Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

In the Peninsula of India dancing and professional singing is first of all a religious institution, bound up with the worship of the Gods. To every temple of importance are attached bands of six, eight, or more girls, paid in free gifts of land or in money for the duties which they perform. They are recruited in infancy from various castes and wear the ordinary garments, slightly more ornamental, of the Indian lady of those regions. In certain castes the profession is hereditary, mother bringing up daughter in turn to these family accomplishments. In other cases, as in the great temple of Jejuri in the Deccan, children are dedicated by their parents to the service of God and left when they reach a riper age to the teaching and superintendence of the priests. Twice a day, morning and evening, they sing and dance within the temple to the greater glory of God; and at all the great public ceremonies and festivals they play their part in the solemnities. Teaching is imparted by older men, themselves singers, who take in hand the training of small groups of girls. In some cases a form of marriage is performed, for the fulfilment of traditional religious obligation, with a man of the dancer’s caste, with an idol, or even with a sacred tree. But the ceremony entails no ethical obligations, such as apply to the real married woman. The dancers are regarded, being independent and self-supporting, as freed from the code which applies to women living in family homes and maintained by the work and earnings of a father or a husband. It is their right to live their lives as they will, for their own pleasure and happiness, unrestrained by any code more stringent than that of an independent man.

DANCER FROM TANJORE

Besides Tanjore, the old Portuguese possession of Goa and the neighbouring districts bordering on the ocean, where the forests and rocks of the Western Ghauts drop sharply to the rice-lands of the shore, are famous for the excellence of their singers. Here they are known under the name of Naikins or “Ladyships,” and have a position of no little respect. Though they like to trace their origin in their own sayings to those nymphs who in heaven are said to entertain the Gods, the truth is that they are largely recruited from other classes, whose children they purchase or adopt. They live in houses like those of the better-class Hindus, with broad verandahs and large court-yards, in which grows a plant or two of the sacred sweet basil. Their homes are furnished in the plain style of the Hindu householder, with mats and stools and wooden benches and an abundance of copper and brass pots and pans and water vessels. Only they wear a profusion of gold ornaments on head and wrists and fingers, a silver waist-band, and silver rings on their toes, and they make their hair gay with flowers. Their lives are simple and not luxurious; but the days are idled away in the languorous ease of the tropic sea breezes, a land of repose, a lazy land. They rise late, they bathe, they eat rice-gruel, and talk and sleep. The long afternoon is passed in more chatting and in their constant enjoyment of chewing betel leaves, till after dinner they go out to sing and dance to a late hour of the night. It is a life of quiet ease, uneventful, indolent no doubt, but hardly dissipated. And of course in all worship and religious observance they are devout and orthodox, fearing the Gods, and reverent to the officiating priesthood.

Now when some Hindu reformers object to the employment of such women in the temples of God and deny the efficacy of song and dance as adjuncts of religious emotion, it would of course be impertinence for the follower of another creed to express an opinion. The rubrics of prayer are between the worshipper alone and his God. If they preach that worship and oblation are for those only who have made asceticism their practice and who have turned their faces from the world to the pure concept of divinity, they are obviously within their rights: and the question must be decided by a congregation of fellow-worshippers. Even if they desire to bar the temple-door to women, who have taken no vow of chastity and hope for salvation without closing their ears to love, they are entitled to do as they like with their own, if they can obtain a consensus of believers. Observers of other creeds would willingly, if without impropriety they could have a voice, join in deploring the abuse, in some temples, of the custom of dedication; for girls thus dedicated, as at Jejuri, are often too numerous for the purposes of the temple-service and are thrown upon the world, without adequate artistic training, almost, one might say, with none, to make their way as best they can. When this happens, though Hindu society treats the devotees kindly and gives them easy admission to good houses, yet their dearth of artistic accomplishment, the refusal of support by the temple to which they are ascribed, and the pressing needs of sustenance must often force the unfortunate girl to a distasteful trade. But to include these among dancing girls in the proper sense is hardly fair. The motives of dedication are different and are exclusively religious, while the custom has arisen from the old Hindu tradition of appointing a girl to take the place of a son. The trained singer who succeeds to an appointment in a temple is in a very different position, and her life is as a rule happy and prosperous. The example of other countries has shown how an art may gain by the support of a Church, and how, in the absence of countervailing circumstances of popular understanding and enthusiasm, the withdrawal of ecclesiastical patronage may cause its decline and even its ruin. The Reformation in Europe, for instance, whatever its benefits to a new growing world in other matters, swept without doubt like a devastation over the rich fields of human imagination and like a tempest obliterated the aesthetic emotions in which the human soul attains its highest. In India, in the absence of a humanism such as Europe could imbibe from Athens, the dependence of art upon religion is more strait and isolated, while the very forms of Indian art are moulded in a supernatural conception of the universe. So subtly poised is it upon this pinnacle, that the mere touch of the freethinker and reformer, one fears, may send it shattered to the ground.

In the North, it has been said, the dancing girls have no connection with religious institutions, though, as it happens, their artistic conventions are more abstract and less sensuous. Mostly they are Mussulmans by belief or are Hindus who have adopted Mussulman ways and manners. They do not belong to colleges or groups but live alone and independently, earning their living by their art, without support from any temple. At the same time it is the custom in many parts to invite them to perform at the shrine of some dead saint during the annual celebrations. They sing on such occasions songs of a sacred kind, psalmodies of praise to God and His Prophet, poems well known in the Urdu language. They chant also the odes of the Sufis or Persian mystic poets, in which the adoration of the Deity is clothed in the language of love, and the praises of wine are metaphors for the ecstasies of the Spirit. Usually the dancing girl lives alone in her own house, some balconied and flat-roofed house in the crowded bazaar, where she can overlook the movement of the town and mark the doings of her world. There is little that escapes her prying eyes, and the musicians in her pay, the barber who lives in the street and the seller of betel leaves keep her posted in all the city scandals. There is constant coming and going to her doors, and in the afternoon admirers from the younger nobility and professional men drop in to pass the time and smoke and laugh a few hours away. Sometimes her house becomes a centre of intrigue where palace revolutions or doubtful conspiracies are hatched under her friendly eye by young men, who lounge on her cushions beside the trellised window. The room is heavy with the sweet, over-perfumed smoke of the black tobacco paste which she smokes in her silver-mounted hookah. When she drives out at evening, police-constables salute her. In most Native States such dancing girls, two or three or four, are an appanage of the royal retinue, and are paid salaries or retaining fees on a generous basis. Such a girl will ordinarily get one hundred to one hundred and fifty rupees per month from the State—the salary of a Police Magistrate—with gifts on special occasions. In exchange she has to sing twice or thrice a week when the chief calls for her, but with his permission she may always perform at other houses where she can earn larger fees. Some chiefs are famous for their taste, and a girl tries to secure an engagement for a year or two in such a Darbar to establish her reputation for the future. In many cases these dancers, as they grow older, marry one of their lovers and settle down to the quiet life of the respectable Mussulman lady behind the purdah. Sometimes they adopt a clever and pretty girl and train her, half as maid and half as companion, in the mysteries of their art, till she in turn becomes a singer and helps to keep her mistress and teacher, with no little piety and charity, in her old age.

Modern opponents of dancing, however, with their influence on a population which has few artistic tastes and a marked bent for economy, have already done much to degrade the profession and are gradually forcing girls, who would formerly have earned a decent competence with independence and an artist’s pride, into a shameful traffic from very want. Day by day the number of those women is growing less who alone preserve the memory of a fine Indian art. And, as they lose the independence earned by a profession, day by day more women are being thrust into the abysmal shame and destitution of degraded womanhood. An Indian proverb already sums up this peculiar item of the “reform programme” thus: “The dancing girl was formerly fed with good food in the temple; now she turns somersaults for a beggar’s rice.”

But, for the delineation of Indian life and society, the position of the dancing girl must be envisaged from a loftier altitude. It is only from such an aspect that her portrait can be said to complete and interpret the gallery of Indian womanhood.