THE DANCING GIRL
For the women of India an independent profession is a thing almost
unknown. Here are no busy typewriters, no female clerks, no barmaids.
The woman spends her whole life in a home, supported and maintained,
her father’s as a child, then her husband’s, or else one of those
large joint households in which every woman of the family, widowed
or married, finds her place. If she is poor, she may have work to do
in plenty, besides the care of her house and children. She may sew
or go out to help in richer households; often she joins her husband
in his work, and you may see the potter’s wife fetching earth and
carrying bricks, or the washerman’s wife drive his laden ox. Sometimes
she labours in the field, busily weeding or bent double as in the
water-covered muddy patch she transplants the young rice-shoots. But in
none of these tasks does she work for herself, alone and independent,
at a trade chosen by her own taste. She labours as one member of a
higher unit, the family of which she is a part, and she knows that by
her efforts she helps to feed and clothe her children or to add to
the funds controlled by the head of the joint family. Even domestic
service, in the European sense of the word, hardly exists. Ruling and
noble families have their maid-servants, but these are not independent
women hired under a contract, enforceable at law. They are women born
and bred in the palace, bound by affection and upbringing, hereditary
house-servants, almost slaves. They are treated as of the family, are
paid by food and clothing, by presents and the final gift in marriage
to a male servant. Only a few, a very few there are, widows mainly,
usually Mussulman, who can in the Western sense of the word be called
servants.
In recent years changes in ideas, and still more changes in social
economy, have produced a few women in regard to whose work it is
possible to use the words “independent profession.” There are even
a few lady doctors, Parsis mainly, in whose case the imitation
of European customs and the resultant obstacles to marriage have
facilitated study and the adoption of a career. There are far more who
are teachers--always underpaid--in girls’ schools, or nurses--also
underpaid--or midwives. Largely these are Brahman widows, who,
repudiating the austerities of traditional belief, have found a more
useful life by these labours, and relieve their relatives of the charge
of their support or bring up their children by their own praiseworthy
efforts.
But even these are still exceptions to be counted by hundreds, by
thousands at the most, out of all the three hundred millions of India’s
population. For the women of India, it may almost be said, there
is only one independent profession open, one that is immemorial,
remunerative, even honoured, and that is the profession of the dancing
girl. There is hardly a town in India, however small, which has not
its group of dancing girls, dubious perhaps and mediocre; and there is
not a wedding, hardly an entertainment of any circumstance, at which
the dancing girl’s services are not engaged. And it may be added that
there is hardly a class so much misjudged or a profession so much
misunderstood.
For long generations and in many countries the dancing girls of India
have been the theme of poets and stock figures of romanticism. In
Indian literature it was of course natural that they should find a
place. And in fact, from the earliest Sanscrit poets down to the
novelists and play-wrights of modern Bengal or Gujarát, there are
few dramas in which a dancer does not play a role. Often the part is
pathetic, even tragic, while it is usually edifying and pietistic. The
courtesan who, urged by the eloquence or attraction of a pious ascetic,
finds the grace of God and abandons art for austerity and the palace
for the hermitage, is one of the recurrent conventions of the Indian
classics. In one of the best-known of Mahrathi poems, there is such a
picture, expressed with vigour and emotion. Converted to self-denial
and renunciation, the dancing girl, once beautiful, lies alone, dirty
and squalid, without food, in a witch-haunted graveyard, affrighted by
ghosts, tormented by spirits of evil, yet uplifted by the love of God
and blessed by her memories of the saint whose coldness was to her
the sign of a higher adoration. But in the literature of Europe the
bayadère, to use a name corrupted from the Portuguese, has also been a
frequent and a luxurious figure. In the romantic fancies of the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, she was, both in France
and Germany, a personage on whom poets lavished the embellishments
of their art. Her hazy outlines they bespangled with the imagery of
fiction and the phantasies of invention. She was a symbol for oriental
opulence, a creature of incredible luxury and uncurbed sensuousness,
or tropic passion and jewelled magnificence. From her tresses blew the
perfumes of lust; on her lips, like honey sweet, distilled the poisons
of vice; hidden in her bodice of gold brocade she carried the dagger
with which she killed.
Divest her of poetic association. Rob her of the hues cast by the
distant dreams of romanticism. Strip her even of the facts of history
and the traditions of the Indian classics. Yet she remains a figure
sufficiently remarkable. Not tragic and certainly not gay, she embodies
in herself so much of India, both its past and present, that without
understanding her life and significance it is impossible to comprehend
the social whole which she explains and commentates.
[Illustration: DANCER IN MIRZAPUR]
The very name of dancing girl, it must be noted, is a misnomer. For as
an artist she finds expression primarily in song, not in the dance.
In the Indian theory of music, dancing is but an adjunct, one rhythm
the more, to the sung melody. It is the singer’s voice which, is
the ultimate means of music, her song which is its real purpose. To
embellish its expression and heighten its enjoyment the singer takes
the aid of instruments, the pipe, the strings, the drum and not least
of the dance. Regarded in its first elements, the dance is one means
the more of marking the time of the melody. Throughout the Indian
dance the feet, like the tuned drums, are means to mark the beats.
The time is divided into syllables or bars and the dancer’s beating
feet, circled with a belt of jingling bells, must move and pause in
the strictest accordance. The right foot performs the major part, the
left completes the rhythmic syllable. But further by her dance the
singer’s art is to make more clear and more magnetic the meaning of
her song. With her attitudes and gestures she accords her person to
her melody and sense, till her whole being, voice and movement, is but
one living emotion. Her veil half-drawn over her features, her head
averted, a frown wrinkling her brow, she portrays modesty recoiling
from a lover. With joined hands uplifted to her forehead, with body
bent, and eyes cast upon the ground, she accompanies the hymns of
worship and resignation to God’s will. With quickly moving gesture,
she marks the harsher sounds of rage or mortified indignation. Even
pleasure and the tenderer joy she represents by the softly swaying body
and slow waving movements of her upturned hands. But it is not enough
that gesture should be natural and appropriate. Mere realism would not
harmonize with the songs and instrumental music to which it is an
accompaniment. Its crudities would be out of tune, conspicuous, even
brutal. The dancer’s gestures and pantomime must be soft, rhythmic,
and restrained. Like every other art, dancing too has its economy
and its self-restraint. And the way to this ideal harmony is through
the simplifications of convention and the discipline of a graceful
technique. The dancer has to learn by painful practice to move her
limbs in harmony with the rhythms of her melody, to avoid all that
is abrupt or unsymmetrical. Each pose should be that of a statue,
emotion poising in a harmony of line and balance. In order to attain
this complete accord of movement and melody, this union of grace and
emotional expression, it is necessary to conventionalize the means by
strict attention to the material presented to the creative artist--in
the case of the dance, the youthful female figure. As in a painting, to
the trained eye, a line presents the transition between two differently
lit surfaces, so in the dance, by an habitual agreement between the
spectator and the performer, certain simple movements are made to evoke
wider imaginations. Indian dancing, like every art, must have its
own conventions. But they are conventions finally based upon actual
mimicry, simplifications, one may say, of natural movements. They are
attained by the exclusion of all that is superfluous, leaving only the
essential curve or contour of the movement. They are the actual made
spiritual, by the excision of all excess, by the suppression of the
uncouthness which defective material and stiff muscles force upon
human action. The movements of the Indian dancer bear to the primitive
gestures of men and women, in the moments of actual impulse, the same
relation as the simplified form of Indian painting and sculpture bear
to the realities of living flesh and blood in light and shadow. To
the European the conventions are difficult to understand, as they
presuppose a different training; and in him they do not readily awake
the required emotion. For European art has for many centuries been in
the main realistic, concerned above all with the material appearance of
things and actions. The art of the East, on the other hand, has in all
its leading schools sought the spiritual, striving with the jejunest
outlines to interpret the significance which may underlie the outward
clothing of form and colour and surface. Moreover, the oriental eye
has a natural aptitude for decorative pattern, to which the excessive
devotion of the Indian intellect to deduction and abstract analysis
affords a parallel. The artist, therefore, does not rest content
with simplification but further seeks to manipulate the conventions,
through which he realizes his spiritual meaning, into a symmetric and
decorative pattern. The same tendencies appear in the dance, when
practised as an art, in India.
There are two great methods of artistic dancing in India which
correspond to the main geographical distinction of the continent
and can be called the Peninsular and the Northern. The Peninsular
or Southern has its home and training-ground in Madras, where the
temple dancing girls, the “servants of God” as they are called in the
vernacular, follow their fine tradition. The old Hindu city of Tanjore
with its exuberant temple is the centre of the school, to which it has
given its name. The other or Northern method is at its highest in the
cities of Delhi and Lucknow, more secular in its purpose, yet more
austere in its expression.
In the North where the girls, wearing an adaptation of the Mussulman
dress, are mostly of that faith and have no bond with any temple
or religious institution, the dance or gesture-play is strictly
subordinate to the song. The artist moves back and forward a few
steps as she sings, the feet of course always beating the time,
while her hands are raised or lowered and her fingers grouped in a
few conventional poses, gracefully artificial or simply decorative,
but with no present actuality and little stimulus to emotion. The
pleasure of the spectator is in the main intellectual, the effect of
reminiscence and association, while he interprets the meaning of which
the movements are suggestive but abstract symbols. At the end of the
verse the dancer floats softly round the circle of spectators, with
coquetry in her eyes, extorting applause by a quick virtuosity of steps
and pirouettes, which have little relation to any living and real
passion.
The Peninsular school, on the other hand, gives the dance in and by
itself a far higher value and more extended field. It is far more than
the mere visible decoration of a sung melody. It has a life of its
own, often wild and passionate; and has its own instant appeal to
independent emotions. Often the dance is in itself the pantomime of a
whole story, the meeting and love of Krishna and Rádha, for instance,
at the river’s side. The melody of the instruments is a suitable
accompaniment and the voice does little more than supply a pleasing
refrain. Sometimes it is a mere rhythmic and decorative reconstruction
of everyday actions, the mimicry, harmonious and graceful, of a boy
flying a kite or of a fluttering butterfly. The dancers move lightly
and quickly over the floor, their steps diversified, their gestures
free and natural. Upon their features play the lines of hope and joy,
of sorrow and disdain. Then as the story closes, in a final burst of
melody, their voices rise with the instruments that accompany in a last
_forte_ repetition of the refrain or motive.
Thus in the Peninsular or Tanjore school the art of dancing, though
also, of course, dependent upon conventionalisms of gesture and
movement, and significant of meanings which it suggests rather than
imitates, has a more actual appeal to emotion and a less fettered
freedom. It has a finer spontaneity, a freer flow of imagination. At
its best, it is a splendid school of dancing, the only method perhaps
worthy to be put beside, though below, the magnificent creations of the
Russian ballet.
From the point of view of art, however, even the Tanjore dancing girls,
and still more the performers of the Northern school, have certain
defects, which could be removable if the players and public had a
finer sense of artistic purpose. The women themselves are too often
of little education, illiterate, with their tastes uncultivated. A
good voice and some natural grace, with training only in technique,
may make a pleasing enough dancer but cannot produce an artist. For
any excellent attainment a higher cultivation is required. Another
difficulty, peculiar to India, is that many experts will, from
superstitious fear or jealousy, refuse to impart their secrets to a
pupil or a novice. But worst of all by far is that lack of artistic
sensibility, general in modern India, which is satisfied by the tricks
of virtuosity and has no recognition of sincerity and deeper beauty.
In song the faults are obvious and regretted. High notes are screamed
out with the utmost effort of the singers’ lungs to the amazement and
admiration of the groundlings, while the practice of slurred arpeggios
at the highest speed obscures the roundness of the voice in the true
melody. Given a good voice, a girl is only too soon trained to these
efforts, on which in a few years her natural gifts are squandered.
Smooth and easy singing and finished phrasing are little valued by the
side of those difficult but unbeautiful accomplishments. Similarly in
the accompanying dance violent gestures, strained poses, or undue and
difficult effort ravish praise that should more correctly be given to
sincere emotion and an easy and natural rhythm. A dead conventionalism,
emphasized and over-strained by difficult contortions, has repressed
the development of the art, especially in the northern, more abstract
method.
[Illustration: MUSSULMAN NAUTCH-GIRL]
Another great drawback against which Indian professional dancing
struggles is the lack of a public that itself is given to dancing. For
every art the great safeguard and vivifying influence is a popular
practice of its easier forms. Music flourished in Italy and in Germany,
where every person sings. Poetry becomes great when behind it there
is a living growth of popular ballads or lyrics. The Russian ballet
has made its wonderful achievement because every peasant dances with
vigour and even with grace, and in the summer nights in every village
young men and women dance. In India popular dancing has for many
centuries been moribund, even dead. At the festival of the new Hindu
year, in a few parts of India, groups of ladies sing songs in unison
as they circle to a slow measure or rhythmic step. Occasionally in the
_zanánas_ of the richer families the ladies dance what is known as a
Rásada. Each catches her neighbours’ hands and they move round and
round in a circle bowing, slow in the beginning and faster to the end.
These are the palace dances, now almost disused, of which can be read
in Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation of the Chaurapanchasika.--
“Yet now, this but abides, to picture smoothly
How in the palace-dance foremost she paced:
Her glancing feet and light limbs swayed demurely
Moon-like, amid their cloudy robes; moon-faced,
With hips majestic under slender waist,
And hair with gold and blooms braided and laced.”
In villages among the lower classes there is also at stated seasons
some rustic dancing, even with men, of a rough and boisterous kind.
But generally speaking, popular dancing there is none. “No one dances
unless he is drunk,” the Indian gentlemen might mutter with the too
grave Roman.
Still, granting these deficiencies of environment and allowing for
all imperfections and desired improvements, dancing remains the most
living and developed of existing Indian arts. In the Peninsular school
above all, India has a possession of very real merit, on which no
appreciation or encouragement can be thrown away. It is something
of which the country can well be proud, almost the only thing left,
perhaps, in the general death-like slumber of all imaginative work,
which still has a true emotional response and value. It sends its call
to a people’s soul; it is alive and forceful.
All the more tragic is it, a very tragedy of irony, that the dance--the
one really Indian art that remains--has been, by some curious
perversion of reasoning, made the special object of attack by an
advanced and reforming section of Indian publicists. They have chosen
to do so on the score of morality--not that they allege the songs and
dances to be immoral, if such these could be, but that they say the
dancers are. Of the dances themselves no such allegation could, even by
the wildest imagination, possibly be made. The songs are pure beside
the ordinary verses of a comic opera, not to mention a music-hall in
the capital of European civilization, Paris. The dancing is graceful
and decorous, carefully draped and restrained. But the dancers, it is
true, do not as a rule preserve that strict code of chastity which
is exacted from the marrying woman. How the stringency or laxity
of observance of this code by a performer can possibly affect the
emotional and even national value of her art and performance has not
been and cannot be explained. Art cannot be smirched by the sins of its
followers; the flaws in the crystal goblet do not hurt the flavour of
the wine.
In the Peninsula of India dancing and professional singing is first of
all a religious institution, bound up with the worship of the Gods. To
every temple of importance are attached bands of six, eight, or more
girls, paid in free gifts of land or in money for the duties which they
perform. They are recruited in infancy from various castes and wear
the ordinary garments, slightly more ornamental, of the Indian lady of
those regions. In certain castes the profession is hereditary, mother
bringing up daughter in turn to these family accomplishments. In other
cases, as in the great temple of Jejuri in the Deccan, children are
dedicated by their parents to the service of God and left when they
reach a riper age to the teaching and superintendence of the priests.
Twice a day, morning and evening, they sing and dance within the temple
to the greater glory of God; and at all the great public ceremonies and
festivals they play their part in the solemnities. Teaching is imparted
by older men, themselves singers, who take in hand the training of
small groups of girls. In some cases a form of marriage is performed,
for the fulfilment of traditional religious obligation, with a man
of the dancer’s caste, with an idol, or even with a sacred tree. But
the ceremony entails no ethical obligations, such as apply to the
real married woman. The dancers are regarded, being independent and
self-supporting, as freed from the code which applies to women living
in family homes and maintained by the work and earnings of a father
or a husband. It is their right to live their lives as they will,
for their own pleasure and happiness, unrestrained by any code more
stringent than that of an independent man.
[Illustration: DANCER FROM TANJORE]
Besides Tanjore, the old Portuguese possession of Goa and the
neighbouring districts bordering on the ocean, where the forests and
rocks of the Western Ghauts drop sharply to the rice-lands of the
shore, are famous for the excellence of their singers. Here they are
known under the name of Naikins or “Ladyships,” and have a position of
no little respect. Though they like to trace their origin in their own
sayings to those nymphs who in heaven are said to entertain the Gods,
the truth is that they are largely recruited from other classes, whose
children they purchase or adopt. They live in houses like those of
the better-class Hindus, with broad verandahs and large court-yards,
in which grows a plant or two of the sacred sweet basil. Their homes
are furnished in the plain style of the Hindu householder, with mats
and stools and wooden benches and an abundance of copper and brass
pots and pans and water vessels. Only they wear a profusion of gold
ornaments on head and wrists and fingers, a silver waist-band, and
silver rings on their toes, and they make their hair gay with flowers.
Their lives are simple and not luxurious; but the days are idled away
in the languorous ease of the tropic sea breezes, a land of repose, a
lazy land. They rise late, they bathe, they eat rice-gruel, and talk
and sleep. The long afternoon is passed in more chatting and in their
constant enjoyment of chewing betel leaves, till after dinner they go
out to sing and dance to a late hour of the night. It is a life of
quiet ease, uneventful, indolent no doubt, but hardly dissipated. And
of course in all worship and religious observance they are devout and
orthodox, fearing the Gods, and reverent to the officiating priesthood.
Now when some Hindu reformers object to the employment of such women in
the temples of God and deny the efficacy of song and dance as adjuncts
of religious emotion, it would of course be impertinence for the
follower of another creed to express an opinion. The rubrics of prayer
are between the worshipper alone and his God. If they preach that
worship and oblation are for those only who have made asceticism their
practice and who have turned their faces from the world to the pure
concept of divinity, they are obviously within their rights: and the
question must be decided by a congregation of fellow-worshippers. Even
if they desire to bar the temple-door to women, who have taken no vow
of chastity and hope for salvation without closing their ears to love,
they are entitled to do as they like with their own, if they can obtain
a consensus of believers. Observers of other creeds would willingly,
if without impropriety they could have a voice, join in deploring the
abuse, in some temples, of the custom of dedication; for girls thus
dedicated, as at Jejuri, are often too numerous for the purposes of
the temple-service and are thrown upon the world, without adequate
artistic training, almost, one might say, with none, to make their
way as best they can. When this happens, though Hindu society treats
the devotees kindly and gives them easy admission to good houses, yet
their dearth of artistic accomplishment, the refusal of support by the
temple to which they are ascribed, and the pressing needs of sustenance
must often force the unfortunate girl to a distasteful trade. But to
include these among dancing girls in the proper sense is hardly fair.
The motives of dedication are different and are exclusively religious,
while the custom has arisen from the old Hindu tradition of appointing
a girl to take the place of a son. The trained singer who succeeds to
an appointment in a temple is in a very different position, and her
life is as a rule happy and prosperous. The example of other countries
has shown how an art may gain by the support of a Church, and how, in
the absence of countervailing circumstances of popular understanding
and enthusiasm, the withdrawal of ecclesiastical patronage may
cause its decline and even its ruin. The Reformation in Europe,
for instance, whatever its benefits to a new growing world in other
matters, swept without doubt like a devastation over the rich fields of
human imagination and like a tempest obliterated the aesthetic emotions
in which the human soul attains its highest. In India, in the absence
of a humanism such as Europe could imbibe from Athens, the dependence
of art upon religion is more strait and isolated, while the very forms
of Indian art are moulded in a supernatural conception of the universe.
So subtly poised is it upon this pinnacle, that the mere touch of the
freethinker and reformer, one fears, may send it shattered to the
ground.
In the North, it has been said, the dancing girls have no connection
with religious institutions, though, as it happens, their artistic
conventions are more abstract and less sensuous. Mostly they are
Mussulmans by belief or are Hindus who have adopted Mussulman ways and
manners. They do not belong to colleges or groups but live alone and
independently, earning their living by their art, without support from
any temple. At the same time it is the custom in many parts to invite
them to perform at the shrine of some dead saint during the annual
celebrations. They sing on such occasions songs of a sacred kind,
psalmodies of praise to God and His Prophet, poems well known in the
Urdu language. They chant also the odes of the Sufis or Persian mystic
poets, in which the adoration of the Deity is clothed in the language
of love, and the praises of wine are metaphors for the ecstasies of
the Spirit. Usually the dancing girl lives alone in her own house, some
balconied and flat-roofed house in the crowded bazaar, where she can
overlook the movement of the town and mark the doings of her world.
There is little that escapes her prying eyes, and the musicians in her
pay, the barber who lives in the street and the seller of betel leaves
keep her posted in all the city scandals. There is constant coming and
going to her doors, and in the afternoon admirers from the younger
nobility and professional men drop in to pass the time and smoke
and laugh a few hours away. Sometimes her house becomes a centre of
intrigue where palace revolutions or doubtful conspiracies are hatched
under her friendly eye by young men, who lounge on her cushions beside
the trellised window. The room is heavy with the sweet, over-perfumed
smoke of the black tobacco paste which she smokes in her silver-mounted
hookah. When she drives out at evening, police-constables salute her.
In most Native States such dancing girls, two or three or four, are an
appanage of the royal retinue, and are paid salaries or retaining fees
on a generous basis. Such a girl will ordinarily get one hundred to
one hundred and fifty rupees per month from the State--the salary of a
Police Magistrate--with gifts on special occasions. In exchange she has
to sing twice or thrice a week when the chief calls for her, but with
his permission she may always perform at other houses where she can
earn larger fees. Some chiefs are famous for their taste, and a girl
tries to secure an engagement for a year or two in such a Darbar to
establish her reputation for the future. In many cases these dancers,
as they grow older, marry one of their lovers and settle down to the
quiet life of the respectable Mussulman lady behind the _purdah_.
Sometimes they adopt a clever and pretty girl and train her, half as
maid and half as companion, in the mysteries of their art, till she in
turn becomes a singer and helps to keep her mistress and teacher, with
no little piety and charity, in her old age.
Modern opponents of dancing, however, with their influence on a
population which has few artistic tastes and a marked bent for economy,
have already done much to degrade the profession and are gradually
forcing girls, who would formerly have earned a decent competence
with independence and an artist’s pride, into a shameful traffic from
very want. Day by day the number of those women is growing less who
alone preserve the memory of a fine Indian art. And, as they lose the
independence earned by a profession, day by day more women are being
thrust into the abysmal shame and destitution of degraded womanhood.
An Indian proverb already sums up this peculiar item of the “reform
programme” thus: “The dancing girl was formerly fed with good food in
the temple; now she turns somersaults for a beggar’s rice.”
But, for the delineation of Indian life and society, the position of
the dancing girl must be envisaged from a loftier altitude. It is only
from such an aspect that her portrait can be said to complete and
interpret the gallery of Indian womanhood.
In the long history of human development occasional licence appears as
necessary to mankind as the habitual routine of morality. Convention
and self-restraint have been accepted and adopted for mutual
convenience; but, by an impulse as natural as it is healthy, man has
from time to time escaped from his stagnation through the orgy. Even
the savage, with his underfed body and atrophied sensibilities, finds
a periodic outlet for the starveling powers and ambitions hidden in
his breast by some spring or autumn festival at which, by one wild
orgy, he overleaps the fears and trammels of magical prescription and
intoxicates himself, for a brief space, into a freer manhood. When
savagery ends and barbarism begins, the orgy becomes something of an
institution, as it did in the Christian Church of the Middle Ages or
in the Holi of India. But as civilization grows more refined, it is
for the spirit rather than the body that the outburst into freedom is
demanded. In a cultured community it is a sort of cerebral licence
which is excited and assuaged by the orgies of the imagination. The
theatre and music, painting and poetry by their stimulation purge the
soul of those emotions which, unrelieved, would sour and make ill the
spirit. In a state where man is bound hand and foot to a mechanical
routine of wage-earning, he must seek through the excitement of his
imagination that explosion of emotion followed by quiescence, by
which the fermenting activities of his mind and body can alone find
their needed relief. Among the agents that rouse this excitement and
in turn satisfy it are to be ranked high the rhythm and music of
the dance, with the spectacle of graceful limbs and pretty faces, of
dresses such as are seen in dreams and jewelry rich beyond phantasy.
Every man at some time in his life has woven his fairy tales of hope,
and there is none so dull but has pictured a goddess to his fancy. Now
the woman who toils in his house and shares his interests may be ever
so tenderly loved and cared for, but she is his own help-mate, of his
own sturdy flesh and blood. Hardly--except perhaps for a space in the
first blossoming of new love--can he clothe her familiar being with the
robes and colours of his dreaming fancies. But in the trained actress
with her artful graces and her aloofness, he sees one who responds to
those secret aspirations, and gives them room to expand and calms and
soothes them, till at last, the spectacle ended, and his mind reposed,
he returns to his home in peace for the further routine of workaday
existence.
Now where life is free and unrestricted, among the powerful and the
leisured, every hour has its variety and desire may be satisfied
without awaiting any special occasion. But when existence is narrowed
to routine and one day is like another, then indeed the soul must
sometimes soar to an illusion of wild wind-driven liberty. Man has to
guide his plough in the furrow; but not to look to the sky and its
currents at the turning!--better death at once than such weariness. And
it is the finer creative spirits, the men that think and produce, who
are quickest crushed by the unbroken rule of abstinence. In India the
general tone is brown, the light grey-brown of dusty plains and dry
fields and villages of sun-baked mud. The ritual of to-day is that of
yesterday, and will be that of to-morrow. The same prayers, the same
labours, the same plain food, the same simple house and furnishings.
Simplicity, abstinence, repression, the rejection of all that is
superfluous, these are the notes of ordinary life. There is contentment
enough as a rule. The wife is faithful and devoted, the children play
and grow up and get married, the cattle pull the plough and the soil
bears the corn. It produces on the whole a contented resignation,
this life, with its austere simplicities and its overhanging haze of
asceticism. But even then there are times when the self will out and
the lulled nerves begin to stir and tingle and stab with a bitter pain.
There is no social life as in France and upper-class England, where
ladies of wit and reading, graceful, well-dressed, trained to charm
and please, quicken the minds and respond to the sympathies of a wider
circle, while at the same time imposing a fine code of manners and
a tactful moderation. The wife, devoted and affectionate as she is,
must usually be first the _house-wife_, busied with a narrow routine,
limited in experience, bounded by babies and the day’s dinner. In most
classes she is illiterate and she has few of the accomplishments which
amuse and distract. Even in Athens, the city above all of urbanity,
as the married woman was secluded and domestic like the Indian, the
female _comrade_, the _hetaira_, with her witty talk and her song and
accomplishments was a necessity of social life. In old India also this
need was known, as can be read in the traditional poetic histories, and
the dancing girl, the _gunika_ as they called her, was the recognized
teacher to young princes of manners and of chivalry. Those days are
past; but even now the dancing girls, by the admission even of a
missionary,[1] “are the most accomplished women among the Hindus. They
read, write, sing and play as well as dance.” They dress well and
modestly, they know the arts of pleasing, and their success is in the
main due to the contrast by which they transcend the ordinary woman
and to the illusions they can give. They do not, therefore, merely
fulfil a need but also represent an ideal. Even apart from their art
and its high imaginative value, as almost the only living art in India,
they respond in a larger sense to a real need of society. To stifle
a class of women, living their own lives in independence, graceful,
accomplished, often clever, to degrade them, to make them outcastes and
force them into shameful by-ways, is not merely to sin against charity;
it is also a blunder against life.
[1] The Rev. M. Phillips, “Evolution of Hinduism,” 1903.
[Illustration: NAIKIN IN KANARA]
The existence of such a class, regarded in the light of ultimate
truths, may fall far short of the perfect state. But the remedy in
any country lies not in their repression and degradation, the most
disastrous of all attempts. It lies in the freedom and education of
the married woman. When the married woman also is freed from the
oppression of narrow codes and the dull monotony of house-work, when
she too is able to be accomplished and graceful, witty and artistic,
free to choose as she pleases and to be true to her nature, then no
doubt the professional beauty must by the mere weight of facts become
extinct. But what nation, what society will risk the experiment? and
what conditions can make it possible? This at least is clear that
where a rigid matrimonial system, supported by all the sanctions of
religion and inspired by a tradition of asceticism, is fast entrenched
and fortified, where woman is limited and narrowed to the duties of a
housekeeper or a mother, there the fulfilment of the deeper cravings
of human emotion and the satisfaction of artistic sensibilities will
depend upon a class that has in it much which is not ignoble.
Woman’s Dress
“Upon my right hand did stand the Queen in a vesture of gold
wrought about in divers colours.”
_Psalm XLV._
[Illustration: GIPSY WOMAN]