Navigating the Menaka-Archive: An interdisciplinary platform on entangled histories of modern dance across India and Europe

Table of Con­tents
Towards the Dig­i­tal Archive | Transna­tion­al Sites of the Archival Sources | Engag­ing crit­i­cal­ly with the Source-Base | The Mena­ka-Archive as Col­lab­o­ra­tive Research Plat­form | End­notes | Bib­li­og­ra­phy

The Mena­ka-Archive (www.menaka-archive.org) is a dig­i­tal meta-archive which hous­es and links doc­u­ments on the Indi­an dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Leila Roy-Sokhey, alias Madame Mena­ka. The focus of the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is on mate­r­i­al from the con­text of the three-year tour that Leila Roy under­took with her Indi­an bal­let through Europe and espe­cial­ly through Ger­many from 1936–38. In this paper, we describe the struc­ture of the dig­i­tal Mena­ka-Archive and some of the method­olog­i­cal approach­es we have been explor­ing in research­ing, index­ing, describ­ing, and con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing its collection.

Madame Mena­ka was the stage name of the Ben­gali dancer and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Leila Roy-Sokhey (1899–1947). In the 1920s and 30s, Leila Roy was active in India’s nation­al cul­tur­al reform. She strove to revi­tal­ize tra­di­tion­al dance forms such as the North Indi­an Kathak, found­ing her pri­vate dance school and ensem­ble, for which she chore­o­graphed dance dra­mas. Already in the ear­ly 1930s, she under­took tours both in South Asia and Europe. Her project received inter­na­tion­al atten­tion on a larg­er scale when she toured Europe for the sec­ond time with her ensem­ble from 1936 to 1938. Most of this tour took place in Ger­many, where the Mena­ka Bal­let also per­formed at the inter­na­tion­al dance com­pe­ti­tions dur­ing the Olympic Games in Berlin in the sum­mer of 1936.

These are some of the mile­stones of an artist’s life tra­jec­to­ry, which quite lit­er­al­ly criss­crossed with con­flict-rid­den spaces across Europe and India – both geo­graph­i­cal­ly and metaphor­i­cal­ly. Menaka’s body of work is con­sid­ered one of the first inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized attempts at stag­ing and estab­lish­ing con­tem­po­rary Indi­an dance. It aimed to be accept­ed both cre­ative­ly and the­o­ret­i­cal­ly on a par with the West­ern avant-garde. At the same time, it also sought to eman­ci­pate itself from the hege­mon­ic pow­er of the Euro­pean art world to devel­op an inde­pen­dent and “nation­al­ly authen­tic” artis­tic language.

In Indi­an art his­to­ry, Menaka’s work is acknowl­edged as a con­tri­bu­tion to the revi­tal­iza­tion of the north Indi­an Kathak-dance. Above all, how­ev­er, Mena­ka is known for her mer­it in open­ing up the high­ly con­tro­ver­sial field of dance for a new mid­dle class, free­ing it from long­stand­ing social stig­ma and there­in con­nect­ing it to the emerg­ing nation­al­ist move­ment in India. The dance steps of the Indi­an bal­let were seen as essen­tial steps towards strength­en­ing nation­al self-con­fi­dence in India and thus part of broad­er crit­i­cal dis­cours­es on British colo­nial rule (Kan­hai 2020).

Mean­while, in Europe, the idea of nation­al cul­tur­al renew­al, promi­nent­ly fea­tur­ing in Menaka’s Indi­an Bal­let, was com­pat­i­ble with social-rev­o­lu­tion­ary dis­cours­es and aes­thet­i­cal utopias. Espe­cial­ly in Ger­many, the Indi­an Bal­let pro­vid­ed a par­tic­u­lar “plat­form in pro­ject­ing mod­ern long­ings for a return to the ori­gins.” (Bax­mann 2008a: 42).[i]   Par­tic­u­lar­ly in the 1930s, dance per­for­mances from Asia met with wide­spread inter­est because they “seemed to refer to bod­i­ly knowl­edge that had been lost in Europe.” (Ibid.) Such con­sid­er­a­tions were a pan-Euro­pean phe­nom­e­non, but in Ger­many they lead to an almost “inevitable” amal­ga­ma­tion of folk­lore and racial ide­ol­o­gy (Bax­mann 2008b: 102). Dur­ing the three-year tour of Menaka’s Indi­an Bal­let, the Nation­al Social­ist cul­tur­al pol­i­cy was being con­sol­i­dat­ed. Unin­ten­tion­al­ly, the Indi­an artists pro­vid­ed ample illus­tra­tive mate­r­i­al for an ongo­ing quest of Ger­man soci­ety for “re-root­ing” nation­al cul­ture in Ger­many based on racial­iz­ing principles.

Both in Europe and India, the Mena­ka Indi­an Bal­let has left its mark on the artis­tic land­scape. How­ev­er, com­pared to the extent of its con­tem­po­rary recep­tion, remark­ably lit­tle of Leila Roy’s project has been archived. There is no Mena­ka archive in India. Leila Roy died rel­a­tive­ly young at the age of 48 in 1947 from Bright’s dis­ease, a chron­ic liv­er dis­or­der. Her pri­vate dance stu­dio (first on the cam­pus of the Haf­fkin Insti­tute in Bom­bay, lat­er in Khan­dala, a sub­urb of Bom­bay) could no longer exist in the pro­fes­sion­al form she had envis­aged for it, already by the ear­ly 1940s and closed down after her death. The dancer Damayan­ti Joshi, trained by Leila Roy, also par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Mena­ka Ballet’s Euro­pean tour. Lat­er in her life, she pub­lished a short biog­ra­phy of the artist in 1989 (Joshi 1989). Until today, this is the only com­pre­hen­sive wit­ness account of Leila Roy’s life and body of work by one of her contemporaries.

Nev­er­the­less, the per­for­mances of the Mena­ka Bal­let, albeit frag­ment­ed, have been wide­ly doc­u­ment­ed. News­pa­per reports, the­atre pro­grams, pho­to col­lec­tions, let­ters, film clips and sound record­ings paint a nuanced pic­ture of the dance events. Espe­cial­ly the Euro­pean tour of 1936–38 was a thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed event. Not only does it offer mate­r­i­al relat­ed to the hun­dreds of per­for­mances done by the ensem­ble over three years, but it also points to transna­tion­al­ly inter­wo­ven art-worlds and their under­ly­ing ide­o­log­i­cal and logis­ti­cal net­works dur­ing the inter-war period. 

This mate­r­i­al and its dis­cur­sive field were the start­ing point for the idea of a dig­i­tal Mena­ka-Archive. The archival research project aims to under­stand the three-year Euro­pean tour of the Indi­an Bal­let as an archive in its own right, to col­lect traces of the dance per­for­mances, locate frag­ment­ed archival hold­ings, link them in a data­base, and map the over­all event of the tour. This grow­ing data­base of a transna­tion­al art event such as the Mena­ka tour promis­es new insights pro­vid­ing the basis for fur­ther inter-dis­ci­pli­nary research.

Towards the Digital Archive

The first impulse for a sys­tem­at­ic recon­struc­tion of the Mena­ka tour came from our Indi­an part­ner, Ustad Irfan Muham­mad Khan, a musi­cian work­ing in Kolkata. Since his grand­fa­ther, Sakhawat Hus­sein Khan, had par­tic­i­pat­ed as a musi­cian in the Ballet’s Euro­pean tour, he asked for help with his research into his fam­i­ly his­to­ry in Ger­many. In return, Irfan Khan opened his fam­i­ly archive with his grandfather’s mem­o­ra­bil­ia in Kolkata for access.

In 2015, the exchange with Irfan Khan first led to a series of joint artis­tic events with music, Kathak dance per­for­mances and short lec­tures on the his­tor­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the pro­gramme in Ger­many. At the same time, ini­tial research in Ger­man archives brought first results and led, sub­se­quent­ly, to ideas to sys­tem­atize the grow­ing col­lec­tion of found objects via an archival con­cept. Since 2016, the project has tak­en con­crete shape with­in Markus Schlaffke’s PhD project (Schlaf­fke 2021). 

This project was part of the doc­tor­al pro­gram for artis­tic research at the Bauhaus-Uni­ver­si­ty Weimar and con­nect­ed artistic/design prac­tice and cul­tur­al stud­ies research. The con­struc­tion of the data­base, the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of inter­faces and the fur­ther devel­op­ment and cura­tion of the dig­i­tal archive was first under­stood and described here as a spe­cif­ic form of artis­tic research.

From 2018, Isabel­la Schwader­er has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly locat­ed and com­piled the reviews of all doc­u­ment­ed Mena­ka per­for­mances in Ger­man region­al news­pa­per archives and from inter­na­tion­al dig­i­tal archives for her research on the Mena­ka Ballet’s recep­tion his­to­ry in the con­text of her post­doc­tor­al project based at the Chair of Gen­er­al Reli­gious Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Erfurt. The the­atre reviews pro­vide a text cor­pus, which is part of her broad­er research on the image of India in the Ger­man debate around Ger­man reli­gious reform move­ments across art and philosophy.

As a data­base and web­site inter­face, the archive has exist­ed since 2019. We have been run­ning the web­site with a con­nect­ed research blog, expand­ing the col­lec­tion and devel­op­ing new mate­r­i­al. The archive has changed from the orig­i­nal inten­tion of sim­ply doc­u­ment­ing the Ger­man tour of the Indi­an Bal­let as com­plete­ly as pos­si­ble to a broad­er approach of bring­ing diverse mate­ri­als from oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries and India togeth­er on the ear­ly and late his­to­ry of Menaka’s artis­tic work.

In the fol­low­ing sec­tions, we pro­vide an overview of the sev­er­al sites where we found sources relat­ed to the ensemble’s tra­jec­to­ry and dis­cuss some method­olog­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions for fur­ther explo­ration. All sources have duly been list­ed and described in the dig­i­tal Menaka-Archive.

Transnational Sites of the Archival Sources

1. The Ernst Krauss collection in The Allard Pierson Collections, University of Amsterdam

The lack of schol­ar­ly pub­li­ca­tions and edit­ed sources on the his­to­ry of Menaka’s Indi­an Bal­let makes the recon­struc­tion of her Euro­pean tour an archival detec­tive work. The increas­ing move towards dig­i­ti­za­tion of archives con­stant­ly changes this sit­u­a­tion. How­ev­er, as recent­ly as 2016, at the begin­ning of the authors’ research, search­es in the data­bas­es avail­able online yield­ed vir­tu­al­ly no results. The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the per­son­al col­lec­tions of Ernst Krauss, the impre­sario of the Mena­ka tour, in the Allard Pier­son Col­lec­tions, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ams­ter­dam (https://allardpierson.nl/en/), there­fore, was a break­through for the research.

Ernst Krauss (1887–1958) was a Ger­man who had estab­lished an artists’ and con­cert agency with an inter­na­tion­al reach in Ams­ter­dam in the 1920s. Krauss had planned, coor­di­nat­ed, and financed the major­i­ty of Mena­ka per­for­mances in Europe since 1935. Exten­sive mate­r­i­al from his agency – pri­mar­i­ly artist port­fo­lios, event doc­u­men­ta­tion, and some per­son­al papers – are pre­served in the Allard Pier­son Col­lec­tions’ the­atre archive. As Krauss had no chil­dren, the records of his com­pa­ny and pri­vate doc­u­ments went to the Allard Pier­son Col­lec­tions. The col­lec­tions were cat­a­logued in the ear­ly 1990s, and this allowed us to iden­ti­fy the Krauss estate. It also con­tains a port­fo­lio with pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al, pho­tographs, reviews and, most impor­tant­ly, a list of doc­u­ment­ed per­for­mance dates and venues of the Indi­an Bal­let in Ger­many. This list was an impor­tant clue for assess­ing the scale of the tour and cre­at­ing a grid for fur­ther sys­tem­at­ic research.

2. The Khan Family Archive, Kolkata

Anoth­er impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion is the pri­vate archive of the Khan fam­i­ly of musi­cians in Kolkata. This con­sists of the pri­vate col­lec­tions of Sakhawat Hus­sein Khan, who led the six-mem­ber accom­pa­ny­ing orches­tra of the Mena­ka Bal­let. Khan reg­u­lar­ly wrote let­ters from Europe, report­ing about his expe­ri­ences, set­tling fam­i­ly mat­ters. He also doc­u­ment­ed his jour­ney with his cam­era. The albums with pho­tographs show­ing his trav­els through Ger­many, his post­cards, let­ters, and sou­venirs have been kept by Sakhawat Khan’s grand­son Irfan Muham­mad Khan. These doc­u­ments rep­re­sent a coher­ent col­lec­tion of sources that visu­al­ly depict the Mena­ka tour from the per­spec­tive of one of its participants.

3. The European Press Archive

The per­for­mances of the Mena­ka Bal­let have been exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed in Euro­pean press. These took place almost every evening on the stages of hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent city the­atres in the Ger­man-speak­ing coun­tries, and beyond, and gen­er­at­ed a broad response in the fea­ture pages of region­al news­pa­pers. The search for the Ger­man mate­r­i­al turned out to be com­par­a­tive­ly com­pli­cat­ed since at the begin­ning of this par­tic­u­lar part of the research, in 2018, vir­tu­al­ly no Ger­man news­pa­pers were acces­si­ble in dig­i­tized form. There­fore, we had to rely on local archives of sev­er­al cities (Stadtarchive), where we sus­pect­ed one or more per­for­mances had tak­en place, based on the tour sched­ule. Our search in the archives bore over­whelm­ing results in the form of numer­ous traces of the tour. A base of about 120 the­atre reviews, gen­er­al­ly in two columns of about 500 words, some­times with a pic­ture, were the start­ing point.

This was a much eas­i­er process when it came to the full-text search­es we could con­duct in the archives of neigh­bour­ing Euro­pean coun­tries, many of which have mean­while become acces­si­ble, that led us to high-qual­i­ty doc­u­men­ta­tion of the tour. The fol­low­ing nation­al plat­forms should be men­tioned here, in the order in which we inte­grat­ed the documents:

- Delpher (https://www.delpher.nl/): Netherlands

- Anno (https://anno.onb.ac.at/): Aus­tri­an Nation­al Library

- Digi­tised Swiss news­pa­pers (https://www.e‑newspaperarchives.ch/)

- Dig­i­tal archive of the French Nation­al Library (https://gallica.bnf.fr/)

- Euro­peana (https://www.europeana.eu/en): var­i­ous Euro­pean newspapers

Among the mate­ri­als that have increas­ing­ly become acces­si­ble, are adver­tise­ments, the­ater cri­tiques and pic­tures from the Sin­ga­pore news­pa­per archive (https://eresources.nlb.‌gov.sg/‌newspapers/), which form a basis for recon­struct­ing the Mena­ka Ballet’s South Asian tour in 1935. Var­i­ous Indi­an news­pa­pers, pre­dom­i­nant­ly the Bom­bay Chron­i­cle, also deci­sive­ly shed light on the hith­er­to com­plete­ly neglect­ed area of the Indi­an recep­tion of Menaka’s stage dramas.

This increas­ing dig­i­tal avail­abil­i­ty of sources helps trace the transna­tion­al and colo­nial entan­gle­ments of a glob­al enter­tain­ment indus­try. For instance, reports on the Indi­an Bal­let appear in places where the troupe had nev­er been, such as Aus­tralia. The net­work of news bureaus and the exchange of texts from feuil­letons show that dis­putes about art and cul­ture were impor­tant and were con­sumed inter­na­tion­al­ly along with news about pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics, and the nat­ur­al sciences.

4. Individual sources

In addi­tion to the col­lec­tions iden­ti­fied so far, sev­er­al indi­vid­ual sources that are impor­tant for the col­lec­tion of tour doc­u­ments have also been iden­ti­fied and are pre­sent­ed on the Mena­ka-Archive plat­form. At the Ham­burg People’s Opera (Volk­sop­er), the Reich Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny (Reich­srund­funkge­sellschaft) record­ed one per­for­mance on shel­lac records at the begin­ning of 1936. These record­ings exist until today and belong to the col­lec­tions of the Ger­man Broad­cast­ing Archive (Deutsches Rund­funkarchiv) in Frank­furt am Main. Besides, the Mena­ka Bal­let took part in the Ger­man fea­ture film pro­duc­tion Der Tiger von Eschna­pur in 1937. In this pro­duc­tion by Richard Eich­berg, the ensem­ble appears as extras in a scene of the movie. The chore­og­ra­phy was an item from the ensemble’s stage reper­toire. These are the only mov­ing-image record­ings of the Mena­ka Bal­let known to-date. Some oth­er sig­nif­i­cant indi­vid­ual doc­u­ments, such as let­ters exchanged between the impre­sario Ernst Krauss and the artis­tic direc­tors of the Stuttgart State Opera (Staat­sop­er Stuttgart) avail­able at the State Archive Baden-Würt­tem­berg (Lan­desarchiv Baden-Würt­tem­berg); a let­ter addressed per­son­al­ly to Hitler by Leila Roy (Ian Say­er Archive), pri­vate col­lec­tions (The Hano­va Sis­ters’ Col­lec­tion), or British secret ser­vice notes on a mem­ber of the ensem­ble also shed light on a glob­al net­work (Kuhlmann 2003: 172).

Engaging critically with the Source-Base

Ques­tions of decod­ing, read­ing and the his­tor­i­cal con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of the mate­ri­als are undoubt­ed­ly much more com­plex than the process of col­lect­ing these scat­tered sources. A crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the source-base is there­fore nec­es­sary on sev­er­al lev­els. First of all, the frag­men­tary nature of the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion presents a spe­cial sit­u­a­tion. While each new source com­pletes the over­all his­tor­i­cal pic­ture of the tour of the Indi­an Bal­let in Europe, it also rais­es fur­ther ques­tions. Each new doc­u­ment or object reveals con­tra­dic­tions, gaps, and miss­ing parts, leav­ing it unclear whether cer­tain doc­u­ments ever exist­ed or if they were delib­er­ate­ly delet­ed. (Ernst 2002: 25). A typ­i­cal cross-sec­tion of the finds, for instance, might look like this: A medal from the 1936 inter­na­tion­al dance com­pe­ti­tions, kept in a draw­er in Kolkata; a shel­lac record in the Ger­man broad­cast­ing archive in Frank­furt; a pho­to fold­er in the the­atre archive in Regens­burg. Such sources are a few clues amidst which the fates and lives of those involved appear briefly and then dis­ap­pear again. 

In the col­lec­tions of Mena­ka Ballet’s impre­sario Ernst Krauss, for exam­ple, the traces of his busi­ness part­ner, the Jew­ish jour­nal­ist Nathan Wolf, have been lost. Nathan Wolf’s sig­na­ture is miss­ing in the min­utes of a share­hold­ers’ meet­ing in Jan­u­ary 1942. This miss­ing sig­na­ture is the last clue to Wolf’s dis­ap­pear­ance. He was mur­dered in Auschwitz in Sep­tem­ber 1942. The traces of a mem­ber of the Mena­ka ensem­ble have also been lost in Ger­many. Ambique Majum­dar, the company’s music direc­tor, remained in Ger­many when the oth­ers returned to India in 1938. Majum­dar first stud­ied musi­col­o­gy in Königs­berg and then worked for Sub­has Chan­dras Bose’s radio sta­tion in Berlin. A note in Bose’s biog­ra­phy indi­cates that Majum­dar was killed in the bomb­ing of Dres­den in 1945. The years in-between remain a gap in the archive. Final­ly, Irfan Khan, the grand­son of Menaka’s orches­tra leader Sakhawat Khan, reports that his grand­fa­ther took the pre­cau­tion of destroy­ing doc­u­ments from his tour of Ger­many upon return to India because he feared repres­sion by the British admin­is­tra­tion. Here, too, it remains unknown as to which items were pre­served and which not.

Fur­ther­more, the Mena­ka Bal­let sources require care­ful con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion because the Indi­an bal­let moved into sev­er­al con­test­ed cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal fields in the ear­ly 1930s, where numer­ous con­tra­dic­to­ry dis­cours­es overlapped.

Menaka’s Bal­let was, first­ly, an obvi­ous expres­sion of India’s strug­gle for inde­pen­dence. (And, inci­den­tal­ly, it was per­ceived as such in Europe.) It was pro­mot­ed by actors of the nation­al move­ment as a gen­uine Indi­an art form, which strove against the cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny of the British colo­nial pow­er – at a time when India’s nation­al inde­pen­dence was still an uncer­tain project. 

Sec­ond­ly, it was also a symp­tom of a pro­found and con­flict­ual socio-cul­tur­al change in India itself, which was being nego­ti­at­ed in the arts, and espe­cial­ly in dance, between tra­di­tion and mod­ern­iza­tion (Sone­ji 2012: 13). This process of mod­ern­iza­tion in the arts was accom­pa­nied by the rise of a new bour­geois class as the pro­mot­ers of the per­for­ma­tive arts, with the simul­ta­ne­ous mar­gin­al­iza­tion of tra­di­tion­al women per­form­ers (Walk­er 2017).

Third­ly, it was pre­cise­ly these qual­i­ties that made Indi­an Bal­let an inter­est­ing object for cul­tur­al debates in Ger­many — name­ly, those along the lines of the Nation­al Social­ist pol­i­cy of cul­tur­al co-ordi­na­tion (Gle­ich­schal­tung) vs. the mod­ern art of the inter­na­tion­al avant-garde. The Indi­an Bal­let was thus regard­ed as mod­ern art, but also as a suc­cess­ful “völkisch”-national expression. 

A ques­tion that aris­es is how crit­ics in Europe nego­ti­at­ed the aes­thet­ic cri­te­ria for eval­u­at­ing a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown art form. Here, the spec­trum of descrip­tions in the sources ranges from an eru­dite ethno­graph­ic engage­ment with the instru­ments to a cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion of music and dance into the art-reli­gious con­cept of a Gesamtkunst­werk, as pro­posed by Richard Wag­n­er. How­ev­er, there is no lack of voic­es that appre­ci­ate the per­for­mances as an inde­pen­dent, mod­ern form of dance expres­sion. Writ­ing about these reviews and how they belonged to their con­tem­po­rary con­texts requires a care­ful seman­tic exam­i­na­tion of the sources and a clas­si­fi­ca­tion of an ongo­ing change in the cul­ture of bour­geois rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Europe and Germany.

The Menaka-Archive as Collaborative Research Platform

The Mena­ka-Archive is an illus­tra­tion of entan­gle­ments that exist­ed between actors from col­o­nized India and those from inter­war Ger­many. Trac­ing such tra­jec­to­ries hints at his­to­ries that cross paths with, but also go beyond the realms of the British empire. The dig­i­tal Mena­ka-Archive doc­u­ments how our search moves through this his­to­ry and is pri­mar­i­ly to be under­stood as a work-in-progress tool for var­i­ous inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and linked research projects. It serves to visu­al­ize his­tor­i­cal con­texts and to build a doc­u­men­ta­tion and research net­work. Final­ly, it is a con­cep­tu­al frame­work for an open and col­lab­o­ra­tive data collection.

The Mena­ka-Archive has a num­ber of future objec­tives. The first pur­pose is to secure and inter­con­nect frag­ile data. The archival records, some of which are stored under pre­car­i­ous con­di­tions, are to be col­lect­ed, dig­i­tal­ly secured, and ren­dered acces­si­ble to a wider pub­lic. One of our main goals is also to iden­ti­fy how the scat­tered sources belong togeth­er. We aim to offer impuls­es that con­nect dif­fer­ent sources with each oth­er, there­in mak­ing them “speak”, and to doc­u­ment them as part of a liv­ing his­to­ry of a cul­tur­al encounter between Ger­many and South Asia. There­fore, the Mena­ka-Archive is not only lim­it­ed to the pure­ly his­tor­i­cal sources of the 1930s, but also includes the results of var­i­ous research trips con­duct­ed in Ger­many and India, which trace the mul­ti-lay­ered inter­con­nec­tions of the his­tor­i­cal encounter and estab­lish new con­tacts (Schlaf­fke & Schwader­er, 2019/2020).

As the col­lec­tion is open, we expect fur­ther devel­op­ments in the near future. Recent­ly, since the web­site is also list­ed in inter­na­tion­al search engine algo­rithms, descen­dants, inter­est­ed researchers, and col­lec­tors have been get­ting in touch to share their pri­vate col­lec­tion items. These are per­son­al let­ters, pho­tographs, and post­cards, but also mem­o­ries and sto­ries they have pre­served in the fam­i­ly. This dynam­ic is about to turn the Mena­ka-Archive into a plat­form for a live­ly exchange, ren­der­ing it a liv­ing archive. This implies that our objec­tive is not just to col­lect only the his­tor­i­cal, mate­r­i­al sources, but also to con­nect these to oral his­to­ries of var­i­ous per­sons relat­ed to the tour, which gives the archive a con­tem­po­rary val­ue. Mem­o­ries and sto­ries of friends, rel­a­tives, or stu­dents all over the world come into con­tact and enable us to weave a dense net­work of con­nec­tions that have arisen from the his­tor­i­cal event of the Menaka-tour.

A few exam­ples will illus­trate this. One of the most impor­tant wit­ness­es to the musi­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the “Indi­an Orches­tra” is Irfan Muham­mad Khan. He pre­serves today the mate­r­i­al lega­cy of his grand­fa­ther Sakhawat Khan, Sar­od mae­stro and leader of the musi­cians of Menaka’s ensem­ble, and is a con­tem­po­rary musi­cian in India him­self. For him, this mate­r­i­al serves as evi­dence of his grandfather’s pres­ence as an artist in Ger­many. More­over, this mate­r­i­al is impor­tant for him as it enables him to prove that Mus­lim artists like Sakhawat Khan have also made a sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the intan­gi­ble cul­tur­al her­itage of the Indi­an nation.

As part of the ongo­ing involve­ment with the archival sources of the Khan fam­i­ly, Markus Schlaf­fke pro­duced the doc­u­men­tary film The Alba­tross Around My Neck, Retrac­ing Echoes of Loss between Luc­know and Berlin (https://vimeo.com/113805297). This film fol­lows the pro­tag­o­nist Irfan Khan over sev­er­al years as he lives his life as a musi­cian in India and also takes him to a num­ber of per­for­mance venues of the Mena­ka Bal­let in Ger­many, address­ing the archive as a con­tem­po­rary site where prac­tices of trans­mis­sion are negotiated.

Reflec­tions on the Mena­ka-Archive mate­ri­als have been incor­po­rat­ed in a series of pub­li­ca­tions and events that engage with the objects in the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion in var­i­ous ways. Here we would like to espe­cial­ly men­tion Parveen Kan­hai, muse­um edu­ca­tor from Rot­ter­dam, who con­tributed to our project with her pro­found knowl­edge of dig­i­tal archives of the colo­nial peri­od all over Europe. In numer­ous small­er and larg­er arti­cles, she com­ments on mate­r­i­al from the archives and neigh­bour­ing sources. Her work shows mul­ti­ple con­nec­tions of art to soci­ety and pol­i­tics, and in par­tic­u­lar their colo­nial entan­gle­ments, and con­tex­tu­al­izes the Mena­ka per­for­mances in the field of cul­tur­al pol­i­cy across the Nether­lands and Nazi-Ger­many in the inter­war period.

To open a plat­form for spe­cial find­ings and dis­cus­sions, we have cre­at­ed two sec­tions on the web­site. The main sec­tion is the project’s jour­nal (https://menaka-archive.org/journal/), which works like a blog. It pro­vides space for essays such as Isabel­la Schwaderer’s exam­i­na­tion of a ques­tion that has haunt­ed the researchers from the very begin­ning, name­ly, whether the ensem­ble real­ly danced for the most promi­nent polit­i­cal lead­ers of Europe, as stat­ed by Sakhawat Khan in his mem­oirs (Schwader­er 2021). Parveen Kan­hai con­tributes reg­u­lar­ly to the jour­nal with arti­cles that recon­struct the ear­ly body of Menaka’s work, such as her first tour in Europe in 1931, with her dance part­ner Nilka­n­ta, by using ample mate­r­i­al from Dutch news­pa­per archives (Kan­hai 2019). Addi­tion­al­ly, this sec­tion pro­vides a space for inter­views, oral his­to­ry record­ings and oth­er broad­er discussions.

Con­verse­ly, the sec­tion Notes on the archive’s web­site (https://menaka-archive.org/notizen/), presents indi­vid­ual archival sources, most­ly pho­tographs, intro­duc­ing them with the most impor­tant infor­ma­tion, sim­i­lar to objects in a vir­tu­al muse­um. This con­stant­ly expand­ing sec­tion reg­u­lar­ly presents new find­ings and unex­pect­ed curiosi­ties, such as a pho­to­graph depict­ing Mena­ka and two of her ensem­ble mem­bers on skis (https://menaka-archive.org/en/notizen/india-on-skis/), or the long trav­els of a print­ed pho­to­graph of Mena­ka from Berlin to New York (https://menaka-archive.org/en/notizen/photographs-around-the-globe/). These short notes are also pub­lished simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on social media chan­nels, name­ly Face­book, where they gain grow­ing atten­tion by dance prac­ti­tion­ers and a wider audi­ence inter­est­ed in dance his­to­ry in India and around the world.

Based on a bio­graph­i­cal mem­o­ry of a descen­dant of a mem­ber of Menaka’s ensem­ble, the dig­i­tal plat­form has tak­en shape step-by-step as an archival body. Today, it serves as an invi­ta­tion for fur­ther dis­cus­sions and explo­rations, which we con­sid­er to be a process of con­tin­u­ous nav­i­ga­tion as well as an artis­tic and ethno­graph­ic explo­ration of the archive.

Endnotes

[i] All trans­la­tions done by the authors.

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Markus Schlaf­fke, Fakultät Kun­st und Design, Bauhaus-Uni­ver­sität Weimar

Isabel­la Schwader­er, The­ol­o­gis­che Fakultät, Chris­t­ian-Albrechts-Uni­ver­sität Kiel