Decolonising human exhibits: dance, re-enactment and historical fiction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on decolonising exhibition practices and colonial archives. It begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. Next, the article examines the failed Liberty’s 1885 exhibition in London, specifically analyzing the nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing such live human exhibits. In the final section, the article examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experiences by embodying archival slippages might be a usefully anarchic way of exhuming the memories of those dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history. The article delineates the structural limitations of reenactments, a current trend in contemporary Euro-American dance, and it argues that historical fiction as a corporeal methodology might be a viable decolonising strategy for dance studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance
• nautch
• South Asia
• colonial exhibitions
• human zoos
• race relations
• re-enactment

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust under the Small Research Grants Scheme (SRG2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Prarthana Purkayastha is Senior Lecturer in Dance at Royal Holloway University of London. Her monograph Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (2014, Palgrave Macmillan New World Choreographies series) won the 2015 de la Torre Bueno Prize from the Society of Dance History Scholars and the 2015 Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress on Research in Dance. Her research locates South Asian dance at the intersections of race, gender and nationhood.

Notes

1 It is important to examine briefly here the multiplicity of meanings that the term ‘nautch’ evoked for people in South Asia and for those in Europe. As Rosie Jensen (2018) suggests, one meaning pointed to the dramatised and fictional character of an exotic South Asian dancer, which was popularised on the European stage through ballets such as La Bayadère (1877) and productions such as The Nautch Girl (1891). These were played by white performers. The other versions of nautch were the real South Asian dancers who Euro-Americans encountered in India, or who travelled to Europe and North America from India. The term nautch is an anglicised version of the word ‘naach’, which translates simply as ‘dance’. It was an umbrella term used by Europeans to collapse a range of different practices of dance from across the South Asian sub-continent. The nautch body, along with the bodies of devadasis (temple dancers) became the centre of fierce debates on South Asian dancing women’s sexual promiscuity, public sexual health, property and inheritance rights for women, etc. under colonial rule. Simultaneously attractive and fearsome, beautiful and dangerous, skilled but disreputable – the nautch embodied ambivalent attitudes to the idea of Indian exotic femininity. An anti-nautch campaign was launched by British Christian missionaries and urban Indians, including nationalists and professionals, in 1892, a few years after nautch dancers were brought over for the Liberty’s exhibit. It ultimately led to the suppression of the devadasi (temple dancer) system in India. See Pallabi Chakravorty (2008) for a more detailed discussion of nautch.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust under the Small Research Grants Scheme [grant number SG161464].