Book chapter: Sensuous Dance, Transgression, and the Nazi Racial Worldview in Richard Eichberg’s Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal (1938)
A part of:
Charting Asian German Film History
Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation
Edited by Qinna Shen, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Qingyang Freya Zhou
Contributions by Mita Banerjee, Janelle Blankenship, Anjeana K. Hans, Iris Haukamp, Tobias Nagl, Isabella Schwaderer, Oliver C. Speck, Philipp Stiasny, Evan Torner, Sabine von Dirke
The chapter examines Madame Menaka’s participation in Richard Eichberg’s two-part film Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal (1938) within the broader context of German representations of India, popular cinema, and National Socialist racial discourse. Eichberg’s production was the second of three German film adaptations of Thea von Harbou’s 1918 novel Das indische Grabmal, situated historically between Joe May’s 1921 version and Fritz Lang’s 1959 remake. Rather than treating the film simply as Nazi propaganda, the chapter argues that it reveals the contradictions and ambiguities of racial representation in German popular culture during the late 1930s.
Eichberg promoted his production as an unusually “authentic” representation of India. The director and his team travelled to India and shot extensive documentary footage of landscapes, architecture, and local inhabitants. Yet this claim to authenticity remained highly problematic. Locations from widely separated regions were combined into a fictional geography, while most major Indian characters were played by European actors in brownface. Indian extras were often represented as technologically backward or “primitive,” whereas the German protagonists embodied competence, modernity, and technological superiority. The film thus oscillates between the conventions of the ethnographic Kulturfilm and those of the exotic adventure film. Contemporary Indian responses already exposed this contradiction; the Bombay Chronicle, for example, condemned the film’s representation of Indians.
Menaka and members of her troupe constitute an important exception within this representational system. During their highly successful European tour of 1936–38, they were spontaneously recruited for the Berlin production. Their physical presence as Indian performers complicates a cinematic world otherwise largely constructed through European fantasies of Indianness. The film consequently juxtaposes “real” Indian dancers with actors performing racial difference.
This tension becomes particularly visible through the Austrian dancer and actress La Jana, who plays the Maharani Sitha and, while fleeing her husband, performs under the stage name Indira. Her appearance was transformed into that of a supposedly prototypical Indian dancer: long centrally parted black hair, accentuated lips, elongated eyebrows, jewellery, costumes, and poses all closely resemble Menaka’s visual stage persona. The film’s dance aesthetics also appear indebted to Menaka’s ensemble. Indira’s costume and dramatic bodily poses recall photographs of the Menaka dancer Ramnarayan Mishra, while the mise-en-scène translates the troupe’s carefully constructed stage imagery into cinematic spectacle.
This visual borrowing is especially significant because Menaka’s company had actively developed its costumes and choreographic imagery from Indian sculpture, miniature painting, and religious iconography rather than simply reproducing established European Orientalist dance conventions. Their presence therefore introduces a degree of artistic agency into a film otherwise dominated by colonial fantasy. At the same time, their dances were incorporated into an exoticizing visual economy that associated “Indian” dance simultaneously with spirituality, sensuality, and spectacle.
The comparison between Menaka and La Jana ultimately reveals the instability of Nazi racial categories. German critics sometimes described Menaka as an “Aryan” representative of ancient Indian civilization, while La Jana’s darker, “southern” appearance made her unusually suitable for exotic roles. Although the two women become visually almost interchangeable on screen, their bodies were interpreted through very different racial assumptions. Their juxtaposition therefore exposes contradictions between authenticity and imitation, racial classification and aesthetic desire, and colonial exoticism and transcultural artistic influence. Menaka’s brief cinematic appearance is consequently more than a cameo: it demonstrates how her stage aesthetics entered German mass culture while simultaneously challenging the racial and representational structures through which “India” was constructed.
Read the chapter here