Tawaifs: unsung warriors of India's independence

This age brings with it the call for freedom/No one fears your jail, your oppression/Martyrdom has become for us child’s play.

Resistance is sometimes in song. For Vidyadhari, a tawaif living in Banaras at the height of the non-cooperation movement in 1921, it was much more. Rebellion, it was revolutionary. Swept up by the desire to be free, she insisted on singing this song at every mehfil (musical gathering) that she was invited to.

“She spun the charkha,”says documentary filmmaker and writer Saba Dewan. “She wore khaddar. It was a big deal, as tawaifs needed to be dressed a certain way. It was a statement.”

Vidyadhari was not the only one. In Tawaifnama, Dewan has chronicled contributions of tawaifs to the political struggle for freedom. Tawaifs, loosely translated as courtesans, were skilled singers and dancers who entertained the nobility.

There is Gauhar Jaan, the superstar from Calcutta, who holds a concert to raise money for Gandhi; a princely sum of Rs24,000. The story goes that when Gandhi failed to turn up at the concert as promised, a miffed Jaan sent only half to his kitty.

Begum Akhtar—in her mehfil filler avatar before she chose to get married—also lent her voice to the cause. “She held a concert and sang so well that Sarojini Naidu sent her a khaddar sari,”says Dewan.

Their contribution can be traced to 1857. “In Delhi and Lucknow, even colonial accounts mention a few that took part in the battle,” says Dewan.

Unfortunately, this is a ghadar (rebellion) story that has been wiped out of memory. The story of Rani Lakshmi Bai’s valour charging into battle is known but not Dharmman Bibi’s, the tawaif who fought with her patron Babu Kunwar Singh. Heavily pregnant, she hid in a temple—and in what sounds almost like a film script—went into labour as the British tracked them down and Kunwar Singh went to fight the troops off. While Singh fights till his dying breath, Dharmman, with her newborn twins strapped to her, rides to Delhi. “Apart from a footnote in the gazetteer which says she rode with Babu Kunwar Singh into war, there is nothing,’’ says Dewan.

Then, there was Azeezan, who lived in Kanpur. “She was a fervent nationalist,’’ says Dewan. “In colonial accounts, she was portrayed as a bloodthirsty monster [who] supervised the massacre of English women and children.” Begum Hazrat Mahal, who led the rebellion after her husband, the nawab of Awadh, was exiled to Calcutta, too, had tawaif blood.

While scattered references of the tawaifs remained during the ghadar, with the rise of Gandhi and his stands on morality in the 1920s, the tawaifs and their resistance—quiet, determined and brave—often got left out. “They are often brushed aside because the nationalists were uncomfortable with them being there,’’ says Dewan. As the non-cooperation movement went beyond just shunning foreign-made cloth to cleansing social ills, the tawaifs found themselves on the outside, their voices silenced.