Abstract
Before the early to mid-twentieth century, performing professionally in front of men or in public was generally incompatible with marriage and ‘respectability’ for women in India. Anna Morcom traces the origins of professional female performers from hereditary groups of courtesans or dancing girls who did not marry, or males performing female roles. Male performers included transvestite female impersonators and men identifying as females—transgender female performers. She describes how, in today’s India, the esteemed classical performing arts are overwhelmingly the preserve of middle-class and upper-caste performers and institutions. Courtesans as such have no role, let alone cross-dressed males. Although performing in public has not entirely lost its ambiguity for women in India, especially as a profession, the middle class’ acceptance of dancing has nevertheless continued to widen and since the 1990s a Bollywood scene has emerged which is overtly sexy and sensual, but is not considered disreputable. Morcom examines the legal and social changes shaping this transformation, looking at laws, social campaigns and discourses of rights. In particular, she explores what has happened to traditional female public/erotic performers. She reviews colonial laws regulating prostitution and the criminalising of ‘obscenity’ and homosexuality, and the action of the anti-nautch (‘anti-dance’) campaign, a social purity movement against courtesans that spread in the nineteenth century. Morcom then turns to the present day and ab/use of trafficking and obscenity or nuisance laws against female hereditary and transgender performers, and the ban on dance in bars in Maharashtra in 2005 with its subsequent surprise defeat in the Indian High Court and Supreme Court. She explores these forces and others in the radical changing of socio-cultural space of India’s traditional female performers from a liminal to a more black-and-white illicit and excluded status.
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Some Mughal and late Mughal nobility enacted temporary or mut’a marriages to courtesans, constituting legal concubinage for Muslims and possibly as short as a few days. Mut’a wives were distinguished from courtesans (even when former courtesans), being unable to perform in front of other men, and also distinguished from non-mut’a wives (married by a nikah): Brown (2003, pp. 148–153); Williams (2014, pp. 165–171). Communities of (disenfranchised) courtesans in contemporary India still forbid girls to both marry and be a dancer (Morcom 2013, p. 63). Courtesans (known as devadasis) at South India temples adopted a ritual marriage enactment to a deity, but were denied marriage to mortal men (Kersenboom-Story 1987; Soneji 2012).
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Kidwai and Vanita (2000) document a history of Indian same sex love through translation of primary texts, with numerous references to erotic male dancers.
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The only legislation was against dedicating girls to temples to become devadasis, coming after most devadasis had ceased performing.
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Morcom, A. (2016). Modern Laws, Human Rights and Marginalisation of Courtesan and Transgender Performers in India. In: Scutt, J. (eds) Women, Law and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44938-8_3
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