A dancer’s plea: racial politics, gendered agency, and aesthetic labour in imperial expositions

Abstract In 1897, an Indian dancer named Piaree Jehan petitioned the Bombay government seeking justice for her two granddaughters—Begum Jehan and Vajir Jehan—who died and allegedly disappeared, respectively, during their 1895–1896 England tour. As traditional sources of patronage for the performers declined owing to the colonial criminalisation of prostitution and rising anti-nautch sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century, certain groups of Indian women performers started travelling to the British metropole for contractual performances. Despite promises of lucrative salaries and foreign travel, life in the imperial exhibitory spaces proved to be quite precarious. Through a close reading of Piaree’s petition and contemporary British newspaper reports, this article presents a microhistory of Indian women performers’ experience in the racialised and sexualised imperial circuits of performance. It shows how the British imperial government adopted a certain ‘politics of convenience’ to selectively sexualise Indian women performers to erase their contributions as transcultural workers for the empire. By doing so, the empire continued to economically and culturally benefit from the dancers’ labour while avoiding any responsibility towards remedying their working conditions. At the same time, focusing on Piaree’s affective argumentation, the article also demonstrates how the performers used the British legal system to make their voices heard. By writing petitions, demanding unpaid wages, refusing sexual offers, and forging kinship ties, Indian women performers repeatedly foregrounded their identities as professional creative workers. In doing so, they disrupted narratives of passive victimhood, challenged their hypersexualised colonial representations, and brought their overlooked contributions to the late nineteenth-century British stage to the fore.