THE BODIES BENEATH THE SMOKE OR WHAT'S BEHIND ... - Dance

THE BODIES BENEATH THE SMOKE OR 

WHAT’S BEHIND THE CIGARETTE 

POSTER: UNEARTHING KINESTHETIC 

CONNECTIONS IN AMERICAN DANCE 

HISTORY 

PRIYA SRINIVASAN 

One’s sense of self is always mediated by the 

image one has of the other. (Crapanzano, 1985, 

p. 54) 

The music becomes threatening, building to 

a furioso, as Radha rises and twitches her 

hips. Her skirt whips angrily from side to 

side. One elbow leads her into a spiral turn. 

Reversing directions, she turns restlessly 

until a nautch whirl possesses her. As she 

spins one hand makes its own agitated rotation 

… she writhes and trembles to a climax, 

then lies supine as darkness descends 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 61; my emphasis). 

This essay traces the dance encounter between 

Ruth St. Denis, one of the three ‘foremothers’ of 

American modern dance, and the Indian dancing 

women known as Nautchi dancers or nachwalis, 

who visited the United States in 1904. Although 

this encounter is mentioned briefly in dance writings, 

there are no accounts that give much credence 

to this meeting, let alone the idea that 

the Nautch dancers may have contributed to St. 

Denis’ emergence as a choreographer. 

Countless writers confine the historical record of 

St. Denis’ beginnings to a single moment of origin: 

an Orientalist poster advertising cigarettes 

depicting ‘Egyptian deities’ (Coorlawala, 1992; 

Desmond, 1991; Erdman, 1996; Khokar, 1961; 

Shelton, 1981; St. Denis, 1939). Assuming that St. 

Denis’ creative flair could not have come from 

corporeal interactions with Nautch dancers she 

saw in Coney Island in the summer of 1904, and 

whose forms she imitated artfully in the years to 

come, dance writers have ‘bought into’ the idea 

that St. Denis researched her ideas from library 

archives and emerged as an individual genius 

through the performance pieces she subsequently 

created. 

I will argue that St. Denis was concerned with 

reproducing the spectacle she had seen at 

Coney Island called the Durbar of Delhi. Using 

her interactions with Nautch dancers and Indian 

male performers, she emerged as an economically 

independent artist, woman, and choreogra- 

VOLUME 4 ISSUE 1 DISCOURSES IN DANCE

8 SRINIVASAN/THE BODIES BENEATH THE SMOKE 

pher at the time that suffrage was ongoing. 2 I 

suggest when white bourgeois American women 

are battling against patriarchal control over 

labour and for political, social, and constitutional 

rights, they simultaneously seize representational 

and discursive control by using people of 

colour’s labouring practices for ‘cultural capital’ 

(Williams, 1983). 3 Even though modern and post 

modern dance historians fail to remember the 

Nautch women and Indian men whose labour 

enabled St. Denis’ creation of Radha (1906), the 

first elabourate piece she premiered after seeing 

the exhibitions in the Coney Island ‘spectacle,’ I 

argue that St. Denis’ white female body in performance 

highlights and makes visible their 

kinesthetic legacies. The labour of Nautch dancing 

women thus haunts American dance histories 

through the very basic dance principles of movement; 

spiral turns and whirls. Suzanne Shelton 

(1981), St. Denis’ biographer, describes in great 

detail various dances performed by St. Denis. In 

particular Shelton’s quote at the beginning of 

this essay describes St. Denis’ turns in terms of 

Nautch dance movements in her performance of 

Radha. It is therefore only through an engagement 

with turns, whirls, and dance movement 

itself that the laboured hauntings of Nautch 

dancers can be understood both in terms of 

their contribution to dance and U.S. labour histories. 

The kinesthetic traces left by Nautch women 

have a history in the U.S. and the Coney Island 

Nautch dancers were not an anomaly. 4 Indian 

dancers first appeared in North America under 

the name Nautch as early as 1880. 5 Newspaper 

and theatre archives note the arrival of Indian 

dancers in New York to perform at the Augustin 

Daly Theatre for the production of Zanina in late 

DISCOURSES IN DANCE VOLUME 4 ISSUE 1 

1880. 6 Photographs of the dancers were frontpage 

news in the New York Clipper followed by 

several reviews in various periodicals of the 

Zanina performance. 7 The many reviews of the 

actual performances as well as details of the 

Nautch women’s lives reveal a contradictory and 

quixotic blend of desire and disgust for the performers. 

8 Another group of Nautch dancers 

arrived in New York in 1884 under the auspices 

of P.T. Barnum for his circus shows and street 

parades, but their performances are not as 

detailed as the earlier group. 9 Again in 1885, a 

newspaper report reveals that a group of Nautch 

dancers were sighted in Boston in a Dime 

Museum, but it is unclear if these were the same 

dancers who had performed with Barnum and/or 

Daly. (Wood, 1885). There is some information 

that refers to Nautch dancers following this period, 

that is from 1886 to 1903, 10 but the evidence 

is limited. In 1904, a larger contingent of Indian 

dancers from Bombay were brought to Coney 

Island by Thompson and Dundy, 11 while simultaneously 

another group of dancers were brought 

from South India and Sri Lanka by P.T. Barnum 

for his shows in New York, and yet another 

group of dancers from Sri Lanka were brought to 

the St. Louis World Exposition. It is the group 

that was brought to Coney Island that is of significance 

to this essay. It seems that the women 

dancers brought to Coney Island by Thompson 

and Dundy were primarily from northern India, 

although there were some from Sri Lanka as 

well. 12 Although the evidence is contradictory, it 

appears that the female dancers were dancing a 

pre-cursor of the ‘classical’ form known today as 

Kathak. In making some of these observations 

about the dance forms in India during this time 

period, I am informed by Pallabi Chakravorty’s 

(2000) work on women dancers in Kolkata during

the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

It is significant that Indian dancers were traveling 

to the U.S. between 1880 and 1904 because 

dance in India was undergoing a massive transformation 

at this time. The Anti-Nautch movement 

began in 1892 as Indian nationalists in 

response to the colonial government linked 

dancing girls to prostitution and urged the ‘boycott 

of nautch dancing at formal occasions’ 

(Meduri, 1996, p. 56). This culminated in the 

Abolition Act of 1947, although the colonial government 

had already issued an inquiry about the 

devadasi practice by 1872. Effectively, dancing 

women bore the brunt of nationalist negotiations 

with colonialist ideals, through which ironically 

the agendas of empire and nationhood 

became identical. 13 Although the dancing 

women were not valued, their dance practices 

were. Their dance was subsequently modernized, 

classicized, and reconstructed on the bodies 

of upper caste and middle class Indian 

women by the mid twentieth-century. Certainly, 

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 

the Nautch women were not the most 

likely ambassadors of Indian culture to the West. 

It is not surprising then that the Nautch women 

who came to the U.S. during this time have been 

written out of both U.S. and Indian dance histories. 

My argument in this paper is threefold. Firstly, I 

suggest that although dance scholars have 

begun to acknowledge the bodies of people of 

colour who have contributed to American modern 

dance, 14 far more work needs to be done to 

interrogate the effects of intercultural connections. 

I argue that a re-examination of the inception 

of modern dance in Oriental dance reveals 

the labour of transnational dancing women and 

THE BODIES BENEATH THE SMOKE/SRINIVASAN 9 

men from India that has been rendered invisible 

thus calling the ‘national’ and modernist project 

of American dance into question. 15 A focus on 

women dancers as labourers complicates understandings 

of the history of gendered immigrant 

labour in the U.S. and points to the transnational 

connections that are constitutive of key elements 

in U.S. cultural formations. While labour histories 

have focused on Asian 16 and Indian immigrants 

contribution to political, cultural, and economic 

formations of the U.S. in the early twentieth century, 

very few studies examine women’s labour 17. 

I therefore point out that an examination of 

Indian women dancers as labouring bodies complicates 

previous gendered labour histories of 

cultural formation. 

Secondly, I argue for an examination of kinesthetic 

contact between dancing women and the 

discourses of living, breathing texts produced by 

dancing bodies rather than a singular focus on 

the written text, a term I call the ‘bodily 

archive.’ 18 The significance of bodily contact and 

the subsequent kinesthetic exchange between 

St. Denis and the Nautch dancers must be highlighted. 

19 I suggest an examination of discourses 

by, and through the body by focusing on its 

corpo-realities, where bodily reality is ‘not as natural 

or absolute given but as a tangible and substantial 

category of cultural experience’ (Foster, 

1995, p. 11). Such a focus on the performing 

body as its own archive would reveal alternate 

understandings of dance practices in North 

America. 

Thirdly, I suggest that a focus on gendered, bodily 

discourses and practices opens another 

archive in interrogating Orientalism. Following 

Edward Said (1979), discussions of Orientalism 



have largely focused on literature to examine 

knowledge and power. 20 It is here, then, that I 

ask what happens to the theory of Orientalism 

when corpo-realities are made central to the 

investigation of colonialism (in this case U.S. 

imperialism), knowledge and power? I argue that 

contradictions and racist overtones that have 

been sidelined previously in North American 

Orientalist discourse come to light. The violence 

of North American Orientalism and its racist 

underpinnings have left marks on corpo-realities 

both through enactments of immigration policies 

of exclusion and through representational and 

discursive control. A close analysis of St. Denis’ 

early performances reveals a deep imbrication 

within the violence of Orientalist discourse. 

Rather than just focus on the ‘spiritual,’ I ask 

what an examination of the ‘material’ can do for 

our understandings of St. Denis’ performance. 

I argue that the violence of discourse can be felt 

at the bodily level, here in terms of the corporeal 

traces left through bodily encounters. I therefore 

turn to a materialist reading of the body’s labour. 

I locate Nautch women’s practices within a materialist 

discursive reading that focuses on labouring 

women’s bodies whose stories remain 

untold. I attempt to tell their story from another 

place that might allow us to see alternative readings 

of knowledge and power. I am informed by 

the work of third world feminist scholars such as 

Chandra Mohanty (1991), Margo Okazawa-Rey 

(2004), and Piya Chatterjee (2001), who argue 

there can be no feminist analysis without a critique 

of Capital. I therefore argue that a feminist 

and materialist analysis of American dance history 

has to focus on the labour of poor and young 

women of colour (here, women dancers and 

their practices from India) traveling in the late 


nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus it 

is Nautch women’s costumed, labouring bodies 

that dance but whose work is rendered invisible 

and yet leaves a trace within the larger ideological 

and patriarchal framework of American 

Orientalism, imperialism, and modernism evidenced 

in contemporary modern dance practices 

through a kinesthetic haunting. I attempt to 

locate coloured dancing women and their stories 

within specific historical political economies and 

ask what kinds of performances, performance 

histories, and discourses are produced when the 

analysis begins with questions of gendered 

labour, knowledge, power, and access. In particular, 

I am interested in the ‘work’ that Indian performance 

practices produce in specific geopolitical 

and social locations on gendered, racialized 

bodies. 

Theoretically, I am informed by postcolonial and 

feminist scholars such as Gayatri Spivak who 

argues that feminist historiography’s key foundation 

is excavation, but that this process is always 

caught in a double bind. Spivak argues that ultimately 

the subaltern woman whose story has not 

been told in the official archive is always outside 

representation and, therefore, bringing her into 

representation evacuates her subaltern status 

(Spivak, 1999, p. 199). I acknowledge the impossibility 

of recovering or representing Nautch 

women as subjects in their own right. Rather, I 

take up the call of subaltern postcolonial scholars 

such as Spivak, Gyan Prakash, and Dipesh 

Chakrabarty to find the partial, fragmented, and 

hybrid subject within the ‘colonial,’ read here, as 

the imperialist U.S. archive. For example, Spivak 

argues that the subaltern subject only emerges 

when she is needed in the space of imperial production. 

As the historical record is made up, who

is dropped out, when and why is directly related 

to the imperatives of imperialism (Spivak, 1985). 

Few records remain of the Nautch women and 

Indian men except in relation to the Coney 

Island newspaper reports, and the vast collection 

of manuscripts, books, letters, and performance 

paraphernalia of Ruth St. Denis. Thus Indian 

women and men’s performance excavation is 

partial and can only be understood in relation to 

the St. Denis records framed within the larger 

imperatives of U.S. modernism, citizenship, and 

nationalism. 

Methodologically, I use tools provided by critical 

dance studies, third world feminist theory, and 

performance ethnography to tell a different story 

to the official records, from Nautch women’s perspectives. 

The writing of women’s histories and 

dance both involve employing frames of fiction 

in reconstructing the past. I piece together evidence 

from the lives of performers traveling at 

the time, re-read autobiographies, biographies, 

and dance articles of St. Denis, as well as newspaper 

reports of Coney Island, advertisements in 

various newspapers of the time, and the available 

film recordings. This includes newspapers 

such as The New York Times (NYT), New York 

Dramatic Mirror (NYDM), New York Daily News 

(NYDN), New York Evening Post (NYEP), 

Brooklyn Daily Eagle (BDE), New York Clipper 

(NYC), New York Herald (NYH), and New York 

American and Journal (NYAJ) from 1903-1905. 

The main film recording of St. Denis’ Radha 

(1906) is a reconstruction performed at Jacob’s 

Pillow in 1941. I acknowledge that there are historical 

gaps between her 1904 encounter with 

Nautch women, the 1906 performance of Radha, 

St. Denis’ tour of the Orient from 1925-1926, her 

autobiography published in 1939, the 1941 film 


of Radha, and Shelton’s biography in 1981. The 

multiple fabrications of history that take place in 

between must be acknowledged and thus any 

search for an objective Truth is impossible. On 

the evidence of photographs, newspaper 

accounts from 1906-1911, and St. Denis’ diary, I 

argue that kinesthetic encounters took place 

between St. Denis and the Nautch dancers 

which must have left traces in St. Denis’ body. 

Critical historical dance analysis is difficult at 

best because of the ephemerality of performance, 

but a focus on corporeality and kinesthetic 

exchange offers an opening for bodies who have 

been unaccounted for in text-based recoveries 

alone. I begin to tell Nautch women’s stories 

simultaneously acknowledging that telling these 

stories can always only be partial, filled with half 

truths, and at times, fictive. 21 In the process I am 

not creating another originary moment, or faulting 

St. Denis for a partial history, rather, I offer an 

alternative to the singular dominant history of 

the dance encounter between St. Denis and 

Indian Nautch women and men. 

The essay is written through multiple voices. 

Beginning with a critical analysis of dance scholars 

who have failed to account for the encounter, 

I move toward an ‘imagining’ of the dance 

encounter between St. Denis and the Nautch 

women and offer insights based on newspaper 

reports from New York, historical records from 

India, 22 and miscellaneous archival material. I 

offer a first person narrative account using two 

Nautch women’s voices. I frame one voice within 

a phenomenological perspective drawing from 

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the active, involved 

body in its analysis of perception. I use Merleau- 

Ponty’s notion of the active, involved body to 

cast a Nautch dancer as she might have experi- 



enced her performance in Coney Island. In this 

process, I imagine this Nautch dancer as one 

whose body senses, feels, experiences, thinks, 

and is socialized but I cast her as a figure ‘in the 

moment’ as she experiences her reality 

(Merleau-Ponty, 2002). The second voice has a 

more critical, postcolonial, and dystopic edge. 

This perspective is decidedly postcolonial. The 

voice is fragmented, multivalent in meaning, 

capitalistic, and offers a view that looks at history 

from the contemporary moment. I place these 

two voices in dialogic relation to autobiographical 

notes from St. Denis. Pivotal to this dialogue 

between St. Denis and the Nautch women are 

the brief mentions of the latter in the autobiography 

of the former. Since so little has been written 

about the Coney Island Durbar performance, 

I provide a perspective of what the dancers 

might have looked like amidst the larger spectacle. 

I also offer a possible dialogue between St. 

Denis and the Indian male performers who performed 

on stage with her. Two of the men who 

accompanied St. Denis on her tours are mentioned 

by name in her records; another, who is 

not mentioned by name, is referred to as a 

Columbia University Student. I create an imaginary 

dialogue between St. Denis and these three 

Indian men. Focusing on key moments of 

exchange gleaned from St. Denis’ autobiography 

and Shelton’s biography, I offer a different 

view of their encounter. By providing multiple 

perspectives, I attempt to de-center a unitary 

subjectivity, or any insights into a singular Truth. 

In the next section of the essay, I ask what the 

larger socio-political impact of not accounting 

for the labour of these Indian performing bodies 

has in terms of the control over discourse and 

representation. In the final section, I suggest that 

the invisibilization of Nautch women and Indian 


men’s labour has been made possible because 

of the State’s racist implementation of immigration 

policies, but that their impact has also been 

erased because of the imperatives of North 

American modernism. 

In effect, this essay challenges the current dance 

history accounts that do not allow room for the 

possibility that multiple labouring bodies interacting 

kinesthetically with one another can create 

new dance forms, rather than emerging from 

an individual genius/choreographer who magically 

creates movement either through research 

in a library or due to a spiritual reaction to an 

image on a poster. Accounting for this bodily 

labour ruptures simplistic essentialist origin 

myths that aspire to pure beginnings and, 

instead, unearths the potential to rethink dance, 

women and labour history in America as a complex 

and rich amalgam of forms and processes. 

THE ORIGINARY MOMENT FOR AMERICAN 

MODERN DANCE: A CIGARETTE POSTER? 

Dance scholars such as Uttara Coorlawala (1992), 

Jane Desmond (1991), Joan Erdman (1996), 

Deborah Jowitt (1989), Mohan Khokar (1961), and 

Suzanne Shelton (1981) to name a few, note the 

fact that St. Denis saw Nautch dancers at Coney 

Island during the summer of 1904. But they then 

dismiss this encounter as insignificant and focus 

instead on a cigarette poster as the Ur text that 

inspired St. Denis. I refer here metaphorically to 

the cigarette poster featuring an Egyptian deity 

that has blown smoke over the Nautch women 

themselves since it is the single most cited reference 

pertaining to St. Denis’ emergence as a choreographer. 

Perhaps these writers were influenced 

by St. Denis’ autobiography where St. Denis attributes 

her beginnings to her reaction to the poster:

I saw a modernized and most un-Egyptian 

figure of the goddess Isis. She was sitting on 

a throne, framed by a sort of pylon. At her 

feet were the waters of the Nile with lotus 

growing. . . . Lying on my bed, looking at 

this strange instrument of fate, I identified 

myself in a flash with the figure of Isis. . . I 

knew that my destiny as a dancer had 

sprung alive in that moment (St. Denis, 

1939, p. 52). 

The passage suggests that individual genius 

sprang out of an intense reaction to a commercial, 

Orientalist poster purporting to represent 

an Egyptian deity. Although the image is pure 

fantasy, St. Denis identifies with a deity she considers 

to be Isis. I argue that while the poster 

may have inspired St. Denis, it is the bodily 

encounter with Coney Island dancers that actually 

enables her to create her first piece. She 

returns to her original idea of Egypta in 1910 

inspired by the poster only after she completes 

Radha, Snake Charmer, and Incense pieces in 

1906. 

The other attribution to St. Denis’ genius that is 

often mentioned in countless dance writings is 

her research abilities even though St. Denis herself 

admits the Coney Island spectacle captivated 

her – in particular the snake charmers and 

Nautch dancers. In her autobiography she 

admits: ‘When I reached home that evening I had 

determined to create one or two Nautch dances, 

in imitation of these whirling skirted damsels…. 

with these I was sure I would find some vaudeville 

bookings’ (St. Denis, 1939, p. 56). Suzanne 

Shelton, St. Denis’ biographer, views the Nautch 

dancers as non-sequitors who merely propelled 

St. Denis’ research in the Astor Library. 


She had in mind something like the Indian 

dances she had seen the previous summer 

at Coney Island, where the world-famous 

durbar, or gathering of Indian potentates, 

was reproduced as an East Indian sideshow, 

complete with rajahs, snake-charmers, and 

nautch girls. Looking for information on 

India, Ruthie went to the Astor Library 

where, in true Belasco fashion, she 

researched her ideas (Shelton, 1981, p. 50; 

my emphasis). 

As this passage demonstrates, Shelton suggests 

that St. Denis researched her ideas from textual 

sources and emerged a genius in the performance 

piece she subsequently created. Nautch 

women’s bodily encounter with St. Denis is 

therefore marginalized in this account. 

Interestingly, dance critic Deborah Jowitt (1989) 

remarks that St. Denis herself admitted to a 

reporter in 1905 that she had been influenced by 

the Coney Island dancers (p. 131). However, 

Jowitt seems to suggest that St. Denis did not 

believe this to be an encounter that was authentic 

enough to truly influence her work. Dance 

scholars who focus on Indian dance such as 

Mohan Khokar, Uttara Coorlawala, and Joan 

Erdman support the view that the Nautch 

women were not significant to U.S. dance formation. 

Instead they look toward the influence that 

Western dance has had on Indian dance revival 

particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Since Indian 

nationalist history has sought to erase Western 

connections in Indian dance, Khokar, Coorlawala, 

and Erdman’s contributions are significant in 

redressing this imbalance. However, in the 

process, Erdman ends up arguing for an originary 

moment for Indian dance in Western dance 

that closes possibilities for exchange between 



India and the West prior to 1920s. It is also the 

privileging of the ‘classical’ that forms her argument 

for an originary moment in Europe 23: 

While it is true that twentieth-century Indian 

dance is a historical consequence of the idea 

of oriental dance, which did in fact originate 

in Europe, the dialogue between oriental 

dance (European) and classical dance 

(Indian) was a complex interchange of 

expectations and discovery. Actual Indian 

dance influenced programs of western 

artistes only after their interest in the feminine 

divine principle and in the play of the 

gods provoked Ruth St. Denis and prima 

ballerina Anna Pavlova to seek authentic 

Indian dance and dancers in India in the 

1920s (Erdman, 1996, p. 290). 

Erdman’s account completely dismisses Nautch 

women (perhaps because their dance would not 

be considered classical) and does not problematize 

Euro-American Oriental female dancers’ 

practices. While Jane Desmond (1991) offers an 

insightful feminist psychoanalytic critique of 

colonialism, Orientalism, and sexuality in St. 

Denis’ work, she does not consider evidence of 

St. Denis’ visit to the Coney Island spectacle. 

Thus, Desmond, along with other dance scholars, 

has failed to examine the brown coloured 

female bodies ‘beneath the smoke’ of the cigarette 

poster. 24 In rethinking the previous dance 

scholarship of this encounter, I use a postcolonial 

lens that reads the biography and autobiography 

of St. Denis with ambivalence that allows for 

multiple possibilities by privileging the corporeal 

dance encounter. 


IMAGINING THE DANCE ENCOUNTER 

Ruth St. Denis was one of the millions visiting 

New Coney in the summer of 1904. The Nautch 

dancers didn’t really take notice of this one white 

woman among the many throngs who passed by 

and therefore never really understood the full 

impact they had made. They too returned to 

India eventually, never knowing they had 

sparked such a future for American dance. Or 

perhaps they did. Let us imagine for a moment 

the view from another side. Let us ask the 

Nautch women what they saw in this bodily 

exchange. Did they know who St. Denis was? 

Might they have realized the impact they were 

making on the millions of visitors who saw them 

at Coney Island (NYT, 1904, p. 3)? In the following 

section I place the voices of St. Denis and 

the Nautch women in dialogic relation to imagine 

what the encounter might have entailed from 

another perspective. While postcolonial scholars 

like Edward Said and Wole Soyinka have been 

critical of ‘nativism’ or ‘return to the past’ 

because of the romanticization of the past (precolonization, 

pre-dislocation), they also acknowledge 

the creative and progressive potential in 

the critical search and reconstruction of the past. 

It could be argued that there is a danger of 

fetishization, or re-Orientalization akin to St. 

Denis’ own practices in trying to re-imagine the 

encounter from the Nautch women’s perspective. 

I argue developing Hayden White’s (1987) 

notion that history is akin to fiction in its methods 

and tasks, that historical reality as we view it 

in the established biography and autobiography 

of St. Denis, is in itself a fabrication of representation. 

Ultimately, it is my voice that speaks for 

Nautch women and thus, I add to the fabrication 

of representation of historical construction. My

voice comes from a critical, anti-imperialist perspective 

that has not been imagined in the onesided 

encounter thus far in order to displace the 

dominant voices that have structured history. For 

this purpose, I turn to Savigliano’s (1995) notion 

of auto-exoticism as a way to critically re-think, 

re-imagine, and subsequently, auto-Orientalize, 

‘with a difference.’ I offer a deconstructive 

method that takes into account my own complicity 

in the project of an impossible recovery. I lay 

bare the notion that my representation of 

Nautch women is the inter-subjective encounter 

between my body and the archive. 

During these days someone took me down to 

Coney Island. I was mildly intrigued by the sights 

and sounds, but my whole attention was not 

captured until I came to an East Indian village 

which had been brought over in its entirety by 

the owners of the Hippodrome. Here, for the 

first time, I saw snake charmers and holy men 

and Nautch dancers, and something of the 

remarkable fascination of India caught hold of 

me (St. Denis, 1939, p. 55). 

Where are we now? They have taken us from the 

shipyard to a strange city. It is an island with large 

machines, and buildings. This is our new home. The 

great turrets vaguely resemble the mosques back 

home. Of course these are not made of white marble 

but something else altogether. We assemble daily 

under these towers and then make our way behind 

the Himalayan mountain facade to begin our show. 

The durbar, Durbar of Delhi, is what they call it. It is 

indeed a large gathering meant to emulate the durbar 

gathering of 1903 in India. 25 All the great kings and 

princes of India bowed down before the Viceroy. The 

great white Emperor sitting in London sent them a 

message. 


He was grateful all right, to have them included as his 

loyal subjects. Who wouldn’t want six hundred million 

Indians as his subjects? 

The show was beautiful I hear and it included 

elephants and jewels, crowns and necklaces, 

dances and songs, horses and camels. 

So here we are performing that submission over and 

over again. This time to hordes and hordes of white 

Americans – men, women, children who cannot get 

enough of us. Daily there are thousands of them who 

come to see us. 26 They gasp when they see us for the 

first time as they walk between the elephants and 

watch the street pageant. We move too, along with the 

pageant. The horses and the soldiers, the musicians and 

the ‘princes.’ There we are in a corner behind the snake 

charmer and jugglers. Of course the snake charmers 

are of interest to the children and some women. But the 

men are not interested in them. They eagerly file in to 

look at us. They ogle us daily, hoping to see our brown 

skin. Our bodies excite them just by their very colour, 

and of course because our midriffs are bare, we are 

even more delectable. See them ooze from their mouths 

and the sweat pour from their brows… 

There was a woman whom I believe is more 

interested in us than even the men. She has 

come to see our performances more times than 

most of the others. She nodded her head at me 

clearly wanting to communicate in spite of our 

language barrier, then folded her hands awkwardly 

in namaste. She even touched my skirt 

as if trying to take the feel of the material into 

her very self. Her curiosity seems to go beyond 

the passing fascination of the rest. She was paying 

very close attention to everything. Her eyes 

were filled with desire. An idea was blossoming 

in her mind and she was going to burst if she 



didn’t do something about it… Ek gori ladki mere 

aankhon ke saamne rehthi hai… 

You are crazy, there was no such woman. Many of them 

were so scared of us they never even came close. 

Besides there were hundreds and thousands of these 

white people and some black, even a few Chinese, 

Filipino, and Japanese people that walked past. How 

could you possibly remember one strange woman? 

No I remember her well. She looked very young 

and yet her hair already seemed to be turning 

white. She came with another woman, a friend 

perhaps. Besides, when she visited us the second 

time, I saw her try and move her body the 

way we did. She even tapped her foot and 

clapped her hands to the rhythm of our drums. I 

saw her looking very curiously at my ankle bells. 

What I remember most was that she waited till 

after we were finished and came to me with a 

mudra formed in her hand. She showed me she 

was trying to do what we were doing and she 

was asking me through gesture language 

whether she was doing it correctly. I showed her 

how to hold the mudra correctly and she seemed 

very pleased. She left that day holding that 

mudra tightly. Not wanting to let it go for fear she 

might not remember how to do it again. 

I repeat, there was no such woman. You are imagining 

it. There were hundreds and thousands of people that 

filtered past us each day. Many were interested in the 

elephants and of course the fire engine and the ‘police’ 

(NYAJ, 19 June 1904). I remember the children who 

were so excited by all the noise. Do you remember that 

boy who almost got trampled by an elephant? His mother 

was furious with the owners of Coney and made a 

complaint. I wonder if they kept her quiet by paying her 

off. I never did see anything about it in the papers. 


When I reached home that evening I had determined 

to create one or two Nautch dances, in 

imitation of these whirling skirted damsels, and 

possibly a Japanese number, a faint echo of 

Mme. Sadi Yaco (sic.). With these I was sure I 

would find some vaudeville bookings and, with 

the money earned, produce Egypta. I was very 

happy over my decision, and went the next day 

to the Astor Library to do a little research in 

Nautch costumes (St. Denis, 1939, p. 55). 

She seemed different when she came the third 

time. She had come with a pen and pieces of 

paper and brought an older woman and man 

with her. Perhaps it was her mother and her 

brother? They all seemed so friendly. The man 

tried taking pictures of us with a camera but it 

didn’t seem to work and he was quite upset 

about it. But she was not upset. She smiled and 

tried to converse with me. She asked me to do 

some poses holding my skirt out and then she 

wanted me to do my chakkars, so I spun around 

and around so many times. She loved watching 

that and wanted to see it again and again. She 

drew pictures of us all the while. They were all 

so attentive and seemed so interested in us. 

Of course they seemed interested. They were probably 

trying to figure out a way they could make money out of 

what we were doing. Who knows maybe they went 

home and made costumes like ours to sell to other 

white women, or maybe they used the drawings and 

sold them to interested people. It seems to me that all 

these white people who walk past and watch us every 

day are very, very curious about us. So it is quite possible 

you did see this woman but I’m sure you’ll never 

see her again now that she has what she wants. Here 

comes another group. We better get ready to dance. I

know we can get their attention. Whether it is because 

of our strangeness or difference, or their fascination 

with our lives, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll get some tips 

from the men, that’s what I’m interested in. 

Our musicians begin. We do a simple piece. 

Starting with a slow four beat rhythm we slap our 

feet and our bells jingle. This often brings on 

laughter and delight with children. A simple four 

beat count with bells jingling, that’s all we need 

to do. I’ve noticed during our performances that 

the adults don’t become interested till we start 

some chakkars and turn again and again with 

our skirts flying out in the air. They are fascinated 

with our footwork and the way the gungroo 

creates a music of its own. Maybe they like the 

mudras our hands create during the dance. You 

know when we do the thumri piece on Krishna, 

they seem to be really fascinated by that. They 

are probably not used to women who dance and 

sing. I have seen the wonderment in so many 

faces. Ek gori ladki mere aankhon ke saamne 

rehthi hai… 

Well why wouldn’t they like what we do? We are very 

good, some of the finest talents that money can buy. 

That Mr. Thompson knew what he was doing when he 

brought us over. We are making him some big money! I 

hear they charge 25¢ just for our show so think of the 

overall profit! Look at these thousands that come here 

every single day. 

I remember the white haired woman taking a 

very keen interest when we performed the thumri. 

Her eyes lit up bright and sparkling. I even saw a 

tear in her eye. She seemed to be very moved 

by what we were doing. I wondered why she 

was so interested especially when there was a 

language barrier between us. How did she 


understand what we were doing? Did she realize 

this was a dance for Krishna that we were performing 

in the streets of Luna Park? There was 

so much chaos, noise, and activity. Why was 

she able to connect to our dance in this way? I 

mean there were many people who returned to 

see us perform, of that I am sure but this one 

was different. She seemed like a kindred spirit. 

Who knows? These people are so strange. The strangest 

of things seem to fascinate them. Look they are not 

really interested in our dances but more interested in 

our costumes and the colour of our skin. They are curious 

about what we eat and how we sleep and talk. I 

think they believe this is how we live our lives, on the 

streets, singing and dancing, eating and sleeping. 

Ek gori ladki mere aankhon ke saamne rehthi 

hai… The white haired one was very interested 

in my dances not just my costume…The white 

lady remains in front of my eyes. 

The evidence about Nautch women’s performances 

at Coney Island is contradictory. St. Denis’ 

diary and autobiography indicate there was a 

definite encounter with dancing girls from India 

in Coney Island as part of an East Indian village 

in the summer of 1904. Her accounts are brief 

but significant. St. Denis describes the quality of 

the dancing and the costumes she saw and 

admits that she was influenced by her encounter. 

It is important to note St. Denis’ own admission 

that she experienced Nautch dance practice and 

all its physicality first-hand and this fueled her 

fascination, leading to her research of Nautch 

costumes in the library. If we pay attention to 

what St. Denis actually says, we begin to understand 

the materialist dimensions to her desire. 

She encounters live dancing bodies whom she 



blatantly desires to imitate for several reasons. 

She astutely recognizes that fascination for India 

set aside, she stands to make substantial economic 

gain by performing imitations of these live 

dance forms for vaudeville audiences. 

Understanding the market for various kinds of 

Orientalia, she imagines herself becoming successful 

in performing her own Orientalist desire 

for others thus garnering cultural capital. St. 

Denis believed she was witnessing an authentic 

‘East Indian village’ of Indians who were not performing 

but in fact really ‘living’ as they normally 

would in their homeland. 27 Perhaps we can think 

of St. Denis as a dance anthropologist who was 

really re-staging ‘the natives’ for widespread 

American public consumption. 

In her own accounts of the creation of her 

dances, particularly Incense (1906), St. Denis 

admits she did not know how everything came 

together: 

My first Indian dance was a jumble of everything 

I was aware of in Indian art, but with 

little sense of balance and continuity. Ideas 

came in a stream and from quite unrelated 

sources… I thought in terms of scenes and 

not of technical virtuosity. Mother and I 

moved our bits of toast about to indicate 

where the Indian water carrier came in and 

spoke to the fruit seller, where the merchant’s 

stall was, and where the brass seller 

squatted to watch the snake charmer’s exhibition 

(St. Denis, 1939, p. 56; my emphasis). 

In her own words, St. Denis acknowledges her 

ideas came from quite unrelated sources. Of 

particular note is her admission of interest in 


‘scenes.’ These scenes seem to reflect many elements 

in the Coney Island show she had witnessed 

and yet she gives no credit to the source. 

Newspaper reports of the time gush and revel in 

exoticism over the spectacle created at Coney 

Island and reflect the ‘scenes’ St. Denis 

describes: 

There was the Vice Royal palace in the city 

that had been reproduced in miniature, and 

a pageant of Oriental splendor was presented. 

There were guilded chariots and prancing 

horses, and trained elephants and dancing 

girls, regiments of soldiers, and an 

astonishing number of real Eastern people 

and animals in gay and stately trappings… 

In fact there was a charm about the streets 

of Delhi that kept the people spellbound 

until the exhibition ended. Five thousand 

people at a time saw this remarkable show, 

and then went back to see it a second time 

(NYT, 8 May 1904, p. 5). 

There are only brief mentions of the Nautch 

dancers. The spectacle as a whole with animals 

and the sheer numbers of costumed people captured 

this journalist’s interest. But for St. Denis, it 

was the Nautch women who mattered the most, 

even though she conveniently forgets their significance 

and focuses instead on the larger spectacle 

itself. 

An interview with Thompson (an impresario of 

Luna Park) reveals that Indian performers along 

with elephants had left Calcutta, India via ships 

in April 1904 and were expected to arrive in New 

York for the summer opening of Coney Island 

before May 7th (BDE, 10 April 1904, p. 5). It is 

remarkable that Thompson was able to secure a

contract with dancers to bring them to New York 

particularly when ‘traditional’ dance and dancers 

were under attack in India. Newspaper reports 

and first-hand accounts of the Durbar of Delhi 

spectacle offer slightly different information 

about the whole spectacle. While some reports 

refer to the dancers as part of a procession, others 

suggest they were viewed as a separate 

show. Photographs of the procession offering 

partial views also suggest the order in which 

Nautch performers might have been viewed. 

Apart from one or two brief accounts, we do not 

know what the dancing looked like or what was 

being performed. Using this piecemeal material, 

I offer a possible view of how the dancers might 

have been seen in relation to the larger spectacle. 

The audience is under a grandstand and in front 

of them is a city street. On one side of it is a 

mosque resembling the ‘Taj Mahal,’ and the 

street is lined with bazaars that sell spices and 

trinkets that would be seen in the ‘real’ streets of 

Delhi (NYAJ, 19 June 1904, p. 16-17). In the distance, 

the Himalayan mountain backdrop can be 

seen and this is where the parade begins. The 

six female Nautch dancers lead the parade ‘brilliant 

in reds and yellows, with sloe eyes and 

graceful bodies,’ and they bend from side to 

side, swaying and moving slowly to the music 

(NYAJ, 19 June 1904). Behind them comes a procession 

of elephants with Indian male mahouts. 

The elephants are decorated with silk and velvet 

saddle-cloths (NYDN, 20 March 1904, p. 10). 

Howdahs were mounted on top brought straight 

from India covered with over two thousand brilliant 

lights that sparkle and dazzle at night, but it 

is daytime now and it is not the same as the 

evening show. Winding their way down the main 

street of Luna Park steered by their mahouts and 


the ‘rajahs’ seated on them, the elephants are 

followed by chariots, soldiers on horses, soldiers 

on foot, and then camels. Musicians, acrobats, 

jugglers, snake charmers, ‘artisans,’ and ‘yogis’ 

are in the rear of the procession dressed in reds 

and yellows matching the colour of the roofs and 

buildings of Luna Park (NYT, 8 May 1904; NYT, 15 

May 1904; NYAJ, 19 June 1904; BDE, 10 April 

1904). Thus in performing for the ‘Durbar of 

Delhi,’ the dancers would have created a spectacle 

in accompanying snake charmers, jugglers, 

‘holy men,’ and elephants, among others (NYT, 8 

May 1904, p. 2; Shelton, 1981, p.50; St. Denis, 

1939, p. 55). 

As the parade fills up the ‘Streets of Delhi,’ right 

in front of them, the audience is treated to a 

short five-minute performance by dancers, musicians, 

jugglers, and snake charmers. In the background 

are merchants selling their wares in the 

bazaars – this too is part of the overall performance. 

The dancers are no longer moving in procession, 

but instead, stand in two rows and perform 

in front of the bazaars on one side. They 

start rhythmic patterns with their feet following 

the sound of the drummer who accompanies 

them. They start spinning and their skirts fly out 

in the wind. They are indeed eye catching and 

together with the snake charmers seem to be the 

center of attraction. All eyes are riveted on them 

except for the children who are distracted by the 

elephants trumpeting in line behind the performers. 

As the dancers finish their piece, they move 

into the background and mingle with the folks in 

the bazaar. The parade ends with elephants sliding 

down the chutes in to the water below 

thrilling the crowd (NYAJ, 15 May 1904). 

It is possible that the dances the Nautch women 

were doing could have been simple versions of 



tatkar (rhythmic footwork) or tukde (combinations 

of rhythmic footwork, hand movements, 

and turns), which are aspects of folk dance and 

the Kathak repertoire. 28 One in particular 

involved rhythm and series of fast turns and 

spins which is what perhaps caught St. Denis’ 

attention and is mentioned in her diary and 

biography as ‘the whirling skirted damsels.’ The 

dancers were most likely wearing skirts that 

would fly out when they spun on their heels. 

Their hands formed mudras, gestures used only 

for aesthetic purposes. It is also unlikely that the 

dancers performed the more complex, expressional 

aspects of their repertoire such as thumris 

which interpret text that is sung to facial and 

bodily expressions. 29 But it is possible that the 

dancers did use facial expression and some elements 

of mime in their performance, and perhaps 

even interpreted a bhajan (a primarily 

mimetic devotional piece). This could explain St. 

Denis’ conflation of Indian dances with an essentialized 

spirituality that then became a hallmark 

of her own work. 

St. Denis’ own creation of the dance performance 

pieces Incense (1906) and Nautch (1908) 

reflected many of these elements. While St. 

Denis may not have trained with these dancers 

formally, she did in fact have kinesthetic contact 

that influences her creations, albeit as a receptive 

audience member. St. Denis was particularly 

articulate with her hands and fingers. Her performance 

comprised elements of posing, followed 

by turns, and a shuffling walk. Several 

aspects of what St. Denis saw among the Coney 

Island Nautch dancers, such as the tukde along 

with the use of mudras and use of facial expression, 

emerged repeatedly in many of her choreographies 

including Snake Charmer (1906), 


Incense (1906), Dance of the Black/Gold Sari 

(1913). As Shelton (1981) writes: 

Ruth had seen nautch girls at Coney Island, 

and she added her own hijinks to their basic 

dance…Through the years St. Denis’ Nautch 

evolved into half-dozen different 

dances…but always the basic ingredients 

were Ruth’s character acting, her head-isolations, 

enticing arms, skirt manipulations, 

whirling, drumming feet, and the tinkle of 

ankle bells (p. 81). 

She could not have easily gotten these elements 

from her book ‘research’ of Orientalist texts 

alone. I am not arguing however that kinesthetic 

contact with the Nautch women is the only 

means through which St. Denis created her 

dances. Obviously her own training in Delsarte 

technique, in Genevieve Stebbins’s work (also 

derived from Delsarte), her focus on yoga practice, 

and her viewing of the Japanese artist, 

Sadayakko Kawakami may have all contributed 

to her creations and all of these influences call 

attention to corporeal interactions as the basis of 

St. Denis’ work. 

The Nautch dancers most likely returned to India 

and we do not know what became of them. 30 

The anti-Nautch campaign was in full swing in 

India due to colonial and national pressures, and 

soon most dancing women were forced to leave 

their art form behind and turn to other professions. 

They simultaneously disappeared from 

both North American and Indian dance archives 

just as St. Denis’ career took off. In the tradition 

of Orientalism, St. Denis’ performances became 

perceived as the creative imaginings of a white 

bourgeois American woman. For countless

American audiences of the time and for subsequent 

dance writers, it was easier to imagine and 

desire Indian practices as foreign elements coming 

from afar than as first-hand bodily encounters 

between women. Despite the actual presence 

of Nautch bodies in Coney Island, the work 

of Orientalism serves to hide the face-to-face 

encounter in favor of the imagined one and 

enabled St. Denis’ career to thrive. 

In her earlier performances, the press and audiences 

alike mistook St. Denis for a Hindu 

princess, Hindu dancer, or even a Native 

American performer (Shelton, 1981, p. 53). For 

example, when Mrs. Fish, an eccentric, but powerful 

New York hostess, invited St. Denis ‘and her 

Hindus to dance in her mansion’ in 1906, the 

press believed they were American Indians 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 53). She used all these 

Orientalist misidentifications to aid her career, 

both for economic profit and cultural capital, 

and performed the role of the ‘Hindu dancer’ 

extremely well. It is clear from her autobiography 

that St. Denis was very aware of her own participation 

in the racialized economy of the time. 

She contributed to, and marketed herself, in this 

economy through her performance of ‘brownface’ 

in the beginning of her concert performances 

where she covered her face, arms and legs 

with brown paint. The ‘brownface’ show was 

hardly contested, and was instead embraced by 

the New York public (St. Denis, 1939, p. 71). 31 

In the tradition of Orientalism, St. Denis was 

seizing control of the representation of the 

Indian ‘other’ and reconfiguring their dance 

practice through her own frameworks. She participated 

in the rhetoric of mistaken ethnicity, 

and played on these performance ‘mis-’ tropes 


for her own end. St. Denis, in her performances, 

conflated her own body with a brown Indian 

woman and played on mistaken identities, collapsing 

the character she performed on stage 

with herself. Interestingly, it was her mother who 

reminds her she was not an Indian, but an 

American dancer: 

Up until now we’ve called you Radha. But as 

you’re going to do other things, I think you 

ought to use your own name. After all, you 

are an American dancer, and not an East 

Indian. What was it that Belasco used to call 

you? Wasn’t it Saint Denis?’ (St. Denis, 1939, 

p. 68) 

Mother Denis rightly suggests to St. Denis that 

she had the ability to stage various kinds of 

Orientals and must not risk being associated 

with one Oriental woman over another. This set 

the stage for St. Denis’ other Asian pieces. 

Throughout her career, St. Denis staged various 

dance practices from Japan, China, Thailand, 

and Indonesia, to name a few. Like other 

Orientalists who collect Asian objects, St. Denis 

became a curator of Asian artistic practices, but 

unlike other collectors, she housed, displayed, 

and re-choreographed them in, on, and through 

her own body. 

Capitalizing on the desire for Asian goods and 

philosophies, and by using her body as a site for 

Oriental desire, and aided by several Indian men 

to authenticate her work, St. Denis enabled 

white North American audiences to experience 

the ‘other,’ in a safe way. The multiple valences 

through which the discourse of Orientalism 

operated perhaps enabled St. Denis to perform 

as an ‘authentic’ Indian dancing girl because it 



was easier to imagine the ‘native’ through the 

white American woman’s body than the ‘real’ 

Nautch woman herself. 32 St. Denis thus familiarized 

the unknown and domesticated the foreign, 

even polluted body 33 of the Oriental ‘other’ and 

made her performance safer for American audiences, 

all the while aided by Indian male performers, 

whose performances have also not 

been recognized in St. Denis’ career. 34 

THE VIOLENCE OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM 

(I): SEIZING REPRESENTATION: THE BROWN 

MALE BODIES BENEATH THE SMOKE 

RSD: I imagine that many of the turns that followed 

me were concerned with ribaldry and not 

art, for when the curtains rose and one of the 

Hindus entered the temple bearing an incense 

tray on his upturned palm it was too much for 

this audience and one of them, in a rich Negro 

dialect, called out, ‘Who wants de Waitah?’ They 

roared at this and I could see my Hindu priests 

stiffening under this ridicule (St. Denis, 1939, p. 

65). 35 

Ismail: What a horrible night. I was shocked we 

had to put up with this, and that too on stage. 

Those men smoking their cigars and reclining 

their feet on tables and shouting rudely at us. 

Who do they think they are? 

Khan: Well they are big white men. They own this 

country. We have no choice but to live by their 

rules. I am only doing this for Brother Denis. He’s 

such a nice fellow. He asked me to come be a 

part of this to help his sister. So here I am. 

CS: Don’t they know we are visitors from India? 

Show some respect! I mean I’m a student at 

Columbia University. I’m not going to put up 


with this treatment. I’m from Bharat. I’m brown, 

not black. 

Ismail: Arre bhai. Just relax. These people are 

just ignorant and ignorance breeds contempt. 

They don’t know what to make of us. They know 

nothing of geography or where we are from. 

They don’t know what we are doing here or anything 

about our background. They don’t know 

you are Hindu and I’m Muslim. It is all about the 

colour of our skins. I suppose that is the reality 

here, what with all the slaves they brought over. 

Black men and women were only emancipated 

late last century and there’s still so much prejudice 

towards them. Why does it surprise you that 

they are rude to us too? We are all the same to 

them and if you are going to be here for a while 

to study you better get used to it. 

CS: I expected that Miss Dennis would say 

something to stop them from harassing us. But 

she said nothing. That really disappoints me. 

Khan: Why should that upset you? Why do you 

expect anything from any of these people? Tell 

him Ismail, not to get so upset. We need to 

band together and stay strong. 

Ismail: Arre, Khan bhai, you are both right and 

wrong. Look at me. I came here to do a show a 

few years ago and stayed on. That’s why I teach 

this woman what I know of our dances. I have no 

choice because I need the money to continue 

living here. But you do have a choice. Do what 

you feel is right. Khan is right and we must band 

together, but each one of us must make his own 

decision. There are not enough of us to make 

any real difference to the system here. We can 

do nothing but fend for ourselves.

CS: You’re right. I was ready to walk off that 

stage when that rude man called out to us. In 

fact I’m done. I’m not going to perform here any 

more. It is just too demeaning. I’m sure she 

doesn’t really need me in this performance. I 

could use the money too, but I’m not that desperate 

to tolerate this rudeness. She has all of 

you anyway. But you know I don’t think she will 

go very far with this dance. I mean the nachwalis 

from Coney Island didn’t go anywhere. 

Ismail: You’re forgetting something. They were 

dark skinned and this woman is white and she is 

a native of this country. She will be treated like a 

queen and they will love her. She will become a 

great dancer. Mark my words, this woman will go 

very far with her dances. She is very good at 

learning things. All I have to do is show her once 

and she remembers it right away and repeats it 

exactly. What a memory! Soon she might come 

to India and teach us about our own dances. 

We’ll be dead and gone but she will continue. I 

wouldn’t be surprised at all. That’s the way this 

world works. 

By now, as you will see, I had expanded my 

plans to include super-numeraries. My intense 

interest in India had sent me into the byways of 

New York and I collected a little company, which 

used to meet in our flat to rehearse two or three 

times a week. They were of all varietiesóHindus, 

Moslems (sic), Buddhists. Some were clerks 

from shops, some were students at Columbia, 

and one or two were unmistakable ne’er-dowells 

(St. Denis, 1939, p. 56). 

In the early years, the key issue for St. Denis was 

trying to market her ‘authenticity.’ As evidenced 

by reviews and her own autobiography, St. Denis 


did not perform by herself on stage and often 

had an entourage of ‘natives.’ These were men 

who formed part of the set design to perpetuate 

the myth of authenticity as she moved between 

different stage spaces. 36 Yet official records of St. 

Denis’ performance mark her as a solo artist, 

that is until she met Ted Shawn and formed a 

dance company. For example, Christena 

Schlundt’s (1962) chronology of St. Denis and 

Ted Shawn’s performance lists all of the former’s 

performances as solo events until she met the 

latter in 1911. Although Schlundt (1962, 14) 

includes a photograph of St. Denis with three 

Indian male performers on stage, she still bills St. 

Denis as a soloist, that is: ‘American Tour of East 

Indian Dances, 1909-1910: Ruth St. Denis, 

Soloist.’ 37 Thus the Indian men are not seen as 

performing bodies, let alone artists, in most 

accounts of St. Denis’ performance records. 38 

There is no denying that Indian male bodies performed 

on stage with St. Denis. As Nautch 

women disappeared, Indian male performers 

began appearing in St. Denis’ shows. St. Denis 

herself explains that some Hindu, Buddhist and 

Muslim men were picked off the streets of New 

York, along with male jugglers from Coney 

Island, desk clerks, university students from 

Columbia University, and her brother’s friends, 

who stayed behind and even helped St. Denis 

stage her first show Radha in 1906 (Shelton, 

1981, p. 51-52; St. Denis, 1939, p. 56). These 

were men that St. Denis admits she consulted in 

creating both her performance and lavish sets to 

reflect the inside of some kind of 

Hindu/Buddhist temple, and who were made 

over to look like ‘priests.’ The men were hardly 

priests, even though they were marketed and 

represented as such by St. Denis. It appears they 



ranged in religious backgrounds, education levels, 

class, and caste. Everything about them 

seems to be a performance including their 

hyper-exoticized names. In particular, only a few 

of the men such as Mogul Khan and Ismail 

Mohammed who performed with St. Denis are 

mentioned by name. The former is mentioned in 

her autobiography, and the latter in her biography, 

for different reasons. Inayat Khan, a professor 

of music from India who lectured at 

Columbia University, also joined her entourage 

in 1911 (Shelton, 1981, p. 102). Some of the men 

met the audience as they walked in to see the 

show and others provided drinks and bowed to 

all and sundry. It is interesting that St. Denis 

used these men to help her with her production 

and did not seek the Nautch women 

themselves. 39 The research and information the 

Indian men provided and who became part of 

St. Denis’ performance troupe are rarely given 

any importance. Their brown bodies too remain 

‘beneath the smoke’ of Orientalist discourses. 

As St. Denis herself mentions, the Indian men 

were aware of the racial politics of the time and 

stiffened ‘under the ridicule’ of being conflated 

with African Americans. Indians during that time 

tried to distance themselves from Asians and 

other people of colour. Fearing for their own 

tenuous immigrant positions as labourers, and 

playing off recent Orientalist scholarship that 

had been translated into German and English, 

they often worked in opposition to other people 

of colour and went to lengths to define themselves 

as Aryans and therefore Caucasian cousins 

of Europeans (Takaki, 1990, p. 294). However, this 

proved to be of no avail when Indians were denaturalized 

and deprived of citizenships in 1923. 

They were always already operating within an 


overtly racialized framework and St. Denis too 

was keenly aware of her own participation in this. 

At least in the beginning, when she first premiered 

Radha in 1906, St.Denis knew and 

acknowledged that racialized tropes were being 

used to understand her performance. ‘The critical 

reception broke the next day. To the New York 

Telegraph the dances were nothing more or less 

than a wow! A “mixture of hoochee-koochee and 

cake walk’’ ‘(St. Denis, 1939, p. 71). Interestingly, a 

Middle Eastern dance form that became known 

as the ‘hoochee-koochee’ and the dance form 

‘cake walk,’ made famous by an African American 

dancer Aida Overton Walker, are collapsed to 

describe St. Denis’ performance. Both Walker 

and ‘hoochee-koochee’ dancer Little Egypt were 

also performing around the same time as St. 

Denis. It is through the terms that Middle Eastern 

dances and African American dances were known 

that both Nautch dances and St. Denis’ performances 

can be understood. As Shannon Steen 

(forthcoming) argues ‘race is a system through 

which multiple racial categories are created, and 

then combine, split off, and interact dynamically 

with one another.’ Particularly in North America, 

Nautch dancers and St. Denis’ creations based 

on their practices were operating within an everchanging 

racialized economy. This economy was 

one that had denigrated, assaulted, and seized 

representation of bodies of colour for at least a 

hundred years and was being questioned in the 

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by 

both African American and Native American performers. 

40 This was not true of Indian dancers for 

a variety of reasons. 

Just as the ‘Cult of Authenticity’ was becoming 

an important discourse for racialized performers, 

St. Denis was able to overcome the issue and

continue her ‘brownface’ and ‘yellowface’ acts 

between 1906-1930 although she dropped the 

implicit brownface in her performances after the 

first few years and adopted what Susan Manning 

terms ‘metaphorical minstrelsy’ (Manning, 

2004). 41 St. Denis’ performances were not viewed 

as minstrel acts or metaphorical minstrelsy 

because Indians did not and do not function in 

the North American imaginary as American citizens 

who can contest framings of their own representation. 

42 Partly this is because Indians and 

other Asians were subject to anti-immigration 

laws, but it is also because they have always 

remained ‘foreign’ even after several generations 

of presence in the United States. 43 Unlike 

European immigrants who can become white, 

Asians can never assimilate racially (Okihiro, 

2001; Chan, 1991). 

St. Denis relied and capitalized on what these 

particular coloured bodies represented on stage 

in relation to her own white body for a North 

American audience. Shelton mentions that St. 

Denis knew and understood that her ‘Hindoo 

men’ were viewed as ‘coloured’ and told 

reporters she was afraid of booking her company 

in the Southern States since there was a ban on 

mixed race theatrical companies and because of 

the hostility of railway and streetcar conductors. 

St. Denis also knew that the men could not even 

stay in the same hotels as her even in the North 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 95-96). St. Denis still managed 

to secure many tours over the years despite the 

race problem. St. Denis did indeed tour a large 

part of the US between 1909 and 1913, and 

many of the Indian men also traveled and performed 

with her, accompanying her on stage as 

a multitude of many ‘actors’ and musicians in 

contrast to her singular white ‘dancing’ body. 


Imagine the impact of St. Denis’ white female 

dancing body surrounded by dark brown Indian 

men in towns and cities from New York to San 

Francisco. 44 Five years after their initial performances 

in New York, and the overtly racist viewings 

when the Indians were conflated with 

African Africans, newspaper clippings from 1911 

reveal different readings of the troupe during 

their tour: 

In one instant as it were, the audience is 

taken a thousand, nay, 10,000 miles away 

from Occidental civilization and back into 

the strange country whose dance is so well 

described in the sonnet of the little known 

Francis Saltus. It is not alone Hindu dances 

that are presented. It is a vision of India, not 

the India of Rudyard Kipling and Flora Annie 

Steele; not even the India of the burning 

love poems of Laurence Hope but the native 

India of the worshipers of Krishna, presented 

in scenes of street, and home, palace and 

garden, forest and temple. 

Ruth St. Denis, who evokes this vision and 

makes it for the afternoon a reality, is an 

artist in every sense of the word. Aided by 

such extraneous things are splendid and 

accurate stage settings, languorous, haunting, 

melancholy Hindu music, chanting 

Hindu natives, the smell of incense, the tinkle 

of the strange bells, the throb of native 

drums, she takes her audience completely 

captive by a combination of pantomime and 

dance that is unlike anything ever before 

seen on the American stage (DCF, 1911; my 

emphasis). 



The following writer has even stronger opinions 

about the function of the ‘almost naked 

Orientals’ who accompanied St. Denis: 

In the east, incense is a symbol of devotion, 

and the Spirit of Incense dance is expressive 

of this thought. Wreathes of pale blue 

incense smoke quiver in the atmosphere; 

clean-limbed, nimble-footed, almost naked 

Orientals animate the scene, who now stand 

mute and stoical, and now exchange vivacious 

greetings (DCF, 1911; my emphasis). 

There seems to be no doubt that the ‘natives’ 

produce both excitement and tension for audiences, 

but it is St. Denis’ white female body that 

relieves the situation for audiences: 

Miss St. Denis has gathered about her a bit 

of the east itself and transplanted it to the 

American stage. Her attendants and very 

capable supporters are for the most part 

natives of the lands she depicts in her dancing. 

The musical mantle that goes over it all 

so sweetly strange that it disturbs the listener’s 

peace of mind and produces an uneasiness 

that is only satisfied when the beautiful 

dancer flits onto the stage and melts into 

the melody as though she herself were the 

creator of it (DCF, n.d.; my emphasis). 

There are several features to note here in relation 

to the three passages, and these are all connected 

to the ways in which Orientalist discourse 

operated in the viewing of this performance. 

Specifically in the case of the first passage, it is 

the corporeal ‘liveness’ of the Orientalist specta- 


cle that brings such an overwhelming response 

for white American audiences. The reviewer 

bases his reading of St. Denis’ performance on 

extra-textual information about India gleaned 

from literary sources that informs his understanding 

of the spectacle in front of him. But it is the 

live bodies of the ‘natives’ in contrast to St. 

Denis that captivates him. Classic tropes of 

Orientalism suggest that the East is rendered 

passive and feminized in opposition to an active, 

masculine West. Similarly the writer of the second 

passage describes the natives as stoic, passive, 

feminine, and essentially inactive in opposition 

to St. Denis’ moving, dancing, active, and 

‘speaking’ body. Perhaps it was the very visceral 

and striking presence of the Indian men, albeit 

feminized, who stood in contrast to St. Denis’ 

white female form that further authenticated and 

enhanced her performance in contradictory 

ways. On the one hand, these men were portrayed 

as barbaric, which made St. Denis’ performance 

dangerous, or at least it was a staged 

danger that was controlled, isolated and performative. 

Audiences were always aware St. Denis 

was in control over both the actual Indian male 

bodies and their representation. On the other 

hand, her performance was less dangerous 

because she maintained a clear difference from 

the men even as they assisted in rendering her 

performance ‘authentic.’ They never came close 

to her or touched her in performance. St. Denis 

was always literally and symbolically separated 

from these men; she performed center stage, 

while the men existed only on the peripheries of 

the stage and performance. Thus it is St. Denis’ 

body in performance that mediates between 

East and West. By centering her own white 

female body and contrasting it in relation to 

Indian men, St. Denis thus maintained control

and mastery over the unknowable, dangerous 

Orient. St. Denis’ white body intertwined the 

desire for the unknowable and mystical in ways 

that were safe. By assuming patriarchal control 

over the representation of India and therefore of 

Indians themselves, St. Denis stabilized audience 

fears of the essentially unknowable Orient. When 

white women could perform the exotic and 

become the choreographers of staged ‘live’ 

Orientalist visions, the danger of Oriental bodies 

polluting the American landscape could thus be 

laid to rest. St. Denis’ show thus surpassed anything 

an audience could see at Coney Island or 

other displays of female Indian dancers themselves, 

because it is only through the illusion of a 

white woman performing the Orient that its mystique 

could be maintained (Yegenolugu, 1998). 45 

Women like St. Denis could keep up the artifice 

of the Orient in better ways than the tangible 

bodies of female Nautch dancers. Nautch 

women’s bodies were also dangerous to St. 

Denis’ claims to authenticity in the early years of 

her performance. Knowledgeable Nautch dancing 

bodies would compete with St. Denis’ on 

stage, whereas, ‘passive’ male Indian actors 

would not offer such levels of competition. 

Indian male bodies thus became the substitute 

for India and Indian dancing women. As seen in 

the reviews of St. Denis’ 1911 performers, these 

men evoke India through their corporeal presence 

on stage, thereby authenticating St. Denis’ 

performance. 

The men added another dimension to St. Denis’ 

performance as research subjects and ‘native 

informants’ for staging her Oriental dances. 

From her own admission, conversations with the 

Indian men were extremely valuable in her cre- 


ations. Further, Shelton also notes that the conversations 

were lengthy, contentious, and significant: 

During the autumn of 1905 she attracted a 

small company of Coney Island Indians, 

clerks from the Bhumgara store, and 

Columbia University students and friends of 

her brother’s, an indiscriminate mix of 

Moslems (sic) and Hindus that turned her 

rehearsals into religious wars. . . Ruthie’s tiny 

New York apartment on Forty-second 

Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 

must have seemed the center of strange 

activity that autumn: streams of Indian visitors, 

arguments that lasted into the night, 

the smell of curry and incense, the sound of 

tinkling bells, the fall of dancing feet 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 51-52). 

St. Denis had effectively used the knowledge 

provided by the ‘native informants’ to assert her 

own authority in terms of economic and cultural 

capital. She thus uses them as a dance anthropologist 

would, but gives them no credit in the 

creation of the performance product she ultimately 

stages. 

One of her ‘native informants,’ Mohammed 

Ismail, who appeared on stage with her, took 

offense and eventually attempted to sue her in 

1910 ‘on the grounds that he had invented her 

dances,’ but his lawsuit was dismissed in court 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 95-96). Interestingly, St. Denis 

never mentions this in her autobiography; it is 

Shelton who briefly refers to it, but then dismisses 

it as a native’s avaricious attempt to steal St. 

Denis’ increasing wealth and fame. The political 

context for the reasons why Mohamet Ismail’s 



court case was dismissed without due process 

have never been examined. By 1910, Indians had 

become a national problem and declared racially 

unassimilable. From 1909-1911, up to fifty percent 

of visas for Indians trying to enter the US 

were rejected. 

THE VIOLENCE OF AMERICAN ORIENTALISM 

(II): THE DISAPPEARING INDIAN BODIES 

By now, as you will see, I had expanded my 

plans to include super-numeraries…They would 

sit on the floor and answer in a chorus the questions 

that I had flung at them…. When our 

evenings came to a close and the boys had 

drummed for me to dance until I was sure the 

neighbors would pound on the walls, we went 

off, very loud and gay, into the kitchen, where 

the boys made great dishes of curry while I 

perched where I might and continued to harry 

them with questions (St. Denis, 1939, p.56). 

RSD: You know I have a secret to tell you. For 

many years now I have been fascinated by your 

gods, your religion, and your temples. It seems 

so opposite to our religion and our One God. 

Our God seems so harsh while yours seem so 

playful, spiritual and erotic all at the same time. I 

mean you even use dance as a form of prayer. 

Christianity condemns dance in prayer. When I 

was younger we had boarders who stayed at our 

house. Many of them would tell me amazing stories 

of the East and my love and desire for all 

things mystical was born then. But I want to 

learn more. Perhaps I was a Hindu yogi in my 

past life. This desire to learn everything about 

your religion is overwhelming. 

Ismail: I can tell you about our temples. The 

deity can only be propitiated by the priest. There 

are women dancers who are married to the tem- 


ple deity. I don’t know what they do except look 

beautiful. Many are prostitutes too. 

Khan: Arre what the hell do you know? You’re a 

Muslim. You have no idea about Hindu customs. 

If you call our dancing women prostitutes, I will 

kill you now. 

Ismail: Who the hell made you the learned one? 

You’re not exactly a high caste Hindu yourself. 

You know nothing about it either. You were just a 

cleaner back home. 

Khan: Who are you calling cleaner? Here in 

America, I can become anything. Why I can even 

be a priest. Nobody would know the difference. 

CS: Ok you two stop this fighting. This behavior 

will not solve anything. Let me tell her what I 

know. The temple functions as the center of the 

village or town. Usually all the shops and houses 

surround the temple in four directions. People 

attend the temple everyday and propitiate the 

deity for good luck, prosperity, and health. The 

male priests are Brahmins, of an upper caste, 

and conduct ritual offerings to the deity at auspicious 

times of the day. There are temples dedicated 

to male Gods and some just for female 

Goddesses and worship to each deity is conducted 

slightly differently. Perhaps you want to 

know more about the temple for the 

Goddesses? 

RSD: I’m curious about the women dancers. You 

mean that dance can happen as a form of worship. 

I had heard about that but I never realized 

the beauty of that possibility. That dance is 

prayer. What about the male priests? Do they 

dance? By the way, are you a Brahmin?

CS: So many questions. Women dance in worship 

but men do not. Men might sing in worship. 

And no, I am not a Brahmin. Even if I was I would 

have lost caste by traveling beyond my native 

lands and crossing the seas and oceans. 

RSD: There’s just so much to know and I am so 

overwhelmed by all this information. It seems so 

confusing. Who is Radha? Is she a Goddess? 

CS: She’s not a Goddess technically speaking. 

She’s not a Goddess who’s worshiped in temples. 

She’s the God Krishna’s favored lover. 

RSD: But I find her so fascinating. 

Ismail: Well, just because he’s a student at 

Columbia University, he thinks he knows everything. 

He’s not a priest, nor does he study religion. 

What does he know? 

Khan: He knows more than you at least. 

Brother Denis: You must stop all this fighting. 

What use is it? 

Ismail: Still, I think I know more than he does. 

The village I grew up in had a very close Hindu 

and Muslim community. I went to temples. I 

watched the temple dancers both inside and 

outside the temple, if you know what I mean? 

CS: Ok Ismail, if you really think you know so 

much, why don’t you show Miss Ruthie what you 

know about the dances. 

Ismail: I will definitely but there’s no space here. 

We’ll have to clear away these tables and chairs 

and then I’ll show her everything I know. 


RSD: Why, thank you kindly Ismail! 

Khan: While you do that I will go make us all 

some good spicy food in the kitchen. Maybe 

Mary can help me cook. 

RSD: Of course, of course whatever you like. 

Come Ismail, let us begin our lesson. 

I argue in this section that far from being a 

benign discourse, North American Orientalism 

manifests itself through a violent, racialized 

economy accompanied by anti-immigration laws 

that enable a white woman such as St. Denis to 

perform Indian dances of sorts without opposition 

or question. 46 Thus the quixotic love-hate, 

desire-repulsion, excitement-fear binaries were 

ever-present in the relationship between white 

Americans and various Asian ‘others.’ It was 

through this complex prism of relationships that 

St. Denis gave herself and countless numbers of 

her white female students the discursive, corporeal, 

and representational power not only to control, 

but also to stage choreographically the ways 

in which Indian dance would be viewed for 

decades to come in the U.S. 47 

At the time white women absorbed Nautch 

women’s practices, the state played out its irreconcilable 

and contradictory desire and loathing 

for Asian people in racist immigration policies 

that curtailed Asian women, including Indian 

women, from entering the U.S. (Leonard, 1992; 

Espiritu, 2000). Despite a desire for Indian and 

Asian goods, philosophies, and products, actual 

Asian bodies were often unwanted. 48 For a period 

of ten years – from 1907 until 1917 when 

Congress prohibited immigration from India – six 

thousand four hundred Indians, mostly Sikhs and 



farmers from Punjab, came to America’s West 

Coast, and less than one percent of them were 

women (Chan, 1991, p. 18-23; Takaki, 1990, p. 

294). The North American immigrant landscape 

was dramatically transformed for Asians and, in 

the case of Indians, they were effectively prevented 

a consolidation of community and cultural 

practices. 

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, 

immigration law prevented Indian men from 

bringing their wives because bosses thought 

they were more efficient as a workforce without 

family distractions, and the law did not permit 

women to enter the U.S. on their own as labourers. 

The gender differential in immigration policy 

led to various actions. 49 It became very clear 

between 1917, when immigration law barred all 

Asians (including people from India, South Asia, 

and Asia Pacific regions) from immigrating to the 

United States, and 1924, when all Asians were 

denaturalized and deprived of citizenship, that 

although the U.S. needed Asian labour, it did not 

want Asian bodies permanently. Leonard suggests 

the systematic racism took place over time: 

There was a rising rejection rate of Asian Indian 

applicants by the Bureau of Immigration and 

Naturalization. Before 1907, fewer than 10 percent 

of applicants for admission were rejected; 

in 1907, 28 percent were rejected; and in 1909, 

1911, and 1913, 50 percent or more were rejected 

(Leonard, 1992, p. 31). 

Indians, who had previously been seen as a solution 

to the Chinese and Japanese problem, now 

became an issue in themselves. 50 Racial assimilation 

was viewed as an impossibility because of 

the very different ‘habits’ of the ‘Hindus’: 


The civic and social question concerns the 

ability of the nation to assimilate this class 

of Hindus and their probable effect on the 

communities where they settle. Their habits, 

their intense caste feeling, their lack of 

home life – no women being among them – 

and their effect upon standards of labour 

and wages, all combine to raise a serious 

question as to whether the doors should be 

kept open or closed against this strange, 

new stream (Survey cited in Takaki, 1990, p. 

297). 

As Takaki notes, even high-profile Indian visitors, 

who had no intention of staying on in any permanent 

way, were not welcome in the U.S. 51 

It was amidst this flurry of the implementation of 

racist immigration policy that St. Denis’ career 

soared; she formed a partnership with Ted Shawn 

and established the Denishawn School and 

Company in 1915. Creatively, St. Denis had a powerful 

and prodigious choreographic streak from 1906 

to 1918. St. Denis began branching out of doing 

Indian-themed pieces in 1910 when she choreographed 

and performed Egypta. This was followed 

by many Asian themed pieces. By comparing St. 

Denis’ career directly with immigration issues during 

the time, I demonstrate the importance of anti-Asian 

laws that enabled her to have a thriving career. I am 

not suggesting causality here, merely correlation. 

In 1906, St. Denis premieres Radha along with 

several Indian male performers who accompany 

her. 52 In 1907, Indians are feared as labour competitors 

by white workers and are frequently victimized 

by white working-class antagonism and 

violence. Several hundred white workers invade 

the Asian-Indian community in Bellingham,

Washington, and drive seven hundred Indians 

across the border into Canada. In 1907, St. Denis 

leaves on her tour of Europe. In 1908, The 

Asiatic Exclusion League, that had been formed 

several years earlier, discusses the ‘Hindoo problem.’ 

St. Denis creates a Japanese inspired piece 

called A Shirabyoshi in 1908. In 1910, 

Mohammed Ismail attempts to sue St. Denis for 

using his choreography without credit. His case 

is dismissed. The same year, St. Denis premieres 

Egypta – a piece that branches away from Indian 

themes – and studies with a Geisha in Los 

Angeles for a few weeks. In 1911, while touring 

the U.S., one of her Indian performers attempts 

to escape from St. Denis’ troupe, but is caught 

with the help of the Indian consulate and made 

to return to St. Denis’ company. In 1913, St. 

Denis premieres a duet with Ted Shawn called 

The Garden of Kama and a solo piece O-Mika, a 

Japanese-inspired number, heralding the beginning 

of many of her Asian-themed pieces 

beyond India. She also creates Bakawali ‘A 

Hindu Love Tale of Indra’s Heavenly Court,’ 

which included four new dances: The Dance of 

the Gold and Black Sari, The Jewel Dance 

Before the God of Heaven, The Dance in the 

Forest of Ceylon, and The Dance of the Blue 

Flame. In 1914, there are very few Indian females 

in the United States, the ratio of Indian men to 

women being seventy-five to one at its most 

favorable. In 1914, women only represent 24 percent 

of the five thousand Indians in California 

and St. Denis creates The Legend of the 

Peacock. In 1915, the Denishawn School is set up 

in California. In 1916, St. Denis performs her solo 

Kuan Yin and she and Shawn premier their commissioned 

work at UC Berkeley. Mogul Khan is 

part of the troupe and has married St. Denis’ 

maid Mary. By 1917, Immigration Law is enacted, 


which prevents Indian male labourers from bringing 

their wives to the U.S. Further, anti-miscegenation 

laws are enacted and Indian men are 

denied the right to marry white women. In 1918, 

St. Denis creates the Royal Ballet of Siam and 

simultaneously in that year the ‘U.S. vs. Ozawa’ 

(Case no. 209) rules that only Caucasians can be 

naturalized. Indians believe that since they are 

Caucasians, they will be granted citizenship. The 

Denishawn School thrives and prospers in 

California, although St. Denis (1939, p. 255) suggests 

that she and Ted Shawn remained poor 

because they footed the bills for their extravagant 

shows. Both St. Denis and Shawn take up 

teaching young working class and bourgeois 

white girls their repertoires, and also tour across 

the U.S. In 1923, a landmark court case ‘U.S. vs. 

Bhagat Singh Thind,’ (Case no. 216) ends with 

the decision to revoke all citizenship granted to 

Indians. This is the culmination of a long debate 

regarding the question of race and citizenship in 

America. Although Indians are considered 

Caucasian, they are not deemed to be white and 

the Constitution is re-interpreted to account for 

this anomaly. In 1926, St. Denis creates White 

Jade before beginning her tour of the Orient. 

Just as the Asiatic Exclusion League systematically 

worked towards preventing Asian bodies 

from having equal immigration and citizenship 

rights, the Indian troupe of clerks, students, and 

the sideshow performers began fading out of St. 

Denis’ performances. Thus, the Indian male performers 

who worked with St. Denis from 1906, 

and had accompanied her on tours until 1911, 

faded away by the 1914 tour. 53 Except for the 

mention of Mogul Khan in 1916, one of the original 

Indian performers who continued with St. 

Denis on the UC Berkeley pageant, the rest 



seem to have disappeared. Perhaps because 

Mogul Khan married St. Denis’ maid, Mary, he 

was able to stay on in the U.S., having gained 

citizenship through marriage (Shelton, 1981, p. 

132). It is not clear how long he was able to 

maintain his stay in the U.S. because in 1917 

anti-miscegenation laws were enacted that prevented 

Indian men from marrying white 

American women. Further, the 1923 Thind vs. 

U.S. decision revoked Indians of their U.S. citizenships 

regardless of marriages, children, ownership 

of property, and other proofs of validity 

that had been acceptable until then. Friends of 

St. Denis and Shawn, and students from the 

Denishawn School whom they had trained also 

began replacing the Indian men on stage. With 

the absence of Indian women and only a few 

Indian men remaining, most of whom were working 

class labourers, there was no one to contest 

St. Denis’ appropriation and staging of Indian 

cultural and dance practices in the U.S. 

For Indian dancing women, Orientalist state 

policy in the form of racist immigration laws of 

exclusion did not allow for contestations of representation, 

at least not until the 1940s, with the 

arrival of traditional female Indian performers 

such as Varalakshmi and Bhanumati, 54 and more 

significantly, not until the 1960s, with the performances 

of Balasaraswati. 55 But by the 1930s, 

Oriental dance had metamorphosed into modern 

dance and St. Denis’ students, Martha 

Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles 

Weidman, to mention a few, were performing 

under its new name. Oriental dance had another 

offshoot that became known as ethnic dance, 

encompassing dances of the world, propagated 

by white American dancers such as La Meri. Thus 

the kinesthetic legacies of Nautch dancing 


women and Indian men were absorbed and 

made invisible in the North American modern 

dance project. 

The white American bourgeois female body 

assimilated all varieties of racial difference in the 

modernist project in a safe way and thereby 

relieved patriarchal anxieties over miscegenation, 

racial mixing and cross-racial desire. The 

white bourgeois female body became an active 

enabler of patriarchal order and in the case of St. 

Denis, artfully staged this order for visual consumption 

and kinesthetic pleasure. There was 

never any doubt that St. Denis was the star, the 

choreographer, the author, who carefully maintained 

white patriarchal order and thus Indian 

male ‘labourers’ like their immigrant counterparts 

who labour in the fields, continue to labour 

in St. Denis’ performances as extras and attendants. 

The racialized division of labour evidenced 

through racist immigration policies is restaged 

through the body of St. Denis in performance. 

CONCLUSIONS 

They have no idea we live in cities of great splendor 

and squalor. They don’t understand we live lives very 

similar to theirs. Perhaps they think we live in courts 

and are still under the patronage of the maharajahs. 

What fools! That time is long past. 

We do live on the streets though. I mean that’s 

where we have to perform now. We have no 

choice. Sometimes I think it is better here than 

back home. There, nobody wants us and we 

have to struggle so much. As women dancers 

we are treated so badly at home and no one 

wants us to dance. They dislike seeing us 

dance.

Yes but at least its our home and we are treated like 

people. Here we are like animals to them. Actually, 

worse than animals. The elephants are treated better 

than we are. 

I don’t know. I am not happy about going back 

home. What do we have there? Will they even 

let us dance any more? I hear that there are 

increasing numbers of protests and more and 

more dancers are giving up their art. Maybe we 

will have to do that too. At least here we get to 

dance. 

Look dear, I don’t know why you are getting so excited 

about this place. It’s not like they want us here permanently 

either. They don’t even allow Indian women to 

emigrate here, did you know that? They only let the men 

come because of their cheap labour. Soon, they’ll send 

them back too, mark my words. 

The white haired woman does haunt me still. 

Cawnpore (sic), March 10. We are seated in a 

cool, rather dark room in our bungalow, waiting. 

Presently, along the corridor, comes the conjurer 

we have summoned. . . . To our amazement, he 

says he was in the old Thompson and Dundy 

performances at Coney Island! He must, then, 

have been in that troup (sic) of jugglers and 

snake charmers who started me off on this wild 

career of Indian dancing (St. Denis, 1939, p. 

289). 

I feel I am being rocked back and forth I open 

my eyes and remember where I am just 

before… There are at least two hundred of us on 

this ship from India. 

No, no, no, that’s not true! There are not two hundred 


people from our land. You’re mistaken. There are only a 

handful of us. There are many elephants, snakes, and 

monkeys just below deck. There are just so many elephants. 

It seems as though these people are interested 

more in the animals than us. Perhaps they found people 

on the streets of New York after we arrived and 

coloured them brown like us. Perhaps they used their 

own brown natives they are Indians too. 56 These people 

look like us. These people don’t look like us. They are 

called Indians because some white man searching for 

our land thought he had found us when indeed he had 

found them. These natives lost their land to white 

invaders just as we are now losing our land to white 

invaders. Along with the elephants and monkeys, we’re 

taken to another island, Coney Island. This is a strange 

island where only visitors like us seem to live here. We 

see some people from Persia and Egypt but they are not 

dressed in their native clothes. 

A young white woman with white hair came to 

watch us dance one day. She was very curious 

about our costumes. While we could not communicate 

we certainly understood one another. We 

understood our shared love for dance and artmaking. 

She came back again and again to 

watch us dance. She told me her name was 

Ruth Dennis, but that I was to call her Ruthie. 

Slowly she started learning to move like us. I 

taught her many steps, I showed her how to 

make turns, how to sing, how to move her neck 

and head gracefully. She laughed at her own 

attempts to dance our dance. One day she took 

us home with her. It was a small home but she 

was keen on sharing it with us knowing about 

our visa difficulties. She did not want us to return 

home until we were ready. We talked about 

everything. She wanted to know all about India. 

After we practiced I used to make her some 

good Indian food in her kitchen and we’d keep 



talking. She even took us to her Indian friends 

homes, the Bhumgaras, who were merchants of 

sorts. We had a wonderful time with her. One 

day we heard the Gaekwar of Baroda was visiting. 

57 He arrived at the Bhumgaras and a reception 

was thrown in his honor. To our delight and 

excitement Ruthie wanted us to dance for the 

Gaekwar. I told her she must dance with us as 

well. Only then would she do us proud. She 

agreed and the show began. 

You are truly delirious. The woman did no such thing. 

She took our dances and made a career off it and even 

came to India to show us how to dance. We were 

shipped back home because our visas ran out. I remember 

sitting at the Ellis Island immigration center being 

detained because our contract had expired and we had 

overstayed our welcome. The trip back home was worse 

than ever. Bile wretched bile. There was nothing for us 

to go back to when we returned because they wouldn’t 

let us dance. I set up a small shop and sold American 

trinkets for a high price in Bombay, and you started 

bringing American performers to India. You even 

brought a dance troupe called Denishawn in 1926. That 

was a huge success remember. We gave up our dancing 

because no one wanted to see us. It was too dangerous 

to keep trying. 

Perhaps you are right and yet the white haired 

woman haunts me still… 

In this essay, I have interrogated the possibility 

that accounting for the labour of Nautch dancers 

from India and Indian male performers enables 

us to view more clearly the transnational ‘haunting’ 

of American modern dance practice. A focus 

on corpo-realities offers us new ways to rethink 

the violence of American Orientalism as enacted 

on labouring coloured female and feminized 


male bodies and that it is the white bourgeois 

woman who enacts the imperatives of the State 

by seizing representational and discursive control 

through ‘cultural’ work in combating patriarchal 

dominance. I hope to have contributed not 

only to dance studies, but also to studies of 

power, knowledge and imperialism, as well as 

third world feminist calls for examining the 

labour of female bodies, understood here in the 

work of cultural capital. 

POSTSCRIPT 

I would like to thank several people who have 

given me critical feedback in writing the various 

drafts of this essay including: Anthea Kraut, Tracy 

Fisher, Piya Chatterjee, Lucy Burns, San San 

Kwan, Linda Tomko, Derek Burrill, Rickerby 

Hinds, Ramsay Burt, and an anonymous peer 

reviewer. Margaret Thompson Drewal, Susan 

Manning and Dwight Conquergood also provided 

key feedback in an earlier version of this 

essay. I would also like to thank my Research 

Assistant, Jennifer Buscher for her diligence and 

attention to detail. In particular, I would like to 

thank Susan Foster for her inspirational feedback, 

guidance and support. 

NOTES 

1 A specific caste of women, including naach performers, 

maharis and devadasis, lived and worked as courtesans, 

temple dancers, and cultural workers practicing 

their performance forms in the nineteenth century. The 

term Nautch was used to describe all these dance 

forms. Nautch is the anglicized version of the Hindi 

word naach, which the British applied generally to 

characterize all types of dance forms and dancing 

women from India (Coorlawala, 1992, p. 123-52). In the 

West, the term Nautch elided the differences between 

nineteenth and early twentieth century dances performed 

in colonized North, East, and South India

espectively. In North India, dancing women were 

known to perform naach, a Hindi term for dance, 

which has many connotations within the Indian context. 

Foreigners then mistakenly labeled these women 

Nautch dancers and this term began to be used by 

Indians as well. They substituted the dance for the 

dancer and vice versa. While there were similarities 

between dances in different regions in India, in effect, 

there were actually multiple forms in existence. In East 

India, the dancers were known as the maharis performing 

court and temple dancing, and in the South they 

were called devadasis. Sometimes these dancers were 

moving in between the temple, courts, and streets but 

as Coorlawala (1992) points out, in British usage 

Nautch did not differentiate between street/folk 

artists, courtesans, temple dancers or the different 

forms being practiced in various regions (p. 130-131). 

The word was also used to describe dance practices 

presently identified as classical, such as Kathak, Odissi, 

and, after its nationalist revival, Bharata Natyam. The 

term also became collapsed with dances from 

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Middle East and 

even Egypt within a US context. I continue to use the 

term in this essay acknowledging its complex and 

diverse meanings within a US context. 

2 At the turn of the century, St. Denis and other white bourgeois 

women were for the first time taking center 

stage as choreographers and performers in their own 

right. Having been previously marginalized, white 

bourgeois women were resisting patriarchal dominance 

in a variety of creative ways. As Linda Tomko 

(2004) rightly points out, white bourgeois women were 

fighting for suffrage and the right to enter the public 

sphere in the early twentieth century. 

3 I am informed by both Raymond Williams’ (1983) and Pierre 

Bourdieu’s (1985) notion of ‘cultural capital’ which I 

develop further in this essay to reflect the ways in 

which white middle class American dancing women 

used Asian women’s philosophies, products, ideas, 

techniques of performance, costumes, and labour to 

create a new space for themselves in the early twentieth 

century to combat male dominance. 

4 I argue elsewhere that Nautch women were traveling to the 


US as early as 1880 and were moving transnationally 

for at least twenty-four years before the 1904 visit to 

St. Louis (for the World Exposition), New York, and 

Coney Island (P. Srinivasan, 2003). 

5 There are several articles, advertisements, and some 

description of Nautch dancers when they first arrived 

in New York in 1880 (NYSN, 21 November 1880; BDE, 

5 December 1880; BDE, 12 December 1880). 

6 Augustin Daly’s Scrapbook Collection reveals the complex 

negotiations that were undertaken to bring the performers 

to New York and to house them there as well 

as the subsequent performance reviews that followed 

(Daly’s Theatre Programme, 10 November 1880; Truth, 

22 November 1880; The World, 21 November 1880). 

7 NYC, 3 January 1881; NYC, 8 January 1881; NYT, 12 

January 1881; BDE, 16 January 1881; NYM, 22 January 

1881; NYC, 22 January 1881; NYM, 22 January 1881; 

BDE, 13 February 1881; BDE, 23 January 1881; NYT, 23 

January 1881; NYC, 24 January 1881; NYC, 29 January 

1881; NYT, 2 February 1881; BDE, 13 February 1881; 

BDE, 15 February 1881; NPG, 19 Feb 1881; NYT, 16 

May 1881. 

8 For a more detailed argument about the ways in which the 

Nautch women were received in New York in the nineteenth 

century see P. Srinivasan (2003). 

9 Newspaper articles and etchings of the dancers discuss the 

dance of the Nautch women (NYT, 9 March 1884; NYT, 

11 March 1884; NYT, 17 March 1884; NYT, 10 April 

1884; NYT, 13 April 1884; NYT, 19 April 1884). 

10 BDE, 8 October 1889; BDE, 2 March 1890; BDE, 7 March 

1890; BDE, 20 August 1900. 

11 There is a great deal of evidence that Nautch dancers 

from India performed extensively in Coney Island (NYT, 

15 May 1904; NYDM, 9 July 1904). It was reported that 

Nautch dancers performed amidst a larger pageant 

known as the ‘Durbar of Delhi’ premiering in Luna 

Park. 

12 I have conducted extensive archival research of newspapers 

(NYAJ, NYDN, NYEP, NYH, NYC, BDE, NYDM, 

1903-1905), and yet there appears to be only one photograph 

of actual female dancers from the ‘Durbar of 

Delhi’ Show in Coney Island (Snow, 1984, p. 91). This 

photograph seems to depict Sri Lankan men and 



women who were part of the Durbar pageant. 

Drawings and etchings from newspaper reports reveal 

no clear images of the Nautch dancers either. 

Investigation of the extensive photographs in the 

Library of Congress archives reveal many photographs 

of Coney Island, even a few of the ‘Durbar of Delhi’ in 

Delhi itself in 1903, but none of the Nautch dancers in 

the Durbar of 1904. The Keystone Mast Collection, 

housed at the California Museum of Photography, 

revealed photographs of Indian jugglers, Sri Lankan 

warriors, Native American performers, Little Egypt, 

Japanese performers, and four photographs of three 

female Sri Lankan dancers being deported from Ellis 

Island c.1904-1906. The caption to one of the photographs 

reads: ‘Singalese (sic.) women on board a 

steamer in Brooklyn waiting to be deported by U.S. 

Immigration Authorities after the expiration of their 

contract with Western Theatrical Troupe. N.Y. City’ 

(Print Number: X97779). There are several etchings 

from 1884 and 1894 of South Indian temple dancers in 

the Wisconsin Circus Museum archives (for more 

details on South Asian performance in the American 

circus during this time period, see the work of Janet 

Davis, 1993). The P.T. Barnum and Bailey collection at 

Princeton University contains several photos of female 

Indian dancers photographed in New York. The female 

Indian dancers seemed to have been photographed in 

New York c.1904, around the time P.T. Barnum had his 

own ‘Durbar of Delhi’ show. Thus, the photographic 

evidence of ‘Nautch’ dancers is contradictory because 

it is unclear whether divisions between Indian and Sri 

Lankan dancers, northern and southern Indian dance 

traditions, were clearly understood at the time. Thus 

the labeling of what was Nautch and what was not, 

and which kinds of dancers were performing in Coney 

Island, with P.T. Barnum, and the St. Louis World 

Exposition in 1904 is unclear. 

13 The Anti-Nautch campaign was significantly under way in 

India at this time. Avanthi Meduri (1996) also points 

out that the Anti-Nautch movement was part of a larger 

nationalist social reform movement ‘that was 

staunchly opposed to the dedication of young girls as 

brides to temple gods and also to the continued prac- 


tice of the dance both inside and outside the temple’ 

(p. 56). Indian national debates in the late nineteenth 

century used the devadasi, Nautch, and dancing girl 

symbolically within the Anti-Nautch movement to 

address larger reforms for women, including the ban 

on sati (widow immolation), female infanticide, and the 

encouragement of widow remarriage (A. Srinivasan, 

1983, p. 73-99). Western patriarchy set itself against 

Oriental patriarchy and framed Indian men as barbaric 

and primitive and Indian women as needing to be rescued 

from their men, thus reaffirming white man’s 

authority and identity (Tharu and Lalita, 1991, p. 53). 

Colonial writings condemned Indian character as ‘irrational, 

deceitful, and sexually perverse,’ declaring that 

India…herself needing rescue by the British government…was 

‘white man’s burden’ (Tharu and Lalita, 

1991, p. 9). Embarrassed nationalists as part of the 

social reform movement addressed the accusations 

the colonizers leveled to prove Indians could be ‘civilized’ 

and rule themselves. The ‘women’s question’ 

became an important issue for nationalists because of 

colonial texts that condemned Indian men for their 

barbarism toward their women. According to Partha 

Chatterjee (1986), Indian nationalists attempted to 

resolve the stigma of colonization and the ‘women’s 

question’ by demarcating the public sphere as a male 

agenda and relegating women’s practices to the private 

sphere. Nautch dancers were ‘public’ and therefore 

did not fit the nationalist agenda of ideal and 

moral Indian womanhood. Women reformers such as 

Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, alongside other male nationalist 

reformers, vehemently opposed Nautch practices, 

condemning their link to prostitution. As Tharu and 

Lalita (1991) note, the social reform movement in India 

was also about class and caste struggles; in the effort 

to create ideal middle-class and upper-caste Indian 

women who emulated Victorian mores of morality, it 

scapegoated Nautch women (p. 11). 

14 I refer here to the extremely important work by dance 

scholars Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996), Thomas 

DeFrantz (2002) and Susan Manning (2004) who argue 

that American modern dance has to necessarily be 

examined in dialogic relation to African American

dance practices that have not only shaped what we 

know today as American concert dance, but is constitutive 

of it. The work of Yutian Wong (2002) and 

Jacqueline Shea Murphy (2007) brings to light the 

importance of examining Asian American and Native 

American dance practices respectively as also constitutive 

elements in modern American dance. 

15 Linda Tomko (1999) states, regarding St. Denis, among a 

variety of dancers, ‘Through appropriation of 

“other”dance cultures they attempted to alter 

American perceptions of dance as a native endeavor’ 

(p. 135). 

16 In this essay I locate the term ‘Indian’ within the broader 

context of ‘Asian’ and ‘South Asian.’ Although these 

are geographically disparate regions now, politically 

the term Asian has been applied to Indians at various 

stages in US immigration history. 

17 Lisa Lowe (1996) is one of few Asian American labour 

scholars to argue in favour of cultural labour and 

women’s cultural labour but even she does not examine 

dancers or performers. 

18 Diana Taylor (2003) suggests that archive is often positioned 

in opposition to the repertoire (defined as live 

performance). Calling for new ways of historicizing the 

repertoire, Taylor argues that the archive does not 

seem able to capture the live event. I expand this 

notion in this essay by suggesting that the repertoire is 

its own archive, leaving its traces in live bodily interactions, 

whose history remains captured in muscle memory 

and through bodily labour and kinesthetic contact. 

19 Kinesthetic knowledge, or studying the ways of moving as 

ways of knowing, have been key methods in the contemporary 

dance ethnographies of Sally Ness (1992) 

and Deirdre Sklar (2001) respectively. I build on their 

work to think about kinesthetic contact in the archive 

as a way of knowing. 

20 Exceptions include John Kuo Wei Tchen (1999), Robert 

Lee (1999) and Mari Yoshihara (2003), but none focus 

on corporeal discourses as the center of their argument 

and instead examine literature, film, theatre 

plays, circus, or popular forms of performance. 

21 use Marta Savigliano’s (1995) concept of ‘Plumette’ whose 

story in the tango emerges from a marginal place and 


is constructed through a historical fictional narrative (p. 

106-108). 

22 I draw on the work of Pallabi Chakraborty (2002) and 

Sumanta Banerjee (2000) to imagine Nautch women’s 

backgrounds in Kolkata before they left for the U.S. in 

1904. 

23 I want to make it clear that in this essay I am not arguing 

for another ‘originary’ moment for Oriental or modern 

dance by privileging the 1904 encounter. Rather, I am 

more interested in providing an analysis of transnational 

circulations that rupture origin myths. It is also 

important to note that the term ‘classical’ became 

important in Indian dance reconstruction post-1930s 

and particularly post-independence. The careful systematization 

of the repertoire in the reconstruction 

process, its transition from the temple to the theatre, 

the changes in costuming, lighting, and structure, were 

implemented by Rukmini Devi Arundale, who as 

Avanthi Meduri (forthcoming) argues, was a global, 

transnational, and cosmopolitan subject in her own 

right. In this essay, I point to transnational movements 

of Indian dancers prior to Rukmini Devi, Anna Pavlova, 

and St. Denis, whose practices are pre-existent of classical/folk 

categories. 

24 There is another possibility as to why the Indian dancers 

have been left out of dance discourses. Since the 

‘Durbar of Delhi’ pageant/spectacle was a multi-disciplinary 

performance, it defied labeling. Also because 

Indian dance itself was a complex amalgam of music, 

movement, and drama, it would have been difficult to 

define the performance of Indian women as dancers in 

the Western sense. 

25 Newspaper records reveal that the ‘Durbar of Delhi’ show 

at Coney Island was sparked by the initial Durbar that 

took place in India in 1903 (NYAJ, 2 January 1903; 

NYAJ, 9 January 1903; NYAJ, 9 January 1903; NYAJ, 11 

January 1903; NYAJ, 25 January 1903; NYAJ, 25 

January 1903; NYAJ, 15 February 1903). Subsequent 

Durbars were spawned in various places – Canada and 

New York to mention a few – including Barnum and 

Bailey’s circus show that preceded Coney Island’s 

Durbar. Advertisements for ‘The Gorgeous Durbar’ 

proclaim the show was ‘graphically and truthfully rep- 



resented in all essentials, just as it took place in India 

before the Viceroy and Vicerine’ (NYDN, 20 March 

1904). Yet another advertisement proclaims that ‘The 

Gorgeous Durbar’ was ‘A transcendentally beautiful 

representation of the great event just as it occurred in 

India (NYH, 27 March 1904). Other advertisements 

describe the spectacle as representations via paintings 

accompanied by elephants (NYDN, 26 March 1904; 

NYDN, 3 April 1904; NYDN, 10 April 1904; NYDN, 17 

April 1904). It was the show in Coney Island that 

brought Nautch dancers to New York. 

26 Records from Coney Island suggest many visitors returned 

several times to New Coney, since one visit was not 

enough. Newspapers were advertising the Coney 

Island spectacle months in advance and during the 

summer offered free coupons and other incentives to 

visit which apparently worked and therefore brought in 

millions of visitors (NYH, 27 March 1904; NYDM, April 

1904; NYDN, 14 May 1904; NYAJ, 16 May 1904; NYAJ, 

17 May 1904; NYAJ, 27 May 1904; NYAJ, 30 May 1904; 

NYAJ, 11 June 1904; NYAJ, 12 June 1904; NYAJ, 13 

June 1904; NYDN, 20 March 1904; NYH, 24 April 1904; 

NYH, 1 May 1904; NYH, 1 May 1904; NYH, 8 May 1904; 

NYH, 15 May 1904; NYAJ, 15 May 1904; NYDN, 15 May 

1904; NYDN, 16 May 1904; NYDN, 23 May 1904; NYH, 

23 May 1904; NYAJ, 5 June 1904; NYAJ, 5 June 1904; 

NYDN, 13 June 1904; NYAJ, 19 June 1904; NYDM, 9 

July 1904; NYDM, 30 July 1904; NYDN, 28 August 

1904). 

27 It is interesting that St. Denis believes she was witnessing 

a ‘real East Indian village,’ particularly because advertisements 

and newspaper reports actually wrote that 

the ‘Durbar of Delhi’ show was a ‘representation’ of 

the ‘Durbar in Delhi’ that had taken place earlier (NYH, 

27 March 1904). 

28 I suggest that the Nautch dancers might have been performing 

such items based on the work of Pallabi 

Chakravorty (2000, p. 44-45) who points out the kinds 

of dances Nautch women could have been performing 

at the time. Also, I mention that Nautch dances at this 

time displayed aspects of folk dance because the differentiation 

between the terms classical and folk did 

not exist in India at this time. 


29 When St. Denis went to India two decades later, she was 

astonished to see an old Nautch dancer perform a 

dance with just facial expressions. St. Denis had perhaps 

witnessed the more rhythmic aspects of the 

Nautch repertoire during her visit to Coney Island and 

had not been exposed to the dramatic components of 

it. Alternately, she might have seen the dramatic components 

in Coney Island and just forgotten about it 

two decades later. It is possible that the Nautch 

dancers at Coney Island were instructed or decided to 

perform eye-catching, audience-pleasing numbers, 

rather than expressional aspects of their repertoire. It 

is also possible that they may not have been as welltrained 

as the dancer St. Denis met in India years later. 

30 While we don’t know what became of the Nautch dancers, 

we know that some of the jugglers and snake charmers 

continued their work. One particular performer 

encountered St. Denis on her trip to India on March 

10, 1928 in Kanpur and reminded her that he was one 

of the performers she had seen in Coney Island in 

1904 (Shelton, 1981, p. 200). St. Denis herself admits 

her astonishment in seeing him: ‘To our amazement, 

he says he was in the old Thompson and Dundy performances 

at Coney Island! He must, then, have been 

part of that troupe of jugglers and snake charmers 

who started me off on this wild career of Indian dancing’ 

(St. Denis, 1939, p. 289). It is interesting that by 

1928 there is no mention of the Nautch dancers who 

started her off but rather the story is full of their 

absence. 

31 St. Denis (1939, p. 71), notes that one reviewer wrote: 

It was the Hindu Temple dance that fulfilled all expectations, 

artisticóand otherwise. What matter if the 

baser minds put their programmes before their eyes 

and announced that the brown legs of the dancer 

blended into the tints above the ankles too realistically 

for the legs to be clad in tights. 

32 Amy Koritz (1997), in her article on Maud Allan’s performance 

of Salome in early twentieth century England, 

points out that Allan’s success was because her 

Western, white female body safely mediated the threat 

of the Oriental female ‘other’ in her performance. 

33 Robert Lee (1999) discusses the idea of Asian bodies as

pollutants on the North American landscape as a 

rationale for racist immigration policies and an impetus 

for ‘yellowface’ performance denigrating Asians 

themselves. 

34 Except for the work of Yutian Wong (2002) who suggests 

that dance scholars should pay attention to Asian 

bodies in St. Denis’ performances, in particular the 

Indian men. 

35 I use the imagined dialogue between Ismail Mohamet, 

Mogul Khan and a Columbia Student together with St. 

Denis. In this section, I refer to them as Ismail, Khan, 

CS and RSD respectively. It is also important to note 

the Indian men’s discomfort with being hailed by a 

North American racial slur usually directed towards 

African American men. Clearly the men understand 

the racial politics of the time and are chagrined that an 

Asian can be mistaken for an African American. Yet it is 

precisely this lack of understanding of race politics in 

the U.S. that has plagued the waves of immigrants 

from South Asia who have tried time and time again to 

separate themselves from other people of colour in 

the U.S. 

36 St. Denis was always moving between vaudeville and 

salons of high society in her performances. From the 

Hudson Theatre, New York Theater (Sunday night 

smoking concerts) and Proctor’s Theatre to the salons 

of upper class women, including Mrs. Fish, Kate 

Dalliba and Mrs. Rouland (Shelton, 1981, 53-57). 

37 See Photograph II, Ruth St. Denis and Hindu Assistants, 

‘In An Early Production of Radha, 1906’ (Schlundt, 

1962, 14). 

38 As Linda Tomko pointed out to me the ballet stage also 

had its solo artists surrounded by a chorus of bodies, 

and this was often a classed relationship. It could be 

argued here that following in ballet tradition, St. Denis 

was creating a solo with a chorus of bodies in a racialized 

relationship that rendered them invisible. 

39 Both St. Denis, (1939, p. 56) and Shelton, (1981, p. 52) 

admit the presence of the Indian men aided St. Denis 

greatly in constructing her ideas for Radha in 1906. 

Perhaps the Nautch women had left Coney Island by 

this time but there is no account that demonstrates St. 

Denis was even interested in collabourating or working 


with the Nautch dancing women. 

40 David Krasner (1997) discusses the problematic nature of 

minstrelsy until the 1890s (p. 87). He argues that until 

African Americans began performing on their own, it 

was easy for white performers to control their representation. 

41 Susan Manning (2004) develops the term ‘metaphorical 

minstrelsy’ as the extension of blackface minstrelsy in 

the U.S. by white dancers performing as nonwhite subjects 

in the 1920s and 1930s. White dancers’ representations 

were metaphorical because they were abstract 

and not meant to be impersonations. 

42 Jane Desmond (1991) argues that St. Denis as ‘a 

‘coloured’ white woman (since this is not a caricature 

of the minstrel-show variety) also evokes an ambiguous 

response.’ The argument here is that St. Denis was 

not doing a minstrel show because it was not denigrating 

or caricaturing Indian women performers. As I 

argue the violence of seizing representation, whatever 

its context, either adulatory or denigrating, is equally 

problematic. 

43 Towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the 

twentieth century, the ‘Cult of Authenticity’ can be 

viewed as the discourse through which African 

American and Native American performers were 

beginning to contest the minstrel representations of 

themselves on stage. Unlike some African American, 

and Native American women performers, such as Aida 

Overton Walker (Krasner, 1998); The Whitman Sisters 

(George, 2000); and Gowongo Mohawk (Hall, 2001); to 

mention a few, who were beginning to break through 

racist overtones and perform in non-minstrel shows 

from the 1890s through the 1910s and beyond, Indian 

dancers were not even present to provide alternate 

viewing possibilities of their dance practices for several 

decades. Of course African American and Native 

American performers were still subject to deeply racist 

attacks, as they contested discourses of primitivism 

and struggled over the control of their representation. 

At least until the 1940s, minstrelsy was an ongoing 

form even as African American performers contested 

the racist stereotyping typical of minstrel shows. As 

Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996), Susan Manning (2004) 



and others have argued, metaphorical minstrelsy of 

African Americans continued in many modern dance 

choreographers who took ideas from African American 

dancers and dance forms without due credit. But the 

visibility and presence of African American performers 

enabled new and contesting modes of performance to 

be created and exist simultaneously with old racist 

modes. This provided alternative and oppositional 

ways of seeing African American bodies, even as some 

African American actors and performers participated in 

depicting Asian characters as the case of the performance 

of the ‘Hot Mikado’ demonstrates (Steen, forthcoming). 

But this didn’t happen with Indian dancers. 

The specific and particular histories of anti-Asian immigration 

law enabled St. Denis to represent Indian and 

Asian dances without question, to market authenticity 

and thus to stage a career on the bodies of the absent 

Nautch women and limited presence of Indian men. 

44 This included cities like Chicago, Boston, Springfield, Salt 

Lake City, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, 

Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Davenport, Des 

Moines, Kansas City, Topeka, St. Louis, Pueblo, 

Colourado Springs, Denver, San Jose, Fresno, 

Bakersfield, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa 

Barbara, Sacramento, Chico, and Riverside (Schlundt, 

1962, p. 14-16; Shelton, 1981, p. 95-104). 

45 Meyda Yegenoglu (1998) suggests that the Orient is feminine, 

and can only be known as an artifice and an ‘ideological 

supplement’ and not anything that approaches 

the semblance of the ‘real’ or material (p. 15). 

46 Anti-Asian laws were just one part of the spectrum of the 

gendered and racialized economy of the time. The different 

kinds of epistemic violence perpetrated on the 

bodies of people of colour lead to different kinds of 

histories and performative enactments of power. The 

violence of slavery on African Americans, the decimation 

of Native Americans, and the indentured labour 

and selective immigration policies towards Hispanics 

and Asians are constructed always in relation to specific 

labour issues and lead to different kinds of performances. 

However, as several dance scholars have 

argued, American modern dance histories reflect the 

ways that the gendered and racialized economy 


became constitutive of American identity (Brenda 

(Dixon Gottschild, 1996; Manning, 2004; Shea Murphy, 

2007; Wong, 2002). 

47 Partly because white bourgeois women were trying to find 

their own place within the American state and fighting 

for equal rights as citizens, they operated in an economy 

that forced them to make choices between their 

gender and their race. Asian American historian Gary 

Okihiro (2001) astutely notes, in the American context, 

although white women were afforded some privilege, 

they were situated between white men and peoples of 

colour and were thus found competing with them (p. 

62). Like women in other nations, white women in 

America were torn between loyalty to their race and to 

their gender. U.S. women’s labour histories have also 

discussed this in connection to the suffrage movement, 

ie. often white women prioritized gender rights 

and fought for them in isolation from race issues 

(Kraditor, 1970); as a result, suffragists did not align 

with women of colour in seeking the vote (Mohanty, 

Russo, Torres (Eds), 1991, p. 10). As Cynthia Enloe 

(1990) points out, ‘some suffragists in the United States 

and Europe argued that their service to the empire 

was proof of their reliability as voters’ (p. 47). As 

Mohanty et al. (1991) note, ‘historically, [white] feminist 

movements in the West have rarely engaged questions 

of immigration and nationality’ (p. 23). Historic 

divisions within feminist movements fracture possibilities 

today for united coalitions across the colour line. It 

is not possible to understand current politics without a 

history that acknowledges the ways upper and middle 

class white women, in the process of obtaining their 

own suffrage, sold out their sisters of colour. Siding 

with the state on anti-Asian immigration policies, however, 

did not prevent white middle class American 

women from being enamored with Asian cultures, 

philosophies, or practices. In fact, there had already 

been an exchange – although one-sided – of Asian 

goods, products, services, and ideas that had entered 

and transformed American sensibilities. Thus Asia and 

America were already entwined by commodification 

and consumer culture, and the American desire for 

Asian goods fed a desire for Asian practices as well.

While St. Denis was no activist, she was increasingly 

marketing herself as ‘an unfettered new woman’ 

(Shelton, 1981, p. 22). She even performed for the 

National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) and 

cultivated publicity as a daring woman. Similarly, interest 

in Indian philosophies and culture abounded as 

evidence by Kalidasa’s Sakuntala (a famous Sanskrit 

play from India) that was performed by sixty young, 

presumably white girls in June of 1904, demonstrating 

the fascination for Indian art and culture (NYH, 19 June 

1904, p. 14). 

48 Evidence from newspaper articles of the period reveal 

racist underpinnings of the period as well as a framework 

of categorization and fixation of Indian female 

bodies (NYAJ, 17 June 1904; NYAJ, 21 August 1904; 

NYAJ, 28 August 1904). 

49 Karen Leonard (1992) notes that a large group of Indian 

men married Mexican women and established families 

in northern California near San Francisco in Yuba City 

and to the south in the Imperial Valley. They did so 

partly in the attempt to curb the effects of racist policies 

that prevented Indian women from migrating during 

this period and partly to establish citizenship 

rights. Others resisted by fighting several legal battles 

to retain rights of American citizenship in 1918, 1922, 

1923, and 1924, to no avail (Takaki, 1990, p. 298–302). 

They were unequivocally deprived of citizenship rights. 

50 Various Asian labourers were often pitted against one 

another in an effort to find cheap labour. Indians were 

seen as a solution to the Chinese and Japanese problem 

because they were cheaper and initially were 

viewed as cousins of ‘white folks’ since they were of 

Aryan descent. This changed later on however, as race 

became an issue of colour. 

51 Tagore was denied entry into the United States. He cancelled 

his tour and returned to India where he commented 

caustically: ‘Jesus could not get into America 

because, first of all, He would not have the necessary 

money, and secondly, He would be an Asiatic.’ (Takaki, 

1990, p. 299) 

52 The statistics and information in this section are taken 

from Schlundt (1962), Shelton (1981), and Takaki (1990). 

53 Shelton (1981) mentions that St. Denis’ company had 


grown to five to include Ruth, Ted, Hilda, Alice and her 

brother (p. 123). 

54 La Meri brought Varalakshmi and Bhanumati to the U.S. to 

perform in New York in 1942, thirty-eight years after 

their Nautch sisters had performed in Coney Island 

(LMP, 1912-1954; Abrahams, 1974, p. 125–145). 

55 Balasaraswati, a dancer from a traditional devadasi family, 

first arrived in 1954 under the auspices of the Asia 

Society and went on to tour and perform extensively in 

the United States and even taught at various universities 

including Wesleyan, University of California, Los 

Angeles and University of Southern California, to name 

a few (Abrahams, 1974, p. 25 –145). 

56 There was a Wild Wild West Show featuring a Native 

American ‘village’ on display as well as Egyptian belly 

dancers and many Native Americans who were all performing 

on Coney Island and all mistakenly conflated 

with one another as ‘Indians’, Nautch, or ‘Oriental.’ 

57 St. Denis’ autobiography (1939) details how excited she 

was by the visit of Gaekwar of Baroda – a royal patron 

who arrived at the Dalliba’s salon, saw St. Denis’ performance 

and gave her encouragement to develop 

her art before the 1906 premier of Rhada. What if the 

Gaekwar supported his own dancers, the Nautch 

women both at home and in New York? What might 

have happened then? 

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NEWSPAPERS, PERIODICALS, MANUSCRIPTS CITED 

BDE – Brooklyn Daily Eagle 

NPG – National Police Gazette 

NYAJ – New York American and Journal 

NYC – New York Clipper 

NYDM – New York Dramatic Mirror 

NYDN – New York Daily News 

NYEP – New York Evening Post 

NYH – New York Herald 

NYM – New York Mirror 

NYSN – New York Sunday News 

NYT – New York Times 

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LMP – La Meri Papers 

60 College Girls in a Hindoo Play (1904, June 19). New York 

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New York Daily News, p. 3. 

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New York Herald, n.p. 

Advertisements from Amusements Section (1904, May 14). 


Advertisement from Amusements Section (1904, May 16). 

New York American and Journal, p. 6. 

Advertisement from Amusements Section (1904, May 17). 

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Advertisements from Amusements Section (1904, June 12). 


Advertisement for Durbar (1904, April 16). New York Dramatic 

Mirror, p. 19. 

Advertisement for Nautch Dancers (1881, February 13). 

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 1. 

Advertisement for Zanina (1881, January 8). New York

Clipper, p. 334. 

Advertisement for Zanina and Nautch Dancers (1881, January 

22). New York Mirror, p. 9. 

‘The Aftermath of the Durbar’ (1903 January 9). New York 

American and Journal, p. 16. 

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‘Attractions at the Theatres and Roof Gardens’ (1904, June 

5). New York American and Journal, p. 26. 

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‘Changes in Gay Coney Island Since Last You Saw’ (1904, 

March 20). New York Daily News, p. 3. 

‘Circus Breaks World’s Record’ (1904, March 26). New York 

Daily News, p. 5. 

‘Circus Crowds Grow Bigger Week by Week’ (1904, April 10). 


‘Coney Island Crowd Breaks All Records’ (1904, June 13). 


‘Coney Island’s Summer Splendors’ (1904, April 24). New York 

Herald, p. 2. 

‘Coney Isle has 200,000 at its Opening ‘(1904, May 15). New 

York American and Journal, p. 62. 

‘Contagious Foreigners’ (1881, May 16). New York Times, p. 

4. 

‘Curiosities Showing Off: Nautch Girls, Nubians, and Zulus 


put through their Paces’ (1884, March 17). New York 

Times, p. 8. 

‘Dreamland, Coney Island’ (1904, June 5). New York 

American and Journal (American Magazine 

Supplement), p. 22. 

Dreamland Coupon (1904, May 27). New York American and 

Journal, p. 9. 

Dreamland Coupon (1904, May 30). New York American and 


‘Down by the Sea’ (1904, August 28). New York Daily News, 

p. 3. 

‘The Durbar Portrait of Lady Curzon, Vicerine of India’ (1903, 

January 25). New York American and Journal, p. 54. 

‘Gradation of Mankind’ (1904, August 28). New York 


‘Great Crowds Still Throng the Circus’ (1904, April 3). New 

York Daily News, p. 5. 

‘Half a Million on Delhi's Plain Shout For India's New 

Emperor: A Vast Mosaic of Oriental Dazzle’ (1903, 


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‘Like the Magic of the Arabian Nights’ (1904, June 5). New 

York American and Journal (American Magazine 

Supplement), p. 9. 

‘Lord Curzon Accused of Waste in Starving India: the Durbar 

to be Sharply Probed’ (1903, January 11). New York 


Luna Park Coupon (1904, June 11). New York American and 


Luna Park Coupon (1904, June 13). New York American and 


‘Luna Park Visited by 70,000 Persons’ (1904, 23 May 1904). 


‘Montreal Skaters to Give a Mock Durbar’ (1903, February 


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‘The Nautch Dancers’ (1881, January 22). New York Clipper, 

p. 345. 

‘The Nautch Dancers’ (1880, November 21). New York 

Sunday News, p. 19. 

‘A Nautch Girl’s Wake’ (1881, February 19). The National 

Police Gazette, p. 4. 

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Eagle, n.p. 

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‘Stage Sensations’ (1881, January 16). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 

p. 3. 

‘Stepladder of Human Progress from Aborigine to Anglo- 

Saxon’ (1904, August 28). New York American and 


‘Thompson and Dundy’s Greater Luna Park’ (1904, May 8). 

New York Herald, p. 16. 

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York Daily News, p. 3. 

‘Thousands Find a New Coney Isle’ (1904, May 15). New York 

Herald, p. 6. 

‘Touring the Orient’ (1904, July 30). New York Dramatic 

Mirror, p. 13-14. 

Untitled (1880, December 12). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 3. 

Untitled (1881, February 13). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 1. 

Untitled (1889, October 8). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 4. 

Untitled (1890, March 2). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 17. 

Untitled (1890, March 7). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, p. 3.

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Untitled (1884, April 10). New York Times, p. 7. 



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Herald, p. 7. 

‘Vast Lot Of Work To Be Done On Fair’ (1904, May 1). New 

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‘A Week of Novelties and Disappointments’ (1881, January 

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(1904, June 19). New York American and Journal, p. 

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