Manjari Chaturvedi dispels myths about India’s courtesans

Manjari Chaturvedi discusses courtesans or tawaifs, during the Mughal era, their lives, their relationships with great poets like Ghalib and how the Britishers reduced them to the status of mere nautch girls with Shoma Chaudhury at Algebra The Arts and Ideas Club on May 13, 2018.

While talking about the relationship tawaifs had with the poets of their times, Manjari Chaturvedi says that only those poets became famous whose poetry was sung by tawaifs. “Ghalib wouldn’t have been known if a tawaif called Nawab Jan wasn’t singing him. She was singing in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar and she bought him in the limelight,” she says.

Chaturvedi also says that the Britishers clubbed all the tawaifs and dancers together and put them in one category called “nautch girls” in order to make taxation easy and this is how the status of the tawaifs started declining.

Manjari Chaturvedi is a Sufi Kathak dancer who belongs to the Lucknow Gharana. “The Lost Songs and Dance of Courtesans - Gender discrimination in Arts and How it Shapes the Art for Future” is a project by Chaturvedi that archives and documents the lives and stories of Tawaifs, and aims to remove social stigmas associated with them.

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