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Songs between cities: listening to courtesans in colonial north India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2017

RICHARD DAVID WILLIAMS
RICHARD DAVID WILLIAMS*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Londonrichard.williams@soas.ac.uk
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Abstract

In the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia , October 2017 , pp. 591 - 610
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017 

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102 Ibid .

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105 Ranj, Bahāristān-i-Nāz, p. 32.

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