Nautch Girls of India

Nautch Girls of India PDF Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Court dancing
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents An Authentic View Of Dance Entertainment Specially During The Raj. It Is Sumptuously Illustrated With Productions Of The Finest Paintings And Drawings From Collections All Over The World.

Nautch Girls of India

Nautch Girls of India PDF Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Court dancing
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents An Authentic View Of Dance Entertainment Specially During The Raj. It Is Sumptuously Illustrated With Productions Of The Finest Paintings And Drawings From Collections All Over The World.

Nautch Girls of the Raj

Nautch Girls of the Raj PDF Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143064787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The life and times of the nautch girl evoked by Nevile are an eye-opener The Times of India To see her is to fall in love, and to drink a cup of wine from the flask of her lustrous eyes is to be transported to the cosiest corner of Heaven. To be with her even for a moment is to taste immortality. The much-celebrated nautch girl, extravagantly adored for both her beauty and her virtuosity, belonged to a unique class of courtesans who played a significant role in the social and cultural life of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nautch girl, it may be said, was no ordinary woman of pleasure she had refined manners, a ready wit and poetry in her blood. She embodied a splendid synthesis of different cultures and dance forms the classical and the popular and catered to the sophisticated tastes of the elite who had the time, resources and inclination to enjoy her accomplishments. Over the centuries female dancers have appeared in various incarnations, frequently as temple dancers dedicated to the gods, for dance is believed to have divine approval. However, historians, sociologists, novelists and chroniclers have not always done justice to the nautch girl, depicting her as either a vamp or as a showgirl bought by the wealthy for festive occasions. This book highlights the emergence of the quintessential nautch girl in the Mughal era when she reached the zenith of her talent and charisma. Her mystique continued to reign supreme during the Raj and her popularity and status among the English sahibs and the Indian aristocracy flourished during this period.

Licentious Worlds

Licentious Worlds PDF Author: Julie Peakman
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789141737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Licentious Worlds is a history of sexual attitudes and behavior through five hundred years of empire-building around the world. In a graphic and sometimes unsettling account, Julie Peakman examines colonization and the imperial experience of women (as well as marginalized men), showing how women were not only involved in the building of empires, but how they were also almost invariably exploited. Women acted as negotiators, brothel keepers, traders, and peace keepers—but they were also forced into marriages and raped. The book describes women in Turkish harems, Mughal zenanas, and Japanese geisha houses, as well as in royal palaces and private households and onboard ships. Their stories are drawn from many sources—from captains’ logs, missionary reports, and cannibals’ memoirs to travelers’ letters, traders’ accounts, and reports on prostitutes. From debauched clerics and hog-buggering Pilgrims to sexually-confused cannibals and sodomizing samurai, Licentious Worlds takes history into its darkest corners.

Tawaifnama

Tawaifnama PDF Author: Saba Dewan
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 9395073594
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 804

Get Book Here

Book Description
About the Book A NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY. Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council—and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family’s ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari … there are so many stories in this family. And you—one of the best-known tawaifs of your times—remember the stories of your foremothers and your own. This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten. In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement. Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.

The Dancing Girl

The Dancing Girl PDF Author: Hasan Shah
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811212564
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written in 1790, Hasan Shah's autobiographical romance, The Dancing Girl, is remarkable for both its lyrical prose and its fine recreation of a time, a place, and a culture - India in the 1780s, a tolerant, affable era before the full establishment of British colonial rule. The Dancing Girl tells of the doomed love of Hasan Shah (aide-de-camp to a British officer) and Khanum Jan (a courageous and gifted dancer of the courtesan caste) whose secret marriage could not prevent their separation. At Khanum Jan's death, her grief-stricken husband turned his raw emotion into a surprisingly modern, first-person narrative "without realizing", as leading Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder observes in the foreword to her translation (from the 1893 Urdu translation of the original Persian), "that he had become a pioneer of the modern Indian novel".

Unfinished Gestures

Unfinished Gestures PDF Author: Davesh Soneji
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226768090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective

India's Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective PDF Author: Margaret E. Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317117379
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kathak, the classical dance of North India, combines virtuosic footwork and dazzling spins with subtle pantomime and soft gestures. As a global practice and one of India's cultural markers, kathak dance is often presented as heir to an ancient Hindu devotional tradition in which men called Kathakas danced and told stories in temples. The dance's repertoire and movement vocabulary, however, tell a different story of syncretic origins and hybrid history - it is a dance that is both Muslim and Hindu, both devotional and entertaining, and both male and female. Kathak's multiple roots can be found in rural theatre, embodied rhythmic repertoire, and courtesan performance practice, and its history is inextricable from the history of empire, colonialism, and independence in India. Through an analysis both broad and deep of primary and secondary sources, ethnography, iconography and current performance practice, Margaret Walker undertakes a critical approach to the history of kathak dance and presents new data about hereditary performing artists, gendered contexts and practices, and postcolonial cultural reclamation. The account that emerges places kathak and the Kathaks firmly into the living context of North Indian performing arts.

Oriental Memoirs

Oriental Memoirs PDF Author: James Forbes
Publisher: Gyan Publishing House
ISBN: 9788121202190
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A literary exposition of the early 19th century India, with interesting account of social, cultural and religious life. These illustrated chronicles are valuable for conservation and restoration of some of the important historical buildings and monuments

Girls for Sale

Girls for Sale PDF Author: Gurujada Venkata Apparao
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253348994
Category : Man-woman relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Get Book Here

Book Description
A masterpiece of British Indian literature in a vibrant modern English translation

The High-caste Hindu Woman

The High-caste Hindu Woman PDF Author: Ramabai (Pandita)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindu women
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description