“Going Nautch Girl” in the Fin de Siècle: The White Woman Burdened by Colonial Domesticity

In their introduction to The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880–1900, Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst aptly summarize the turn of the century in England as a “time fraught both with anxiety and an exhilarating sense of possibility”¹—a time when the British had mixed feelings about almost every aspect of their life, including their encounters with the nonwhite races of the world. Despite a growing awareness of the duality marking this transitional period, current scholarship (beginning with Patrick Brantlinger’s seminal discussion of the “Imperial Gothic” in Rule of Darkness to subsequent works by Nils Clausson, Kelly Hurley, Nicholas Daly, William Hughes, and Andrew Smith²) continues to project a one-sided view of the British-foreign encounter, upholding Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the archetypal imperial romance about the “anxiety” of cultural and racial degeneration at the turn of the century. Missing from such scholarship is a more promising understanding of the idea of “going native,” the idea that intimate contact with alternative cultures and ways of being could perhaps free the British subject from the constraints of society, or the idea that by taking on the appearance, life, habits or customs of a non-European race, British men or women might just advance rather than regress.

Although understudied in current scholarship on the fin de siècle, many Anglo-Indian women who wrote imperial romances in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods engage with this very possibility. More specifically, a cluster of Anglo-Indian novels written between the 1890s and 1920s by female writers introduce Memsahibs (the wives or daughters of high-ranking civil servants and officers in colonial India) who contemplate the idea of turning courtesan and of subsequently escaping their domestic and imperial obligations, obligations that seem to thwart rather than foster their aspirations for female independence. As Thomas Metcalf aptly suggests, “the English woman, within the private sphere she presided over, bore the unenviable responsibility—what one may call the ‘white woman’s burden’³—of both representing the virtues of domesticity and extending the authority of the Raj.”⁴ Seeking freedom from this “unenviable” burden to cultivate and guard English civilization in British India, Englishwomen in these novels entertain the prospect of “going native,” or more precisely of “going nautch girl”—of imaginatively or literally adopting the appearance, dress, food, activities, or living space of the relatively more “free and happy” Indian dancing girl or courtesan.

The “Free and Happy” Nautch Girl: An Indian Model of Female Independence

In contrast to the domestically burdened Memsahib, the public Indian dancing girl or courtesan (commonly dubbed the “nautch girl” by the British⁵) seemed to enjoy a relatively autonomous lifestyle—an observation disseminated through a large body of nineteenth-century fiction and nonfiction. Writing in the 1890s, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, for example, asserts that out of the women in India “Only the nachnis … can be said to be free and happy and live respected by others.”⁶ The Indian Messenger even reported that dancing girls “moved ‘more freely in native society than public women in civilized countries are even allowed to do’ and that they were treated with greater ‘attention and respect’ than married women.”⁷ As partial and constructed as some of these descriptions may have been, the general consensus among the British in the nineteenth century was that the nautch girl possessed a higher degree of freedom than married women, Indian or British.

Confirming this observation in her widely cited study, Veena Talwar Oldenburg records the “self-perceptions” of the Muslim courtesans of Lucknow (formally known as tawaifs), who view themselves “as powerful, independent, even subversive women.”⁸ Oldenburg classifies these female performers as a matricentric community who establish a counterculture to patriarchy—a “lifestyle as resistance”⁹—characterized by financial, political, and physical independence. Indeed, the day-to-day activities of influential nineteenth-century courtesans such as those of Lucknow extended far beyond their sexual exploits and their rigorous training in classical dance and singing. A tawaif’s education in Indian literature...