South Asian Review

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From Tawaif to Nautch Girl: the Transition of the

Lucknow Courtesan

Vijay Prakash Singh

To cite this article: Vijay Prakash Singh (2014) From Tawaif to Nautch Girl: the Transition of the
Lucknow Courtesan, South Asian Review, 35:2, 177-194, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2014.11932977

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2014.11932977

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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 177

From Tawaifto Nautch Girl: the

Transition of the Lucknow Courtesan

Vijay Prakash Singh

University of Lucknow

[Abstract: Lucknow with its Nawabi court and its patronage of dance
and music has been for over two centuries a center of the art of fine
language and etiquette. This paper focuses primarily on the dancing
women, tawaif, who performed outside the court in private salons or
kothas. As highly accomplished women catering to the nobility, the
tawaif enjoyed a high degree of financial independence and social
prestige. After the establishment of the East India Company, the tawaif
were solicited as entertainers for British social gatherings and later
pushed into prostitution. The paper shows the decline of the tawaif as
representatives of culture to mere social entertainers and subsequently
as bazaar prostitutes surviving on the margins of society.]

L ucknow, as the center of the eighteenth-century Royal Court of

Awadh (also called Oudh), has been celebrated for its cultural
refinement. Its nazaqat-that is, finesse-incorporated not only
Lucknow's /akhnavi shirin zabaan, 1 the honeyed idiom of its social
etiquette, but also its literary language, arts, and cuisine. Included
among the components of Lakhnavi tehzeeb 2 (culture), there was
tawaifbazi 3 (the art of courtesans) that was reflected in the
characteristic andaai (stylistic gestures) of the regional culture. The
tawaifs (courtesans) of Lucknow were, as Pran Nevile affirms in The
Nautch Girls of the Raj (2009), "highly sophisticated courtesans ...
brought up in accordance with age-old custom and tradition" (66).
Overtime, they served as the most refined and coveted cultural

South Asian Review, Vol. 35, No.2, 2014

178 Vijay Prakash Singh

disseminators of North India, while Thanjavur became the center of the

most accomplished courtesans in the South.
One of Lucknow's foremost historians, Abdul Haleem Sharar,
writes that it was during the reign of Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah ( 1753-
1774) that the settling of groups of dancers in Lucknow, especially of
courtesans, reached its pinnacle. There were two principal groups of
male dancers: the Hindu Kathak dancers and the Kashmiri Muslim
Bhands. Apart from male dancers, there were three categories of female
dancers: the Kanchanis, who came from Delhi and Punjab as common
"bazaar" prostitutes; the lime sellers, or chune waliyan, who did not
come from a particular place but who acquired immense fame-
Chunewali Haidar was one such prostitute, whose unparalleled singing
carried her fame far and wide; and the Nagrani, who hailed from
Gujarat. While Sharar refers to these three categories of common
prostitutes, he neglects a superior class of singers and dancers, the
tawaif, or courtesans, whose chief purpose was to offer entertainment
through song and dance to aristocratic male patrons while,
occasionally, providing sexual gratification to those who paid the
mistress of their Kotha, the salon, a befitting price. lt was this category
of elite entertainers who came to be called tawaif, the plural form of the
individual Taifa. Tawaif is an Urdu-Persian tenn which, literally,
means a wandering tribe or community and refers to the itinerant nature
of the early courtesans, who located themselves wherever there were
army camps or cantonments. To establish the difference between the
prostitute and the tawaif, I would like to refer to the definition of a
courtesan given by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon. Writing in
"The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives," Feldman and
Gordon define courtesans as women who "engage in relatively
exclusive exchanges of artistic graces, elevated conversation, and
sexual favors with male patrons." (5) In the context of the Lucknow
courtesan, one will do well to bear in mind that the tawaif were trained
in the artistic graces of dancing and singing and the elevated courtly
conversation that came out of a foundation in Persian and Urdu Poetry.
This paper aims to show the apparently seamless, yet painfully
disempowering, transition of the courtesans of Lucknow from the
courtly Nawabi period through colonial times to a postcolonial ethos.
Nurtured by the Nawabs (Nabobs) of Lucknow, these courtesans
performed mainly at the royal court, such as in the Pari khan a, 5 the
Abode of Fairies, of the eleventh and the last scion, Nawab Wajid Ali
Shah (1847-1856), until the advent of the British, when their ambit of
performance extended to providing entertainment predominantly to
English officers and, on many occasions, to display their art before
their wives, the Memsahibs. Some of these tawaifs rose to an exalted
status as companions to kings, such as Wajid Ali Shah. 6 Amaresh
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 179

Misra writes of a tawaif named Mushtari with whom "the habitually

amorous king shared a platonic, friendly relationship" (166). Mushtari
served not only as a poet and calligraphist but also as advisor to the
king on various issues. Yet there were tawaif who performed
exclusively for the wealthy, or were engaged in kothas, while many
who were located in the suburbs of the city catered to the lower classes.
In his article "Courtesans, Military Musicians and Shi'a ideology in
Nineteenth century Lucknow,"Adrian McNeil says, "the quality of
these kothas and the type of patronage that they attracted varied
considerably, depending on the means and the physical location of the
establishment" (4 ). The tawa(f of the kothas acquired such a reputation
for finesse and refinement that the scions of wealthy families were sent
to them to learn "manners, grooming, and etiquette" (4).
The tawaif of the pre-colonial era became the popular yet
notoriously exotic nautch (an anglicized distortion of the word nach)
girls of the Colonial era. The transition of the courtesan's position was
brought about not merely by a change in nomenclature-by the
colonizers reference to tawaif as nautch girl-it was also marked by a
shift in perception of the courtesan who now became a mere performer,
an entertainer rather than a dispenser of the aesthetic graces of the
courtly culture. Most tawaif of Lucknow's pre-colonial Nawabi era
were low-caste Hindu widows, although Veena Oldenburg has
documented the stories of some nautch girls who were originally
Rajput. These women converted to Islam as Shias, so that, by one
estimate, up to eighty-five per cent of tawaif were Shia by birth or
conversion. As pointed out earlier, while some of these tawaif were
privileged to be members of the royal harem, as in the case of Wajid
Ali Shah's Pari Khana, the majority were women who performed
either at the houses of the wealthy or in the kothas of the bazaar. The
performance of these courtesans depended on where they were
engaged. While the tawaif of the kotha, especially those of the
suburban kotha, performed folk melodies, the royal courtesans were
celebrated artistes who were trained in classical music and dance. The
artistic training of these courtesans was rigorous, starting usually at the
age of five and continuing for ten years, or more. They were usually
trained by male teachers, known as Ustads, residing in the kotha and,
sometimes, by Ustads in the service of the court. Regula Qureshi
writes, "This training was in the hands of hereditary musicians who
also provided the tawaif instrumental accompaniment. Sarangi and
tabla players functioned as her teachers for voice and dance
respectively" ("Female Agency" 323). Obviously, a working
association existed between them and tawaif as masters and students, in
which tawaif accepted their constructive authority in shaping their
professional selves.
180 Vijay Prakash Singh

Thus, while the vocation of the tawaif as women-entertainers for

the male gaze was looked down upon, with the recent research and
documentation of the life of the tawaifs, it has emerged that these
women were the forerunners of the vocal forms of classical Hindustani
music-thumri, kajri, hori, dadra and ghazal-as well as of the
classical dance form of kathak. Their accompanists have, similarly,
emerged as the masters of such instruments as the sarangi, sitar, rabab,
tabla and the more recent, harmonium. According to Misra, the thumri
was a song of "love, whether it be the romance of union, or [of] the
pangs of separation from a lover" (10). The thumri may, as Misra
points out, "draw on themes of separation and union with the divine"
(10). Its moods may also display either the classical romantic/erotic
sringar rasa or the pathos of karuna rasa. Tawaif, the women who
combined feminine graces and sensual charms with courtly etiquette
and the arts of singing and dancing, had become, prior to the arrival of
European colonizers, valued embodiments of the nazakat and nafasat, 7
the delicacy and finesse, of Lucknow tehzeeb.
Amaresh Misra details the cultural role of the Lucknow tawaif
during their heyday, Nawab Nasiruddin's reign (1827-1837):
Her salon was also not simply a place of dance and music, becoming
[instead] a center of sukun, 8 humor, manner and letters .... [They]
disseminated culture, educating children of well-born families in the
etiquette of zabaan (the speech), behavior and the correct attitude ...
Courtesans acted as arbiters of many a middle class fate, teaching
merchants, hakims, pleaders, guests and general men of fortune, the
vices and virtues of life. (139)
McNeil has documented an aspect of the vocation of the tawaifs that is
largely unknown-their contribution to the religious life of Lucknow.
He writes: "It is not generally acknowledged that the thousands of
imambaras that adorned Lucknow were also important spaces for the
patronage of courtesans" (26). During the period of Muharram, tawaifs
performed marsiya and soz: the two forms of ritual, elegiac recitation
performed during the mourning for the martyrdom of the young sons of
Imam Ali, and the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. McNeil
writes: "The moral legitimacy and divine authority that Shi'a doctrine
bestowed on the Awadhi administration and its Nawabs would have
also benefited those courtesans who, through the majlis or the morning
congregation, became very public propagators of Shi'a activities" (26).
Now this association very much created, says McNeil, the "potential
for some courtesans to attain social status and political influence and, at
the same time . . . contribut[ed] to a greater social acceptance of
courtesan culture by the elite and others than may have otherwise been
the case" (26).
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 181

Thus, from the sensuous performance of song and dance to

pleasure male clients to participation in religious observances, the role
of the tawaif appears to have been interwoven with the social fabric of
the time. The pious nature of such religious participation no doubt
accorded them a position as superior practitioners of the arts of music
and dance. However, with the advent of the East India Company and its
entourage of the agents of the British Raj, consequent to the
disempowerment of the Awadhi royal court, the tawaif as much as
courtesans in other parts of India, came under the colonial male gaze.
The tawaifretained her position as a singer-dancer for the royal court
as well as for the houses of the aristocracy, even as Englishmen, living
lonely lives of official routine-before the arrival of Englishwomen in
hordes in the nineteenth century-began to show interest in the tawaif.
Their curiosity about this exotic figure and their need for local social
entertainment, in absence of English entertainment, along with their
desire for sensual indulgence, propelled them to patronize the tawaif. so
that her life and vocation now acquired a new dimension-that of a
nautch girl. Pran Nevile discusses this in Stories from the Raj:
The fare provided by nautch girls fascinated most viewers and many
a sahib was captivated by their seductive charm. . . . They even
maintained their own troupes of nautch girls and musicians for the
entertainment of their guests. A dinner in the community was usually
followed by a nautch performance. So were other festive occasions,
such as the celebration of a King Emperor's birthday and visits of
dignitaries to civil and military stations. Nautch girls would also
accompany the British army whenever it was on the move,
entertaining the soldiers on the way. (37)
The nautch (dance) became such a favorite with the Sahibs that nautch
girls began to move en masse to British stations. Hasan Shah writes
that "engaging troupes of dancing girls had become common practice
for the English in India. It was their chief amusement along with riding,
hunting, and shooting" (Preface 6). Although nautch girls catered to a
mixed society of men and women, it was exclusively for the eyes of
men that they used their seductive charms. Captain Charles Mundy
wrote in his journal: "When European ladies attend a nautch, the
dancing girls are warned beforehand, and they only witness a graceful
and sufficiently stupid display" (qtd. in The Nautch Girls of the Raj
28). Yet, despite the seductive nature of the nautch, some of the male
descriptions extol the aesthetic grace of the dancer rather than her
sensual provocation. James Forbes m his Oriental Memoirs (1813)
writes:
They are extremely delicate in person, soft and regular in their
features, with a form of perfect symmetry, and although dedicated
from infancy to this profession, they in general preserve a decency
182 Vijay Prakash Singh

and modesty in their demeanor, which is more likely to allure than

the shameless effrontery of similar characters in other countries. (28)
Captain Bellew, in his Memoirs of a Griffin, describes nautch girls
almost in ethereal terms "as pretty gazelle-eyed damsels arrayed in
robes of sky-blue, crimson and gold in stately guise whose languishing
eyes stare brightly through their antimonial borders" (371 ).
On the other hand, an Englishwoman, Mrs. Kindersley,
understandably, writes in 1754: "It is their languishing glances, wanton
smiles, and attitudes not quite consistent with decency, which are so
much admired" (qtd. in Nevile, The Nautch Girls of the Raj 30). It has
to be understood that the graceful or seductive dance of these
performers, de-contextualized from the song-whether folk, Urdu/Farsi
ghazal, or from the refrains of the thumri or kajri-would have had
only a visual appeal to the colonial spectator, a mere visual
performance stripped of its rich linguistic nuances and, thereby, of its
emotional resonance. This kind of witnessing obviously reduced the
nautch girl to an object intended for the male gaze. The colonizer was
ill-equipped to appreciate the tawaifs art and her rich cultural heritage,
as the connoisseurs of the old had been. Critiquing European accounts
of the nautch written as early as the seventeenth century, Qureshi
(2006) focuses on their mainly visual appeal for the colonial gaze:
"Like paintings these descriptions tend to privilege the visual since
these authors lacked the familiarity and comprehension to relate to the
words or their musical setting" (316). All that the spectators perceived
was the seductive body language of the dancer and the nuances of her
expression, so that the performance must have appeared to them as far
inferior to the ballet or the opera, more like a dancing pantomime that
was intended purely to entertain rather than to express the nuances of a
range of emotions-from the longing of the lover to the pangs of
separation, and from the bliss of union to the exuberance of the lover's
company.
Thus reduced, the lure of the nautch girls began to decline with the
increasing numbers of young Englishwomen arriving in India to pursue
matrimony. Their gradual entrenchment in colonial society and the
decorum that Englishmen were subsequently expected to observe in the
face of social censure-that they would provoke by cohabiting with
nautch girls as mistresses or bibis-led to a decline in a free interaction
of the Sahib and the nautch girl. The missionary reform movement, too,
launched by several Englishmen and women, with support from Indian
groups, began to cast a stigma upon the nautch girl. lndrani Sen writes
that the nautch girl, in the colonial perception, represented "eastern
decadence and institutionalized sensuality, occupying a space outside
the familiar and containable one of the domestic space" (46). The
eminent Bengali reformer, Keshub Chandra Sen, described the nautch
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 183

girl in malicious and censorious terms as a creature who is "a hideous

woman .... Hell is in her eyes. In her breast is a vast ocean of poison .
. . . Her blandishments are India's ruin. Alas! her smile is India's death"
(qtd. in The Nautch Girls of the Raj 116).
In addition to the social stigma, the incidence of sexually
transmitted diseases among the European soldiers in Lucknow
cantonment became so acute in the early 1860s that "one out of every
four European soldiers contracted gonorrhea, syphilis, or some 'other'
related infection" (Oldenburg 133). The colonial reaction to this
situation was to subject those tawaif who were the soldiers' prostitutes
to medical examination and to treat those who were infected at special
hospitals called Lock Hospitals, after the Lock-Lazar house in
Southwark, England, which was a hospital specializing in the treatment
of venereal diseases. In this, as Oldenburg points out, there was some
hypocrisy in puritanical posturing as far as the British support for such
reform was concerned:
[when it came to] using these women as prostitutes for the European
garrison, or collecting income tax, the eminently pragmatic British
set aside their moral dudgeon. It became an official policy to select
the healthy and beautiful 'specimens' from among the kotha women
and arbitrarily relocate them in the cantonment for the convenience of
the European soldiers. ("Lifestyle as Resistance" 4)

This bureaucratic practice not only dehumanized the profession,

stripping it of its cultural function but rendered the sex trade cheap and
easy for the men. "These women were perceived as a necessary evil
because they were an inexpensive answer to the sexual needs of single
European soldiers" (Oldenburg, Colonial Lucknow 137).
However, when the national tide turned against the colonizers,
some tawaifs found themselves as a different cast of characters. During
the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the tawaif played the role of spies for the
revolutionaries. They had switched loyalties from the British officers,
to whose garrisons they were attached, and enlisted in the cause of the
first struggle for independence. After the uprising, partly because of the
influence of the anti-nautch movement and due to the degraded role
they were obliged to play, the tawaif came to be "referred to as
'prostitutes' under the direct control of the town criminal officer. An
anti-flesh trade act was slammed on their profession which brought
such shame that they stopped functioning altogether" (Misra 166). The
degradation of the erstwhile embodiment of haute culture was so
complete that they "were made to crawl before pimps and less than
noble figures":
Men who in the past did not dare to climb up the stairs of the kotha,
now lured her with promises of marriage, and then discarded her on
184 Vijay Prakash Singh

the slightest provocation. Deprived of a voice in politics and social

power, she was reduced to economic and moral destitution. (Misra
166)

Mir Jafar Husain, in an interview with Oldenburg, further extends

the reasons for steep changes in the fortunes of tawaifbazi. Apart from
the decline of the wealthy patrons, the "few establishments that
survived into the next century could not maintain the old standards of
hospitality and entertainment":
[T]he final blow to the profession came from the present [national)
government, which abolished zamindari rights in 1957 and declared
existing salons illegal. To this must be added the change in taste
wrought by the British: a garden party, a cricket match, a play, or the
races now competed with the mujara or 'nautch' to amuse those with
means. (qtd. in Colonial Lucknow 137)

With the disempowerment and exile of Awadh's last ruler and grand
patron Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, several singing and dancing women
who had made up his harem resumed trade. But the attitudes had
changed, and they were degraded to the status of "bazaar" prostitutes.
With the scourge of venereal disease, their new profession became so
tainted that a reader of the Oudh Akhbar made a recommendation:
All prostitutes must be registered and classified according to the
facilities they offer. Each woman should be given a wooden "ticket
with her age, address, and fixed rate chiseled on it by the authorities,
and this ticket should be affixed on her front door. (Colonial
Lucknow 139)

What is worse, those "who refuse registration on the pretext that they
intend to lead reformed lives only do so to evade the law by moving to
another town. Such women should be branded on the chin, cheek, or
forehead of their beautiful faces" (Colonial Lucknow 139). Thus, a way
of life that dispensed of poetry and social etiquette, although indulging
in sensual dance and music, was reduced by the high priests of morality
into a sanitized "profession" where the tawaif of yore had to exercise
caution and adhere to a humiliating violation of her privacy:
"Policemen and government jasus (spies) would secrete themselves
during an evening's entertainment to report on the attendance of British
soldiers or the sanitary conditions of the house"(Colonial Lucknow
141). Gulbadan, the mistress of a kotha that Oldenburg repeatedly
visited, recalls, "all these rules and regulations offended our dignity and
sense of pride" (Colonial Lucknow 141).
The tawaif, who were in straitened circumstances, sought other
means of sustenance. According to Qureshi (200 I), because of the
harsh police action against Lucknow salons, "[a] few women switched
to qawwali singing [group songs], but most moved to other centers,
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 185

especially to Calcutta, where a prosperous westernized upper class had

patronized music since the nineteenth century, reinforced in their taste
for feudal styles by the musicians and music, exiled along with King
Wajid Ali Shah in 1856" ("In Search of Begum Akhtar" 100). Some of
the more fortunate singers began performing for private soirees, so that
the institutionalized nature of their profession became a personal
enterprise. Lucknow's courtesans would be invited for weddings and
other ceremonies both within and outside Lucknow. Qureshi writes
about this lucky transition:
Courtesan singers continued to find patronage in Lucknow as long as
feudal nobility remained in place: thanks to British colonial
collaboration with landed interests, this was the case until after
independence. The years before and during WWII saw additional
patronage from commercial elites .... At the same time the spread of
gramophone recordings further enhanced the fame of courtesan
singers, and hence their cultural value and earning capacity add[ed]
to their efflorescence. ("Begum Akhtar" I 06)
Jennifer Post points out a marked omission in the performances of the
tawaif. Instead of sensuously appealing to her male clientele through
dance and appealing to their finer romantic sense through poetry, the
tawaif of the "late 191h century began to restrict their performances to
singing. This can be interpreted as an effort to lend an aspect of
modesty, and, therefore, [of] respect to their performances" (129).
On the other hand, after the decline of patronage, the tawaif
entertained men privately in her own house, holding performances as
earlier tawaif had done at the institutionalized kotha. Akhtari Bai
Faizabadi, who later married Barrister Abbassi and acquired the iconic
respectability as Begum Akhtar, was the most prominent of the
performers that entertained privately at home. Nurtured in Lucknow,
Begum Akhtar "epitomized its feudal high culture both in her music
and poetry" ("Begum Akhtar" 11 0). She evolved into the national icon
of ghazal gayaki9 partially because of her training under the
accomplished maestros like Imdad Khan of Patna, Ghulam Muhammad
Khan of Gaya, and his younger brother Ata Muhammad Khan of
Faizabad, where she was born. She had benefited as much from the
example of celebrated tawaif Jaddan Bai and Gauhar Jan, superstars of
the gramophone era, as from the exclusive culture of connoisseurship
then prevailing in Lucknow. The distinction she gave by her name to
the city where she lived and died has made Lucknow a special site in
the collective cultural memory.
Identified with modern Lucknow, Begum Akhtar represents the
progressive transitions that tawaifbazi made: from the glamor of refined
courtly entertainment, to the shadowy disrepute of the vocation during
the colonial era, to a struggle for existence, and, finally, to acceptance
186 Vijay Prakash Singh

as a repository of culture. Decidedly, Begum Akhtar was the only

singer to achieve respect and fame as a national artiste. It was because
she was extraordinarily gifted as a singer of light music and rendered
the Urdu Poetry, or the thumris, that, as Susheela Misra says, "Her
singing always created visions of [all that] had made Lucknow-culture
so famous and admirable"(qtd. in "Begum Akhtar" 121). According to
the famous Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, her singing was "the honeyed
melancholy of her voice" (qtd. in "Begum Akhtar" 121). Qureshi
characterizes Akhtar's singing as "the voice of a nostalgic past: but that
voice also spoke personally, conveying an aesthetic experience of that
past" ("Begum Akhtar" 121). Her ascendance to national fame is
explained by Misra: "Akhtari Bai, along with Siddheshwari Devi of
Banaras, gave thumri a solid theme, a psycho-sexual sub-text and an
emotional, sophisticated punch line. Akhtari Bai even brought the
reflection and observation of the ghazal to bear upon the form" (275).
However, in private soirees, a major aspect of her performance was that
the tawaif performed the gayaki to farmaish, 10 the requests from her
male audience. These requests came from a select audience of
connoisseurs, the modem elite of Lucknow who, in the words of
Lucknow poet and patron Umar Ansari, came to the salon for ruhani
ghiza, or soul food, a quest for "an essential emotional-spiritual
nourishment that is inherent in music" ("Female Agency" 322).
As her fame grew, Begum Akhtar began to sing for All India
Radio (AIR) and to be invited for stage performances wherein her
status as an artiste of extraordinary talent began to be confirmed. This
became possible because of the national agenda of institutionalization
of classical and semi-classical music by the establishment of music
colleges and performances by artistes in public concerts. Vidya Rao
writes that "as the only singer who entered the class orbit of the new
urban bourgeoisie from an aristocratic vantage point, Begum Akhtar
was appropriated by the nation and recast as a national treasure" (qtd.
in "Begum Akhtar"l28).
Robert Ollikkala points out how the personal transformation of
Akhtari Bai to Begum Akhtar reflects to some extent the transition,
during nation-building, of the socio-cultural ethos of North India, of
which Lucknow happens to be the cultural and political center. He
writes:
Like other professional women of her class she was, coincidentally, a
product of changing times, an agent of transformation and one of the
victim .... Her dilemma while personal, was at the same time that of
a nation which under burden of a colonial influence-in the quest for
a new image and a socio-cultural, political, economic and moral
restructuring-was attempting the excision of a crucial component of
its own artistic self. (n. pag.)
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 187

Begum Akhtar's charmed journey did not, however, become the public
road open to every tawaif. But the changing avenues for a gainful
expression of their hereditary talent did open some new paths for the
venturesome. New recording companies, such as HMV, and the
emergence of Hindi cinema allowed these singers new modes of
performance, although, to an exclusive performer, the mechanical
avenues did not suit their training or inclination. To quote Qureshi,
their performances were "suitably decontextualized and disembodied";
hence, these talented singers, serving "as 'playback singers,' lost their
performing persona to the film stars and [to] largely domesticized roles
whose voices they articulated in song" ("Begum Akhtar" 112).
Listening to disembodied voices was no longer the visual experience it
had been for so long. However, their employment by the new channels
of entertainment was a response to a mass demand. The common man,
fantasizing about the opulent and indulgent life of the nabobs of
Awadh, could live vicariously through glimpses of tawaifs
performance. According to David Courtney, now the fortunes of the
tawaifwere dependent upon the masses' patronage of her art. From the
nawabi court to the aristocrats of Lucknow's feudal culture, the
tawaif's arts began to be projected on to stage performances which the
growing middle-class enjoyed as spectators. Courtney writes:
The passing of the tawa!fs' arts to the middle class was not an easy
job ... the process required the middle class to submerge themselves
into the kotha culture of musicians, poets, [and] tawaifs, take their
arts and then use modem approaches to preserve and propagate them.
Such endeavors involved combinations of modem musicology,
gramophone recording, publication of books and a wide range of
activities. (n. pag.)
Before the films, the play of sensuality and romance, which was the
essence of the courtesan's life and times, had inspired several works of
fiction and poetry. The earliest work on a courtesan's life is Hasan
Shah's Qissa Rangeen or Aftana-e-rangeen (c. 1790), originally
written in Persian, which remained unpublished until 1893, when it was
translated into Urdu by Sajjad Hussain Kasmandavi as Nashtar. A
century later, Nashtar was reworked in modem Urdu by Qurratulain
Haidar and issued as The Nautch Girl ( 1992), the title reflecting upon
the colonizer's favorite entertainer.
The Nautch Girl is far from being an engaging or powerful account
of courtesan life. It is at best a somewhat self-absorbed diary written in
first-person narrative of a doomed lover. The story is apparently
autobiographical. Hasan Shah, clerk to an Englishman called Mr. Ming,
falls in love with Khanum Jan who belongs to an itinerant troupe of
dancers. Written from the male perspective of Hasan Shah, the narrator,
The Nautch Girl is essentially a love story that ends in tragedy,
188 Vijay Prakash Singh

Khannum Jan dying before Hasan Shah can arrive to rescue her. There
is hardly anything in the novel that gives us a picture of the private life
of courtesans or of their vocation.
It is only in a much later novel, Mirza Hadi Ruswa's Umrao Jan
Ada (1899), that a fuller depiction of courtesans' life with its many
personal vicissitudes gives us an understanding of the initiation of
young girls into the socio-cultural milieu of the kotha. Ruswa, a man of
science who taught at the local Christian College of Lucknow, opens
the novel with his first encounter with Umrao Jan, and his narrative
becomes an extended encounter wherein he recurrently interrogates her
and she narrates her story. Umrao Jaan was kidnapped from her
parental home and sold to Khanum, the mistress of a Lucknow kotha.
Once there, she is meticulously trained in classical music and singing,
and the slightest mistake she makes in her singing is attributed to her
teacher, the Ustad. She learns the art of singing and goes on to become
a courtesan of repute, attracting, among others, one Nawab Sultan, the
scion of a wealthy family. Her love for the young aristocrat is
threatened with his loss of his inheritance if he does not marry the girl
of his father's choice. Khanum, the owner of the kotha, humiliates
Nawab Sultan for his family has promised large compensation if she
insures that he never returns to the kotha and if his involvement with
Umrao Jan comes to an end. Yet, other men follow, and life for Umrao
Jan goes on. All sorts of men, refined and coarse solicit her, and the
love she bears Nawab Sultan does not prevent her from entertaining
them. As a personal narrative woven into the historical background of
the early days of the Nawabi era and the 1857 Mutiny, Umrao Jan Ada
is a reflection of the changing times in Awadh's history. The
degradation of A wadh' s glory is reflected in the decline of the fortunes
ofUmrao Jan Ada.
In the decades before India's independence, with the emergence of
AIR, some of the tawaifs began to find a platform to sustain themselves
through their training in Hindustani vocal music; but, after
independence, even AIR, the mouthpiece of a newly-independent
country, barred them, because it did not wish to sully its socially
respectable image by supporting women of dubious moral record,
"whose private life is a public scandal" (The Nautch Girls of the Raj
124). Their intricate arts of ghazal, thumri, kajri or Hori were relegated
to the category of semi-classical or "light" music, while the Khaya/ and
dhrupad were recognized as the strictly classical forms. It was the
disreputable image attached to the nautch girl-once again the tawaif
of yore-that prevented them from taking to the public stage unlike
their male accompanists-whether vocalists or instrumentalists-who
did so with relative ease. With the abolition of the princely states in
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 189

1952, whatever little aristocratic patronage was forthcoming was lost

too.
The tawaif were thus relegated to an utterly marginalized position
where survival became a struggle, and her vocation was relegated to
that of a prostitute. In Veena Oldenburg's now well-known article
"Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesan's of Lucknow,"
one of the tawaifs named Gulbadan speaks of the change in the
situation of the tawaif. On a visit that Oldenburg made to her kotha in
1976, Gulbadan says of the clients of the '70s:
Not many come here openly anymore, because our salons are
regarded as houses of ill-repute in these modem times. Most come to
drink and for sexual titillation. We know how to get a man drunk and
pliant, so that we can extort whatever we want from him: money,
even property, apologies, jewels, perfume, or other lavish gifts.
Industrialists, government officers, other businessmen come here
now; they have a lot of black money that they bring with them,
sometimes without even counting it. (qtd. in "Lifestyle as Resistance"
10)

Thus, the tawaif, after being the repository of high culture, afankaar 12
of the performing arts of song and dance, had to debase themselves by
becoming prostitutes. While Oldenburg's article is a valuable firsthand
account of a kotha in old Lucknow, it focuses primarily on the
exclusively private nature of the kotha ambience, the nature of their sex
lives with its lesbian diversions as different from their sexual relations
with male clients, the miserable domestic circumstances from which
they have escaped and their survival strategies in a modem social ethos
of the Lucknow of the 1970s. An equally valuable study of the decline
of the Lucknow tawaif in post-colonial times is Regula Qureshi's
article, "Female Agency and Patrilineal Constraints/Situating
Courtesans in in Twentieth Century India," in which Qureshi narrates
how the tawaif struggled after independence and the loss of aristocratic
patronage to survive through private soirees or the AIR but never
succeeded in carving out a public space and platform for themselves as
their male accompanists managed to do as performers of classical
music. With the exception of such women as Jaddan Bai, who joined
the Bombay film industry and her daughter, Nargis, who achieved
celluloid fame; Rasoolan Bai, the well-known vocalist; Gauhar Jan of
Calcutta; and the iconic Begum Akhtar, who came to achieve the status
of a virtuoso of ghazal gayaki, most of the tawaifs languished in
anonymity.
Most of these courtesans have struggled to function within an
exclusively female space of, what Qureshi terms, '"loose
matrilineality,' subject to patrilineal constraints" ("Female Agency"
313). If the Ustads of the kotha had been male teachers, with the
190 Vijay Prakash Singh

emergence of gramophone companies in the early twentieth century

and the rise of All India Radio and Hindi cinema, the community of
music and film producers and directors were all male, too. As a result,
the projection of the individually disempowered taifa 's talents were
wholly dependent on male enterprise, whereas the ties of kinship that
had bound her together with other tawaifs in the kotha were exclusively
female, with her dependence on the female mistress of the salon who
was a kind of mother figure for all. Qureshi writes of this male
hegemony that continued to overrule the lives of the tawaif:
The women's musical deference to male musicians is also linked to
their need for male career management in a social world controlled
by men. This became even more evident with the expansion of public
performance contexts during the 1920-30 gramophone recordings and
[when] radio along with theater and film introduced a new set of male
controllers and gatekeepers, from record producers to studio directors
to radio officials. Managing these required male intermediaries,
guides and negotiators especially while a female singer was young.
That role was naturally taken by her teacher who was also the one
vouchsafing her artistic quality. ("Begum Akhtar" 106)

The world of the Lucknow courtesan, despite all the social and political
upheavals it underwent, remained circumscribed by patriarchy, so that,
even in a milieu of public performances, the individual female singer
remained dependent on men for her sustenance.
As an attempt to bring out tawaif of yesteryears from the shadows
of anonymity to the limelight, Qureshi (2006) cites Rita Ganguly's
mobilization of these women in 1984, when courtesans from across the
country were brought to Delhi to "celebrate and acknowledge their
art"(325). Ironically, most of these women could not sing, since they
had languished for so long. Qureshi writes:
I saw how impoverished some of them were: the once splendid
Mushtari Bai lived in squalor in an old Delhi attic and had not sung in
many years. I did not see an extended household with younger
relatives providing for their mothers. And very few of these
courtesans had daughters who sang and could support their mothers.
Others had sons who prospered in business, but kept little contact
with their mothers .... This situation contrasts sharply with that of the
courtesans' male accompanists whose hereditary community
continues to be overtly represented by a far-flung network of
practicing musicians, including youngsters. (325)
While this degenerate figure ceases to inspire fictional recreations in
literature, the world of postcolonial Hindi cinema continues to romance
the figure of the cultured tawaif in such films as Muzaffar Ali's
adaptation of Ruswa's novel Umrao Jan Ada titled Umrao Jan and
Kamal Amrohi's Pakeeza. While Pakeeza, with its grand and even
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 191

somewhat flamboyant sets, delineates the disrepute in which the tawaif

is held should she step out into the life of the mainstream, Umrao Jan
is less grand in its visual display but as romantic as Pakeeza. The tale
of the client in love, rescuing the love-starved courtesan, but failing to
find a fulfilling relationship is a theme reiterated in both films. Unlike
the novel, the film Umrao Jaan places the sole emphasis on Umrao
Jan's love for the young Nawab Sultan, ignoring the more licentious
and mercenary milieu of the kotha with its varied class of clients. The
film is more of a love story than an honest narrative of the life of a
tawaif, with her varied experiences of the life kotha. It seems that both
films use the figure of the tawa(f as an agent of a romantic fantasy, of
the figure censured by a puritanical society and as one in need of being
rescued. Considering the moral taboo attached to the figure of the
tawaif in the postcolonial phase of her life, these depictions are realistic
even if presented in the prototype genres of popular Hindi cinema. The
difference between the two films, both box-office hits, is that while
Pakeeza vindicates the rescue theme-wherein the lover finally
succeeds despite family objections to retrieve the tawaiffrom her kotha
by marrying her-Umrao Jan emerges as a more realistic film with the
tawaifretuming to the kotha that gives her a sense of acceptability and
belonging in a harsh world where fame and humiliation paradoxically
stare her in the face.
The romantic-rescue theme played out in other popular Hindi
films has reiterated the idea of the tawaifas a bird in a golden cage, but
the reality of the lives of the tawaif was quite different. The kotha was
no golden cage but a place where, as Oldenburg has shown, the women
had found an exclusive female space that provided autonomy and a
measure of financial independence. Many of these women had in fact
escaped from the patriarchal bondage of family life as wives and
daughters-in-law, a life they described as hell, orjahannum, because of
its relentless household drudgery as well as the battering they were
subjected to at the hands of alcoholic husbands. Indeed, as Oldenburg
( 1999) documents from 1976-1986 in more than a score of meetings,
she came across tawaif who had fled their homes under adversity of
circumstance:
The compelling circumstance that brought a majority of them to the
various tawa'if households in Lucknow was the misery they had
endured in either their natal or their conjugal homes. Four of these
women were child widows, two of whom hailed from the same
district and had lost their husbands in a cholera epidemic: three were
sold by their parents when famine conditions made feeding these girls
impossible. Seven were victims of physical abuse, two of whom were
sisters regularly beaten by their alcoholic father for not obliging him
by making themselves sexually available to the toddy~seller. Three
192 Vijay Prakash Singh

were known victims of rape and deemed unmarriageable; two of

them had left their ill-paid jobs as municipal sweeper-women ... two
were battered wives, one had left her husband because he had a
mistress, and one had run away from [sic] her love of music and
dancing that was not countenanced in her orthodox Brahmin home .
. . . Not one had claimed that kidnapping had been her experience. (7)
It is quite obvious from these personal testimonies that the kotha was a
refuge for many women in their dire distress and not the prison that
Hindi cinema invariably portrays. The ideal Hindi celluloid heroine is a
virtuous woman who falls in love with one man and remains faithful to
him all her life. Ideally, she is a middle-class girl who would be
solicited by the hero and would yield to his attentions only after he has
persisted in his avowals of love for her. As a virtuous woman, she
would rarely make the first move. Once she has accepted the hero as
the man she loves, she would remain an exemplar of sustained fidelity
all her life. If circumstances bring her to a situation where her honor is
at stake either in a Kotha or a brothel or at the hands of a rapist, she
would resist with all the courage in her. In such recurring situations, the
heroine is invariably rescued either by the valiant hero from the
clutches of a lascivious rake or the designs of a brothel Madam. In
many of the tawaif-oriented films, however, the morose hero deprived
of love or good fortune visits the kotha for solace, encounters the
tawaif, and falls a victim to her seductive charms. In time, he is so
smitten by her that he either wishes to marry her or to engage her
exclusively as the Nawab does in Pakeeza. Since marriage is possible
only when she leaves the kotha, which she cannot willfully do, the hero
must contrive to rescue her from the clutches of the mistress of the
kotha. The situation of the ardent lover in pursuit of his damsel in
distress is a stereotypical theme played out ad nauseam in the Hindi
film, seeking, as it were, to reinforce the paradigm of the Ramayan
epic, in which "the ideal man," Ramchandra, wages war to rescue his
innocent wife, Sita, whose honor is at stake. This mythical archetype, in
tum, reinforces the ideal of the virtuous heroine and the valiant hero
and plays out in films with a tawaif as heroine.
The romanticism of films like Pakeeza ( 1971 ), released at the
opportune moment when tawaifbazi was an expiring tradition,
languishing in a few kothas, such as those of Gulbadan, may have
given cozy comfort to audiences but the reality, as Misra points out,
was that, in the '70s, tawaifbazi had virtually become a dead tradition:
[T]he last of the connoisseurs departed. The middle classes too
stopped flaunting conventions of a courtesan. Up to the '60s, the
kotha culture of UP was respectable to the point of Hindu marriages
being arranged under its shade. Even in villages and qasbas ... it was
customary and traditional for the Bhumihaar, Kayastha or Brahmin
 From Tawaifto Nautch Girl 193

uncle to initiate his nephew in the ways of the world at the kotha. But
by the late '70s, the alleys of chowks in Lucknow and other Avadhi-
east UP-towns began to get filled with those who flock to empty
have/is to scavenge the leftovers-the dregs of society who now
descended upon empty courtesan houses to rob and steal even the
corpses of remembrances. (278)
The reality was that despite the hierarchal nature of the kotha,
where the mistress ruled over the tawaif, the liberty the tawaif enjoyed
in kotha, even as a woman of disrepute, was worth the stifling life of
relative respectability that she had been forced to live. Their lifestyle
was a "living resistance," according to Oldenburg, to subvert
patriarchal bondage. Yet, while the Ustads of yesteryears had carved a
niche for themselves as performing artistes in the mainstream, the
tawaif remained a disgraced yet ostracized figure, surviving on the
margins. The tawaif, who had begun as an embodiment and dispenser
of culture, in our times ends up, except in rare cases, as a social rebel
and a pariah.
Notes
I. shirin zubaan: sweet tongue/language
2. tehzeeb: culture
3. tawaifbazi: the arts of the courtesans.
4. andaaz: literally, gesture, its meaning extends to the whole style of
one's conduct
5. pari khana: Abode of the Fairies
6. Among the famous nautch girls during the period of royal patronage
were Lal Kunwar of the last phase of the Mughal empire, who was a
descendent of Tansen, the mythical singer of Akbar's court; Anarkali in the
court of Emperor Akbar; Nur Bai in the court of Mohammad Shah Rangila;
Baji Rao Mastani of the Deccan; Rupmati of Mandu; Nicki of Calcutta; and
Kaunam and Umrao Jan Ada from Lucknow, which was the center of some of
the most cultured and celebrated courtesans.
7. Nazakat and Nafasat: delicacy and finesse
8. sukun: peace
9. gayaki: song
lO.farmaish: request
II. taifa: singular form of tawaif [In the essay, the Urdu distinction is left
out, using tawaifs as the Anglicized plural and, analogically, tawaif as a
singular noun.]
12. fankar: artiste

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