Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion by Anna Morcom (review)

Anna Morcom’s Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion is a conversation-changing contribution to the scholarship on women and performance cultures in South Asia. After a generation of research on women and dance written through primarily nationalist-historical frameworks, which focused exclusively on elite and heteropatriarchal performance cultures, Morcom deftly widens our lens to include queer, transgender, and otherwise sexually nonnormative performers. By viewing inclusionary practices as necessarily exclusionary, Morcom broadens both the aperture and depth of field to capture dimly lit worlds of dance and in doing so offers new ways of seeing the constructivism of gender and sexuality within public culture.

The book primarily presents a historical account of how “cultures of exclusion” emerged over the past century. In Morcom’s words, the book, driven by a “strong ethical imperative . . . aims to tell untold histories, to reveal unseen cultures” (27). After establishing her intervention—a scathing critique of liberalism within a feminist-revisionist history—in the introduction, in chapter 1 Morcom provides a sweeping and ambitious literature review of the extant historical accounts of hereditary female performers. Condensing vast swaths of archival and historiographical knowledge, including legal history, Morcom offers a compelling narrative about how colonial policies and subsequent postcolonial and nationalist aspirations colluded in the disenfranchisement of female performers. She points to the fallacies of universalist discourses on morality that have underpinned many a modernist teleology on citizenship, law, and the nation-state. According to Morcom, the turning point was singular: “‘The death of the courtesan tradition’ was the birth of the illicit realm of performing arts” (41). Such dynamics of exclusion only received further sanction as upper-caste women emerged as model nationalist subjects. As these worlds of nationalist and illicit performance diverged and coalesced, Morcom identifies reinforcing discourses on citizenship and sexuality that have endured as Hindu nationalist imperatives.

Combining ethnographic and archival accounts, in chapter 2 Morcom explores contemporary worlds of exclusion. This chapter takes a wide-angle lens to survey a variety of modern performance cultures, revealing the resilience and ubiquity of hereditary communities despite concerted and sustained efforts to eliminate them from public culture. She argues that as sex work and dance performance bifurcated into distinct realms of labor, hereditary performers, by virtue of their stigmatized status, turned more consistently to sexual commerce. This argument is not new, but what Morcom adds to the conversation is a far more comprehensive understanding of how increasingly disapproving attitudes toward nonconjugal and nonheteronormative sexuality in the late twentieth century shored up the mutual exclusion of dance and sex.

Chapter 3 examines the understudied history of transvestite and transgender performers. Morcom describes three self-identified categories of men who perform as women: hijras, kothis, and bisexual or homosexual men. This chapter provides productive ways to think about gendered performance, particularly those expressions considered erotic, and about sexuality along a spectrum. Morcom presents evidence that illustrates the provenance of normative standards for gendered performativity and traces the routes by which female performance acquired the structures and strictures that define it today. Most important, this chapter makes a compelling argument for seeing erotic performance, especially dance, as inherently and intrinsically feminine. Within this argument, Morcom also makes a case for viewing transgender and hereditary female performers within a kind of strategic essentialism, united by their shared marginalized status as agents of affective and erotic labor.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to fascinating and, again, much understudied realms of modern performance cultures. Morcom relates the emergence of the “illicit worlds” of Mumbai dance bars (chapter 5) to the popularity of middle-class female dance practices, especially those inspired by Bollywood film cultures (chapter 4), a process she refers to as “embourgoisement.” Arguing that class privilege, or the lack thereof, further marginalized certain kinds of female performers whose performance practices fell outside of the contours of “female respectability,” Morcom ties the social and legal history of public alcohol consumption to the polarization of inclusive and exclusive dance cultures...