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DOWN MEMORY LANE
A different tune
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R.V. Smith brings to light the women who stole glances and broke hearts
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The dancing girls of Delhi have become the stuff of legend. Quite a few of them had come from Faizabad, the seat of power of Salar Jang and Shuja-ud-Daulah. Delhi in those days was facing bad times because of the decline of the Moghul empire. It was
in such a milieu that Qamar Jan flourished, and courtesans like Tara, the beloved of Nawab Asghar, briefly held the stage. The “Mutiny” rang the curtain down on that sort of life and manners.
Tara was the typical Muslim beauty, the kind Urdu poets are always hankering after. Her face, eyes, nose, hair and arms were all in the classical mould. To hold Tara was like embracing Venus herself. But Tara was a creature of moods and passions who flared up at the slightest provocation. Yet she combined the grace of all the Delhi sirens in her being. Even British officers were captivated by the dancing girls and counted them among their sweethearts.
But earlier still, the first lovers of the nautch girls were the East India Company’s Bara Sahibs posted in Calcutta. The young Robert Clive, while still a clerk, was as much open to the influence of that culture as Warren Hastings, who could make an after-dinner speech in Persian.
It was in the latter half of the 18th Century that the British began to patronise nautch girls. Captain Williamson in his early 19th Century account, while complimenting the dancing girls for their personal charms and the superior elegance of their accomplishments, makes mention of a celebrated nautch girl, Kaunam, who was at “the zenith of her glory”. Despite her homely looks, she held dominion over a numerous train of abject followers and solely by the grace of her movements held them in subjugation.
Kaunam was, probably, a corruption of the name Khanum and there were others like her and the poetess Janet (Jamiat Jan) similarly popular among the sahiblog. Their love, incidentally, was not confined to the nautch girls alone, for the housemaid too, more often than not, ended up in the sahib’s bed. Then there were cases like that of the soldier who fell in love with a sweeper woman and shot her dead one morning. Her wails, they say, can still be heard! While Nicki was making waves in Calcutta, Alfina held sway in Delhi.
Captain Mundy
In his journal, Captain Mundy found her “pretty and dusky”, who “like Calypso among her maidens, greatly excelled her fellows in stature, beauty and grace”. The sirens of Greek mythology were half animal and half woman whose singing spelt the doom of many a sailor. They sat on the rocks on the seacoast and caused shipwrecks. The sirens of Delhi were not such she-devils but they did destroy the nobility of the Capital.
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