In a scene towards the beginning of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat (2018), when Malik Kafur is presented to Alauddin Khilji, the latter intoxicatedly walks around the former and asks, “naam kya hai?” Kafur answers, “Malik Kafur, huzoor.” But Khilji, the savage aesthete, is not interested in knowing his name -- “itr ka,” he asks instead. “Jannat-ul-Firdaus,” Kafur promptly replies. In the second episode of Bhansali’s latest web-series, Heeramandi (2024), Nawab Tajdar, in a frantic desire to find the girl he is smitten by, visits a perfumery with Alamzeb’s handkerchief and asks the perfumer to recognize the fragrance. He hopes to follow the trail of her scent to reach his beloved. The perfumer is quick to recognize the scent -- it’s “Jannat-ul-Firdaus.”
One thing is established for certain: in the multiverse of Bhansali’s films, the queer slave and the tawaif/courtesan smell the same.
The ambrosial fragrance of their bodies makes heads turn. At a symbolic level, Bhansali seems to be suggesting that a tawaif and a queer person have similar erotic and aesthetic choices. This is the queerness of the tawaif and the tawaifness of the queer!
The tawaifs of Bombay cinema have always been inspirational and aspirational figures for generations of queer people in India and its diaspora. Madhubala in Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Meena Kumari in Pakeezah (1972), Rekha in Umrao Jaan (1981) -- each of these female stars who were the divas of popular Hindi films -- have been queer icons despite playing ostensibly heterosexual characters on screen. So pivotal is their presence in queer subcultures that in 2014, the BFI Flare LGBT Film Festival in London screened both Mughal-e-Azam and Pakeezah.
In March 2018, Kitty Su -- the queer nightclub in New Delhi -- organized “A Night of 1000 Rekha’s” where drag queens and other queers paid tribute to the legendary Queen of Bombay cinema by performing and dancing to Rekha’s songs. The opening performance at the Queer Bollywood Dance Party, hosted at the Hydrate Nightclub in Chicago last month, was Sakal Ban from Heeramandi where a drag artist (dressed as tawaif/courtesan) meticulously imitated the classical dance steps as choreographed for Bhansali’s web-series.
The figure of the courtesan/tawaif/sex-worker features repeatedly in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films.
Modeled after the iconic tawaifs of Bombay cinema, Bhansali’s courtesans -- be it Chandramukhi in Devdas (2002), Gulaabji in Saawariya (2007), Mastani in Bajirao Mastani (2015), the eponymous heroine of Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022), and the feisty tawaifs of Heeramandi (2024) -- militate against the normative expectations of love, romance, and kinship structures.
While on one hand, they long for and desire the comforts of heterosexual coupledom, and use their adaa (grace), nakhra (coquetry), natkhat (naughtiness), and nazakat (delicacy), to seduce and woo their patrons, on the other hand, each of them is excluded from the script of traditional heterosexual romance. When Paro tells Chandramukhi, “tawaifo ke taqdeer mein shauhar nahi hote,” the latter responds, “tawaifo ke toh taqdeer hi nahi hote” -- indicating that the courtesan functions outside the status quoist frames of normative femininity and does not partake of a future rooted in conservative domesticity.
Bhansali’s courtesans, therefore, exude queer energy in defying heteronormative expectations that are placed on women.
Noted queer theorist, David Halperin, notes that “traditional gay male culture consistently delights in excessive, grotesque, artificial, undignified, revolting, abject portrayals of femininity, and it seeks its own reflection in them.” Historically, in the nineteenth century, the colonial administration in India turned the tawaif into a stigmatized, abject, and diseased figure. Between 1864 and 1871, the British Parliament passed a series of legislations that abjected and criminalized not just courtesans and tawaifs, but also sodomites and gender minorities. While the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, constructed the figure of the courtesan as criminal, diseased, infected, and morally and sexually dangerous, the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 criminalized indigenous communities, tribal groups, and third genders and eunuchs. In the same decade, the British parliament introduced Section 377 in the Indian Penal Code which criminalized sodomy in the Indian subcontinent from 1860.
These legislations made queers and courtesans bedfellows in being sexual and social outcasts which possibly explains their proximity and fondness for one another.
However, bureaucratic regulations alone do not explain the closeness between queers and courtesans, and the queer subcultural fascination with tawaifs. The noted queer historian, Saleem Kidwai, recounts the popularity that Begum Akhtar -- who transitioned from a tawaif to the Queen of Ghazal -- enjoyed among gay men.
Kidwai notes, “every gay man I knew then, was in love with her music. I mean for gay men her lyrics which were mostly about heartbreak and longing, made a lot of sense … Gay men knew all about the agony of being in love. It was the reason why Meena Kumari was so popular with gay men too.” Begum Akhtar’s friendship with and fandom among Saleem Kidwai and Agha Shahid Ali, the celebrated queer poet, is a fairly well-known story. After her passing, Agha Shahid Ali wrote: “She wears her grief, a moon soaked white; / corners the sky into disbelief.”
Gay men’s idealization of women like Meena Kumari, Rekha, and Begum Akhtar, who are the symbols of heartbreak, abject femininity, and the art of excess, confirms Halperin’s remark that queers possibly find their reflection in them.
Moreover, “these icons,” as Hoshang Merchant reminds us, “have gay image-makers. They are literally an invention of the gay man viz., the dress-designer, hair stylist, choreographer or the make-up man.” The queer appeal of these heroines -- tawaifs on and off screen -- therefore, traverse a range of reasons.
After watching Heeramandi, two of my gay male friends made the following observations. One of them said, “If as a kid, I was obsessed with the final scene of Devdas (2002) where Paro runs down the stairs of an endless corridor with the overlong pallu of her saree trailing behind her, Heeramandi made me obsessed with Bibbojaan’s gajagamini walk and the way she impeccably and seductively sways her gait.”
Another friend remarked, “I wish I was a tawaif at Heeramandi; like those courtesans, I long to lie down on a bed of jewels and ornaments.” There is something fundamentally arresting about these scenes: besides their grandeur, opulence, and dauntless beauty, these scenes are animated by helplessness, delicate vulnerability, and nazakat of the courtesan. The epic proportions of Bhansali’s frames allow these tawaifs to turn their grief into gorgeousness, and their sadness into seduction. This is the queer appeal of Bhansali’s kotha: here sorrow and melancholy are conveyed through such luxuriant visuals and a riot of colours that agony starts seeming desirable and sexy!
In a recent interview given to Baradwaj Rangan, Sanjay Leela Bhansali observes that he imagines Heeramandi as an ongoing dialogue with other courtesan films like Kalidas’ Adalat, K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, and Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah.
Produced under the shadow of these films -- which are now considered queer cult classics -- it can be safely assumed that Heeramandi too can be seen and read as a queer web-series. This is true for the other courtesan films by Bhansali as well. Even though the occasional queer characters in Bhansali’s films – be it Malik Kafur in Padmaavat, Raziabai in Gangubai Kathiawadi, or Ustaadji in Heeramandi – are not stereotypically represented, the usual criticism is that they are not always fully explored characters. They are always functional presences who move forward the plot but get lost in them eventually. For instance, at the end of Heeramandi, the courtesans unite to fight against the British colonizers, but we never get to know what happens to Ustaadji or, Fareedan’s hanky-panky with her maid keeps hanging in the air in the larger design of the plot.
However, it should also be remembered that these explicit queer-marked characters are not the only signals of queerness in Bhansali’s universe. Queerness is not as much an identity as it is an energy in an SLB film. Much like the form of the Broadway Musical -- with its emphasis on dance and music, excessive sentimentality and melodrama -- which many commentators have read as having queer effects, Bhansali’s films too exude queerness affectively, sensorially, politically, erotically, and aesthetically. Chandramukhi’s ability to dance in the face of emotional pain or Lajjo’s heart-wrenching song and dance as her lover marries another woman allows an escape from our ordinary and commonsensical understanding of things into a fantasy world of alternate realities. These films are queerer than queer, and their queerness lies not in their portrayal of a marginal identity, but in their realization and expression of a queer desire that is so illogical, unconventional, and excessive that it cannot be contained in commonsense.
(Rahul Sen is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Tufts University. His research areas include queer studies, psychoanalysis, literature, and films.)
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