The 1838 tour: is there a ‘real’ bayadère ? Resistance in the archives

Abstract In June 1838, five female dancers and three male musicians left Pondicherry for France, from where they travelled onwards to England, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. As they travelled, the dancers became bayadères , a European hegemonic construct that shaped Indian women as both sexual property and morally debauched. Through this racialised construct, Europeans, in particular the British and French, became positioned as morally superior to India and therefore legitimate imperialists. Within this context, I am interested in how images of the languid arms of the Indian temple dancers function as a site of archival resistance to their co-optation as the bayadère . I suggest that a close reading of the newspaper illustrations and affiliated articles, noticing details and making connections, undercuts the dancers’ repeated sexualisation and their refusal to be confined to the space demarcated for them in European hegemonic narratives. I argue that this archival resistance also counters the later dominant caste appropriation and embodiment of the temple dancer’s artistic practice as a form of Indian classical dance.