Most literature on tawa’ifs remains confined to specific princely states or cities in colonial India. Making ‘travel’ its central framework, this article tries to bring the movement and mobilities of tawa’ifs into sharper focus. Engaging with the formidable research that has emerged since the publication of Veena Oldenburg’s essay on the Lucknow tawa’ifs in 1990, I propose we approach their travels as itinerant subjects through a nuanced framework that distinguishes between the different types of journeys they undertake. Turning our focus on the trajectories and movements of tawa’ifs, I shall argue, makes room for more embedded and rigorous histories of women performers in late colonial India. A conceptual attempt, this article explores the possibilities of locating performers as subjects within complex networks of travel and mobilities. This peripatetic aspect of tawa’ifs’ lives will hence become visible as distinct types of mobilities—journeys of migration; travel in search of sustenance and patronage; types of displacement; exploitative circuits of exhibitions and displays; and in most cases, a crucial means of identity-making. In this article, tawa’ifs’ travels will thus move between princely courts, towns, cities, and regions, and even across continents.

Despite the expansion of research on South Asian courtesans, there has been no attempt at a critical historiography on courtesans alone. Within this larger gap, the specific connections between travel, mobility, and female performers in South Asia have not been adequately theorised. By making a critical intervention into the historiography of courtesans, we hope to aid in the establishment of what could be termed ‘South Asian courtesan studies’ as a recognised field of scholarship. Foregrounding the historical method for research into courtesans, the articles here show that beyond conventional ethnographic sources, there is a rich textual, visual, and material archive, largely unexplored until recently. They reveal both the transnational and local, and the spectacular and quotidian circuits of female performers’ travels. These include religious sites and participation in rites of passage like weddings but also extend beyond South Asia into the theatre spectacles and exhibitions of Europe. In the context of empire, this volume maps how female performers travelled in local, regional, and transnational contexts, and whether they were able to transcend the hypersexualised colonial trope of the ‘nautch girl’. This special issue offers a sample of the new developments in this growing field to catalyse its further expansion.

In 1897, an Indian dancer named Piaree Jehan petitioned the Bombay government seeking justice for her two granddaughters—Begum Jehan and Vajir Jehan—who died and allegedly disappeared, respectively, during their 1895–1896 England tour. As traditional sources of patronage for the performers declined owing to the colonial criminalisation of prostitution and rising anti-nautch sentiment in the second half of the nineteenth century, certain groups of Indian women performers started travelling to the British metropole for contractual performances. Despite promises of lucrative salaries and foreign travel, life in the imperial exhibitory spaces proved to be quite precarious. Through a close reading of Piaree’s petition and contemporary British newspaper reports, this article presents a microhistory of Indian women performers’ experience in the racialised and sexualised imperial circuits of performance. It shows how the British imperial government adopted a certain ‘politics of convenience’ to selectively sexualise Indian women performers to erase their contributions as transcultural workers for the empire. By doing so, the empire continued to economically and culturally benefit from the dancers’ labour while avoiding any responsibility towards remedying their working conditions. At the same time, focusing on Piaree’s affective argumentation, the article also demonstrates how the performers used the British legal system to make their voices heard. By writing petitions, demanding unpaid wages, refusing sexual offers, and forging kinship ties, Indian women performers repeatedly foregrounded their identities as professional creative workers. In doing so, they disrupted narratives of passive victimhood, challenged their hypersexualised colonial representations, and brought their overlooked contributions to the late nineteenth-century British stage to the fore.

This article analyses the fifteenth-century Arabic panegyric for Sultan Jaqmaq (r. 1438–1453), Taʾlīf al-ṭāhir fī shiyam al-Malik al-Ẓāhir (The pure composition on the character of the King al-Ẓāhir), by the Syrian poet-historian Aḥmad ibn ʿArabshāh (1389–1450). It focuses on how the author engages with the Dulgadirid and Aqquyunlu Türkmen in the context of the new sultan’s attempts to repair fraught, decades-long relationships with these groups. Challenging the expectations of a highly literary text praising the ruler, Ibn ʿArabshāh’s writing offers sophisticated engagement with the political tensions of the time and provides insight into how the Cairo Sultanate navigated the complex networks of its northern frontier through rhetoric and realpolitik. By examining layered political commentary on the former rivals, allies, and antagonists of fifteenth-century Cairo—the article argues that Ibn ʿArabshāh utilised the previous 60 years of Türkmen–sultanate relations to stage a narrative of closure and reconciliation, in the wake of Barsbāy’s disastrous frontier campaigns, to better present Jaqmaq as a sovereign capable of reversing past missteps and ushering in a revitalised and prosperous geopolitical order.

Focusing on the late eighteenth-century kulliyat by Lutf un-Nisa ‘Imtiyāz’ (1733?–?), arguably the first published Urdu poetess, this article seeks to explore the mobility—primarily metaphorical rather than physical—of a remarkable woman overlooked in historical accounts dominated by the male gaze. This mobility is enacted through her metaphysical, emotional, and literary navigation of time and space, rather than through geographic movement. Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī, functioning as an autobiography, employs time and space metaphors to offer a counter-archive for early women’s writing, providing a unique perspective into early modern feminine subjectivities. The examination underscores Imtiyāz’s agency in shaping her narrative, intertwining religious intercessions, canonical compositions, and literary sophistication. The metaphoric navigation through space and time illustrates the resilience and creativity of this woman, transcending her geographical and temporal constraints. At its core, Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī stands as a testament to her innovation, interwoven with convention through life-writing, crafting a rich narrative tapestry resonating within and beyond South Asian realms.

This article seeks out the spaces and strategies through which hereditary women performers enacted mobility and articulated power in early modern South Asia. The fraught relationship between a Multan-based courtesan, Murad Bakhsh, and a Durrani aristocrat of Dera Ghazi Khan, Muhammad Raza Khan Pupalza’i, is at the heart of Raza’s Persian memoir titled Jaur-o-Jafā, which is written in a distinctive literary style and lavishly illustrated with several miniature paintings. While overtly about the romantic entanglements of Murad and Raza, the story offers us a window into the cultural history of south-western Punjab during the political tumult of the late eighteenth century. It features a range of characters, including Multan’s last Durrani ruler, Muzaffar Khan (1775–1818), and a vast retinue of courtiers, musicians, and messengers embroiled in Raza and Murad’s love–hate story. The article focuses on the many journeys Murad took during her life, highlighting her ‘courtesanly mobility’. Written by her paramour-turned-enemy, we read Jaur-o-Jafā against the grain to amplify the voice of Murad Bakhsh in order to highlight the arc of her mobility, resistance, and agency in defying the limits of both patriarchal honour and the determining social, legal, and political positionalities of women in the region.

Village India, edited by McKim Marriott and included in a series on cultures and civilisations edited by Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, was a widely read and influential book published in 1955 at the beginning of the ‘village studies era’ in modern Indian anthropology. For Redfield and Singer, the two main questions were whether the Indian village as a ‘little community’ was ‘isolable’, and how Indian culture and civilisation could be understood through village studies. But for several of the eight contributing authors to Village India, especially M. N. Srinivas—who edited India’s Villages, also published in 1955—the principal subject matter was the structure of the village community itself, together with its unity and autonomy, and most readers tended to take the same view. There were various reasons for this, including Redfield and Singer’s failure to explain the book’s aims and objectives clearly in their foreword. Moreover, only Marriott seriously discussed their question about understanding Indian civilisation. Also important was Louis Dumont and David Pocock’s article reviewing both Village India and India’s Villages. Dumont and Pocock’s insistence that the village is not a crucial ‘social fact’ in India, together with Srinivas’s later response, strengthened the belief that the village’s ‘sociological reality’ and unity, rather than its relationship with Indian civilisation, was the key question discussed in Village India. This retrospective analysis of Village India sheds new light on its production and reception, and on its role in the development of modern Indian anthropology.

The emergence of female performers in the public sphere from the early twentieth century changed the contours of performance arts in colonial Assam. By studying the lived experiences of female performers in conjunction with their portrayals on-screen and on-stage, questions of mobility and agency are explored with a focus on Aideu Handique, the first heroine of Assamese cinema, along with women performers from selected mobile theatre groups. This article traces the shifts and continuities in the representations of the eponymous female protagonist in the first Assamese talkie, Joymoti (1935) by Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, and the recent stage adaptation, Awahan Theatre’s Joymoti (2021–2022). While mediated images popularised an idea of womanhood that travelled from the colonial to the contemporary stage, the mobility of the female performer enacting the role in the colonial context was severely restricted. Using feminist ethnography, oral history, and archival materials, this article brings the subjective narratives of the travelling female performers to the fore. It reveals the power hierarchies that exist between male and female performers—for instance, how gender affects decision-making processes as well as the modes and destinations of travel—thus highlighting the politics of mobility.

This article explores the changing trajectories of tawa’ifs—highly trained female performers of music and dance—in colonial North India, with a focus on their mobility and evolving patronage relationships. As British colonial policies and reformist moral discourses shattered long-standing networks of courtly support, tawa’ifs increasingly travelled between regional centres in search of livelihood and artistic relevance. Focusing on the princely state of Rampur, this study explores the complex interactions, power dynamics, and social hierarchies between Muslim female performers, middlemen, and elite patrons, particularly in the context of public festivals and fairs. Based on handwritten petitions, letters, and poems in Urdu and Persian, as well as vernacular print sources, the article argues that princely patronage was not static but adapted to the pressures of colonial modernity and wider pan-regional transformations. It also shows that post-1857 Lucknow remained a vital hub for recruitment, training, and trade. By tracing female performers across princely and colonial contexts, the article illuminates how their mobility and professional flexibility expanded alongside rising social stigmatisation and the intensifying conflation of courtesans with sex workers.

Mughal historiography has primarily focused on the lives of royal women vis-à-vis the harem and the imperial court. Looking at the entanglements of power, gender, and social capital, this article attempts to study another group of women—courtesans—as cultural and economic agents in early modern North India. The aim here is to move away from an empire-centric study of women and look closely at non-royal women who normally figure peripherally in official sources. The article locates them within the monetary and non-monetary transactions of the slave trade and explores how it acted as a form of generating social capital for such women. Since possession of slaves was a mark of distinction and affluence, the article argues that a section of courtesans, by being slave owners, belonged to the upper strata of the economic class. Moreover, relaxations in taxes as well as gifts and rewards further show that these courtesans managed to gain a foothold in the socio-political sphere. In this manner, they can be considered liminal actors who belonged to mobile communities, both geographically and socially. Departing from a homogenised narrative, the article shows that courtesans functioned within a patriarchal system that simultaneously empowered and marginalised them.

In June 1838, five female dancers and three male musicians left Pondicherry for France, from where they travelled onwards to England, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. As they travelled, the dancers became bayadères, a European hegemonic construct that shaped Indian women as both sexual property and morally debauched. Through this racialised construct, Europeans, in particular the British and French, became positioned as morally superior to India and therefore legitimate imperialists. Within this context, I am interested in how images of the languid arms of the Indian temple dancers function as a site of archival resistance to their co-optation as the bayadère. I suggest that a close reading of the newspaper illustrations and affiliated articles, noticing details and making connections, undercuts the dancers’ repeated sexualisation and their refusal to be confined to the space demarcated for them in European hegemonic narratives. I argue that this archival resistance also counters the later dominant caste appropriation and embodiment of the temple dancer’s artistic practice as a form of Indian classical dance.

From the 1870s through the 1930s, Parsi entrepreneurs based in Bombay financed large professional theatre companies. Their extensive tours brought live stage entertainment to all parts of the subcontinent. Female performers were one of Parsi theatre’s chief attractions. This article focuses on three celebrated women whose trajectories took them in different directions. Jamila Begam came from Iraq to India but achieved her ambition of running a theatre company in colonial Burma. Mary Fenton, ‘the English actress’, was born in India and escaped poverty by performing in Urdu and Gujarati on stages across North India. Nanhi Jan worked in Parsi theatre, recorded art music on phonographs, and yet was best known for her postcard image as a quintessential ‘nautch girl’. Each actress can be verified from memoirs, newspaper ads, official records, or photographs. Their experiences underscore the hazards of mobility as well as the ways in which travel enabled performing women to occupy a larger world professionally, socially, and economically.

This article offers a detailed analysis of a Kachchhi-Gujarati manuscript chart of the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden dating probably from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and held at the Royal Geographical Society–Institute of British Geographers in London (mr Asia S.4.). The origins and possible dating of the manuscript are examined. Astronomical data inscribed on the chart, establishing latitude and providing sailing directions, are identified, interpreted, and projected. Its Devanagari toponyms are transcribed and identified with real-world locations. Coastal profiles and unnamed features representing significant navigational landmarks are individuated. Islamic buildings depicted on the chart are identified as specific regional mosque-shrines. The presence of Ottoman and other regional polities are inferred. The place of the chart within an early modern tradition of western-Indian navigational manuscripts and a wider Indian Ocean tradition is explored. Our analysis establishes the chart as a detailed and highly practical navigational work—countering earlier scholarly denigrations of its accuracy. In contrast, we show it to be one of the most detailed surviving indigenous navigational charts produced in an Indian Ocean tradition.