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Updated: May 23, 2025
When the officers were not on the drill ground or philandering with their dusky loves, they amused themselves shooting the black buck, tigers, and the countless birds with which the neighbourhood abounded. The dances of the aphish-looking Nautch girls, dressed though they were in magnificent brocades, gave Burton disgust rather than pleasure.
During his visit to that country, being present at a ball where ladies and gentlemen were enjoying themselves in a somewhat laborious way in dancing, he finally asked, 'Why do you not make your servants do this for you? It is at least entertaining to see a nautch, but to wade through the English interpretation of a waltz, hic labor hoc opus est, and the servants ought to perform it."
The chaperone and eight outside girls tom-tom an appropriate Nautch accompaniment on drums with their fingers, the four prettiest girls advance, and favoring me with sundry smiles, and coquettish glances from their bright black eyes, they commence to dance. An idea seems to prevail in many Occidental minds that the Nautch dance is a very naughty thing; but nothing is further from the truth.
When he got there, he found the place was much larger than he had expected quite a good-sized village, in fact the abode of Nautch people and conjurors. In all the houses the people were busy, some dancing, some singing, others trying various conjuring tricks or practising beating the drum, and all seemed happy and joyful.
The impression of works like Tennyson's In Memoriam or Idylls of the King, common text-books in colleges, the steady pressure of Acts of the British Government in India, like that raising the marriage age of girls; the example of men in authority like Lord Curzon, during whose vice-regal tour in South India there were no nautch entertainments; the necessity of understanding expressions like "general election" and "public spirit," and of comprehending in some measure the working of local self-government all such constant pressure must effect a change in the mental standpoint.
When they ran they had an ungainly, dislocated motion, somewhat like the contortions of an Indian nautch or a Theban danseuse a dreamy, undulating movement, which even the tail, with its long fringe of black hair, seemed to partake of.
The party were immediately beset with servants offering them fruit and sherbets, and they were sprinkled with rose-water from silver flagons. The Nautch girls were not the same the tourists had seen earlier in the day. There were more of them, and they were of a finer grain; in fact, the gentlemen, who were judges, declared that most of them were really pretty.
If they're here at all, they are lying perdu in Cairo Street or in some of the Turkish quarters, smoking hasheesh, perhaps, or flirting with the Nautch dancers, and all disguised in turban, fez, or perhaps a Chinese pigtail. 'Do you believe it? 'I certainly do. 'Jove! I wonder how they managed to get into those foreign holy of holies. 'Backsheesh, I answered tartly.
He continued in English: "If you do go through with this, Dewan, tell Hunsa if anything happens when they make the decoity and if I'm any reader of what is in a man's heart, I think something will happen the Ajeet tell Hunsa to bring the Gulab to me. I like his idea, and we can't afford to let the girl get away. Don't forget to arrange for the Gulab at my nautch."
The troupe numbers about a dozen girls, and they have come to the merry-making at the Kootub to gather honest shekels by giving exhibitions of their terpsichorean talents in the Nautch dance.
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