Tawaif: An Echoing Vault of Vacuum

Dancers of Kashmir, 1928 (from sangeethas wordpress)

In the amnesic annals of history, tawaifs have been generalised as sex-workers. During the Mughal rule they formed a class within themselves, affluent and powerful, from whom the sons of aristocrats would learn tehzeeb or etiquette. Initially, when the British came, miscegenation was still tolerable, and the performances of tawaifs and the exotic nautch girls were of great interest to the English. The word nautch is an anglicized version of the Hindi word naach, mispronounced by the English. The colonisers’ incapability and reluctance to understand the rich cultural heritage and intricately stratified society led them to generalise all tawaifs and nautch dancers as one and the same– women who were inclined towards sex work. The masculinist, sexist, colonial gaze stereotyped sex-work as pejorative along with the complicity of the masses. With the ever expanding British influence, this idea creeped stealthily into the minds of the laity– an intellectual cultural colonisation enabled by the ideological state apparatus– causing a decline in the business and reputation of the tawaifs.

“Mohammedan Dancing Girl” via wikimedia commons

When the Sepoy Mutiny began, the tawaifs cashed in on the opportunity to drive away the British by not only espousing the ideological cause but also financially sponsoring it, transforming their kothas into nuclei of strategic colonial resistance for chalking out plans for attacks. One of the tawaifs, Azeezunbai fought on horseback alongside soldiers against the British. After the Sepoy Mutiny, the British launched a pecuniary counterattack on the tawaifs by levying exorbitant taxes which was the highest on any strata of society that actually pushed them into sex work. Laws like the Contagious Diseases Act, 1864 were used to both physically inspect their bodies — an anatomical disciplining specifically of the female body by a male colonial gaze — as well as survey and regulate their income.

Three Nautch Girls Dancing in Costume by Charles Shepherd via wikimedia commons

There have been isolated instances of tawaif groups who had contributed to the freedom struggle but have been excluded from mainstream historical narratives for instance, the Tawaif Sabha from Varanasi that adopted non-violent methods of boycotting British products or the courtesans performing musical renditions of nationalist songs. Their exclusion betrays the deep-rooted biases in canon formation that favours bourgeois morality and family values, a reason why Rani Lakshmibai is so valorised while Azeezunbai is a negation of memory, a vault of vacuum echoing in on itself, interrogating the absence of acknowledgement.

Nautch Girls Bombay via wikimedia commons

Mahatma Gandhi had approached Gauhar Jaan, a renowned courtesan of her time, to contribute to the Swaraj Fund financing the independence struggle though he wrote in the weekly editorial, Young India, that he was unable to identify with the methods adopted at Barisal when courtesans from Barisal expressed the desire to join the freedom movement, urging them instead to renounce their methods and begin spinning the charkha. These isolated instances have been consciously fragmented to undermine the multifaceted contribution of the tawaifs to the nationalist movement that instead has been monopolised by bourgeois ethics and traditional religious narratives. This historical epistemic injustice can only be redressed by acknowledging the kothas as vibrant pockets of resistance and naming the unnamed tawaifs in our history textbooks.