Heeramandi’s stereotyped courtesan world is a missed opportunity

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s new show was a wonderful chance to fictionalise the powerful cultural legacy of courtesans: be it Mah Laqa Bai Chanda (d.1824) of Hyderabad who was the first female Urdu poet; 19th century vocalist Goki Bai who laid the foundations of Patiala gharana, or indeed prolific poet-singer Janki Bai Allahabadi (d.1934).

Yet, despite being mounted on an epic scale, ‘Heeramandi’ could not be more distant from real-life courtesans, or the gritty bylanes of pre-Partition Lahore. For a historian of Punjab, this lack of a compelling storyline even remotely grounded in a Lahori context is bewildering — given the wealth of real-life stories of Lahore’s tawaifs. While Lahore’s Mughal pasts are indirectly referenced, ‘Heeramandi’ bears no imprint of its more recent Sikh-era past, where the very origins of Hira Mandi (named after Hira Singh Dogra, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s wazir’s son) lie.

The song ‘Sakal Ban’ aside, ‘Heeramandi’ could have dwelt on courtesans’ centrality to Punjab’s shrine cultures. For a series set in 1940s Lahore, a reference to the Female Singers’ Prohibition Bill, hotly debated in the Punjab legislative assembly during these very years (1939-1942), would have been apt. The Bill sought to outlaw girls or women from singing or dancing, with or without musical accompaniment, at any Muslim shrine in Punjab, pointing to just how pervasive courtesans had been in these spaces. Naturally, one cannot blame Bhansali alone for missing the link between sacred and sensual worlds inhabited by Punjab’s tawaifs. The anti-nautch movement led by Lahore’s ‘Punjab Purity Association’ in the 1890s has over time wiped out any cultural memory of these overlapping worlds. This overlap was not only evident in courtesans’ performances in holy spaces, whether Sufi, Hindu, or Sikh, but also in the several mosques and schools built by courtesans or in their generous donations to many temples. The Maharaja’s powerful courtesan queen Bibi Moran, for example, built the Mai Moran Masjid in Lahore, donated generously to the Bhairon Mandir, and patronised a madrasa with esteemed hadith scholars. Equally, many tawaifs of Shia origin sponsored taziyas during Lahore’s Muharram processions.

For Bhansali, the courtesan world is an excuse to indulge in visual pyrotechnics and borrow from tired Orientalist tropes of Lahore’s courtesans from European colonial writing. Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘On the City Wall’ (1888), features the wealthy and powerful Lalun, whose beauty ‘was so great that it troubled the hearts of the British Government and caused them to lose their peace of mind.’ It is difficult to decipher at which point Kipling’s imperialist version of the cunning Lahore courtesan morphs into the scheming and powerful tawaif of Bhansali’s homegrown brand of Orientalism. Unlike Kipling’s short story, though, Heeramandi’s watery plot struggles to hold our attention, or explore why Lahore’s courtesans were so powerful.

Amidst such tropish excess, there is no room for the everyday life of tawaifs. The sole, caricaturish ustaad is never shown teaching the courtesans any music or dance, their main forte. Where are the mirasi bard-musicians who accompanied the courtesans, the higher status kalawants who trained them, the bodyguards who protected them, or the holy men who offered religious instruction? Where are the Sikh and Hindu elite patrons of tawaifs or, indeed, the non-Muslim courtesans, both Sikh and Hindu? Where are the maharajas or nawabs from neighbouring princely states like Bahawalpur, Patiala, Jammu, Kapurthala, the biggest patrons of Lahore and Amritsar courtesans? Where are the European memsahibs so keenly interested in courtesans’ music? And finally, contrary to the trite Alamzeb storyline, where are the renowned courtesan-poets of Urdu? Incorporating such details could have made a far more memorable show.

Hardcore Bhansali fans will urge us to ignore the historical setting and succumb to his maximalism, asking us to simply luxuriate in the lavish costumes and sets. This would be easier were the series based in Lucknow, where it more readily belongs. Instead, by choosing to set it in the courtesan quarters of Lahore, and saturating it with ‘Muslim’ protagonists alone —whether courtesans or patrons  —Bhansali falls into a curious ‘presentism’, incorrectly viewing the past in terms of the present. He thereby reveals a uniquely South Asian version of Orientalism by stereotyping Punjab’s courtesan cultures, and misunderstanding Lahore’s rich multicultural pasts. This bears mentioning since ‘Heeramandi’ is Bhansali’s first attempt directly addressing cross-border audiences. Given the Islamophobic undertones of his previous films like ‘Padmaavat’, what does this two-dimensional stereotyping of Muslim courtesans do to the collective memory of our shared pasts?

Bhansali’s films are always steeped in nostalgia, but even nostalgic excursions on this scale bear some responsibility towards their target audiences. Novelist Svetlana Boym famously stated that far from being politically irrelevant, “fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future”. If imagined with some sensitivity to history, ‘Heeramandi’ had the potential of offering us both a window into a bygone era, and a bridge to a more inclusive future. Alas!