18:30
King's College London
November 18
King's Building Room: St David's Room Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Indubala Dasi (1899-1984) was a Gramophone Company star in India, training in music as the only pupil of the renowned courtesan, Gauhar Jan (1873-1930). She was a recording artist, an actress on film and stage and a lifelong supporter of the rights of sex workers in Calcutta’s red-light district. This paper traces the lives of Indubala, her mother Rajbala and their many courtesan colleagues through the contents of her surviving scrapbook. It examines a multi-page party menu from the scrapbook to reflect on rasa, taste and sexuality via Bengali courtesan women’s gustatory experiences in colonial India. The words amod (pleasure) and alladi (indulgence) – found in invitation cards inside the scrapbook – propose coalitional moves, affective states that conjure an organised, inner-world resistance that Bengali courtesans, actresses and dancers practiced during an era of anti-colonial nationalism and anti-dance bans.
Prarthana Purkayastha is Reader (Associate Professor) in Dance and Performance Studies at Royal Holloway University of London. She is the author of Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and The Archives and Afterlives of Nautch Dancers in India (CUP 2025). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance (OUP 2026) and was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded South Asian Dance Equity (SADE) project (2023-25).