43 min
A Bloody Difficult Woman: Mayalee Dancing Girl vs. the East India Company Histories Of The Ephemeral
-
- Arts
The images that accompany this podcast may be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2019/03/musicians-and-dancers-in-the-india-office-records.html
In 1818, the East India Company signed a treaty with the autonomous Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, offering British political and military protection in exchange for heavy cash tribute. By the early 1830s, these states were swimming in debt and increasingly resisting the Company's influence. So in 1835 the Company took direct control over the revenue of the salt lake at Sambhar, still one of India’s largest sources of that most precious of commodities, salt. Sambhar Lake was returned to Jaipur's and Jodhpur’s control in 1842 when, having been brought to the brink of ruin by the Company’s protection racket, their arrears were written off by the Government in Calcutta. Short-lived and little-studied, the Sambhar Lake affair left behind a set of financial accounts in the East India Company records that are alive with details of musicians and dancers, the cycle of Sambhar's festival year, and the economics of such cultural production.
One musician in particular stands forth from Jaipur's accounts as exceptional, Mayalee “dancing girl”. As well as being paid a monthly cash stipend, she received 25 maunds of salt annually, and was clearly one of Sambhar’s chief courtesans. Little exculpatory notes in the margins of successive Company accounts reveal that Mayalee successfully resisted the Company’s attempt to force her to give up her salt stipend in exchange for cash. Was she merely protecting a nice little sideline selling salt? Or did the more lofty ideal of “faithfulness to the salt” (namak-halali) underpin her resistance? In this podcast I consider why Indian musicians and especially courtesans appear at all in the official records of the East India Company, and what this tells us about relations between the British colonial state and the Indian peoples whose worlds it was increasingly encroaching upon during the 1830s and 40s.
This podcast is part of the project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library; additional research was funded by the European Research Council.
Mayalee Dancing Girl vs the East india Company was written by me, Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London), and is based on my original research. It was produced by Chris Elcombe. Additional voices were Michael Bywater, Chris Elcombe, and Kanav Gupta. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC–BY-NC–ND) license.
The recording of Rag Jaunpuri by Jaipur gharana doyenne Kesarbai Kerkar is courtesy of the Archive of Indian Music and Vikram Sampath. https://soundcloud.com/archive-of-indian-music/kesarbai-kerkar
The sarangi recording of Rag Bhairavi is by Nicolas Magriel and reproduced with thanks.
Information on the Jaipur gunijan-khana is taken from the work of Joan Erdman, and material on Amber/Jaipur’s political life from the work of Giles Tillotson and Monika Horstmann.
With thanks to: the British Academy, the British Library, the National Archives of India, the European Research Council, Norbert Peabody, Paul Schofield, and Mrinalini Venkateswaran.
Flute and Drum, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Prayer Temple Jaipur by Xserra CC BY 4.0
20160922_summers.end.marshes by dobroide CC BY 4.0
Waves on the Lake by Vlatko Blazek CC BY 4.0
Kirtana_in_Hindi by psubhashish CC BY 4.0
Water Music From the Handel Show by The United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps Public Domain Mark 1.0 Licence
Ganga Aarti Ceremony V, Haridwar by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Shiva Worship Ceremony, Varanasi by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
A Man Approaches with Bowed Sitar, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Track 1 by Deep Singh and Ikhlaq Hussain Khan
Originally broadcast live on Rob Weisberg's show, Transpacific Sound Paradise on WF
The images that accompany this podcast may be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2019/03/musicians-and-dancers-in-the-india-office-records.html
In 1818, the East India Company signed a treaty with the autonomous Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, offering British political and military protection in exchange for heavy cash tribute. By the early 1830s, these states were swimming in debt and increasingly resisting the Company's influence. So in 1835 the Company took direct control over the revenue of the salt lake at Sambhar, still one of India’s largest sources of that most precious of commodities, salt. Sambhar Lake was returned to Jaipur's and Jodhpur’s control in 1842 when, having been brought to the brink of ruin by the Company’s protection racket, their arrears were written off by the Government in Calcutta. Short-lived and little-studied, the Sambhar Lake affair left behind a set of financial accounts in the East India Company records that are alive with details of musicians and dancers, the cycle of Sambhar's festival year, and the economics of such cultural production.
One musician in particular stands forth from Jaipur's accounts as exceptional, Mayalee “dancing girl”. As well as being paid a monthly cash stipend, she received 25 maunds of salt annually, and was clearly one of Sambhar’s chief courtesans. Little exculpatory notes in the margins of successive Company accounts reveal that Mayalee successfully resisted the Company’s attempt to force her to give up her salt stipend in exchange for cash. Was she merely protecting a nice little sideline selling salt? Or did the more lofty ideal of “faithfulness to the salt” (namak-halali) underpin her resistance? In this podcast I consider why Indian musicians and especially courtesans appear at all in the official records of the East India Company, and what this tells us about relations between the British colonial state and the Indian peoples whose worlds it was increasingly encroaching upon during the 1830s and 40s.
This podcast is part of the project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library; additional research was funded by the European Research Council.
Mayalee Dancing Girl vs the East india Company was written by me, Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London), and is based on my original research. It was produced by Chris Elcombe. Additional voices were Michael Bywater, Chris Elcombe, and Kanav Gupta. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC–BY-NC–ND) license.
The recording of Rag Jaunpuri by Jaipur gharana doyenne Kesarbai Kerkar is courtesy of the Archive of Indian Music and Vikram Sampath. https://soundcloud.com/archive-of-indian-music/kesarbai-kerkar
The sarangi recording of Rag Bhairavi is by Nicolas Magriel and reproduced with thanks.
Information on the Jaipur gunijan-khana is taken from the work of Joan Erdman, and material on Amber/Jaipur’s political life from the work of Giles Tillotson and Monika Horstmann.
With thanks to: the British Academy, the British Library, the National Archives of India, the European Research Council, Norbert Peabody, Paul Schofield, and Mrinalini Venkateswaran.
Flute and Drum, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Prayer Temple Jaipur by Xserra CC BY 4.0
20160922_summers.end.marshes by dobroide CC BY 4.0
Waves on the Lake by Vlatko Blazek CC BY 4.0
Kirtana_in_Hindi by psubhashish CC BY 4.0
Water Music From the Handel Show by The United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps Public Domain Mark 1.0 Licence
Ganga Aarti Ceremony V, Haridwar by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Shiva Worship Ceremony, Varanasi by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
A Man Approaches with Bowed Sitar, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0
Track 1 by Deep Singh and Ikhlaq Hussain Khan
Originally broadcast live on Rob Weisberg's show, Transpacific Sound Paradise on WF
43 min