“Thurs [December] 27th [1787]. Spent the day at Col [Claude] Martin’s [, with] the Ives family. There entertained with a Kattpattey notch and cards”.
This is one of many references to entertainment by Sophia Plowden, wife of East India Company director Richard Chicheley Plowden, who visited Lucknow in the late 18th century. Katherine Schofield has followed Plowden’s musical interests in much more detail than I have (Schofield 2024:79-116), but I was looking in Plowden’s diary for references to the Polier family, and came across many other things of interest.
What is a ‘Kattpattey notch’ (nautch)? Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (2003:285) refers to it as a ‘brisk’ dance, but it might also be a ‘spicy’ one! Thanks to Priya Venkat Ramen for the suggestion that the word was an adjective that might mean ‘naughty’. Was Plowden entertained by a salacious nautch or just a briskly performed one? Perhaps both!
Plowden was present at a lot of entertainments, a really wide range. This was useful to notice, just because of the flatness of many European descriptions of every dance as ‘nautch’. She discriminates between types of dance and dancers (‘the nabob’s nautch women […] performed a kind of play, which I could not tell what was meant to represent’), types of vocal music (she dislikes tappa, ‘a sort of wild, harsh music without any air. I was not much pleased’), and was entertained with puppet shows, fireworks, various types of dance, tumblers and more, at an event held by the nawab for British guests. She also attended cockfights, elephant fights and a lot of European-style theatre.
The nawab’s entertainment was viewed from a garden terrace, looking over the river. The terrace was lined with green and white cut glass lamps, surrounded by trays of scented flowers ‘strung in wreaths, which they do in a very ingenious and beautiful manner. The flowers were chiefly white and red roses, white and yellow jessamine, and some of those buds strung and bound with silver threads’. Little Chichely was given some to wear like a necklace. Having watched a tumbler thread eggs on a string as she spun around, she remarks: ‘I have seen the Hindoostanny Notch women make up a string of flowers in the same way, with linen which is bound around the waist and I have marked the time they turn around to be more than a quarter of an hour.’
I enjoyed my morning in Mrs. Plowden’s company.
Martin, Claude and Llewellyn-Jones (Ed.) (2003). A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century India: The Letters of Claude Martin, 1766-1800. India: Permanent Black [in association with] The Embassy of France in India.
Schofield, Katherine (2024). Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral 1748-1858. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.