Dancers

These images are from colonial postcards purchased on ebay of "nautch" girls in South India:

"As part of the entertainment for the royal family, these highly skilled dancers performed for the ruler and entertained his guests. They also formed part of everyday life for those outside the palaces, as people invited them to perform at celebrations, festivals, and fairs. These women were valued for their intelligence as well as their dancing skills and were at least partially educated...For the Western travelers, the nautch girls were the embodiment of sexuality, highly erotic seductresses who had the ability to charm all males. Indeed, seventeenth-century travelers frequently portrayed India as a hotbed of vice and full of prostitutes....the nautch girls had become a sexual threat to the tight-laced colonial women....Over time, the dancing girls who had been so admired and celebrated for their skills and attributes in precolonial India saw a decline in their status. During the British colonization of India, the nautch girls fell from their exalted position of esteemed artist to the role of common prostitute; their movements, previously appreciated as high culture, were now seen as merely sexually provocative. This shift in attitude towards the nautch girls is sometimes blamed on the influx of British soldiers of the East India Company, as they took the women as mistresses and gave them little in return."
- Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires by Julie Peakman

Overlaid on top of these prints using intaglio are circles created using a Watershed Algorithm. The Watershed Algorithm is a classic image processing algorithm that treats an image like a topographic map, with brightness equating to height. In these prints, the circles represent the "peaks" of the image. I feel these marks somehow also emphasize the skilled poses of these dancers. The treatment of the image as landscape or topography metaphorically emphasizes the goddess Bhumi, representing mother earth and these dancers' originally-held spiritual and socio-economic status as devadasis. Rather than a single watershed moment, the disenfranchisement of these dancers was caused by the imposition of Western cultural values, leading to the Victorian Purity and Anti-nautch movements during the British Raj.