Gulabijaan is a fictional character, a stereotyped tawaif who came to Calcutta with the entourage of Wajid Ali Shah when he was exiled to the city by the East India Company in 1856, just a year before the Sepoy Mutiny. The court of Wajid Ali at Awadh was a seat of the most refined culmination of the Mughal era of music, dance, poetry and drama. With the Nawab cast away to Calcutta, the entirety of this high culture too comes to rest in the city with his entourage of musicians, performers, magicians, dice players, cooks and tailors. As Awadh, the luminary of a bygone world eclipsed, Calcutta, the star of the new age was rising. Lakhnavi nostalgia is eagerly lapped up in Calcutta’s modernity and this we know from the many ghazals and thumris of the court which can clearly be recognized as refurbished versions of the court of Awadh.

While the tawaifs of Lucknow only reveled in their glorious past, the Bengali baiji, to name a few, Akashi, Batashi and Golapbalas lapped up their emotions and poetry to create songs which endear the Bengali high culture of the times. In fact, due to their long residence in Calcutta, many tawaifs also started to write in the Bengali language.

When cinema came, many of these songs found their way on to the silver screen and they do so even today. The merit of the presentation directed by Shukla Banerjee lies in its exacting archival research into the poetry and songs of the court of Awadh which make them bring forward the ghazals and thumris with which we are familiar and hence can relate to.

The rendition of Kathak by Ramandeep Kaur was unlike anything I have seen before. Wajid Ali Shah took the kathak much patronized in the Mughal court and refined it, once again in the form that we know today. Ms Kaur’s performance of Kathak was sheer transcendental in grace and beauty, she was light, graceful and flowed like a musical fountain. I found her spellbinding in her perfection and aesthetics.

Prof Pamela Singh, an established doyen of the ghazal used her age to the fullest advantage in playing the role of Gulabijaan, exiled and out of job, with only memories to help her remain afloat as she composes the famous Bengali ghazal, Jochhona Korechhe Aari, to lament a world that is passing her by. Her humourous presentation of her most pitiable state of existence made one laugh out loud and yet wipe a tear from the eye.

The show made an important point in which the tawaifs were far from being prostitutes; they were ascetics in the harem with their creativity and though they worried about the men, mostly their patrons, they too had worries about their creativity. This is why notebooks and pen are found to be as much around Gulabijaan as her hookah and paan are. While at Awadh, the main patron was obviously the Nawab but in Calcutta, the patrons were the lesser men, the sundry and commonplace zamindars and some noveau riche upstarts who rarely ever knew what Mughal imperial culture was and these patrons crossbred the obscene khyamta of the nautch girls who came with the Maratha soldiers with the noble suavity of Lucknow. That was precisely how the Bengali baiji was born. As the economic status of patrons descended, the baijis doubled up as prostitutes to earn their living.

With the decimation of the Mughal power, there were many wannabes especially the Maratha nobility and militia who sought their revenge on the empire by producing parallel courts in their respective precincts. The Lavani with varying grades of obscenities also emerged as court culture. This too was a downgrading of the tawaif and more so because many Maratha soldiers now sought upward social mobility by becoming their lovers. The tawaif was invaded by lower social class with crass culture.

As the events spiralled towards the Great Mutiny of 1857, the tawaif now found a new role – that of a leader of the revolutions and often that of an executed martyr. Here tawaifs found an equal status with the married wives of Nawabs, who too led the sepoys and were either exiled or killed in action. The Mutiny of 1857 was the last cry for survival of both the medieval India as well as of the tawaif, both of whom modernity consumed leaving them behind in our hoary myths and hazy memories.