Tawayafs
Tawayafs, often called baijis, are the singing and dancing women who used to occupy center-stage in the performing arts of India. Madhuri Devi (below) will soon be joined by more videos of mujhras, courtesan performances, in Banaras, Mirzapur and Calcutta. Sadly the tradition is nearly totally deceased. In the words of Ustad Abdul Latif Khan: "these women kept our music alive for the last four hundred years". But the tradition has been ravaged, beginning in the late nineteenth century by:
1) Victorian moral values, imported on a large scale by a lower class of British soldiers and civil servants and their families who began to populate India after the opening of the Suez Canal;
2) a large number of repressive ordinances, meant to curb vice and prostitution, brought in by both the colonial government and its native successor;
3) embassassment among middle-class musicians about the actual history of Indian music and a virulent movement towards covering up and disassociating from this history. As women who were not from the tavayaf tradition began to learn and perform vocal music and dance, the drive to render these pursuits respectable reached a feverish pitch.
South Asian male audiences still respond openly—with open mouths—to the intense sensuality of Indian art music, but as an intrinsic feature of the music, sensuality receives very little acknowledgement, except perhaps by foreign scholars. Re-packaging the music as a religious pursuit has helped to cloud the issue. This is not, in any way, a denial of Hindustani music's deeply spiritual nature—just an opinion about the pretentious piousness which has become attached to the music.
In the nineteenth century sarangi was by far the most common instrument of Indian art music. Many a baiji performed with two sarangi players, one to her left and one to her right, moving with her while she danced, delivering the nagma in stereo. It would have been unusual to find a kotha in any small town of North India that did not have at least one sarangi player (and tabla player!). And sarangi players were commonly the teachers of singers as well as their accompanists. One can see this tradition continuing in my videos of Lakshmibai of Banaras: her accompanist Chanda Khan constantly steers her melody and reminds her of song texts. And the sarangi sounds beautiful in unison with the female voice—with a male singer the sarangi has to follow an octave higher than the soloist.
For more on this subject, please see my article "Eros and Shame in North Indian Music" in Music, Dance and the Art of Seduction (2013 Eburon Delft, Delft, Netherlands).