Books
COURTESANS, BAR GIRLS AND DANCING BOYS: The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance by Anna Morcom. Hachette India, Gurgaon, 2014.
INDIAN dance has been discussed primarily through the narratives and counter narratives of Indian classical dance shaped during the colonial and the nationalist period. In most of the cases, scholars tend to make passing remarks on what happened to the ‘othered’ traditions or the traditions that got marginalized. Morcom’s book, Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys makes a much needed intervention by bringing in the discourses of the most marginalized and the least explored worlds of Indian dance.
What can be considered as ‘an underworld’ or the othered worlds of Indian dance are deeply rooted in the cultures of exclusion and around the question of multiple marginalities. The subtitle of the book, The Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance is appropriate in the sense that it captures the ‘contingency’, ‘illegitimacy’ and ‘precariousness’ of such cultural practices. The author has used an interdisciplinary approach of ethnomusicology which not only combines song and music but the associated fields of cinema, dance and other kinds of arts and cultural industries. It attempts to introduce a conceptual framework that treats performing arts as labour. Breaking out of the conventional social science approaches, which tend to make a clear separation between past and present, the author keeps shifting between history and the contemporary period to capture the intricate movements of dance.
In innovative ways, the work fuses descriptive fieldwork analysis to empirical theoretical approaches and ‘social’ to ‘artistic’. The fundamental question that arises is about where to locate the problems associated with the illicit worlds of dance? Like many other scholars, Morcom locates the problem in ‘the axis of inclusion/ exclusion’ which began with the intervention of modernity in the nineteenth century (16). She contests the viewpoint which classifies ‘a public/ erotic female performer as a prostitute and therefore not a performer.’ The problematic can be viewed through the prism of the materiality of discourse which shaped the discourses of Indian modernity and rationality as strategic projects.
The author challenges the assumed boundaries and hierarchies of ‘illicit’ and ‘respectable’ dance based on classical, folk, popular and elite genres. Rather, she argues that the illicit worlds of Indian dance cut across genres and spaces. These assertions, however, raise more questions than provide answers. While the success of this interdisciplinary approach rests in the crucial intersections and conjunctions which bring several art practices, communities and bodies together, the failure lies in the fragile and vast experiences it tries to capture.
The book begins with a scene from Kamal Amrohi’s popular film Pakeezah, a story of courtesan Sahib Jaan who is struggling to escape from her shameful world in a kotha. The author foregrounds the fundamental question of the ambiguous position of professional female performers who simultaneously fit and do not fit into the politics of respectability. The film intricately captures the boundaries, transgressions and contradictions of the illicit world (3). Morcom rightly argues that the problems of modernity and rationality become immensely important in this discussion as they mark the politics of inclusion and exclusion. This politics of modernity and rationality gets further complicated post the 1990s when neoliberal globalization made its crucial inroads in the cultural field. Now the question is no longer about being either traditional or modern; rather both become strategic locations.
The work tries to bring together a vast range of performances under the rubric of the illicit worlds of Indian dance. Herein rests both the success and weakness of the work. In part it provides a brilliant sketch of a diverse range of such cultural practices; however, some chapters lack proper historicization, failing to substantiate several issues which need more elaboration. Of course, the failure has also to do with the fragile nature of this field of study. Even as the author points out that the legitimate and illicit zones of dance and music cut across the categories of classical, folk and popular, their role and boundaries cannot be completely underplayed either. The question then arises: where do the roots of marginalization and the illicit zones of Indian dance lie? Where do they fit and how do they play out in the questions of inclusion through exclusion and vice-versa. For that matter, several assumed categories and existing binaries come under scrutiny. Morcom discusses the case of Maharashtra in which sections of vernacular forces represented the same nationalist and conservative values (p. 143), and thus, the assumed binaries between nation and vernacular did not necessarily figure as opposites. The author introduces the questions of agency and representation to counter the anti-nautch arguments, a concern that acquires a renewed significance in the context of bar dancers in Mumbai. However, the question of agency gets complicated by the lack of mobility, as discussed by contemporary dalit scholars supporting the ban on devadasis. Despite the attendant ambivalence, the question of agency needs to be situated in the politics of emancipation.
The book discusses a range of performances that include, among others, court dancers to kothi dancers, from bar girls to Bollywood. At the level of mapping, this is quite inclusive and generous; however, every genre needs to be historicized in its own particular social and cultural contexts. The performance cultures become so diverse and wide-ranging that somewhere they lose their historical experiences and cultural specificities. This is important because modernity and rationality were negotiated quite differently in different communities and regions. One also needs to ask why the question of obscenity and vulgarity only becomes prominent when dealing with vernacular cultural communities. Is the marginalization merely about the illicit? These complexities need to factored in because the questions of modernity, respectability and illicit do not work as self-explanatory categories. They rather become strategic performative categories privileging some over the others. If being illicit is the basis of exclusion, then why does the song Launda badnam hua become vulgar while Munni badnam hui is celebrated?
While the colonialist and the nationalist use of aesthetic distinctions was understandable as both use the categories of the performer to delegitimize the prostitute, why do we need to base our assertion on similar grounds, viz. by arguing the opposite – that bar girls are performers and not sex workers. I would like to argue that the boundaries of the suggestive or the real sexual encounter and artistic labour are not necessarily demarcated; they also merge. Such artists can simultaneously be labourers, performers and engaged in sex work, but this does not diminish their artistic identity. In the case of kothi performers, Morcom tries to undo this binary. The argument that she (bar dancer) is a performer and not a sex worker should actually be put the other way round: so what if she is a sex worker? The point is that the bar dancer is a performer and her performing identity or artistic skills cannot be undermined merely because she is involved in sex work. Distinguishing on the basis of performers as labourers, performers as sex workers and performers as artists can create an unnecessary division; they can be all, one at a time or one at all times.
I agree with the author that the trajectory of exclusion of public/ erotic performers requires a broader consideration of modernity. Since modernity in India was also a strategic location, there cannot be one single reading in our context. In Maharashtra, both Lokmanya Tilak and Jyotiba Phule supported a ban on the devadasi system, but on opposing grounds and thus cannot be lumped together. For Tilak, a ban was necessary as the dance represented immorality and a corruption of culture. For Phule, the devadasi system was a ritualized exploitation of lower caste women. Sharmila Rege has successfully explained how Lavani as an expression of the everyday desire of labouring communities was reduced to a performance satiating male desire in the upper caste courts and how women slaves were part of the larger economic transaction under the Peshwa regime.1 Crucially, what is missing in Morcom’s study are dalit readings of these marginalized cultural practices. One needs to be wary about this uncritical celebration of local and vernacular cultural practices.
The first chapter deals with the creation and recreation of India’s illicit zones of performing arts through the dynamics of exclusion in colonial and postcolonial India. The book begins with a historical overview of female hereditary courtesan-type performers. It examines the process of their stigmatization and loss of livelihood in colonial India (28). The author correctly points out that these performers are usually discussed in the context of studies of prostitution and questions of development rather than on their immediate artistic and creative contribution. Given this assertion one expects a deeper engagement with corporeal and creative concerns. Unfortunately, however, sexuality remains the basis through which most of the performance practices are analyzed. The second chapter is on female hereditary performers in post-independence India: communities, histories and livelihood. It offers a genealogical background of some of the most marginalized communities of performers in India – Nat, Bedia, Kanjar and Kolhati. The fragile nature of these communities’ identities becomes apparent in the discussion of their cultural and social practices. However, in comparison to other chapters which are grounded in deep empirical fieldwork and offer insightful conceptual underpinnings, this chapter disappoints.
The chapters on Bollywood Dance Revolution, Mumbai Dance Bars and the Contemporary World of Kothi Performers stand out. In the context of performativity of gender, kothi performers present multiple identifications. Morcom argues that kothis need to be seen as equivalent to females because they reflect feminity in number of ways: dancing female dances, wearing female clothes and make-up, shaping their eyebrows, applying henna, doing housework, adopting a feminine mode of speech and so on. However, such an identification itself needs to be seen as a product of certain discourses and the politics of marginality through which the communities have gone. It would be more radical to envision kothi performers beyond male-female sex and gender boundaries. In Morcom’s view, a kothi performer becomes a hyper-feminine category. What then happens to the issue of materiality in such construction of hyper-performativity? The chapter makes a strong connection between performativity of gender and embodiment through artistic practices. In kothi performances, dance and music can be seen as potentially feminizing in terms of emotion and aesthetics.
The author suggests a further exploration of the trajectory of embourgeoisement of performing arts as crucial to understanding the illicit world, because as the ‘other’ of the legitimate world, the two have mutually created or depended on each other at various levels. Despite some limitations, the book makes a significant contribution to the under-explored world of dance in South Asia.
Brahma Prakash
Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, Delhi
Footnote:
1. Sharmila Rege, ‘Conceptualising Popular Culture: "Lavani" and "Powada" in Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2002, pp. 1038-1047.
