Aspects of Pictorial Indian Dance History
by Donovan Roebert
East India Company Officials and the ‘Nautch Girls’ of Lucknow and Delhi: 1780-1846: A Pictorial Survey
By Donovan Roebert
The thrust of this essay is to deal with the pictorial record showing the association of proto-Kathak dancers with East India Company officials who resided and worked in Lucknow and Delhi in the period under review. Much has been written in recent decades about this period in which officials and soldiers of the Company took Indian wives, adopted local dress and manners, and patronized the arts in their places of residence, including the dance.
This essay will confine itself to a number of well-known paintings which depict these officials in the enjoyment of dance entertainments, as well as providing some pictures of the dancers themselves. In the main, I will be dealing here with such public figures of the time as Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier in Lucknow, and Sir David Ochterlony, Raja Hindu Rao, Colonel James Skinner, William Fraser, and Sir Thomas Metcalfe in Delhi, all of whom are pictorially shown to have had dealings with ‘nautch troupes’.
Before moving on to the depictions themselves, it is necessary to say a few words about the artworks and the artists who produced them. In this regard it is important to note that the style of painting – later to be subsumed under the evolutionary development of what was to become ‘Company Style’ paintings – was largely a fusion of Mughal and European styles, increasingly leaning towards European pictorial tastes because that was where the market for the pictures lay.
One of the strong influences on the art came from Charles D’Oyly’s ‘Behar School of Athens’ in Patna, which trained such artists as Jairam Das and Shiv Dayal. D’Oyly also set up a lithographic press in Patna, a step that tended towards the encouragement of a more stylized painting style. At the same time, local artists were seeking to create larger, more vivid and peopled canvases that reflected the work of European painters such as Johann Zoffany and William Henry Hutchisson, but which retained their own formal stylization of subject matter.
The subjects of this painting are unnamed, as are those occurring in this second example below:
It was this kind of Patna approach to painting, which also went through a period of blossoming in Murshidabad, that had its influence on the painters of Lucknow and later of Delhi, with whose depictions of dancers this essay is mainly concerned. Further influences on the Delhi painters were exerted by the Calcutta artist, Sita Ram, who came to Delhi in the retinue of the Governor General, Warren Hastings, in 1815, and initiated a less stylized manner of reproducing the city’s architecture in rich landscape settings derived from William Hodges. By 1822, Ghulam Ali Khan, two of whose depictions of dancers are given in this essay, was creating work in the same pattern. Ghulam Ali Khan himself established a family workshop in Delhi, involving such artists as his brother, Faiz, and, later, Mazhar Ali Khan, who was responsible for many paintings collected in Thomas Metcalfe’s ‘Delhie Book’ (see below).
Before moving on to the paintings of dancers from Lucknow and Delhi that illustrate this hybrid style, here is a purely European representation painted in oils by William Henry Florio Hutchisson, probably around 1820:
The painting shows a proto-Kathak performance staged in the course of official business conducted by the Nawab and the Company Resident, both of whom are shown seated at right on a raised dais. Though the early company paintings produced by local artists do not reflect the rich, early orientalist tone of this depiction, they do record the same importance afforded to dance performances in the course of official entertainments, and the formality with which such dances were presented.
The first two of these hybrid-style paintings by local artists with which this essay deals show Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier enjoying ‘nautch’ performances in Lucknow or Faizabad in the late eighteenth century.
The painting was produced by an unknown local artist between 1786 and 1788, and is described as a work ‘after Johann Zoffany’, implying that Zoffany had originally painted this scene, perhaps in oils. In the depiction itself we see Polier in local garb with the omnipresent huqqa pipe. It is interesting also to note that the musicians at this performance are all women, a feature that recurs in other similar scenes from the period.
This painting by the Awadhi artist Mihr Chand, who was employed as chief artist in Polier’s own atelier, shows male musicians in white jamas, while the dancers are clad in colourful peshwaz, floor-length gauzy garments that are often remarked on in written descriptions of the dancers, usually to emphasize the ‘modesty’ of the costume, from which ‘only the feet peep out’. The musicians are playing sarangi and tabla, typical instruments for this kind of proto-Kathak performance. Again we note the huqqa pipe, which emphasizes the character of the ‘nautch’ as part of an exercise in relaxation for the onlooker, an exquisitely lulling tableau of soft movements. Mihr Chand was the son of the artist Ganga Ram, who had possibly been an artist in late Mughal Delhi, and who initially taught his son the craft.
Colonel Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741-1795) was a Swiss engineer involved in the military exploits of Robert Clive. He arrived in India in 1758, becoming a cadet in service of the Company. He quickly became chief engineer in Calcutta, and was later promoted to the rank of major in Lord Clive’s Buxar Campaign of 1764. He eventually left the military, feeling himself badly treated as a Frenchman in English service, and, with recommendations from Warren Hastings, entered the service of the Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula as architect and engineer in Faizabad.
Growing increasingly disillusioned with this post, he entered service at the Mughal court in Delhi and amassed a fortune working within the ambit both of the court and of the East India Company. He became a great collector of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic manuscripts, as well as a patron of local arts. He married two Indian wives by whom he had three or four children, all of whom he placed in the care of a friend when he returned to France in 1788, where he was assassinated seven years later in the French revolutionary ‘terror’.
Polier, then, is one of those early Company adventurers who remained in India long enough to adopt native dress and customs, to immerse themselves in the literature, culture and art of India, to marry Indian wives and raise Indian families, while at the same time fulfilling lucrative careers in political and military service.
Sir David Ochterlony was another of these, and to an even more colourful degree. We encounter him here in the Delhi of the nominal reign of the penultimate Mughal ruler, Akbar Shah II, watching a ‘nautch’ performance around the year 1820.
David Ochterlony (1758-1825), a Scottish American born in Massachusetts, came to India in 1877, at eighteen years of age, becoming, like Polier, a cadet in Company service. He quickly rose through the ranks on account of his brilliance as a military leader and strategist, and was appointed Lieutenant General by 1803. He fought in several important campaigns, including those against the Maratha and Gurkha forces, and was commended as one of the most brilliant military men in India. He was appointed Resident of the Governor General in Delhi between 1803 and 1804, promoted to Major-General in 1814, and again appointed Delhi Resident from 1818, combined with the Residency of Jaipur, until his death in 1825. His last year was fraught with unhappiness and bitterness at having been removed from his position by Lord Amherst as a result of political and strategic differences, and his misery was compounded by ill health. He retired to his house, ‘Shalimar’, in Delhi, to be succeeded as Resident by his close friend, Charles Metcalfe.
Like Colonel Polier before him, David Ochterlony married several Indian wives – thirteen in all – by whom he had offspring, and who would accompany him on evening promenades around the Red Fort, each on her own elephant. It is recorded that his favourite wife was Mubarak Begum, who had been a ‘dancing girl’ before her marriage.
In the painting we see again the huqqa being smoked while the dance proceeds in a relaxed but formal setting with numerous official attendants. As an old soldier with many ruthless campaigns behind him, Sir David would have become accustomed to the calming effects of the graceful and subdued proto-Kathak patterns of the period before the re-designing of the dance by Wajid Ali Shah at the court of Awadh. It is indeed the case that soldiers and officers often attended ‘nautch’ performances in the aftermath of battles and campaigns.
The atmosphere becomes decidedly less formal, as well as more lifelike and genial, in the painting of a dance performance given in the house of the contemporary Delhi socialite, Raja Hindu Rao:
Raja Hindu Rao (d. 1855) was a Maratha nobleman who moved to Delhi after the 1857 Rebellion, and became a well-known socialite in the city, fond of entertaining his European friends, including the Governor General. It is possible that he had a house in Delhi before moving permanently to the city, which would explain the dating of this painting to c. 1815-1820.
In this depiction we see the dance in the context of a party of friends outside of the constraints of an official function. It is a purely social occasion at which the dance is presented as one of several entertainments. The atmosphere is homely and friendly, with the house-dog also fascinated by the dancers, and one European gentleman smoking a huqqa. Hindu Rao himself seems intent on conversing while the dance goes on, so that it seems as if the ‘nautch’ itself provides only a background to the communion of the amicable party-goers.
We are given an insight into the communal world of the dancers themselves in the following portrait by Ghulam Ali Khan:
Though nothing is said about these dancers or ‘courtesans’ in the several archives where they appear, we notice at once the air of confidence and self-sufficiency which the picture captures in their postures and attitudes. By the time this painting was produced, these ‘nautch girls’ were already being viewed askance by many European commentators as putting temptation in the way of Company officials and soldiers who were almost invariably strongly attracted to them, and in some cases were moved to marry them. Again we espy the huqqa in the foreground, almost serving as a symbol for the association of these professional dancers with the notion of indolence and voluptuous luxury. We see also the richness of costume and jewelry, as well as the accoutrements seeming to imply that the dancers were well enough remunerated to ensure for them a prosperous lifestyle.
And it is the case that they were regularly in demand in the wealthy houses and courts of Delhi, and that the employment of a troupe of dancers was an indispensable part of any establishment that wanted to be held in high esteem. High-ranking citizens of the city, such as the Anglo-Indian soldier Colonel James Skinner, seem to have presented regular ‘nautch’ entertainments at their lavish homes.
An earlier depiction of similar dancers was made in the Delhi studio of Ghulam Ali Khan, probably by his brother, Faiz Ali Khan:
Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841) was born in Calcutta of a Scottish father and Indian mother. Not content to remain an apprentice printer, the career selected for him by his father, he ran away at the age of sixteen and joined the Maratha army of Gwalior. Dismissed from service there in 1803, he joined the Bengal army. He became renowned for raising the cavalry regiment known as ‘Skinner’s Horse’ or ‘the Yellow Boys’ (on account of the colour of their uniform). The regiment became famous for its successes in various campaigns.
In Delhi, Skinner built St. James’s Church, the oldest church in the city. He is also reputed to have commissioned the building of a temple and a mosque. He is said to have had fourteen wives, and is known to have lived splendidly in his charming Delhi residence, where the Hindu College of Delhi was later housed. He wrote a number of works in Persian, including his own memoirs. In all of these accomplishments he is representative of the other early Company adventurers who combined brilliant military and administrative careers with a taste for scholarship, architecture, art, and the culture and literature of India. Unlike his European counterparts, though, he lamented that ‘… I thought I had now served a nation that had no prejudices against caste or colour, but, alas, I was mistaken … If they had considered me as a British subject, did I not deserve a better treatment for 20 years of hard labour? … My birth has been the cause of not gaining what I deserved …’
Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, Governor General from 1836 to 1842, mentions a visit and a ‘nautch’ at Colonel Skinner’s home during her sojourn in India in one of her letters, as follows:
‘In the evening we went to a nautch at Colonel Skinner’s. His house is fitted up in the native fashion, and he had all the best singers and dancers in Delhi, and they acted passages out of Vishnu and Brahma’s lives, and sang Persian songs which I thought made a very ugly noise, but Mr. B, who speaks Persian as fluently as English, kept saying, “Well, this is really delightful – this I think is equal to any European singing – in fact there is nothing like it.”
‘There is nothing like it that I ever heard before, but certainly the words, as he translated them, were very pretty. One little fat nautch girl sang a sort of passionate song to -G., with little meaning smiles, which I think rather attracted his lordship, and I thought it might be too much for him if I forwarded to him Mr. B.’s translation. “I am the body, you are the soul: we may be parted here, but let no one say we shall be parted hereafter. My father has deserted me, my mother is dead, I have no friends. My grave is open, and I look into it; but do you care for me?” The dancing is very slow and very dull, but the dresses and ornaments are beautiful.’
Godfrey Charles Mundy, describing a ‘nautch’ in Delhi in 1827, tells us that:
‘Each set of dancing girls is usually furnished with an old crone who takes care of their finery, their interests, (and their morals perhaps;) and a band of two or three musicians … At the close of each stanza of the song, the girl floats forward towards the audience by a sort of ‘sidling’, ‘bridling’, and, I may add, ‘ogling’ approach, moving her arms gently round her head, the drapery of which they are constantly and gracefully employed in arranging and displacing … concealing with the tissue veil one brilliant or languid eye … sometimes effecting a total eclipse; or allowing the whole head to be seen in order to display the sevigne of pearl on her forehead … The lithe snake-like suppleness of their arms excites, at first, great surprise in the European spectator …
‘On entering the room, the dancing girls and their followers salaam respectfully to the company, and then, amid a confused jingling of bracelets and anklets, an all-pervading odour of attar, squat quietly down in a semi-circle until called upon to display.
‘For the applauding natives ‘Wa! Wa! Ka Khoob!’ … of the spectator, they return a smile and a low salaam. Natives of rank sometimes give more solid proofs of their approbation, by ordering the two hands of the charmer to be filled with gold or silver coins …’
The delicacy of the dancers can be seen in this subtle depiction by Ghulam Ali Khan, found in the Fraser Album:
The Fraser Album is a collection of paintings by Delhi artists – chiefly those working in the studio of Ghulam Ali Khan – commissioned by William Fraser, the Governor General’s Agent in Delhi, and collected between 1815 and 1819. The company paintings that make up the collection were discovered in the Fraser family archives in Scotland by Joan Lancaster in 1979. Among these pictures there are several depicting Delhi dancers.
William Fraser (1784-1835) came to India at the age of sixteen, and entered East India Company service as a ‘Writer’, studying for this position in Calcutta. It is interesting to read, in his own words, about the kind of subjects taught there to budding company administrators:
‘… a scientific and grammatical knowledge of the Eastern languages which I class thus as to utility: Arabic, Persian, Hindoostanee, Sanscrit, Bangalee etc. A personal intercourse with natives of all denominations and castes to acquire idiom, dialect, manner, local knowledge, knowledge of custom, character, prejudice, religion, ancient hereditary habits, and distinguishing characteristics …’
He became Agent to the Governor General in Delhi in 1823, then again in 1828-1829, and finally in his last years from 1832 to 1835. In 1835, he was assassinated over a matter involving a disputed case of inheritance, by an assassin hired by Shamsuddin Ahmed Khan, a minor nawab who was subsequently hanged for the murder. Both he and his brother were close friends of Colonel James Skinner, and William himself is shown in one portrait dressed in the uniform of ‘Skinner’s Horse’. Fraser also had an Indian wife, Amiban, from Rania, by whom he had three children, two boys and a girl.
Fraser was deeply interested in all aspects of Indian life and culture, including the ‘nautch’. His brother, James, visiting him in Delhi, wrote about the dancers in a letter sent to his family in Scotland:
‘After dinner we had a nautch. As we get more accustomed to the thing, it certainly improves on one, or at least becomes more intelligible and the songs are more followed. There were many sets of nautch women, some of whom were very fair – and the dresses were very rich. Some sang extremely well – and one named Malageer particularly excelled. I have ordered her picture to be done in one of her attitudes, and shall attempt it myself, getting her to the bungalow.’
In the event, Malageer (or, Malaguire) was painted for the Frasers by Hulas Lal (‘Lalljee’), whom James Fraser describes as a ‘pupil of Zofanies’ i.e. of Johann Zoffany:
Other paintings for the Fraser Album were commissioned over a period of years, and these included other dancers, who are also named:
As to nature of the dance itself, we do not know much about it, and apart from the narrative descriptions found in early 19th-century European writings, there is not much to guide us towards a definitive understanding of the choreographies and steps that were used in performance in the decades under review here. As Margaret Walker writes:
‘The most widely disseminated belief is that Kathak originated in the Hindu temple, where priestly story-tellers called Kathakas performed devotional songs and dances. With the advent of Muslim rule in North India, these performers are said to have sought employment in the courts and changed the aesthetic of Kathak dance from devotional to virtuosic in order to please their non-Hindu patrons (for further information see among many others Devi 1972, Banerji 1982, Khokar 1984,Natavar 2000, and Sinha 2000). I have investigated this claim of kathak’s supposed temple origins at length (Walker 2004 and 2009/2010), and have found little, if any, substantial documentation to support it. Indeed, before the 1920s or 1930s, there is no mention at all in either the indigenous treatises or colonial travel writings of dance called Kathak. There are references to performers called Kathaks in the census reports from the 1800s, but sources from the 1700s make no mention of them. As one looks through past centuries for the dance’s elements rather than the name, however, one can find evidence of a number of semi-related performance traditions scattered across North India from Benares to Rajasthan that are indeed the historical roots of today’s dance. These include the performance practice of the hereditary women performers we now call courtesans or tavayafs, the rhythmic dances of the hereditary male performers variously called Kathaks, Bhands, or Bhagatiya, and a range of devotional and secular rural theatrical genres including Ras Lila, Ram Lila, and Nautanki (Walker 2004).’
Certainly there are strong distinctions to be made between the ‘nautch’ performances of North India in the 19th century and the ‘classical’ Kathak repertoire that is known today. The 19th-century style seems to have been rooted in mimetic pantomime, with sedate movement of the limbs in kinetic illustration of lyrics sung by the dancers themselves, although there were also interludes of pure dance or nritta. Much emphasis was also placed on facial expression, with special reference to the eyes, and use of a veil for covering and uncovering of these features in the course of the performance. (See ch. 10 of Margaret E. Walker’s PhD dissertation, Kathak Dance: A Critical History, University of Toronto, 2004).
This sedate and calming sort of ‘nautch’ sequence is captured by Mazhar Ali Khan in a dance scene painted for the ‘Delhie Book’ compiled by Sir Thomas Metcalfe between 1842 and 1844:
Sir Thomas Metcalfe (1795-1853) arrived in Delhi in 1813 and lived there until his death in 1853. He became assistant to his older brother Charles, who succeeded Sir David Ocherlony as Resident to the Mughal Court in 1825. Sir Thomas himself became Company Agent in 1835 after the assassination of William Fraser, and held this position until the year he died, possibly from slow poisoning by the favourite wife of the last titular Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. He built himself two residences in Delhi, the Metcalfe House, and his retreat ‘Dilkusha’, which he erected over the tomb of Quli Khan, near the Qutb Minar in Mehrauli. He commissioned the ‘Delhie Book’ in 1844, creating an album of some 130 paintings by Delhi artists, including especially Mazhar Ali Khan, for which he provided his own written commentary. The album was sent to his daughter, Emily, in England, and brought back to Delhi when she joined her father in the city in 1848. It remained in private hands until 1985, when it was acquired by the British Library, being one of the few books and albums to have survived the destruction of Metcalfe’s home in the Revolt of 1857 and the subsequent siege and razing of Delhi by the British forces.
Thomas Metcalfe was, unlike most of his British contemporaries in Delhi, a fastidious Englishman who did not easily fraternize, and whose official tasks included the plotting of the fall of the Delhi court. Nevertheless, he loved the city in which his two opulent and eccentric homes had been built, and was keenly interested in its monuments and culture. His ‘Delhie Book’ is today regarded as one of the most intrinsically valuable collections of outstanding examples of early Company Painting before the genre declined into a largely mass-produced commodity.
Even in their mass-produced format, company paintings of North Indian dancers, including dancers from Delhi, do help researchers towards a more accurate view of the postures and costumes of the dancers, and steer them away from such fantastical depictions as this one by J. Chapman:
By contrast, the company depictions show a more modest and unromanticized representation of the dancers, and one that would probably be recognized as realistic, though stylized, by Europeans living in India in the mid- and late-19th century.
Musulmanee Dancing-girl, 
Notes:
- For Colonel Polier see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career of Colonel Polier and Late Eighteenth-Century Orientalism, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2000, pp. 43-60.
- For Sir David Ochterlony see F.G. Cardew, Major-General Sir David Ochterlony, Bart., GCB, 1758-1825, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Vol. 10. No. 29, January 1931. See also his vindication in The Oriental Herald and Journal of General Literature, James Silk Buckingham, ed., London, J.M. Richardson, 1827.
- For Colonel James Skinner see Krishna Lal Sachdeva, Military Memoirs of Lt. Col. James Skinner (1778-1841), Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 30, 1968, pp. 375-378.
- For William Fraser see Toby Falk, The Fraser Company Drawings, Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture, 5 May, 1988, RSA Journal, Vol. 137, No. 5389, Dec. 1988, pp. 27-37.
- For Thomas Metcalfe see Jacqueline Banerjee, Sir Thomas Metcalfe’s ‘Dilkusha’ or ‘Heart’s Delight’, Delhi, Victorian Web, October 2014.
- For the Delhi artists see J.P Losty, Depicting Delhi: Mazhar Ali Khan, Thomas Metcalfe, and the Topographical School of Delhi Artists, in Dalrymple W. and Sharma Y., ed., Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, Asia Society, New York, 2012, pp. 52-59.
- For analysis and description of proto-Kathak dance in the 19th century see Margaret E. Walker, Revival and Reinvention of India’s Kathak Dance, MUSICultures, 2010, and, Kathak Dance: A Critical History, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004.
- Quotations from Emily Eden are from Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India, London, R. Bentley, 1866.
- Quotations from Godfrey Charles Mundy are from Pen and Pencil Sketches, being the journal of a tour in India, London, John Murray, 1833.
End.
