Public Events

Keynote in the framework of the international conference “Interwoven Dependencies. Fashion and the Heritage of Mission”:

Wednesday, 2 April 2025, 4.30pm
Keynote
Dr. Gabrielle Hosein
Nachorious: The Nach Gyal as Post Indenture Caribbean Feminist Jouvay Mas
Venue: Global Heritage Lab at P26, Poststraße 26, 53111 Bonn and online

Please register for onsite attendance: https://lmy.de/sNIdk

Please register for online attendance: https://lmy.de/jidWq

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.

Dr. Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is Senior Lecturer, Institute for Gender
and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine.

“Playing Nachorious, a nach gyal mas, in Trinidad’s Jouvay”, Photo: Roger Lewis, 2025.