Curtains Down: Borawadi and the Gradual Erasure of the Tawaif Culture

The tabla gives out a soft dhum as the player tightens its straps, followed by the bright, nasal notes of the harmonium being coaxed into tune. The musicians test a few more notes, listen, adjust and try again. Then the dancers appear.

They come dressed in lancha, a flowing variation of the lehenga-ghagra, with choli and dupatta. The clothes are elaborate and alive with colour, yet there is nothing loud about them. The make-up is light and sure, the eyes darkened just enough to sharpen their expression, the lips carrying a quiet flush. A string of jewellery rests against the skin, catching the light when they move. Their hair is freshly washed and left open, falling loosely around their shoulders. For a moment, before the dancing begins, they stand there in the half-light, dressed for the music that is still finding its voice.

One of the women greets the guests: “Salaam walequm.” Those who know the etiquette respond: “Walequm-assalaam.” The mehfil (gathering) begins with pleasantries. “Kaise hain, janab? Chai, coffee, cold drink? Elaichi lijiyega, huzoor?” (How are you? Tea, coffee, cold drink? Will you have some mouth freshener?)

And then comes the question that has probably begun countless mehfils in Borawadi: “Kya pesh karoon?” (What should I present for you?) The answer is the farmaish (request). The tabla begins. The harmonium follows. Her ghungroos (anklets) answer.

Mujra, a form of dance, carries a history of more than 450 years. It has survived empires, courts and changing tastes, retaining something of the old world’s joie de vivre while continuing to enchant the privileged classes that once gathered around the courts of Mughal India. In Borawadi, a small town 350 km from Bhopal, the tradition has endured, almost against the grain of time. Here, mujra is not merely remembered. It is still danced, watched and lived.

The first song of the mehfil is announced. The opening notes of fill the room. The song begins: ‘Bakhuda mujhko ab koi tamanna hi nahi, jaane kya baat hai dil kahi lagta hi nahi’ (I have no desires left now; my heart finds no solace anywhere). The night is only beginning. More kadardans, as the audience is known here, continue to walk in, taking their seats on a dari (mat) for a night of music and mujra.

The mehfil is being held on the ground floor of a nondescript building that has witnessed many such nights. Its fading grandeur hint at another time, when the place must have been an imposing piece of architecture, built perhaps for a world that knew how to linger over music, poetry and dance. To the connoisseurs of the art form, however, the peeling paint and worn-out corners do not matter. For them, the room comes alive as soon as the music begins. The mehfil is slowly reclaiming something of that old life.

The song is punctuated by wah-wahs. Sometimes a patron asks for a particular song again, or requests that a dance move be repeated. The women oblige.

“Mujra is a jugalbandi (duet) of ghungroo and tabla. It means fulfilling a farmaish. You ask for a song, ghazal or qawwali and I oblige,” says Sanjida, 38, a dancer.

Mujras and mehfils have been synonymous with Borawadi. A town that seems to have slowed down while the rest of the world raced ahead. Outsiders don’t casually wander into the narrow lanes. The houses stand close to one another. The streets are cramped.

Behind some of the unremarkable doors are the rooms where, for generations, women have sung and danced for patrons. I arrived in Burhanpur looking for one such room. I found one. And I met Sanjida, who has been dancing for 25 years. “I have dance in every pore of my body. It runs in my blood,” she says. Sanjida walked me through the past, the present and the future of Borawadi’s galis (lanes), the mehfils, the mujras and the tawaif (courtesan) culture.

A Lost Town

Burhanpur is deceptive. Its history is far more elaborate than its present appearance suggests. Once an important Mughal centre, the town still carries traces of that imperial past in its monuments, old neighbourhoods and stories. Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who would go on to build the Taj Mahal in Agra, one of the world’s most enduring monuments to love, spent considerable time here. It was in Burhanpur that his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died in 1631, before her remains were eventually taken to Agra. Today, the town sits amid a flourishing banana-growing belt, while its cotton and power looms continue to keep its economy ticking.

The same is true of Borawadi. The word tawaif was probably heard 450 years ago when Jahangir brought Moti Kunwar and Gulara Bano in 1616 to entertain his dera—camps where regiments would rest. The tradition thrived for centuries. Mujras and tawaifs were a part of the culture. A culture Borawadi was proud of. But today, the mehfils are no longer grand. The ustads (masters) and kadardans are vanishing. Tawaifs are moving out, leaving their identities behind. Sanjida says she won’t leave. There is a reason.

Disappearing Kothas, Kadardans

There were once around 70 kothas in Borawadi. About 22 remain. The men who come for the mehfil are mostly middle-aged or older. Some arrive alone, others in twos or threes. There is little noise or swagger about their arrival. Instead, there is an air of familiarity, almost of ritual, as though they have done this many times before. They sit on the dari, waiting for the music to begin. Yet modernity has left its mark on the aesthetics of the place. A two-tonne air-conditioner hums in the room. Speakers powerful enough to pump out heavy music stand ready, while disco lights fixed to the ceiling cast coloured flashes across the space. For younger guests, these have become part of the modern mujra experience.

The setting is somewhat different from the one conjured by memories of Rekha as Umrao Jaan, her eyes languid and her movements measured as she sang “In aankhon ki masti ke”. The 1981 film gave generations of Indians an enduring image of the mujra: an intimate mehfil, poetry carried on melody and a room steeped in the quiet grandeur of another age.

The audience may be smaller today, but its tastes have changed. Younger guests often want louder music and Bollywood songs. Some arrive with references picked up from the internet, occasionally asking the dancers to reproduce a particular step they have seen online. “They are our guests, so we oblige,” says Sanjida.

But not everyone wants the volume turned up. The older kadardans, the connoisseurs of the classics, still ask for songs from the golden repertoire. ‘Dil cheez kya hai, aap meri jaan lijiye’, another beloved number from Umrao Jaan, remains a request, Sanjida says. The music may have changed around them, but for some, the old mehfil still begins with an old song.

Seventy-five-year-old Hamida Bano, a respected ghazal singer, remembers another time, a time when there were real kadardans. “There was tehzib,” she says, remembering the etiquette surrounding farmaish. Today, some younger performers are more comfortable with film music. “Either I sing or dance to the tunes of a mobile phone or songs stored on a pen drive,” says Samina Bano, 35.

Younger women learn dance steps from television and films, taking inspiration from Bollywood stars such as Rekha and Madhuri Dixit. “I can sing mujra songs, qawwali or ghazals, but the demand for these classics is dying. People want filmi songs from Bollywood films,” says Asma Bano, one of the popular performers. The irony is that the women are adapting because they want to survive. But every adaptation also moves the mehfil further away from what it once was.

The shift is not merely musical. It is a change in the idea of entertainment itself. The older mehfil required listening. A patron made a farmaish for a particular ghazal, thumri or qawwali and waited for the performer to interpret it. The newer audience often arrives with a visual memory: a song clip, a dance step, a viral performance.

A 55-year-old businessman who has been coming to Borawadi once or twice a year has witnessed the change. “Borawadi has changed and so has the quality of mujras. But what is missing now is the tehzeeb. It is missing from both sides—the tawaifs as well as the patrons.” Perhaps tehzeeb is what is disappearing faster than the tawaifs, ustads and kadardans.

Those Who Left

Around 90 daughters from these families have studied, married and settled in different cities. They have built lives away from the profession. Most do not want to be identified with their mothers’ or grandmothers’ past. Their absence tells its own story.

The better the next generation does outside Borawadi, the harder it becomes for the old profession to reproduce itself.

Sanjida stayed back. For her daughter, who wants to be an IPS officer. Sanjida is determined to help her fulfil her dream. She dances so that her daughter does not have to. So that she can escape the stigma attached to her mother’s dance.

She visits her daughter’s school and helps her with her studies. She also worries about the day someone at school might identify her from a video circulating on a mobile phone. She worries about what people might say. She does not want her daughter to carry the identity that society has attached to her mother. The word tawaif hangs heavily over everything she does. She is a performer. A dancer. A singer. But outside the room, society has another word for her. That is the contradiction at the heart of Sanjida’s life. She earns her living through a profession she inherited, but she is trying to give her daughter a life beyond it.

“There is not enough money in mujra. The profession is also shrinking. I dance because there are bills to pay,” she says, shifting her heavily bandaged foot from the chair on which it had been resting. She recently injured her right foot and had to undergo surgery. For a woman whose body is her livelihood, six months is not simply a period of recovery. It is six months without income. Shazia, her young niece, arrives. Sanjida helps her tie her ghungroos. She is training her nieces. “It will take at least four years for them to start performing,” she says. There is something almost paradoxical about the scene—Sanjida wanting her daughter to move away from this life but training Shazia so that she can master the art.

Ustads are Leaving Too

“These may be the last years of mehfils. The 450-year-old legacy is dying,” says Ameen bhai, one of the community’s elders. He remembers the Khan saabs and ustads from Kairana in Uttar Pradesh who once came to Burhanpur to teach singing and dancing. They stayed, trained performers and passed on an artistic vocabulary. Then some of the ustads died. Their families had no takers for the profession because it no longer offered a viable livelihood. The chain broke.

Musharraf Hussain, a tabla player who has accompanied performers for years, feels the decline physically. “My fingers seem to be tiring. There is very little money, but I am trying to give my best,” he says. The economics tell the same story. Around 40 per cent of the mujra fee goes to the sajindas—the accompanying musicians—and 60 per cent to the tawaifs. A mehfil may cost around Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000. Once, pleased patrons used to shower currency notes on performers but that rarely happens now.

The Last Mehfils

The mehfil was never just women dancing. It depended on the tabla and harmonium player, the teacher, the repertoire and an audience capable of recognising what it was hearing. Remove one piece and the whole structure becomes fragile.

Ameen bhai worries about who will take responsibility for what remains. For Sanjida, it’s a question of survival. For her, it is work. The work is not cheap. Sanjida’s lancha costs around Rs 35,000. She has them stitched by designers in Mumbai. She cannot wear one for very long. The dancing is physically demanding and the clothes are soaked with sweat.

She does not spend a lot on make-up and jewellery. There is no attempt to turn the performer into a caricature of a Bollywood dancer. That distinction matters to Sanjida. She believes Bollywood has done enormous damage to the way people perceive women like her. “This is a 450-year-old legacy. But society thinks otherwise.” She does not want to romanticise the life either. Her own father would often tell her: “You have tawaif written on your forehead. You can’t change.”

She knows the stigma cannot simply be wished away. That is why she is extremely cautious about mobile phones. She discourages guests from recording her performances. She does not want videos of herself circulating on the internet. There have been, she says, four instances in which women divorced their husbands after discovering that the men had visited her. The story sounds like it belongs to an older India, but the mechanism is entirely contemporary: a phone, a video, a digital trail and a reputation that can travel far beyond Borawadi.

Inside the room, Sanjida asks people not to take videos. Outside, the world is full of cameras. This is perhaps the strangest feature of the new Borawadi. The old mehfil was intimate precisely because it was contained. The performance disappeared when the patrons left. Now, a few seconds of video can escape the room and travel across phones, WhatsApp groups and social media. Sanjida does not want that. She is not ashamed of knowing how to dance. She is afraid of what other people will do with the video. She also does not want younger patrons to turn the mehfil into a cheap performance. Some ask women to wear shorter clothes or perform steps they are uncomfortable with. The response is polite but firm. They ask such guests to leave. The old etiquette, perhaps, survives in this refusal too.

Pakiza—pure—that’s how Ameen bhai refers to Borawadi, a place he associates with a madrasa, an imambara, a mosque and an akhada. He has watched the old ecosystem disappear and the community’s traditional work outside the mehfil shrink. The women once earned from qawwali sessions during the Ganesh festival. But those invitations have declined. Ameen bhai says this is happening due to a changing communal climate.

For Ameen bhai, the end is visible. The women have complicated the narrative. Some have left. Some want their daughters to leave. And some are teaching the next generation.

Perhaps that is the hardest truth about inherited traditions: sometimes the people best placed to preserve them are also the people most desperate to free their children from them.

That evening, the mehfil ended quietly. The tabla fell silent. The harmonium was put away. The dancers left the room. “Phir aaiyega—do visit again,” Sanjida tells those leaving.

Outside, it was a usual Borawadi evening. Inside, a tradition had performed itself one more time. Not quite the mehfil of Hamida Bano’s memories. Not yet the Bollywood-driven spectacle some younger patrons want. Something in between. Something adapting, shrinking, resisting and surviving. How long till the swansong?

Deshdeep Saxena is a Bhopal-based journalist