Shauqeen Viewing: Mingling with the Indian Courtesan

Contained in the South Asian collection at the Royal Ontario Museum, the 'courtesan album' is an unpublished personal compilation of 146 photographic portraits of mostly North Indian courtesans that were taken at Indian studios between 1860 and 1910. It commands an affective engagement from the viewer in a page-after-page accumulation of its sitters—the courtesans, celebrated reverentially as entertainers. In this article, I mobilise my scholarly orientations as a dance ethnographer and historian to ask how the album can be read as a performance. I propose 'shauqeen viewing' as an affective mode of spectatorship in which the viewer is drawn into the album and impassioned in the process. Shauq theorises the continuities with what lingers affectively from courtesan entertainment into the present day. It enables the shauqeen viewer to mingle or convene affectively with the courtesan both in a kathak performance and in engaging with the album.