South Indian Dance History

This article presents and identifies twelve photographs of the hereditary dancer and renowned teacher of abhinaya, Mylapore Gauri Ammal. It also presents a biographical outline and critical appreciation of her contribution to Sadir and Bharatnatyam, using original anecdotes and articles composed by critics who knew her and witnessed her work.

Photography began to be popularized in India in the 1850s, and from that time photographic studies for various purposes, professional, commercial and official, began to be commissioned by a variety of instances. They were used for ethnographic purposes by early anthropologists and explorers, as well as by imperial agencies conducting a number of official surveys. In addition, by the 1860s a number of photographic studios were opened throughout India and individual court photographers were being hired in a professional capacity. By the 1870s photography had been established as the new and best way for pictorial documentation throughout the subcontinent. Until these decades, the documentation of South Indian dance had largely become the province of local Indian artists producing gouache and watercolour paintings in the Company School style.

My intention in the 'studio devadasi' articles, of which this is part one of three parts, involves little more than the attempt to order and provide sources for a number of photographs of South Indian dancers who were photographed in studio settings in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In this first of three articles I am singling out four dancers whose studio portraits were later made into postcards and other related print-products. The outsourcing of dance or 'nautch' or 'bayadère' prints was clearly common usage at that time. Negative plates were shared among photographic studios on a royalty-fee basis, and then used for a variety of commercial purposes such as postcards, cabinet cards, illustrations for travel books, magic lantern slides etc.

This article examines the pictorial data associated with exhibitions of Indian dance in the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. It also analyses some important aspects of the presentation of these dancers in the context of the 'human zoos' or ethnic exhibitions that became popular in Europe from the late 19th century to the 1920s.

Company paintings, originating in the Bengal Presidency, became a standardized method for depicting and preserving visual representations of Indian dance. This article discusses the evolution and uses of these depictions, and presents examples of the use of Company Art in the history of South Indian dance.

In December of 1901, Frederick Dunsterville, then Manager of the Madras Railways, made several photographs of dancers at the Christmas Festival in the gardens of the People's Park in Madras. This article examines his work and the circumstances in which these dancers were being photographed and perhaps performing in public.

The dancer represented in the three photographs with which I deal in this brief article remains unnamed, nor can we be sure as to the exact year in which she was photographed, probably in a photographic studio in Madras. Her case is representative of the general anonymity to which dancers in 19th-century India were consigned in most cases of pictorial representation.

Henry Bohan was for many years attached to the French colonial judiciary as 'King's Prosecutor' in Pondicherry. Details for his life and work are scant, and those that I have are drawn from the the brief preface to his book, 'Voyage aux Indes orientales; coup d'oeil sur leur importance politique et commerciale' ('Voyage to the East Indies: a survey of their political and commercial importance', 1866) in which he is described as having spent 'many years in India' and as being much exercised with the questions of French colonial power, the 'Hindu laws' obtaining in India, the inequitable status of women in the country, and the political and commercial importance of the East Indies colonies generally.

My chief aim in this article is to make available in a single document a number of pictorial data and some samplings of reviews that accompanied the appearance of the bayadères in France, England, Germany and other countries in Europe during 1838 and 1839. In addition, the article discusses the repertoire that was performed, and provides some insights into the art and character of the dancers themselves.

At some museums, and at several antique and fine arts vendor sites, one comes across wooden figures of South Indian devadasis. These are usually polychrome statues, having their centres of production in various areas of Tamil Nadu. This article examines some examples of these representations and the settings in which they were made.

Captain Allan Newton Scott (1824-1870) was an officer in the Madras Artillery during the two years of the Indian Rebellion (1857-1858) and afterwards. Not much seems to be recorded about his military career: a gazette from 1856 mentions him as 'to be promoted Captain'. His relative fame in his own time was earned not by military exploits but by his prowess as an early amateur photographer, a part-time vocation that he is said to have adopted partly on account of the 'monotony' of military life in India. Among the many early photographs he produced, there are several depicting Kalavantulu dancers at Hyderabad or Secunderabad.

In this article I deal with six artists and illustrators who created pictures of South Indian dancers in the period under review. The artists dealt with here by no means make up the total tally of those depicting Indian dancers at that time. There are indeed several others, and these will be dealt with in later articles, as my research on their life and work progresses.