For the RECORD

They also traced their lineage to an illustrious line of musicians. Even in Emperor Akbar’s court,both men and women musicians performed. Around 19th century,communities of women singers lived and worked in many towns of north India. When recording technology arrived in India in the early 20th century,women performers were at the forefront,recording a vast number and variety of songs,especially the thumri. The legends of the time were Rasoolan and her contemporaries,Siddheshwari Devi,Begum Akhtar and Zohra Bai.

But in the Varanasi that we glimpse in the film,“the tawaif sings no more those beguiling melodies that made innocent men forget their way back home.” Salons that once hosted musical mehfils are temples now. At musical soirees,pandits sing thumris made famous by Rasoolan and Siddheshwari,but shrug dismissively when asked about the women who came before them. As it goes in search of the ghost of Rasoolan’s thumri,The Other Song also tries to understand why an entire community of musicians was airbrushed out of our musical consciousness. “What I wanted to do was to relocate the tawaifs in the musical context that they have been deprived of in the last 60 years,” she says.

Dewan travels to Muzaffarpur and Bhabhua in Bihar,and Lucknow to meet the last of the tawaifs and their sarangi players,a delightful cast of quirky,independent women,whose fingers still move to the memory of the courtesan’s ada,and who still talk passionately of the artist’s life. There’s Rani Begum,a ward councillor in Muzaffarpur; Saira Begum in Varanasi,a soft-spoken woman being coaxed by her French student to perform again. In Muzaffarpur too is Daya Mausi,who tells Dewan how she fell prey to a mysterious illness when she had stopped singing. “Marriage kills an artist,beta,” she says without hesitation. It’s a thought echoed by other musicians who let Dewan into their lives. “I’d have been a mere housewife. Instead,I’ve done so much more in life,” says Rani in the film. Through their stories we come to know of a scattered community of women,who live in want but undiminished pride,and in the knowledge that their art that will die with them—as none of their children are interested in the music. “Get them married,get them married,is the chorus these days,” says Saira’s aunt,Ladli Begum.

It’s at this point that the film moves outward and back in time to show how these musicians,mostly Muslim,got written out of history. The film quotes “A short historical survey of the music of Upper India” written by VN Bhatkhande in 1916,which complained: “The advent of Muslims led to the decline of Hindu arts. They preferred Muslim musicians who distorted the language and purity of Sanskrit verses. The only music heard now is that of tawaifs and their sarangis. The old arts need to be restored.”

Bhatkhande,along with Vishnu Digambar Puluskar started the movement to make Hindustani classical music a nationalistic project. At a major musical sabha the duo organised in Varanasi in 1905,Muslims and women weren’t included. In 1921,when the tawaif community organised a meeting and offered to be part of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement,the apostle of peace spat out at “the obscene” suggestion. The tawaif was on her way out of respectability.

“Bhatkhande spent valuable time rewriting bandishes,expunging them of their traditional erotic content,” says Dewan. “When Hindustani classical music had to be whitewashed into purity,the tawaifs had to be physically and culturally removed. For me,the fact that this song went out of circulation represents a more insidious attempt to whitewash Indian classical culture,make it less erotic,less plural,” she says.

Which brings us back to the missing recording. Dewan did eventually track it down,thanks to another dogged sleuth: a professor of English in Kolkata who listened to each Rasoolan record in his collection and found the jobanwa version.

The Other Song is a complex,layered attempt to give the first women musicians of India their due. It’s the otherness we had all forgotten to celebrate.