fig. 21 Francis Frith &co., ‘3191, Cashmere: Nautch Girl (dancing attitude)’ (c.1850-60), whole-plate albumen print from wet collodion glass negative, 16.5 x 20.3 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
fig. 15 Alfred Edward Chalon (artist) and Richard James Lane (lithographer), La Bayadère - Portrait of Mademoiselle Taglioni (c.1830), printed by Graf & Soret, published by Ackermann & Co. and Rittner & Goupil, London, hand colored lithograph, 57.4 x 38.4 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
These (figs. 21 and 15) are two images of dancing which cross and connect the worlds of India and England. One dancer’s hand displays an ornamental stage gesture, the other’s conceals a hidden mudra; one dancer’s eyes look coyly askance to the boxes, the other’s are fixed on the camera in cold khumari; one dancer’s feet are elevated en pointe and on the cusp of another step, and the other’s are poised firm on the floor, having already arrived; both are amplified and extruded by the folds and links of their different cloth and jewels. It is not to absorb these two images into correspondence that I place them together but rather to magnify the effect of such different worldly contexts having somehow caused two dancers, two oceans and two decades apart to strike two attitudes which ghost and grace each other on the verge of resemblance.
End.