Eastern Dancers and the Western Gaze: The Queer Spectacle of Oriental Dance in Decadent Poetry

Abstract

Eastern dance traditions have historically been shaped by the continuum of socio-political forces, including colonial encounters, and the aftermath of the Empire. An embodied repository of cultural histories, Orientalized dancer communities delineate genealogies of socio-cultural oppression, and queer resistance against dominant forces of erasure. The Oriental dancer in particular, has figured prominently in long-nineteenth century decadent literatures of the Empire, regularly fetishized as an exotic spectacle, inherently imbricated in queer traditions incomprehensible to the West. In postcolonial literature, the bodies of these Oriental dancers often become the ontological space upon which resistance against the intersecting racial and political discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-colonialist nationalism is enacted. This study interrogates the triangulated discourses of decadence, Orientalism, and anti-colonial nationalism by critically analyzing the nationalist replications and postcolonial resistance to decadent Orientalist representations of the “Oriental” dancer in British and Indian decadent poetry. Through the transnational and transhistorical study of three poems, namely, Athur O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé,” Sarojini Naidu’s “Indian Dancers,” and Kamala Das’s “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” this study explores the persistent reverberations of the nineteenth-century decadent movement in the postcolonial era. Across these three poems, I would trace the complicities and departures of fin-de-siècle decadence from the colonial discourse, to study how it can be subversively transformed into a language of resistance to the violence visited upon the subaltern dancers’ textual and sexual bodies.

1. Introduction

Congealing within itself the competing discourses of aestheticism, decadence, and Orientalism, dance has often historically embodied a metamorphic form of cultural expression that has remained perpetually in flux, repeatedly subjected to socio-political forces of change, delineating historiographies of cultural memories and national identities. The socio-cultural significance of dance transcends beyond that of an art form generating visual and kinesthetic pleasure, thus featuring frequently in works of literature. The decadent Oriental dancer, in particular, has figured prominently in Western literature, regularly fetishized as an incomprehensible exotic spectacle. In European decadent literature, in particular, the hypervisible, openly eroticized but abjected bodies of the Oriental dancers often become the ontological palimpsest upon which intersecting racial and political discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-colonialist nationalism are inscribed and reinscribed.

The transnational nature of European decadence has been explored by several scholars like Stefano Evangelista (2019), though its ripples in the postcolonial world remain underexplored. Even though decadence’s complicity with Britain’s imperialist project has been amply critiqued by scholars, what remains to be studied in greater depth is how “the juncture of Orientalism and decadence provides a specific inflection of the problem of nationalism in the colony” (Fieni 2020, p. 5). This study interrogates, using a postcolonial and an intersectional feminist lens, decadence’s fascination with the Oriental dancers, who were inherently imbricated in queer traditions incomprehensible to the West. The uncomprehending imperial eye interpreted these queer Oriental spectacles as signs of moral degeneration that justified the enactment of violent corrective measures instituted through colonial laws. Colonial history often occludes the records of this historical violence visited upon these dancers, surprisingly reinforced also by the revisionist paradigm of anti-colonial nationalist history, eventually resulting in their inevitable social exclusion, and cultural extinction.

Unsurprisingly, the Middle Eastern dancer became the first object of the decadent Orientalist gaze as it continued to shift further East. Even as the campness of Oscar Wilde’s (1894) Salomé’s “the Dance of the Seven Veils” held the nineteenth-century European audience in thrall, the fin-de-siècle British Orientalist gaze shifted to the bayaderes or the Romantic ballerinas on the Western stage, who attempted to approximate the Hindu temple dancers or the devadasis of a fantastical and imaginatively constructed India. Treating Salomé’s queer performance as delineated by Arthur O’Shaughnessy in his decadent poem “Salomé” excerpted from “The Daughter of Herodias” in An Epic of Women and Other Poems (first published in 1870) as a template, this essay examines the ways in which the devadasis or the temple dancers of India have been rendered in typical decadent Orientalist fashion in Indian poetess Sarojini Naidu’s 1905poem “Indian Dancers”. In this study I critique how Naidu’s portrayal obscures the subjection of the devadasis’ queer subculture under the subsequent onslaughts of the colonialist and nationalist discourses. Comparing alongside Naidu’s self-orientalizing tendencies evident in the poem competing with her nationalist fervor, I also analyze in this essay Kamala Das’s postcolonial response to the historical disenfranchisement of another explicitly queer community in India, namely the hijras, by the colonial administration and the postcolonial nationalist government alike, in her 1965 decadent poem “The Dance of the Eunuchs”. Using the template of O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé,” I examine how Naidu, a Western-educated, elite nationalist leader, seamlessly replicates in her poem the British Empire’s decadent Orientalist attitudes towards the devadasi community. Das’s postcolonial ethos, on the other hand, subversively transforms the lingering legacies of decadent imperialist discourse into a language of resistance against the Orientalist romanticization of the textual body of the dancers while exposing the violence visited upon their sexual bodies. To this end, I critically interrogate Naidu’s self-Orientalist reliance on Eurocentric discourses, in spite of her anti-colonial, nationalist politics, as the genetic expression of her colonially inherited DNA. Contrastingly, Das’s conscious refusal to replicate the Western colonial framework in her poem is interpreted as a point of genetic mutation and queer subaltern resistance to reproductive genealogies.

2. Salomé as a Template

The polyvalent representations of Salomé across a corpus of texts collectively typify the decadent Orientalist packaging of the East into an artistic commodity for the Western audience’s consumption. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé is one such text emerging out of the movement that, in centering the sensually exoticized Judaean princess, fully embraces a decadent Orientalist campness of exaggerated artifice and extravagance, in the depiction of her irrational cruelty and the outrageousness of her desires. Yet, simultaneously, Salomé’s “the Dance of the Seven Veils” remains curiously obscured between the lines of Wilde’s play, even as her dance had by then been rendered by several artists. However, Shireen Malik (2008) suggests that Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s poem “Salomé,” by introducing for the first time the veils as part of Salomé’s vestments, might have served as an inspiration for that specific reference to the dance in Wilde’s play (p. 145). Jordan Kistler (2016) too, credits O’Shaughnessy, British pre-Raphaelite poet and herpetologist, with importing French literature into Britain, thus shaping the aesthetic and decadent movements in the 1880s and 1890s in England: “His primacy in the revitalization of characters such as Salomé in his “Daughter of Herodias” suggests the path of his influence, since Mallarmé appropriated the same subject in his Herodiade (1898), as did Wilde in 1891” (p. 118).

The enigmatic figure of Salomé has hitherto been interpreted in myriad ways by critics as the archetypal femme fatalé, a male transvestite, or even a New Woman (Im 2017, p. 163). O’Shaughnessy’s poem effectively captures the sexual threat posed by the seductive, genderqueer, Oriental dancer to the Western male gaze, as it becomes crystallized within her dance. Excerpted from O’Shaughnessy’s (1871) “The Daughter of Herodias” from An Epic of Women and Other Poems, his “Salomé” reads as follows:

• Her long black hair danced round her like a snake
• Allured to each charmed movement she did make;
• Her voice came strangely sweet;
• She sang, “O, Herod, wilt thou look on me—
• Have I no beauty thy heart cares to see?”
• And what her voice did sing her dancing feet
• Seemed ever to repeat.

• She sang, “O, Herod, wilt thou look on me?
• What sweet I have, I have it all for thee;”
• And through the dance and song
• She freed and floated on the air her arms
• Above dim veils that hid her bosom’s charms:
• The passion of her singing was so strong
• It drew all hearts along.

• Her sweet arms were unfolded on the air,
• They seemed like floating flowers the most fair—
• White lilies the most choice;
• And in the gradual bending of her hand
• There lurked a grace that no man could withstand;
• Yea, none knew whether hands, or feet, or voice,
• Most made his heart rejoice.

• The veils fell round her like thin coiling mists
• Shot through by topaz suns, and amethysts,
• And rubies she had on;
• And out of them her jewelled body came,
• And seemed to all quite like a slender flame
• That curled and glided, and that burnt and shone
• Most fair to look upon.

• Then she began, on that well-polished floor,
• Whose stones seemed taking radiance more and more
• From steps too bright to see,
• A certain measure that was like some spell
• Of winding magic, wherein heaven and hell
• Were joined to lull men’s souls eternally
• In some mid ecstasy:

• For it was so inexplicably wrought
• Of soft alternate motions, that she taught
• Each sweeping supple limb,
• And in such intricate and wondrous ways
• With bendings of her body, that the praise
• Lost breath upon men’s lips, and all grew dim
• Save her so bright and slim.

• And through the swift mesh’d serpents of her hair
• That lash’d and leapt on each place white and fair
• Of bosom or of arm,
• And through the blazing of the numberless
• And whirling jewelled fires of her dress,
• Her perfect face no passion could disarm
• Of its reposeful charm.

• Her head oft drooped as in some languid death
• Beneath brim tastes of joy, and her rich breath
• Heaved faintly from her breast;
• Her long eyes, opened fervently and wide,
• Did seem with endless rapture to abide
• In some fair trance through which the soul possest
• Love, ecstasy, and rest.
(O’Shaughnessy 1871, pp. 118–20)

O’Shaughnessy’s “Salomé” uses Symbolist imagery to describe her “jewelled body,” which in movement whirl “jewelled fires” since it is decked alluringly in topaz, rubies, and amethysts. Her movements are compared to that of a “slender flame.” Her “supple limbs,” long, wide eyes, and her faintly heaving breast are sensually rendered. With her perfect face, and her “strangely sweet” voice, she seems to herself be in a “fair trance.” Simultaneously, her long black hair dances round her like a snake, and like a snake-charmer, she weaves for her audience “some spell of winding magic.” Kistler (2016) claims that O’Shaughnessy’s portrayal equates Salomé with aesthetic objects, thus textually reifying her sexual body: “The jewels conflate with the exotic female body, transforming it from perishable to imperishable” (p. 123). Through his use of these symbols, O’Shaughnessy deftly negotiates an abstraction of the material, as well as the aesthetic spiritualization of the physical and the erotic. Much like the entire corpus of literary depictions of Salomé, his poem is also explicitly limned with Orientalist politics. The magical quality of the Judean princess’s veiled Oriental dance, for instance, is exoticized to the fullest, and her movements sexualized. The tantalizing effect created by the “sweet unfolding of her arms” coupled with the “bendings of her body” is primarily captured and reinforced through the revealing and concealing erotics of the veils that fall “round her like thin coiling mists,” hiding “her bosom’s charms.” It is this fixation on Salomé’s use of veils that has consistently drawn critical attention.

Salomé’s dance, with its pagan origins speculated to be in the legend of Ishtar’s Descent into the Underworld where she shed one piece of garment at each of the seven gates, is largely interpreted as a strip-tease performed to pleasure King Herod. It is however, also, as Daria Santini (2011) remarks, “Salomé’s supreme moment of self-expression” (p. 233). Yet, this veiled Middle-Eastern belly dance poses an implicit queer threat to the uncomprehending Orientalist gaze. In his Oriental adventures recorded in The Women of Cairo, Gerard De Nerval (1930) rapturously describes some painted dancing girls, only to realize shortly that the dancing girls were in fact dancing boys (p. 64). Edward Lane (1836) describes them as transvestites: “being partly male, and partly female…they often even veil their faces; not from shame, but merely to affect the manners of women” (p. 101). Stavros Karayanni (2009) comments on depictions of Turkish dancing boys (köçek) in other travelers’ records: “These beautiful male coquettes drove men crazy with their seductive sighs and Oriental dance” (p. 329). Salomé’s veiled Oriental dance too, therefore, generates the possibility of a homosexual attraction between the Western male spectator and the alluring male transvestite, who could hardly be distinguished from Oriental dancing girls.

Megan Becker-Leckrone (1995) refers to Marjorie Garber’s interpretation of Salomé’s dance as in itself aesthetically transvestic, since “that is the essence of the dance itself” (p. 253). Unsurprisingly, British dancer, choreographer, and mime artist Lindsay Kemp’s 1977 adaptation of Salomé provided a distinctive queer interpretation of “the dance of the seven veils” with Kemp performing Salomé while dressed in flagrant drag.1 Gerrard Carter (2019) writes, “Kemp did not intend to deceive the audience by shrouding his male body in convincing apparel of extreme femininity. Rather, during the dance sequence his audacious use of drag that was ultimately shed exposed the actor as a man…the veil becomes a prop to fantasize Salome as a male transvestite” (p. 274).

Salomé’s ambiguous gender expression is indeed highlighted in O’Shaughnessy’s poem through the repeated references to “the swift mesh’d serpents of her hair.” As Elliot Gilbert (1983) writes, “like the reptilian basilisk, Medusa and her snakey locks—representing, as Freud suggests, “the female genitals” and therefore male “terror of castration/decapitation,” Salomé solidifies her status as an emasculating femme fatalé (p. 158). As a phallic woman equated with, as Carter (2019) observes, the “fixed duality” of the snake, she is seductive, but dangerous, and she commits both sexual and religious transgressions (p. 282). Even in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration of Salomé’s “The Stomach Dance” for Wilde’s play, Salomé’s androgyny has been remarked upon by critics. Despite her unveiled breasts being prominently visible in the illustration, Gilbert (1983) remarks on her peacock feather headdress as a marker of her androgyny: “as for Salome herself, her hair, decorated sometimes…with peacock feather eyes, suggests that she combines in her own person male and female power” (p. 153). For Im (2011), Salomé occupies the liminal space between “man and woman,” since in Wilde’s play, she promises Narraboth a little green flower, that Im (2011) equates with the green carnation, believed to be a covert and shared sign of homosexuality in Wilde’s circle (p. 369).

O’Shaughnessy’s poem, moreover, does not merely describe a possibly queer, Oriental dancer, but insists on appropriately whitewashing her so as to make her palatable to the white, European, and presumably male audience. The poem describes her arms and bosom as being “white and fair,” compared specifically to “white lilies.” This gesture is certainly indicative of the typical Orientalist impulse of appropriating the exotic racial Other through the fetishization of said culture. In fact, the fetishization of Salomé’s strip-tease as a commodity for entertainment reached the stage that it birthed the phenomenon called “Salomania,” which, Charles Bernheimer (2002) remarks, had Europe in its thrall from 1870 to 1920, well into the early twentieth century (pp. 104–105).

3. The Devadasis and Elite Nationalist Representations

I use Salomé as the template for studying the Orientalist fetishization of the devadasis or the temple dancers of India, who would rapidly replace the belly-dancing Salomés on the Western stage. As the charm of the dancing Salomés started to dwindle, especially for the English audience, it was replaced by a greater desire to know India. This was largely because of the public’s growing interest in the British Empire’s colonial enterprise in India. Dancers like Anna Pavlova and Ruth St. Denis capitalized on that demand by making themselves stand out from the crowd of Salomés in their Oriental ballet, that all but constructed the Oriental imaginary as, “a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe” instead of “an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world” (Said 1978, p. 63). India, in these Orientalist performances, was reduced to a set of mere clichéd tokens and tropes like “licentious sultans, eunuchs, snakes in baskets, magic bouquets, slave markets on the stage,” as well as “temple dancers and sati” (Engelhardt 2014, p. 510).

The devadasis or the temple dancers were a community of women in pre-colonial South India who were trained in the arts and were proficient in dancing and singing. As Saskia Kersenboom-Story (1987) writes, the devadasis were not inherently bound to this profession against their will or inclinations (p. 179). It was through matrilineal descent that the right to the life of a devadasi was inherited, and therefore, the devadasi were dedicated to the temple by their mothers. The dedicated devadasi were symbolically married to divinity, and as such, were highly respected in pre-colonial India. Her only duties were in the temple, where she performed rituals of worship. As nityasumangali (translated as “always auspicious”), her presence at any social occasion was an intimation of divine blessing. At once holy and unchaste, she could never partake in conjugal domesticity, but could have sexual liaisons with wealthy Brahmin patrons. In the sexual economy of the deeply patriarchal Indian society she was an outlier, a transgressive figure in possession of certain privileges that were not afforded even to upper-caste Hindu women within a heteropatriarchal marriage. Besides her sexual autonomy, the devadasi, for instance, was an educated woman with custodial rights to the children she birthed or adopted. She also had legal right to own land and property, which were also successively inherited primarily through matrilineal descent.

The devadasi was, therefore, a queer figure, insofar as she existed outside of the dictates of normative social codes, empowered within the established patriarchal social order through divine sanction. As David Halperin (1995) theorizes, “‘queer’…acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (p. 62). Noreen Giffney (2009), in her “Introduction to the ‘q’ word,” also suggests that queerness need not always be linked to sexuality, and that the term loses the fluidity inherent in its meaning when it is explicitly associated with an identity category. The devadasis might not have been queer themselves in the sexual sense of the term, but they were indeed queer by dint of the unique privileges afforded to them because of their peripheral but divinely sanctioned position at the fringes of the patriarchal society of that period. They appeared queer especially to the uncomprehending imperial eye that could only debase and criminalize them.

The devadasi could be considered queer also because of the non-normative traditional practices of their vocation. For instance, as Lucinda Ramberg (2014) in her ethnographic research into the practices of the South Indian devadasi notes, the devadasi were not always symbolically married to a god, but also to goddesses (p. 4). Moreover, they have not all been historically female, and male transvestites, called the jogapas could also be dedicated to the deities (Ramberg 2014, 4). Thus, a closer look at the devadasi tradition reveals how the sexual configurations of the pre-colonial Indian society was more flexible, and fundamentally a queer one, unlike the rigid sexual scripts thereafter imposed by the Western colonial masters, that has since come to define modern Indian society’s sexual and national identity. Rohit Dasgupta (2011), in his essay, “Queer Sexuality: A Cultural Narrative of India’s Historical Archive,” delineates how in pre-colonial India, queer relationships had been accepted and encouraged across several religious registers in a devotional context. The uncomprehending European Orientalist gaze, however, could not categorize the devadasi’s queer societal presence, and fetishized her as a sensual spectacle. Despite being quite distinct from the “nautch girls,” or the “dancing girls” whose secular profession was to entertain wealthy dignitaries, often at royal courts, the Christian missionaries and the British colonial administration routinely conflated the devadasis with that same monolithic descriptor, and relegated the community to the disdained status of glorified prostitutes to be criminalized.

Despite this simultaneous epistemic and law-enforced violence visited upon the devadasi community, the Orientalist gaze was drawn to the bayaderes or the Romantic ballerina on the Western stage, who attempted to appropriate the sadir dance of the devadasis. Western audiences had long been familiar with the devadasi through literary representations. As early as 1807, for instance, Madame Germaine De Stael’s (1987) novel Corinne, or Italy, incorporated her protagonist’s graceful performance as a Bayadere: “shaking her tambourine in the air…mixing modesty and sensual delight, that might suggest the power exercised over the imagination by the Bayaderes the temple dancing girls in India, when they are poets of the dance” (p. 92). In 1838, a troupe of devadasis associated with a temple in Pondicherry performed in Paris and subsequently in London for months. Critiquing French novelist Theophile Gautier’s famous reviews of these “real bayaderes,” Molly Engelhardt (2014) writes, “Gautier writes very little about form and movement but goes into great detail about the dress and jewelry, bodies and body piercings of these Indian dancers” (p. 521). Indeed, most of his reports are focused on one particular dancer, the eighteen year old, beautiful Amany. Gautier’s European, male, decadent Orientalist gaze fetishizes her physical attributes and reifies her in terms of aesthetic objects. For instance, he compares her skin to “Florentine bronze,” and her back and torso with “the most perfect surviving examples of the art of antiquity” (Guest 1986, p. 41). He compares her “incomparably beautiful and brilliant” eyes to “two jade suns revolving in a crystal sky” (Guest 1986, p. 42). Such descriptions encapsulate the Western decadents’ fugitive desire to aesthetically and textually enshrine the Oriental dancers while the colonial administration simultaneously ensures their cultural extinction.

4. Naidu’s “Indian Dancers”

It is this sustained decadent Orientalist fascination with the devadasis that Naidu relies on to market her poem to Western audiences. Sarojini Naidu, née Chattopadhyay, hailed as she is in India with the moniker, “the nightingale of India,” is famous both as a poet and as a nationalist with a feminist bent of mind. She was born to a Westernized Brahmin family in India, educated partly at Cambridge, and was closely affiliated with both Arthur Symons and Edmund Gosse during her stay in England. On the nationalist front, she was the first Indian woman to be the president of the Indian National Congress. Naidu’s poetry is considered by and large, a cultural syncretism of both Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions. She initially published the poem in The Savoy in September 1896 as “Eastern Dancers,” later renaming it to “Indian Dancers” in her 1905 collection The Golden Threshold. The same poem appearing interchangeably under two different names is an Orientalist essentialization of not only Eastern cultures, but also a colonial conflation of the devadasis with other Indian “nautch girls.” Naidu’s (1905) “Indian Dancers,” excerpted from The Golden Threshold, reads as follows:

• Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what
• passionate bosoms aflaming with fire
• Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens that
• glimmer around them in fountains of light;
• O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music that cleaveth
• the stars like a wail of desire,
• And beautiful dancers with houri-like faces bewitch the
• voluptuous watches of night.
• The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter and die in
• the maze of their gem-tangled hair,
• And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies
• of lips that are opiate-sweet;
• Their glittering garments of purple are burning like
• tremulous dawns in the quiver-ing air,
• And exquisite, subtle and slow are the tinkle and tread of
• their rhythmical, slumber-soft feet.

• Now silent, now singing and swaying and swinging, like
• blossoms that bend to the breezes or showers,
• Now wantonly winding, they flash, now they falter, and,
• lingering, languish in radiant choir;
• Their jewel-girt arms and warm, wavering, lily-long fingers
• enchant through melodious hours,
• Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what
• passionate bosoms aflaming with fire!
(Naidu 1905, pp. 21–22)

While Naidu indeed portrays an idealized version of an unspecified community of “Indian dancers,” inspired undoubtedly by Arthur Symons’ poem “Javanese Dancers,” Jeffrey L. Spear and Avanthi Meduri (2004) associate Naidu’s enigmatic dancers with the devadasis, by then popularized in Europe by the bayaderes and the notable visit from the troupe of the real devadasis. That Naidu indeed describes the nocturnal performance of a group of devadasis can be inferred further from the setting of the poem, since the dancers are surrounded by the aroma of sandalwood, which is typically used in temples for anointing the deity and also in incense. The dancers’ breasts, “celestially panting,” also associates them with a performance dedicated to the deity whom they serve. The devadasis are also predictably eroticized, with their rapturous eyes and “passionate bosoms aflaming with fire.” While Cherrie Kwok (2021) reads in these suggestive phrases queer possibilities of wild, homoerotic desire “between the dancers themselves” (p. 68), this truant passion also evokes the devadasis’s devotional love for the deity. In Indian religious contexts, drawing from the medieval Bhakti tradition, devotional love mingles with romantic love, as the deity often becomes the object of the devotee’s romantic desire, frequently “seen as friends, lovers, spouse and even child” (Dasgupta 2011, p. 654). Even as a cultural insider, Naidu deliberately eroticizes this expression of queer desire which is only normative for the devadasis who are symbolically married to the deity for the rest of their lives.

The poem is meant to intoxicate; deliberately titillating the readers’ auditory, visual, olfactory, and gustatory sensations, creating an enchanting sensescape of heightened emotions. Beneath the glimmering “hyacinth heavens” this group of beautiful dancers perform to a “wild and entrancing” music that cleaves through the night like an inarticulable wail of desire, as the air surrounding them is enriched with the fragrance of roses and sandalwood. The dancers, with their “houri-like faces,” perform to this music, “wantonly winding,” they flash, falter, and sometimes languish, in impeccable synchronicity. Their smiles, compared to entwined “magical serpents,” imaginatively evokes a decadent Oriental land of snake-charmers. Tactile sensations are evoked through the descriptions of the dancers’ rhythmical slumber soft feet, the movements of their “lily-long fingers,” and the melodious music coming out of their “opiate-sweet” “poppies of lips.” Naidu’s expressions conjuring the images of the dancers’ serpent-like attributes, lily-like arms, and the all-encompassing magical atmosphere mirror O’Shaughnessy’s Orientalized descriptions of Salomé’s dance.

Like his veiled and gem-clad Salomé, Naidu’s portraiture of the devadasi also titillates the Western decadent Orientalist fetish for colonial commodities. Her devadasis are described to be clad in glimmering purple garments, with their hair sporting glittering gems, and their arms decked out in ornate jewelry. While it was a regular practice for the temple dancers to be decked out in temple jewelry, Naidu’s poem describes them in a way that exoticizes their appearance to best suit the British tastes for commodity fetishism. Suzanne Daly (2011) has commented on how the Orient was imagined as a materially constructed and decadent “colonial treasure trove” for mining and plundering precious gems (p. 67). To the decadent Orientalist imagination, Naidu’s ornately dressed dancers seem to embody aestheticized renderings of these colonial treasure troves. Moreover, the reference to opium, which had become a crucial colonial commodity grown, processed, and packaged in India, to be traded with China for a steady supply silver to the Empire’s coffers, is also a deliberate insertion to cater to the decadent aesthetes for whom it had become a trademark indulgence.

Naidu’s poetics has been much debated, with scholars like Christin Hoene (2021) claiming that the inherent sensuousness of Naidu’s poetics derives from her incorporation of the typically Indian aesthetic principles of the Rasa theory, as delineated in the Natyashastra, since it “evokes sensations that can conclusively be understood as heightened states of sentiment, which is the aesthetic experience at the core of rasa” (p. 973). Yet, the self-Orientalist strain in Naidu’s expressions remains predominant, as Kwok (2021) observes: “Images of blossoms, serpents, jewels, and sandalwood scents fluttering and dying can seem, like the Rajput battlefields and Sati practices that Naidu mentions in her letter, to extend the tropes of exoticization in European Orientalism” (p. 167). Lotika Basu (1933) critiques Naidu’s self-Orientalizing performance of Indianness, which she claims, depicts India as a magical land of indecipherable mystique for the Western audience, thereby occluding its authentic representation: “They make them so exotic that they wither and die when compared to the natural simplicity and bare beauty of the work of the greatest artists” (p. 93). Postcolonial scholars like Elleke Boehmer (2005), however, posits that Naidu’s Orientalist self-representation is a deliberate strategy to ingratiate herself to the British audience that only recognized India through these specific descriptors. Boehmer (2005) argues that Naidu “sought to imitate both an English poetic voice and an eastern style acceptable to the West,” as part of an act of “double colonial mimicry,” defining it as a “studied reworking of a classically exotic East” (p. 163).

This line of defense, however, must be complicated and cross-examined in the context of this specific poem. Under the British colonial regime that swiftly replaced the native rulers, the devadasis lost the patronage of the temples, as well as the legal rights and privileges they had previously enjoyed. As the Christian missionaries conflated the devadasi tradition with a system of prostitution, it was deemed a social evil to be eradicated, comparable to the Sati. As Uttara Coorlawala (1992) opines, “the sociohistoric complexity of the structure that enabled the devadasi to devote herself to perfecting her art was ignored and an active campaign to discredit her was launched” (p. 132). Indeed, a full-fledged anti-nautch movement sprang up in the 1890s in conjunction with a campaign for women’s rights that targeted not only the secular “nautch girls” but also the devadasis, in order to abolish the allegedly immoral dedication of girls to the temples. This movement was spearheaded by native elite nationalist and feminist social reformers, and the Theosophical Society, which was headed at the time by Annie Besant. Spear and Meduri (2004) note that the Congress Party activist Naidu herself became “a supporter of the anti-nautch movement hoping to see the dance transferred from the debased devadasi to the unsullied body of the middle-class woman” (p. 443). Much like the other feminist Indian nationalists, Naidu came to view the devadasi as a representative of the corruption that had been destroying the once glorious Indian culture (Coorlawala 1992, p. 132). It seems, therefore, doubly violent, for Naidu, as an upper-caste, elite Indian woman, to subject the subaltern devadasi to the successive assaults of her initial Orientalist exploitation in her poetry and subsequently, nationalist violence vis-à-vis her support of the anti-nautch movement. While the anti-nautch movement began as a well-intentioned, anti-patriarchal initiative, it ended up indelibly stigmatizing the devadasi community, failed to secure their rights and privileges, and consequently, the nationalist project “failed to make citizenship available to these women in the context of the emergent state,” a condition that continues to affect their descendants to this day (Soneji 2012, p. 163). In replicating Orientalist epistemic violence on the devadasi’s textual body and later, the colonial codification and criminalization of their sexual body, Naidu’s elitism directly participated in the erasure of this disenfranchised, subaltern community from the nation’s cultural memory.

The anti-nautch movement sealed the fate of the devadasi, many of whom did fall into prostitution since the respectable heteropatriarchal family units in the society had no place for them. In the 1920s and 1930s the sadir dance of the devadasi was reinvented, embodying a more global hybrid identity, as the Bharatnatyam, (which literally translates into “the dance of India”), to be performed by respectable middle-class and upper-caste women. The reformationist efforts of native elite dance exponents like Rukmini Devi Arundale (who was married to Lord Arundale, the British head of the Theosophical Society) and Uday Shankar, became focused on, as Matthew Allen (1997) observes, “destroy[ing] what was crude and vulgar in the inherited traditions of dance and replac[ing] them with sophistication and refined taste” (p. 64). Thereafter, Bharatnatyam unofficially attained the status of India’s national dance, and it redefined the pre-colonial, complex gender and sexual politics to serve the emergent nation’s heteronormative, nationalist agenda well. The devadasi used to be trained exclusively by male dance-masters or nattuvanars, and their gynemimetic2 movements encapsulated a kind of androgyny that was thereby summarily eliminated from Bharatnatyam. Bharatnatyam deployed instead, a clear sexual division of labor dictating the way the movements are performed by men and women, respectively. The movements and facial expressions themselves underwent transformation considering the relocation of the dance from the temples to the stage, with the audience at a less proximal distance.

By 1947, the year of India’s independence, the devadasi system had been legally abolished, and the temple dancer, and their subaltern dance traditions were both swept into historical oblivion (Weidman 2003, p. 200). Frequently thought of as Naidu’s literary successor in many ways, postcolonial Indian poetess Kamala Das (2010), in her short poem “Lines Addressed to a Devadasi,” excerpted from Tonight, This Savage Rite, renders a wistful portrayal of the temple dancer, violently displaced from cultural memory. A brief excerpt from the poem reads as follows:

• It is then that your desires cease
• And a homesickness begins
• And you sit on the temple steps
• A silent devadasi, lovelorn
• And aware of her destiny.
(Das and Nandy 2010, p. 26)

In stark contrast to Naidu’s self-Orientalized portrayal, her devadasi is “silent,” and “lovelorn.” She can no longer derive rapturous pleasure from her art, or experience passionate desire for her deity. She does not dance, but sits on the temple steps longing for days bygone, “aware of her destiny.”

Davesh Soneji (2012) writes that some upper-caste elites in the dance and music industry in Chennai have since attempted to recuperate the repressed stories of a few devadasis and commemorated them for their exceptional grasp on the arts even as women of dubious backgrounds, the renowned T. Balasaraswati being one of them: “For the urban elite, there simply are no more “real” devadasis in the city, and thus the commemoration of a few “acceptable” devadasi women becomes a viable, and certainly profitable, enterprise” (p. 225). Soneji (2012) is, however, skeptical of this show of elite benevolence, and the performative commemoration and showcasing of a few representative devadasis that does not erase the history of their stigmatization, social alienation, cultural appropriation, and disenfranchisement. Soneji (2012) ascribes this “renewed urban nostalgia about devadasis” to the upper-caste and middle-class desire to further take control and maintain stewardship of a fossilized and commodified version of devadasi dance and music (p. 225).

5. The Hijras and the Shadow of the Devadasis

Twentieth-century Indian poetess Kamala Das (1934–2009) is a celebrated poet, and short story writer, though she is best known for her poetry written in English as well as her English autobiography. Das’s poetry is generally considered radical in its feminist reclamation of the use of sensual language and sexual imagery, which frequently draws on decadence. Das’s feminist ethos is, however, intersectional; her poetry regularly foregrounds different marginalized factions of society, often using decadent language and imagery, which have not received enough critical attention. For instance, in a distant echo of the vanquished devadasi, she aesthetically renders another explicitly queer community in India that was also criminalized under colonial rule and survives in the postcolonial state as a marginal presence. Her poem, “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” published in her very first volume of decadent poetry, Summer in Calcutta (first published in 1965), narrates her experience of witnessing the wild dance performed by a group of eunuchs in Calcutta. In India, “eunuchs” is a generic term used to refer to a range of queer identities including transgender and intersex people. These communities have been historically acknowledged in ancient Indian texts like the Vedas, and in the epics as belonging to the tritiya prakriti (translated as “third nature”). The most commonly seen community of eunuchs in Calcutta are the hijras, largely consisting of male transvestites with a markedly feminine gender expression. The people of this community earn their livelihoods by collecting alms but mostly through their dance performances called badhai. These are music and dance numbers performed at auspicious social occasions by the hijras to bless newborns or a newly wedded couple. As Jeff Roy (2016) writes, “When hijaras sing, they convey messages of fertility, financial prosperity, general marital bliss, and spirituality to the (heterosexual) patrons for whom the badhai is performed” (p. 422). Insofar as they are accepted in society precisely in return for these services performed, their dance is therefore central to their communal identity formations.

Their way of life is intricately interwoven around their art. Roy (2016) writes, “badhai music lies at the center of hijra economic and social vitality, providing the basis for the community’s primary organizational and pedagogical system—the gharana…a “feudal” (premodern) system of learning wherein the teacher is ‘the owner of the ‘land’ or the holder of information, and the student is the laborer that cultivates it’” (pp. 417–418). These eunuch communities, therefore, are built around a particular tradition safeguarding a body of knowledge. However, as Jessica Hinchy (2017) observes, “Colonial commentators—and increasingly, middle class Indians—understood the hijra-hood not as a knowledge tradition but as a form of ‘sexuality,’ and more specifically, as a perverse or immoral form of sexuality” (p. 3). Accordingly, these communities of eunuchs were penalized in 1871 under the Criminal Tribes Act, which accused them of sodomy, and also suspected them of kidnapping young boys and castrating them. Much like the devadasis, the hijras had to register themselves with the colonial authorities, who identified them based on their vocation. Gayatri Reddy (2005) writes, “through the regulation and surveillance of badhais—among other mostly benign practices—the potential for criminal behavior and its codification were inscribed onto the bodies of dancing hijras” (p. 27). Their art, which had allowed this queer community to carve out a place for themselves in pre-colonial Indian society, therefore became the identifying marker ensuring their criminalization. Roy (2016) writes, “as new forms of gender representation began to emerge in performance during Indian nationalism, drag performers…were gradually displaced from the stage…traditional gender-nonconforming [subaltern dance] forms like Lavani were pushed into obscurity, others were displaced to rural areas” (p. 425). Akin to the fate suffered by the devadasi, these communities of eunuchs faced the joint onslaught of colonialist and nationalist redefinitions of rigid gender identities.

6. “The Dance of the Eunuchs”

Kamala Das’s “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” from Summer in Calcutta (1965) reads as follows:

• It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came
• To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals
• Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling,
• Jingling…Beneath the fiery gulmohar, with
• Long braids flying, dark eyes flashing, they danced and
• They danced, oh, they danced till they bled…There were green
• Tattoos on their cheeks, jasmines in their hair, some
• Were dark and some were almost fair. Their voices
• Were harsh, their songs melancholy; they sang of
• Lovers dying and of children left unborn…
• Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts
• And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy. They
• Were thin in limbs and dry, like half-burnt logs from
• Funeral pyres, a drought and a rottenness
• Were in each of them. Even the crows were so
• Silent on trees, and the children, wide eyed, still;
• All were watching these poor creatures’ convulsions.
• The sky crackled then, thunder came, and lightning
• And rain, a meagre rain that smelt of dust in
• Attics and the urine of lizards and mice…
(Das 1965, p. 9)

Contrasting at the very outset with Naidu’s devadasis’ nocturnal performance, in “The Dance of the Eunuchs,” the dancers perform on a hot summer day. They perform in a secular setting, under fiery red gulmohur trees. The eunuchs’ dance is accompanied with the typically Indian imagery of the clashing “cymbals,” and the jingling “anklets” conveying familiar auditory sensations. The eunuchs are a visually miscellaneous group—some are dark-complexioned, while some are fair. Das’s depiction of them is sensually appealing. They are described as sporting green tattoos on their cheeks and wearing fragrant jasmines in their hair. With their flashing dark eyes, their “long braids flying,” and their “wide skirts going round and round,” and the poem visually builds up an anticipatory momentum that is suddenly undercut by the unexpected insertion of the imagery of their bleeding feet.

Unlike O’Shaughnessy’s ethereal Salomé or Naidu’s idealized devadasis, Das’s eunuchs’ voices are harsh, and their songs are melancholy. Instead of extolling the supple beauty of their limbs, Das describes them as “thin” and “dry; like half-burnt logs from/Funeral pyres.” The eunuchs’ badhai songs, which were traditionally supposed to be conveying blessings of marital bliss, and fruitful unions, are instead, about “lovers dying and of/Children left unborn.” While Naidu’s devadasis had let out melodic wails of passionate desire, the wails of Das’s eunuchs are beat out of their “sorry breasts” as their writhing bodies convulse in a poor imitation of ecstasy. Das deliberately resists the Orientalist romanticization of the dancers. Her eunuchs are neither ethereal, nor enchanting, but discernibly decadent, and the poet asserts with conviction that “a drought and a rottenness/Were in each of them.” If their audience is in thrall, it is one of sobering shock and horror at their plight. With their profession criminalized, and their livelihoods threatened, they risk falling into prostitution, which is precisely what they are stigmatized for. These impoverished communities, historically marginalized, newly persecuted under an emergent social order, and thereby cornered into dusty attics smelling of “the urine of lizards and mice,” articulate their resistance to the hegemonic forces of erasure through their embodied queer performance. Their desperate misery cleaves through the sky as thunder and lightning, but even Nature is unmerciful, and sends forth only “a meagre rain” for the alleviation of their pains.

Das’s rendering thus resists the orientalist reification of the dancers’ bodies in O’Shaughnessy’s poem, as well as its self-orientalized replication in Naidu’s poem. Das’s postcolonial perspective foregrounds subaltern oppression without any attempts at self-orientalist aestheticization of the dancers. In portraying subaltern resistance, Das’s poetics itself resists any expressions of bourgeois elitism, which is a remainder of colonial frameworks of thinking.

7. Conclusions

Precariously poised between the audience’s aesthetic and erotic appreciation of them on one hand and moral condemnation on the other, the Oriental dancer has always been a queer, marginalized figure. In the context of India, while their textually aestheticized body has been romanticized by the Orientalist discourse, their sexual body has simultaneously been subjected to colonialist and nationalist forces of repression and erasure. The dancer’s body becomes the ontological site upon which India’s anti-colonial nationalist movement’s ideological collusion with colonial rhetoric is rendered legible. Naidu, a Western-educated native elite nationalist, is an inheritor of the colonial DNA that enables her to replicate a practice of the oppression of minorities in her work. Even her anti-colonial ethos, therefore, merely mirrors colonial oppression. She in turn participates in the aestheticized and subsequently, the literal oppression of the indigenous subaltern. Her decadent poem, in rendering the Indian devadasi, draws on the typical Orientalist tropes and expressions used to describe the Judean princess Salomé’s enchanting appearance. In Naidu’s treatment, decadence, as it emerged in the nineteenth-century, remains complicit with imperialist discourse in spite of its apparently radical, anti-establishment ethos. In Kamala Das’s lexicon, however, decadence is transformed into a language of subaltern resistance. In her subversive portrayal, the hijras protest against Naidu’s decadent Orientalist enshrinement of the devadasi and their own cultural extinction.