Interwoven Dependencies: Public keynote by Dr. Gabrielle Hosein

"Nachorious: The Nach Gyal as Post Indenture Caribbean Feminist Jouvay Mas"

This mas commemorates 180 years of the Indian ‘nautch girl’ – dancer, courtesan, tawa’if, devadasi, widow, bazaar woman, and rand or randi prostitute or sex worker – escaping British imperialism, dispossession, criminalization, evangelism, political punishment and impoverishment through the journey of indenture. Stereotyped as notoriously immoral and sexually loose, the indentured Indian woman was considered a threat to the system itself. Remembered through the character of the nach gyal, Nachorious, she still dances in the spirit of freedom and resistance. This Jouvay mas is made with indenture records from 1867, text from Mahadai Das poetry and scholarship on the nautch girl, a nach gyal figure whose spinning in the air will be a dance of life, and ghungroos to sonically memorialize this history as it became ours in the Caribbean.

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