OTD in early British television: 5 January 1938
John Wyver writes: One of the things I love about researching early television is how bare programme listings can lead down the strangest and most unlikely rabbit holes. Take the line-ups for the two Picture Page editions on Tuesday 5 January 1938, which featured, among others, Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, then filming Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion at Pinewood; the great German animator Lotte Reiniger; ‘former Russian spy’ Colonel Kaledin (well, not exactly; see the fascinating profile of him on the West Down Community Website); Basque children refugees performing traditional songs and dances; and, in both the afternoon and the evening, Ragini Devi (above), billed as ‘Indian dancer’ performing a Marwari dance.
As the informative Wikipedia biography of Ragini Devi notes, she was born Esther Luella Sherman in 1893 in Michigan. Her father was of Canadian-German ancestry. By the 1910s she was performing ‘international’ dances in cabarets around Minneapolis, combining Russian folk dances with self-styled Greek-and Egyptian-themed works. In 1921, against her parents wishes, Sherman married the young Indian scientist and nationalist activist Ramalal Balram Bajpai in a civil ceremony in Delaware. She embraced Hinduism and took the name ‘Ragini Devi’.
After living for a time in Brooklyn, the couple moved to India where Ragini undertook a rigorous training in traditional Indian dance. With the classical Kathakali dancer Gopinath, she toured India seeking to revive and reinvent indigenous Indian arts as a contribution to the nationalist movement. As Wkipedia notes:
Shortening the length of the dances, streamlining the costumes, and staging them on an indoor, proscenium stage, Ragini Devi and Gopinath gained prominence by transforming Kathakali into evening entertainment for urban theatergoers.
Ragini’s appearance on Picture Page came at the start of a European tour, which was cut short by the war. She returned to the United States where in New York she established the India Dance Theatre, a dance school and company that chimed with the growing American rage for ‘ethnic’ and ‘exotic’ dance. In 1947 she travelled back to India and in 1948 won a Rockefeller Foundation grant to support her ethnographic work. She travelled widely in post-Independence India, documenting regional classical and folk dance forms. She died at the age of 89 in 1982.
There’s an absolutely fascinating essay online with the journal Ligament by Rachel Mattson, ‘An archive of racial fantasy’, where she writes:
Devi’s story rarely makes an appearance in critical surveys of US or Indian dance history. She left behind no company or cohort of devotees, had no discernable influence on larger-than-life figures like Martha Graham or Rukmini Devi, and her choreographies are rarely studied, written about, or re-performed. At best, she appears in an occasional off-handed remark, a footnote, or a novelty.
But the story of Esther Sherman’s invention of, and performances as, Ragini Devi holds within it valuable information about the ways in which dance history intersects with, and can contribute to, our understanding of the history of racial and national ideologies. Maybe we can glimpse within Devi’s dancing body—and within the stories she deployed to describe it—a collection of ideas about how the dancing body reflects, contains, and reinforces ideas about racial difference.
Mattson writes with sympathy about Ragini Devi, but she is also unsparing in her conclusion:
Her efforts to articulate and perform [the Hindu ‘race-spirit’] actually worked to reinforce the foundation of white supremacy, Orientalism, and colonialism: the idea that race exists as a biological reality, and that racial groups can be described and judged and ranked. Indeed, for all her efforts to suppress her white Americanness, Devi’s life story— as well as her embodied archive, her gestural repertoire —was a quintessentially white, American one.
Devi performed for perhaps four minutes on Picture Page on the afternoon of 5 January 1938, and for the same period in that evening’s edition of the strand. And this survives only as a trace in a programme listing, along with a myriad of other stories and people and performances and ideologies that make up the richness of television in Britain before the war.
The wonderful image comes from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division archive, part of the New York Public Library Digital Collections, where it is dated only 1922-1940.
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