The first name in the Wikipedia entry for ‘tawaif’ is Begum Akhtar. The trailer of Heeramandi, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s magnum opus based on the courtesans of a neighbourhood in present-day Pakistan, dropped yesterday, once again bringing attention to the Mughal-era entertainers who have often been a topic of interest. Incidentally, Bhansali opened the Alia Bhatt-starrer, Gangubai Kathiawadi, with Akhtar’s song—a lament-like tune that picks on the loneliness of someone pining for their lover. Pop culture has conflated terms such as tawaifs, kothewali, courtesans, sex workers and nautch girls with each other but ‘tawaif’ is, in fact, not just another word for a ‘cultured’ sex worker.
“Courtesans are performance artists who use the medium of song and dance to eke a living. Sex work does not involve singing and dancing,” says Manish Gaekwad, author of The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir, which released last year. “Courtesans were initially not involved in sex work but when the kotha culture (residences of art and etiquette) dwindled, practitioners of the tradition began working in dance bars and gradually also got into sex work. That is when the confusion started.”
Beyond the Bollywood gaze
In addition to Mughal-E-Azam (1960) and Umrao Jaan (1981), the earliest on-screen representation of the courtesan life was in the 1966 film Amrapali directed by Lekh Tandon, starring Sunil Dutt and Vyjayanthimala as leads. In the popular Indian imagination, Umrao Jaan takes precedence over Amrapali. It helps that Umrao Jaan was aided by a record-breaking music album that imbued the character with poetic, lyrical sensitivity. Unlike Amrapali, who was a real-life royal dancer and a devotee of the Buddha, there is no universal consensus on whether Umrao Jaan actually existed. There is almost no historical record of her life outside Umrao Jaan Ada, an 1899 novel written by Mirza Hadi Ruswa that depicts her as a 19th-century courtesan whose life keeps taking a turn for the worse—later adapted into the 1981 film starring Rekha and Aishwarya Rai in 2006.
When Gaekwad started work on his mother’s memoir, it wasn’t fiction or a historical retelling of a time far removed from the present. It was something of a personal project because he had to make sense of a life that he was a part of, having spent his formative years with his mother in the kothas of Mumbai and Kolkata in the ’80s and ’90s. Rekhabai would eventually narrate her story to her son which he would then faithfully transcribe in English.
At the end of it, Gaekwad was astonished at the life his mother had lived before his birth. “When she told me how she sang ‘Ramayya Vastawaiyya’ on an empty stomach for a patron, we both wept. Or of the time when my father held me for ransom. It changed my stance on him. I had forgiven him, but this new story made me question my nature,” the author says. “I came to love my mother more during the recordings. She told me such exhilarating tales of grit and courage that I began to see why this story was not just about a tawaif, but also about a woman who defied every obstacle to live on her terms, both before and after the kothas formed a part of her life.”
Between the song and dance
In April 2019, a seminar held in the Royal Opera House in Mumbai almost went unnoticed as did the subject of that evening: the forgotten stories of India’s courtesans. Tehzeeb-e Tawaif, organised by Manjari Chaturvedi’s The Courtesan Project, dived into the stories of courtesans that cannot be found in books, let alone in the aforementioned Wikipedia entries for ‘tawaif’. The panel, comprising historians and academics, celebrated the story of Azeezunbai, the sole woman and courtesan who accompanied Indian soldiers when they laid siege to Cawnpore (now Kanpur) during the national uprising of 1857.
On those guided tours into the dilapidated homes and lives of courtesans in Old Delhi, the tales of courtesans like Azeezunbai are told and retold so they are not forgotten. Sadly, most of these tours have now been suspended because of the dwindling number of people signing up for them. There is hope that at least some of these will revive again after the release of Heeramandi on the streaming giant Netflix.
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I was on one such tour of the kothas in Old Delhi two years ago. We started our walk from the intersection outside Jama Masjid and completed the full circle of Chandni Chowk before progressing into the narrow alleyways of Chawri Bazar. We were regaled with stories of Begum Samru—a ‘nautch girl’ who married a British mercenary. Born Farzana Zeb-un-Nissa in 1753, not only did she rule Sardhana, a town near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, but also led the mercenary army she’d inherited from her husband.
Now, the kothas wear a sullen look. The jharokhas, enclosed balconies jutting outside rooms, are covered with intersecting electric wires and bird poop. During the national uprising of 1857, most of these kothas were hideout spots for Indian rebels to stock their weapons and strategise their moves against the British army. It is perhaps quite telling of our moral standards that courtesans, who contributed to the economy, participated in the freedom struggle and were amongst the highest taxpayers in the country, were forced into sex work. Although trained in music, it is reported that they were also denied jobs at All India Radio.
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Gaekwad has captured the less glamorous aspects of his mother’s profession in his memoir because hers was a life far removed from the bejewelled courtesans of Bollywood. She had worked as a background dancer in a few films in the ’80s when she was performing in Kamathipura and Bacch Seth Ki Wadi. “My mother knew that films, like mujras, were magic—not everlasting. I was conscious of the [Bollywood] stereotype and purposely chose her photo for the cover that starkly reminds you that a courtesan is no less than a circus performer, balancing a bottle on her head,” he says. “She was not draped in jewels and her hair was not scented with lobaan but she adapted to the times and worked hard.”
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