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

Anna Morcom's Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion explores the place of hereditary communities of female and transgender dancers within the modern history of North Indian public culture. This book adds to a growing body of academic literature that has investigated the erasure of marginalized artistic communities as a result of Indian nationalist music and dance projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Allen 1997; Babiracki 1991; Manuel 1986; Qureshi 2006; Soneji 2012; Walker 2014). Morcom's work expands the scope of these studies, tracing a history of "exclusion/inclusion" in Indian performing arts from the late colonial period to the present. Her analysis illuminates the ways in which bourgeois-nationalist ideologies of rights, liberalism, progress, and science continue to frame contemporary "erotic" female dancers within a discourse of prostitution—one that has ignored their sociocultural identity as performers and exacerbated their exclusion from officially sanctioned Indian culture.

The book is organized into two parts. Chapters 1 to 3 examine courtesan-type dancers and transgender performers in historical and sociological perspective. Chapters 4 to 6 ethnographically explore the production, consumption, and politicization of dance in twenty-first-century India, via case studies on the Bollywood dance revolution, Mumbai dance bars, and kothi transgender performance.

Chapter 1 traces the changing status of hereditary female dancers from colonial to postcolonial India. Rather than focus on a particular community, Morcom surveys the collective loss of status and livelihood among various classes of female dancers, including courtesans, Nautch, Bedia, Nat, and South Indian Devadasis. As old patronage networks began to unravel throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courtesans and dancing girls occupied an increasingly important role within newly emerging forms of Indian public culture, particularly the cinema, vernacular stagetheater, and the recording industry. By the mid-twentieth century, these same performers were regarded as prostitutes and had all but disappeared from high-profile public life. Morcom demonstrates how this shift in identity was made possible through colonial forms of knowledge, laws, and policies as well as elite-Indian social reforms. The major contribution of this chapter, however, is Morcom's examination of the ways in which academic and nonprofit development work on female erotic dancers in postcolonial India continue to construct them as "traditional sex workers" rather than performing artists. Morcom highlights how such well-intentioned liberal discourse has ironically driven hereditary communities further underground into the "illicit world" of sex work.

In chapter 2, Morcom draws on colonial sources as well as her own ethnographic data to describe the complex tribal and communal networks to which these performers belong. At the broadest level, all female erotic performers identify themselves as Bhatu—or belonging to a meta-community of interrelated "gypsy" tribes, with its own "secret" language and distinct social and ritual practices. Morcom explores how once-fluid boundaries between Bhatu groups and subgroups have become rigid in postcolonial India, as particular Bhatu have become equated increasingly with prostitution. Morcom then focuses on some of the more well-known Bhatu communities, including the Nat, Bedia, Kanjar, Kolhati, and Deredar, exploring changes in their primary livelihood from artistic performance to sex work and their varying responses to social stigma (71–85).

Chapter 3 expands the discussion of cultural exclusion to include the largely "invisible" world of kothi "female impersonators." Morcom's is one of the first scholarly attempts to consider the social, cultural, and economic importance of kothis as performers. She locates kothi performance "firmly within Indian culture, history, and heritage," citing a range of primary sources from the third to nineteenth centuries that depict effeminate erotic male performance in open and celebratory terms (89). This acceptance of erotic male performance in precolonial India contrasts strikingly with the stigma and invisibility that kothis face today, a topic that Morcom deals with later in the text. In the final part...