If we were to go back to historians’ definition of a courtesan, we will find out that they were female intellectuals who belonged to unconventional households and earned a living through poetry, song, and dance, Ruth Vanita tells ANUBHAV PRADHAN

South Asian cultures have a richly varied history of courtesans. Far from contemporary notions of the courtesan as a glorified sex worker, the courtesan in history was more of a female intellectual whose profession was premised on conversation and song more than anything else. In Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema, Ruth Vanita traces the history of this transformation in society’s engagement with and perception of courtesans in over eight decades of Bombay cinema. Her research, provocative and intriguing, reveals that the courtesan has been central to the evolving notions and representations of gender, family, and nation in modern India.

Congratulations, first of all, for the book. Could you tell a little about what the journey behind it was likeij

I became aware of how important tawaifs are in North Indian culture when I was working on my 2012 book Gender, Sex, and the City which was about lucknow’s poetry and literary culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then, I began to wonder, courtesans were so prominent in cities, what happened to them…after 1857, they sort of dwindled away over the course of the next hundred years. But that kind of speech, that kind of song, where did it goij One place I felt it went into was cinema, especially film songs. That’s how I started paying more attention to movies, and then I realised how many movies actually have courtesan characters. I haven’t seen all of them, of course, that’s not possible, but I watched about 235 movies, and realised how unique the presence of courtesans is to Bombay cinema...there is no parallel in any other world cinema, such as French or Japanese. I kept finding out more as I saw more films, and found more even after I’d finished. But I had to stop somewhere.

The framework you have for the term ‘courtesan’ in the book is fairly expansive: women in “unconventional family arrangements…making their living by purveying dance, music, and witty conversations”. I wonder if this was influenced by the choice of the movies you surveyedij Or was it the other way roundij

What happens over time in Bombay cinema is that the word tawaif more or less becomes synonymous with the word randi. The meaning of randi changed gradually; it originally meant a single woman, usually of noble origin, but over the nineteenth century the meaning changed to prostitute or sex worker-and that’s not at all who tawaifs were. Tawaifs were defined by their work, which was making a living through dance, music, and conversation. They were female intellectuals, that was their profession. They also very often lived in  matrilineal households; sometimes, they lived on their own or with their sisters, basically unconventional family households in real life as well as in movies. They did not live in conventional patrilineal households unless in later life they got married and became lower-ranking wives of kings, noblemen, or wealthy businessmen. But when they were working as professionals, they did not live in patrilineal households.

But how did you come to thisij Was it because of the movies you saw, the way you defined ‘courtesan’…I noticed you defined courtesan’ as that and not ‘tawaif’.

Historians have defined courtesans in this way in many parts of the world. This is an accepted definition, not an unusual one. Some films do clearly distinguish between courtesans and sex workers; others confuse them. Tawaif is one of the North Indian words for courtesan, but I also looked at films set in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and other areas. A few films, such as Guide and Ahista Ahista, mention ‘devdasi’, but other words are also used like bai, naachnewaali, gaanewali, that’s why I used the English word ‘courtesan’, because what I’m looking at is not just the tawaif but the wider phenomenon.

It can act as an umbrella term then, yes. You also suggest that “the voice of the courtesan is the residual voice of excess” in some ways. What do you think is happening to that voice of excess todayij

Well, today, women — particularly middle class, upper class women — are speaking in those voices of excess. There’s this figure we all know, the woman who is a glamorous, professional woman, maybe an intellectual, who lives on her own, and has conversations and friendships with men that are not necessarily sexual but could be sexual. This is an urban phenomenon, and in Bombay cinema it started in the sixties. Such a woman is not a tawaif but what I call courtesan-like and has many things in common with courtesans: like serving liquor to men, interacting freely with male friends, living on her own or with a woman friend, earning her own living, but is not depicted as a bad woman. She’s an independent woman living on her own terms, and you can see it happening more and more today. The voice of excess, of looking glamourous not just for her husband, or having more than one relationship — what we call serial monogamy — can be shown in films today without her being seen as a bad woman. If you want to call it excess, it has become mainstream and middle class.

So if I was to think of representation, you’re right that there’s the single woman like that, or there are women who enact the so-called voice of excess, but if there’s a lot of cinema right now that’s showing that, there’s also a lot of stuff on television which is not doing that and is very different from what you have in cinema or even the Netflix and Amazon Prime shows which are produced on India. Do you think those dichotomies between good and bad, they still exist across the representation spectrumij

Well, of course, dichotomies between good and bad do exist, not just for women but for everything and in most times and places. There’s been didacticism in every nation and it is going to continue. Even when there were lots of courtesan films being made, or even in the eighteenth century when courtesans were part of urban intellectual life, there was still the wife and the conventional family . These are dichotomies, which may or may not be seen as good and bad. I can’t comment on television because I barely watch it and I don’t know how courtesans are depicted on television.

My next question is about the matrilineal household. I was wondering if ‘matrilineal’ is a term that’s too strong to describe the context…or how do you describe a pre-Modern, pre-Puritanical, pre-Victorian sort of system where gender relations were not as rigid as they became after the early nineteenth centuryij

I won’t say that gender relations were not rigid, gender relations were rigid: they were rigid in different ways. Just because the system is matrilineal doesn’t mean it was not rigid. There were hierarchies of older women, younger women, mothers, daughters, aunts, nieces, and men as visitors or patrons. Men who lived in courtesan households were not treated as important. Having a daughter was more important than a son, because daughters carried on the tradition. Sons became accompanists, performed errands for the household, set up small shops, or took to small-time trades. Veena Oldenberg, for instance, found that tawaifs were the only single women in the highest income tax bracket in nineteenth century lucknow, since they owned property and earned incomes in their own names. So by matrilineal I simply mean that the skills, the accomplishments, and the property were passed on from mothers to daughters, aunts to nieces, or older women to younger women within the household. This is not to say that in matrilineal households things are necessarily less rigid.

You also wrote about an element of wishful thinking, that films in the seventies had an element of wishful thinking with respect to male fantasies…now, the interesting thing about north Indian culture seems to be that people like mushairahs, people like ghazals, but they’re not really very comfortable thinking about the tawaif, the heritage of the mushairah and the ghazal with reference to the tawaif.

Well, the mushairah at that time consisted mainly of male poets reciting or singing their poetry…the courtesans performed in the mehfil more than the mushairah. A mehfil was a relatively more informal gathering where singing, reciting, conversation went on, and courtesans would dance or sing or sit there. You drink wine and sit around and chat and converse: we forget how much of it was just about talk and not about singing and dancing. It was just about meeting in the evening and sitting around and talking, reciting or singing too, since poetry and song were part of everyday conversation. That’s a mehfil, which could take place in a courtesan household or the male quarters of a conventional household or at court. A mushairah was much more formal with its own conventions, where poets recited their poetry — and primarily male poets participated in those. There were all — women mushairahs, held inside the women’s quarters…one movie, Zindagi Ya Toofan, depicts this…the tawaif goes and reads her poetry along with conventional women. But most were all-male mushairahs where occasionally a tawaif might recite or sing. This is depicted in the film Bank Manager, where the tawaif sings her poem, “Saba se kah do ki kaliyaan bichha den”. Discussing tawaif culture is in fashion now, and I think people are comfortable with it.

No, I’m saying just that some elements of the tawaifana culture, not the tawaif’s establishment but the entire culture…you see a lot of nostalgia for that in events happening across the city, all over north India. But then people are not really comfortable with discussing or thinking about that.

Reallyij I would think they’re much more comfortable now as it barely exists now and it’s easy to discuss something that doesn’t exist. Now that it is comfortably and safely part of the past, I think tawaifs are discussed quite a lot. Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah are icons now, everyone loves those movies and their songs. It’s because glamorous tawaifs are the centre of these films and images of particular film stars, say Rekha or Meena Kumari, fit that model too in the public eye…I think people love to talk about it now, because it’s so removed from everyday life and tawaifs exist primarily as a memory. People may not be comfortable talking about sex workers, who are real and not a part of this glamorous world, but the tawaif, I think, has become part of even polite conversations.

I wonder if we could also talk a little about Ramkali, which is one of my favourite sections in the book. You talk about Ramkali as the new Draupadi and how she comes and sits between the pandit and the maulvi. Do you think that sort of hybrid tehzeeb was the aspiration of an India which is no longer thereij A little more secular, a little less bound by religious identitiesij

I think the film is playing about it, being funny about it…that scene is very humorous! It is referring to the real phenomenon of tawaifs having a hybrid culture in their households, because these women interacted with men of different communities, which s is shown in more than one film. Their children had fathers who might be Hindu or Muslim or European or Parsi or whatever…but the way this film refers to it is very humorous: Ramkali doesn’t join the pandit and maulvi’s debate about her religion, she just smiles and doesn’t say anything about her identity. Soon after, though, people from all communities who are in the train join in a song which she sings: when it comes to the pleasure of singing, like in a Hindi movie, everyone joins in and is happy and it doesn’t matter who you are. I think that still is the case in Hindi movies: you have Hindus, Muslims, and Christians acting, directing, singing together, both in production and as characters… that hybridity has clearly survived in Bombay cinema. Many of the top male stars are Muslims …though one interesting thing I notice is that the top female stars are not Muslim anymore, for whatever reason…they were in the fifties, that’s really not the case now. Apart from Tabu, there is no major Muslim female star.

I was very surprised about your choice of publisher, especially after the previous book Gender, Sex, and the City, which was very academic in the conventional sense and the publisher was also that sort of a publisher. Here, in this book, the narrative too is a little different from the conventional academic sense: it’s much more interactive and conversational as compared to your previous book…what determined these choicesij

I always try to write for the common reader and I do it with more or less success. I always try to avoid jargon, for lack of a better word, and to write in a way that any educated person can read and enjoy it, not for the academic reader alone. I don’t see any particular advantage to going only with a conventional academic publisher. I want my books to reach bookstores and to be picked up by common readers, they are my target audience. This is not my first non-academic book, I have published a lot with Penguin. I also didn’t think of Speaking Tiger as entirely non-academic.

You know, a lot of erudition is apparent from the book, but there are still things which surprised me. For example, you say in places things like “middle class” or “upper middle class”…a lot of sociologists would object to that, to this idea of the middle or upper middle class in India…or, again, you say that “women’s brothers in popular discourse are her only refuge”, but what is your framework of the popular hereij

But then that’s what the whole rakhi ritual is about, isn’t itij The point is that in many communities, once your parents die, you come back to your brothers if your husband mistreats you or your in-laws mistreat you: your brothers are supposed to defend you, protect you, and keep you in their house if in-laws mistreat you. I know several people who have done that, and it was more important in the urban middle-class where fewer women were earning. That’s what brothers are supposed to do, whether they do it or not is a separate matter, but traditionally that’s the role of the brother.

This is, but there are other things like this. I was wondering why you chose to not substantiate claims or terms like these.

I prefer not to overload my books with footnotes. I did look at the secondary sources and referred to them where necessary. It becomes a choice: I have viewed 235 films, those are the primary sources. There is no earlier book on the topic of courtesans in films. There are several earlier articles on the topic; they are based mostly on two to three films (usually Pakeezah and the two Umrao Jaans), or at most a dozen to twenty films, and scores of secondary sources. It depends where your emphasis lies. To me, the primary sources are much more important than the secondary ones. Especially since Hindi films are a popular medium with which everyone is familiar, I wanted this book to be easily readable. Gender, Sex, and the City is loaded with footnotes, but the references are mostly to primary sources. I tend to alternate a book that is more footnote-heavy with one that is more for general readers. But even my academic books rely more on primary than secondary sources and avoid insider jargon.

For example there are times when you say things like “Hindu and Muslim aristocracy”. When you’re talking about how there is an Islamicate culture or there is a hybrid culture, then doesn’t it defeat the point to end up saying “Hindu and Muslim aristocracy”ij

I never used the word Islamicate. I referred to the kotha as hybrid, not court culture or Urdu literary culture. Court and literary cultures is hybrid to some extent but not in a 50:50 way. If you count the numbers of nobility at court, it’s heavily Muslim nobility with just a sprinkling of Hindus. In Hindu courts it would be the opposite. You can have a hybridity that’s 90-10 per cent and you can have one which is 60-40 per cent. This is not 60-40, it is definitely not 50-50: it’s more like 80-20 or 90-10. This is clear from the lists of Urdu poets and their shagirds or disciples. Most of the Urdu poets are Muslim and most have many Muslim shagirds and very few Hindu ones. There are exceptions, but overall court culture or Urdu culture is not hybrid in the sense of being equally Hindu and Muslim. There is definitely a Muslim aristocracy that dominates the court and a separate Hindu aristocracy that has its own lineage and spaces. Since the majority of the population in the city is Hindu, street and market culture is more hybrid and in some areas would be Hindu-dominated. Several Muslim kings, noblemen and poets had Hindu mothers, so that produces a kind of hybridity, but the Hindu mothers were living in Muslim households and were usually converted, and the children were raised Muslim. I don’t want to pretend that it was a happy, egalitarian mix, that’s our romanticisation of the past.