenboom 1987, 27. 28 Paxton 1999, 84. 29 In an attempt to categorise the figure, she was compared to the 'vestal virgins of Europe', see Orr 2000, 4.

15 dancer defy ‘naming’ and, if so, were there any enduring consequences of this for the devadasi tradition and the figure herself? As I aim to demonstrate, the representation of the devadasi and dancing girl in this period would have implications in the nineteenth- century. Without an understanding of the devadasi’s religious role, and the gradual erosion of power of Indian rulers, which led to artists, musicians, and entertainers losing patronage across the sub-continent, the devadasi would become a visible target of the nineteenth-century British evangelical and social reform movement, epitomising all that was regarded as immoral in India.

16 Methodology and Process

In line with the application of histoire croiseé I adopt a cross-disciplinary approach to my inquiry. The three methodologies deployed are archival research, fieldwork and creative practice. I first heard about the figure of the devadasi in 2007 when I read a newspaper article entitled, ‘Prestige but a memory for last of courtesans’, about a family of Kalavantulu women from Peddapuram, in southern Andhra Pradesh, who were taught to dance, sing and entertain the local elite rulers.30 The story introduced nineteen-year-old Durga and her mother, Kumari, who described how women like them were once ‘heroines, stars’.31 Today, Peddapuram has a reputation for a flourishing sex industry.32 Without any patronage, the Kalavantulu have been forced to turn to prostitution to make a living and Durga, the last of her generation, suffers from HIV AIDS. As soon as I read this, I wanted to discover why and how these women, who consider themselves artists, now face a life of apparent abjection. From the outset, their identity seemed contradictory and intriguing: the courtesan operated at the nexus between art, culture and religion. She was known by several titles—the Sanskrit devadasi or Telugu bhogam (‘embodiment of enjoyment’)—to name just two.33 Initially I planned to write a non-fiction book, exploring the historical trajectory of this figure from a celebrated cultural holder of knowledge to sex worker. However, I decided against writing a study that would see my subjects as ultimately doomed, ‘their portrayal as passive, as lacking agency, and as victims—is linked . . . to ideas about India’s history and about the role of women in that history. The denial of agency to the people of India is characteristic of the Orientalist studies of the colonial period’.34 What interested me in this topic is that, prior to the nineteenth-century, the many roles of these women—temple ritualist, performative dancer, scholar, mistress to high caste men—assured their agency.

30 Williams 2007, Prestige but a memory for last of courtesans. 31 Ibid. 32 Soneji 2008, 283. 33 Ibid., 283. Women from Andhra adopted the title Kalavantulu, or (‘receptacles of the arts'), in the early twentieth- century during the anti-nautch campaign. 34 Orr 2000, 12.

17 While the male colonial gaze is substantially documented, temple courtesans have been omitted largely from the historiography of India and since the mid-nineteenth- century social reform movement, their position has been politicised. So when I began research at the India Office Records (IOR) in the British Library in London, and the Adyar Library in Chennai (formerly Madras), I was faced with a challenge: a lack of primary sources.35 Histories of women, of indigenous peoples, and of sex, are all problematic. The first and second because of a lack of archival material, and the latter because it falls within the private sphere. As my project covered all three intersecting historiographies, I decided to change from non-fiction to fiction as a way of recovering the agency that Orientalism marginalises. Without traditional sources and knowledge of Indian native languages, my investigation required a hybrid approach. I watched a BBC series, The Story of India, in which journalist Michael Wood travels to the eleventh- century Brihadeshvara, or ‘Big temple’, in Thanjavur. 36 On the exterior walls of its central shrine, the names of 400 devadasis are inscribed.37 Inside the womb chamber is a giant granite lingam—phallus—of the god Shiva. Every day since 1010, in an unbroken line of tradition the priests have poured milk libations over the lingam. Wood’s film inspired me to locate my creative work in Thanjavur, which was also the first destination for my fieldwork. Between 2008 and 2010 I undertook three field trips to India, two centred around Thanjavur and one in Chennai. Situated below the Cauvery delta, Thanjavur is the fertile rice bowl of the south. In the Maratha period the court acquired a reputation as a crucible of artistic and cultural achievement through particular artistic traditions, such as the melam (a form of singing and dancing) and sadir (public performance).38 While the lineage of the devadasis as an artistic elite can be traced back to the third century BC, Davesh Soneji described their voices as ‘irretrievable’.39 However, as I aim to demonstrate in this combined thesis, historical issues—and archival omissions—can become literary problems as the notion of absence

35 Ghosh 2006, 17. 36 Wood 1997; also Wood 2007, 176. 37 It was custom for temples in southern India to maintain musicians, dancers, and actors. On the inscription in Thanjavur, 'the list includes dancing-girls, dancing masters, singers, pipers, drummers, lute-players, conch-blowers, superintendents of temple women and female musicians, accountants, sacred parasol bearers, lamp-lighters, sprinklers of water, potters, washermen, bearers, astrologers, tailors, jewel-stitchers, brazier-lighters, carpenters, and superintendents of goldsmiths’. See Michell 1977, 58-59. 38 Soneji 2008, 288; Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 72. 39 Soneji 2009.

18 generates historical imagining. Fiction can replace the agency that Orientalism marginalises and offers a means of response that is not always possible within a non- fictional genre. The decision to situate my project within the mid- to late eighteenth-century, and in south India, was due to three reasons. First, the majority of accounts I found in the archive were in the form of legal documents during the campaign to abolish the devadasi institution from the 1860s onwards, together with occasional references in anthropological accounts, novels and contemporary diaries. Yet paintings and travelogues from the Georgian period, indicate that the temple dancer was a well- recognised figure in European literary circles, and among artists. Second, during this period, the contests of power and ownership of representation engendered a different model of social intercourse than previously or in the later nineteenth-century. As Dutch, French and English trading companies and merchants competed to outmanoeuvre each other, there was no certainty that Britain would succeed as the dominant power. Every time war broke out between the British and French in Europe, south India became the stage on which this rivalry was played out.40 In 1776 Britain lost its American colonies and four years later, Tipu Sultan defeated the armies of the East India Company in the Second Mysore War (1780—84), holding over 7,000 British men and women captive.41 In one poignant account and exemplar of the ‘captive narrative’, James Scully describes escaping from Mysore after ten years in captivity. 42 Scully, who converted to Islam with the ‘Moorish name, Shum Shu Cawn’, had taken a local wife and had a sixteen-month-old child:

The battalion was under arms, while I was in my hut looking at her and the child alternately. Her soul was in her eyes; and surely never a woman looked at a man with more eagerness and anxiety. I fain would have taken her with me, and the child, who was then smiling in my face. I was eager to give them a final embrace; but fearful of the consequences. O my God! What were my sensations then! And even now, after a lapse of more than thirty years! I am still sure a thousand will never obliterate that moment. . . .. At last, I resolutely tore myself from her and the child without speaking a single word, and I never saw them more. Farewell! Thou most affectionate creature! And may the God of mercy and peace and preserve thee and thy infant!43

40 Michell and Peterson 2010, 32. 41 Leask 2002, 17. 42See Linda Colley's work for a far-reaching analysis of 'captive narratives' 2002, 277; according to Pratt, captive literature had existed since the late fifteenth-century and provided a ‘safe’ context for themes of intercultural contact, sex and slavery, see 1992, 86-87. 43 Scully 1824, 178-179 & 184.

19 Despite sending repeated letters to India and asking others to seek her out, Scully never heard news of his wife or child again. He then describes how another escapee, Richardson, ‘suddenly stopped, and wept aloud . . . the poor fellow, then, in broken accents, told us he could not leave his children!’ Although Richardson returned to his native family, he made his escape later—encapsulating the tense negotiations and historical complexities between nations, genders, and the coloniser and colonised. This inter-mingling between cultures is typified in the derided figure of the nabob who had ‘gone native’, and who had sexual liaisons with Indian women. Job Charnock, widely regarded as the English founder of Calcutta, lived with an Indian widow and fathered several of her children. 44 The English lawyer and memoirist, William Hickey, wrote with great affection about his Indian wife or bib in his memoirs. Alongside these tender accounts, however, there were many examples of European men who referred to their Indian wives as housekeepers; their half-caste children as servants. This large Anglo-Indian (also known as Eurasian) community helped England to consolidate power in the early colonial period. In 1778 the EIC directors went so far as to declare that they would give five rupees as a christening present to every child of a rank soldier baptised in Madras.45 In some cases, this increased up to a gold pagoda per child. In little over a decade, however, this fostering of intermarriage went into sharp decline. From 1786, Anglo-Indians were excluded from European social and political life and no longer classed as British subjects, but as ‘natives of India’.46 During the decades that I focus on there was still the possibility of exchange—a possibility that would not be available when racial stratification and ‘us’ versus ‘them’ polarities became entrenched, characteristic of the Raj era.47 It was a time of acceptance and rejection, when class, rather than skin colour was often the over-riding factor of difference. Durba Ghosh has convincingly shown, through her analysis of 600 wills and testaments from Calcutta and Bengal, how interracial relationships contributed to

44 Ghosh 2006, 1 & 246-247. See also Hyam 1991, 115. The practice of having a bibi or Indian mistress was often secret, but sexual liaisons with Indians continued into the early nineteenth century. Bibis were also a popular subject for English portraitists, see Dewey 1982, 692. 45 Hyam 1991, 116. 46 Hawes 1996, 57; Carton 2004, 4. 47 Washbrook 2004, 486. Recent biographical research supports this view, see PJ Marshall’s verbal comments in Chancellor 2001, 780; also, Margot Finn’s illuminating case study of the family of Sir Thomas Munro (1761-1827) in Finn 2010, 49-65.

20 anxieties of hegemony, ‘whiteness’ and how the colonial state was governed:

National affiliations and imperial priorities were being actively worked out from the earliest moments of the Anglo-Indian encounter, particularly on the bodies of native women, who represented a clear and present danger to maintaining Britishness within the frontiers of the household and the empire in India. 48

While some of the same trends and patterns that Ghosh identifies in Calcutta are visible in Madras, revisionist historical studies indicate a more integrated culture in the south, particularly among the European and Indian elites, who interacted in a lively ‘soiree’ culture:

Long exposure to European ideas gave rise to many other forms of cross-cultural dialogue— which could be positively evaluated by Europeans themselves, even in the metropolis. Most remarkable here was the great Maratha court at Thanjavur, which was in contact with a ‘German’ Lutheran mission from the early eighteenth century. . . . It may have been this more open and plural context which, perhaps, accounts for the degree of eclectic cultural borrowing and exchange with Europe, which was a marked feature of the South over a long period.49

My third reason, therefore, to situate my exegesis and creative work in south India was because historical research has generally focused on the north or Bengal, rather than the Coromandel Coast. The south is also where the devadasi tradition thrived. As my theoretical framework encourages an interactive and ‘entangled’ approach—between archive and experiential research—I coined the phrase, doing ‘history with my feet’. This particular methodology combines the anthropological approach of participant observation with historical imagining, and I propose allows greater critical analysis and understanding of the textual research. As Tanya Richardson argues in another context:

During walks, history is encountered in buildings, objects, ruins, monuments, stories, or other traces of the past in the urban landscape. At these moments, history is a diffuse feeling that may evoke or mingle with memories rather than the fixed form of a narrative. It is also a dialogic process in which, during discussions, the past is experienced as concrete and intangible, known and unknown.50

During my fieldwork I spent time seeking out where devadasis would have lived in eighteenth-century Thanjavur—it is well documented that their homes were on West Main road. I also made numerous visits to the ‘Big temple’, the Saraswati Mahal Library

48 Ghosh 2006, 2 & 10. 49 Washbrook 2004, 485 & 493-484. 50 Richardson 2005, 15.

21 located within the Thanjavur Maratha palace complex, and the eighteenth-century Christ Church built by the German Lutheran missionary, Reverend Schwarz. In the library I viewed a dusty eighteenth-century map of the town which showed that the British garrison was constructed next to the ‘Big temple’—and close to West Main road.51 Remnants of the barracks still exist and I retraced the paths that the women may have walked from their homes, past the garrison, to the temple. Through walking, observing and reflecting on the place itself, I hoped to access a continuum threading past and present, imagination and history, art, dance and feminine wisdom.52 On my visits I was looking for traces left by these women. Their presence is everywhere: in the temple inscriptions and carvings, in frescoes and sculptures. Their artistic legacy is visible in the Bharatanatyam dance performances, based on the traditional dance repertoire of the devadasis, albeit with much of the sexuality and sensuality excised.53 Yet there remained the methodological problem of identifying individual case-studies as few indigenous accounts exist from the period. As a way to complement the experiential and imaginative, I therefore turned to the texts that are available. My chosen period coincided with a rapid expansion of travel writing as a popular literary form, in which the figure of the devadasi became a recognisable, if ambiguous, trope. It was also when an increasing number of British artists travelled to India seeking the new—and exotic—and dancing girls became a popular pictorial metaphor of difference. Within Telugu erotic poetry and song, the courtesan is a well established motif within south Indian secular and religious culture. Therefore by reading the European alongside the non-European accounts, and from a time when bi-cultural negotiations were forming and dissolving, I aim to represent this figure through multiple viewpoints that allow for ambivalence, paradox and, even surprise.

51 In 1773 Thanjavur became a ‘protected’ state with the stationing of a British garrison see Archer 1992, 43; over the next three decades when Britain was fighting the Mysore wars, the temple was also used as an arsenal and for a period worship was stopped; the buildings and sculptures were damaged. See Michell and Peterson 2010, 32-33. 52 I tried to meet descendants of the devadasis but I was told repeatedly that there are no high-caste devadasis still alive, although there are tribal women in Maharashtra who are still dedicated to the Goddess Yellamma and some communities of Kalavantulu in Andhra Pradesh. I therefore relied on anthropological and ethnographic studies of Soneji, Kersenboom, Apffel-Marglin, and Orr, among others. 53 See Coorlawala 2004, 50-63, for how aspects of the dance that reflected erotic sentiment were consciously erased from the modern dance form.

22 Chapter 1: Pictorial Representations of the Devadasi and Nautch Girl in European and Indian Art

For a brief window of time from 1770 to 1825, the school of Anglo-Indian art flourished on the sub-continent. Tilly Kettle was the first professional painter to travel and work in India with EIC approval. Over fifty British artists would follow—among them John Zoffany, William Hodges, George Willison, and Thomas Daniell and his nephew William—pursuing the aesthetic trends of the picturesque, sublime and exotic, and ethnographic studies and topographical landscapes.54 This phenomenon instigated a new hybrid style among Indian native artists, which became known as the ‘Company’ or ‘Firangi’ school, and flourished as indigenous patronage went into decline. 55 By adopting Western skills and techniques, indigenous artists found commissions among the influx of wealthy Europeans and military who arrived in south India during the Carnatic and Mysore Wars of 1767-99. A distinct style from Thanjavur of locally painted scenes of daily life and images of individuals, castes and occupations, including devadasis, were sold in sets for the local expatriate market and metropolitan audience.56 This form of ‘colonial mimicry’ can be read as the dominant imperative asserting hegemony over the exotic ‘other’ and thereby fixing the Orient as a cultural product. It can also be viewed from a transcultural perspective, where an exchange occurs which informs and transforms non-Western subjects, albeit unevenly.57 In this chapter, I focus on the idea of colonial ambivalence, negotiation and the exotic, in the work of Tilly Kettle and Charles D’Oyly. As a way to reflect the gaze, I also look at two paintings from the ‘Tanjore school’ and three indigenous accounts, in particular the anonymous Sarva-Deva-Vilasa, Hasan Shah’s The Dancing Girl, and The Courtesan’s Keeper by Kshemendra.58 While I examine issues of the gaze, sensuality, sacredness, and agency, I am aware that in visual and literary texts, an authentic voice or objective representation

54 William Gilpin published guides to the picturesque in England from 1782 which was then adapted to India, see De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 190. 55 Archer 1979, 67-70; Chaitanya 1994, 102. 56 Scotland 2000; Mathur 2007, 734; Archer 1992, 43-66. 57 Vishwanathan 2010, 4; also see Eaton 2008, 65, for the importance of mimicry in a revisionist interpretation of cross-cultural relations. See North 2010, 1-2 &104 for the transcultural perspective. 58 Sara-Deva-Vilasa 1957; Shah 1790/1992; Kshemendra 2008.

23 is inevitably constrained by authorial subjectivity and influenced by the shifting dynamic between artist, object and reception. The final result is therefore almost always an approximation of the cultural ‘other’.

Madras: city of trade, city of houris59

With the expansion of the port city of Madras from the mid-eighteenth-century, the Company extended its monopoly on trade through political alliances with Indian rulers. As it took six months to a year for a letter to arrive from London, the Company’s council increasingly lived according to their own rules, pursuing a life of balls, billiards and horse riding. Such stories of Oriental excess—and the associated vices—that circulated back to Britain were encapsulated at the palace of Arcot, home to Nawab Mohammed Ali Khan Wallajah (1749-1795), the ruler of Carnatic. In its luxurious mix of Indian and European furnishings, Arcot palace, on the outskirts of the city, typified the aesthetic and social hybridisation of the period and became a popular gathering place for Europeans. The mutually dependent—and fraught—relationship between the Company and Nawab is relevant to my theoretical framework:

Rather than discussing bilateral transfers, histoire croisée examines multilateral entanglements that occur in a temporal and spatial framework where many actors interact together on different levels, in different directions. [It] illuminates the synchronic tangle of political, economic, intellectual, artistic and human dynamics involved in processes of cultural exchange.60

The English allied with Ali Khan first against the Prince of Thanjavur and then against Hyder Ali of Mysore. However, this was much more than a strategic relationship: the Nawab would become banker of the Company in the south and directly influence British politics in London. In a convoluted web of corruption between British councillors and governors, who were the Nawab’s creditors, the Company became financially reliant on Ali Khan. In turn, he depended on the Company for military protection from his rivals, paying the British 400,000 pagodas per year (around (£160,000 in the currency of the day). By 1780, the Nawab's debts had risen to over £3 million and elections in the British parliament were, influenced by ‘nabob money’, with around a dozen Members of

59 See Maddy 2010, on how Thomas Parry, a free merchant who arrived in Madras in 1788 described it as no place for celibates. Rather it was a city, ‘full of houris, from the Mesdames of the Choultry plain to the dancing girls with the eminently beautiful counters’. 60 Kaufmann and North 2010, 2.

24 Parliament known as the ‘Arcot interest’.61 Keen to promote himself and assert his power among Indian princes, European kings and the Company’s Court of Directors, the Nawab commissioned several portraits of himself. These paintings, ‘played a crucial and important role in the initiation and consolidation of European trading companies’ political and economic contacts with Asia’s indigenous rulers’.62 It was Tilly Kettle who executed the inaugural portrait of the Nawab, the first large-scale painting of an Indian ruler to be shown in London at the Royal Academy in 1771, and launching Kettle’s expatriate career, ‘India, it could be argued, supplied the element of scale so essential to the full development of the romantic imagination at the optimum moment in time, just as the art market—an amalgam of money and taste—poised itself to receive what Anglo-Indian artists had to offer’. 63 An unsuccessful portraitist in England, who specialised in glamorous images of English actresses and whose style was considered unfashionable, Kettle painted several scenes of Indian women in daily life. They include a temple scene, a woman committing sati— probably the first to be exhibited publically back in Britain in 1776 at the Society of Artists—and a 1772 painting entitled Dancing Girls (Blacks).64 It is not known for whom Kettle painted these classical studies.65 In the first, Hindu Temple Scene (1770-1), Figure 1, the eye is drawn to the three women foregrounded on the left, particularly the central figure whose head tilts downwards. Her numerous gold bracelets, necklaces, hair jewellery, nose-ring and anklets are signifiers that she is most likely a devadasi. The temple setting accords with this, as do the anklets—a conventional idiom in depicting the subject.66 Although the painting is predominantly social, the suggested devadasi has her arm across her chest— drawing attention to the part of the body it is supposed to cover—and implicitly sexualising her. On the one hand, by cutting the feet of the three women out of the frame,

61 Chatterjee 2012, 56. 62 There is not the scope to explore the significance of the ‘image gift’ in colonial diplomacy. See Eaton 2008, 63-93, for an analysis of the agency of art and mimicry and how it allowed Indian rulers, such as Mohammed Ali, to resist colonial despotism. 63 Dewey 1982, 684. 64 Sati is when a Hindu widow commits immolation on her husband's funeral pyre. 65 De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 69-73. Sati was one of several Indian tropes of travel literature at the time, with authors frequently borrowing and refashioning accounts from earlier works. Given the fascination in the subject, Kettle's work, painted in a sentimental style, would have been keenly received by the metropolitan audience. 66 Chancellor 2001, 772.

25 the conventional pictorial metaphor of anklets representing a dancing girl is ruptured. On the other hand, the use of synecdoche, or cut-off figure, is a rupturing device. However, one of the women in white, appears to be carrying a small pot. One of the main duties of a devadasi was to wave the sacred lamp or kumbarti before the deity and in processsions.67 Such ethnographic detail can be interpreted in contrasting ways. It can legitimise the work as objective and naturalist, yet it can also exoticise.68 While Kettle’s paintings contain recognised narratives of the Orient, ambiguities and inconsistencies are also evident. The contrast between the dark skin colour and vivid white of the clothes and the choice of palette, colour, contrast and body markings, suggest a deliberate strategy to draw attention to fetishise and racialise Indian difference. A closer look, however, indicates a deconstruction of certain stereotypes. This is not a representation of ‘lazy’ or ‘insolent’ natives. Instead the composition imparts the subjects with strength and dynamism, symbolised by the carved seated bull, or Nandi, in the top central axis of the frame. The figures are in movement, not static, and unengaged with the viewer. Two men walk away. Only one man in the far corner gazes out, and while this establishes the artist’s position as the holder of power, our eye remains with the two figures looking away. As an advancement of Lewis’s reading of Henriette Browne’s paintings inside the Turkish harem, Kettle’s painting focuses attention on what is outside of the frame. In this case, this is not suggestive of the mystery of the harem, but what is beyond reach of the colonial narrative.69 If distance is about maintaining difference, then in this work, distance is diminished. Rather than a rigid depiction of the Orient, this temple scene is presented as a space of mixed gender relations, if not resistant to, then un-engaged and separate to imperial discourse.

Dancing Girls (Blacks)

In comparison to the temple scene, Dancing Girls (Blacks), Figure 2, is heavily influenced by Romantic aesthetics in the dark swirling cloudscape behind the figures. Whereas the former painting emphasises the architecture in a classical style, the use of heavier brushwork and centrally placed figures in the latter, signals several fantasy

67 Kersenboom 1987, 67. 68 Lewis 1996, 168 & 172. 69 Ibid., 166.

26 components as expected by the salon. The word Blacks in the title and shadowy pastoral overtones also emphasises racial difference. The fact that this is painted in Madras where devadasis were a visual part of civic and religious life, and the backdrop of the sandstone pillars indicates a temple setting, it is highly probably that these women are devadasis. The lead subject dressed in a dark plum-brown sari holds her arms in a typical dance posture with one arm above her head. The feet of both women are active. Their attire, with stripy pantaloons under a sari, beaded headwear, nose-rings, anklets and bracelets, are signifiers of their profession. De Almeida and Gilpin describe the women as nautch girls:

In the painting, two dancers in elaborate costumes beckon the viewer toward them; their eyes and bodies are posed suggestively, at once coy and distant. The women are circled closely by a group of watching Indian men and the presence of this audience makes them kindred of the English actresses in Kettle’s theatrical portraits: they are public objects of desire who exist to stimulate fantasies and expectations in their viewers. 70

These critics add that such a temple setting is an unlikely venue for the dancers and that the artist is combining a number of stock Oriental idioms into one frame. I argue that the temple setting is crucial when reading this painting as it signifies them as devadasis and differentiates them from the nautch girls from northern India. I agree with De Almeida and Gilpin on the fact that it is unlikely these dancers would have been performing in such a small space, surrounded by a tight knot of men and with no musicians present.71 Devadasis were used to being scrutinised; they lived with the gaze. Here the proximity of the Indian men engenders the female figures as spectacle, although only one bare- chested man squatting looks directly at the women. Yet, note the facial expressions of both dancers. The dancer whose eyes are angled to the left is indicative, I suggest, not of coquetry, but a study of abhinaya or ‘mimetic gesture language’, which uses facial expressions and hand movements or mudras.72 The second woman in white whose eyes are half-closed, as if in trance, rests the back of her left hand on her forehead, see Figure 2i. This destabilises the image. The tilt of the woman’s head is suggestive of a swoon—and therefore of her vulnerability and abandon—it can also be read as an artistic and devotional gesture. This repositions

70 De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 69. 71 Ibid., 74. 72 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 77.

27 the image into a cultural text. When devadasis performed, they used both abhinaya and nritta or pure dance, and were taught to express the eight different emotions known as rasa in their art.73 Among these, sringara rasa is the most important, ‘Sringara is one of the eight essential emotional states in Indian dramatic and visual art theory. It covers the depiction of a range of states from romantic separation and longing to the visualisation of sexual union and ecstasy’. 74 While Kettle surely would have been unaware of such knowledge, and as a European artist he would have been prohibited from entering the inner shrines where the devadasi performed her rituals, I suggest that this abhinaya differentiates the work from the representations of dancing girls as sexual objects. Moreover it does not emphasise the salacious nature of their dance, which was the normative representation. After living in the south for several years, Kettle failed to find long-lasting patronage in Madras and moved north, where he became the equivalent of the court painter for Shuja-ud-Daula, the Subedar Nawab of Oudh near Lucknow. In 1772 he painted the portrait of a Dancing Girl with a Hookah in Faizabad, Figure 3. She is likely to have hailed from the tawaif community who were popular entertainers among the Mughal aristocracy.75 An adaption of Julia Kuehn’s paradigm of the exotic is helpful in reading this work:

Exoticism is not an essence or quality that is innate to, or resides “‘in”’ an object or scene; consequently, the critic’s task is to look for the aesthetic modalities and transformations through which the exotic is produced. In a second step the critic is then invited to consider how such modalities and transformations are influenced and measured by the representations’ reception.76

With regards to Kettle’s dancer in red, an oscillation is evident between the artist’s imagination, fantasy, and an awareness of what exotic narratives his audience expected. The male viewer is exalted in his position and remains detached. By itemising each piece of jewellery, from the necklace known as a punchlerry worn by women of that region, to the individual gold beaded necklaces, and chunky silver anklets, the subject is fetishised. The woman’s left hand, curled around the end of a hookah pipe, suggestive

73 Krishnan 2008, 75. 74 Thapalyal 2007, 135 & 137. 75 Bayly 1996, 117. Lack of space means I cannot expand further on these women but unlike the devadasis from the south, tawaifs were not attached to temples. European writers and artists used the words describing these women interchangeably. 76 Kuehn’s study is in relation to how two female nineteenth-century Orientalist painters depicted the harem, see Kuehn 2011, 33.

28 here of a phallus, is positioned in front of her chest. The gilt covered tube of the pipe is wound around in a serpentine manner, evoking temptation and the promise of narcotic recklessness.77 The palatial surroundings and red carpet, suggest the opulence—and excess—of the Orient, which is reinforced by the Romantic rather than realist style.78 While the light tone of the model’s skin is closer to a European subject, this could depict her geographical location as women from the north are in general lighter- skinned than from the south, a point emphasised in Kettle’s previous work with the word ‘Blacks’ in the title. Yet the dancer’s dress is clearly Eastern. Her choli blouse is gold silk; the curves of her body accentuated in the draped sari. However, by using the prestige of high art—oils, a single figure in a large canvas—and the backdrop of classical marble columns, the artist empowers his subject, ‘Instead of a stiffly posed form, there is a sense of fluidity and charged energy to her body. . . . The painting is not theatrical in composition, and in tone and import it is quite unlike [others] that [Kettle] sent home to England for exhibition in London’.79 The subject’s face is tilted downwards in an indication of modesty and her eyes are thoughtful. Her gaze follows her outstretched right hand, the palm open inviting the viewer to look closer, and behind the arm are the figures of two more women dressed in similar attire. While they seem separate to the main portrait, the outstretched arm connects all three women. The fact that the focus is on a single full-length female and she is painted in such detail, whereas dancers were usually shown in groups, with a male audience, suggests an intimacy and a possibility that Kettle may have known his subject.80 At this point, situating Kettle in his historical context is instructive as a means of illustrating the transcultural encounters of the period. During his time in Oudh, he took an Indian mistress and had two children to her. In 1772 he was wealthy enough to move with his family to Calcutta where his two daughters were baptised. While he is listed as the father in the Calcutta baptism register, the mother—a non-Christian—remains un- named. According to Ghosh, the convention of keeping native women out of the official records also extended to Anglo-Indian art:

77 De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 74. 78 Ghosh 2006, 63-65. 79 Indeed this painting never left India, see De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 74 & 80. 80 Ibid., 74. De Almeida and Gilpin posit that, ‘this was a labour of love that expressed [Kettle’s] own enchantment with India’.

29 More importantly, the anonymity and invisibility of the native servants, and of natives generally, was reinforced by these portraits that commemorated only the important members of the colonial establishment. These visual narratives created images in which natives could only be painted as nameless and unidentifiable.81

In 1776, Kettle left India—leaving his family behind—and on returning to England married an Englishwoman. Once more, he became a struggling artist, and some years later, he set out once again for India. He died en route in the deserts of Turkey. In many ways, then, Kettle epitomises the quintessential English nabob who exploited the native women, both in art and in life. In spite of this, I argue that in these three works, the dancing girls are not straightforward representations of desire inscribed with the pictorial vocabulary of the exotic East but instead offer an alternative vision of their subjects within colonial and native discourse.

The Civic Milieu of the Dubash and Courtesan in the Sarva-Deva- Vilasa

In eighteenth-century Madras, the dubash—literally translator—was a unique individual poised at the ‘intercrossing’ between cultures. He acted as the interpreter or broker between European Company men, private traders and native merchants; he was also head steward, advisor, guide and moneylender.82 No English Governor could operate without one nor could any Indian merchant negotiate a decent rate for their broad cloth. Neither could the lowly Company Writer, fresh off the boat, pay for his supper nor lodgings without a dubash advancing the cash. Unlike banians from Calcutta, who hailed from the mercantile castes, the dubashes were descendants of landowning families. From the early 1700s, they moved from peripheral farming areas of Madras and began to wield influence in the centre as members of the elite.83 In their role, straddling the fault-line between native commerce and foreign trade, they took advantage of their connection to the EIC, both financially and in terms of prestige. This often facilitated their rise to chief of the village or temple manager (dharmakata)—

81 Ghosh 2006, 62. 82 Neild-Basu 1984, 3. 83 Ibi., 10; Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 21.

30 considered one of the highest positions in native society.84 Some individuals took this role very seriously, with regular donations and the reconstruction of civic temples; others took advantage of their position for personal gain.85 At the interface between local people and the colonial government, dubashes were part of the emerging comprador class. Homi Bhabha has evocatively described the ambivalence of such classes and how these ‘mimic men’ were able to empower themselves and establish, ‘their own cultural hegemony over the rest of Indian society’.86 In their go-between position, with the opportunity to siphon funds from both English employer and Indian trader, their reputation quickly became tarnished. Native and colonial accounts, and court records, accuse the figure of corruption and, ‘by the 1780s the English were becoming almost paranoid in their distrust of dubashes and their influence, usually described as “evil”’.87 One Company official went so far as to describe them as a ‘diabolical race of men’.88 In an example of how colonial idiom appropriates and twists native language, ‘Governor Macartney felt compelled to insist that he was not “dubashed”. . . . The very word “dubash”, like the other eighteenth- century label, “Nabob”, lost its original meaning under a mantle of disrepute’.89 Historian, Peter Marshall, extends this argument further in his analysis of the alliances between the British and merchants, middlemen and bankers:

The Madras presidency was long to enjoy a dubious reputation and to be racked by periodic scandals, but the interdependence of Indian and British may have been a firmer foundation for eventual empire than was commonly supposed. . . . Corruption, that is the pursuit of their own interest by both sides of the alliance, may have been the cement that held it together.90

Among several high profile cases of illegal activity, were the Holland brothers, briefly Governors of Madras, and their dubash, Avadanam Paupiah, accused of forging bonds of the Nawab of Carnatic and attempting to forcefully remove another Company servant,

84 The English were often dismissive of this trend. In 1756 Lord Pigot said, ‘in this country, men who are fond of showing their wealth and granduer have as yet found no better means of displaying them than by the building of temples’. As quoted in Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 59. 85 Neild-Basu 1984, 29; Mukund 2005, 84. 86 Pillai 1904, offers a another fascinating account of dubashes, see Ananda Ranga Pillai’s diaries. As dubash to the French Governor-General in Pondicherry, Joseph Francois Dupleix, Pillai paints a vivid picture of daily life in the French-dominated town, the business deals and elaborate form of gift-swapping between natives and foreigners—a signifier of the importance of the currency of exchange between cultures. 87 Mukund 2005, 42. In travel narratives, dubashes are mentioned—usually negatively. See D'Souza 1995, 315. 88 Neild-Basu 1984, 2. See also a collection of ‘Oriental Drawings’ by Captain Charles Gold. One acquatint shows a dubash with his servants and a man bent low offering him a plate of money in De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 215-216. 89 Neild-Basu 1984, 3. 90 Niranjana 1998, 146.

31 David Haliburton. Sir Walter Scott (a relative of Haliburton) popularised this Orientalist narrative of the scheming dubash in his novel, The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827).91 While the Holland brothers, who were alleged to have received 1.4 million rupees in the Madras currency of the day, escaped to England, Paupiah was convicted and fined. Scott’s novel represented the real and imagined anxieties of how the East could corrupt if close relations existed between ‘master’ and ‘servant’.92 After the loss of the Americas in the 1770s, and the San Domingo slave revolt in 1791, the Company began to view this comprador class with greater suspicion. The arrival of Lord Cornwallis in Madras as Governor-General in 1786 coincided with Edmund Burke’s impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, in Parliament, and a concerted effort to stamp out nabobs.93 By the end of the eighteenth-century, as colonial power shifted from commercial to political, what had begun as a mutual arrangement, in which the English benefitted from the local political and social networks of the dubashes, had become a perceived liability.94 Historical research into this subaltern figure is currently in its early stages, but evidence suggests that, ‘between 1800 to 1825 a paradigm shift had occurred in the way the colonial state perceived itself in relation to indigenous institutions’.95 This included a deliberate move to erode the hegemonic position of the dubash. In 1806 an East India Company College was set up at Haileybury to train young men for bureaucratic service in India—and to govern the empire. In order to provide a counterpoint to the European representation of this marginalised and demeaned figure, I now turn to a little known late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century text, the Sarva-Deva-Vilasa (SDV). This opens a lens onto the rich artistic life of the city, its indigenous leaders—including several named dubashes—and their relationships with high-caste devadasis or courtesans. In the mid- 1950s V. Raghavan reinterpreted and compiled this anonymous work, originally written

91 Scott 1827/1906. 92 Neild-Basu 1984, 20. 93 Burke failed to impeach Hastings in the seven-year trial (1788-95). See Eaton 2008, 86, for a discussion on how Burke viewed Hastings as abandoning Georgian political values in favour of arbitrary power. 94 Neild-Basu 1984, 16-17. 95 Mukund 2005, 110.

32 on palm leaf in Sanskrit.96 In stark contrast to the reductive representation of the dubash in colonial literature, this text reveals how the dubashes created their own networks within indigenous society, which were not so dependent on the British, ‘In this new world the dubashi class no longer looked to the European masters for validating their claims to social leadership’.97 The text illuminates the power and prestige of two groups, the agrarian Vellalars and the Brahmins, both of whom belonged to the right-hand caste, and who were patrons to a large entourage of courtesans, scholars and musicians, who they entertained in courtly style in garden houses in and around Madras.98 Told from the perspective of two poets seeking patronage, the SDV is a literary entanglement in and of itself because, except for the two apparently fictional protagonists, all others mentioned are historical figures, ‘The two poets eke out a perilous living as hangers on of the “great lords” (prabhu) of Madras, whom they assiduously follow and cultivate’.99 In a tone that switches between irony and admiration, the poets describe how these great men flaunt their wealth in public displays of ostentation and ride through the city streets on caparisoned elephants with a retinue of armed guards. As leaders of the temples they command respect and handpick the most elegant and beautiful courtesans who become their mistresses. In his lengthy introduction to the poem, Raghavan lists five named courtesans as well as their patrons, and where they are from, in the representative passage below:

The first of these is Narayani of Kumbhakonam, patronised by Kalingaraja; she is described as a very capable singer . . . Next comes Manga of Tanjore, in service of Sriranga; she is said to be very proficient in music and abhinya . . . Vedacala had a courtesan named Minakshi who is especially praised for her sweet music and unrivalled exposition of tana and alapa.100

In this indigenous description, each courtesan is appreciated for the specificity of her artistry, with tana and alapa referring to structures of the ragas popular in Carnatic music, and abhinya in relation to mimetic gestures.101 The SDV presents a vision of these women as much more than servants attached to temples, but as high-profile figures—

96 In this section I will be referring to Raghavan’s introduction to the Sarva-Deva-Vilasa (SDV), and to Kanakalatha Mukund’s interpretation and translation, see Mukund 2005, 164-168. I am grateful to V. Sriram for bringing the poem to my attention. 97 Mukund 2005, 164. 98 Mines 2006, 97. 99 Mukund 2005, 164. 100 Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 49-50. 101 Sharmam 2006, 16; Ramchandani 2000, 46.

33 eighteenth-century celebrities—at the centre of public events and gatherings of poets, musicians and scholars, known as sadas.102 These sadas, where patrons listened to new literary works and musical compositions, influenced the cultural renaissance of city life. In the SDV, the dubashes and their entourage, enjoy creative and recreational pursuits in their opulent garden residences, and open the grounds to the public.103 Whenever dubashes went out publicly, their courtesans accompanied them:

Flaunting these beautiful and accomplished women in public also reinforced the status and image of the rich men. Kalingaraya’s mistress was Narayani, “an expert in erotic games” and a great singer; Sriranga’s mistress was Manga, “the foremost of the courtesans, very knowledgeable in music and a rich storehouse of erotic art” . . . and one of their favourite public activities was to have a public bath with their mistresses . . . watched by an admiring public.104

I suggest that in this passage the celebratory language—‘expert’ and ‘rich storehouse’— of their erotic knowledge reinforces the agency of the courtesans, rather than diminish them as sexualised objects. While the women are still bound by the native patriarchal restrictions of the day, this is an example of what Pratt describes as ‘autoethnography’— strategies that colonised subjects adopt to represent themselves.105 Furthermore these processions and therefore the individuals, including the courtesans, ‘represented a kind of geographical mapping of power, a form of argument about eminence and authority’.106 I propose that this assertion of power consolidated their position in civic society. The alternative paradigm presented in this work further illustrates the complexity of encounters between East and West, and the symbiosis that occurs when multiple relationships, individuals and objects intersect in histoire croiseé. As a political strategy and a way to legitimate their presence, the European elite adopted certain native customs.107 These included the protocol that high officials—even the English Governor of Madras—would not leave their residence without a procession of dancing women and musicians. Just as the English imitated the dubashi trend of building garden houses in and around Madras, the dubashes, ‘built mansions in imitation of their colonial patrons,

102 Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 41. 103 Ibid., 61. 104 Mukund 2005, 167. 105 Pratt 1992,,7. 106 Mines 2006, 97. 107 As Eaton points out, ‘there was no precedent for direct British rule over non-European peoples, nor were there modern examples of European government in Asia’. See 2008, 104 & 79.

34 often partly furnished according to Western tastes, where they could lavishly entertain both Europeans and Indians’.108 In an emblematic image of entangled racial and gender relations, the text describes how:

By reason of [their] association with the English, these City-magnates kept large retinues, developed a liking for Western music, and went out for rides in the morning etc. Vedacala goes out like this on horseback, with numerous hounds and accompanied by English ladies . . . who had decked themselves with wild flowers.109

This extraordinary image captures a pivotal moment of exchange and the intimacy of relations with the English. However, as Mukund illustrates, the poet-protagonists of the SDV did not hide their dissatisfaction with the foreign overlords and were attempting to maintain a space free from the control of colonial government. Indeed, while much of the poem ignores the reality of the English presence, employing the representational strategy of omission, towards the end, they are referred to as, ‘Huns (huna) or white- faced . . . in obviously derogatory tones’, and ‘all-devouring whales’.110 This is corroborated by the text itself, in which:

The interlocutors discuss how their affluent and influential citizens could allow the growth of the power of these inferior people (nica-uddhati), which is detrimental to the maintenance of dharma; and they console themselves by comparing the ascendancy of the English to similar periodic ascendancy of evil, under Ravana and others.111

Here, native discourse employs Hindu religion in its comparison of the English to Ravana, the ten-headed king of the demons, and laments how such people are upsetting the natural order of good and evil in society. Although the dubashes were rich by local standards, they could not compete with the wealth of the Europeans and the end of the SDV reflects how the colonial state was threatening to destabilise the position of the indigenous elite. From this perspective, the resonance and power of the voices in this text offer a compelling insight into this mercantile city and its politics of representation at a crucial historical juncture.

Representation of the Nautch

From the mid-1700s, as Western travellers and artists went in search of the

108 Neild-Basu 1984, 25 & 27. 109 Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957,.70. 110 Mukund 2005, 168; Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 68. 111 Sarva-Deva-Vilasa Reprint 1957, 69.

35 exotic, the popularity of the post-prandial nautch increased.112 Historian Percival Spear writes that the Europeans, both men and women, had an ‘addiction to the nautch’, which became the conventional way Indian merchants and dubashes entertained their English guests:

Engaging troops of dancing girls had become common practice for the English in India. It was their chief amusement. . . . To see a nautch was something like attending the ballet in Europe, with the difference that the troop always came to a private house. . . . and though some had doubts of its propriety, all acknowledged its charm.113

How much impact colonial intervention had on devadasis and nautch dancers in this period is difficult to assess due to a scarcity of primary sources, but historical evidence indicates that by the later eighteenth-century, troupes of dancing girls were moving en masse to British army cantonments. Significantly Anglo-Indian official and artist, Sir Charles D’Oyly, described how groups of women came from the ‘neighbouring village or pagoda [temple]’, suggesting that devadasis as well as secular dancing girls became entertainers.114 In part this appears to be due to the erosion of native patronage as the English expanded their power and the fortune of Indian princely rulers declined. It became semi-official policy to establish ‘Lal Bazaars’ with Indian prostitutes for the soldiers’ (the women were also subject to medical examinations in an attempt to ensure the safety of the soldiers).115 Although most sexual relations with native women were limited to soldiers, the influx in officers from the late 1770s onwards, continued this trend of interracial liaisons. The images of the nautch that were circulated contributed to the perception, in the home culture and India, that the dancers were both desirable and immoral, mirroring how dancers in England were viewed—as lower class women of easy virtue. While Mrs S. C. Belnos, an artist who lived in Calcutta in the early 1800s and who painted several nautch scenes, describes them in sentimental language, most Europeans emphasise the erotic. Belnos describes how, ‘on entering the magnificent saloon, the eye is dazzled by a blaze of lights . . . the glittering dresses of the dancing girls, their slow and graceful

112 Bernstein 2010, 125-126. 113 Spear 1998, 35. 114 D'Oyly is qtd in Shah 1790/1992, xii. 115 Nayar 2009, 210 &309, also describes how in 1844, 'in order to curb the soldier-native woman (mostly nautch girls) relations, the government introduced a tax on them'.

36 movement’.116 Towards the end of the eighteenth-century the fashion for the nautch began to wane and, ‘the English taste gradually changed from a guilty appreciation or naïve enjoyment to frank incomprehension, boredom and finally disgust’.117 In the following British images of the nautch, the sexual availability of the dancer is accentuated. A reading of, A Nautch, Native Dancers at Nizugapatahi Coast of Coromandel East Indies, drawn by Captain Crockatt of the Engineers Bengal Establishment in 1801, Figure 4, reveals crudely executed skin colouring of the musicians. Although it purports to be from the south of India, the dancers have a Europeanised appearance and are the same shade of white as Captain Lyons of the Infantry Bengal Establishment, seen seated and smoking a hookah. All the dancers and musicians, and in the background an Indian guard, are looking at Lyons who is foregrounded—and empowered—in a bright red jacket. The detail of his elongated black buckled shoes, compared to the bare feet of the indigenous troupe, further implies superiority. Whereas in the previous image, the social inter-cultural space predominates, in the 1810 drawing by Sir Charles D’Oyly described, somewhat ironically as, A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before an European Family, the sexualised space predominates, see Figures 5 and 5i. Born in India in 1781 and educated in Britain, D’Oyly returned to the sub-continent in 1797. A reasonably accomplished artist himself, he taught local artists European techniques and imported a printing press to Patna where he was the Company’s Opium Agent. D’Oyly’s works range from Mughal ruins to domestic life, picturesque landscapes and interiors. While this lithograph of dancing women promotes many of the stereotypes, I agree with De Almeida and Gilpin that there is also, ‘ambiguity of artistic stance and an implicitly satiric perspective’.118 Framed within a drawing room setting—and with no obvious ‘family’ present, only white males—the women are culturally displaced and in their undulating bodies, aesthetically eroticised. The central dancer, with her tight bodice, Europeanised dress and bizarrely pointed dress shoes, tilts her head and directs her attention down the line of her arm and outstretched fingers, towards the main seated

116 As qtd in Nevile 1996, 57.. 117 Spear 1998, 35. 118 De Almeida and Gilpin 2005, 259-260.

37 male, his mouth half-open and expectant. The fantasy of the exotic is on full display here. Except for the silhouettes of palm trees indicating the Indian locale, we could be in an English drawing room. As it is set in Lucknow, the pearly-skinned woman is likely to have been from the community of tawaifs who were known to have sex with their clients, and the pictorial narrative underpins this assumption. Despite the fact that the main dancer stands and most of her male audience sit on chairs, the darkness of their clothes and their positioning at the forefront of the frame, place them in an elevated position. This further objectifies the dancers. However, the caricature style of the men’s faces, especially the figure with plump red lips in Figure 5i, casts some ambivalence as if D’Oyly is hinting at the complicit immorality of the Europeans. In many ways this work, to rephrase Linda Nochlin, typifies the fantasy of absolute possession of women’s bodies, a fantasy which for the eighteenth-century artist and English elite in India was, at least, in part a reality.119 A counterpoint to these colonial images and narratives is The Dancing Girl, described as the first novel written by an Indian in 1790.120 This recounts how the author, also the narrator, Hasan Shah, falls in love with a dancing girl in Cawnpore (Kanpur) in Uttar Pradesh. Shah works as a clerk for ‘Ming Sahib’, a Company officer who, ‘belonged to the breed of large-hearted, bold, and adventurous Englishmen. He put me solely in charge of his business and trusted me implicitly’.121 In this autobiographical account, it is not the Company man who exploits the beautiful Khanum Jan, a high- spirited dancer and courtesan. Instead, it is members of Jan’s dancing troupe who try to force her to have sexual relations with the sahib. In The Dancing Girl, Shah is the mouthpiece—and mimic man—of the colonial establishment. He is the protagonist, yet also the weakest of the three main characters. The more benign character of the sahib, who unwittingly encourages the love affair between his clerk and courtesan, undermines the conventional colonial narrative. Indeed it is Khanum Jan who is described with agency—and guts—in flowery prose typical of the period, ‘She had a magnolia face and narcissus eyes. She must have ruined the piety

119 Nochlin 1989, 9-10. 120 Shah 1790/1992, xv. 121 Ibid., 33-4.

38 of a thousand men. Dressed in finery, she ambled in, and struck a pose which was utterly devastating’.122 A talented dancer, singer and poet of the Persian ghazal, Jan encourages Shah to quit his position so they can marry. She decides to leave the safety of her dance troupe in order for this to happen. In comparison, Shah is a weak, vacillating figure who is simultaneously a victim of, and in thrall to, the colonial establishment. His loyalty towards his boss—and to his job as a clerk—means he delays leaving. In doing so, he forfeits his future marriage and in a tragic twist, contributes to the death of his betrothed. It is evident in this case how native discourse also perpetuates the notion of the sexual availability of these women. In another indigenous text from Kashmir, The Courtesan’s Keeper, the conventional courtesan narrative of the woman relying on a ‘madam’ to procure her client is expressed. This work written by a prolific eleventh- century author, Kshemendra, portrays the madam or ‘keeper’ as old and wily. The courtesan needs a madam, otherwise the ‘customers become shameless and impudent, like jackals . . . A young courtesan without the mother is like a garden of flowers without a hedge of thorns . . . at the mercy of libertines and their henchmen’.123 Thus, the representation of dancing girls is equivocal in both colonial and native discourses. Indeed, as has been widely documented by scholars specialising in the recovery of the devadasi, it is this dichotomous representation in her home culture that continues to destabilise her role in Indian society today. The final two images, Figure 6 and 7, painted by un-named Indian artists, highlight the importance of the musicians who accompanied devadasis. Historically paintings were not signed in India, ‘The notion of signing a work of art is of little importance as it is believed that the artist does not himself directly imagine the work— he is “guided” and functions only as the executor’.124 These two works reflect the artists’ attempt to employ techniques common in English watercolours and prints. Figure 6 has a more realistic background of landscape and trees, Figure 7 has a plain background.125 Despite the two-dimensional perspective, which flattens the form, the subjects display an innate self-confidence in their poses. The first, Figure 6, A Nautch Girl and Musicians

122 Ibid., 11. 123 Kshemendra 2008, 7. 124 Michell 1977, 54; see also Purohit 1988, 734. 125 Archer 1992, 18, 21 & 44.

39 painted in Thanjavur around 1805, depicts a devadasi in profile. As Figure 6i displays, her right hand is in a mudra, or ritual gesture, her left is turned back to touch the musician behind; her feet are in a wide squat. In comparison to the English works, all the figures are finely dressed in clothes of their occupation, with realistic and varied skin tones. The men carry instruments including a flute, drum and hand cymbals. Two have Shaivite markings across their forehead, another is a Vaishnavite, or follower of Vishnu, as shown by the vertical lines between the eyebrows. All of these signifiers give them a realism lacking in most of the European images. The second image, Figure 7, in gouache and watercolour is from a volume containing thirty folios depicting castes, occupations, methods of cultivation and procession scenes. Also painted by an anonymous Thanjavur artist working at the town of Vellore, it is variously inscribed with Hindoostany Natch or Kunchinee (dancing girls) and is dated circa 1828.126 In this work, there are three dancers and five musicians whose clothes are less elaborate than in the previous image. Two women are dancing, one keeps time by clapping, with the musicians playing various instruments including a violin, hand-cymbals and tambura. (In another example of cross-cultural exchange, the violin, introduced from a Fort St George band in late eighteenth-century, became a popular addition to the Carnatic music). The older woman at the back is dressed in a Kashmir shawl and a striped mushroo skirt. 127 Both indigenous works establish the social and cultural space of the performers, rather than any sexual narrative. The lack of any temple setting is suggestive that these are groups of travelling dancers and musicians, and therefore the devotional aspect is also omitted. The beckoning gestures of two of the women are inviting, without being salacious; the level of detail in the costume stylises rather than fetishises. In Figure 7, the two women gaze out, as do two of the musicians and the women at the back, establishing a connection with the audience. In spite of what appears to be a quasi- ethnographic documentation of these subjects—a prevalent trend at the time—the title of the painting raises an ambiguity. In the 1808 publication of the British Monitor,

126 Ibid,, 64. Archer cites it as having the name Hindoostany Natch; in Nevile 1996, 75, it is inscribed with Kunchinee or dancing girls. 127 Ibid,, 64.

40 kunchinee means both dancing girl and prostitute.128 It is probable that the native artist would have known the term and in this light, the beckoning glances of the women contain a sexual idiom.

128 Gilchrist 1808, 329.

41 Chapter 2: Representations of Difference in Eighteenth- century Travel Writing and Jacob Haafner within his Literary Context

Theorists of travel narratives broadly agree that the West travelled to, mapped, narrated and interpreted the East, channelling knowledge back to the home culture where it could be chronicled and then employed in further voyages of discovery and exploration.129 In the seventeenth-century, it was predominantly missionaries, ambassadors and representatives of a European monarch who travelled and reported back to their patrons.130 In this pre-colonial era, such accounts were not polished pieces of prose, rather a series of vignettes touching upon the difficulties of the journey, the marvellous and bizarre, unusual customs of the ‘other’ and ethnographic details and descriptions of the landscape. Teltscher argues that there is a clear line between pre- colonial and colonial self-representation. Once the British become powerful rulers themselves, ‘the Self takes on the guise of the Other . . . [and the] narratives of national identity . . . are now haunted by new anxieties and instabilities. The assumption of colonial power marks the emergence of a much more precarious sense of self.’131 By the eighteenth-century, soldiers, free merchants, adventurers, sailors, Company men and a growing number of women travellers, began penning their experiences, sometimes in the epistolary form, as diaries or journals, which found their way to publication once the traveller had returned home. In many cases the motivation to travel was commercially driven.132 This new wave of travel writing coincided with the rapid advancement of the printing industry in Britain, higher literacy rates and a metropolitan audience eager to consume more. At a time when the novel was still in infancy, travelogues were one of the most popular genres of the period. ‘Almost every writer of consequence worked in

129 Kuehn and Smethurst 2009, 1. 130 Franklin 2002, 120; Warwick 2009, 55. 131 Teltscher 1995, 7. 132 For example, Alexander von Humboldt went to Spanish America in 1799 in search of regions suitable for mining precious metals, see Pratt 2002, 143.

42 [it from] . . . Addison to Fielding, Smollett, Boswell, Johnson, and Sterne’.133 Alongside the travelogues of countries as diverse as Australia, India and Tahiti, was the growing popularity of subjective and experiential accounts of the Grand Tour in Europe. Whereas the former favoured scientific and naturalist discourse, the latter were more concerned with aesthetic strategies of representation and, ‘the picturesque and sublime in natural and man-made landscape . . . [became] a nearly indispensable convention’.134 Both privileged the narrator, whether as an impersonal voice on the margins or as a central protagonist. Both were also expected to conform to certain moral expectations of the genre which, ‘demanded rigorous practices of description and notation, however distorted these reports now seem to us. . . . Representations that appeared to be merely “textual” stereotypes were refused credit’.135 As these texts became more sophisticated, there was a self-conscious synthesis of the empiricism and rationality of the Enlightenment with the Romantic aesthetics of loss and melancholy. While each approach adopted its own strategies of representing difference, both affirmed the colonial imperative in which the European narrator was elevated as the holder of knowledge, and therefore power.136 As I examine the accounts, I am looking for slippages, inconsistencies and contradictions reflective of the challenge to represent ‘the other’ in this cross-cultural zone. Following the approach of critics such as Nigel Leask and Kate Teltscher, I recognise, ‘the vulnerability rather than self-sufficiency of European travellers, in relation to the lands and peoples in which they travelled, and the instability rather than authority of their published narratives, in the eyes of the metropolitan readership’.137 As my starting point, I will briefly analyse Jacob Haafner’s, Travels in the Island of Ceylon (1810), before examining how his representation of the figure of the devadasi compared to other accounts.138 Adopting Mary Louise Pratt’s three categories of European travel writing as firstly, ‘manners-and-customs’; secondly, informational aimed at capitalist

133 Fussell 1963, 54; only theology was more popular than the travel writing genre, see Teltscher 1995, 4. 134 Bohls and Duncan 2005, Xxiv. 135 Leask 2002, 15. 136 Space prevents a full discussion of how travel accounts furthered imperial hegemony and power, now widely accepted in travel writing theory. See Kuehn and Smethurst 2009, 1; Pratt 1992, 5; Roberson 2002, xix. 137 Leask 2002, 16, emphasis his; Teltscher 1995, 7. 138 I would like to thank Joep Boer for his generosity in sharing his research with me as most writing about Jacob Haafner remains in Dutch. Haafner’s Dutch biographer, Paul van der Velde, has compiled an extensive biography and bibliography, including a list of archival sources, see van der Velde, Jacob Haafner (1754-1809).

43 expansion; lastly, sentimental, Haafner’s works falls into the latter group.139 As with any non-native informant, Haafner was always an outsider whose accounts were determined by the period and expectations of the audience. Yet I contend that different strategies in his writing position him as an intermediary between European and extra-European cultures, native peoples and his home culture and despite the limitations, Haafner succeeds in negotiating difference in a provocative and singular manner. Jacob Gottfried Haafner left Europe as a young boy, travelling with his father to Cape Town in 1766.140 After his father’s sudden death, Haafner, from the age of 11, spent several years at sea, including a stint in Batavia, Jakarta, employed by a slave trader. He arrived in India at the age of 18 and worked for the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) on the Coromandel Coast. He would spend the next thirteen years on the Indian sub-continent, becoming fluent in Tamil and Hindi, with a limited understanding of Sanskrit. His early exposure to the colonial expansion of the Dutch in Indonesia and cruelties of the slave trade appear to have traumatised him and shaped his adult views.141 Published in 1810, Travels in the Island of Ceylon chronicles Haafner’s 1783 journey on foot from the south of the island, then under Dutch control, to Colombo. The decision to explore the island comes in the classic form of a call to adventure—a literary strategy used in the genre since Odysseus. In a passage that encapsulates the author’s ambivalence to travel—and to himself—and positions him as a nostalgic narrator looking back on his youth, he writes:

The love of travelling is an unfortunate, incurable desire, ending only with life, which it frequently shortens. I have been possessed with this desire from my childhood; it troubles me still now I am become older, and embitters many of my days. This insatiable curiosity to examine every thing myself, and foolish passion for adventures, has exposed me to many dangers, and been the occasion of much adversity and vexation; it has often rendered me unhappy, or forced me from the happiness I enjoyed.142

From the outset, the author self-represents as being at the mercy of the journey, and yet in control; a protagonist pursuing a quest, and a fool for endangering himself. Such

139 Pratt’s seminal work, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, provides an invaluable critical and theoretical framework to read travel texts, see 2002, 145. However, Steve Clark also provides a useful critique of her work arguing that while, ‘narratives of encounter are undeniably dominated by the viewpoint of the mobile culture . . it is possible to exaggerate the degree of superiority implied’. He also challenges Pratt’s assertion that travel writing produced the rest of the world when only a small metropolitan elite read it, see 1999, 5 & 8. 140 Although Haafner was of Franco-German origin, he considered himself Dutch. 141 Nieuwenhuys 1972/1982, 21. 142 Haafner 1821, 1.

44 apparent contradictions give Haafner authorial flexibility. They also perpetuate the enduring myth of the traveller who must suffer for his vocation.143 It is significant that Haafner describes his desire in terms of ‘insatiable curiosity’, not with ‘hope of any great advantage’, but rather out of the empirical need to examine everything himself. 144 As Leask comprehensively analyses, the word ‘curiosity’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries had multiple meanings:

[It was] associated with a socially exclusive desire to possess the “singular” object or else (especially in the later part of the period) a vulgar, popular interest in exotic objects for commercial profit. The second—employed more positively—denotes an inclination to knowledge which will lead the observer to a rational, philosophical articulation of foreign singularities.145

In the positive sense, therefore, it represented the search for knowledge and was the correct motivation for a young man (and they were usually men) to travel. In the negative, it indicated a superficial aim to travel in pursuit of pleasure or personal gain. In relation to French travel accounts of the Middle East, Behdad offers a counter- argument. He suggests that whereas the seventeenth-century adventurer was merely curious signifying, ‘a lack of serious interest in the Orient’, by the following century under the auspices of the Enlightenment the traveller was motivated, ‘to see the other, to know the other’s culture better [in] a desire for self-recognition and self-realisation’. 146 Furthermore, within eighteenth-century discourses of travel, it was believed that if a writer became too familiar with his subject, it could make the account partisan—and therefore less trustworthy.147 In a similar manner to eighteenth-century travelogues, the maritime voyages to new lands are, ‘suffused with the notion of curiosity, both as a subjective attitude and as an attribute of things noticed’.148 Twinned with this empiricism, which from an Orientalist reading is associated with an implicit assertion of power, is the aesthetics of the sublime. Both streams run through Haafner’s work. In the conventional language of the Romantics, Haafner writes:

143 Leed 2002, 6. 144 Haafner 1821, 5. 145 Leask 2002, 4. 146 Behdad 2009, 83 & 86. 147 Ibid., 158. 148 See Thomas 1991, 127 & 130, who cites this tension as originating from the opening section of 'Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757): “The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity.”’ Thomas adds that curious was seen as a neutral term, along with other words such as “striking”, “interesting”, “singular”, “peculiar” and that it was not necessarily an aesthetic judgement.

45 A journey without difficulties or dangers had few charms or attractions for me. All that is dreadful, beautiful, great or awful in nature, gave me pleasure—a hurricane, a tempestuous ocean, the roaring of thunder, the lightning shooting across the sky . . . were so many enjoyments for my restless mind.149

This strategy of consolidating the authorial position within the senses, which required experiencing the extremes, and associated frisson, of the natural world, further establishes Haafner’s work within the category of sentimental writing.150 This can have the twin effect of appropriating Indian imagery and motifs, and advancing the notion that the static and primitive East requires regeneration by the Industrial West. In Haafner’s case, curiosity establishes the author as an eighteenth-century everyman, whose personal narrative approach and embodied experiences distances his work from the scientific, naturalist accounts.151 In the narrative, what begins as a journey from Jaffnapatnam to Colombo with a small party of Europeans becomes a survival tale when Haafner joins a foolhardy Portuguese searching for treasure in the interior of the island, then off-limits to foreigners. At this point, the text can be read as re-enforcing the imperial discourse, with the unambiguous allegory that the author—synonymous with any European traveller— will take what he can plunder when venturing into virgin territory. This final episode culminates in the death of the Portuguese, and Haafner facing every assault and danger possible—from a large fanged tiger, a she-bear and howling jackals.152 In a well-worn Christian analogy, ‘a monstrous serpent’—a giant python—seventy-feet long, chases him, signifying both the climax of the book and the moralising message that temptation will only end in disaster. 153 In a quaint sketch, Haafner is shown dressed in a frock coat, shoes and breeches, attempting to escape from the python. Forced to abandon his belongings, including his pistols and goatskin bag of rice—all emblems of conquest and civilisation—he faces starvation. Truly at the mercy of the journey and the wilderness, the narrator curses his, ‘credulity and foolish curiosity’.154 In this case, I suggest that this ‘curiosity’ is a literary device, in which the author self-represents as the hero-discoverer

149 Haafner 1821, 9. 150 Pratt 1992, 76. 151 Paul Fussell’s description of travel writer Patrick Brydone as a ‘representative man’ inspired this phrase, see 1963. 152 See Teltscher 1995, 93, who argues that dangerous animals embodied the strange and threatening aspects of India. 153 Haafner 1821, 108. 154 Ibid., 107.

46 pitched against the untamed natural world. This serves to glorify the quest narrative familiar to his metropolitan audience and assert his own subjectivity. In the style of contemporary travel writers such as Mungo Park, who is set upon by bandits in Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, Haafner turns to his Christian faith when faced with a crisis. Park’s 1799 work was one of the most popular books of its time and is a leading example of what Pratt describes as a, ‘fully-fledged renaissance’ of the ‘“dramatic” travel narrative’ which began in the 1780s.155 When faced with a life- threatening ordeal, both authors turn their gaze inward, affirming their roots, religion and culture of origin. It is no coincidence that at this point Haafner also affirms his position as a man of the Enlightenment. That night, which he believes would be his last, horrible yells wake him. While the Sinhalese believe these to be ‘evil spirits . . . [and] vulgar Europeans call them cries of wood devils’, the author—in another nod to his sophisticated audience—declares, ‘The philosophical reader will, however, ascribe them to natural causes’.156 In the final pages, as the lyric register rises into melodrama and the author prepares to die alone, he is astonished to come across a party of Sinhalese with their oxen. Among the group is an old man, named Manioppe, who Haafner, somewhat serendipitously—and conveniently for the narrative—had met earlier in his journey. It is here that the ambiguity of such a text is revealed. The deeper Haafner journeys into the jungle, the more fantastic the story becomes.157 At the end, the Dutchman lies to Manioppe about his real reason for being lost—to search for forbidden treasure—and ends with the edifying moral message that in times of danger the traveller must never lose courage. Thus the account succeeds in conforming to the heroic traveller’s tale, and yet in a reversal of the customary trope, it is the European who is saved by a native.

Naming as a Form of Giving and Denying Agency

Whether in the archive or in texts, the dominant culture has employed the strategy of naming or not naming native peoples to marginalise, dispossess, control and subjugate. The issue of naming is also a device in travel writing that is employed to

155 Pratt 2002, 144. 156 Haafner 1821, 111. 157 Hooft 1999, 105.

47 divide subject from object, observer from observed, and can construct real and imaginary borders within texts. In analysing the descriptions written by Columbus and Herman Cortes in America, Wayne Franklin argues that when Cortes reached the, ‘limits of his known world, [he] appears to have encountered the boundaries of his familiar language, and of the culture implicit in it’.158 In this case, the Spanish travellers, who relied on translators, experienced culture shock in their interaction with native peoples. Simultaneous with imperial expansion was the phenomenon of systemising knowledge. Whether it was the Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus, who standardised botanical nomenclature, or William Jones codifying India’s legal practices into an Anglo-Indian framework, the importance of naming and categorising is widely accepted as one means by which the West was able to control the East.159 In the case of naming places or lands, it was frequently a political statement and, ‘almost always a renaming . . . that is also a writing over of a previously given name in a language other than one’s own, and therefore, an erasure of the past’.160 From a Saidian perspective it equals exploitation, appropriation and an imperial reconstruction of the Orient.161 Therefore within travelogues, the representation—or not—of natives and the naming of them, is a key signifier of where and how a text perpetuates stereotypes, encourages misinformation or denies agency. Unlike other contemporary writers who consistently wrote natives out of their narratives, or reduced them to a homogenised ‘other’, Haafner’s work reflects the multiple interactions and entangled relations between Europeans and natives and the resultant friendships.162 Fluency in the local Indian languages allowed Haafner to mediate with the coolies (bearers or porters) who accompanied the European party on their journey through Ceylon, and the villagers they met en route. The coolies are frequently referred to as ‘poor’ (in the unfortunate sense), with one lengthy description of an incident where one man falls out of a tree when trying to seize a beehive and breaks his leg.163 The general tone recognises their unequal

158 Franklin 2002, 119. 159 Kuehn and Smethurst 2009, 1. 160 Porter 1991, 98. 161 Said 1978, 168. 162 In John Barrow’s 1797 account of the Bushmen of South Africa, Pratt illuminates the numerous ways the author reduces the natives to abstract pronouns and ‘traces’ on the landscape, see 2002, 136. See van der Velde, Jacob Haafner (1754-1809), for how Haafner depicts the friendships between Europeans and Indians. 163 Haafner 1821, 34.

48 standing and by inference, an awareness of the author’s privileged position. Several chapters into Travels in Ceylon, the author describes attending a village wedding in which he breaks out into, ‘Malabar love songs, called chicoties and chacras’, receiving ‘applause of the whole company’.164 This incident, I suggest, is pivotal in terms of the Dutchman’s positioning as an outsider and insider, and signifies a rupture in the text. It continues, ‘My companions, who did not understand a word of the songs, and still less could sing them, stared at me with admiration, and the respect of my Koolies, who had listened at some distance, rose from that moment in a remarkable degree’.165 Despite Haafner’s possessive ownership of ‘my Koolies’, there is unmistakable pride in this newfound ‘respect’ reflective, I suggest, of a desire to be accepted. Haafner, however, does have clear boundaries on how far he is willing to acculturate and only on one occasion does he allow himself to be persuaded by the natives’ so-called superstitious beliefs. When the party are faced with a crocodile-filled river, Haafner recounts how the coolies performed an elaborate ritual, which they said would, ‘shut the jaws of the crocodiles’. At this point, Haafner quotes the native in direct speech, “Aya, (Sir) you are mistaken in not putting confidence in the charm that I have just been repeating; do you then believe, that we should dare to expose ourselves to be devoured by the crocodiles if we were not certain of the infallibility of [our] art?”166 The man offers to lead the coolies first across the river, then return and lead the Europeans. Once on the other side, Haafner’s companions immediately take up their guns to shoot the crocodiles. The coolies pleaded with them to stop, saying that the man who had repeated the charm would be punished. Reluctantly, they lower their arms.167 In this incident, agency is accorded to the un-named coolie, both in form—using a direct quotation—and in content he is seen leading and assures the safe passage and wellbeing of the Europeans, albeit with what they considered primitive and idolatrous means.

164 Ibid., 38. 165 Ibid.. 166 Ibid., 61. 167 Ibid., 62. Haafner is unusual among his fellow travellers as he disagrees with shooting wild animals for sport, then a common pursuit, declaring that, ‘nothing [is] more cruel, contemptible, or unworthy, than to kill a harmless unsuspecting animal merely for amusement, of the empty praise of what is called a good shot’.

49 Briefly, the marginal and ‘poor koolie’ becomes the hero, inverting the asymmetrical relationship between coloniser and colonised. Later that day, they come across a party of twenty-three Sinhalese and seventeen oxen. It is among this group that Manioppoe is first introduced to the reader. While the deliberate naming of this individual affirms Haafner’s insider perspective, it is also a literary device that, as noted above, is paid off in the book’s climactic end. Haafner describes the ‘aged’ and ‘worthy’ Manioppoe as a ‘caterer to the emperor’.168 This establishes him as a man of distinction—an individual who trades, which was the currency of the period. When the author tells the native that he would like to explore the island’s interior, Manioppe says, ‘a Mestese [mixed-race] had nothing to fear, as they could travel all over the country without a passport’. Haafner continues:

I could not forbear laughing to myself when the good old man took me for a Mestese. It is true that I had altogether the manner and exterior appearance of one, and he was only in part deceived, for besides being without shoes or stockings, my face was quite sunburnt, and I spoke the Malabar language fluently.169

Now halfway into the journey, the Dutchman has stripped away his European artifice— his clothes and his shoes have fallen apart—and he relishes the disguise this allows him.170 In this account, I argue that the journey has allowed the author to create a new identity: he is a Dutchman who can be mistaken for a ‘Mestese’, whose skin is dark enough to blend in with the locals. Here, Haafner fits Porter’s description of a travel writer who combines, ‘explorations in the world with self-exploration’ and in doing so comes, ‘to know [himself] differently’.171 In this entanglement, Haafner’s authorial positioning is solidified not by being superior to the natives, rather by briefly becoming one with them. I propose, therefore, that Haafner’s knowledge of the Malabar language (not Singhalese incidentally) allowed him to become closer—and therefore allow the reader to become more intimate with—the native informants.

168 Ibid., 63. 169 Ibid., 64. 170 Haafner re-clothes himself in conventional European attire once in Colombo for the return journey, as already mentioned in regards to the sketch of Haafner and the snake. 171 Porter 1991, 5.

50 Jacob Haafner: An Eighteenth-Century ‘Flame-thrower’172

In a similar vein to Travels in Ceylon, Haafner’s two-volume account of his journeys in a palanquin, Reize in eenen Palanquin, of Lotgevallen en merkwaardige aanteekeningen op eene reize langs de kusten Orixa en Choromandel (1808), adopts the mode of the narrator as protagonist.173 The palanquin, a type of litter with a mattress, serves as the physical vehicle for him and the literary device for his stories. Travelling in comfort through southern India, the author has several bottles of arrack to make an evening punch, five hundred decent cigars and a tray so he can write en route. Carried by four bearers who swap shifts with another four who walk alongside, the experience for the occupant (at least) is like floating, or even flying. This mode of transport, in which the colonial travels on the back of the natives, is highly suggestive. First published in Holland, Journeys in a Palanquin, or Voyages as I also will refer to the text, chronicle the author’s life from the early 1780s, when he was living in a Dutch factory on the Coromandel Coast, to his departure from India in 1786. This poignant story of love won and lost hinges around his relationship with a young dancing girl named Mamia. Set against the backdrop of a series of dramatic events—war, famine, hurricane and shipwreck—it employs emotion to communicate. It reflects, ‘The new importance of “affective realism” in prose narrative—most fully developed in the literature of sensibility’.174 I suggest that this strategy, combined with the compelling immediacy of his prose, his maverick persona as a staunch anti-colonialist and champion of other cultures, have contributed to Jacob Haafner’s recent literary renaissance in Holland. It appears that he still has the power to engage a modern audience.175 When Haafner’s works were first translated in the early 1800s into French, German, Swedish, Danish and English, they won a broad readership. By the mid- twentieth century, however, they were out of print, until their recent recovery by Dutch

172 This title is inspired by Thomas Rosenboom, see below. 173 The title for the original Dutch work is Reize in eenen Palanquin, of Lotgevallen en merkwaardige aanteekeningen op eene reize langs de kusten Orixa en Choromandel. As this has never been translated into English, I am using my own translations from the French edition, Voyages dans la Pénninsule Occidentale de l'Inde et dans l'Ile de Ceylan (1811) and will hereafter refer to it as Voyages. I also refer to Joep Bor’s translation from Dutch of Haafner’s essay on the devadasi, which appears as Chapter V in Voyages, vol 2, see Bor 2013, 15-42. 174 Leask 2002, 42. 175 Henrik Hooft describes how, ‘Haafner’s violent likes and dislikes appeal, not to reason or common sense, but to feelings of magnanimity and compassion’, see 1999, 88.

51 scholars.176 In 2011, Thomas Rosenboom, a well-known Dutch author, retranslated and edited Haafner’s Journeys in a Palanquin, with the new and suggestive title, Exotische Liefde (Exotic Love).177 In his new popular edition, which he hoped would rescue Haafner from obscurity, Rosenboom admits to improving the narrative by deleting Haafner’s lengthy digressions and regular tirades against the English; publicly, he described Haafner’s writing as ‘like a flamethrower’.178 Among the ensuing media coverage of Exotic Love, Haafner was described as, ‘the first Dutch author of literary non-fiction, or the first Dutch literary travel writer’ and his descriptions of the famine in Madras as, ‘sheer Holocaust literature’:179

Feeling faint, I hastened to pass by when I caught sight of an emaciated woman behind a partly collapsed wall. She was sitting next to the body of a man and holding in both hands a small, dead child. I saw her bring her blood-covered teeth to the corpse and, like some starving tigress, tear from it what little flesh still covered its delicate limbs. An icy shiver ran through me; I felt my legs weaken and it was only with great difficulty that I reached my friend’s house.180

This representative passage has the ability to shock even today. In it ‘affective realism’ is combined with the visceral language of the Romantics—‘feeling faint’, ‘icy shiver’. The comparison of the woman to a ‘famished tigress’ is stereotypical. It briefly empowers the woman, yet as swiftly diminishes her in the sensationalist language of cannibalism. While the narrator reveals his vulnerability as he vacates the space and feels ‘faint’, he succeeds in remaining privileged throughout and plays the role of witness-as-hero. This is a reoccurring theme through Haafner’s work, and other writers who employ the sentimental approach.181 After the Fourth Anglo-Dutch war broke out (1780-84), Haafner was forced to leave his well established home in Sadraspatnam, as the English seized all of the Dutch trading posts and factories. He then spent a year in Madras under house arrest. The loss of his liberty, career and wealth fuelled his frequent anti-English outbursts.182 Yet Haafner does not hide the fact that his position in service of the Dutch East India

176 Nieuwenhuys 1972/1982, 21-22; van der Velde, Jacob Haafner (1754-1809). 177 According to Nederlands Letterenfonds/Dutch Foundation for Literature, Thomas Rosenboom, a novelist, is the only Dutch author to have won the prestigious Libris Prize twice. 178 In a lecture on Exotic Love Rosenboom describes that after all those years in the tropics, Haafner had 'lost the posh Dutch stiffness’, see Albert Verwey Reading about Jacob Haafner (1754-1809). 179 Van Renssen, Exotic Love—Jacob Haafner. 180 Haafner 1811, 94. 181 Leask 2002, 7. 182 See Voyages, vol 1, xi, Haafner describes how he lent 1,000 star pagodas to a Dutch commander. The following day, the English took the fort by surprise and Haafner never received his money back and was forced to go to Madras.

52 Company VOC and then as a free merchant, allowed him to amass a considerable fortune.183 Indeed the anti-English vein running through the 1810 Ceylon work became a gushing torrent in Journeys in a Palanquin. In this work, Haafner describes his oppressors with words such as ‘perfidious’, ‘barbarity’ and ‘revolting insensibility’.184 He blames the English for contributing to the Madras famine and causing the 1795 Bengal famine in which, ‘three millions of souls perished, to satisfy the insatiable avarice of a company of monopolisers’.185 While the tyrannical English are singled out, he also accuses the Dutch of unjustly treating Indians in their ‘insatiable need for gold’.186 As Rosenboom points out Haafner’s, ‘increasing hatred of the British reaches a climax in Madras as reflected in his highly turbulent style’.187 Haafner was aware that some readers would disapprove of his strong words. The author frames his original edition of Journeys in a Palanquin with a universalist credo, stating (my trans.), ‘I have always hated injustice and cruelty, and I consider all men as brothers, no matter what their colour or religion. Those who think as I do will be pleased to see that I have taken up the cause of oppressed Indians’.188 In contrast to other Dutch colonial writers, who were restricted by their roles as emissaries or officials, Haafner was, ‘not bound to lofty tone and diction, [so] he is able to furnish moving descriptions and incisive comments that reveal, perhaps more than anything else, the folly of the colonial endeavour, Dutch or otherwise’.189 From the outset, he makes his intention clear. He is taking up the cause—and speaking on behalf of—the Indian people. Such an exemplar of anti-colonial critique is not without precedent. There are similarities between Haafner and French writer Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, whose Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (1772-74) also attacks

183 This irony is not lost on the critic in London’s Quarterly Review, see below. 184 Anon 1812, 24-25. 185 Eaton 2008, 124-125.. 186 Haafner 1811, vol 2, ix (my trans). 187 Rosenboom further compares Haafner to the nineteenth-century Dutch writer, Multatuli, (a pen-name for the writer Eduard Douwes Dekker) who strongly denounced the abuses of colonialism in Java, ‘Whereas Multatuli advocates for the excesses of colonialism to decrease . . . Haafner advocates that colonialism should simply stop.’ As Multatuli praised Haafner, it appears that he had read him, although never promoted Haafner’s work. See Exotic Love: the Albert Verwey Reading about Jacob Haafner (1754-1809). 188 Haafner 1811, viii. 189 Lefevere 1999, 93.

53 slavery and imperial brutality, and to whom Haafner had referred.190 Indeed this rhetoric of anti-colonial dissent became a theme in sentimental travel writing, which was often allied with the Abolitionist cause.191 This is reflective of a broader trend in which the traveller took the stance of the philosopher to record information and comment on it for the metropolitan audience, enabling an informational flow between centre and periphery.192 An example of this entangled dynamic between different corners of the globe is evident in how Diderot, in his Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, mined the travelogue of Bourgainville’s voyage to the South Pacific. Through his critique, Diderot ‘reinvigorated the critical thought of the philosophes and social reformers . . . [and] the debate on the form of the ideal human society’. 193 French scholar, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (Anquetil), credited as the ‘father’ of French ‘orientalism’, who was the first to translate the Avesta, Zoroastrian scripture, into a modern European language, was another vocal critic of colonialism and like Haafner, viewed the dominance of colonial governments as antithetical to the right of nations to govern themselves freely. In 1778 Anquetil published Legislation Orientale, in which he attempted to demonstrate that Montesquieu’s depiction of ‘oriental despotism’ was misguided.194 In his critique Anquetil also recognised how travel writing could—in post-colonial parlance—produce the ‘rest of the world’. Not only was he shocked at the ignorance of most Europeans he met during his seven years living in India, he also predicted the far- reaching implications that stay-at-home philosophers accorded to such travelogues and the inherent misrepresentation when they were re-interpreted for the home market. His solution was to establish a ‘travelling academy’ for professional scholar-travellers.195 It is not known whether Haafner was aware of Anquetil’s writings, however references to Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu pepper the Dutchman’s work.196 While Haafner lacked the rigorous scholarly training of Anquetil, who mastered Hebrew

190 In Bor’s comparison of Haafner with contemporary travel writers, he demonstrates how just as Haafner referred to Raynal, Raynal had copied from the French translation of John Henry Grose’s account, Voyage to the East-Indies, see Bor 2013, 28. 191 Pratt 1992, 86. 192 Porter 1991, 48, emphasis his. 193 Ibid., 87 & 91. 194 D'Souza 1995, 18. 195 For a portrait of Anquetil and further details on his anti-colonial views, see Stuurman 2007, 255. 196 See van der Velde, Jacob Haafner (1754-1809); Bor 2013, 17.

54 as his first extra-European language at the University of Paris, and went on to learn Persian, Tamil and Sanskrit, I propose that in Haafner’s philosophical oscillation between the egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment and his Romantic defence of nations and individuals, such as Hyder Ali’s right to protect his Mysore territory, a useful comparison can be made to Anquetil. I suggest, therefore that Siep Stuurman’s elegant description of Anquetil’s intellectual ideas is applicable to Haafner:

In philosophical discussions, cultural relativism and moral universalism are often regarded as mutually exclusive, but here they complement and reinforce each other. . . . If cultural difference is reasonable and justified, equality becomes thinkable on a world scale. Diderot, Raynal, and Anquetil [and here I would add Haafner] recognise, each in his own way, a universal human nature and universal moral imperatives, such as good faith and reciprocity, but within those broad limits they affirm the equal right of all humans to live according to their own rights.197

Where I argue that Haafner differs from Anquetil is in his strenuous defence of Indian people, their culture and morals, and his attempt to view them through their eyes. In this, Haafner is more of an ‘everyman’ and less of a philosopher. In Haafner’s preface to volume two of Voyages, Haafner claims that his objective is to, ‘destroy prejudices so strongly rooted against Indians and to take a lead against all the false reports of their ignorance, personal interest, wickedness, even fanaticism’.198 In his attempt to offer a counter-view to other reports, he encourages any reader who travels to India not be distracted by the people’s, ‘colour, worship and habits [but to] consider them as his brothers, created by the God himself’.199 In her analysis of Peter Kolb’s journey among the Khoikhoi (Hottentots) in South Africa, Pratt cites a similar instance where a writer vindicates the natives from negative stereotypes laid down by earlier writers, ‘In keeping with its interactive perspective, Kolb’s account, especially in comparison with subsequent ones, is strikingly dialogic in character’.200 Published in 1719, in the style of ‘manner and customs’, Kolb, is less emphatic than Haafner in tone and content. Haafner, writing nearly a century later, extends his vindication of Indians insisting they are equal in the eyes of God, and as Bor rightly notes, uses irony to make his point, ‘O bring me to the heathen lands, with the unbelievers, with these so-called

197 Stuurman 2007, 266. 198 Haafner 1811, Voyages, vol 2, vii (my trans.). 199 Ibid., viii, (my trans.). 200 Pratt 1992, 40-44.

55 savages, with these unenlightened and uncivilised peoples, where at least true hospitality is practiced’.201 In this reading, I argue that by demonising and criticising the colonial paradigm, the author is attempting to narrow the gulf between cultures and in a form of ventriloquism, to speak on behalf of the native people.

A Literary Entanglement between Fact and Fiction

Journeys in a Palanquin has never been translated into English. In contrast, the German translation appeared in 1809, the year after the Dutch edition, and the French in 1811, with numerous reprints published in both countries. Journeys in a Palanquin, however, was known to a select English audience through an 1812 review of the French edition, in London’s Quarterly Review (QR). In this, the anonymous reviewer quotes the French translator who describes Haafner’s account, as ‘un peu Romanesque’ or ‘a little inclined to the marvellous’.202 The French translator’s quote, which appears in the preface of volume one, is worth reading in full:

We need only note—as do the editors of an excellent German newspaper—that, while [Haafner’s accounts of his] voyages might seem a little fanciful at first, the details, scenes and background comprising the amorous adventures we encounter within contain a distinctiveness and truth so great, and an Oriental sensibility so apt, that they can hardly be dismissed as imaginary, even if the author, in his prefaces, makes no promise about their authenticity. Furthermore, Monsieur Haafner proves himself to be a meticulous observer of the natural world throughout, and his great virtue is to paint, in the most vivid and most honest of colours, those people and things to which he introduces us.203

This description encapsulates a number of inter-related themes, both representative of eighteenth-century travel writing in general, and in particular, Haafner’s own textual entanglements. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, travel writers frequently employed discourse of the marvellous in their attempts to describe new lands, peoples and cultures.204 By the mid-1750s, as discussed, wonder had been replaced by curiosity, with its diverse and nuanced meanings. I suggest that with Haafner, the repeated use of the words ‘curious’ and ‘curiosity’ in Travels in Ceylon and Journeys in a Palanquin is a strategy to assert his empirical authority.

201 As qtd in Bor 2013, 18, who also questions whether Haafner’s comment about, ‘these so-called savages’ is referencing the notion of the ‘noble savage’. 202 Anon 1812, 122. 203 In this quote (my trans), from Voyages, vol 1, v., the French translator has paraphrased an article by Haafner from Allgemeine-Literatur-Zeitung von Jena, 1809. 204 Behdad 2009, 83.

56 Following Haafner’s preface is a sketch of the author’s life. The practice of including the author’s credentials and asserting their commitment to truth was common practice among travel writers and novelists. 205 In Haafner’s case—although there is no evidence to corroborate this—his son, who published several of Haafner’s works, may have written this as a form of epitaph for his recently deceased father. In any case, even by today’s standards, the four-page biographical account reads as a carefully crafted piece of authorial promotion. After mentioning the trials of Haafner’s early life, it states that his service for the Dutch East India Company did not afford Haafner, ‘the time to pursue the culture of science and letters, for which his intellect was so singularly prepared’.206 Despite receiving no formal education, it continues his, ‘brilliant literary career’ had been stopped short by his death in 1809.207 After losing everything to the English in 1780, Haafner was doing remarkably well by the time he arrived back in Europe in 1786. Ironically, given his hatred of the British, this success was largely thanks to his position as bookkeeper to Joseph Fowke, the former British governor of Bengal and jewellery merchant in Calcutta. Through the friendship that developed, Haafner was introduced to Sir William Jones and his ‘orientalist’ circle which dominated the intellectual scene of the eighteenth-century British capital of India. Fowke’s amity extended to inviting him to become a partner in his jewellery business, however, as Haafner tells it, Fowke’s jealous son prevented this happening. Nonetheless this period of wealth-accumulation should have ensured a comfortable retirement for him back in Europe. However in 1795, he lost all his money in the collapse of French bonds. It was around this time that Haafner married and moved back to Amsterdam. Broke, and with a family to support, Haafner started writing travel stories based on his journals. Haafner’s motivation to get published seems to have been monetary and a desire for recognition within literary circles. I suggest that this encouraged him to combine the conventions of fiction—atmosphere, revelation, characterisation and occasionally dialogue—with a deeper and more nuanced knowledge of the East. Haafner remains in the foreground with the diegetic ‘I’ as the driving force of the text. This

205 Bohls and Duncan 2005, xxi. 206 Haafner 1811, Voyages, vol 1, xi (my trans.). 207 Ibid., ix-xii.

57 allows him to range over the usual eighteenth-century subjects such as flora, landscape, customs and manners, which are described lyrically and with attention to detail. In this case he is both a narrator and the principal protagonist of the story.208 However too much egotism could invite criticism as it, ‘risked banalising the genre, offering sentiment, wit, or retro-irony in the place of the narrative project of representing the foreign’.209 The Quarterly Review (QR) accused Haafner of much worse than egotism. Over sixteen pages, numerous errors in Haafner’s text—ranging from incorrect dates, fabricated names, falsehoods and exaggerations—are cited. Parts of Haafner’s account are slammed as ‘downright fiction’ and the reviewer gives several convincing examples where Haafner has copied from a certain Mr Chambers, declaring the Dutchman’s plagiarism ‘stinks to heaven’.210 As aforementioned, if writers fell foul of the perceived expectations of the genre, they could expect to be crucified as frequently as thieves were pilloried. In the case of the QR, the critic takes particular umbrage at Haafner’s ‘raucous and malignant antipathy’ towards the English which fixes, ‘an unmerited stigma on the British name in India’.211 Ultimately the English reviewer, in a fine example of jingoism, concludes that Haafner’s style embraces, ‘the pert flippancy of a Frenchman, the coarse vulgarity of a Dutchman, and the whining sentimentality of a modern German’.212 Nevertheless, he does reserve praise for one aspect of Haafner’s work, which distinguishes him from other writers, perhaps because unlike other accounts that focused on the main cities of India, Haafner’s Journeys in a Palanquin, offered a fresh perspective on rural India—and the unusual characters en route.

His observations on the manners of the natives, and the characteristic features of the country . . . form by far the most interesting part of his book, and may be read with pleasure. We travel with Brahmins and fakirs—with jugglers and fortune tellers, musicians and dancing girls . . . and sleep in choultries with groups of coulis [sic], kaschi-kaunis, and travellers of every description.213

208 In this analysis I have applied Porter’s interpretation of James Cook’s work to Haafner, see 1991, 18. 209 Leask 2002, 9. 210 Anon 1812, 129 & 134-5. Several examples are given: Chambers—‘On coming near to the foot of the rock or hill of stone, from the north, works of imagery and sculpture crowd so thick upon the eye as might seem to favour the idea of a petrified town’. Haafner—‘At the foot of the hill, on the north side, one meets with such a multitude of ancient monuments that at the first approach, one might imagine oneself entering a petrified town’. 211 Anon 1812, 121. 212 Ibid., 132. 213 Ibid., In Leask’s analysis of Lord Valentia and Reginald Herber, Leask describes how, ‘the tricks of Indian jugglers and the exotic dancing of Natuch-girls conspired to render India one huge exhibition’. See 2002, 179.

58 Ever since the writings of Marco Polo and John Mandeville, travel writers have been labelled liars, and throughout the centuries there has been ‘ample room for “fictionalising” imagination’ and blurring the boundaries between reportage and fable.214 In order to distance themselves from this trend, writers from the mid-eighteenth- century increasingly adopted the scientific mode, avoiding the dramatic and subjective. However, as Porter illuminates in Cook’s Journals, scientific discourse could still be destabilised by the poetic.215 With regard to Haafner, is the English critic to be believed, and if so, does that impact a present-day reading? Two hundred years after Haafner’s survival tale in Ceylon, a Dutch writer, Henrik Hooft attempted to retrace his route and find the mountainous natural barrier and unsurpassable canal that Haafner describes so vividly at the end of the book. Hooft only finds hills and no canal. Moreover, pythons do not chase their prey down, but lie and wait. This contemporary critic who is, nonetheless, swept away by the power of Haafner’s writing, questions the author’s commitment to truth, ‘He was not known as an inventor of stories. [But] was he tempted to exaggerate the story of the treasure hunt. Did he gild the lily?’216 My work does not have the scope to investigate this on-going debate on how much it matters if accounts are a blend of fact and fiction or if characters are composites—or simply imagined. Nonetheless, I suggest in relation to Haafner, it is another expression of literary entanglement, and as such, his work may be read as conforming to poetic rather than literal truths.

Tensions and Anxieties: Jacob Haafner and Interracial Love

Of all the cross-cultural encounters, it is in affairs of the heart that the entanglement between the personal/political, private/public and self/other becomes foregrounded. While Porter claims that eighteenth-century travel writing was associated with eroticism, Steven Clark takes a different approach arguing that although the genre is, ‘traditionally associated with licentious wandering . . . [the] convention is one of abstinence. Travellers seldom pursue seduction, and are surprisingly unnameable to

214 See Adams 1983, 81-102; Fussell 2002, 115. 215 Pratt 1992, 76; Porter 1991, 88. 216 Hooft 1999, 88 & 105.

59 being seduced’.217 In Haafner’s case, he seduces and is seduced in two intimate relationships. In Travels in Ceylon and in volume one of Voyages, Haafner describes his relationship with Anna, the mixed-race teenage daughter of a Dutch Company servant by a native woman. Despite his apparent affection, he leaves her not long after arriving in Ceylon to explore the interior of the island. She later leaves him for a rich merchant. In Voyages, Haafner departs from Ceylon and returns to India. According to the QR, Anna is quickly replaced by a ‘Hindoo dancing girl, of the name of Mamia, of whom he is, if possible, more enamoured than he was of the adorable Anna’. The reviewer continues:

His amours with this interesting Hindoo certainly form no disagreeable episode. To the sprightliness and activity of Le Vaillant’s Narina, Mamia adds feeling and sentiment; her affection appears to have been pure and unshaken, and she lost her life to save that of her lover, who, in our opinion, was little deserving of such a sacrifice.218

The comparison to François Le Vaillant’s Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique (1790, 2 vols.) is as instructive as the reviewer’s comment that Haafner’s own writing, ‘may probably contain about the same proportion of truth and fiction, as that amusing romance’.219 During this period interracial love stories were popular in fiction and travelogues, and contributed to a book’s sensationalist appeal. Pratt describes how Le Vaillant’s book was attacked widely when published:

No embellisher irritated the scientific establishment more than Francois Le Vaillant. . . . [His] travel book is saturated with Rousseauian sensibilité. Like Mungo Park, whom he surely influenced, Le Vaillant produced an explicitly experiential, narcissistic narrative structured around human dramas of which he is the protagonist.220

As the Dutch edition of Le Vaillant’s work came out in 1791, it is likely—although cannot be confirmed—that Haafner may have read it. On first reading, Haafner’s relationship with Mamia provides an affective experience similar to Le Vaillant’s love affair with a Khoikhoi woman named Narina. Mutual exchange between the two individuals is juxtaposed with asymmetry. Both parties are changed—for Mamia, irrevocably and tragically. Yet the transformative

217 Porter 1991, 43; Clark 1999, 20. 218 Anon 1812, 129. 219Ibid., 132. 220 Bor notes that in another of Haafner’s works, Lotgevallen en Vroegere Zeereizen (1820), ‘like Le Vaillant, Haafner describes a flirtation with a Hottentot girl’, see 2013, 22.

60 power revealed in the text during this ‘intercrossing’ is undeniable and I suggest it is heightened because it takes place in a liminal and frontier location. On the one hand, the love affair conforms to the colonial convention. Mamia dies an early death. Jacob leaves and returns home rich—if heartbroken. However, as the QR noted, it is Mamia’s presence—which I interpret as her explicit agency—which touches the reader. Bor suggests that Haafner wrote the essay on the devadasis in Mamia’s honour.221 This may or may not be the case, however, I propose that Haafner’s infatuation with India, the country and the people, is transferred onto the figure of Mamia. Mamia’s arrival halfway through volume two establishes her as the secondary lead character in the narrative. They meet at a choultry (rest-house), where it was common for dancing troupes to perform for travellers. As it is usually foreigners who would pay, Haafner is approached and agrees to watch the performance. After dinner he describes in detail the native musical instruments used and the seven women who dance.

How swift and light are all the movements of the nimble nymphs, how consonant are their gestures with their steps, how pleasant and enchanting are the sensuous bends of their well- formed limbs, and with how much art and agility, without offence to modesty, they unfold all their charms.222

After an hour, Haafner waves his handkerchief indicating that they should stop and asks them to sing for him. Sitting in a semi-circle around the Dutchman, the women sing poetry and romantic songs until he thanks and pays them. According to the author, the 15-year-old Mamia is so taken by Haafner, that she sends the older woman in charge (tai), to offer the ‘love betel’, but he refuses her, believing that such travelling dancers were not to be trusted. This echoes John Henry Grose’s account, who Haafner had read, and who described the ‘rapaciousness and perfidies’ of dancing-girls:223

“You refuse the beautiful Mamia, Monsieur?” replied the tai, “You surprise me! I’m quite sure I noticed that you were hardly indifferent to this girl. What has made you close your heart to her? What do you fear? She is my dearest protégé, and you are the first man to whom she has offered the kampaak [love betel]”. I couldn’t help but laugh at the old woman, who no doubt mistook me for some untutored novice. But I knew perfectly well that these tais were not wont to delay making their students productive, and that they sought to profit from the girls’ beauty as soon as possible.224

221 Ibid., 24. 222 Ibid., 19. 223 Grose 1766, 140. 224 Haafner 1811, p. 232 (my trans.).

61 The next day when Mamia scorns him, and Haafner realises how beautiful she is, and how she appears genuinely upset—she is crying—he regrets his actions. Over the following weeks, he cannot stop thinking about her and feels remorseful. As he searches every village for the dancer the prose becomes more emotive—‘he can’t banish Mamia from his thoughts’, ‘he has tears in his eyes’.225 Haafner is then bitten on his hand by a venomous snake and as the infection worsens, he decides to return to Madras. On the way he stops at another choultry, and lo and behold, sees Mamia bathing with some of the other women. In a moment of sentimental melodrama, in which a semi-clothed Mamia is depicted in a highly sensual and erotic manner, and Haafner’s self-representation is of a love-struck teenager, he runs up to the lake and calls out to her:

My heart shuddered with happiness. . . . In an instant I raced over to her, regardless and without considering what my companions and all the other people who were bathing or standing there must think of me. . . . Mamia! I called out loudly, beloved Mamia! at last I see you again, ah! how often have I thought about you! . . . How beautiful she was!—how bewitchingly beautiful! The white muslin cloth . . . high under her arms and wrapped around her body a few times, clung, still dripping with water, to her graceful, well-formed limbs, and displayed this pretty body in all its appealing contours. Her full youthful and heaving bosom, under the fine and wet linen, looked like the moon behind a thin, shimmering cloud—my senses were completely numbed by the unexpected meeting and the face of this lovable person, and I stood there gaping at her with open mouth, unable to utter another word.226

Mamia greets him cautiously. As a crowd gathers, she tells him to wait for her at the choultry. When she finally arrives the young dancer, ‘stays quiet with her eyes fixed on the ground, but the strong agitation in her chest let me know that she was profoundly moved’.227 Over the following months their relationship deepens. In Haafner’s descriptions of Mamia in the bath, I propose he is employing the convention of the picturesque, in wide usage in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth- century. Its classical imagery of temperate landscapes transferred easily to the tropical aestheticism of India and was visible in the work of painters such as the Thomas and William Daniell and William Hodges. In its creation of distance between the viewer and object, it allowed the image to be seen as a representation. This not only commodified India for the metropolitan public it also, ‘translated sensibility into the personal nostalgia

225 Ibid. 242-3, (my trans.). 226 As qtd in Bor 2013, 19-20. 227 Haafner 1811, p. 313 (my trans.).

62 of the imperial viewer’.228 It can be assumed that a drawing in Voyages of a slender, young woman with garlands of blush pink flowers in her hair is Mamia, see Figure 8. Depicted in a picturesque manner, with the ubiquitous palm trees, Mamia’s hair is blond and her skin is fair. This explicit strategy to Europeanise the figure reflects the tendency for colonial men to have affairs with lighter skinned woman. In a similar manner to the textual ambiguities of Mamia, in this visual portrait the woman displays her sexuality in the coquettish turn of her head and her scalloped feminine clothes. It is an image that surely captures what the author would like to see—a European Venus in an Oriental setting—with the pink sash across the lower part of her body, indicating modesty, yet the side-ways glance of her eyes telling a different story. In this, it mirrors Haafner’s initial impression of Mamia the morning after he had refused her at the choultry, ‘What lovely features in her countenance, what a fine attractive figure – like one would paint a Venus. Her proud bearing and spirited step, the fresh youthful life, and the blooming health which shone out from her pretty face and clear eyes’.229 In Bougainville’s descriptions of Tahitian women, who approached the Europeans naked when they first arrived on the island, the French voyager compares them to Venus as a way to describe this, ‘sexual freedom wholly unknown to contemporary European society’.230 In the case of Haafner, I suggest that this comparison to Venus was a device to elevate Mamia above her status as a lower caste dancing girl and ally her with a deified figure from the classical past. In Voyages, the author relates how Mamia moves to Madras in order to be closer to him but they do not live together. The fact that Haafner does not mention the affair to his European friends is suggestive of the anxiety that existed around interracial relationships.231 However, the couple’s love and affection for each other is depicted at length in surprisingly domestic and endearing details:

Sometimes, we spent the evening playing chadringa (chess), which Mamia was quite good at, or else she would sing an akhejour (love song) or giet (epic hymn or song) and play a viné (a type of guitar) to accompany her own lovely voice. Other times, she told me short stories or tested me with riddles; in short, she employed all the means she could imagine to make the time pass pleasantly for me. I must not forget to mention supper, which she prepared herself, talking and

228 Leask 2002, 166-167, 169-170 & 176. 229 As qtd in Bor 2013, 19. 230 Porter 1991, 98. 231 Bor 2013, 23.

63 singing all the while; and when she served it, she invited me to sit besides her on the mat, on which I would find a dish of rice and tajer (curdled milk), a little atchar and a bowl of mologonier (pepper water); and every time, this frugal meal seemed to me a banquet of the gods.232

Haafner adds that the tai (older woman in charge) visits Mamia often and, as if emphasising their modest lives which revolve around their spirituality, he writes:

Both women were strangers to the city, and knew no one else besides me. They never went out except together, either to worship the gods in one temple or another, or to attend a religious procession; these were their only amusements.233

The ambiguities in the visual representation notwithstanding, I propose that from the start, Mamia’s agency is represented in parallel with Haafner’s cross-cultural sensibility. She is lead of the dance troupe; she pursues him with the ‘love betel’. He responds in native tongue to the tai, ‘Aar idou?’ and apologises profusely for snubbing her (and then suffers for it as weeks pass before he finds her again). She treats his suppurating snakebite, making the ointment herself.234 This surprises Haafner as usually Hindus will not touch wounds of others because of concerns over caste purity. According to Pratt, the gesture of the female native tending, ‘to the suffering European [out] of pity, spontaneous kindness, or erotic passion’ appears frequently in the genre.235 Nevertheless, I suggest that the fact that he had seen many doctors who had been unable to help, and it is Mamia’s indigenous wisdom, handed down from her father—a village doctor—which heals the wound is an implicit recognition of subaltern knowledge. Moreover, from the outset there is no sense of coercion on his part. As he portrays her, Mamia volunteers her learning and affection spontaneously. Haafner also quotes Mamia at length, giving her a voice. After losing her mother at a young age, Mamia was married aged eight to a much older man. After his death, which left her as a pre-pubescent widow, she ran away to Tanjore to find her aunt. On the way she met with the troupe and the tai offered her a place, promising that she would teach her to sing and dance.236 In Mamia’s own words:

What should I have done? I was still very young and did not have any safe place of refuge; it was unsure whether they would take me in at Tanjore. Besides, I had already eaten with the

232 Haafner 1811, 432 (my trans.). 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. 235 Pratt 1992, 96. 236 Haafner 1811, 314-6. (my trans.).

64 soutredharies [and] I liked their lifestyle; they painted such an amusing picture of it, the free unconstrained life they led, the abundance of everything; the advantages, the beautiful clothing and jewels appealed to me, and I threw in my lot with this company.237

While Mamia tells Haafner her life-story, nominally so he will not think ill of her, it also serves to contradict the representation of dancing girls as women of easy virtue. She insists that she is, ‘too proud to abandon herself to money like a courtesan or let herself by treated like a slave’.238 Nonetheless, more than any other incident in Mamia’s short life, it is her death that is arresting. The events leading up to Mamia’s death, and the account of the funeral arrangements, symbolise the complexity of encounters in the cross-cultural sphere. Although Haafner may have dreamed of a quiet life with Mamia, it is evident in Journeys in a Palanquin that his on-going trade interests and desire to accumulate capital take precedent over his romantic interest. In the narration of what happens, Haafner describes how he and Mamia have a tender farewell the evening before Haafner departs Madras to go on business in Pondicherry. The next morning Haafner is surprised to see Mamia waiting for him on the beach. She is worried about his welfare (a recurring theme) and insists on coming with him on the boat—again explicitly affirming her individual choice. Haafner is easily persuaded and this decision, he says, ‘saves his life’.239 In order to reach the larger sailing ship, they must board a sloop. Overloaded with merchandise and people, including an English officer and a mulatto woman, I suggest that this boat in itself is a microcosm of the cultural, economic and racial ‘intercrossings’ of the port city of Madras, and the commodity culture of the period. Within minutes, the boat begins to sink and the couple jump into the water, quickly falling into difficulties when the mixed-race woman grabs hold of Haafner’s leg pulling him under. Mamia continues to propel both individuals towards the shore. Haafner writes:

How was it possible for such a delicate young girl to swim while dragging two people behind her? The kind creature fought fiercely to save me; she shouted for help with all her strength. I at last ridded myself of the old half-caste woman, kicking her off; but my arms were swollen from all my efforts, and I could no longer swim. Unluckily, a huge breaker rolled over us; I again

237 Bor 2013, 21. 238 Haafner 1811, 317. (my trans.). 239 Ibid., 439. (my trans.).

65 swallowed a lot of water and lost consciousness.240

When the author wakes up, he finds himself on the beach, surrounded by onlookers. Shortly afterwards, he learns that after Mamia had held him above water for ten minutes, a catamaran pulled alongside to rescue them both. (These catamarans were regularly on hand in the Bay of Bengal as drownings were common). In the process, the catamaran knocked against Mamia, who complains of pain in her chest. It transpires later that she suffered a pulmonary in her right lung. When Haafner visits her later that day, he promises his eternal love. In a representative sample of Mamia’s affection for him, he paraphrases her as saying that, ‘she had only done her duty, and that I [Haafner] attached more importance to her action than it merited, since she intended to die a mahasti should she have the misfortune of losing me. I didn’t doubt that this was her firm intention’.241 Despite her injuries, Haafner leaves shortly afterwards and in another tearful farewell, next to a house fallen into ruin, they say goodbye. In deep anguish and crying bitterly, she says, ‘You will not see me again! . . . the light of my life will be extinguished’.242 While he is travelling, he entrusts his dubash (interpreter) to be the go-between. Despite receiving messages that Mamia is unwell, and then, that she has disappeared, Haafner writes that he continues pursuing his business commitments. In a serendipitous meeting similar to the moment when Haafner met Manioppe in Travels in Ceylon, the author relates how the son of a devadasi had, ‘by chance met a young dancer, who was very ill and tired, travelling with her mother’, and as they were from the same caste he invited them to stay with him.243 This young man then travelled to Pondicherry to pass the message to Haafner that the young dancer has only three days to live. On arriving in the village of Onour he finds Mamia is dying. Her final request is that Haafner light the funeral pyre. ‘Ah yes, from the bottom of my heart!’ he exclaims, and he continues:

My promise brought a ray of satisfaction and joy on her face. She wanted to thank me but her weakness prevented her speaking. It seemed as if death had waited until she could have asked me this, because shortly afterwards I saw her suddenly change. Her eyes began to flicker and a shiver

240 Ibid., 444. (my trans.). 241 Ibid., 449. (my trans.). 242 Ibid., 452. (my trans.). 243 Ibid., 504 (my trans.).

66 ran through her limbs. I sat next to her on the mat and she hastily grabbed my hand and pressed it, while her lips moved convulsively. “Farewell, my lord!” She wanted to say, but she could not utter the words—Mamia was no more!244

In Haafner’s account of her death and his part in it, the relational ambiguity and tensions between personal narrative, poetic embellishment and authentic representation, are clearly on display. In certain respects, then, this plot conforms to colonial discourse. In its boiled- down form, the innocent native woman—an analogy for the Edenic native culture and people—saves the white male hero and sacrifices her life for his. In Mamia’s repeated emotional goodbyes, which are romantic in both senses of the word (and mawkish by today’s standards) she is represented as the vulnerable female who will give up everything for her beloved, even her life. Mamia’s reference to being a ‘mahasati’ is a strategy that indicates her devotion and loyalty, while countering her sexuality, ‘Sati is the ultimate expression of wifely subservience . . . The complex and contradictory representations of sati by European travel writers reflect the highly ambivalent masculine responses to the act’.245 Yet in one of several original twists, the conventional trope of sati—where the native woman gives herself to the flames out of respect for her husband—is subverted. In this case, the native woman dies saving her foreign lover, and requests that he has the honour of lighting her funeral pyre: an honour in Hindu culture that was customarily accorded to the son or nearest living male relative of the deceased. It is also striking that in both Travels in Ceylon and Journeys in a Palanquin, the native saves the European. I propose that the repeated use of this trope is significant in form and content. The narrativisation of Mamia’s tragic death is most satisfying textually. The reader identifies with her, rather than the narrator. It is her presence—her innocence—and her courage that remains, in contrast to Haafner’s weakness. It is also the purity of their love, in contrast to the abuses in the colony, which heightens the dramatic import of the book. As previously mentioned, Haafner was aware of literary devices of the day and employed fictional strategies to elevate the poetic.

244 Exotic Love: the Albert Verwey Reading about Jacob Haafner (1754-1809). 245 See Teltscher 1995, 51-68, for a detailed analysis of sati.

67 A useful comparison to Haafner’s account is Pratt’s analysis of John Stedman’s mixed-race relationship in Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam:

Stedman’s marriage to Joanna, like many transracial love affairs in the fiction of this time, is a romantic transformation of a particular form of colonial sexual exploitation, whereby European men on assignment to the colonies bought local women from their families to serve as sexual and domestic partners for the duration of their stay. 246

In some respects, Stedman’s story is similar to Haafner. The Dutchman leaves India wealthy, marries a European woman and never returns. In Stedman’s case, he also leaves Surinam and marries an Englishwoman. When Haafner leaves, he declares, ‘All the projects that I had thought, the idea to spend the rest of my life in India, have now been destroyed. [Mamia’s death] would change the plan of my life because I found myself again isolated on the earth’.247 In spite of Haafner’s attacks on colonialism, undeniably, Haafner retains his privileges throughout the narrative. These are many: male white traveller, witness, Dutch Company servant, free merchant, protagonist, author, and—most significantly—survivor. Without him, there would be no tale. Yet in the final scene, in which Mamia has invited him to light the pyre, the native ensures that the foreigner is brought into the liminal space between cultures—and between life and death. When her body travels in his palanquin to the funeral ghat, this not only renders his physical vehicle unusable (as a corpse is considered impure), but the literary device employed throughout the narrative becomes obsolete. When Haafner holds the flaming torch he turns his back, as tradition dictates, to hide his grief. At this moment, the Dutchman is at the point of ‘intercrossing’—he is no longer on the outside, he has stepped into the other’s culture. Afterwards he buries what is left in a large jug.

The entire village, so to speak, had attended Mamia’s funeral, and had witnessed my sincere display of love for the departed woman, which made an even greater impression on these good people, who were unaccustomed to seeing such attachment on the part of a European. Women and young girls crowded around my palanquin as I left, while others stood in their doorways and watched me pass; all bade me farewell and seemed to want to console me with their eyes. I am certain that the inhabitants of Onour will not soon forget kind Mamia, or the white man who had her burned with such pomp.248

246 Pratt 1992, 116. 247 Haafner 1811, 511-512 (my trans.). 248 Ibid., 511 (my trans.).

68 In this final scene, the author succeeds in his egalitarian intention to write as if within the native culture. Simultaneously, he ensures that his self-representation as a humanist European, an individual suffering a broken heart—and ironically Haafner did suffer from angina in India and will die at the age of 54 from a heart condition—seals the final page of his account with the trace of his presence, and the hard physical reality of a dancing girl’s bones buried under some palms on a nearby hill.249

249 Exotic Love: the Albert Verwey Reading about Jacob Haafner (1754-1809).

69 Chapter 3: Multiple Representations of the Devadasi in the Writings of Jacob Haafner and his Contemporaries

Throughout the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dozens of references to dancing girls in European travel accounts indicate the visibility and prevalence of the figure in native society.250 In this section, I compare Jacob Haafner’s essay detailing the lives, habits and practices of the devadasis in Reize in eenen Palanquin (Journeys in a Palanquin or Voyages, 1811) with three other travel writers: John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East Indies: Containing Authentic Accounts of the Mogul Government in General, the Viceroyalties of the Deccan and Bengal, with their Several Subordinate Governments under their respective Nabobs, and independent States (hereafter referred to as Voyage to the East Indies); Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde 1754-1762: Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du Zend-Avesta. (hereafter referred to as Travel in India 1754-1762) and Abbé J.A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. In deciding which authors to read, I aimed for contrasting and similar interpretations to Haafner. As my focus remains on strategies of representation of the devadasi, I will limit my analysis of the other travel narratives to only the relevant sections. Over the centuries, the naming—and mis-naming—of the figure of the devadasi, or dancing girl, contributed to the conflicting representations in traveller and eyewitness accounts. In some cases, this was a deliberate strategy characteristic of the colonial period to marginalise native women.251 It was also due to mis-identification between the devadasi, or temple woman from the south, and the Mughal court dancer, or tawaif, from the north.252 It was also due to the fact that although the figure did perform in public processions, travel writers were excluded from witnessing their dances and rituals

250 References to dancing girls appear in travelogues, diaries, ethnographic works, poetry, memoirs and plays, see Bor 2007, 39-46, for an overview. I am very grateful to Joep Bor for sharing archival sources with me on the devadasi. Further research is likely to produce more examples. See Teltscher 1995, 45-51, for a critique of seventeenth-century representations of the figure in English accounts. 251 Ghosh 2006, 63. 252 Lack of space means I will not expand further on the tawaif culture of Lucknow here. However, I briefly referred to the visual representation of the tawaifs in Chapter One.

70 inside the temples and based their reports on native informants.253 This not only denied the writer’s role as witness, it also allowed ample space for projection, fantasy and conjecture.254 In 1673, the British referred to them in a general way as ‘dancing wenches’; the Dutch described them in the self-explanatory dans-horen; the Portuguese favoured bailadeiras, which evolved into the French bayadères or female dancer. (The evocative and Orientalist word bayadère is an example of a Western construct of an Eastern phenomenon and is still used today).255 From the end of the sixteenth-century moral condemnation began, gathering pace during the 1700s when the Sanskrit term, devadasi, appears for first time in European literature.256 This term is derived from the Tamil tevaradiyal which in itself has a double meaning—and is likely to have muddied the waters further, ‘The term translates (not very well) as “slave of the gods”; literally it means “at the feet of the lord” which clearly distinguishes it from the cruder term, tevadiya or “available for men” which is used to refer to a common class of prostitute’.257 In native culture, therefore, ambiguity about the name of the figure exists. As Orr aptly notes, ‘Unique among temple servants because they were women and unusual among Hindu women because they remain unmarried, they have long been an object of fascination and the focus of controversy’.258 Certainly, this debate continues today as recovery scholars attempt to redefine the figure in terms of her artistry and literary prowess, rather than solely her religious role as a temple woman or the stereotype of a prostitute.259 Within eighteenth-century European travelogues the erotic is made explicit in the repetitive use of the word ‘lascivious’ to describe how temple dancers move.260 Another common theme is the differing signifiers of beauty between East and West, in which foreignness is indicated through posture, bodily adornment and dress. Some

253 Bor suggests that ‘travellers confused the devadasis, who performed in the interior part of the shrines, with “dancing prostitutes” (dasis) who had no association with the temples whatsoever’. See Bor 2007, 69. The term ‘dasi’ is problematic as it is also used simply as the shortened version of ‘devadasi’. 254 See Teltscher 1995, 38. The same issues apply to representations of the harem, frequently portrayed as a place of sexual excess and lesbianism. 255 Yule and Burnell 1903/1995, 295-296. 256 Bor 2007, 43-44. 257 Srinivasan 1988, 175. 258 Orr 2000, 4. 259 See Soneji and Leucci, 2012. 260 See Grose 1766, 139; Anquetil-Duperron 2007, 383; La Flotte as qtd in D’Souza 1995, 110.

71 observations indicate a neutral curiosity—such as Grose’s bafflement at the use of black kohl around the eyes, ‘It is not easy for Europeans unaccustomed to it, to discern at first that grace the Orientalists think it adds to them’.261 In regard to the nose-ring, remarks were freighted with aesthetic disapproval.262 I suggest this reflects a similar obsession illustrated in the writings on the South Pacific in which tattoos were thought to be equally as disfiguring and, ‘alien to eighteenth-century European culture and aesthetic values’.263 During the period, any permanent marking or alteration to the body was judged from a moral and religious perspective, and as a sign of difference. John Henry Grose, an EIC servant, arrived in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1750. His book, which was translated into French and reprinted in 1766, became the source for many later Indian travelogues. In comparison to more literary narratives, Grose displays a lack of introspection and a laborious style. His pre-classificatory language and discourse of the marvellous is reminiscent of early writers.264 In the seven pages that Grose devotes to the dancing girls of Surat (who were not attached to the temples), he shifts between Oriental discourse of Western superiority and an almost ironic, sexualising discourse of their role in society, describing them as having ‘made vows of unchastity which they religiously keep’.265 He also asserts that some women are, ‘appropriated to the service of the Gentoo-temples, and the use of the Brahmin- priests’.266 On this point Haafner vehemently disagrees, ‘That they will be obliged to offer themselves first to the head priest of the temple as travellers and ignorant Europeans write and say, is incorrect; the contrary is true, they can choose their lovers in or outside a temple . . . [,] they are even free to remain life-long virgins if they so desire’.267 This notion, in circulation since François Bernier’s widely read account of the Mughal empire (1671) and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier’s popular work (1678), shaped beliefs about the predatory nature of Hindu priests and the threatening sexuality of

261 Grose 1766, 142. 262 Ibid., 227. See Bor 2007, 64 & 2013, 27, for European reactions to the nose-ring; and see 2013, 37, where Haafner qualifies his response, ‘at first glance this ornament seems very strange and displeasing; but when one is at all used to it, one realises that it is absolutely necessary with their outfit, and quite effective’. 263 Porter 1991, 115. 264 In a similar manner to Peter Kolb’s descriptions of the Khoikhoi in South Africa, Grose comparmentalises his account of the dancing girls in a section on 'Hindu manners and customs', see Pratt 1992, 45. 265 Grose 1766, 238. 266 Ibid.. 267 Bor 2013, 36.

72 Hindu women.268 As Teltscher convincingly argues in her analysis of these seventeenth- century texts:

It is the alliance of religion and sex that most disturbs and titillates. . . . [Travel writing’s] quasi- scientific status confers authority, while the public expectation of foreign outlandishness ensures that sensational stories are happily consumed. Tales of the sexual activities involved in lingam worship, brahmanic sexual privileges and religious prostitution . . . abound in Indian travel literature.269

Later, Christian writers such as Dubois, seized upon this alleged custom and it became a central theme in the anti-nautch movement of the nineteenth-century to ‘rescue’ temple servants, represented as victims in a corrupt religion.270 The issue continues to be a source of dispute today.271 In Grose’s account, he indicates his authorial position as eyewitness with elaborate descriptions of the women’s attire, particularly their breast-wear (a strategy also adopted by Haafner who appears to copy Grose in this section, albeit in a more flattering manner).272

Yet they, as well as other women in that country, have a peculiar way of managing and preserving their breasts . . . for they enclose them in a pair of hollow cups or cases, exactly fitted to them, made of a very light wood, linked together, and buckled at the back. These at once confine the breasts so, as that they cannot grow to any disgustfully exuberant size; though, from their smoothness and pliancy, they play so freely with every motion of the body, that they do not crush the exquisitely tender texture of the flesh in that part, like the stiff whalebone stays in use among Europeans.273

I propose that this wordy description captures the paradoxes in representing the figure of the dancing girl. The level of detail makes one wonder how Grose became so well acquainted with the breast-wear and surely reflects the author’s personal predilections— large is not beautiful for the Englishman. At once the author reveals both an eighteenth-

268 Teltscher 1995, 3-4 & 45. 269 Ibid., 1995, 46-47; see also Bor 2013, 16 & 27, who adds that the figure of the so-called wicked Brahmin priest also became a common theme in several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plays, operas and ballets. 270 Dubois describes how the temple dancers gave favours to whoever offers them money and were once, ‘reserved exclusively for the enjoyment of the Brahmins’, 2010 [1906], 661; also Soneji 2008, 296. 271 In Apffel-Marglin, 1985 75-7, the custom of dedicating young girls to priests is verified. Her anthropological study focuses on the rituals at the Jagannath temple in Puri, in which the young devadasi first had sexual relations with the king or male temple servant, i.e priest. This took place after puberty and her dedication to the deity. Customs varied according to region. 272 See Bor 2013, 37-38, for Haafner's similar description, 'They believe that large eyes and round, hard, small breasts are the most important charms of a woman . . . Here they differ to a large extent from many of our European beauties, who do their best to destroy these natural jewels with bodices, corsets and whatever those things are called. . . . There are many among them who, gifted by nature with a lovely bosom, enclose each breast in a form, in order to avoid it becoming larger or smaller for as long as possible; these are connected to each other with strips and tied behind the back against the body’. 273 Grose 1766, 141-142.

73 century fantasy of the Orient with an enduring male fascination with the female form. The strategy of comparison between Eastern and Western women allows the author to normalise his observations for his home audience and is used repeatedly in the work. Whereas European women wore corsets and were therefore seen as proper—and by implication safe—the flesh-revealing outfits of non-Europeans represent timelessness, disorder and sensuality. 274 Further on Grose compares Indian dancing women to the, ‘opera-girls in France’. While Haafner employs comparison, likening the dancers to European ‘showgirls’ and other cultural signifiers of the exotic—garlands of flowers, perfumed oils—the Dutchman presents a more nuanced representation of their performance.275 For Grose, however, their dance is like a pantomime in which familiar scenes are enacted, ‘such as a lover courting his mistress, a procuress . . . endeavouring to seduce a woman from one gallant in favour of another’.276 Grose ends the section with a back-handed compliment, typical of the period. He claims that the native dancing girls do not have anything, ‘of that nauseous boldness which characterises the European prostitutes, their style of seduction being all softness and gentleness’.277 His concluding remark is noteworthy, however, as he justifies why he has dwelt, ‘more particularly on this article of Asiatic luxury, as it enters for so much into all the entertainments public or private’.278 In this statement the importance of the women as native entertainers is conflated with their objectification as mere luxurious articles—to be bought and sold, just as a Company servant such as Grose would have done in the local Oriental bazaar. Writing around the same time as Grose was French scholar and historian, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (Anquetil) who arrived in India in 1755 at the age of 23. As Stuurman argues, ‘Anquetil's journal displays a curious mixture of Orientalist common-places, open-minded curiosity, and the first glimmerings of a critique of European prejudice and arrogance’.279 At one point Anquetil describes how, ‘the difference between blacks and whites is due only to the relative warmth of the

274 Lewis 1996, 72. 275 Grose 1766, 139. 276 Ibid., 138. 277 Ibid., 144. 278 Ibid., my emphasis. 279 Stuurman 2007, 259.

74 climate, the relative thickness of the skin . . . [;] otherwise Indians have the same traits as Europeans’.280 This relatively ‘open-minded curiosity’—curious in the impartial sense— is not present, however, in his highly eroticised although brief description of the ‘The bayadères’ of Surat. In this, the French scholar employs virtually every eighteenth- century idea of the debauched East while revealing his own ambivalence. Indeed, in parts of the source text, the syntax seems incomplete, as if the author, so fired up, trips over his own euphemisms.

Nightfall brings the dance of the bayadères, a spectacle to which the people of the south are most partial. It is performed to the sound of the tâl and a small clay drum. Whenever an audience proves both generous and without scruples, the servants withdraw and the dancers appear quite naked, and invest their dancing with the most lascivious poses and gestures imaginable; one sees in Asia (as in Europe) rich men, beguiled by such provocations, ruin themselves lavishing gifts on these victims of debauchery. I am speaking here of the Mughal Mu’iz-ud-Din, whose dancing-girl Lal Kunwar governed his empire.281

Anquetil’s description of the women as naked is unusual—and telling. Grose, for example, who also wrote about the dancing girls of Surat at the same time, describes the women as not ‘exposing any nudity’.282 Marco Polo was one of the few travellers to describe women as performing naked. In the thirteenth-century, this may have been the case—or the women could have been bare-breasted as this was tradition among the general population of southern India. Since this early account, however, the portrayal of dancing women is almost always with clothes.283 The passage continues:

If passion does not extinguish reason, then at the very least it momentarily quiets it. The dancers, already agitated to the most violent degree by their own movements and by the scents of their own perfumes, are further stirred by these gifts of silver and jewels, and all the varieties of pleasure follow one after the other, until the dance begins again; and sometimes the princes will have four or five troupes of bayadères brought to them one after the other in one night, only to send them off again, exhausted.284

Anquetil writes in a language of excess: the men are ‘beguiled’ and ‘ruin themselves by lavishing gifts’; the women are ‘agitated’ and ‘stirred’. The use of superlatives and the fact that not just one, but up to five troupes are needed to satisfy the princes’ insatiable lust extends the metaphor of Oriental corruption.

280 Vincent interprets this statement as anti-racist, see 1990, 123; Stuurman suggests that Anquetil’s explanation most likely originates from Buffon's Histoire naturelle, see 2007, 259. 281 Anquetil-Duperron 2007, 363 (my trans.) I am grateful to Alex Gilly who brought my attention to this and who assisted me in translating this complicated passage.. 282 Grose 1766, 139. 283 Bor 2007, 41. 284 Anquetil-Duperron 2007, 363 (my trans.).

75 Yet the authorial distance within the piece suggests a gulf between what he allegedly witnessed and what he truly saw—as if writing about an experience, not of an experience. This indicates a high level of imagination and collapses the gap between fantasy and pornography.285 The author, it seems, is bowing to the pressure to furnish his account with stock motifs. A strategy, which he admits at a later date, results in deception. The Frenchman describes watching a sati in his notebooks but then, ‘in the margins of the printed copy of his work, he acknowledged his lie. “I was not present at this barbaric if religious ceremony. . . . I added that line to be freed of the thousand and one questions I was asked on the country’s customs; in this I failed to tell the truth”’.286 This admission illuminates the tensions of the genre and the negotiation between fact and fiction. It also reflects the powerful expectations demanded by his audience and how to witness a sati was the eighteenth-century equivalent of the Indian traveller’s badge of honour. Without it, a travelogue was not seen as complete. In his description Anquetil typecasts Indians as indulgent and entrapped by their own desires:

At the end of the night, when the audience is drowsy with the fullness of pleasure, a mutrib is fetched to play a type of three-stringed violin, which, with its soft, monotonous tones repeated over and over, induces sleep. Some throw themselves into the arms of young male Abyssinian slaves and, their imagination overheated, prolong in their sleep such moments that base instinct wrests from desire.287

The last sentence is revealing for two reasons. First, in eighteenth-century texts, the image of a black slave was associated with sexual—in this case homoerotic— promiscuity.288 Second, any illusion about Anquetil’s authorial position as a witness is shattered. It is clear that he can only fantasise about the dreams of the male spectators and one wonders if he did not fantasise the entire scene. In the final paragraph, the Frenchman includes an intriguing interpretation of the impact of despotism on the Indian people (a subject he would explore at length when critiquing Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws) and also refers once again to their voracious sexual appetite:

Most Asians, particularly those in the south, long for such pleasures . . . . This predilection

285 See Teltscher 1995, 51, on how the sexual representations of Hindu women in seventeenth-century travel literature were re-worked in contemporary pornographic novels. 286 As qtd in Vincent 1990, 124. 287 Anquetil-Duperron 2007, 363 (my trans.). 288 In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, it has several meanings see Kuehn and Smethurst 2009, 53-54 & 64.

76 influences all their customs and religions; it helps them endure the violence of the despotism under which they live. And to prolong their pleasure, they employ, in addition to opium, remedies made up of Spanish Fly . . . it would seem that, among these people, these remedies have the desired effect on all men, no matter their age, and that they have only contempt for those whom nature has rendered incapable [of experiencing the effect].289

Travels in India 1754-1762 typifies the dichotomous nature of travel narratives which could perpetuate stereotypes, yet also foster original thought. As aforementioned, like Haafner, Anquetil was a staunch critic of colonialism, especially of the English. After returning to Paris in 1762, with 180 oriental manuscripts, the French scholar would spend the remainder of his life translating and critiquing these texts, and arguing that Asian history and ancient languages must be studied as a way of assuring all races were treated with equity and humanity.290 Yet in his voyeuristic representation of dancing girls, which is closer to an orgy than a dance performance, his writing would only contribute to European misunderstanding.

The Romantic Interpretation of the Bayadère

In its rejection of science and return to nature, the Romantic movement in Europe, from 1770 onwards, elevated sentiment, irrationality and the esoteric workings of the unseen world.291 As Indian religious texts became available, beginning in 1785 with Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad Gita, European philosophers, writers and artists integrated Eastern knowledge, Sanskrit theology—believed to hold the primeval mysteries of humankind—with a critique of Enlightenment rationalism. Over the next five decades, the dissemination of ‘orientalist’ discourse would exert a profound impact on the Romantic movement in subject, style and composition: 292

‘Romanticism played a unique and distinctive role in the “temporal exchange” of global capitalism, whereby the antique, the curious, and the picturesque were imported to the metropolis as, modernity, technology, rationalism, and “universalist” aesthetics were exported to the periphery’.293

289 Anquetil-Duperron 2007, 363 (my trans.). 290 Stuurman 2007, 256; see also Gabilondo 2010, 1-15. 291 Halsted 1969, 12-14. 292 The full impact of Indian philosophy and theology on the Romantic Movement is beyond the scope of this work. As Drew indicates, this initial embrace did wear thin among certain poets. Although Coleridge was inspired by Oriental images to write Kubla Khan, in 1815, he would complain in an issue of The Friend, ‘now we hear of nothing but the language and wisdom of India’. See Drew 1987, 80 &185. 293 Leask 2002, 52.

77 This regeneration of Western thought influenced poets such as Schelling, Shelley and Coleridge, the latter naming India, in the Biographia Literaria, as one of four countries where, ‘the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood’. Yet in the assimilation of Sanskrit philosophy and theology, distortion arose. Members of the Asiatic Society, founded by William Jones in 1784, misinterpreted the texts which were often translated from Sanskrit into Latin, then into English:

For their inquiries into the religions of India, the society's members were dependent largely on a developing but still imperfect knowledge of Sanskrit literature, on references to India by Greek or Roman historians or by Persian scholars, on the reports of modern European missionaries and travellers, and on information supplied by native scholars. 294

Throughout the 1790s, when Jones’s writings were diffused through Europe via the publication of Asiatic Researches and in two volumes of Asiatic Miscellany, the English lawyer-scholar promoted the view that the mystic Orient could replace conventional classical imagery.295 According to Said, scholars such as William Jones enabled the Romantics to reconstruct the Orient.296 While acknowledging the Saidian view that eighteenth-century ‘orientalists’ appropriated native culture, ideas and thought—and material knowledge in the case of Anquetil’s 180 manuscripts he took back to France—I also propose that Jones and others played a pivotal role in the ‘intercrossing’ between West and East. Stuurman takes this further, arguing that both Jones and Anquetil, ‘opened up the study of Asiatic languages, and therewith laid the groundwork for the new methodologies of comparative linguistics and the comparative study of civilisations’.297 In the 1790s, Jones compared the Vedanta school of Indian philosophy with the philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato and used Neo- Platonism, ‘as a mediating factor between English poetry and Indian mythology’.298 In his work, such as nine Hymns in honour of the Hindu deities he also warned, ‘against misinterpreting the eroticism of mystical poetry’.299 It is in this context that the bayadère, as a poetic and theatrical figure, became known in European literary circles, regularly

294 Scharfstein 1991, 477. 295 Drew 1987, 56 & 68. 296 Said 1978, 22. 297 It is unlikely Jones would have viewed himself in a similar light to Anquetil, whose work Jones dismissed publicly. Stuurman, however, analyses the similarities between the two men rather than their differences. See Stuurman 2007, 266-267. 298 Drew 1987, 49 & 223. 299 Ibid., 56 & 74.

78 appearing in ballets, opera, plays and poetry. Examples include Goethe’s ballad Der Gott und die Bajadere: Indische Legendem (1797), Madame de Staël’s Corinne (1807), and the opera Les Bayadères, by Étienne Jouy and Charles-Simon Catel (1810).300 In her Romantic aspect, the temple dancer was portrayed as a woman who actively cared for and attended the passive male God. In this representation, I suggest, she embodied the Neo-Platonist spirit of Psyche, so popular among eighteenth-century ‘orientalists’ like Jones. This historical and intellectual continuum from the Neo- Platonists to the Romantic poets can arguably be found in its full expression in Jones’s 1796 translation of Kalidasa’s play, Sacontala, which created a sensation in Europe and went into repeated editions in Germany. While the Romantic interpretation of the bayadère brings its own limitations and the propensity to idealise, I suggest there is more allowance for paradox and an acceptance that so-called opposites—spirit and matter, good and evil, sacred and profane—could coexist.301 According to Nancy Paxton, the translation of Sacontala introduced the notion of Shakti, or divine feminine power, to European readers:

Jones’s Sacontala was closely associated with temple dancers, even though she was not actually presented as a devadasi in the play. . . . [In time] Romantic writers, from Goethe to Shelley, imagined devadasis who were idealised embodiments of joyful physicality and sacred sexuality.302

The Romantic interpretation, however, can have the troubling effect of sanitising the figure for the West. I suggest that Teltscher’s argument with regards to Jones is also applicable to the representation of the bayadère:

[Jones’s] Hymns to Hindu deities serve to relocate Indian culture within the English poetic tradition. These representations tend to obscure the violence and disruption of colonial intervention and make British authority in India appear natural and unproblematic.303

300 Bor 2007, 16. 301 Here I have extended Drew’s argument and applied it specifically to the Romantic representation of the devadasi, see Drew 1987, 62. 302 See Paxton 1999, 86-108, for an analysis of the representation of the figure in Anglo-Indian novelists during the nineteenth-century. 303 Teltscher 1995, 9.

79 Yet in comparison to the ethnographic or missionary portrayal of the devadasi, the Romantic bayadère does offer an alternative vision. 304 In the case of Haafner, whose friendship with Joseph Fowke brought him in contact with Jones during those heady days of Calcutta in the 1780s, I suggest his interpretation is positively influenced by Romantic ideology and an awareness that the sacred and sensual can coexist.

Devadasi as Ethnographic Subject

Jacob Haafner addresses the institution of the devadasi in a separate chapter to the main narrative of Voyages. Such a digression was common in travelogues and followed the convention of presenting a different group of people in a quasi- ethnographic portrait. This form of textual compartmentalising allows the focus to be on the object, rather than on the authorial and sentimental ‘I’. According to Pratt, ‘these descriptive practices work to normalise another society, to codify its difference from one’s own, to fix its members in a timeless present’.305 It also defines the subaltern status of the natives and groups individuals into a collective. Employed in this way, ethnographic discourse, whether in writing or in images, was a means to legitimise and validate the author/artist as scientifically accurate and therefore objective.306 In Haafner’s case, I suggest that although the form of the ethnographic sketch is a means to authenticate his description, what is significant is his framing of the chapter, the specificity of the details, and numerous Sanskrit words and native definitions embedded. The combination of these presents a more substantial representation of the figure than any other travel account from the same period. Furthermore, Haafner’s essay establishes the social and cultural rather than sexual and erotic discourse of the devadasi. The author states his intention clearly from the start:

Here and there one does find something about the Indian dancers by travel writers; but the little they say about them is not sufficient, and furthermore for the most part wrong or of no import, so that I have no doubt that a careful and detailed description of this class of women, who are so necessary and indispensable in those countries, will be welcome to the reader. They deserve a

304 Lewis describes how followers of the Romantic cult had an, ‘immersion in what they took to be the authentic experience of strange lands [which] ideally led to the loss of their contemporary Western identity in favour of a passionate over-identification with the exotic other’, see 1996, 179. 305 Pratt 1992, 63-64. 306 Lewis 1996, 168.

80 special chapter.307

Straightaway, Haafner asserts his departure from other travel accounts and emphasises the importance—and implicit agency—of this ‘indispensable’ figure. It is not known how the Dutchman collected material for this section, other than taking notes and drawing sketches in situ. In passing Haafner mentions speaking to Brahmin priests, and one can presume there was 'pillow talk with Mamia. He also collected Hindu scriptures and sourced some of his descriptions from other travel accounts, including Pierre Sonnerat’s Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine (1782), as well as Raynal and Grose. The background of this essay only recently came to light when Haafner’s biographer, Paul van der Velde, discovered a handwritten draft entitled Beschrijving der Indiasche Dansseressen (Description of the Indian Dancers):

Written in 1797, Haafner presented it in the form of a research paper with fifty-four footnotes and offered it to the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (Dutch Society of Sciences). But the learned society considered this an inappropriate subject and refused to publish it.308

In this early draft Haafner refers to devadasis as prostitutes. Eleven years later, when an extended version of the essay appeared in Voyages, the author had amended his copy and the word prostitute does not appear. Instead, Haafner goes to great lengths to emphasise their chastity, ‘Meanwhile, publicly they display the greatest modesty and restraint, and imitate maidenly shyness so well that one would regard all of them as vestal virgins’.309 On the one hand, this correction reflects a deliberate decision on his part to de-eroticise the figure. Yet I propose that by leaving its trace in the archive, this slippage is a textual example of how the naming and re-naming of the devadasi was a political act, which often had far-reaching implications for the subjects involved. From the start, Haafner’s essay foregrounds the religious significance of the temple dancers who are introduced with the Sanskrit definition devadasi, ‘female slave—dasi—of God—deva’. He continues, ‘The chief occupation of such devadasis is to dance in front of the image of the deity they serve—either in the temple or in public, when it is carried through the streets in procession—and to sing the praises of this god

307 In this interpretation, I agree with Bor, see 2013, 15 & 28. In this section, I am also referring to Bor's translation of Haafner's devadasi essay from Dutch into English, see 2013, 32-41. 308 Ibid., 24. I am grateful to Bor for alerting me to this correction. 309

81 and about his deeds.’310 Crucially the text then distinguishes devadasis from other Indian dancers, such as those who entertain at nautches, or the travelling troupes, and explains that there are two distinct groups of devadasis. The first, who are connected to the temples of Vishnu and Shiva, remain cloistered and are only permitted outside during the processions. The second class, attached to the lower order of gods, are free to come and go as long as they perform their ritual duties when required. Both classes must adhere to strict purity codes, which includes not associating with lower castes, Muslims or Europeans, and following certain rules when approaching the deity.311 I suggest that this strategy of specifying the differing groups further distinguishes Haafner from other writers as does his reiteration of the commitment of the devadasi to her sacred duties throughout her life. Haafner also details the dedication ceremony, how the young girl is formally offered to the priest with a document sealing her dedication. This provides a counter-point to earlier accounts, such as those of Bernier or Tavernier who depict the girl as a victim at the mercy of the priesthood. While the author’s division of groups could be seen as a codifying strategy, I suggest that it does the opposite. It illustrates the agentive role of the second class—both within the temple and communal space. It also appears to address the confusion as to how devadasis were able to have sexual relations with higher-caste men and how they were able to move between a cloistered and public arena:

The dancers of the lesser gods . . . are also employed at all special ceremonies, such as marriages, parties, the reception of distinguished people, bringing presents, and so on. Thus, they have much more benefit, satisfaction and freedom than those of the first class; moreover, in addition to what they receive from the temple and their lovers, they are also richly rewarded with money, clothes, linen or jewels at all the above-mentioned events at which they are employed. Since their lovers (who usually consist of businessmen, baniyas and others) are also more generous and richer than the Brahmins, they earn a great deal of money; often some have eight to ten thousand rupees’ worth of gold and jewellery on their bodies.312

In this passage, Haafner is explicating the devadasi as civic courtesan—a wealthy, independent woman who operates freely as an esteemed member of upper-caste Indian society. He further elaborates that this class of devadasis, ‘are honoured with the title

310 Ibid., 33. 311 Ibid., 32-34 & 35-36. 312 Ibid., 36.

82 begum (meaning lady)’.313 This passage also draws attention to her social role of being present when entertaining guests.314 In further contrast to the sexualised representation adopted by his contemporaries, Haafner details the daily practices of the devadasis, both mundane and performative, with Sanskrit definitions:

The dancers mainly sing the praises of the gods, their victories and deeds; it is also their duty to attend the festivals [of the gods], to dance before them, whether in the temples or when taking them through the streets in a procession; to weave the vanamalas or garlands of [wild] flowers with which [the gods] are adorned, and to bind together the lanchanas or bouquets of flowers which they use at the offerings and to decorate the altars; to sweep the temple and the priests’ cells in the inner courtyard, and to carry out all the other work suited to women. They also have to clean the wool . . . prepare the curnam or sandalwood powder . . . clean the lamps which hang in front of the image of the god, provide them with oil and wicks, and preserve the sediment of this oil which is used to ignite the homas or fire offerings.315

Up to a point, Haafner is aware of the significance of dance within the native religion and attempts to provide an explanation as to why devadasis who, ‘moreover lead a lascivious life’, are allowed into the inner sanctum of the temple, when the Brahmins refuse entry to lower castes.316 They are permitted, he says, because the way to conduct worship is, ‘to give thanks to, praise and exalt the deity’ which can only take place with ‘singing, music and dance’.317 While the use of the word ‘lascivious’ indicates authorial ambivalence, these remarks appear to be in reaction to Christian observers such as the Dutch Calvinist minister, Abraham Rogerius, could not comprehend the sexual/sacred axis, ‘It seems a very strange affair, that while these Bramines regard the Pagodas as holy places . . . that they also allow such lewd women to serve their gods’.318 As if to clarify, Haafner continues that dancing is considered, ‘a contemptuous practice’ among the majority of Indians. ‘But the devadasis do not dishonour dancing as it is their profession and they have voluntarily consecrated themselves to serve the deity and entertain the public.’319 This interpretation touches upon the significance of dance within Hinduism, without fully comprehending it. Dance is believed to be a spiritual practice and the way

313 Ibid., 41. However, the word begum is of Muslim not Hindu origin. 314 Dubois also refers to the role that temple dancers played in households and at marriages, see 2010 [1906], 66. 315 Bor 2013, 34. 316 Ibid., 39. 317 Ibid. 318As qtd in Bor 2013, 37, from De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom, 125. 319 Ibid., 39.

83 a devotee can attain religious ecstasy.320 In the case of the devadasi, her dance was not only integral to her rituals but also to her sexuality and her role within the greater community:

During sexual intercourse the devadasi produces the auspicious female life force . . . The creative powers released by this life force assure prosperity, fertility, and well-being of the land . . . . Whereas the married woman’s fluid makes her family and lineage thrive, the fluid of the devadasi produced during her dance is available for the welfare of the devotees and the embodiments of her divine lord.321

In Haafner’s vivid description of watching the devadasis dance, however, he does capture subtleties missed in other accounts, which reduce their performances to a pantomime (Grose) or a piece of erotica (Anquetil).

They are excellent mime artists. With an amazing precision of attitude and gestures, while singing and dancing, they can portray a love story or any other theme—even a fight; and their art in expressing emotions has been developed to such a height that our dancers and showgirls on the stage, with their cold and meaningless gestures, contortions of the body and break-neck jumps, would compare poorly to an Indian dancer.322

Here I suggest, Haafner is representing two sophisticated aspects of south Indian dance repertoire—abhinaya (facial gestures) and nritta (abstract dance technique). His description also alludes to the dance music genres javali and padam, described in another context as dealing, ‘with the myriad varieties of love in separation [which] are excellent vehicles for the portrayal of the Sringara rasa, erotic sentiment, in dance. These genres were at the heart of the performance repertoire of women from the devadasi community’.323 These details, only glimpsed in Tilly Kettle’s painting, Dancing Girls (Blacks), consolidate the representation of temple servants as accomplished artists. In Haafner’s interpretation of the role and purpose of the institution of the devadasi, he also reveals the limitations of their agency within the native patriarchal system. Devadasis, he writes, ‘also serve as concubines of the Brahmins and other [men of] high castes, in order to avoid them associating with public women and common

320 Vatsyayan 1997, 23. 321 Srinivasan 1988, 169. 322 Bor 2013, 40. 323 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 76. Also see Soneji 2008, 301, who describes how hand gestures depicted sexual positions from the medieval texts on eroticism, such as the Kamashastra, and were used until recently by the Kalavantulu. ‘Terms such as samarati (man on top), uparati (woman on top), and nagabandhamu (bodies coiled in the serpent position) were common parlance’.

84 dancers, by which they would lose their caste’.324 This role not only kept the caste of the Brahmins intact—it also inflated the status of upper-caste men in society.325 Haafner encourages the European reader not to interpret this custom nor Hinduism as immoral, and stresses that those who contravene caste law (even with a woman from the same caste) are punished severely.326 In a similar manner to Grose and Dubois, albeit with more specific detail, the Dutchman describes how temple dancers are taught reading and writing, and how this sets them apart from the rest of the female population, ‘because an honest woman or girl does not learn reading or writing and would be ashamed to admit that she [did]’.327 Here, the authorial anxiety about the morality of temple women is implicit. Such anxiety is also revealed in an undisguised reference to his intimate relationship with Mamia, ‘it is only in private that they do everything to please their lovers, by calling them the most tender names, with the most friendly welcome and most exquisite flattery; it is also very difficult to disentangle oneself from their snares’. This comment is reminiscent of Boswell’s boastful remarks when recounting his sexual romps through Europe, and even though Haafner is more circumspect, it reflects the unease associated with interracial relations.328 Again, the author writes:

A young and beautiful dancer, in all her finery, with her natural and free attitude and graceful gait, is indeed an enchanting and tempting creature. Her simple head ornament, the moderately bare, beautiful bosom and full arm, the tightly fitting dress with artful neatness and pleats twisted around her high, well-formed hips, the graceful curves of the veil—in other words, the whole garment of these girls is completely calculated to emphasize and add to their natural charm, and to radiate a certain gracefulness of her persona and gestures; each movement of her limbs is shown at its best – and her full figure can be perceived in the most enchanting and also the most modest way.329

This passage demonstrates how the representational strategies shift between objectification of the woman—as a dancer, on display—with her sexual availability as ‘an enchanting and tempting creature’ whose attire is ‘calculated’ to seduce the male spectator. The author is in awe, yet paints himself at the mercy of his companion. His

324 Bor 2013, 34. 325 Srinivasan 1988, 183. 326 Bor 2013, 34. 327 Ibid., 33. 328 Porter 1991, 34. 329 Bor 2013, 39.

85 ethnographic approach falls away and he self-represents in a language of infatuation, lust and—even—adoration. As a counterpoint to Haafner, the Jesuit Abbé J.A. Dubois, employs an ethnographic approach, in which he combines crude sociology, personal prejudice, frequent moral outrage and occasionally admiration for the country and people.330 As a missionary sanctioned by the church, it was his home audience who determined the content and tone of his work, valued for both foreign and domestic evangelism.331 Dubois lived in India, mainly the south, for 31 years from 1792 to 1823. His book, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (hereafter referred to as Hindu Manners), based on research and observations, covers Indian society, the caste system and religion, and follows the tradition of French scholarship founded by the Jesuits in Pondicherry.332 Reading Dubois through the Orientalist model, he epitomises what Said said in another context, ‘[the] European is a watcher, never involved, always detached’.333 Throughout Dubois’ observations, a common thread emerges: the superiority of Christianity and the belief that Hinduism is to blame for the nation’s degeneracy. On arriving, this Catholic priest and royalist from Ardèche claimed to recognise the need for a comprehensive study of Hindu culture and religion as a means of understanding the native population. In analysing Dubois from a sociological perspective, Paul Hockings argues that the Frenchman was familiar with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Law, and pursued the empiricism of the Enlightenment, ‘He was a wide-ranging scholar-priest equipped with such intellectual postures as environmental determinism, cultural relativism, and progressivism, all of which allowed him to record, evaluate and synthesise a vast range of social phenomena’.334 In the author’s preface he establishes himself as a savant, ‘zealous in his pursuit of knowledge’. He continues:

I made it my constant rule to live as they did. I adopted their style of clothing, and I studied their customs and methods of life in order to be exactly like them. I even went so far as to avoid any

330 D'Souza gives an alternate view, '[Dubois] loved profoundly the people, even though that didn’t extend to their religion and morals, which he frequently described with horror’. See D'Souza 1995, 324. 331 Thomas 1991, 144. 332 There is a suggestion by Sylvia Murr that Dubois’ work is heavily influenced (even copied) from an earlier manuscript, Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens, written by Jesuit Gaston-Laurent Courdoux and now lost. As qtd in, Vincent 1990, 333. 333 Said 1978, 103. 334 Hockings 1977, 331-332.

86 display of repugnance to the majority of their peculiar prejudices. 335

While he claims to have restrained himself from revealing his ‘repugnance’ outwardly, he does not hide his views in the work. Despite this, he adopted the preferred Jesuit approach and for three decades dressed as a local swami, and lived with the native people, travelling from village to village.336 Throughout Hindu Manners, the author adopts a discourse of dogmatic conviction in Christian superiority and European elitism. The Frenchman’s goal is transparent. He dreams of a time, ‘when the stubborn Hindu will open his eyes to the light and tear himself away from his dark superstitions’.337 After three decades in India, with only a few hundred converts to his name, Dubois claimed that the failure of Christianity to take root was due to the appalling behaviour of Europeans who the Indians viewed as immoral, as they ate beef, had sexual relationships with lower caste Indian women and were frequently drunk.338 Dubois’ view of India as a place of sexual excess, obscene statues and literature, and his personal distaste at the sensual nature of the religion would inevitably shape his representation of the devadasi.339 A representative excerpt follows:

[In] the many religious services . . . the principal part is played by prostitutes, who often make even the temples themselves the scenes of their abominable debauchery; all these things seem to be calculated to excite the lewd imagination of the inhabitants of this tropical country and give them a strong impetus towards libertinism.340

While he adopts this bombastic language throughout, Dubois reserves his invective in particular for the Brahmins, ‘it is not an uncommon thing to see even sacred temples converted into mere brothels’.341 As Orr argues, there is no evidence to suggest that devadasis performed ritualised sex inside the temples, therefore this statement, like others, is an eroticised projection to further his mission.342

335 Dubois 2010 [1906], 9. 336 Ibid., 333. The Jesuits differed to other Catholic missions, such as the Franciscans or Capuchins, and adopted Hindu customs, living the ascetic life of a Hindu sannyasin, see Teltscher 1995, 87. 337 Dubois 2010 [1906], 11. 338 Scharfstein 1991, 41-42. 339 Kersenboom offers an alternative interpretation of Dubois claiming that he, ‘seems to manifest a surprisingly broad-minded critical spirit, and can be said to have performed highly valuable “fieldwork” in the modern sense by his close association and intimate knowledge of the Hindus’. See Kersenboom 1987, 81. 340 Dubois 2010 [1906], 348. 341 Ibid., 662. 342 Orr 2000, 17.

87 In a standard description of their dress, Dubois, like other observers, compares the temple dancers favourably with European prostitutes:

Of all the women in India it is the courtesans, and especially those attached to the temples, who are the most decently clothed. Indeed they are particularly careful not to expose any part of the body. I do not deny, however, that this is merely a refinement of seduction.343

If this first sentence is notable for its neutral tone, the next sentence reveals what Pratt has aptly described elsewhere, as an ‘ideological tangle’.344 Here, and in the exclamatory remark that follows, Dubois swings between an implicit admission of desire—in recognising the devadasi’s ‘refinement of seduction’—before he reverts to his usual disapproving stance, ‘God forbid, however, that anyone should believe me to wish to say a word in defence of the comparative modesty and reserve of the dancing-girls of India!’345 I argue that in this final travel account, entangled elements of self- representation and inexplicable difference are glossed over by Dubois’ ideological posturing. More significant, is that this work, still available in India today, was regarded by British civil servants from the mid- nineteenth-century as their ethnographical ‘Bible’ to the country. Dubois became a cipher for the English who he praised at length as the nation who would liberate India. After purchasing his manuscript, the EIC published the English translation in 1816, with the French edition appearing only in 1825. (During this period Dubois rewrote much of the earlier version and in 1897 this revised edition was published with additional notes). When the French priest finally left India, the Company, in an unusual gesture of largesse, paid for his passage home and gave him a lifelong pension for services rendered.

The Western versus the Eastern Gaze

The difference between Western and Indian perspectives, and therefore representation, can be epitomised by the gaze. Whereas in the West the gaze is associated with power and gender, in India it is a way of looking upon a sacred object. India has a tradition of darshan, or ‘devoted viewing’ in which, ‘eye contact between the

343 Dubois 2010 [1906], 663. 344 Pratt 1992, 57. 345 Dubois 2010 [1906], 663.

88 model and beholder was reserved for worship of an image or deity’.346 It is for this reason that processions form an integral part of Hinduism, because traditionally this was the only time when the lower castes, not permitted inside the temple, could receive a blessing from the deity.347 I suggest that this concept was one of the key ways that Westerners contributed to the mis-representation of the devadasi. Darshan is derived from the Sanskrit word darian and has several meanings:

The basic one is indeed “seeing”, but the word often occurs in contexts which point to more complicated or deeper mental processes, involving the mind in issues of a philosophical and even mystical nature. It can mean “knowing” and “understanding” and, in the highest sense, having insight into or a vision of the ultimate truth. . . . The darshan of a deity's image is a mutual affair, only the deity does not take, but “gives” a darian to the worshipper and that is when the blessing occurs.348

Witnesses, such as Dubois, were baffled at the length the priests and temple women went to appease the deity, describing how the dancing girls used the aarthi, or lamp, ‘twice daily over the images of the gods to whom their services are dedicated’.349 He, like other Europeans, viewed the statue of Shiva as a lifeless idol—or in the case of the Shiva lingam, a degenerate phallic symbol. The rituals of washing the statue with water and milk, dressing and garlanding it, dancing in front of it, singing erotic padams and preparing the deity at night for ‘his’ conjoining with his female consort, were incomprehensible and bewildering if seen as simply a stone or metal object.350 However, from the Hindu point of view, the god or goddess is, ‘considered to be asleep when unmanifested. Due attention is paid to the comfort of the divine presence, the preparation of vessels and ingredients necessary for worship . . . and the offering of refreshments’.351 Indeed, it is the very sensual nature of Hinduism that Christian observers recoiled from. Dubois’s inability to cope with the sensual—emotionally and physically—is a consistent theme through his narrative and coloured his negative views of the people and country, ‘It really seems as if most of the religious and civil institutions of India were only invented for the purpose of awakening

346 Vishwanathan 2010, 4-5. 347 Michell 1977, 65. 348 Werner 2000, 266-8. 349 Dubois 2010 [1906], 167. 350 Kersenboom 1987, 87. 351 Michell 1977, 63.

89 and exciting passions towards which they have already such a strong tendency’.352 As Diane Eck describes in her seminal work on darshan:

[Hinduism] makes full use of the senses—seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and hearing. One “sees” the image of the deity (darshan). One “touches” it with one’s hands (sparta), and one also “touches” the limbs of one’s own body to establish the presence of various deities (nyasa).353

Such oppositional views between Christianity and Hinduism pivot around the assumption that a statue is not, in fact, inert stone but has an innate power and a vibration, which must be kept clean and pure in order for the devotee to receive a transmission. Instead of the Western belief that prayer is a means of communicating with the divine, in India, it is through darshan that communion occurs. Through serenading the statues temple dancers were believed to, ‘evoke the Shakti or female energy, of the male deity’.354 It is this faith that elevated the figure of the devadasi as mediator between worshipper and god—and contributed to her auspicious status in the culture. The god’s direct gaze, however, was not only harmful but could be sullied. In this case, Dubois accurately describes the importance of the temple dancer in averting the evil eye from the deity after it was taken through the streets in a procession, ‘so as to turn aside malignant influences, to which the gods are as susceptible as any ordinary mortal’.355 While the French missionary was familiar with the concept of the evil eye from Europe, I suggest that the Hindu notion of darshan remained outside the paradigm of his empirical knowledge. Nonetheless an intriguing textual slippage presents itself in Hindu Manners, in which Dubois quotes a Tamil saying:

“Vesya darisanam punyam papa nasanam!” which means, “To have intercourse with a prostitute is a virtue which takes away sin”. The editor, Henry Beauchamp, adds a correction: “The real translation is, ‘Looking upon a prostitute’”.356

Unbeknown to the author, then, this correction—in which the Tamil ‘darisanam’ translates as the Sanskrit darshan—places the devadasi in a revered position. Through this mistake, I propose, Dubois represents the figure’s spiritual and cultural agency, and implicitly reveals how to even set eyes upon a temple dancer is to receive a boon.

352 Dubois 2010 [1906], 348 & 650. 353 Eck 1985, 11-12. 354 Thapalyal 2007, 142. 355 Dubois 2010 [1906], 167. 356 Ibid., 350.

90 As neither darshan nor the transmission between deity and believer is visible, it is almost impossible to document or represent; it can only be felt or experienced. Therefore it is unsurprising that the majority of European witnesses who viewed Indian religious practices and rituals from the outside—whether figuratively or literally—failed to grasp these numinous elements. After the 1813 Charter Act, enabling missionaries to proselytise openly in Company-controlled areas, Christian observers became further blinded by their own prejudices which became enmeshed with the paternalist view that India and its people needed saving, thus justifying imperial dominance and rule.357

357 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 76.

91 Conclusion and Provocations

As the East India Company moved from trade to sovereignty and intervened more in native society, the earlier embrace of Indian culture began to wane. The perceived need to control the local population also became the need to control local women, including dancing girls. In the second half of the nineteenth-century, most colonial representations of the devadasi fell within the legal paradigm.358 Arthur Steele’s Summary of the Law and Custom of Hindoo Castes , which systematically codifies Indian castes and ethnic groups, including the different groups of temple dancers, is one of many strategies that imperial policy governed from above.359 The Indian Mutiny of 1857 marked a turning point in the country’s history with the British formalising their rule through military might. Throughout the sub-continent, the British direct rule of princely kingdoms led to artists losing their royal support and returning to their native homelands or moving to urban areas. In 1856, the British annexed the kingdom of Thanjavur when prince Shivaji II died without a male issue, ‘This accelerated the decline of the system of patronage that had supported the devadasi and other temple service castes since the Chola period. . . . Many devadasis lost their livelihood and homes, some turning to prostitution’.360 Simultaneous to the women losing their religious and artistic positions, the Victorian evangelical and utilitarian movements, both highly critical and morally scathing of Indian society, were spreading across India.361 By the end of the nineteenth- century and early twentieth-century, the Christian missionaries, Victorian social reformers and Indian Westernised elite would discredit the devadasi institution as an affront to the sanctity of Hindu marriage and a threat to patriarchal ideals of feminine purity, respectability and domesticity.362 In effect the devadasi, who symbolised the

358 Exceptions to this include references to nautch girls and devadasis in nineteenth-century novels, see Jagpal 2009, 252-272. Paxton 1999, 86-7. 359 Steele 1827/1868, 110. 360 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 72; Krishnan 2008, 71; Srinivasan, 175-98. 361 Dewey 1982, 691. 362 Orr 2000, 13.

92 apparent contradiction between the sexual and sacred was ‘de-sacralised’.363 Through successive legislation, which forbade the generational inheritance of land or property from mother to daughter, her ancient connection to the temples was severed. In 1947, the devadasi institution was abolished. This well-worn narrative of nineteenth-century decline is familiar among devadasi recovery scholars.364 When viewed within the wider context, I suggest therefore that the representation of the devadasi during the period from 1770 to 1820, in particular Jacob Haafner’s work and his detailed essay, is of particular importance as it predates this narrative. Whether it was literary happenstance that his work was not published in Britain or it was because of his anti-British views, Haafner’s Journeys in a Palanquin appear to have had particular influence on the poetic representation of the bayadère in French nineteenth-century literary circles, with numerous authors employing her image. Among them, Madame de Staël, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Philarète Chasles, Jules de Rességuier, Léon Gozlan, Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert.365 In comparison, the wide dissemination of Jean-Antoine Dubois’s Hindu Manners, among the British colonial elite and the public from the mid-1850s, contributed to the negative portrayal of the figure, and fuelled the anti-nautch movement. I propose that the theoretical framework of histoire croiseé allows a multi- dimensional approach when reading these texts, especially when combined with an awareness of the representational tensions and anxieties within travel accounts of the period. As Mukund rightly argues in another context, ‘The interaction between indigenous society and the colonial state was characterised by dissonance and complex contradictions rather than unconditional acceptance by indigenous agents’.366 As a way to close the critical section of the thesis, and pave the way for the novel, I turn to a final

363 Paxton 1999, 89. 364 For the long-term implications of the decline of the devadasi system, and the impact it would have on dance and music traditions, see Srinivasan 1988, 175-198. While Krishnan 2008, 85, notes that ‘literal "scripting" of dance culture’ did ensure the ‘the preservation and survival of devadasi dance’ in some regions, the concerted efforts by high-profile figures like Rukhmini Devi, to sever the new national dance form from its temple (and therefore sensual/sacred) heritage, continues to be a point of contention. See Coorlwala 2004, 50-63. 365 Current research by Joep Bor on Western representations of the figure in the nineteenth-century, focusing on the European reception of a performance tour of a group of travelling devadasis in 1838 and 1839, promises to illuminate Haafner’s influence further. Private communication with author, 2012. 366 Mukund 2005, 169.

93 indigenous text and chart the journey it undertook from its eighteenth-century genesis at Thanjavur court to its publication in Madras two hundred years later. Reading this from Pratt’s autoethnographic point-of-view, I suggest it encapsulates the enduring agency— and controversy—of the figure of the devadasi.367 Muddupalani (ca. 1730-90) was the consort to the Nayaka King, Pratapsimha (1739-1763), who championed south Indian arts, music and literature, and who honoured his favourite courtesan for her scholarly and artistic pursuits. Fluent in Telugu and Sanskrit, Muddupalani translated works of other female poets and composed her own poem, which ran to 584 verses and was dedicated to Pratapsimha. Considered a masterpiece of Telugu literature, it is entitled Radhika Santwanam, or Appeasing Radha. The inspiration, she claimed, was from a dream in which Krishna revealed himself to her as a young boy. Muddupalani’s guru and other scholars confirmed her revelation and encouraged her to compose an epic.368 In this work, Muddupalani traces her literary lineage through her grandmother, mother and paternal aunt. While this strategy was common among male composers and poets, it was unusual among female artists at the time and ensured that Muddupalani’s genealogy—like that of a queen—would be publicly recorded.369 In Radhika Santwanam, the poet introduces herself boldly:

Which other woman of my kind has felicitated scholars with gifts and money? To which other woman of my kind have epics been dedicated? Which other woman of my kind has won such acclaim in each of the arts? You are incomparable, Muddupalani, among your kind.370

In this overture, Muddupalani establishes her scholarly agency among her peers—in terms of monetary success and as a recipient of epics. Again, while it was common for poets to dedicate their work to male patrons, there appears to be no record of epics being dedicated to a woman.371 The repetition of ‘woman of my kind’ is a celebration of her

367 Pratt 1992, 7. 368 Rao and Shulman 2002, 397. 369 Ibid. 370 From the autobiographical preface to Radhika Santwanam, Tharu and Lalita 1991, 116. 371 Sriram 2007, 38.

94 courtesan heritage and an indication of her status within the court. The final line is a potent endorsement of her uniqueness and represents the strength of her authorial presence. In switching to the second person pronoun, the author invites the reader to honour her—as she honours herself. Throughout, there is no hint of apology or indication that her contemporaries condemned her work.372 Few details are known about Muddupalani’s life. In her poetry, however, she complains about the fickle and undependable nature of men, as if mining her own experiences. Indeed what is so striking is her triumphant language as she reveals her attributes in the following way:

A face that glows like the full moon, skills of conversation, matching the countenance. Eyes filled with compassion, matching the speech. . . . These are the ornaments that adorn Palani, when she is praised by kings.373

In this description, the author self-represents according to the typical signifier of Indian beauty in which her face ‘like the full moon’ is juxtaposed with her learned abilities in speech. As a woman used to wealth and fine clothes she does, however, objectify herself as a precious jewel, feted not by one king, but by many. Muddupalani was writing in the tradition of padams or composer Ksetrayya’s erotic poems of the seventeenth-century, the latter who adopted a female voice and wrote from the perspective of a courtesan. In these works the notion and agency of bhoga (pleasure, enjoyment) lies with the courtesan herself.374 In Muddupalani’s poem she inventively subverts the classical story of Krishna pursuing his lovers to foreground the importance of the woman as the initiator in lovemaking—an approach not taken by any other Telugu poet, male or female.375 In this approach the author, ‘offers a rich expression of a woman’s sensibility and self-perception in the domain of sexuality’.376 It also contrasts with the conventional narrative where the male protagonist dominates and the woman is the passive recipient. Female sensuality and self-worth pervades the poetic

372 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 6. 373 Ibid., 117. 374 Soneji 2008, 307. 375 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 117. 376 Rao and Shulman 2002, 397.

95 structure and form, in which Radha is advising Krishna’s new wife, Ila Devi (Ila), on bedroom etiquette:

When your husband holds you, push him gently with your breasts. If he kisses your cheek, touch his lips with yours. When he gets on top of you, move against him from below. If he gets tired while making love, quickly take over and get on top. He's the best lover, a real connoisseur, extremely delicate. Love him skilfully, and make him love you. That's my advice. But you know best.377

In the poem, Ila is Radha’s niece, who is being trained for Krishna and then given away on reaching puberty. While Radha, a woman at the height of her power celebrates her niece’s coming of age, she is unable to hide her own jealousy once she knows Ila and Krishna are together. Ultimately, Krishna returns to her and satisfies Radha— figuratively and literally—in the resolution of the poem. It is from this appeasement that the poem takes its title.378 It is also this section which challenges tradition, as Krishna complains that even though he does not wish to make love, Radha insists:

If I tell her of my vow not to have a woman in my bed, she hops on and begins the game of love. . . .

Appreciative, she lets me drink from her lips, fondles me, talks on, making love again and again. How could I stay away from her company?379

It is Muddupalani’s ironic voice and honeyed tone that indicates her linguistic mastery of the traditional form:

What makes the work so radical today, if not in its own time, is the easy confidence with which it contests the asymmetries of sexual satisfaction commonly accepted even today, and assert’s a women’s claim to pleasure. In fact Muddupalani transgresses today as much in her attitude as in her themes and her person.380

377 Ibid., 398. 378 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 7 & 117; Sriram 2007, 37. 379 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 120. 380 Ibid., 7.

96 In 1910, one hundred and fifty years after Muddupalani wrote her poem, a Tamil devadasi, Bangalore Nagarathnamma, decided to republish it. Nagarathnamma was a popular figure in Madras, a highly regarded musician, a patron of the arts and a champion of the rights of devadasis, at that time under attack by the anti-nautch movement. When Nagarathnamma read Muddupalani’s poetry she wrote, ‘However often I read this book . . . I feel like reading it all over again . . . since this poem, brimming with rasa was not only written by a woman, but one who was born into our community’.381 Nagarathnamma believed that Muddupalani’s poetry had just the right amount of sringara rasa—love or sexual pleasure—for an aesthetically pleasing work of art. Nagarathnamma, however, was disappointed to find that the 1887 version of Radhika Santwanam, then in circulation, had several stanzas missing including Muddupalani’s autobiographical introduction which established her female lineage and profession. Indeed, the poem, edited by an Indian male scholar, Venkatanarsu, an associate of the ‘orientalist’ lexicographer C. P. Brown, had been edited in accordance with prevailing Victorian moral standards. In some cases, Muddupalani was referred to as Maddu Pillai—a male writer.382 In his comprehensive history of Telugu poetry, Kandhra Veereshalingam (1848-1919), had begrudgingly recognised the poet’s knowledge of Sanskrit and Telugu, but negated this compliment by dismissing the author’s credibility as she hailed from the devadasi—or in his words ‘prostitute’— community. As a vigorous social reform campaigner and highly critical of the devadasi institution Veereshalingam declared, ‘This Muddupalani is an adulteress. . . . Parts of the book are such that they should never be heard by a woman, let alone emerge from a woman’s mouth. Using sringara rasa as an excuse, she shamelessly fills her poems with crude descriptions of sex’.383 After considerable research, Nagarathnamma tracked down the original palm leaf manuscript and a new edition was published in 1910. An outcry ensued and well-known critics and social reformers denounced Muddupalani’s poetry as scandalous. Nagarathnamma and her publishers, Vavilla Ramaswami Sastrulu and Sons, were accused of publishing obscene literature and the offices were raided and all copies

381 As qtd in Tharu and Lalita 1991, 2-3. 382 Viswanathan and Allen 2004, 74. 383 As qtd in Tharu and Lalita 1991, 3.

97 seized. Seven years later the work was banned in the first obscenity case in Madras. It was not until 1947, when the then chief minister of Madras, T. Prakasam, lifted the ban.384 In an illuminating twist to this story, Susie Tharu and Ke Lalita, editors of Women Writing in India, recount how difficult it was to find an original copy of Muddupalani’s work in the 1980s to publish in their pioneering anthology. Their requests were routinely dismissed by male scholars who attempted to persuade them that Muddupalani’s work was obscene and not worth reading, ‘The story of Muddupalani’s life, her writing, and the misadventures of Radhika Santwanam could well be read as an allegory of the enterprise of women’s writing and the scope of feminist criticism in India’.385 And the story does not end there. In a 2006 article, Indian writer, Rina Mukherji, writes that, ‘Twenty-first century India can never accept erotica composed by a woman’, citing the persecution of four Tamil female poets—Kutti Revathi, Sukirtharani, Salma and Malathy Maitri—who loosely formed a group, Anangu (woman), following years of public vilification. 386 Since then the poets, especially Salma, have won critical acclaim and been published internationally. Yet, back home Salma continues to write her erotic poetry under a pseudonym for fear of reprisals. Tamil writer, C.S. Lakshmi, also publishes under the pseudonym of Ambai and appreciates the enduring struggle her compatriots face, ‘At times the woman's body becomes the disputed ground between a man and a woman and at times it becomes the battleground to settle disputes. . . . Birth, death and love get written on the body and also violence, violation and power’.387 In conclusion, then, I end where I began, with the body. As the aggressive response to these contemporary Tamil poets indicate, the female body remains a contested space within Indian society, a space which falls within the private and public spheres, within the spiritual and the sacred, and which is vilified as often as it is celebrated. Threatened by a new wave of patriarchal ideologies, reconstituted in the interests of nationalism, religious extremism and anti-Western rhetoric, these Tamil

384 Sriram 2007, 37-53. 385 Tharu and Lalita 1991, 11. 386 Mukherji 2006. 387 Lakshmi 2003.

98 poets demonstrate the fraught issues when writing about the female body and its innate sensuality. Within this broader context, the representation of the figure of the devadasi in eighteenth-century writing, with its related anxieties, paradoxes and contradictions, continues to exert an aesthetic and political influence on contemporary literature and representations of female agency and sexual empowerment.

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107 108 Notes and Sources

While the main characters in The Pagoda Tree are fictional, some of the minor characters are based on real historical figures. Reverend Schwarz was a German Lutheran missionary (1726-98) who lived in and around Tanjore for over thirty years. I mined his rather laborious diaries and letters for life at the time (Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of the Reverend Christian Frederick Schwarz, 1835). The Dutchman, Jacob Haafner, existed and his travel accounts are still available, although only one is in English (Travels in Ceylon, 1810). It is in his Reize in eenen Palanquin (Journeys in a Palanquin, 1808) in which he tells the story of his love affair with the dancing girl Mamia. British India is exhaustively documented but the stories of Indian women— temple dancers and courtesans even more so—are harder to find. Where I can, I have tried to be historically accurate. Where sources do not exist, I have imagined. For the sake of the reader knowing who’s who, I have not adhered strictly to Tamil kinship relations or used the many different honorary terms for family members— such as chinnamma for auntie, meaning ‘small mother’ or akka for ‘elder sister’. I am also aware that in Tamil culture there is no general word for ‘cousin’ and there is a custom that a wife does not call her husband by name out of respect and because it is believed to be inauspicious. For simplicity sake, Maya refers to her lovers by name. There are some unacknowledged quotes in the book. Palani’s poetry (p.140, 205 & 215) is taken from Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radha) written by the real Muddupalani, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Tanjore court who dedicated her poem to her beloved King Pratapsimha. On p. 175, Lakshmi also quotes a brief section: ‘Palani has skills of conversation … incomparable among her kind.’ I have adapted the sixth-century poem ‘So free am I, so gloriously free’, written by Mutta, an Indian nun who lived contemporaneous to the Buddha (p. 206). There is also a fragment from the twelfth-century mystic Akkamahadevi, first mentioned on p. 206 and repeated several times in various ways, ‘The Lord is white as jasmine.’ I am grateful to the encyclopaedic Women Writing in India for these quotes.

469 I have compressed some historical events and occasionally shifted dates to fit the narrative. It was in 1773 that General Smith invaded Tanjore and the English switched sides, allying with the wealthy Nawab of Arcot in Madras against the impoverished Prince Tuljajee of Tanjore. Nabobs of Madras by Henry Dodwell (1926) was useful in furnishing details of the English traders and Company writers, and provided the following quotes. Thomas repeats two phrases from the letters of Francis Jourdan, another Company servant down on his luck, ‘you are a man of fortune’ (p. 331) and ‘dunning him for money’ (p. 435). The merchant David Young inspired the line, ‘The only profession to profit are the lawyers …’ (p. 417) and I quoted Young verbatim after the hurricane on p. 442. ‘From the Sea Gate as far as Chepauk the whole beach was covered with wrecks.’ Descriptions of the 1782-3 Madras famine are also drawn from eyewitness accounts, among them Schwarz and Haafner, together with letters published in The Scots Magazine (1785) and historical accounts. Mudaliar and the world of the dubashes were informed by the little known eighteenth-century Sanskrit work, the Sarva-Deva-Vilasa. Margot Finn’s fascinating study of the family of Thomas Munro (1761-1827) inspired the fate of Suranita (see below). It was in fact Thomas’s brother, Sandy Munro, who sent his illegitimate ‘little Dark girl’ to be raised by his family back in Scotland. From the Munro letters, I adapted the phrase, ‘polite society shunned the girl’s company due to her being a ‘mixed Breed’ (p. 468). Walter’s trip to the Tirupattur district was influenced by Jacob Haafner’s description of visiting a town called Onour in Journeys in a Palanquin. As Haafner tended to embellish, I’m unsure whether he did go there, but the massacre that took place is historically accurate—I merely changed the location. In the Second Anglo– Mysore War (1779–1784) against Hyder Ali, Colonel Mathews besieged Onour and then sent a detachment to the nearby town of Aumapore where English soldiers raped and murdered 400 Indian women who had taken refuge in a temple. Mathews was among several thousand British soldiers later captured by Hyder Ali. He died in chains in the dungeons of Seringapatam. I thank Haafner for providing the last line to this section, on p. 414, ‘All around a profound and horrible silence reigned, only broken by the sound of crows.’

470 Further Reading

In my wide reading on the figure of the devadasi, I sourced material from archives, European travel narratives and contemporary anthropological studies. The following were particularly helpful: Saskia Kersenboom, Nityasumangali: Devadasi Tradition in South India (1987); Leslie Orr, Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamil Nadu (2000); Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Wives of the God- King: the Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (1985); Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (2011); Sriram. V., The Devadasi and the Saint: The Life and Times of Bangalore Nagarathnamma (2007); Lakshmi Vishwanathan, Women of Pride: The Devadasi Heritage (2008), Pran Nevile, Nautch Girls of India (1996); A.K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman (eds), When God is a Customer (1994); Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the present, volume 1 (1991) and Joep Bor, ‘On the Dancers or Devadasis: Jacob Haafner's Account of the Eighteenth-Century Indian Temple Dancers’ in Music, Dance and the Art of Seduction (2013).

On dance, Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art (1997) edited by Jim Masselos, Jackie Menzies, Pratapaditya Pal (eds); Krishna Sahai’s, The Story of a Dance: Bharata Natyam (2003).

For eighteenth-century Tanjore, I drew upon K. N. Krishnaswami Ayyar and T. G. Rutherford, Gazetteer of the Tanjore District (1906) and William Hickey, The Tanjore Mahratta Principality in Southern India: The Land of the Chola, the Eden of the South (1874). I also enjoyed the lavish monograph of George Michell and Indira Viswanathan Peterson, The Great Temple at Thanjavur: One Thousand Years, 1010-2010 (2010).

Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (1992) helped illuminate Tamil kinship relations.

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There is a wealth of information on eighteenth-century Indian history, but I found these particularly useful: for an overview Michael Wood, The Story of India (2007); Christopher Bayly (editor), The Raj: India and the British: Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (1996) and by the same author, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1990), as well as journal articles by historians David Washbrook and P. J. Marshall. Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (2006), was indispensable in understanding the complexities of mixed-race relations.

The world of eighteenth-century Madras from an Indian point-of-view is well- represented in Kanakalatha Mukund, The View from Below: Indigenous Society, Temples and the Early Colonial State in Tamilnadu, 1700-1835 (2005) and D. V. Raghavan’s introduction to the eighteenth-century Sarva-Deva-Vilasa (1957).

From an English perspective, Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (1998); Henry Dodwell, The Nabobs of Madras (1926); Henry Davidson Love, Vestiges of Old Madras 1640-1800 (1913); Fanny Emily Penny, Fort St George Madras (1990); Philip Mason, The Men who Ruled India (1985) and Pramod K. Nayar, Days of the Raj: Life and Leisure in British India (2009).

Margot Finn’s family biography of Thomas Munro provided a valuable counter- narrative to some of the ‘old school’ historiography, in ‘Anglo-Indian Lives in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’ in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2010): pp 49-65. Christopher Hawes is insightful on interracial families in Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian community in British India, 1773-1833 (1996).

Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery (2009) helped construct the world that the English left behind.

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