ABSTRACT
The fusion of male and female performance practice as the hereditary women were gradually disenfranchised and the Kathaks became the primary practitioners of their repertoire also occurred during these years. The Kathaks documented in the British Census reports were communities of musicians and dancing masters. The Lucknow gharn has been the subject of much more research and documentation than the Jaipur gharn. The history of the Jaipur gharn stands in complete contrast to this documented and pruned, although occasionally contradictory, Lucknow story. The performances of hereditary women continued in increasingly less sophisticated settings through the first half of the century, and by the 1930s and 1940s some girls from middle-class families had begun to take formal music and dance lessons. The new genres Uday Shankar and Tagores Schools and their Western equivalent, the modernist dance style known as Oriental Dance form a useful link, not only between nineteenth- and twentieth-century dances but also once again between Orientalism and nationalism.
