Musical Stories across India and Pakistan: Gender and Power in Punjab

Music and musicians abound in Punjabi stories, and in stories about Punjabis. As a cultural historian of South Asia, I was fascinated by how these stories were shaped by the big moments of political history, like the Partition of 1947, or the English East India Company’s annexation of Punjab in 1849. However, once I began investigating the vast cache of archives on the histories of musicians and dancers in undivided or pre-Partition Punjab (a linguistically and culturally cohesive region today divided between India and Pakistan), I was unprepared for just how ubiquitous–but understudied–its female performers were.

Without intending to then, the wealth of material in the archives helped me grapple with the question of gender and centre the powerful female performers or tawa’if on the stage of Punjabi cultural history. The reasons for this are manifold, the primary one being that the stage has for too long been primarily occupied by male performers. The popular memory of generations of formidable female performers contrasts with their marginalization in canonical accounts– both oral and textual– which always emphasise the pre-eminence of male performers, given that musical lineage in the Hindustani gharana (household/lineage/school of music) system of classical music is traced in a patrilineal format.

As a result, several powerful figures are sidelined. One representative example is the prominent vocalist Goki Bai employed at the Jaipur court, without whom the Patiala gharana as it exists today would not stand, since she forms the crucial pedagogical link between the early nineteenth century maestro Ustad Behram Khan and Ali Bakhsh-Fateh Ali (the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century inheritors of Behram Khan’s legacy), who are recognized as the founders of Punjab’s most famous musical lineage.

This disregard for Punjab’s female performers has its roots in the early nineteenth century, which marked the first moments of a sustained and ever-growing encounter between Indians and Europeans (specifically the Punjabis and English) in the region.

Female musicians feature prominently in the abundant travel memoirs of European visitors to the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Punjab’s first Sikh ruler (1799-1839). They feature in these accounts to mainly highlight his so- called debauchery, and the apparent abuse of power this implied. The realm occupied by female performers was one where the Maharaja—otherwise widely feared and respected politically—could be unabashedly criticised and depicted as profligate and debauched.

Victor Jacquemont, the French scientist, expressed this general denigratory attitude toward Ranjit Singh remarking that, “one knows that Orientals are debauched; but they have some shame about it. Ranjit’s excesses are shameless.” [1] Charles Metcalfe, the British envoy who met the Maharaja in 1808–09 for negotiations leading to the Treaty of Amritsar, also criticised Ranjit Singh’s proclivity for devoting evenings to female performers and drinking, evidence that he was, “in the midst of a riotous career of self-indulgence.” [2]

In contrast to these Orientalist texts, for Ranjit Singh and his courtiers, female performers were viewed as an essential and even virtuous part of a courtly setup, a regular component of the Maharaja’s everyday leisure. Such listening practices co-existed with his identity as a pious Sikh, evident in his daily practice of listening to Gurbani or scriptural hymns.

Beyond the sacred and the sensual, these performers had a very tangible, political impact. In Ranjit Singh’s court chronicles, we find stories about music’s very material, even supernatural impact on people (they would become “like paintings on the wall”). These female performers were also an important marker of his power and sovereignty to the outside world, embodied in his famed queer troupe of cross-dressing Kashmiri dancers, instituted by Ranjit Singh in 1831, at the height of the Sikh empire. They were called ‘Amazonian’ dancers, since they dressed like men and mimicked Sikh soldiers in their performances before political rivals like the English East India Company, and other European visitors.

Ranjit also married two Muslim courtesans– the first being Bibi Moran, so named because she could dance like a ‘mor’ or peacock. Bibi Moran, like Ranjit Singh’s other courtesan wife Gul Begum, built the Mai Moran Mosque in Lahore, donated generously to the Bhairon Temple, patronised a madrasa with the most esteemed scholars of hadith, and built traveler’s rests with wells and ponds at places like Tawa’if Pul (Bridge of the Dancing Girl).

The evidence for the conjoined sacred and sensual worlds of tawa’if from Ranjit Singh’s early nineteenth century court also echoed a century later. The ‘Music in Muslim Shrines’ or “Female Singers’ Prohibition” Bill, hotly debated in the Punjab Legislative Assembly between 1939-1942, sought to outlaw any girls or women from singing or dancing, with or without musical accompaniment, at any Muslim (or Sufi) shrine in Punjab. This piece of legislation reveals just how pervasive courtesans were in Punjab’s popular devotional shrine cultures.

Any cultural memory of these overlapping worlds inhabited by Punjab’s tawa’if has now been wiped out, as seen in recent Bollywood shows like Heeramandi, which are marked by visual and tropish excess and lack any basis in history. Responsible for this amnesia are the powerful India-wide anti- courtesan or anti-nautch movements that began in the 1890s, spearheaded by groups like Lahore’s ‘Punjab Purity Association’, which, over time have successfully obliterated both the tawa’if and any historically grounded memory of them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the status of Tawa’if Pul or Pul Kanjri. Built originally by Maharaja Ranjit Singh as a testament of his love for Bibi Moran, the site is now located less than 3 kilometres away from the India- Pakistan border at Wagah between Amritsar and Lahore. It was briefly conquered in skirmishes by both nations: Pakistan in 1965, and then ‘reclaimed’ by India in 1971. A grandiose war memorial, symbol of a seemingly perennial yet only 75- year-old divide, currently stands at the site of a bridge that was originally built to connect two lovers, ‘a memorial to love’.

Today, Pul Kanjri is one of Amritsar’s lesser-known historical land-marks. The relative obscurity of this once-famous structure is a product of the historical shifts in social attitudes towards musicians, especially female performers, in Punjab. A symbol of the wealth of the patronage and power enjoyed by courtesans during Ranjit Singh’s reign, Pul Kanjri is also an emblem of the ‘shared space’ of religious cosmopolitanism fostered by the Lahore court. [3]

The short-lived reign of Ranjit Singh’s successors was followed by British annexation in 1849. Consequent upon the decline of Lahore as the courtly centre, this public structure gradually fell into a state of decrepitude. The powerful wave of socio-religious re- form led by the Anglicized middle classes that began in late nineteenth- century Punjab was marked by a hardening of anti-courtesan beliefs. Consequently, this nineteenth-century monument came to be restored only in the twenty-first, as late as 2010.

Punjab’s musical histories have thus been impoverished on two counts: by the gendered memory of its musical pasts, but also by the Partition of 1947, which severed a region boasting a dizzying mélange of elements in its cultural history and marked by the vibrant ‘shared spaces’ of performance, listening, and connoisseurship which connected people across its major religions: whether Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or Christian.

Radha Kapuria is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Durham University, UK. She is the author of Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, and Connoisseurs; and co-editor of the volume Punjab Sounds: In and Beyond the Region.

References

[1] H.L.O. Garrett, (tr. and ed.) The Punjab A Hundred Years Ago As Described By V. Jacquemont & A. Soltykoff (Patiala: Languages Dept., 1971), 54.

[2] J.W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Charles, Lord Metcalfe, Volume I (London: Richard Bentley, 1854), 282. 

[3] Farina Mir, ‘Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 3 (July 2006): 727–758.

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