Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T13:25:24.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Faithful to the Salt: Mayalee Dancing Girl versus the East India Company in Rajasthan

Official Records of the East India Company

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Katherine Butler Schofield
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

In 1835, the East India Company sequestered the salt lake at Sambhar from the Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, until 1842. This historical footnote left behind a set of financial accounts in the Company records that are alive with musicians and dancers and the cycle of the ritual year in Rajasthan. One courtesan stands forth as exceptional: Mayalee “dancing girl”. Her insistence on being paid in salt reveals the extraordinary stories the fleeting appearance of performers in the official records of the East India Company can tell about relations between the British and the princely states in the 1830s and 40s, about the Rajput notions of prosperity and sovereignty invested in courtesans and in salt, and the existence of a salt commons at Sambhar before the ill-informed interference of the Company there.

Type
Chapter
Information
Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858
, pp. 147 - 179
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×