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Updated: June 28, 2025
While this was going on a puppet-show was introduced, in which the figures acted a play and danced almost in as lifelike a manner as performers on a stage. The nautch-girls continued their performances throughout the whole evening, but the other entertainments were varied.
The intimacy of the nautch-girls with the gods, which is generally accepted, cleanses them from every sin and makes them in every one's eyes irreproachable and infallible. A nautcha cannot sin, in spite of the crowd of the "celestial musicians" who swarm in every pagoda, in the form of baby-vestals and their little brothers.
Now the stud is dispersed, the buildings are in ruins, and all that remains is the Indian pagoda, where religious ceremonies, curious processions, and dances of nautch-girls occasionally take place and are attended by great crowds. To the southward again of Adam's Bridge is the celebrated Gulf of Manaar, from which the best pearls come.
Both of the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms go, in India twelve; they ought to have been married a year or two sooner; still to a stranger twelve seems quite young enough. A while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced nautch-girls appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang.
The multitude followed the great highway past the station oval and turned aside into the open jungle deepening, thickening, swelling, teeming forward. Twenty thousand voices, lifted in all pitches of the human compass, were caught by tom-toms and the impelling cadence of the singing nautch-girls like drift-wood in a swift current and driven into rhythmic pulsation.
The first courses being removed, a group of nautch-girls, attended by musicians, entered the hall, and commenced their performances, now advancing in graceful attitudes, now retiring; now with one hand held over the head, now with the other; the musicians during the time playing on lutes and tambourines behind them, and accompanying the instruments with their voices.
Companies and companies of nautch-girls, with their men-servants and instruments to accompany them even the most costly of these, who were also singing women poured out of the districts where the towns-women lived and blended in their groups as individual units, in the increasing surge that flowed out along the great Highway, like a river which had broken its dam.
He had sat to none but the most noted artists of Burmah and Japan, and the outcome of their brushes or, rather, needles, as I suppose it should be termed was in places more than remarkable. Buddhas, nautch-girls, sacred white elephants, serial fairy stories, and the rest were all worth studying; but I think the chefs-d'oeuvre of the two artistic centres were a peacock and a multi-coloured dragon.
We all sat down, the Hindus calm and stately, as if preparing for some mystic celebration, we ourselves feeling awkward and uneasy, fearing to prove guilty of some unpardonable blunder. An invisible choir of women's voices chanted a monotonous hymn, celebrating the glory of the gods. These were half a dozen nautch-girls from a neighboring pagoda.
And above all, a few tall tamarisk trees drooped long branches under hundreds of small boys. Famous nautch-girls had come from distant cities and trained with those of Hurda for an important part in the celebration. They were all staged on twelve Persian-carpeted platforms, ranged on the ground within the outer edge of the arena and close against the foot of the circular tier of seats.
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