The first title within the Wikipedia entry for ‘tawaif’ is Begum Akhtar. The trailer of Heeramandi, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s magnum opus based mostly on the courtesans of a neighbourhood in present-day Pakistan, dropped yesterday, as soon as once more bringing consideration to the Mughal-era entertainers who’ve typically been a subject of curiosity. Incidentally, Bhansali opened the Alia Bhatt-starrer, Gangubai Kathiawadi, with Akhtar’s music—a lament-like tune that picks on the loneliness of somebody pining for his or her lover. Pop tradition has conflated phrases corresponding to tawaifs, kothewali, courtesans, intercourse staff and nautch women with one another however ‘tawaif’ is, actually, not simply one other phrase for a ‘cultured’ intercourse employee.

“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, creator of The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir, which launched final yr. “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 illustration of the courtesan life was within the 1966 movie Amrapali directed by Lekh Tandon, starring Sunil Dutt and Vyjayanthimala as leads. In the favored Indian creativeness, Umrao Jaan takes priority 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 isn’t a common consensus on whether or not Umrao Jaan truly existed. There is sort of no historic report of her life outdoors Umrao Jaan Ada, an 1899 novel written by Mirza Hadi Ruswa that depicts her as a Nineteenth-century courtesan whose life retains taking a flip for the more serious—later tailored into the 1981 movie starring Rekha and Aishwarya Rai in 2006.