Aditi Sharif:
“Like birds in glided cages, these Tawaifs knew the value of freedom. They rebelled for freedom. Fought for it. Made sacrifices. But their sacrifices were forgotten with time.”
While watching Heeramandi, I encountered those sentences in the very last scene of the web series. The term ‘Tawaif’ is denoted to understand the highly skilled courtesans of the Indian sub-continent(Mehrotra, 2021). Heeramandi is the story of such courtesans, who fought against themselves, their destinies, and the colonial empire during the British period. Heeramandi, produced by famous Sanjay Leela Bhansali, is one of the most celebrated dramas on the OTT platform, people who have watched this web series continuously share their opinions about various elements. While some audiences are bashing a particular actress for her bad performance, others are more concerned with the plot. On the other hand, many people complained about the historical inaccuracies. However, this web series has had a profound impact on my mind as it made me think about the role of women in Historiography.
Being a graduate of Anthropology, I am largely familiar with the writings of Ranajit Guha. Guha claimed that two mainstream elitist historiographies could be identified in Indian historiography where the contributions of women had hardly any place (Guha 1988). Particularly, history has been more brutal to women, who are largely considered marginalized in society. Tawaifs were among them. Though in pre-colonial India, these courtesans led an honorable life as the custodians of elite art and culture, the colonial moral codes of the British, influenced by Victorian Ethics, stigmatized them as prostitutes and tried to erase them from mainstream society. Such acts have their reflections on their ‘absence’ in the sub-continental historiography(Modi, 2024). In this write-up, I will try to shed light on the struggles of some ‘Tawaifs’, who fought against the British empire.
After watching Heeramandi, I was motivated to search for the role of courtesans in the anti-colonial struggle during the British colonial period. As a result, I have found the names of three famous courtesans, who fought against the British. Among them, Azizan Bai was a courtesan of Lucknow, who worked as a secret information of Indian revolutionaries and gathered necessary information from British patrons. She also regularly helped the revolutionaries by providing shelter and financial assistance. It is also said that Azizan Bai fought with Nana Saheb against the British during the rebellion of 1857 and got caught. Though British policemen gave her a choice to escape in exchange for the information of rebels, she denied it and received the death penalty(Modi, 2024). Like her, Begum Hazrat Mahal, the wife of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Lucknow, fought fiercely against the British. Surprisingly, her contribution to the anti-colonial struggle was recognized in mainstream historiography. However, the fact that before her marriage, she used to be a ‘Tawaif’ was concealed(Modi, 2024). The battle of Husna Bai, the prominent Tawaif in the late colonial era, was quite different. Husna Bai , along with her colleagues, participated in the nationalist freedom movements, led by Mahatma Gandhi. Nevertheless, the freedom fighters didn’t respect them properly despite getting enormous financial assistance from Husna Bai and their colleagues. Being the followers of Victorian moral codes, these nationalist freedom fighters considered the courtesans as “fallen women” with low moral standards(Modi, 2024). In that case, I assume that the perceptions of conventional historiographers regarding courtesans were not different from those of nationalist freedom fighters. It’s possibly one of the reasons for which the presence of courtesans, who mostly belong to lower caste or lower ladders of society, has been obliterated in the history of anti-colonial struggle.
After reading these stories, I am quite certain that there were many girls and women, considered immoral, who sacrificed their lives for freedom in the colonial period. It also provoked me to reconsider the role of women, who are stigmatized due to their ethnic or professional identity, in our liberation war in 1971. For this reason, we can give some credit to such history-based contents including Heeramandi as they shed light on the ignored aspects of mainstream discourses despite their exaggeration and historical inaccuracy.
References:
Guha, R. (1988). On Some Aspects of the Historiography in Colonial India in Selected Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak ed. Pp (1-8).
New York: Oxford University Press
Mehrotra, S. (2021, July 7). Tawaifnama: A brief history of Tawaif culture in India.
Shinjini Mehrotra. https://shinjinim.com/2021/07/07/tawaifnama-a-brief-history-of- tawaif-culture-in-india/
Modi, C. G. (2024, May 10). Dance to Freedom review: How courtesans helped India break free from colonial yoke. https://thefederal.com/category/features/dance-to-freedom-review-how-courtesans-helped-india-break-free-from-colonial-yoke-121674
Biography:
Aditi Sharif is a Social Researcher, currently researching Gender Diversity, Historiography, Feminist Discourse and Methodology, Heritage, and Migration. She is also a volunteer writer in Women Chapter English.