Tawaifnama
Material type:
- 9789388689816
- 305.40954 DEW
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
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Gandhi Smriti Library | 305.40954 DEW (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 162043 |
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305.40941 Nie ADA nield chew | 305.40951 Cus Chinese women speak. | 305.40954 CHA Gender in South Asia: social imagination and constructed realities | 305.40954 DEW Tawaifnama | 305.40954 FRO From the seams of history | 305.40954 KIS Off the beaten track | 305.40954 SOC Social reform, sexuality and the state / edited by Patricia Uberoi |
This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten.
In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement.
Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.
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