The novel unfolds as a dual narrative, moving between a Hindu woman Rukmini’s present-day life and a courtesan, Munni Bai’s world of kothas, mehfils, and poetic devotion.
The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is a layered novel about memory, desire and women’s determination to assert their independence across generations
The Courtesan, Her Lover and I
Tarana Husain Khan
Hachette India
INR 699
Tarana Husain Khan’s The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is an ambitious and engaging blend of history, romance, and mystery, moving between contemporary Rampur and the glittering, precarious world of nineteenth-century courtesans. Part archival detective story, part love story, and part meditation on women’s erased voices, the novel sets out to reclaim a forgotten cultural history while asking what it means to write about the past from the present.
The modern narrative follows Rukmini, a Hindu woman married into a conservative Muslim family in Rampur. Having given up her job as a teacher under pressure from her father-in-law, she struggles with questions of purpose, identity, and belonging. She begins to toy with the idea of writing about Rampur’s cultural history—a town now far removed from the elegance of its princely past. This impulse takes shape when she stumbles upon traces of Munni Bai Hijab, a nineteenth-century courtesan celebrated in the poetry of DaghDehlvi. From this point, the novel unfolds as a dual narrative, moving between Rukmini’s present-day life and Munni Bai’s world of kothas, mehfils, and poetic devotion.
Khan clearly delights in the textures of both settings. Tawaif etiquette rubs shoulders with the polite rituals of a contemporary book club, with a knowing nod to Kamila Shamsie. Rukmini imagines the club as a bridge between old Rampur and the present, drawing in friends—some insiders, some outsiders—including the enigmatic Daniyal, the only man in the group apart from her husband. These different settings highlight the social negotiations women must constantly perform, across time.
While the historical sections are the novel’s strongest and most compelling even the content occasionally seems similar, juggling Dagh’s trips to Calcutta and Munni’s argument’s with paying clients. However, the details of her lifeare written with every day fasmiliarity, her artistic ambition and emotional vulnerability vividly realised. Her relationship with DaghDehlvi—conducted against the strict codes governing courtesan lives—has the sweep and lyricism of classic tawaif romances, echoing figures such as UmraoJaan while remaining firmly grounded in its own cultural context. Khan handles courtesan politics with sensitivity, portraying these women as artists, teachers, and cultural custodians, while also showing how fragile their independence could be reliant as it was on a high paying patron or series of patrons who may or may not have been reverent lovers.
Munni Bai’s story is most often narrated in the second person, as though Rukmini is speaking directly to her across time. This device catches the attention and reinforces the sense of historical recovery and emotional intimacy. The descriptions of music, food, clothing, and etiquette are rich and immersive, reflecting a historian’s fondness for detail and a wish to bring a lost world to life for her readers.
In contrast, the present-day narrative is less rivetting. Rukmini’s struggles, domestic tensions, professional frustration, the difficulty of choosing writing as a vocation and getting into print, are relatable but familiar and the curve of her emotions sometimes feels hurried. The archival investigation, involving letters, artefacts and oral memory, is intriguing but resolves itself quickly and far too easily. With the help of a young librarian at the Raza Library, moved by Rukmini’s halting ability to read Urdu script, Munni Bai’s story comes together more smoothly than real archival work often allows and actually disappears from the narrative.
What ultimately holds the novel together is Khan’s commitment to restoring almost forgotten women to history. The parallels between Munni Bai and Rukmini—both negotiating conservative worlds, both seeking intellectual and emotional fulfilment—are clear, though deliberately uneven. Munni Bai’s passion and poetic legacy as Dagh’s muse outshine Rukmini’s tentative authorship, and Khan wisely resists forcing the comparison too far. Rukmini’s growing connection with Daniyal, an intellectual confidant rather than a grand romantic figure, serves more as contrast than echo.
In the end, The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is a layered novel about memory, desire and women’s determination to assert their independence across generations. While the contemporary narrative lacks the depth and urgency of the historical sections, the book succeeds in offering a nuanced portrait of cultural loss and recovery—and in reminding readers that women’s stories, once silenced, continue to insist on being heard.
