The 'Nautch Girls' of Edwin Lord Weeks: 1882-1900

The Nautch Girls of Edwin Lord Weeks: 1882-1900 By Donovan Roebert Edwin Lord Weeks was the son of a Boston grocer who had made good. His father’s prosperity enabled the son to finance his period of development as an artist, and to move to Paris, where he studied under Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme, creating a life-long bond with the École des Beaux-arts. Many of his best paintings of Indian life, landscape and architecture were exhibited at the Paris Salon, and were highly regarded, both by his fellow artists and by art critics in France, Britain and the United States. Weeks not only cultivated the persona of the artist-adventurer that he no doubt actually was, but also got himself into a number of dangerous situations in his many travels, as an orientalist painter, through North Africa, the Middle East and India. Yet it was his travels to India that yielded the most beautiful, the most enduring, and the most numerous of his many light-filled and sympathetic works of art. Although his work enjoyed acclaim and success from the 1880s until the mid-1890s, as brilliant and idealized depictions of an India that was then still regarded as largely exotic and inaccessible to the public at large, appreciation began to decline towards the end of the 19th century when the popularity of the rich textures of Orientalist art began to wane in favour of new artistic currents. Figure 1: ‘A nautch girl resting’. Unknown date. (Edwin Lord Weeks: The Complete Works). He made three journeys to India between 1882 and 1893. Between October 1882 and March 1883, he travelled in India with his wife, a trip he repeated between October 1886 and March 1887. His last and, as it turned out, very hazardous adventure was undertaken by train and on horse-back with the art critic Theodore Child as his travelling companion. It was Child who had the written the enthusiastic review of Weeks’ work in The Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1888: ‘No one has treated with greater effect and with such unhesitating directness the grand architectural backgrounds of India, with their pluri-color richness and splendor of detail . . . Such is the scene depicted, with, in the background, a vision of holy India—temples, pagodas, funeral pyres, fakirs, and men of all kinds sheltering themselves from the blazing sun under umbrellas that look like giant white mushrooms; and in the foreground, the broad Ganges, with its flotsam of pious corpses escorted by carrion-crows. This picture shows Mr. Weeks’s dramatic and scenic qualities, and his careful observation of Oriental air and colour.’ Figure 2: ‘A Nautch at Delhi’. Unknown date. (Edwin Lord Weeks: The Complete Works). The last journey Weeks made to India was both difficult and disastrous. Theodore Child, who had been commissioned by Harper’s Magazine to write the narrative of the expedition, died of cholera in Persia in November 1892. Weeks himself continued on to India, becoming both the documenter and the artist of the adventure. His experiences were later recounted in his reminiscence From the Black Sea to Persia and India, published in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1896. The artist travelled widely in the north of India but seems only to have made one excursion to the south, to Chitoor. Otherwise his work as an artist was concentated on such centres as Lahore, Hyderabad, Rajasthan and Varanasi. It is from these regions that we have, except perhaps in the case of one painting, his warm and sympathetic depictions of what he called ‘women of the Nautch-sisterhood’. He died in November 1903 of complications arising from misdiagnosed diabetes, and fell for decades into obscurity, to be revived again for scholarly attentions of various kinds in the wake of Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978. Figure 3: ‘Two Nautch Girls’. Unknown date. (ELW: The Complete Works). His several paintings and sketches of nautch girls, though they do not form part of the greatest works of his oeuvre (though two of them were exhibited and praised at Salon exhibitions) are rendered with much sympathy, warmth – and real kindness. There is no hint of the usual colonial castigation of the ‘nautch’ tawa’if dancer-courtesans that he encountered often in his travels throughout North India. Among Weeks’ depictions of these Kathak-tawa’ifs there are only three in which they occur in dance postures. More often, they are encountered in romanticized and dreamy street-scenes, in doorways or on balconies, and there is one figure of a nautch girl in repose. It is argued by some commentators that the artist used courtesan dancers for most of his representations of women in various settings in North India because women and girls in that environment would not have been allowed to pose for the kind of portraits that Weeks created. Nor does he mention them frequently in his written recollections. It is worth noting that Weeks was also a photographer who in some cases used his photographs as a basis for an idealized reworking of his subjects. His photographs, unfortunately, do not survive. They went lost when his estate was settled in 1905. Figure 4: ‘Nautch Girls’. Unknown date. (ELW: The Complete Works). The dancers represented in his art works were sketched, painted and probably photographed by him in the main North Indian centres where their practice was still current and relatively prolific, despite the ongoing anti-nautch writings, protests and trickles of legislation that were beginning to gather momentum in the last two decades of the 19th century. Figure 5: ‘Nautch girls emerging from the Taj Mahal’. Unknown date. (ELW: The Complete Works). The ‘nautch girls’, as they had by then become universally designated throughout the English-speaking world, would have been performing the repertoire of the Lucknow and Jaipur gharanas, and in the extract dealing with the dance presentation in Benares, the style and format of the school of that city, where Kathak is said first to have been formalized. They would also have been versed in Hindustani music and singing, and they were in many cases literate. As the only type of ‘public woman’ of that era, Weeks would naturally have been attracted to them for his artistic-aesthetic purposes, and is indeed likely to have drawn on the kotha environment and system for most of his models of the Indian feminine. That he was humanly and individually drawn by their beauty and grace is hardly to be doubted. These qualities illuminate the whole of his vision of the nautch girl. In From the Black Sea to Persia and India, there are only three allusions to the nautch girls, only one of which, describing a Kathak performance in Varanasi, is relatively lengthy. In the first short passage, Weeks associates the dancers with their upper-storey dwellings in Lahore: ‘Over (the) shops and lower stories there are often balconies and they are usually occupied by young ladies of the nautch-sisterhood, who are keenly alive to the value of a scarlet or yellow blossom in their blue-black hair, but unfortunately some of them do not realize that the effect of rice-powder on a transparent brown skin is rather disastrous …’ There is a second brief mention of them when he describes the Jagmandir Palace in Udaipur: ‘To qualify it as theatrical might seem disparaging, and yet one cannot see it without thinking of the theatre … peopled with a crowd of courtiers and attendants, and a glittering ballet of nautch girls …’ Figure 6 (A, B & C): Three illustrations of ‘nautch girls’ in From the Black Sea to Persia and India, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1896. (A: A Young Nautch Girl, B: Nautch girls on a balcony, C: Nautch Dance – probably the dancer described in the account of the Varanasi performance; see below). A slightly abridged account of the Kathak performance in Varanasi reads as follows: ‘It was our good fortune to see a nautch dance under the most favourable conditions, given by the Maharajah of Benares for the benefit of some friends, who had stayed on, in spite of the heat, for this occasion. We were driven down to the landing-place in the cool of the evening … Here on the steps the secretary of the prince was waiting, accompanied by his two sleepy little boys, some men with torches, and a bearer with a silver staff … ‘By the light which shone from the tiers of palace windows, from the doors of temples and shrines, from the flashes of fireworks and gleam of hurrying torches along the steps, it was evident that all Benares … had poured out upon the ghats … From the nearest boats floated strange music and the voices of the nautch girls … Figure 7: ‘Indian Dancing Girl’, exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1900. (ELW: The Complete Works). ‘After a preliminary ballet … a dainty little personage came forward; graceful, gazelle-eyed, enveloped in a filmy cloud of black and gold gauze, which floated airily about her; she was the living incarnation of the Nautch as interpreted by the sculptors of Chitor; from the air of laughing assurance with which she surveyed her assembled subjects, it was evident that she was accustomed to homage and sure of conquest. She held her audience absorbed and expectant by the monotonous and plaintive cadence of her song, by long glances full of intense meaning from half-closed eyes, and by swift changes of expression and mood, as well as by the spell of “woven paces and waving arms.” …’ Figure 8: ‘Nautch girls and bullock gharry’. Unknown date. (ELW: The Complete Works). ‘This paragon of nautch girls, like most of her sisterhood, wore nose jewels, but to our eyes they did not detract from her beauty, nor did they appear more unchristian than the bulky pendants which women in other countries suspend from the cartilages of their ears; the diminutive cluster of pearls or brilliants seemed rather to play the part of the black patch on the powdered face. As we were afterwards to learn, one may see many a nautch without retaining such a vivid impression; much of its force was owing, no doubt, to the fitness of the place and the charm of strange accessories, the uncertain glare of the smoking torches, the mingling of musky odours and the overpowering scent of attar of roses, and of wilting jasmine flowers; those perfumes were intensified by the close air of the tent …’ As I have indicated in my note to figure 6C above, this ‘paragon of nautch girls’ is probably featured in that illustration, and may well be the face of the ‘young nautch girl’ in figure 6A. I believe, however, on instinct and observation, that Weeks may have used her as the chief dancer in the superb painting of The Nautch, below, that subsumes so many elements of the artist’s experience and aesthetic vision of the North: Figure 9: ‘The Nautch’. Unknown date. (ELW: The Complete Works). It is his most detailed and elaborate ‘nautch’ painting, but it is something of an enigma too. The dancer in posture seems to be clad in the ‘filmy cloud of black and gold gauze’, and yet the seated dancer seems to be attired in distinctly South Indian head-jewels. The scene seems to be set in a Rajashtani palace and other than the percussionist there seem to be no musicians present. The depiction seems to be a purely imaginative assemblage of the many possible elements that Weeks would have wanted combined in an ideal ‘nautch’ setting. It was intended to awaken a holistically responsive chord in the critics of the Salon and the cultivated part of the public for whom the ‘Nautch’ was a dance with fascinations like no other, and the ‘nautch girl’ a non-conformist, elusive female illusion impossible finally to fathom. Notes: Dana M. Garvey, Edwin Lord Weeks, An Artist in North Africa and South Asia, 2013; is a full treatment of the life and work of Weeks with much analysis of the cultural criticism surrounding the artist’s person and art. Amna Wayalat, Edwin Lord Weeks: An Artist and Traveller, (Mis)understanding the Indian Subcontinent, 2015; is a shorter treatment in the critical theory vein. Edwin Lord Weeks, From the Black Sea to Persia and India, 1896, is available for reading and downloading at the Internet Archive. END