COURTESAN TALES

Two recent books focus on the life histories of courtesan performers

- Saba Dewan

SAHELA RE

By Mrinal Pande; translated by Priyanka Sarkar

HARPERCOLLINS

COURTING HINDUSTAN

The Consuming Passions of Iconic Women Performers of India

By Madhur Gupta RUPA

Highly trained, professional female singers, dancers and entertainers, called tawaifs in northern India and devadasis in the south, have disappeared from contemporary India's cultural and social life. Refracted through a prism of sexual morality, their memory lives on, however, in popular literature and films as either scheming seductresses or hapless victims in need of redemption.

Mrinal Pande's novel Sahela Re, translated into English from the Hindi original (2008) by Priyanka Sarkar, is a nostalgic search for lost histories of musicians, especially tawaifs, their patron families and the social, cultural and political context within which Hindustani music-making took place in late 19th- and early 20th-century India. Woven with multiple narratives in the form of letters, the novel is refreshingly free of the stereotypes and moral trappings that have dogged the representation of tawaifs.

The search introduces the readers to the enigmatic Anjali Bai of Anglo-Indian descent, her mother Hira Bai originally from Kumaon, their friends, the mother and daughter pair of Husna Bai and Allahrakhi Bai, and a host of other characters. Their journeys from performing in mehfils in cities like Banaras and Lucknow to making the transition, with the advent of new technologies, as gramophone artists, playback singers and radio artists makes for engaging reading.