Download or read book Nautch Girls of India written by Pran Nevile and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents An Authentic View Of Dance Entertainment Specially During The Raj. It Is Sumptuously Illustrated With Productions Of The Finest Paintings And Drawings From Collections All Over The World.
Download or read book The Last Nautch Girl written by C Phillip and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrinalini, a native ex-dancer at the old Gold House, is harbouring a deadly secret. Together with her trusted aide Sajjan, she is secretly providing shelter in the lower echelons of the Gold House to five young men - the same men accused of the notorious cold-blooded murder of Major Harold Armitage. Fiercely patriotic and hot-blooded, the men regard Mrinalini as "Didi" and trust in her completely while waiting for a means to escape from the city. When the handsome and youthful investigating officer, Captain White, arrives at the old Gold House seeking answers to the bizzarre murder of his superior, Mrinalini finds herself at a crossroads. Will Mrinalini sacrifice the just and captivating White to prove her loyalty to her Motherland or risk being branded a traitor by her own people?
Download or read book The Nautch Girl written by Hasan Shah and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An English Translation Of 1790 Novel `Nashtar` , The Title Changed To Nautch Girl. Portrays Realistically The Contemporary Scene In The Author`S Time Which Makes It India`S First Modern Novel.
Download or read book The Dancing Girl written by Hasan Shah and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1993 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1790, Hasan Shah's autobiographical romance, The Dancing Girl, is remarkable for both its lyrical prose and its fine recreation of a time, a place, and a culture - India in the 1780s, a tolerant, affable era before the full establishment of British colonial rule. The Dancing Girl tells of the doomed love of Hasan Shah (aide-de-camp to a British officer) and Khanum Jan (a courageous and gifted dancer of the courtesan caste) whose secret marriage could not prevent their separation. At Khanum Jan's death, her grief-stricken husband turned his raw emotion into a surprisingly modern, first-person narrative "without realizing", as leading Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder observes in the foreword to her translation (from the 1893 Urdu translation of the original Persian), "that he had become a pioneer of the modern Indian novel".
Download or read book Licentious Worlds written by Julie Peakman and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Licentious Worlds is a history of sexual attitudes and behavior through five hundred years of empire-building around the world. In a graphic and sometimes unsettling account, Julie Peakman examines colonization and the imperial experience of women (as well as marginalized men), showing how women were not only involved in the building of empires, but how they were also almost invariably exploited. Women acted as negotiators, brothel keepers, traders, and peace keepers—but they were also forced into marriages and raped. The book describes women in Turkish harems, Mughal zenanas, and Japanese geisha houses, as well as in royal palaces and private households and onboard ships. Their stories are drawn from many sources—from captains’ logs, missionary reports, and cannibals’ memoirs to travelers’ letters, traders’ accounts, and reports on prostitutes. From debauched clerics and hog-buggering Pilgrims to sexually-confused cannibals and sodomizing samurai, Licentious Worlds takes history into its darkest corners.
Download or read book Nautch Girls of the Raj written by Pran Nevile and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and times of the nautch girl evoked by Nevile are an eye-opener The Times of India To see her is to fall in love, and to drink a cup of wine from the flask of her lustrous eyes is to be transported to the cosiest corner of Heaven. To be with her even for a moment is to taste immortality. The much-celebrated nautch girl, extravagantly adored for both her beauty and her virtuosity, belonged to a unique class of courtesans who played a significant role in the social and cultural life of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The nautch girl, it may be said, was no ordinary woman of pleasure she had refined manners, a ready wit and poetry in her blood. She embodied a splendid synthesis of different cultures and dance forms the classical and the popular and catered to the sophisticated tastes of the elite who had the time, resources and inclination to enjoy her accomplishments. Over the centuries female dancers have appeared in various incarnations, frequently as temple dancers dedicated to the gods, for dance is believed to have divine approval. However, historians, sociologists, novelists and chroniclers have not always done justice to the nautch girl, depicting her as either a vamp or as a showgirl bought by the wealthy for festive occasions. This book highlights the emergence of the quintessential nautch girl in the Mughal era when she reached the zenith of her talent and charisma. Her mystique continued to reign supreme during the Raj and her popularity and status among the English sahibs and the Indian aristocracy flourished during this period.
Download or read book Oriental Memoirs written by James Forbes and published by Gyan Publishing House. This book was released on 1988 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary exposition of the early 19th century India, with interesting account of social, cultural and religious life. These illustrated chronicles are valuable for conservation and restoration of some of the important historical buildings and monuments
Download or read book Tawaifnama written by Saba Dewan and published by Context. This book was released on with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the Book A NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY. Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council—and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family’s ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari … there are so many stories in this family. And you—one of the best-known tawaifs of your times—remember the stories of your foremothers and your own. This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten. In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement. Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.
Download or read book Unfinished Gestures written by Davesh Soneji and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Download or read book Dancing Women written by Usha Iyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms cinema and dance historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the "women's question" via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the "choreomusicking body" and "dance musicalization," aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic "techno-spectacles," Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
Download or read book The High caste Hindu Woman written by Ramabai Sarasvati and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bollywood Cinema written by Vijay Mishra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is home to Bollywood - the largest film industry in the world. Movie theaters are said to be the "temples of modern India," with Bombay producing nearly 800 films per year that are viewed by roughly 11 million people per day. In Bollywood Cinema, Vijay Mishra argues that Indian film production and reception is shaped by the desire for national community and a pan-Indian popular culture. Seeking to understand Bollywood according to its own narrative and aesthetic principles and in relation to a global film industry, he views Indian cinema through the dual methodologies of postcolonial studies and film theory. Mishra discusses classics such as Mother India (1957) and Devdas (1935) and recent films including Ram Lakhan (1989) and Khalnayak (1993), linking their form and content to broader issues of national identity, epic tradition, popular culture, history, and the implications of diaspora.
Download or read book Girls for Sale written by Gurujada Venkata Apparao and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece of British Indian literature in a vibrant modern English translation
Download or read book Sweating Saris written by Priya Srinivasan and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking book that seeks to understand dance as labor, Sweating Saris examines dancers not just as aesthetic bodies but as transnational migrant workers and wage earners who negotiate citizenship and gender issues. Srinivasan merges ethnography, history, critical race theory, performance and post-colonial studies among other disciplines to investigate the embodied experience of Indian dance. The dancers’ sweat stained and soaked saris, the aching limbs are emblematic of global circulations of labor, bodies, capital, and industrial goods. Thus the sweating sari of the dancer stands in for her unrecognized labor. Srinivasan shifts away from the usual emphasis on Indian women dancers as culture bearers of the Indian nation. She asks us to reframe the movements of late nineteenth century transnational Nautch Indian dancers to the foremother of modern dance Ruth St. Denis in the early twentieth century to contemporary teenage dancers in Southern California, proposing a transformative theory of dance, gendered-labor, and citizenship that is far-reaching.
Download or read book The Dancing Girls of Lahore written by Louise Brown and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable and compassionate look at the lives of the residents of Lahore’s pleasure district The Dancing Girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond District in the shadow of a great mosque. The 21st century goes on outside the walls, this ancient quarter, but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: beloved by sultans, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are, unclean, and Maha’s daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of one Lahori courtesan. Beautifully understated, it turns a novelist’s eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, at fourteen a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to the Sultan of Dubai; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the Sultan come calling once more.
Download or read book From the Black Sea Through Persia and India written by Edwin Lord Weeks and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Helen written by Jerry Pinto and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now over two decades since the Hindi-film heroine drove the vamp into extinction, and even longer since the silver screen was ignited by the true Bollywood version of a cabaret. Yet, Helen – nicknamed ‘H-Bomb’ at the height of her career – continues to rule the popular imagination. Improbably, for a dancer and a vamp she has become an icon. Jerry Pinto’s gloriously readable book is a study of the phenomenon that was Helen: Why did a refugee of French-Burmese parentage succeed as wildly as she did in mainstream Indian cinema? How could otherwise conservative families sit through, and even enjoy, her ‘cabarets’? What made Helen ‘the desire that you need not be embarrassed about feeling’? How did she manage the unimaginable: vamp three generations of men on screen? Equally, the book is a brilliantly witty and provocative examination of middle-class Indian morality; the politics of religion, gender and sexuality in popular culture; and the importance of the song, the item number and the wayward woman in Hindi cinema.