In September 2014, Exhibit B, a live performance installation featuring black performers and curated by the white South African director Brett Bailey, was forced to close down following a social media campaign that collected over 22,000 signatures and a large public protest outside The Barbican Theatre in London. Bailey’s anti-imperial reenactment of colonial exhibitions, featuring mute and caged black performers, was designed to offer a critique of nineteenth-century human zoos where colonised bodies were displayed as objects, connecting racist colonial histories with the plight of present-day asylum seekers and immigrants around the Mediterranean basin who were installed as ‘found objects’. The show backfired badly in London amidst questions of unequal representation, covert power and ‘complicit racism’, which in turn prompted The Barbican to accuse protestors of censoring artistic freedom (Muir, Reference Muir2014).Footnote ¹

The public protest against Exhibit B brought sharply into focus the ethics of representing racial trauma through theatrical reenactments, particularly when the terms of such representation and authorship continued to evoke the victimhood and coerced silence of black subjects. In some ways, Exhibit B undoes the radical work of the performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who in Couple in the Cage (1992) had placed not the displayed but the viewer ‘back into the frame of discovery’, as Diana Taylor (Reference Taylor1998: 163) suggests. Katrin Sieg suggests that the cancelled Exhibit B clearly signaled the urgent need for ‘more differentiated engagements with the ethics of confronting a violent, racist history, the dramaturgy of interracial encounter and the politics of decolonizing cultural institutions’ (Reference Sieg2015: 250). Sieg writes that we should not be too quick to dismiss Exhibit B’s intentions as an anti-racist statement and proposes that ‘Exhibit B addresses spectators as witnesses urged to respond to an emergency’ (Reference Sieg2015: 251). While dismissing the show’s conceptual framework would be erroneous, one cannot help but notice the failure of liberal, progressive theatre to adequately account for the triggering of historical trauma amongst its witnesses, despite well-intentioned efforts to highlight a contemporary emergency. Crucially, the failure of Exhibit B’s reenactment of trauma lies in its inability to shift a discourse of blackness as subjugated experience.

Butting against such narratives of racialised submission and silence, this chapter listens to the noise and clamour of some colonised subjects displayed in a nineteenth-century human exhibit in London. It hears images of subaltern South Asian nautch dancers, whose gestures of refusal remain unnoticed behind the visual traces of a colonial exhibition in the 1880s. Following Paul Gilroy’s (Reference Gilroy1993) invitation to attend to the ‘lower frequency’ of sound through which ‘a politics of transfiguration’ reverberates (Reference Gilroy1993: 37), Tina Campt calls attention to ‘the haptic encounter that foregrounds the frequencies of images and how they move, touch, and connect us to the event of the photo’ (Reference Campt2017: 9). I follow Gilroy and Campt to listen to the lower frequencies with which the visual images of nautch women hum, resonate and vibrate, connecting us to events of radical subaltern recalcitrance. While Campt listens to the genre of identification photography featuring black subjects, the genre of visual art under consideration here is the illustrated sketch in Victorian British newspapers and news magazines. How might listening to nautch in these sketches allow an interrogation of the ontological bias that lay at the very foundation of European theatre modernity? How do the frequencies of these sketches disturb congealed ideas of subaltern silence, particularly in scenarios framed by colonial dominance and terror? The aim, then, is to hear the visual remains of nautch leftover from racialised Euro-American exhibition and theatrical practices and to examine how they might disrupt a hegemonic understanding of disappearance as the ontological basis of performance.Footnote ²

The chapter begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. Next, it provides a very brief overview of the ‘nasty’ Indian nautch, a racially charged practice framed simultaneously by colonial desire and abhorrence, which moved between Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as disturbances. It then examines one particular colonial exhibition, the failed Liberty of London’s 1885 exhibition in London, and specifically analyzes the nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing live human exhibits. The chapter then listens to the dissenting voices of Liberty’s performers and delves into the legal proceedings they set in motion against their producers. In the final section, the chapter suggests how re-imagining Liberty’s nautch experience by embodying archival silences and slippages might be a usefully anarchic way of exhuming the memories of subaltern dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history. By locating my own performance lecture on Liberty’s nautch dancers within the landscape of reenactments in contemporary Euro-American dance and scholarship, the chapter delineates the structural limitations and (im)possibilities of such reenactments. It explores how a corpo-active method of animating a lost archive might be a more viable decolonial strategy for revisiting a difficult history of nautch.

Part I Race on Display: Human Exhibits and Pedagogical Violence

In recent years, multiple academic fields, including history, art history, museology, anthropology and cultural studies have carefully scrutinised Euro-American museum and exhibition practices through a decolonial lens.Footnote ³ This follows a few decades of scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and US empires and their exhibition practices. Some of the earliest research on colonial practices of exhibiting by John Allwood (Reference Allwood1977) and Richard Altick (Reference Altick1978) focused on the British Empire’s insatiable hunger for objects and products collected from its colonies and on the importance of displaying these in Britain as spectacles for a curious public with little access to global travel. In the 1980s, a number of important studies further highlighted the direct relationship between European and US colonial expansion and exhibiting practices. Robert Rydell (Reference Rydell1984) explored the US Empire and its dominion over lands and peoples, noting how, to organisers such as George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian, the World’s Fair illustrated ‘the steps of progress of civilization and its arts in successive centuries, and in all lands up to the present time’; it would become, ‘in fact, an illustrated encyclopedia of humanity of civilization’ (Reference Rydell1984:45).Footnote ⁴

Rydell’s study explored how fairs such as the Chicago World’s Columbia Exposition of 1893 featured ethnographic exhibits curated by the Smithsonian and Peabody museums and noticed how they were necessary to educate and ‘formulate the Modern’ (Reference Rydell1984: 45). The Smithsonian exhibit of 1893, according to Rydell, ‘provided the cement for integrating ideas about progress and race into an ideological whole’ (Reference Rydell1984: 27). However, cementing this ideology occurred much earlier in Britain and in other parts of Europe, such as France, Germany and Spain. Europe’s perceived racial and civilisational superiority over other ‘savage races’ resulted in the practice of putting ‘natives’ on display in public fairs from the fifteenth century onwards, but the Industrial Revolution and advancements in technology took exhibition practices to an international level in the mid nineteenth century. Paul Greenhalgh (Reference Greenhalgh1988) and Peter Hoffenberg (Reference Hoffenberg2001) place Britain’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations as a watershed moment in the history of international exhibitions, ushering in an era of heated competition between European colonial empires, mainly between the French, German, Dutch and the British and the new US Empire.Footnote ⁵ The Great Exhibition of 1851, also known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition (named after the vast building covering nineteen acres and erected in London’s Hyde Park for the sole purpose of housing it), set a standard template for other international ones in terms of creating four categories of exhibits: Manufactures, Machinery, Raw Materials and Fine Arts; and Greenhalgh noted how themes such as international peace, education, trade and progress were at their theoretical core.

Later studies on exhibition practices focused on the importance of visual representation to the empire’s progress. Carol Breckenridge (Reference Breckenridge1989) studied how objects from India were taken out of their everyday contexts and turned into a ‘spectacle of the ocular’ (Reference Breckenridge1989: 196; italics in original) and how the systematically categorised displays maintained a visual illusion of order and control that provided an antidote to an otherwise disturbing and chaotic colonial experience. Raymond Corbey wrote that in human ethnological exhibits, ‘the citizen’s gaze on alien people was determined to a considerable degree by stories and stereotypes in his or her mind’ (1995: 361) and that the motto ‘To see is to know’ became the ‘underlying ideology that is at work in a range of seemingly disparate practices in colonial times: photography, colonialist discourse, missionary discourse, anthropometry, collecting and exhibiting’ (360). By the mid-1990s, Tony Bennett had coined the term ‘exhibitionary complex’ to include, along with art museums, history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and international exhibitions and department stores, ‘which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision’ (Reference Bennett1995: 59). Bennett argued that the exhibitionary complex ran parallel and in juxtaposition to Michel Foucault’s (Reference Foucault1975) notion of the carceral archipelago, in which objects and bodies were transferred from private spaces and collections to public displays for the masses. The spectacles offered by objects in museums were intended for individuals to know themselves as the subject of knowledge and to engage in a ‘voluntarily self-regulating citizenry’ (Bennet, Reference Bennett1995: 63).

This literature points to the encyclopedic nature of colonial expositions and fairs, including inventories of all cultures of the world and a crafting of a history of the human race, with some peoples considered superior (morally, intellectually, technologically and economically) and others primitive or barbaric on a linear scale of progress. Jeffrey Auerbach notes the development of five tropes – ‘exoticization, racialization, sexualization, commodification, and civilization’ – used in colonial propaganda to advertise and promote empire, to convince people to live in distant lands and to justify political domination (Reference Auerbach2002: 2–3). The mass circulation of visual imagery used in this promotion campaign represented indigenous people as either ‘noble savages or degenerate heathens, in neither case a threat’ (Reference Auerbach2002: 3–4). Alongside focusing on the taxonomic impulse to categorise races and their cultural products, these studies pay attention to the relationship between colonial exhibitions and pedagogy on a mass scale. The consensus amongst writers is that the most vicious yet acceptable form of nineteenth-century imperialist ideology and contemporary social Darwinism framed the human exhibits. ‘Savages’ were displayed for Euro-American citizens for what we today call ‘edutainment’, with the supply of ‘natives’ to exhibits following close on the heels of a colonial conquest. Moreover, as Annie Coombes (Reference Coombes1994) has found, conflicting representations of exhibited peoples or cultures, for instance of Africa, were circulated often in the exhibitions, depending on political or disciplinary imperatives.

The display of exotic people in colonial exhibitions ran parallel to nineteenth-century circuses and freak shows run by producers such as Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–1891), which mainly focused on entertaining the masses.Footnote ⁶ From 1874 until World War I, the animal trainer and trader Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) of Hamburg exhibited nomadic Sámi (‘Laplanders’), Nubians from Egyptian Sudan, North American Indians, people from India, Inuits and Zulus across several German and other European cities in his Völkerschauen, that is ethnic or folk shows (Ames, Reference Ames2008). These were framed as ‘anthropological-zoological exhibitions’ or Anthropologisch-Zoologische Ausstellung. Christopher Balme (Reference Balme2007) notes that over time in Hagenbeck’s career, there was a shift from the exhibition to the performance mode when staging spectacular shows. Balme views Hagenbeck’s patent for a ‘scientific panorama’ as ‘the culmination of a performative practice that was aimed at maximising the experience of alterity under the legitimating label of scientific authenticity’ (333).

Not all human exhibits were treated the same by curators of exhibitions. As Hilke Thode-Arora (Reference Thode-Arora2014) notes, the ethnic shows were a complex phenomenon, sometimes featuring people who were abducted or kept under poor conditions and sometimes, as with the Hagenbeck company, with professional contracts that formalised food and accommodation, medical care, fees and performance schedules. Roslyn Poignant notices how Indigenous Australians featured in colonial exhibitions transformed themselves into accomplished performers in order to survive the brutal tours, in the process becoming ‘professional “savages”’ (Reference Poignant2004: 4). Rosie Jensen (Reference Jensen2018) suggests that certain cultures, such as those of India’s, could not be easily labelled ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ within the exhibitionary complex, as it was deemed to be an ancient (albeit pre-modern) civilisation. Despite some differences in experiences, human labour in ethnic shows and exhibits was extremely profitable for producers, although human lives were dispensable. Many natives travelling for human exhibits lost their lives and never made it back to their homelands.Footnote ⁷ Violent scientific methods informed and underpinned Europe and the United States’s pedagogical drive to understand the world’s cultures.

World’s Fairs and exhibitions would include laboratories where visitors could see or even take part in scientific research on racial features of various human population groups. Raymond Corbey finds that ‘anthropologists used to be represented on the committees heading the anthropological sections of world fairs, often quarreling with those who wished to cater more to commercial than to scientific or educational interests’ (Reference Corbey1993: 354). Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler (Reference Parezo and Fowler2007) examine the intricate relationship between anthropological research at US fairs and the promotion and advertising of both the nation state and the academic discipline. Sadiah Qureshi (Reference Qureshi2011) notes how museums of ethnography or colonial museums were often the direct offshoot of a World’s Fair or exhibition. Some of the shows gained immense popularity in the academic community, such as the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in US world fairs, which would feature Native Americans on display. Some of those exhibited also became popular amongst anthropologists, such as Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ who was put on show when alive and dissected when dead.Footnote ⁸ Walter Putnam (Reference Putnam and Persels2012) notices that a similar clinical and educational approach framed the display of Ota Benga, an Mbuti man, caged along with chimpanzees and orangutans at the Bronx Zoo, New York.Footnote ⁹

In 2013, the term ‘human zoo’ was coined by Pascal Blanchard et al. to encompass French expositions, the Swiss and German Völkerschauen and British exhibitions featuring live human displays and freak shows. The term has remained in circulation ever since. It highlights the lasting significance of human displays in exhibitions in studies of empire, race and colonialism. I would argue, however, that with the exception of Priya Srinivasan’s (Reference Srinivasan2012) groundbreaking discussion of the fate of exhibited nautch dancers in Coney Island in her book Sweating Saris and Joanna Dee Das (Reference Das, Manning, Ross and Schneider2020) work on African dance in World’s Fairs, dance history (in the English language at least) has paid little attention to the minefield of acts and performances that populated human exhibits.Footnote ¹⁰ Second, attending to the narratives of dancers in colonial exhibitions and World’s Fairs opens up a violent relationship that dance shared with visual art and exhibition practices. These disturbing histories need to be adequately acknowledged in European experimentations with dance in museums and galleries.Footnote ¹¹ Third, most of the literature on displayed peoples in colonial exhibitions outlined so far privilege ocular experiences and histories over embodied or corporeal ones. This emphasis on spectacle and gaze, on the visual grammar of the display, undermines the bodily experiences, sensations and corporeal politics of those on display, rendering them as passive individuals lacking agency. As Lisa Munro (Reference Munro2010) suggests, historians have focused mainly on a top-down approach to studying colonial exhibitions, focusing on archival materials such as committee reports, newspaper accounts and catalogues and visual images and revealing little about the experiences of those exhibited. The discussion in this chapter applies a bottom-up approach to the history of human exhibits. In this endeavour, I follow Hershini Bhana Young’s remarkable reading of the exhibited Saartjie Baartman’s life and afterlife and her conjuring of ‘the ghostly possibilities of [Baartman’s] agency within the close confines of free and unfree labor’ (Reference Young2017: 31). Faced with archival anomalies on Liberty’s exhibited Indians, I similarly engage in a re-imagination of the corporeal experiences of its nautch dancers. But first, here follows a brief background on the Indian nautch and its appearance and disappearance from the modern European stage.

Part II The Nasty Nautch

Descriptions of nautch women and their children such as these helped fan a white hysteria for the Orient in nineteenth-century live exhibits in London. A number of studies have ascertained how nautch entered and circulated in Europe and North America in the years that preceded the 1885 colonial exhibition in London. Joep Bor (Reference Bor, Clayton and Zon2007) examines the prevalence of bayadères in European travel writings, for instance, in the French naturalist and colonial administrator Pierre Sonnerat’s (1782) Voyage aux Indes orientales et à la Chine.Footnote ¹² Bor also notes how in travel accounts such as the German-Dutch Jacob Haafner’s Reize en eenen Palanquin (1808), the ‘regulated and gracious’ movements of the Indian dancers encountered by Haafner in his thirteen years in India were pitched in stark opposition to what he considered to be the ‘cold and meaningless gestures’ in European dances (2007:51). Such romanticised images of the Orient, caught in a binary with European aesthetics, dominated many early nineteenth-century European writings, which imported images of a highly exotic India to Europeans who could not travel to the colonies. Amanda Lee (Reference Lee2019) finds that bayadère imagery in Sonnerat’s travelogue, in the form of engravings such as ‘Danse des Bayadères’ (showing dancers in araimandi, that is, half-sitting position with knees turned out, and mudras, i.e. hand gestures), along with travelling dance troupes from India, provided visual inspiration to European choreographers composing orientalist ballets such as La Péri (1843, by Jean Coralli) and Sacountala (1858, by Lucien Petipa). As the first half of the nineteenth century deepened the colonial divide between a rational Europe and an emotional Orient, so too did the gulf widen between romantic European ballets and the ‘real’ nautch from the colonies that those very ballets appropriated.

For a period of time in the nineteenth century, the fictional nautch played by European performers in romantic orientalist ballets and the real nautch performed by visiting Indian dancers from the South Asian subcontinent shared the spaces of European theatres. Jeffrey Spear and Avanthi Meduri find that while Euro-American Orientalism became ‘a self-referential tradition and a seedbed for modern dance, it also piqued periodic curiosity about the originals’ (Reference Spear and Meduri2004: 442). They discuss the European tour of a group of Indian musicians and devadasi dancers in 1838, first billed to perform at the Variety Theatre in Paris, and later at the Adelphi Theatre in London. Dancers such as Amani were witnessed and celebrated by scenario deviser/poet Théophile Gautier during the French tour, providing direct inspiration for Gautier’s scenarios for the ballets La Péri and Sacountala. Molly Engelhardt (Reference Engelhardt2014) suggests that the presence of real Indian dancers in London in 1838 heightened a developing British interest in Indian culture that desired more than the imagined India on the ballet stages. Romantic ballet productions such as Le Dieu et la Bayadère (1830), its compressed version La Bayadère (1831) and the Maid of Cashmere (1833) had marked the meteoric fame of prima ballerinas Marie Taglioni and Pauline Duvernay, who played bayadère characters but ‘still danced en pointe, pirouetted across the stage, and abided by the rules of classical ballet, using sensualist elements – scarves, earrings, darkened faces – as props for representing an exotic, non-specific east’ (Engelhardt, Reference Engelhardt2014: 510). By 1838, audiences in Britain were excited about the arrival of an original nautch.

An interesting fact to emerge from Engelhardt’s study is that the 1838 England tour of the devadasis proved to be a financial loss for the impresario Frederick Yates. Outside of London, during a tour of the English provinces, news reports on the dancers dried up, and to rescue flagging audience interest in the devadasis on stage, the French producer E. C. Tardival financed live exhibitions of the Indian dancers in the Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly, London. The venue provided closer interactions between viewers and the Indians on exhibit and records suggest that the shows proved to be popular (Reference Engelhardt2014: 510).Footnote ¹³ What becomes evident, then, is that Indian dancers as human exhibits satisfied British spectatorship far more than in their appearance as artists on the stage. While the real nautch from India may have circulated in theatre circuits in Britain alongside ballerinas who were performing fictions of nautch in brownface, it was clearly the latter that was deemed the greater art form and continued to reign supreme, despite their racist stereotyping and appropriating of Indian material. Indian dancers were relegated to the status of curio objects, to be stared at from close quarters as inexpensive experiences.

By the time a revamped La Bayadere premiered in 1877 in St. Petersburg, Russia, choreographed by the French Marius Petipa, the Indian nautch was a highly successful import on the European stage, but as an idea for European ballerinas to usurp rather than as an aesthetic embodied practice requiring specifically honed techniques of movement. The real nautch in the South Asian subcontinent was being dealt a different hand. Under British colonial governance, the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 aligned dancing with contagion, vice and filth. Nautch, in India and in Europe, became a racially charged practice, framed simultaneously by a colonial desire for the Oriental and an abhorrence for the nasty, sexually excessive women who danced it. By 1880, nautch had appeared in the United States, where, as Priya Srinivasan (Reference Srinivasan2009) finds, it met with a similar fate as the devadasis in Europe in 1838: initially greeted with enthusiasm, then shunned by audiences and reviewers. Srinivasan finds that in the decades following, nautch in the United States, too, found popularity in circuses by P. T. Barnum, sideshows and dime museums, but not on the concert stages.

In 1885, within a month of Liberty’s human exhibit (which I discuss next), another human exhibit featuring nautch dancers opened at Portland Hall (Langham Place, Regent Street) as part of the ‘India in London’ exhibition. Newspaper accounts announced their arrival as ‘a new sensation’ billed to perform at the Gaiety Theatre along with being exhibited in an ‘Indian Village’ (Pall Mall Gazette, 10 December 1885: 6). Sketches and illustrations of these nautch dancers highlighted that they were accompanied by a small child, who was installed with them in the ‘Indian Village’ exhibit (see Figure 1.1). Some accounts suggest the child was three and that her grandmother was one of the ‘girls’ (The Daily News, 23 December 1885: 6). Nautch dancers were therefore being exhibited along with their little children to draw in the crowds, to present realistic scenes of Indian family life in an Indian village, and visual sketches capitalised on the presence and labour of the Orient’s children in London, as exhibited specimens rather than simply as accompanying family members.

Figure 1.1 ‘Teaching a Child Its Steps. India in London. Sketches at the Indian Village at Portland Hall, Langham Place. The Graphic, 6 February 1886: 54.

Image reproduced with the permission of Mary Evans Picture Library.

Figure 1.1Long description

Top left. This section shows a woman performing a dance with a child standing on her left. A man seated on her right is playing a drum. Top right. This section shows two women twirling. Bottom. The central figure is a woman, seated on the floor, dressed in traditional Indian attire, a long, flowing garment. She appears to be interacting with a young child, who is also dressed in traditional Indian clothing. Other women are seated or standing nearby. The women are adorned with jewelry, including necklaces and bangles.

In light of these nautch events, a few themes emerge that help us frame Liberty’s exhibit in London in 1885. First, nautch becomes a racialised experience that moved between Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as a form of disturbance, since it did not allow the production of the Orient, in Edward Said’s terms, to continue unperturbed. Said views the colonial production of a contained Orient as ‘a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe’ (Reference Said1979: 63). In Said, the theatre serves as a metaphoric space, bounded by colonial violence. My proposal is to revise this view of the stage as a symbolic site and to see it instead as a material/physical space where the production of the Orient was not seamless, but disturbed by the entrance of practices such as nautch. Second, as forms of disturbances or even failures, nautch brought to the surface the deeply racist foundations of European ballet, in which the consumer value of racial mimesis (darkened European skin, or Oriental costuming) was privileged over ethical modes of borrowing material from other cultures. Finally, nautch also disturbed the curatorial practices of museums in Britain, which were simultaneously influenced by, and impacted on, the theatrical productions of the time. As Edward Ziter writes, ‘[t]he East was constituted in its own remains; it was always in decay, and the process could only be arrested in British museums and theatres’ (Reference Ziter2001: 46). The presence of the nasty nautch in Britain disturbed the curatorial impulse to arrest degenerating British colonies within the museum complex. It exposes, too, the ontological bias in the very fabric of nineteenth-century European modern theatre, which led to real nautch women being viewed as specimens on display and a cannibalised nautch in brownface seen as worthy of the real theatre.

Part III Please Don’t Touch: Nautch in Liberty of London’s Exhibition (1885)

In the winter of 1885, a group of ‘natives’ were shipped from India to London by Liberty of London, a luxury department store, to be installed as human exhibits in a ‘living Indian village’ at the Albert Palace in Battersea Park. Available visual records suggested that the exhibition arena was a lavish architectural show in itself, with newspapers highlighting the splendour of the site (see Figure 1.2). The Graphic reported:

Figure 1.2 ‘Opening of the Albert Palace, Battersea.’

Image reproduced with the permission of Mary Evans Picture Library.

Figure 1.2Long description

The top left scene depicts a bandstand or gazebo in a park-like setting. People are gathered around and within the Gazebo. There are trees and other structures in the background. The top right scene depicts a view of the Albert Palace, from a distance, overlooking a lake. There are trees and vegetation around the lake. A few sailboats and swans are visible in the lake. The bottom left scene shows the interior of the Albert Palace. A large pipe organ is prominently featured, and a large crowd of people are gathered. The bottom right scene shows the interior of the Albert Palace. It depicts a large, ornate, glass-roofed hall. Many people are seated within the hall, and there are architectural details visible in pillars and the upper levels.

As the image and the text show, the 1885 exhibition followed the logic of grand Victorian exhibitions, established by the Great Exhibition of 1851, with the purpose of advertising trade, commerce and colonial power. Liberty’s exhibit was designed to promote and advertise the store and to hike up sales in the Oriental Antiques and Curios Department. The British weather, however, altered this plan. Day and nighttime temperatures plummeted to a record low: it was the coldest winter in Britain in thirty years. As the historian Saloni Mathur (Reference Mathur2000) has noted, the exhibition was a disaster, financially as well as in terms of Indian and British relations. The bitter cold caused a breakdown of hot water pipes at Albert Palace, causing freezing conditions for the Indians on show. The spectacle of ‘native’ authenticity failed as the Indians were given European winter wear to fight off the cold, much to the disappointment of British spectators. Moreover, the Indians were deceived by their recruiting agent, who ignored contractual obligations around suitable board, fees, accommodation and clothing. The group turned to Nanda Lal Ghosh, an Indian barrister living in London, who chaired a committee that began legal proceedings on their behalf. The case received wide publicity in Britain and in India, and a relief fund was set up in India to help raise funds for their return passage.

The failed Liberty’s exhibit has fittingly attracted attention from scholars such as Mathur for the backlash against colonial power that it exhibited and the impact of ‘popular, commercial, or “low” cultural practices on the history of anthropological production’ (Reference Mathur2000:516). The archives expose several fascinating details about this particular colonial exhibition and the legal case led by Nanda Lal Ghosh, revealing a complex tapestry of ‘native’ bodies, colonial law and anti-colonial agency from seemingly oppressed constituencies of people in Britain.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, if we attend closely to the dancers who were part of Liberty’s exhibit and re-trace their movements, the picture becomes further complicated. I will open up, therefore, a different and remarkable set of archival remains hitherto unexplored. These are from a slim file housed in the Westminster City Archives in London. By focusing on the dancing bodies listed here, a more nuanced view of colonial history and archival records is afforded.

Most of the available primary records of Liberty’s exhibit cited by Mathur, mainly in the form of newspaper records, concur that among the ‘natives’ exhibited were two women, a pair of nautch dancers who had travelled with a group of forty Indian men. Mathur reported that these dancers were described as ‘“bewitching” objects of sexual curiosity’ and, by quoting The Indian Mirror newspaper from 6 April 1886, highlighted how visitors to the exhibit tried to ‘“touch the nautch girls… in doubt as to whether they are the real article.”’ (Mathur Reference Mathur2000: 503). The fact that the dancers were subjected to unsolicited physical touching by visitors to the living display at Battersea Park is not surprising. Most studies on human exhibits have found that despite clearly demarcated zones for spectators and those exhibited, regulations for contact between bodies were often breached. One of the first striking points about a newspaper article attributed to Illustrated London News in the Westminster City Archives file is the relegation of dance labour to non-work. The article announces:

This paragraph reveals the Victorian anthropological and taxonomic impulse to not only categorise racialised subjects but also to place different values on their class of work. There is no hesitation here to curate the ‘different castes and creeds’ of India. The caste system was a matter of great curiosity, generating attitudes of superior moral indignation and marking out racial differences from Euro-Americans. On the other hand, the taxonomy of labour swiftly classifies the work of the Indians into the binary categories of ‘entertainers’ and ‘workers.’ Dancing, along with juggling and snake charming, is not considered work, and dancers are not ‘employed’ in a trade.

A similar absenting of dance labour occurs in the captions of a visual sketch in Illustrated London News (see Figure 1.3). The dancer is at Number 2, labelled ‘Nautch dancing’. She is not given a profession or trade and is not labelled a Nautch dancer, as the rest of her colleagues. She and the ‘Elementary Boy’ are stripped of any identity pertaining to trade or work. The second piece of information of note is a short paragraph in the same newspaper article on the dancers:

Figure 1.3 ‘Sketches at the Indian Village, Albert Palace, Battersea Park.’ Illustrated London News. 21 November 1885b: 527.

Image reproduced with the permission of Mary Evans Picture Library.

Figure 1.3Long description

Scene 1: A man is charming three snakes. Scene 2: A woman is performing a dance, while a few men and women, seated on the floor are playing different instruments. Scene 3: Two men are depicted seated on a bed, facing each other. Both are seated with their legs crossed. They wear a turban each. Scene 4: A man is seated at a table. He is dressed in a long-sleeved garment and wears a head covering that resembles a turban. The table is overlaid with a few items on it including a small, shallow plate, and a couple of small, decorative items and a vase. Scene 5: A scene of a bustling outdoor marketplace. The foreground shows a variety of people interacting with each other, including women in elaborate Victorian-era dresses, men in various attire, and children. The background depicts men, women and children walking toward the shops and buildings. The buildings has awnings and balconies, suggesting a multi-level structure. Palm trees are prominent. Scene 6: A man wearing a turban is depicted juggling with knives. Scene 7: A man is seated on a bed or a similar structure and is playing a sitar. Scene 8: The scene depicts two men seated on a mat. One person is crouched, with their head slightly tilted back, and is balancing an object on their nose. The other person is seated nearby, holding a small, round object. Scene 9: The scene depicts a potter working at a pottery wheel. The man is seated on the ground. The wheel is in the process of shaping a clay pot. Several finished or partially finished pottery vessels are arranged around the wheel. Scene 10. A young boy wearing a turban like head covering and short loose fitting pants is facing to his right.

The newspaper article suggests that there were three dancers, not two, as found in the archival records consulted by Mathur. Who was the third dancer? Is this an error in reporting, along with the fact that the first excerpt reports forty-five natives, instead of forty-two? The archival reportage on the dancers becomes further complicated when we learn, through Mathur’s study, that the pair of nautch dancers was a mother and daughter duo. A pithy file at Westminster City Archives tells a different story. In a document titled ‘List of Indian Natives’ (see Figure 1.4), forty-five ‘natives’ are listed, and three people are named as dancers: Dancing Boy Sheik Ameer Sheik Mohideen from Delhi (age 14), Dancing Girl Sahina Jayabanoo from Delhi (age 16) and Dancing Girl Sheeta Thayi from ‘Carnatic’ (age 20).Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 1.4 ‘List of Indian Natives.’

Image reproduced with the permission of City of Westminster Archives Centre and Liberty Ltd.

Figure 1.4Long description

The following profession or trade are listed in the first column. Spinner, weaver, dyer, dress maker, printers, embroiderers, potters, brass worker, jewelers, carvers, inlaid wood workers, musical instruments, model figure makers, entertainers, musicians and servants. Their respective class of work, name, origin, religion, caste and age are given. The text at the bottom of the table reads, the Natives have been brought over by Messrs. Liberty and company, of Regent Street, on behalf of the Albert Palace Association, Limited, and Mr. A. Bonner was entrusted with the duty of collecting them in India, and personally superintending their Passage to England. Sir Frank Sonbar, of Bombay, in his official capacity, gave most valuable aid. The fact of such various Indian Castes being associated together is unprecedented, and the difficulties surmounted can perhaps only be fully appreciated by Anglo-Indians.

This previously unpublished document is significant for manifold reasons. First, it is an example of a groundbreaking ‘found’ trace in the colonial archives, which re-animates the histories of hitherto unknown individuals employed for human exhibits through the specificity of naming them, and in the process making possible an honouring of their memory. Second, it reveals discrepancies and inconsistencies in the very colonial archives that home the record of those exhibited in colonial displays: reports on how many ‘natives’ were exhibited or how many were dancers are clearly variable. Third, the list includes a nine-year-old boy, Bala Balaya, the ‘Elementary Boy’ here listed as ‘Tum Tum Chokra’, showing that for exhibit curators such as Mr A. Bonner and Sir Frank Sonbar of Bombay (named at the bottom of the document), child labour was not an issue. Fourth, attending to the language at the bottom of the document shows how ‘collecting’ natives in India and ‘superintending’ them (for sure there were fears that they would escape or, worse, settle on British soil) endorses the importance of closely guarding the precious cargo of human collectibles and labour that was transported to the Empire. As I pore over digitised archives of newspapers in the British Library’s Newsroom, a sideways glance on the page of The Era reporting on the Indians exhibited at Albert Palace reveals other news about ‘A Stray Zulu’, brought to England for the purposes of another exhibition and ‘cast adrift in London’ (19 December 1885: 10).

Finally, attending to the entries for the dancers reveals the chaotic and haphazard way in which dances were curated and presented for the spectacles at the exhibition. Not only were the two women dancers not a mother and daughter, they also came from opposite sides of India: Sahina from Delhi in the north of India and Sheeta from the vaguely labelled ‘Carnatic’ region, which would mean southern India. The two dancers would have hailed from very different movement traditions: a close inspection of the image in Figure 1.3, especially the garments that the dancers seem to be wearing, suggests that Sahina trained in a north Indian dance form (she is wearing a churidar, a long skirt, a blouse and a veil), whereas Sheeta, seated and playing a musical instrument, seems to be wearing a sari. Sahina’s caste location provided in image 1.4 is ‘Kanchani’, whereas Sheeta’s is ‘Lingayat Vani’. The Kanchani are a stigmatised caste variously associated with professional singing, dancing and sex work, and frequently connected to women from hereditary Muslim tawaif communities, whereas Lingayat Vani are considered to be a sub-sect of Hinduism. Sheik Ameer Sheik Mohideen, the Dancing Boy (of ‘Sayad’ caste), has left no visual trace of his dancing. The reportage of the performance also suggests that snake charming was an ‘important part of the performances.’

Not only were the live nautch performances a complete mish-mash of north and south Indian movement idioms, they also collapsed animal and human performances. The dancers apparently kept up a conversation in ‘Hindustani’ while dancing. What was this ‘Hindustani’ language, spoken by a Carnatic dancer and two performers from Delhi, hailing from different linguistic territories? The spectators who thronged the exhibitions were desperate for an ‘authentic’ taste of the exotic. Instead, a chaotic curation from the colony, of randomly collected South Asian aesthetics, was served to exhibition audiences in the name of Asian authenticity. On the other hand, this chaotic and random framework of the human exhibit may have allowed for new forms of creativity within nautch. The dancers would have had to adapt to each other’s movement vocabularies through improvisation, working across caste and faith lines and linguistic, cultural and corporeal differences between northern and southern Indian dance forms to perhaps produce new hybrid dance aesthetics.

The layered-up bodies of the nautch dancers were a visual oddity for spectators and of no value to anthropologists. These dancing bodies disrupted both the scopophilic gaze that attempted to consume them and the violent anthropological/pedagogic/taxonomic drive that may have wanted to study, visually dissect and label them. The corporeality of the dancers butted against the ocular hegemony of the exhibition, and as Part IV examines, against colonial law and Empire itself.

Part IV Nautch v Empire: Dance, Law and the Forgotten Forty-Five

On 19 December 1885, The Standard reported the following news:

This short and seemingly inconsequential report appearing at the bottom right of the newspaper page captures the first official complaint made by the exhibited Indians against their employers, the Albert Palace Association. The report suggests that two of the group of forty-five had appeared at the Wandsworth Court around 17 December 1885 to complain of an unfair dismissal from work and lack of clothing and food. The group’s manager, Mr Abraham Bonner, flatly refuted their claims of a breach of contractual obligations, stating that there ‘was no foundation for the complaints’ (19 December 1885: 2). Of note is Mr Bonner’s surprise that the two complainants got away from their lodgings without his knowledge, suggesting that the Indian ‘natives’ were meant to be under constant surveillance, their every movement closely watched. Of note, too, is that several other authoritative voices invalidate the complaint: the medical doctor gives the group of Indians a clean bill of health, stating ‘they were well looked after’ (19 December 1885: 2). A police constable checks their living quarters and sees that they have ‘plenty of good clothes and money’ (19 December 1885: 2). Moreover, other members of the group are brought to the Court by Mr Bonner to counter the claims of the two complainants. The report concludes that ‘it was not necessary to go any further in the matter’ (19 December 1885: 2). For surely, the silence of the two complainants (‘they made no reply’) and their absence on Mr Bonner’s trip to the Court (‘they were at the home’) meant that their dissent could be forgotten (19 December 1885: 2). What we learn from the report is that these two invalidated, silenced and absented complainants from the group of forty-five Indians were a man and a woman. Since there were only two women in this group, we can safely assume that one of the complainants was a nautch dancer, that is, it was either Sheeta or Sahina or Sahina.

This failed attempt by a nautch dancer and her colleague at moving court is not where this curious case of nautch versus Empire ends. Two bitter wintry months later, the story re-appears in another newspaper, this time reported by an anonymous ‘Afternoon Visitor.’ The Daily News runs his article on 20 February 1886, titled ‘The Albert Palace Indians’, in which the anonymous reporter highlights the plight of the group of Indians after the Albert Palace Association’s premature termination of their contract (20 February 1886: 5). The reporter finds that although the contract was originally drawn up till 30 April 1886, the Indians were unemployed and starving in their ‘miserably furnished’ quarters two months prior to their contract ending:

The article deftly conjures up the misery of the exhibited Indians, even as it continues with the colonialist gaze and lexicon around brownness: in a compassionate piece of writing about financially subjugated Indians, their ‘flashing black eyes, the swarthy faces, and the pearly teeth’ (20 February 1886: 5) must still be invoked for British readers. Yet, while the anonymous writer maintains Orientalist precedence around objectifying brown bodies, they nevertheless provide important information about the nautch dancers. The article mentions there ‘are only two females in the party, and they have left their little ones at home, and have come over here to make their fortunes’ (20 February 1886: 5), which suggests that Sheeta and Sahina were both mothers who had children, although they had not travelled with them. The article also sheds light on the tall promises made by the producers of the exhibition to recruit the Indian artists: assurances were given of their making vast sums of money in ‘backsheesh’ (tips) on top of their contractual pay, and they were asked to carry ‘good big boxes to take home the rupees that would flow in upon them in a copious shower’; they were to do only four hours work per day and were to be shown all the sights of London; and that Queen Victoria personally wished to meet them (20 February 1886: 5). The reporter found some of the Indian artists sleeping on the boxes they carried from India, ‘few, if any, of them have seen anything but that dreary corner of Battersea’, and that one of the group members had died, ‘though it should be added that whisky seems to have had as much to do with his death as cold. At any rate, he died partly at least from some affection of the chest’ (20 February 1886: 5). The reporter also describes the ill health of other members of the group:

The group of forty-five Indians were now reduced to forty-four, unemployed, struggling with poor health and ‘pinched and poked’ by medical students. From not-to-be-touched exhibits, their bodies had become objects of different kinds of touch, one that was validated by medical and scientific enquiry. Their grievance against the Albert Palace Association was picked up by a Cambridge-educated Bengali barrister in London, Mr Nanda Lal Ghosh, who began legal proceedings on their behalf. The following letter to the India Office written by Ghosh marks his concerns about the group’s well-being and their right to legal settlement with their employers:

This historic incident of dissent, in which a caste-privileged South Asian immigrant chairs a legal case on behalf of subaltern subjects against colonial authority on British soil, becomes an important example of inter-caste allyship and solidarity in the colonised subject’s recalcitrance against the Empire. The group of Indian natives, who I call the Forgotten Forty-Five, held out until their wages were paid in full, until the date specified in their original contract. They returned to India, starving, ill, having lost a member of their group, but having moved the courts of British law in their favour. And worth remembering is that initiating this dissent was a nautch dancer (either Sahina or Sheeta), whose very presence would be delegitimised and gradually wiped out by Anti-Nautch colonial and nationalist law in South Asia.

Part V Dance Remains: (Im)Possible Reenactments and Corpo-Active Approaches to Nautch Archives

The visual colonial archive (illustrations and sketches) on nautch dancers speaks not of violence, dissent or oddly draped dancing bodies. Confronted with inconsistencies between textual and visual records in the archives, with the archive’s failure to adequately capture in visual language the lived experiences of the dancers in Liberty’s exhibit, I ask: in what ways can a creative, performative and corporeal engagement with the archives, with history, offer a valuable methodology for research? From the nearly vanished remains of dancing bodies in the colonial archive, what form could a re-imagining of nautch dancers, their dancing and their histories take? To attempt a reconstruction, to give Sahina, Sheeta and Sheik Ameer a ‘true voice’ to speak back to history seems to be a fair way forward, but Spivak whispers that I, a caste-privileged South Asian academic and ‘native informant’, would then be ventriloquizing for the subaltern (Reference Spivak, Williams and Chrisman1993: 79). I therefore turn to performance reenactments in order to seek a viable methodology to make sense of a violent colonial history.

Rebecca Schneider’s seminal essay ‘Performance Remains’ probed the ephemeral nature of performance within the logic of the archive, according to which performance is ‘that which does not remain’ (Reference Schneider2001: 100). Schneider argues against this tendency of the archive to make performance vanish, suggesting that archives themselves perform the institution of disappearance. Schneider writes:

Schneider warns that we should not treat ‘performative remains as a metaphysic of presence that privileges an original or singular authenticity’ (104). She suggests that ‘it is not presence that appears in performance but precisely the missed encounter - the reverberations of the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten’ (Reference Schneider2001: 103).

This rejection of authentic pasts in reenactments is also echoed in contemporary dance reenactments, and in scholarship on such reenactments. Andre Lepecki proposes that a choreographic ‘will to archive’ in current dance reenactments gives dancers ‘the capacity to identify in a past work still non-exhausted creative fields of “impalpable possibilities”’ (Reference Lepecki2010: 31). In reenacting dances, Lepecki suggests, ‘we turn back, and in this return we find in past dances a will to keep inventing’ (Reference Lepecki2010: 46). A concern with the ‘economies of authorship’ (Reference Lepecki2010: 46) also appears in Ramsay Burt’s essay on dance reenactments, which highlights the political potential of an active rather than a ‘reactive use of history’ (Reference Burt2003: 37), exploring how contemporary dances butt against the imposed hegemony of codified dance vocabularies and techniques as methods of regulating bodies. Burt suggests that in dance work where the use of historical citations emphasises the present experience of the performer and her relationship to the past, it is possible to ‘short-circuit the power relations through which dancing bodies are disciplined and controlled’ (Reference Burt2003: 41). In such reenactments, ‘history is no longer seen as a source of transcendent, aesthetic values’ and the spectators, through partial access to memory acts, engage in a new relationship with the past (Reference Burt2003: 41).

In Mark Franko’s edited volume of essays on dance and reenactment, the increasing significance of reenactment as a methodology in dance studies is argued persuasively. Franko carefully delineates the difference between reconstruction as a ‘method of recovery’ and reenactment as a ‘dramaturgy of presentation’, highlighting, like Schneider (Reference Schneider2001), the rejection of authenticity within the reenactment process (Reference Franko and Franko2017: 8). Discussing reenactment as a methodology, Franko suggests:

In attempting to re-narrate creatively the history of the nautch dancers in Liberty’s exhibit, I could see myself, a historian-dancer, as agreeing to the features outlined above: exercising my ‘right to return’ to the past; using my own dance as a historiographical medium with a discursive element; and staging my own self in confrontation with the historiographical project. I could not agree more with Franko that ‘[i]n many ways, reenactments tell us the past is not over: the past is unfinished business’ (Reference Franko and Franko2017: 7). Yet, Bret Bailey did all the above in Exhibit B, a reenactment which, according to Chikha and Arnaut, engaged mostly white bourgeois audiences, in ‘bourgeois ventriloquism’ (Reference Chikha and Arnaut2013: 679), which failed disastrously in London, a city with politically conscious diasporic constituencies. I would argue, therefore, that there are ideological underpinnings within current contemporary Euro-American dance reenactments, which fail certain kinds of archival traces, certain violent histories and certain types of dance remains.

Most Euro-American dance reenactments are overwhelmingly concerned with the politics of authorship, as noted by Lepecki (Reference Lepecki2010) and Burt (Reference Burt2003). In Susanne Foellmer’s (Reference Susanne, Baldacci and Franco2022) work, dance reenactments offer opportunities to critically examine modes of performance analysis as well as processes of knowledge transfer. Anna Pakes (Reference Pakes and Franko2017) points out that most, if not all, reenactments she analyses in her own essay in Mark Franko’s (Reference Franko and Franko2017) volume, rely methodologically on the idea of notations or other written records of dance, on the presence of recoverable materials. Neither authorship as a conceptual drive nor notation as a methodological tool can help make a case for reenacting nautch. Nautch women were not allowed by either British colonialism or Indian nationalism to author their own histories – instead, they were criminalised and banned, and their dances appropriated, learnt, sanitised and notated by caste-privileged Indian women and men. The erasure of nautch labour in the Indian subcontinent was the combined result of colonial racism, Indian casteism and, later, a progressive South Asian feminism, which privileged access to dance knowledge and its authorship to some rather than all Indian women. I must contend with my own Hindu dominant caste ancestry and recognise that reenacting subaltern trauma or victory in representational performance returns us to Exhibit B’s territory – it risks causing further harm to those subaltern dance communities in India who continue to grapple with the aftermath of racist and casteist Anti-Nautch regulation, as dance artist and anti-caste activist Nrithya Pillai (Reference Pillai2020) has powerfully outlined.

So I follow, instead, the robust use of historical fiction as a methodology in Saidiya Hartman’s (Reference Hartman2008) study on trans-Atlantic slavery and her concept of ‘critical fabulations’, which challenges the fictions of history in favour of the necessity of historical fictions to write back silenced bodies.Footnote ¹⁷ I ask, for my project of recalibrating the lived experiences of Liberty’s nautch dancers: how can historical fiction as a corpo-active method expose the lies of the colonial archive, whilst shifting the terms of representation?

When I first encountered the history of Liberty’s human exhibit through Saloni Mathur’s essay, I was struck by a gap in the historical narrative, between the written text and the visual archive. Mathur wonderfully captured the bitterly cold winter of London in 1885, when the human exhibit opened. This icy history crept inside me and began to settle as I began to wonder about the displayed Indians, shivering and trembling, their breath freezing. In sub-zero conditions, the motley group of South Asians, in their cotton dhotis, kurtas, churidars and saris, still managed to find a voice – they complained about a lack of adequate clothing and were given winter clothes. Instead of the warm brown skin of exotic bodies, spectators witnessed the ‘natives’ covered in layers of European woollens and left the exhibit disappointed. There was no spectacle of coloured human flesh for the voyeuristic white gaze.

The visual records, however, do not tell the story of the cold. In the image reproduced in Figure 1.3 and on the pages of the Illustrated London News, the ‘natives’ are all sketched as wearing their usual attire, without any signs of winter wear. Was this a lie, a bit of ‘fake news’, to rope in audiences through false publicity? Or was the sketch made once the displayed Indians were asked to remove their warm clothing to pose for the sketching artist, despite the cold? What would the nautch dancers have felt in a woollen coat, hat, gloves and scarf and shoes, layered on top of their Indian clothes? How did they move, pirouette, gesture, with the weight of the garments, the burden of the Empire? To understand their bodily, kinaesthetic experience, I decided to corpo-activate history, using my own body as a method of research. I wore a long skirt, a blouse and a dupatta (long scarf) as a veil, and on top of these I wore a long coat, hat, gloves, scarf and shoes. I tried to dance. I moved awkwardly, clumsily, unable to pirouette at speed, to traverse space fluidly. My hand gestures were muffled by the gloves. My neck and head movements were buried under the hat. My footwork vanished under the cover of shoes.

Theirs was a clumsy, awkward dance. A dance muffled, buried, vanished in the cold and covered up in the archives. How could this awkward and clumsy dance be returned to dance history? I wrote a performance lecture keynote on the nautch dancers in Liberty’s exhibit for the ‘Dance in the Age of Forgetfulness’ conference (Purkayastha, 2018a). I walked onto the performance space wearing layers of clothing, European woollens on top of layers of mismatched Indian articles, carrying a suitcase. I tried to briefly reenact the frozen moment of dancing in Figure 1.3, turning slowly while holding the veil, and then abandoned the pirouette, the gesture. As my performance lecture progressed, I began to take off the articles of clothing. I bit one glove with my teeth, pulled it out of my hands and spat it. I shook off the other glove. I flung my hat at the audience, threw my coat and cast off my dupatta. I undid my blouse, unhooked my skirt. By the end of my lecture, the space was strewn with overthrown clothes. I gathered these strewn garments, packed them in the suitcase and wheeled it away, leaving an empty space. When I presented the lecture at the opening plenary of the Dance Studies Association annual conference in Malta in 2018, I added another layer (Purkayastha, 2018b). I heard what Sahina and Sheeta would have muttered under their breath when their buttocks were groped or their breasts pinched by spectators of Liberty’s display. I wrote a fiction in which they swore back. Along with dance scholars Melissa Blanco Borelli and Ann Cooper Albright, I performed a choreography of choral swearing, in which the filthiest of expletives were uttered, echoed and repeated loudly. These were our contribution to untruths, consciously staged fabrications that added to the archive’s partial versions of nautch. The intention of these experiments was not to represent, rescue or recover Sahina or Sheeta’s voice. Instead, as Hershini Bhana Young suggests in her analysis of Sara Baartman, performance as a space produced a context where ‘we can imagine the transformation of the spectacle into something more than an expression of the master’s will’ (Reference Young2017: 71).

In the absence of notations, reliable visual records or other forms of documentation, a reenactment of the material conditions in which Liberty’s nautch dancers may have moved was a useful starting point to imagining their corporeality. However, the limits of reenactment as a methodology in this context lay mainly in the impossibility of returning to a history of race-gender-caste-based violence without repeating or reifying its violence. Hence, in my own corporeal engagement with the nautch dancer’s history, only one gesture – that of holding the veil and turning slowly – is attempted, and then abandoned. My movements mainly arise from the fictional overthrowing of garments. I call this embodied historical fiction a corpo-active rather than a reenactive approach. Such an approach uses the researcher’s body as a resource and a tool to expose the visual archive’s lies and fabrications, with no attempt at reproducing nautch. As such, the corpo, or body, becomes fundamental to the task of revealing the visual image’s untruths. The radical voice and will of nautch women that still hum underneath the visual records resist translation or representation, even as they help amplify and summon vibrant worlds of nautch refusal.