The other song by Saba Dewan traces the story of the famed courtesans of north India through the cities of Varanasi, Lucknow and Muzzafarpur to understand why the talented female artistes were stigmatised by society
The other song by Saba Dewan traces the story of the famed courtesans of north India through the cities of Varanasi, Lucknow and Muzzafarpur to understand why the talented female artistes were stigmatised by society
The 'tawaif' of Hindi cinema cut a tragic figure: Sold by her financially backward family at an 'innocent' age, she would grow into the role of the prostitute, albeit one with a heart of gold, soon to be betrayed by lovers and circumstance. "In my mind, tawaifs existed only on film, not in real life," says Saba Dewan, director of The Other Song, a 2009 documentary that attempts to strip the mystique behind the famed, yet 'invisible' courtesans of north India.
Dewan, whose film is inspired by the story of a lost song: Lagat jobanwa ma chot, phool gendwa na maar (My breasts are wounded, don't throw flowers at me), sung in 1935 by renowned singer Rasoolan Bai, did not initially set out to make a film on the courtesan tradition. "I was working on a project on HIV/AIDS that took me to a lot of red light areas, when I was introduced to a family with a tawaif past."
The woman Dewan met challenged her notions of the community that post the late 1960s was stigmatised and relegated to the fringes of society. "She was confident, educated, a graduate, and a dance teacher. Her children were studying in very good schools." Getting the woman (and others) to open up on camera however, was not as easy.
"No one would initially agree to be part of the film. They didn't want their past to be raked up, as they considered it to be shameful. Tawaifs have had a rough deal in history, so I could empathise with their reluctance to be part of the project," says the 47-year-old filmmaker, who would invest eight years on the project. "There are no shortcuts to gain trust."u00a0 Dewan would eventually gain their trust to re-tell their individual stories.
'His'tory says
While researching for the film, Dewan found the seeds of the stigmatisation of tawaifs as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the accounts of European writers. "They would write a lot about these dancing girls in aristocratic cultures, who they continually referred to as prostitutes," she says, adding, "Culturally, they could not understand the context of the tawaif or why she enjoyed such a high position in society."
Over time, Indian middle class reformers would adopt the Victorian 'values' prescribed through their English education. "They would take on the morality of their masters. They were the ones who carried out the most sustained acts on the tawaifs and the devadasis of south India."
Dewan, keen to describe herself as someone who is not big on nostalgia, says that the saddest part about the disappearance of tawaifs is the loss to Indian culture. "There was this intermingling of the erotic and the spiritual, which made our art and history so much richer."
On: Today, 6.30 pm
At: Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, NCPA Marg, Nariman Point.
Admission is on a first-come-first-served basis.
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