Rare Madame Menaka Find: The Menaka Archive

A few days ago, an article on Madame Menaka by the great Indian dance historian Sunil Kothari was published in The Asian Age, and I was heartened to see that the title of his article is about his viewing a clip from "The Tiger of Hastinapur," which by his description of the brief tiger and king visuals and reference to my blog, is clearly the video clip I posted online years ago from the 1938 German feature film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur (see here and here) which, due to the editing program I used, included brief glimpses of the scenes before and after the dance sequence.  I love knowing that rare video clips I have posted or sourced are being seen by such knowledgeable people as Kothari who lived through so much of India's dance history!  There is some confusion and perhaps typos in Kothari's article, given that the photo and descriptions he references from Damayanti Joshi's book on Madame Menaka, which I own, actually refer to the film and the photo still as "Die Tiger von Eschnapur," not "The Tiger of Hastinapur," and he also amusingly refers to me as "Milai Milan." :)

Anyway, Kothari's article prompted me to see if any new Madame Menaka finds had surfaced online in recent years, and through a quick search I discovered something EXTRAORDINARY: some Indian dance and music history enthusiasts/scholars in Germany have created an online archive, "The Menaka Archive," dedicated entirely to Madame Menaka (aka Leila Roy-Sokhey, 1899-1947) and her Indian ballet group's European performance tour from 1936-1938 at http://menaka-archive.org!  Note that the archive is in the German language, and while it does have an English option, the English translations seem to be automatically generated so are not fully accurate;  I have linked to those pages or linked to/used automatic Google Translate translations throughout this post where possible (but for those that appear in German, you'll need to use the translation features of a browser like Google Chrome).

The archive looks to be the brainchild of two Germans, Markus Schlaffke, a documentary filmmaker and doctoral student at the Bauhaus University Weimar researching the Menaka Ballet in Europe, and Isabella Schwaderer, a research associate at the University of Erfurt who is also working on a project about the European reception of the 1936-1938 Menaka ballet tour.  The efforts looks to have sprung from the artistic research project/collective of which Schlaffke and Schwaderer seem to be a part, Zinda Naach, that has aimed to hold Indian dance performances in recent years along the original route of the Menaka tour.  In such coincidental timing related to Kothari's November 11 article this month, the Zinda Naach Facebook page (which writes in English) shared that The Menaka Archive went live a few days earlier on November 6, proclaiming:

... We are now able to trace Madame Menakas performances in Europe from an overall perspective for the first time. Over the last years we have researched documents of Menakas performances in Europe in hundreds of Archives and private collections. We have ordered these finds and assigned them to a digital database that is now available to the public as 'The Menaka Archive' (www.menaka-archive.org). We understand The Menaka Archive as a collaborative platform for further research and reconstruction of a specific history of artistic modernity, written jointly by dancers and musicians in India as well as in Germany ... The Zinda Naach performances will from now on continue as a series of events under the umbrella of The Menaka Archive in order to activate and decipher its archival findings. We kindly invite you to explore The Menaka Archive holdings and to contribute to its research program.

The first thing visitors to the Menaka Archive see is—guess what!—the other Menaka troupe dance from the 1938 film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur!  I think the archive's version, given the sharper appearance and some scratch lines, may come from a copy of the film in Germany, rather than the lesser-quality but longer one I had found and posted.  Here's a screencap of the archive's homepage:

Screencap from www.menaka-archive.org

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1 comment Madame Menaka, Rare Find

Film Dances of Madame Menaka and the Menaka Indian Ballet

Joshi's Biography

Over a year ago, I featured three rare film dance sequences of members of Madame Menaka's "Menaka Indian Ballet"; two were from the 1938 German film Der Tiger Von Eschnapur and the other was from the 1938 British documentary Temples of India.  Medame Menaka (real name Leila Sokhey) is generally recognized as an instrumental figure in the transformation of the maligned North Indian "nautch" dance to respectable "Kathak" in the 1930s.  Not only was she among the first (some would say the first) Brahmin women to perform Kathak on the public stage at a time when public female performance was stigmatized due to its association with prostitution, but also she was a pioneer in refashioning the form with a modern, dance-drama format and introduced Kathak technique to the international community for the first time through her troupe's tours of Europe and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, Menaka's name and contribution remain generally forgotten today outside of serious dance circles due to her early death in 1947, the demise of her dance school soon after, and the establishment of Kathak as a patriarchal tradition that rarely acknowledges women practitioners of the past "as gurus, teachers, co-creators, or pioneers" (Chakravorty). 

Given Menaka's importance to Kathak dance and her billing as a dancer using Kathak technique, I was perplexed when I first watched her troupe's performances in Der Tiger Von Eschnapur.  The first dance segment had absolutely nothing to do with Kathak and the second only marginally so; both seemed to be presenting a generic, "exotic" Uday Shankar-style aesthetic that did not follow any particular form of Indian classical dance and instead looked inspired by Javanese dance.  At the time I figured Menaka must have bowed to the demands of the film which wanted to feature an "oriental" spectacle.

But this interpretation was turned on its head this week when I got a hold of the late Kathak dancer Damayanti Joshi's biography of Madame Menaka.  Joshi explicitly notes the dances in Der Tiger Von Eschnapur were excerpts from two of Menaka's earliest dance-drama creations, Krishna Leela and Deva Vijaya Nritya!  What's more, the costumes are clearly authentic pieces straight from the real-life productions, and it's highly likely the music is authentic as well.  What conclusions can be drawn from this striking information?  I'll get to my thoughts later on in the post, but first I want to review the songs again and reveal who the dancers were.

Identification

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6 comments Madame Menaka, Male Dance, Menaka Indian Ballet, Rare Find, Research

Indian Dances in Western Films about India: Part 2 (The Rare)

Continuing on from Part 1 of the series, here in Part 2 I've listed those dances that don't quite fit in the upcoming Part 3 (orientalist dances) because although they don't appear particularly authentic there is something truly historically special and rare about them and they deserve a space all of their own. 

The first two sets of dances are not from British or US films but, instead, Germany! I didn't realize that Germany's interest in India dates back to the Romantic Period and the many German romanticists who found inspiration in Indian writings. Not surprisingly, when films became mainstream a century or so later, quite a few German films concerned the subject of India.  The history of "German Indology" is quite fascinating and complex particularly regarding German orientalism (and how it compared to British and French orientalism) and the rise of Nazi ideology in Germany; the book The Indo-German Identification looks like an interesting review of these topics and is previewable on Google Books.  OK, on to the dances!

Der Tiger von Eschnapur (1938, Germany) 

The 1918 German book The Indian Tomb written by Thea von Harbou has had many German film incarnations and keeping track of them gets really confusing!  Let's just say this 1938 version (split in two parts, one Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur) and two Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb)) directed by Richard Eichberg is the second film incarnation; the third version from 1959 will be lovingly covered in all its bizarre glory in Part 3.  :) Anything and everything you would want to know about the various Indian Tomb films is covered in this great article from some obscure online magazine called Rouge.

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9 comments Madame Menaka, Menaka Indian Ballet, Rare Find, Research, Western Films