Public Women in British India: Icons and the Urban Stage

370 Pages·2018·24.216 MB·English

by  Rimli Bhattacharya

PUBLIC WOMEN
IN BRITISH INDIA
This book foregrounds the subjectivity of ‘acting women’ amidst
violent debates on femininity and education, livelihood and labour,
sexuality and marriage. It looks at the emergence of the stage actress as
an artist and an ideological construct at critical phases of performance
practice in British India. The focus here is on Calcutta, considered the
‘second city of the Empire’ and a nodal point in global trade circuits.
Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a
professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the
model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of
the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing
the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the
politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich
archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time.
This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining
performance studies with literary history and art practices within
a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it
will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and
performance studies, history and gender studies.
Rimli Bhattacharya currently teaches at the Department of English,
University of Delhi, India. She has trained in Comparative Literature
at Jadavpur and Brown Universities and has been Visiting Professor at
the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, the University of Pennsylvania and
the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She has collaborated
with artists and filmmakers on multimedia projects and has published on
critical areas in gender and performance, children’s literature and primary
education. Her corpus of classic translations from Bangla into English
includes novels by Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay and Rabindranath
Tagore. She is the author of the key text Binodini Dasi: ‘My Story’ and
‘My Life as an Actress’ (1998) and The Dancing Poet: Rabindranath
Tagore and Choreographies of Participation (forthcoming).
Like to a woman’s youth is your pride:
. . .
Little did you know the ways of this wily world!
From the poem ‘Kusum o Bhramar’
(The blossom and the honey bee)
by Tarasundari Dasi, Saurabh, 1895.
Teenkari Dasi (1870–1925) and Narisundari (1877–1939)
Source: Author’s Collection
PUBLIC WOMEN
IN BRITISH INDIA
Icons and the Urban Stage
Rimli Bhattacharya
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2018 Rimli Bhattacharya
The right of Rimli Bhattacharya to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-28255-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-50718-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To my guardian angels
Henning and Runupishi

CONTENTS
List of figures viii
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiv
Note on transliteration and translation xix
Introduction 1
1 Genealogies: or, what’s in a name? 52
2 Benediction in performance: playing the saint
and meeting the saint: 1880s–90s 102
3 Counter seductions: and metropolitan dysfunction 154
4 The ‘female’ confessional voice: actress-stories
as captivating copy 191
5 ‘A strange meeting’ at the Star Theatre, 1912:
mourning on stage 240
Postscript 291
Appendix 328
Select bibliography 336
Index 339
vii
FIGURES
0.1 Entrance to the Calcutta Town Hall, 2017 xiii
I.1 Binodini Dasi as Bankimchandra’s heroine ‘Ayesha’ 2
I.2 Advertisement, Statesman & FOI, Calcutta,
4 August 1883 8
I.3 ‘Gayasurer Haripadapadmalabh Geetabhinay’/‘At
the lotus feet of Hari!’, a musical play 8
I.4 One of the first Calcutta schools where students
performed Shakespeare in their ‘Oriental Theatre’
in the 1850s 16
I.5 Real and imagined . . . matchbox label, c. 1920 27
I.6 A medley of genres in a bilingual playbill, 1894 28
I.7 St John’s Church, foundation stone laid by Warren
Hastings in 1784, built in 1787 37
I.8 Minerva Theatre, Calcutta, inaugurated in 1893
with Girishchandra’s rendering of Macbeth 48
I.9 The actress as the model, early 20th century 51
1.1 Annette Ackroyd with students of the Hindu Mahila
Bidyalaya, 1875. Visiting Unitarian Annette A.
Beveridge (1842–1929) established the school in
1873 with support from a progressive group of Brahmos 63
1.2 ‘Merry performance by fair sex only’ 70
1.3 Interior of ‘Emerald Bower’, c. 1920 71
1.4 Rabindranath Tagore at a rehearsal, 1930s 72
1.5 Bilingual playbill for The Wily Woman, 19 October
1895 84
1.6 Binodini Dasi with Saratchandra Sinha 93
2.1 My ticket for Bina Dasgupta’s Nati Binodini,
27 June 1991 108
2.2 Bina Dasgupta as Binodini playing Chaitanya
in Nati Binodini, dir. Bina Dasgupta, produced
by Surangana, 1991 110
viii
FIGURES
2.3 Jatra agency in Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 117
2.4 Kalo Sindur (Black mark of marriage), a jatra book
cover 141
2.5 Advertisements for jatra, Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 143
2.6 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 1: Six-armed Chaitanya as a
composite of Radha and Krishna in tribhanga, dance
pose of three angles 144
2.7 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 2 144
2.8 Shadabhuja Chaitanya 3 145
3.1 A letter from ‘Miss Bankim-Binodini’, Majlis, 1890 155
3.2 Inner and outer spaces: Madhabi Mukherjee in
Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, 1964 158
3.3 ‘Can’t even shut the door when he’s lighting the fire!’ 164
3.4 ‘Manbhanjan’ in a new frame? 165
3.5 The charms of the metropolis 174
3.6 The Charms of an Actress, Advertisement, Amrita
Bazar Patrika, 1914 185
4.1 First performance of Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil
Darpan by the National Theatre company held in
this residence, Jorasanko, on 7 December 1872 192
4.2 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925 194
4.3 Variegated beauties from Roop o Rang, c. 1925 195
4.4a Mahakabi Girishchandra/‘Girishchandra the great
Poet’ 200
4.4b Girishchandra Ghosh’s signature 201
4.5 Kalighat drawing of a sundari, c. 1870–1880 208
4.6 Problematising Binodini 218
4.7 Sarah Bernhardt in a Bengali theatre magazine, 1926 223
4.8 Pandit Ramnarayan Tarkaratna 226
4.9 The ‘accomplishment curriculum’, Pravasi, 1311
BS/1904, p. 13 233
4.10 ‘The harbinger of spring’ 234
4.11 ‘Entertainment worth ten rupees’ 235
5.1 Interior of Town Hall, Calcutta, 2017 241
5.2 ‘Won’t leave a stone unturned!’ 249
5.3 A girl and a woman: ‘Srimati Giribala and Kiran’ 258
5.4 Chitpur, Calcutta, 2017 282
P.1 Sukumari as Bankimchandra’s enigmatic ‘Motibibi’ 295
P.2 Rani in the role of ‘Poriar’ in Maner Moton (As I wish) 297
P.3 Tarasundari as ‘Razia’ Sultana, first produced in 1902 299
P.4 Binodini cross-dressed in Upendranath Das’s
Sarat-Sarojini 306
P.5 Binodini Dasi, Amar Katha/My Story, 1912, p. 110 317
ix