Performing On and Beyond the Stage: An Understanding of the Nautanki Women

Author

Rahma Ali, SSLA Class of 2024Follow

Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Fall 2024

Date of Submission

2024-09-07

Advisor

Ramsha Siddiqui, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Committee

Aliya Iqbal Naqvi, Visiting Faculty, Department of Social Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

Nuatanki women, Gender, Caste, Performance, Virtue, Promiscuity

Abstract

The nautanki was a genre of folk theatre that was prominent in 19^th and 20^th century North India. Nautanki troupes travelled across the regions of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, and Punjab. While previously men cross-dressed as women to embody female characters on-stage, around the 1920s women began being recruited in the nautanki too. This project is primarily concerned with the domestic and social factors that led to this innovation in the nautanki. It interrogates the claim that while the nautanki men came from various castes, the women came from less diverse backgrounds. This fact is explained using the idea that female performers’ character was scrutinized more than the male performers. The public nature of their profession often framed them as promiscuous. Therefore, women from only a select communities entered the nautanki. This thesis focuses on the social and spatial context of the performance arena these women occupied. It sets the stage by using Peter Claus and Frank Korom’s folkloristics to highlight the importance of the performance setting. It then contrasts the pre-existing scholarship on the nautanki women with Deepti Mehrotra’s biography of Gulab Bai to reveal both the public and private dimensions of these performers’ lives. And lastly, it includes an account of the nautanki women in Pakistan. This thesis relies on secondary research and expert interviews to evaluate the abovementioned ideas.

Pages

1-74

Recommended Citation

Ali, R. (2024). Performing On and Beyond the Stage: An Understanding of the Nautanki Women (Unpublished undergraduate project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/sslace/301