A Bloody Difficult Woman : Mayalee Dancing Girl vs. The East India Company
- Submitting institution
-
King's College London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 116032846
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- SOUNDCLOUD
- Month
- November
- Year
- 2018
- URL
-
https://soundcloud.com/user-513302522/a-bloody-difficult-woman-mayalee-dancing-girl-vs-the-east-india-company
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This soundscaped podcast and accompanying blog post is part of Schofield’s project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, produced with the British Library in 2018. In this episode, a marginal note about a “dancing girl” in a set of East India Company financial accounts prises open the illuminating story of the British sequestration of the rich salt lake at Sambhar 1835–1842 from the independent states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, and of these states’ acts of resistance to the Company’s rapacious and culturally provocative actions. Apart from brief mentions of the Sambhar lake sequestration in the secondary literature, a history of these events has never before been written. Both the historical background and the main narrative of this podcast are thus reconstructed entirely from Schofield’s new primary research in the Company’s official records, and her translations of complementary Persian and Hindi sources. The podcast intertwines the first narrative history of the Sambhar lake sequestration, told through the letters and reports of the main protagonists, with a revelatory discussion of the cultural and religious importance of salt to Jaipur and Jodhpur. The performers of Sambhar lake reveal the existence of a salt commons between the people of Jaipur and Jodhpur that the British misunderstood as a state revenue monopoly, generating a deep backstory to Gandhi’s famous salt march of 1930. Schofield narrated the whole podcast, except for quotations from primary sources which were envoiced by three different male speakers for sonic verisimilitude. The soundscape and musical samples were expressly designed to be as faithful as possible to their original cultural and sonic contexts; e.g. birdsounds from Sambhar lake, festival sounds from Sambhar town, early recordings of Jaipur gharana doyenne Kesarbai Kerkar, etc. While Schofield directed the overall soundscaping, the audio production was done by Chris Elcombe.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -