Prostitution?

The role of courtesans was not simply to let men watch them dance and sing, although this was certainly an important element. In practice Indian films, although delicate in their treatment, do not make any bones about what was involved in being a courtesan or a tawaif or more or less any female performer (singer or dancer) in the past. It is made quite clear in films like Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah, Teesri Kasam, Mandi, Guide (where the heroine is daughter of a taiwaf) and many more that they were expected to have sex with men. It is true that the courtesan tradition is not very well characterised by the word prostitution which conjures up rather different images but it was not just about dancing and singing....

Lucknow in the mid-nineteenth century was both famous for its elegance and its poetry, song, dance and culture generally and notarious as a centre for, if you will, high-class prostitution and the two things were intimately and inextricably linked. Such traditions of courtesanship are not of course exclusive to India. Very much the same thing existed in Japan, China and throughout South-East Asia. It has also existed in Europe. It is estimated that in seventeenth-century Venice (famous for its courtesans) something quite staggering like there quarters of the female population were engaged in prostitution of one form or another. Some courtesans were pampered megastars like Umrao Jaan and no doubt had a certain degree of choice about where they granted their favours (although the "madames" were ruthless businesswomen) but that could not of course have been the case for all. For a lot of women the conditions must inevitably have been very much more sordid.