ABSTRACT
This chapter calls attention to the historic tour of five Indian devadasis (courtesans affiliated with courts and temples in South India) to Europe in 1838 and uses this extraordinary moment in world dance history to explore the global politics of cultural translation, which remains unexplored, not just in Indian Dance Studies but more widely in comparative and cross-cultural studies of world dance traditions. I articulate this new historical trajectory by focusing on three imperial keywords Dance/Nautch and Bayadere, used interchangeably to describe all varieties of dancing in India during the long nineteenth century period of British rule in India, ending with decolonization in the 1950s. Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theory of “rough translation,” I show how these rough keywords enabled both the provincialism and transnationalism of devadasi courtesan traditions in the nineteenth century. The rough keywords were transformed into imperial classificatory categories when they were enshrined as such in the colonial, Oriental, and native archives associated with three key Orientalists: Warren Hastings (1746–1794), William Jones (1732–1818), and Maratha King Serfoji 11(1798–1832), who ruled the princely state of Tanjore, under the aegis of British rule, in the early nineteenth century. Finally, I use the three geopolitical archives, what I encapsulate as the “Trinity of Dance Archives,” performatively to re-historicize the local “Indian” dance revival within a global dance history and modernity framework.
