Chapter VII
THE DANCING GIRL
For the women of India an independent profession is a thing almost unknown. Here are no busy typewriters, no female clerks, no barmaids. The woman spends her whole life in a home, supported and maintained, her father’s as a child, then her husband’s, or else one of those large joint households in which every woman of the family, widowed or married, finds her place. If she is poor, she may have work to do in plenty, besides the care of her house and children. She may sew or go out to help in richer households; often she joins her husband in his work, and you may see the potter’s wife fetching earth and carrying bricks, or the washerman’s wife drive his laden ox. Sometimes she labours in the field, busily weeding or bent double as in the water-covered muddy patch she transplants the young rice-shoots. But in none of these tasks does she work for herself, alone and independent, at a trade chosen by her own taste. She labours as one member of a higher unit, the family of which she is a part, and she knows that by her efforts she helps to feed and clothe her children or to add to the funds controlled by the head of the joint family. Even domestic service, in the European sense of the word, hardly exists. Ruling and noble families have their maid-servants, but these are not independent women hired under a contract, enforceable at law. They are women born and bred in the palace, bound by affection and upbringing, hereditary house-servants, almost slaves. They are treated as of the family, are paid by food and clothing, by presents and the final gift in marriage to a male servant. Only a few, a very few there are, widows mainly, usually Mussulman, who can in the Western sense of the word be called servants.
In recent years changes in ideas, and still more changes in social economy, have produced a few women in regard to whose work it is possible to use the words “independent profession.” There are even a few lady doctors, Parsis mainly, in whose case the imitation of European customs and the resultant obstacles to marriage have facilitated study and the adoption of a career. There are far more who are teachers—always underpaid—in girls’ schools, or nurses—also underpaid—or midwives. Largely these are Brahman widows, who, repudiating the austerities of traditional belief, have found a more useful life by these labours, and relieve their relatives of the charge of their support or bring up their children by their own praiseworthy efforts.
But even these are still exceptions to be counted by hundreds, by thousands at the most, out of all the three hundred millions of India’s population. For the women of India, it may almost be said, there is only one independent profession open, one that is immemorial, remunerative, even honoured, and that is the profession of the dancing girl. There is hardly a town in India, however small, which has not its group of dancing girls, dubious perhaps and mediocre; and there is not a wedding, hardly an entertainment of any circumstance, at which the dancing girl’s services are not engaged. And it may be added that there is hardly a class so much misjudged or a profession so much misunderstood.
For long generations and in many countries the dancing girls of India have been the theme of poets and stock figures of romanticism. In Indian literature it was of course natural that they should find a place. And in fact, from the earliest Sanscrit poets down to the novelists and play-wrights of modern Bengal or Gujarát, there are few dramas in which a dancer does not play a role. Often the part is pathetic, even tragic, while it is usually edifying and pietistic. The courtesan who, urged by the eloquence or attraction of a pious ascetic, finds the grace of God and abandons art for austerity and the palace for the hermitage, is one of the recurrent conventions of the Indian classics. In one of the best-known of Mahrathi poems, there is such a picture, expressed with vigour and emotion. Converted to self-denial and renunciation, the dancing girl, once beautiful, lies alone, dirty and squalid, without food, in a witch-haunted graveyard, affrighted by ghosts, tormented by spirits of evil, yet uplifted by the love of God and blessed by her memories of the saint whose coldness was to her the sign of a higher adoration. But in the literature of Europe the bayadère, to use a name corrupted from the Portuguese, has also been a frequent and a luxurious figure. In the romantic fancies of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, she was, both in France and Germany, a personage on whom poets lavished the embellishments of their art. Her hazy outlines they bespangled with the imagery of fiction and the phantasies of invention. She was a symbol for oriental opulence, a creature of incredible luxury and uncurbed sensuousness, or tropic passion and jewelled magnificence. From her tresses blew the perfumes of lust; on her lips, like honey sweet, distilled the poisons of vice; hidden in her bodice of gold brocade she carried the dagger with which she killed.
Divest her of poetic association. Rob her of the hues cast by the distant dreams of romanticism. Strip her even of the facts of history and the traditions of the Indian classics. Yet she remains a figure sufficiently remarkable. Not tragic and certainly not gay, she embodies in herself so much of India, both its past and present, that without understanding her life and significance it is impossible to comprehend the social whole which she explains and commentates.
DANCER IN MIRZAPUR