When audience was customer

Published on 30th August, 2015, in Mid-day. A few months ago, I attended a fabulous Marathi show called Sangeet Bari that spoke about a little-known, yet widely prevalent, subculture of traditional singers and dancers in Maharashtra who perform only at private gatherings. It gave me a glimpse into the dancing halls of dancing girls, popularly known as 'nautch girls', would have been, before they were termed dirty, condemned by British colonisers and many puritan Hindus in the 19th and 20th century. It was in these private performing spaces that the arts flourished in India: Where song and dance was cultivated, way before the modern classification ..