Lucknow. 1840s. As the sun sets on the Mughal Empire, Muzaffar Ali's cinematic elegy 'Umrao Jaan' (1981) — based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa's 1899 Urdu novel 'Umrao Jaan Ada' — transports us to a world fading into oblivion. Set in 19th-century India, the film follows the life of Umrao Jaan, a courtesan-poet who was kidnapped as a child and trained in music, dance, and etiquette in the kothas of Lucknow. Her beauty and art captivate the nawabs, but cannot secure her freedom. What makes Umrao Jaan (1981) a masterpiece is not just Rekha's iconic performance or the musical brilliance of Khayyam and Shahryar's soundtrack, but the film's ability to evoke a sense of profound loss with such elegance that it becomes sublime.
Tawaifs, or courtesans, emerged prominently in the later Mughal period, particularly in cities like Lucknow, Delhi, and Banaras. Their emergence was intricately linked to the decline of Mughal political power and the increasing fragmentation of the empire. As imperial patronage waned, the custodianship of the cultural arts migrated from mehfils in royal durbars to the kothas of the tawaifs. These salons became sites of classical training in performance arts like kathak, thumri, ghazal, and rekhti. The tawaif was often all at once a performer, a spoken-word poet, a musician, and a teacher. Young royals were often sent to them to learn tehzeeb (etiquette), zaban (language), and adab (manners) under their guidance. In this sense, tawaifs were custodians of the cultural grammar of 18th and 19th-century Indo-Islamic society.
Unfortunately, the same Mughal decline that enabled tawaifs to flourish, also precipitated their downfall. The arrival of British colonial rule brought with it the imposition of Victorian moral values, social customs, and the codification of Indian society into rigid binaries of purity and impurity, respectable and disreputable, moral and immoral. The nuanced world of the tawaifs collapsed into the colonial category of the undesirables. Their music was branded vulgar, their dance obscene, and their presence in public life became subject to moral and judicial policing. Institutions that once celebrated and supported them turned away or disappeared altogether. The nationalist movements also, ironically, upheld colonial and patriarchal respectability norms, further silencing their voices.
Umrao Jaan (1981) offers a powerful decolonial and feminist lens through which to read this cultural erasure. Rekha's portrayal of the eponymous Umrao is steeped in dignity and melancholic strength. Umrao is abducted and sold into a kotha, but instead of descending into despair, she rises to become a celebrated poet and performer. Her tragedy is not her profession but the hypocrisy of a society that consumes her art, courts her attention, but denies her dignity and acceptance. Even her brief romance with Nawab Sultan (Farooq Shaikh) crumbles under the weight of societal judgement and expectations, as he, like many men of the time, admires the tawaif in private but will not love her in public.
Through Umrao's personal narrative arc, the film critiques the patriarchal hypocrisy that demands women's silence in respectable spaces while exploiting their brilliance in disreputable ones. The kotha, in this context, becomes a paradoxical space of both emancipation and entrapment. It is where Umrao finds her voice, her pen, her performance, but it is also what confines her to the margins of 'respectable' society.
Modern feminist scholarship has begun to reclaim the figure of the tawaif as a proto-feminist icon. In an era when women were largely denied education, public presence, or self-expression, tawaifs asserted themselves as artists and entrepreneurs. Their refusal to be confined to domesticity, their mastery of multiple art forms, and their navigation of a complex web of power, gender, and aesthetics — all point to figures of radical agency that defies simplistic moral readings.
The tragedy of Umrao Jaan (1981) is, ultimately, the tragedy of a society that thrives on and exploits women's work but does not value women workers. In reclaiming tawaifs as proto-feminist icons and re-watching Umrao Jaan (1981) through this decolonial, feminist lens, we do not romanticize the precarity of their existence; we recognize the resilience of these women who, against all odds, wrote poetry, nurtured language, preserved performing arts, and refused to live as victims of their circumstances. They even formulated their own matriarchal hierarchies and matrilineal rules of inheritance. As the iconic ghazal by Khayyam in Umrao Jaan (1981) reminds us:
"In aankhon ki masti ke… mastaane hazaaron hain" — in the allure of these eyes, lie the traces of a thousand stories, waiting to be told, heard, seen and remembered.
Muzaffar Ali's 'Umrao Jaan' (1981) is returning to cinemas in a stunning 4K restoration thanks to a rare 35mm print preserved at the National Film Archive of India starting Friday, June 27.
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