A filmmaker goes in search of a lost song and finds Hindustani classical music’s blind spot— the tawaif
It was in Varanasi, where even the most ancient ragas find a home, that Saba Dewan first heard of the song. The lost thumri of Rasoolan Bai, forgotten, except by the rare hoarder of memories. Lagat jobanwa mein chot/Phool gendwa na maaro, Rasoolan had sung in 1935, a 33-year-old woman at the prime of her musical prowess, giving throat to a song of desire. The more sedate version of the song is remembered today, even enshrined as the best example of Rasoolan’s style—Lagat karajwa mein chot/Phool gendwa na maaro (My heart is wounded/Do not throw flowers at me). Why did she never sing the other song again? As Dewan sliced through the thicket of equivocations and embarrassed silences around the song, the answer came to her. “Jobanwa” meant breasts. Not youth, not sexuality, the standard replies musicians had fobbed her off with. “My breasts are wounded”, Rasoolan sang, unabashed by the bandish’s sexuality, launching from every phrase into confident taanbazi, “do not throw flowers at me.”

The hunt for the song is the subject of 45-year-old Dewan’s new film The Other Song, one which took her seven years. But her sleuthing digs up much more. She finds a startling absence in the history of Hindustani classical music, the blind spot in its memories—the reluctance to see or hear the tawaif. “Like any average Indian, I thought tawaifs existed only in films,” says Dewan. “Till the middle of the 20th century, tawaifs were the only professional women musicians of India. They were highly educated women adept at the arts, literature, poetry and music, when large swathes of Indian women were illiterate,” she says.

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