The Plea Of The Simla Dancers - Analysis

A lament that can’t admit it’s about power

The poem stages itself as a tearful, ceremonial complaint about a stolen dance hall, but its real drama is the way pleasure claims moral authority. From the opening line—Too late, alas!—the speakers treat their loss as an irreversible historical injury, something that must be recorded so future ages will know they cried against the crime. Yet what has happened, concretely, is bureaucratic: the rooms are taken from us and turned into offices. By inflating that change into sacrilege, the poem makes a bold (and revealing) demand: that a space built for leisure is a kind of temple, and that paperwork is contamination.

Benmore, teak floors, and the insult of clerical work

The complaint sharpens when it gets specific. The speakers ask why there was no room except at Benmore for docket, duftar and office drudge. The details matter: polished teak is not just flooring but a symbol of refinement, carefully maintained for bodies moving elegantly—not for ink you spill. Even the alternative buildings named—Strawberry Hill—sound like a lighter, more makeshift place, as if office work naturally belongs somewhere cheaper and less visible. The poem’s logic is classed and hierarchical: the clerks’ labor is necessary, but it must not occupy the best rooms.

That hierarchy is also racialized. The question Must babus do their work on the dance floor, and the later command to cast out a swarthy train, turn a spatial complaint into an ethnic one. The poem’s “plea” therefore has an edge: it isn’t simply mourning lost music; it is defending a social boundary that the office invasion has violated.

Moonlight versus files: turning administration into desecration

To make the loss feel cosmic, the poem recruits the landscape and the night sky. A moon that once watched lightsome wiles through the deodars now becomes wan from staring at official files. Even the stars are said to feel disgust at desecrating desks. This is more than decoration: the speakers are trying to prove that dancing is in tune with the world, while bureaucracy is against nature. The diction tilts hard toward religious language—desecrates, temple, sacrilegious—so that a practical repurposing becomes a kind of profanation.

At the same time, the poem’s insistence on innocence—We never harmed you!—rings slightly defensive. The speakers describe themselves as Innocent, Dainty, with voices low, revolving to divers melodies. The intensity of this self-portrait suggests they feel judged, or fear they should be. Their pleasure needs justification, as if it were being replaced not only by desks but by a different moral order: industry, accounting, governance.

The poem’s turn: from pleading to spell-casting

The hinge arrives with Or -- hearken to the curse. Up to that point the poem tries persuasion: questions, memories, and a litany of what the ball-room held—wine that sparkled, wailing waltz, reckless gallop, soft replies. Those details give the place texture: not abstract “joy,” but a specific social atmosphere of flirtation, half-private conversation, and orchestrated excitement. The repeated Nay! reads like someone blocking the door with their body, insisting the past is binding.

When pleading fails, the speakers reach for an older power than administration: superstition. The curse is tailored to bureaucrats: ghosts of waltzes will invade the mind, murmurs of past merriment will follow clerks as they try to indite documents. Even money becomes infected—while counting Provincial millions, the pen will only make figures that are cotillions. In other words, the dance will survive as a haunting error inside the very mechanisms that displaced it.

Names of dances as weapons: “See Saw” and “Dream Faces”

The poem intensifies its magic by naming specific dances—See Saw, Dream Faces—as if they were spells with personality. These titles are almost teasing, childish, or dreamy, which matters because they are set against heavy heads and estimates. The clerks’ labor is described as stolid, rational, and numerical, and the curse doesn’t destroy it by force; it makes it impossible through distraction, nostalgia, and involuntary feeling. The verandas, once eloquent with echoes, will begin babbling—a word that turns the past into an uncontrollable talker, spilling kisses, laughter, love, and tears into the workspace.

This is also where the poem’s central contradiction becomes hardest to ignore: the speakers treat their ball-room as a temple fit for higher use, yet that “higher” use is explicitly a place of romantic intrigue and alcohol. They insist on a sacredness that is, by their own inventory, a sacredness of sensation. The poem wants dancing to be both frivolous and holy—something that can’t be argued with because it belongs to a superior realm.

What’s really being defended?

The final demand—Give us our ravished ball-room—frames the loss as a kind of violation, and that word ravished deliberately blurs theft with sexual violence. The intensity is meant to shock, to make administration seem predatory. But the poem’s anger also betrays an entitlement: it assumes leisure should have first claim on prime space, and it depicts the workers—wildered clerks, a swarthy train—as intruders in a world that was never meant for them. In that sense, the poem mourns not only a room but a social order in which certain bodies belonged on polished teak and others did not.

A sharper question the poem accidentally asks

If the ball-room is truly a temple, why does its sanctity depend on keeping out docket and duftar—the paper trail of governance that, in a colonial hill station, underwrites the very society able to dance there? The curse imagines joy as self-justifying, but the poem keeps showing how tightly that joy is tied to exclusion: the past returns as a haunting not because it was pure, but because it was protected.