By Nihira
In 1938, Sarola Kasar, a village on the western peninsula of what is today known as India, arranged its annual fair in honour of Nirgunshah Auliya, a fakir, an ascetic, venerated by local Muslims. A British survey of the village says the band of musicians and tamashas (theatre troupes) hired for the event commenced only after 10 PM. Despite the fact that tamashas in the region had for long been a vibrant and spontaneous art form which embodied the spirit of social change and still do, the British officers included them in the list of apparent problems plaguing the village. This was part of the colonial ethos that developed in the 19th century, which deepened after a subcontinental rebellion in 1857. Colonial law proscribed what they viewed as native, vulgar, and unproductive and criminalized those engaged in such practices. The consequent Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 marked several castes for whom music and dance was a hereditary necessity as indulging in criminal activities.
In 1946, a provisional coalition government was formed in South Asia in order to begin the process of political transition from British rule towards ‘independence.’ Vallabh Patel (1875-1950) was elected by the Congress Working Committee to head the nascent Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. One of his first decisions was to prohibit musicians and singers in the ‘courtesan culture’ from performing on All India Radio (established first at Bombay in 1922). Patel believed an artist from this legacy was a person whose “private life was a public scandal.” The Indian government was thus continuing the colonial project of disempowering musicians. Its attempts to root out the cultural hold of marginal performing castes led many to burrow in the shadows. But today, we can leaf through that history with a wide array of sources, if we think creatively. Documentation of music (both textual and recorded), paintings and photographs, ephemera such as diaries (typically of European travellers and administrators or their wives), legal files, and literature-poetry are some of the resources we can use to craft narratives which think against the normative conception of women as a passive audience to colonialism (and music for that matter) instead placing us as active instigators of riot and song. Be it song or resistance, native women innovated. It is crucial, then, to build archives of their innovations and not just their tragedies. These archives exist, albeit in scattered and disheveled forms strewn across public and private libraries, museums, institutions, digital spaces, and homes.
In the Rural
In the 1930s, Dutch professor of South Asian music, Arnold Adrian Bake (1899-1963), recorded numerous every-day songs. Music and dance have historically been part and parcel of social life across South Asia. My father speaks of his younger days spent listening to women in his village crushing grain into song. Collective music became an expression of enduring back-breaking labour when working in the fields. Some of this extensive archive is preserved by UNESCO’s The International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region and some by the British Library. The archive is peppered with several songs associated with specific agricultural tasks in the countryside in Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Hindi, and Tamil. I hear my father’s childhood in these melodies. The toil of work drowned out by the notes of melody. My mother remembers vessels being beaten on the occasion of boys being born in her home-town and the absence of sound lingering for the birth of girls. The noise of mirth and the silence of mourning. Bake’s repository includes a Kannada language song performed by women for the seventh month of pregnancy. It is music and the lack thereof that carries us on the journey from womb to last breath. Music, in South Asia, became a sensitive grammar of unspoken conflict or celebration.
In 1910 or 1911, a schoolmistress in Tanjore sang five samples, including lullabies, for Arthur Fox Strangways (1859-1948) which he then published with other recordings in his 1914 volume, ‘The Music of Hindostan.’ For all five compositions, she accompanied herself on the harmonium. Lullabies were a genre popular for recordists such as Bake as well. Perhaps it was the outsider’s sense of domestic familiarity that ensured archival prominence for songs hummed to children. But it is the fact that the unnamed teacher had with her a harmonium that is of surprise. Although the humble harmonium today enjoys a special place in the region – particularly in spiritual and religious music– it was earlier seen as a product of Western influence and even banned by All India Radio till 1971. Popular 20th century nationalist ideologues purported it to be a threat against native ‘purity’. And yet, here was a ‘commoner’, a local woman using the harmonium to sing to the next generation! This signals to a gulf that existed between daily life and nationalist rhetoric.
Music was not always incidental to work like in the above examples. Rather for many, music was professionalized through the mechanism of caste. Several such caste groups who relied on performing their music to survive were eventually forced into pastoral and agriculturalist lifestyles. Many remain in poverty till today. Yet, without them the course of music and dance would have remained vastly underwhelming.
Ethnomusicologist Adrian McNeil’s paper ‘Mirasis: Some Thoughts on Hereditary Musicians in Hindustani Music,’ states that in Marwar, in the west, Dhadhis, (both Hindu or Muslim), nurtured women composers and singers but disallowed them from public performance. This was not true for Dhadhi women in other regions like Punjab where both men and women were known for their public display of dhadh, a hand-drum. Caste management maintained differential regional characteristics but all performing castes were positioned in the lower rungs of the caste regime. A majority of them persisted to survive on little. But there were a few who gained financial stability for brief periods of time. McNeil suggests certain performing castes, including Dhadhis, drew a significant portion of their income as musicians in service to small and scattered militias. British upheaval of the pre-existing military labour market displaced these musicians, many of whom migrated to urban centres to work in the thriving courtesan culture that existed at the time: A culture that wouldn’t have evolved without women.
In the War
An old Punjabi language song translated by the poet Amarjit Chandan reads:
War destroys towns and ports, it destroys huts
I shed tears
Come and speak to me
All birds, all smiles have vanished
And the boats sunk
Graves devour our flesh and blood
It tells the story of the hollowed life of a grieving woman. Research by scholars like Santanu Das has detailed how music was integral to facing the deluge of the ‘Great War’ and for encouraging anti-war sentiments. The grammar of music, like I mentioned earlier, is reflected in recordings of Indian soldiers incarcerated at the Half-Moon POW Camp. Sepoy Bela Singh (birth and date unknown) can be heard a hundred years later reciting his journey to Marseilles and his capture by Germans in a verse-like form. Local resistance raged against army recruitment conducted by the British aided by native feudal, religious, or political elites. Women were not passive observers in the spectre of war. Many women followed military marches and snatched their loved ones. According to Das, desertion rapidly increased in 1917 to almost 27,000 men in recruitment centres of whom over 17,000 were arrested by the colonial police. Born were songs against war, resisting mass death. Loss took the shape of melody and discontent, the lyric.
In the Resistance
This doesn’t mean that colonial incursion was the only violence native women sung about. In Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal, historian Sumanta Banerjee discussed “segregated colonies” of women from lower caste groups –who were hereditary singer-dancers– following the Vaishnavite sect of Hinduism. There lived “free women [on] the fringes of ‘respectable’ society [who were] free to choose their partners.” While physically segregated by the local ruling class, they were invited to perform at funerals, weddings, or other ceremonies of that same native gentry. These settlements included Hindu widows, abandoned women, or other ‘fallen’ women forced to survive on their own for different reasons. They provided, at the very least, temporary shelter to destitute women.
Some “women ‘jhumur’ dancers and ‘khemtawalis’,” as Banerjee writes of folk singers and dancers who were primarily from the lower castes, would possibly “sexually [entertain] their male admirers and customers for financial remuneration, or domestic security.” Here is a jhumur song in taal khemta recorded by Arnold Bake in 1932. A historical trace of the vitriol against such women lies in Heera Bulbul, a courtesan who in 1853 “was determined to educate her son in the prestigious Hindu College of Calcutta.” This caused outrage with upper-caste strata. Bulbul’s son was expelled, but not before the governing body issued a public apology for his admission. A Bengali sex worker’s song from the era located by Banerjee opens a window into the tumultuous lives performing women were forced to carry themselves through:
Send me my bills, landlady, and let me clear them
I’m quitting your place tomorrow.
Fuck your room!
No lover ever comes here.
This time, I’ll go to Beleghata and pick up lovers who are beefy and chunky!
I’ll entertain everyone— porters and labourers—and refuse none.
Music freed them.
In 1909, the District Magistrate of Rungpur, which today lies in northern Bangladesh, heard two applications under the Eastern Bengal and Assam Disorderly Houses Act, 1907, alleging that women in certain houses were practicing sex work. 138 women were accused, one of whom was recorded as having the last name ‘Khemtawali,’ practitioner of the khemta performance, and another’s, ‘Baishnabi,’ a common transliteration of Vaishnavi (whose settlements I referred to earlier). The defense utilized by the accused women was that they were flower-girls, betel sellers, ‘even’ dancing girls but not sex workers. Banerjee in his book mentions that many women on the ‘fringe’ were often engaged in multiple forms of work to keep themselves afloat. Still, the court ordered them to cease their trades. From Rungpur to Moradabad to Calcutta to Bombay to Jaipur, newspaper clippings reveal how sex workers and performers were being thrown to the outskirts of locales. Labouring native women who either worked in the crafts of music-dance, in the sex trade, or pursued both, trade and craft, were inscribed with disrepute by native society and colonial rule. Music threatened them. And yet women continued to sing and dance. 78 RPM records exist of Anantabala Baishnabi, active in the 1930s and 1940s, a popular Vaishnavite singer from rural East Bengal.
Another group of musical women collectively referred to as tawaifs, courtesans, have for long captured the imagination of many, partially because of their exotification and work of sensuality. Dancing girls, commonly known as nautch girls in Hindi-Urdu, formed the lower order of the ‘public women’ hierarchy. The first record ever cut in British India were of two young nautch girls, Soshimukhi and Fanibala, in Bengal in 1902. There were also middling courtesans financially supported primarily by land-owners or in urban centres by traders, bureaucrats and administrators rapidly gaining strength in a fledgling colonial economy. Courtesans who performed for local kings or fiefdoms were positioned higher.
‘Public’ women as they were known, maintained a strong presence in the social scheme of colonial India. Historian Katherine Schofield uncovered the story of dancing girls like Mayalee, who “refused point blank to obey the British instruction to accept cash in lieu of the salt stipend that was her” rightful compensation. Courtesans like Azeezan Bai, an “informer, messenger and possibly even a conspirator” during the landmark 1857 rebellion in Cawnpore who “was seen by at least one eyewitness armed with pistols” prove that ‘fallen’ women were integral to holding up the landscape of resistance in South Asia. Interestingly, during India’s first lockdown in 2020, Delhi’s old Courtesan Mosque known as ‘Randi ki Masjid’ or the ‘Whore’s Mosque’ commissioned by a courtesan, Mubarak Begum, saw its central dome break apart due to the government’s infrastructure neglect. The fallen heritage of a ‘fallen’ woman. Although we do not have recordings of Mubarak, we have countless audio recordings of other ‘fallen’ women. Women who were musically revelled and socially reviled.
Films have become a way to preserve, if not the voices of women, then their songs. Particularly fascinating is a 1918 rendition of the evergreen song ‘Inhi Logon Ne’ credited to an Akhtari Jaan of Lucknow and recreated for several films like Himmat, Yakub; sung by the inimitable courtesan, Shamshad Begum (1919-2013) in Aabroo, and finally in the now memorable sequence of Pakeezah; by the iconic Lata Mangeshkar. These and other records prove that performers lived in a circuit of knowledge and geography. That women performers maintained specific migration routes, either out of choice or monetary necessity, becomes obvious. A strong instance of this is the exile of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah who ruled in the central and western tracts of South Asia known as Awadh. Shah was known for having a large retinue of women singers and dancers as his consorts. After he was exiled by the British, many of these women fled to feudal strongholds like the eastern port of Calcutta in order to earn a livelihood.
The song also moved across as living memory, passing from one woman to the next. Naushad, the composer for Pakeezah, was clearly attuned to this circuit as he featured ‘Inhi Logon Ne’ and other courtesan songs in a film about one. But what of the women who gave him that song? What were their names?
It wasn’t only that tawaifs were an inspiration for or gave voice to the film industry. These women were also adept at playing with the craft and innovating and exploring new forms of music. How else would Jaddan Bai compose a song for Moti Ka Haar, a Hindi film she produced and directed in 1937, that opens with English lyrics!
These women were the voices of the gramophone age; of the first instance a song was recorded. They had a history long before that and they have a present. Here is a recording of Zareena Begum (1930-2018) an Awadhi courtesan who studied under the infamous performer Begum Akhtar (1914-1975), and passed away in 2018, impoverished and largely forgotten by mainstream audiences. Asgari Bai (1918-2006) a court singer who excelled in dhrupad, passed away in 2006 inside a small hut after imparting her knowledge to students in an even smaller government-provided room. There are many more women languishing in unseen and unheard corners. Talented and knowledgeable women whose creativity has not only been erased but aggressively deprived of healthy lives by post-colonial states.
The Financial Year of 2021-22 saw budgetary allocations for India’s Ministry of Culture drop to an all-time low of 0.07% while budgets for the arts and culture sector across Ministries were slashed by 21%. While announcing the Union Budget for 2022-23, the Central Government played a familiar trick. Government publicity which was parrotted by many media outlets claimed that the Ministry of Culture’s budget had increased 11.9% from the previous year. This is true. But while today the budget for the Culture Ministry stands at Rs 3009.05 Crores, the allocation was actually higher in 2019-20 at Rs 3042.35 Crores. It is also important to note that 35% of this budget is reserved for the Archaeological Survey of India, which should raise questions around the intention of a government determined to carve out narratives of a Hindu past through the process of heritage conservation.
There also looms a heavy question over archival access in India. Modi’s government has left the future of The National Archives grim and uncertain in order to pursue his vanity project of ‘Central Vista.’ However, the pre-existing unequal dynamics of historical research in the country beckons several questions. Archives remain, for the most part, in dilapidated conditions unprotected from privatization and decay due to floods or other weather events. While many state archives have for long verbally committed to digitization and failed, the question is would digitization solve the crisis? In a country where “only 10% of students have access to the internet through any digital device,” how will national and international archives be made accessible through online distribution? Why is there no significant investment in vitalizing public resources in order to grow the number of free local libraries and archives that can co-circulate materials? Why is there no attempt in making versions of the material held by institutions like the British Library available in the region of the material’s origin? Rare projects such as the Digital Music Archiving of North Indian Classical Music are more intriguing as they ensure physical access within India. However, will its proliferation also reflect the importance of translation into local languages? Does public listening only extend towards academics?
Boasting of a glorious past without nurturing its repositories of knowledge can be disastrous. Zareena Begum and Asgari Bai were living proof. They were. But what of the ones who still are? There are some dedicated music lovers seeking to uncover lost music but what of the women who built those legacies? What of the ones who remain unnamed till today? The ones who continue to have nothing despite giving so much. Begum Akhtar, prior to becoming a Begum –she chose the prefix as a post-marital signifier– often signed off her recordings with ‘Aapki nacheez’ (‘Yours nothing’). She reminded us that she was but a ‘fallen’ woman, a woman of disrepute; a woman whose voice brought the one listening bliss and grief and love and ache. The innumerable scratches on their records mark the vestige of time, the din of apathy, and the noise of resistance. But women, despite society, continue to sing.
Note
Styles like jhumur and khemta are often categorized outside of Hindustani ‘classical’ music. Arnold Bake penned an essay in 1937 titled ‘Indian Folk Music’ in which he writes that ‘folk’ music in South Asia “naturally is one of the parents of art-music [classical] whether the latter acknowledges this parenthood or not.” At one point, he states that folk can be understood as music “for the people by singers from the people.” This is distinct to a certain extent from classical music which retains till today strict rules regarding learning, practice, and performance. While ‘folk’ could refer to any number of daily or ritualist activities enjoyed within a community, classical musicians and singers belonged to particular gharanas (regional styles) and were attached to external clientele especially consisting of royal courts. These courts also patronized women singers and musicians who are colloquially known as tawaifs (courtesans) in Hindi-Urdu. What this typically did in research circles is posit folk musicians as unchanging receptors of music and classical musicians as agents of change and evolution. This belies a materialist understanding of fluctuating political and economic regimes that developed music (both folk and classical) in local pockets through connected but shifting ways. While individual choices of musicians are present across the folk-classical spectrum, one must always turn towards the context which bore specific styles and the structural reasons behind the same.
Biography
Nihira is a freelance writer and editor also working in the audio-video production space. Her research primarily focuses on the South Asian histories of sound and music. Her personal interests lie with Hindustani music, nautanki theatre, and the women that cultivated these artistic labour practices. You can find more about her work here.