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