BENGALURU : When documentary filmmaker Saba Dewan initially started researching the emergence of middle class women in public spaces, little did she know that it would spark off a deep interest in tawaifs or courtesans who catered to the Indian noble class. This then eventually gave way to her 2009 film The Other Song, which was about the art and lifestyle of the courtesans. And now, a decade later, the filmmaker has penned her maiden book, Tawaifnama (a Context publication that released July this year), which looks at the history of tawaifs from 19th century to present day and how the making of modern India impacted their art practice.
“Tawaifs were actually the most educated section of women in society, since they were not limited by the purdah and had to be companions to the male aristocracy. They received this education much before middle class women did,” explains the Delhi-based Dewan, who was in the city recently for an event. “The period of emergence of middle class women in public spaces coincided with the stigmatisation and pushing out of tawaifs from the same space.
It was like public spaces were being sanitised to make it safe for ‘respectable’ women. It made me realise that my own history as a middle class woman is so intrinsically tied to tawaifs,” added the filmmaker who is well-known for her films Sita’s Family (2001) and a trilogy on stigmatised female performers: Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi (2006), Naach (The Dance, 2008) and The Other Song (2009).
The idea for the book came to Dewan after the trilogy, when she realised she already had gathered a lot of material on tawaifs. “A film has a fixed frame; an image can’t be overloaded. But I realised my research was still not enough,” Dewan told CE while talking about the book that needed “intensive archival research”. Though she had done the spadework for her film, the book required her to trace not just tawaif families but a wider network of their patron families and accompanying musicians as well.
Her initial work with tawaifs, however, led to many closed doors. “They had faced so much ostracisation that they had every good reason to not trust me or share their life with me,” she says. Dewan eventually gained their trust over time and built relations of friendship with them, which helped them open up.
Besides research, figuring out a form also took time. The maiden writer’s biggest challenge was that the main protagonist of the book didn’t wish to be identified. “How do you write a truthful story about people who are alive but do not wish to be identified?” questions Dewan, who eventually learned to realise that every obstacle can be a blessing. “This then gave me more access. I couldn’t just change their names, I also had to blur their identities so that they were not easily identifiable. This meant I could also make them composite characters while being true to the story.”
Though intensive, the research also helped Dewan learn many lesser-known facts about the former courtesans. For example, tawaifs were actually a close-knit community, a fact that gets ignored since most people see them as individual women. “People, and Hindi films too, often presumed that any woman in a difficult situation could become a tawaif.
You had to be born within the community to be accepted by them as a tawaif,” says Dewan, adding that singer Gauhar Jaan too had to get two old tawaifs from Lucknow to formally adopt her in order to gain recognition from the community.While the book has been a big part of Dewan’s life for the last eight years, she has no plans for any subsequent ones just yet. “I never plan things, they just happen,” she says.