UC Irvine

In 1833, a group of Indian women dancers petitioned the colonial government to abolish the regulation that prohibited their traditional practice of “purchasing” children. Citing the anti-slavery policies of the government, the presiding British officer declined their request. Half a century later, in 1881, another group of women performers, petitioned the government for wrongfully designating them as “common prostitutes” under the provisions of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act. This time, the government had to cede to their demands. In 1898, another dancing woman petitioned the state demanding justice on behalf of her performer granddaughters, who faced immense hardship on their England tour. The final judgment on this case, however, remained inconclusive.Tracking three key moments of colonial legislative and regulatory interventions–abolition of Indian slavery, implementation of Contagious Diseases Act, and the initiation of South Asian presence in international exhibitions–this dissertation examines how Indian women performers directly engaged with the British colonial state from the early nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. It explores how Indian women performers’ active contestations of the criminalizing colonial labels of “slaves” and “prostitutes” across different registers of state regulation, surveillance, and abolition to assert their professional identity as performers exposed the fragility of the colonial state. Throughout the nineteenth century, using the method of writing legal petitions, the women performers continued arguing for restoring their rights of “purchasing” children, reclaimed property from the state, obtained permission for holding performances, contested allegations of engaging in “clandestine prostitution,” complained about European agents’ misdemeanors—while repeatedly asserting their professional identity as performing artistes. By documenting such repeated marks and methods of articulations of Indian women performers left in the colonial archive, this dissertation pushes against the idea of the unchallengeable hegemonic nature of the colonial state and contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the frailties of empire as engendered through the daily acts of negotiations of the marginalized. Drawing on a range of colonial correspondence and reports, newspapers and institutional records, this dissertation emphasizes the centrality of Indian women performers in shaping major colonial discourses and decisions surrounding slavery, venereal diseases, and imperial exhibitions. The dissertation’s opening chapter examines how the process of criminalizing dancers as “slaves” remained incomplete owing to the colonial state’s own administrative inconsistencies brought about by the dancers’ objections through petitions. Continuing in the same vein, chapter two explores how dancers’ petitions played a significant role in the workings (and failures) of the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts in the colonial western India. With a microhistorical approach, the final chapter documents how dancers’ continuous assertions as professional performers (as opposed to “prostitutes”) in the precarious circuits of colonial exhibitionary spaces exposed the hypocrisy of the colonial state which chose to earn revenues from the labor of Indian dancing women in the metropole while simultaneously marginalizing and criminalizing them as “common prostitutes” in India. By centering Indian women performers’ everyday negotiations with the state, this dissertation seeks to provide a new reading of the limits of colonial control into the realms of gender, sexuality, and performance