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Alan Hovhaness, Arnold Bake, Amy Catlin, Harold Powers, Jon B. Higgins… the list of foreigners who evinced a deep interest in the classical arts of India and became regulars at the annual music festival in Madras is long and impressive. But who was the first to come? That honour must go to Mrs. Stan Harding. A hard-bitten journalist, she was an active participant in The Music Academy’s 1931 music conference. A frisson of excitement must have gone through the audience of assembled representatives of Madras society, for Mrs. Harding was no ordinary journalist; she had been arrested in Soviet Russia 11 years earlier, on charges of being a British spy. (‘The spy who came to a sabha,’ V. Sriram, The Hindu Metro Plus, Dec 30, 2016)

Mrs. Harding had come to make a film on the Devadasi tradition of Madras Presidency, and her timing could not have been better. The entire region was in the throes of Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy’s Anti-Nautch Bill. Mrs. Harding presented a paper on the Devadasis at The Music Academy’s conference, and from what little has been documented of it, we can see that she was no stranger to our city. She had come 20 years earlier and she commented that the costumes worn by the courtesans in 1911 were completely different to those of 1931. (‘The spy who came to a sabha,’ V. Sriram, The Hindu Metro Plus, Dec 30, 2016)

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