#tawaif

Umrao Jaan (1981) dir. Muzaffar Ali

"What is the heart? Take my life instead."

Umrao (Rekha) is not just a tawaif, she is the archive of a vanishing culture and history. As colonial modernity creeps through the corridors of Lucknow (and Indian Cinema), the world of the tawaif begins to dim. Once touchbearers of culture and the ultimate quadruple threat - poetry, music, dance, ettiquette - women like Umrao are slowly stripped of dignity and left only with performance, which the film certainly makes clear.

Her body is like colonised ground, writing herself into history through poetry, her voice a rebellion, as she eventually refuses to be rescued by love or redeemed by respectability. When nawabs fail her, when society forgets her, she survives only by her own grace.

Most commonly romantic poetry like Ghazals -a form of Arabic poetry that made its way over to South Asia: odes of long lost lovers, tragedy, separation, stuff to pull at your heart strings. And, shairi, another Arab/Persian kind of poetry that is built on monorhymed quatrains or four sixteen syllable lines (keeping to the same rhyme scheme) with a caesura used between lines 8//9 to break up the first half from the second. During the British Occupation, they were simply called, Nautch girls or dance girls. But this is far from all they did or were capable of. The name itself, Tawaif, is the term for a HIGHLY SKILLED courtesan. They were trained to the upmost of artistic forms.

They were not there to perform sex acts - that was often incidental and not contractual. And the women had the power to rebuff men's advances.

The Tawaifs of India were regarded as some of the greatest performing artists of their time with documented praise and examples from travelers such as Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim, notable traveling Buddhist Monk and scholar who frequented India, remarking on the Tawaifs skill, beauty, and performances during once such visit to the Sun Temple in Multan. Al-Biruni, often regarded as the father of Comparative Religion studies, an Iranian polymath and scholar, regarded on their skill and larger numbers during the 11th century CE upon a visit, Ganikas, another entertainer, are a public dancing girl (very common in cities from the Vedic period upward) who received classical arts training (most obviously dancing) and often performed from public settings up to royal private ones - and would compete to become Nagarvadhu - the most beautiful woman and most highly talented in forms of art (dance mostly).

Many young girls would leave or were taken to be taught these skills, and yes, there were schools for this too as well as private tutelage. People don't often realize this, but Ancient India was a place of extreme learning with all kinds of schools for different disciplines. A place of academies. Something I've talked about, like places like Nalanda, the world's oldest residential university that attracted people from far as Greece to Japan.

need an OC x OC, where the FL is a tawaif who's resigned to her faith and has given up and the ML gives her hope that there is still a way out (not saviour types tho, they mutually help each other and run off in the sun and live happily ever after)

or one where the tawaif character is also working towards azadi and extorts information from her angrezi sahab but is caught (a little Raazi tease there but with a happy ending because my heart can't take anymore angst 😔)

...so I'm making it everybody's problem.

I just finished reading My Name is Gauhar Jaan!: The Life and Times of a Musician by Vikram Sampath. Obviously, what inspired me to pick up this book was Heeramandi, the 8-episode-long escapade by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. I watched a video saying that a major inspiration for Bibbojaan's character, especially, was an actual tawaif called Gauhar Jaan.

That, however, wasn't the only reason. The main motivation behind my reading this book was to better understand kathak as a dance form, because it's obviously been considerably impacted by the tawaifs. In fact it was the way kathak was used in Heeramandi that piqued my curiosity to pick up this book.

Before I say anything about the book, though, I must mention that Gauhar Jaan was the first ever recorded artist of India. After the gramophone was invented, a bunch of people from the gramophone company came to India, looking for good music to record and sell, and Gauhar Jaan was the first of those artists to sing for the gramophone.

So I started reading this book, okay? The first thing I notice about this book is that the first person it truly focuses on isn't Gauhar Jaan but her mother, you guessed it, Mallika Jaan.

But it doesn't start off with Mallika Jaan's skills as a tawaif; it starts with Mallika Jaan's love and acumen for poetry. And as someone who loves reading and writes amateurish poetry sometimes, I thoroughly enjoyed the little epigraphs containing two lines of Urdu poetry in the beginning of every chapter.

But the part that made me cry was something I should've anticipated, but somehow didn't: the society's abusive treatment of a woman so well-versed in art and literature.

Every time a tawaif falls in love, be it Mallika Jaan or Gauhar Jaan, it always ended in utter devastation and heartbreak for them, and by extension, for me.

It really boiled my blood that these women were simultaneously worshipped, yet objectified. Placed on a pedestal, but never respected. Deemed worthy of desire, but never love. Pampered, showered with gifts in cash and kind by men, but never with affection. Not even from their fathers.

They say that the true colors of a person are revealed not by how they treat somebody that everyone else respects, but by how they treat someone whom society does not deem worthy of respect. And the men in Gauhar Jaan's life repeatedly fail her in this regard, because of course she inspires endless passion and desire wherever she goes. Of course the men around her shower her with gifts for her mujras or performances. But the moment it comes to truly being associated with her, everybody backs away.

This is not just the case for Gauhar, it's this way for every tawaif. The only thing that a tawaif gets rewarded with for being in love, it seems, is heartbreak. And it's probably this heartbreak, this inevitable tragedy, that made the study of the lives of these tawaifs so enticing for SLB in the first place.

But also, I feel like in the case of Mallika Jaan, it's quite evident how much this heartbreak inspired the poet in her. Like, read this: