Folk Performances and the European Gaze in Bengal in the Nineteenth Century

Cultural anthropologists acknowledge the primacy of the spectator’s gaze in assigning hierarchical space to performances within the public sphere. Equations of power and transactions between agents of performance and the consumer or between the language of the entitled spectator and subject performers determine the category assigned to a given performance: folk or elite, classic or popular, high or subaltern. The late eighteenth – early nineteenth century in Bengal was a period of political and social transition and of realignment along religious, spatial and intellectual lines. The birth and growth of the metropolitan urban centre (Calcutta), an increasing presence of European residents of both genders in Calcutta and Bengal and the shift of power and influence from Muslim military aristocracy to an European merchant company (The British East India Company), meant that traditional indigenous performances were often thrown open for commentary and judgment to an audience who were largely outsiders and to whom the nuances of language, caste, class, region, ritual signification were matters of academic interest only occasioning descriptive commentaries on the practices in an alien country. In the travelogues and memoirs of Maria Nugent or Fanny Parkes, for instance, rituals, customs or performances were viewed as exemplifying the picturesque ‘otherness’ of an alien race. This paper will focus on evidences within British colonial writings of the early nineteenth century describing what appeared to observers as performances, with which they attempt to conceptualize the native ‘other’ as a cultural trope.