Heeramandi, the latest Netfilx series directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali has been the talk of the month since its release on May 1st. The series allegedly depicts the lives of the courtesans of Hira Mandi, a red-light area in Lahore during pre-independence India. The show has received much criticism for its poor writing, historical inaccuracies and weak execution. What I’m feeling the most after watching the series is disappointment. It appears to me, a colossal loss of an opportunity to showcase the empowering lives of courtesans, known as ‘tawaifs‘: a word derived from the Urdu language.

Who were tawaifs?
Tawaifs were sophisticated female performers well-versed in classical music and dance, literature, art and poetry who became an essential part of the Indian culture from the 15th century onwards. These women had autonomy over their finances, bodies and art; they were some of the highest taxpayers in the country. More importantly, they were keepers of tradition. They made popular thumri and dadra, sub-genres of Indian classical music. These singing styles were combined with graceful body movements of the Kathak dance form. Courtesans spent most of their time honing their singing skills, learning from various gurus and touring all over the country to perform in royal courts. They were artists for hire who were invited by kings and wealthy merchants to grace their musical soirees and were showered with expensive gifts by their patrons as an appreciation for their art. While some of these liaisons were amorous or sexual in nature, that was never the focus of the relationship. There were codes of conduct decreed by the courtesan and a formal courtship ensued between her and her male suitor.

Some of these courtesans were the first artists to be recorded on the gramophone in India, first women to enter the film industries of the sub-continent as producers, actors and singers. They were the only ones allowed to be in the public eye and thereby pioneered the way for other women to be seen and heard in public and professional spaces. At the turn of the 20th century, threatened by their growing power and pressure from Christian missionaries, the British colonizers deemed the courtesan culture obscene. They made no distinction between tawaifs, common prostitutes and cheap entertainers referring to all of them with a single derogatory term ‘nautch girls’ and snatched away years of repute and hard work from the tawaifs. This colonial stigmatization, unfortunately has stayed in the Indian subconsciousness and has affected the depiction of courtesans in our films. Apart from a few nuanced portrayals, Hindi cinema has cemented the stereotype of a courtesan as a seductress showing off lusty dance moves offering sexual favors in exchange for wealth and riches.

Doomed love and other tropes
The most common cliché used in Hindi films is the depiction of a courtesan’s life as being devoid of ‘true love’. The courtesan’s character is doomed to not marry and never have the proverbial happily-ever-after since no man would accept a ‘bazaaru aurat‘ (literally, a woman in the market) as his wife. Married women during the peak of the tawaif culture (around the 19th century) were cloaked behind closed doors and the purdah system. Courtesans were women that had surpassed the need to have the security of a marriage so this cliché speaks more for the male fantasy that a woman’s happiness lies only with a husband.

For most of its initial decades, Hindi cinema was obsessed with the image of a pious heroine who was coy and virtuous. The courtesan character, therefore became an antithesis to the heroine as a promiscuous woman, vocal and aware of her sexuality, within reach yet sufficiently tantalizing to male desire. Pitting women against one another has been an oft-repeated cliché in films and television and the filmy version of courtesan life lends itself easily to this soap operatic narrative. Much of the initial episodes of Heeramandi are occupied with showing the women bickering over Nawab patrons as they resort to scheming and plotting each other’s downfall. While rivalry existed between real-life courtesans, it was more of an artistic rivalry that materialized in the performance space.

Unparalleled classics
Among the many portrayals of tawaifs on Indian celluloid, two films stand out as being more nuanced and respectable narratives: Pakeezah (1972) and Umrao Jaan (1981). Pakeezah was director Kamal Amrohi’s paean to his then wife Meena Kumari who played the titular character of the fictional tawaif Sahibjaan. The film took 10 years to make and had the most exquisite music along with refined dialogue and exceptional performances. Filmmaker, painter and fashion designer Muzaffar Ali directed the 1981 movie, Umrao Jaan, based on an Urdu novella about the life of the courtesan, Umrao Jaan Ada. Ali belongs to the royal family of Kotwara that had connections with Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh where the film is set. His family palace was one of the venues where courtesan performances were hosted. For his film’s research, Ali called in 25 tawaifs who were still alive at the time to understand their mannerisms, used items from his mother’s wardrobe for the courtesan’s costumes and read the Urdu novel a hundred times, writing and re-writing the screenplay with his co-writers Shama Zaidi and Javed Siddiqui.

When I interviewed Ali on the 40th anniversary of Umrao Jaan, he said something that will always remain to me, a yardstick for great art: “a timeless piece of art enters your heart and emotional landscape and lives there forever. However, things that are meant to titillate will only replace other things of titillation (read full piece here).” It’s clearly not easy to make a film or series about courtesans, but to refrain from going down the titillation route has got to be the biggest challenge that Bhansali has not been able to overcome with Heeramandi.

For those interested in reading more about real tawaifs, I highly recommend these two books:

1) Tawaifnama by Saba Dewan
2) My Name is Gauhar Jaan by Vikram Sampath