Highly trained, professional female singers, dancers and entertainers, called tawaifs in northern India and devadasis in the south, have disappeared from contemporary India’s cultural and social life. Refracted through a prism of sexual morality, their memory lives on, however, in popular literature and films as either scheming seductresses or hapless victims in need of redemption.
Mrinal Pande’s novel , translated into English from the Hindi original (2008) by Priyanka, their patron families and the social, cultural and political context within which Hindustani music-making took place in late 19th- and early 20th-century India. Woven with multiple narratives in the form of letters, the novel is refreshingly free of the stereotypes and moral trappings that have dogged the representation of .
