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Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780143064787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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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.
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.
Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Court dancing
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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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.
Author: Saba Dewan
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 9395073594
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 804
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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.
Author: Julie Peakman
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789141737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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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.
Author: Usha Iyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190938765
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms — cinema and dance — historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
Author: Ramabai (Pandita)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindu women
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 0143066919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Culled from Raj literature, Sahib's India reveals little-known aspects of their lives and their dealings with their Indian subjects. Drawing from contemporary journals, plays and poems,
Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780143061977
Category : Lahore (Pakistan)
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
Lahore, First Published In 1993, Is Pran Nevile S Tribute To The Land Of His Birth. Grounded In Memory And Redolent With Nostalgia, Nevile S Reminiscences Transport The Reader Into The Heart Of Lahore As It Was In The 1930S And 40S A City Bustling With Activity Where People Coexisted Harmoniously, Unfettered By Considerations Of Religion, Region Or Caste. From The Riotous Seasonal Festivities Of Kite-Flying To Clandestine Love-Affairs Upon Rooftops, From Matinee Shows At The Cinema To Twilight Hours Spent Amongst The Bejewelled Dancing Girls Of Hira Mandi, Lahore Emerges As A City Of Mesmerizing Contradictions And Chaotic Splendour. The Author Underscores The Contrast Between Pre- And Post-Partition Lahore, And The Sense Of Pain, Loss And Longing For One S Homeland Experienced By The Displaced Millions In India And Pakistan Is Palpable. Evocative And Informative, Lahore Is At Once Social Commentary, Historical Documentation And Memoir.
Author: Louise Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061870714
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
An unforgettable and compassionate look at the lives of the residents of Lahore’s pleasure district The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond District in the shadow of a great mosque. The 21st century goes on outside the walls, this ancient quarter, but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: beloved by sultans, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are, unclean, and Maha’s daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of one Lahori courtesan. Beautifully understated, it turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, at fourteen a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to the Sultan of Dubai; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the Sultan come calling once more.
Author: Nalini Ghuman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019931490X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
During the century of British rule of the Indian subcontinent known as the British Raj, the rulers felt the significant influence of their exotic subjects. Resonances of the Raj examines the ramifications of the intertwined and overlapping histories of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the colonial encounter, and traces the effects of the Raj on the English musical imagination. Conventional narratives depict a one-way influence of Britain on India, with the 'discovery' of Indian classical music occurring only in the post-colonial era. Drawing on new archival sources and approaches in cultural studies, author Nalini Ghuman shows that on the contrary, England was both deeply aware of and heavily influenced by India musically during the Indian-British colonial encounter. Case studies of representative figures, including composers Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, and Maud MacCarthy, an ethnomusicologist and performer of the era, integrate music directly into the cultural history of the British Raj. Ghuman thus reveals unexpected minglings of peoples, musics and ideas that raise questions about 'Englishness', the nature of Empire, and the fixedness of identity. Richly illustrated with analytical music examples and archival photographs and documents, many of which appear here in print for the first time, Resonances of the Raj brings fresh hearings to both familiar and little-known musics of the time, and reveals a rich and complex history of cross-cultural musical imaginings which leads to a reappraisal of the accepted historiographies of both British musical culture and of Indo-Western fusion.
