Few films embody the majesty and melancholy of Hindustani classical music like Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (The Music Room). Set in 1920s Bengal, the 1958 film depicts the vanity of Biswambhar Roy, a feudal zamindar lamenting the collapse of his family’s system of landownership. With the end of his ancestral affluence comes the passing of his influence as a patron of the arts. As his coffers run dry, the titular music room becomes the gem within Roy’s crumbling, colonial mansion—as well as the mise-en-scène of his destruction. The first half of Jalsaghar is a flashback portraying the years Roy hosted soirées known as mehfils, to which he invited bais (trained singers) and ustads (expert musicians) to perform for his esteemed guests. Desperate to flaunt his superiority once more, the film’s second half shows Roy mounting one final gathering before his demise.

Through one character’s obsession with music, Jalsaghar celebrates India’s heritage while mourning the end of the culture that nurtured it. In a Criterion essay, Philip Kemp notes, “The music itself, to which Roy is so passionately if insensately devoted, becomes a key character in the film.” One performance in particular shows how Ray’s creative choices are threaded with “quiet social comment,” writes Kemp. Roy invites a famed singer, played by Begum Akhtar (1914–1974), to sing a lamenting thumri. This genre of amorous Hindustani music, which layers sweet vocals, haunting strings, and rhythmic beats, flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s hard to say how widely popular thumri was amid a host of other styles of Hindustani classical music during its heyday in the nineteenth century. Begum Akhtar emerged as perhaps the most famous caretaker of this genre of singing, reclaiming it and attempting to restore it during her reign as one of the twentieth century’s greatest Indian classical singers. She lends Ray’s film an authentic commitment to honoring India’s past.

Ray arranges the scene in the opulent music room so that Begum Akhtar sits facing an all-male audience. Dressed in a dark silk sari, she appears deep in thought. She croons as she plucks a sitar in her lap. “Bhar bhar aayi mori akhiyan piya bin,” she sings. (“My eyes grow full of tears when my lover is away.”) Thumri’s language isn’t florid. It is simple and delicate, the melodies based on a limited number of ragas (patterns of notes) that are easy to follow. But while the thumri Begum Akhtar sings transports Roy’s guests to a time they might remember, Ray’s filmgoers could only imagine a time when thumri reigned.

Following the performance, Roy’s wife accuses him of drinking too much, spending all their money, and bringing a bai to the mansion. Considered a low class of female entertainers, for which Begum Akhtar is made to stand in, bais were associated with India’s courtesans. But to Roy she was a renowned artist worthy of patronage. Roy reminds his wife that it was his ancestors’ duty to keep these professional women secure. Thumri vanished because the system of patronage that once held it up was obliterated early in the twentieth century. For Ray, individual thumri songs function as more than amorous songs about an absent lover. As a cultural artifact, the genre attempts to reckon with the relentlessness of time and the complicated status of women in India.

Thumri is concerned with the dual sides of love, togetherness and separation. The lyrics are often pleas or interrogations from the singer to her lover. “Don’t go far away, you wanderer” and “Which street did you turn down?” are popular first lines, evoking the agony of estrangement as well as the hope of a possible reunion. But the voice narrating anxiety in thumri is always a first-person, feminine voice addressing a male lover who torments her with harassment or absence, even though male singers often performed thumris. The narrator pleads, “Let me go,” when her lover grabs her sari or teases her on the road; she pines for him to return her and embrace her as she remembers, “Your eyes are full of charm.” The songs conflated devotion for a divine figure with affection for a lover. “What, dear friend, do I do? / My beloved hasn’t come,” a famous thumri sung by the male classical maestros Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Barkat Ali Khan in the 1950s laments. “All night I suffer without him.” With lack and absence conveyed to their fullest aesthetic potential, time seems to stretch backward and ahead, such that the possibility of thumri’s renaissance seems achingly within reach.

Because of the genre’s slow fade from cultural prominence, thumri has been elevated to “semiclassical” status within the canon of Hindustani music, following a century of denigration as a seductive, decadent style of music that recalled the tawa’ifs (courtesans) who once sang them. In the mid-eighteenth century, after the Mughal courts were overthrown, wealthy Muslim nawabs formed a new class of elites, establishing their seat of power at Lucknow, in the state of Awadh in Uttar Pradesh. Allowed to manage huge estates under the shadow of the British East India Company, these nawabs enjoyed the privilege of sovereignty with little responsibility. Culture and taste revolved around the mehfil, which gathered wealthy connoisseurs together for private song and dance recitals. A sophisticated class of courtesans became companions to these wealthy men, educating them in politeness and manners. Songs like “Balamwa tum kya jaano preet” (“Lover, what do you know of love?”) and “Ab ke sawan ghar aaja” (“Now that the monsoon has returned home”) were delicately performed within the mehfil. Listeners grew more educated with the subtleties a tawa’if presented her male audience, and thumri endured in this intimate setting for almost two centuries. Bais and tawa’ifs, drawing from the folk songs of the region, expressed the jouissance they experienced with these men who lavished time and money on them. But thumri also articulated the pain of separation from men who left to take a wife.

On the surface, thumri has long existed within a system of patriarchy, in which men get to shower affection or leave while women suffer as objects of oppression. The scholar and singer Vidya Rao writes in her essay “Thumri as Feminine Voice” that women are familiar with such a limited space. She moves past this narrow framework to ask whether tawa’ifs were in fact the “women who were the few to be able to speak (sing) freely of their sexuality, take lovers, influence kings, earn money, hold land in their own names, read, write, compose poetry, and music.” Thumri may use a feminine voice not because it’s attractive, charming, or emotional but because it extends the musical space available to it. Either thumri plays with formal qualities of Hindustani classical music—texture, voice, scale, and melody—or it reinterprets our understanding of the female body as an open text, one that’s unable to be closed, one with permeable boundaries. Thumri is feminine, in Rao’s view, because it’s “deeply subversive.”

The scholar Lalita du Perron adds important context to this question of feminine agency and the genre’s power within a patriarchal system, however. In her essay “The Female Voice of Hindustani Music,” she asks whether thumri’s female narrator and female perspective necessarily overlap. Put another way, can a male performer express a female voice? And can voice exist independent of context—that is, apart from either the actual audience or the audience implied in the story? Du Perron found that, while the identities and gender of thumri poets are relatively unknown, they used pen names like Binda, Rang Piya (“Colorful Lover”), and Kuvar Shyam (“Fragrant Dark Lord”). She lists a host of male composers from the nineteenth century—including the nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who signed his poems as Akhtar Piya (“Starry Beloved”)—but few female contemporaries are named in the archives other than Alam (“Universe”), one of the nawab’s wives.

Du Perron makes the case that how these songs were perceived, as difficult as that is to document, does more to empower thumri as a feminine genre than does knowing the identity of the auteurs who wrote them. The first-person narrator of thumri poses rhetorical questions to the audience as a means of interrogating the very system in which tawa’ifs perform. She sees this “as a device aimed at establishing a level of mental interaction with the patrons, who are invited to engage with the heroine’s dilemma,” as in “What, dear friend, do I do?” The dramatic tension created between singer/narrator and addressee/audience further subverts female suffering. At heart is the question of who is being addressed. A first-person narrator frequently calls out to tum (“you”), or she sings of “your” attributes: “Your eyes are full of emotion” (“Ras ke bhare tore naina”). “You” could be an absent, unnamed lover—but how could he hear the singer if he’s away? Or is it the heroine’s female friend (sakhi) in whom she confides? Tum could be a figure like Krishna, the deity often invoked in thumri, thereby conflating desire and devotion. Or does tum refer to the actual audience viewing the spectacle before them, called to bear witness to female restlessness?

Thus thumri emerges as a mode of implicit social critique, a point that Satyajit Ray weaves into the performance Begum Akhtar delivers on-screen. The power that female singers had as singers in the nineteenth century must be understood within the space of the mehfil. It’s easy to ascribe men power as creators or composers of thumri songs, but the power of the actual singing was amplified within a space that privileged delicacy and nuance. Subtle facial expressions and shaded meanings lent thumri an emotional depth that public concerts, distant airwaves, and most films struggled to support, much less animate. Ray’s depiction in Jalsaghar succeeds, however, because Begum Akhtar’s authority fills the mehfil. She uses a combination of grace and grandeur to deliver social commentary largely lost on modern audiences: Who will inherit this genre of art? Will it be erased entirely? Her artistry fills the music room to interrogate, from within, the very system of objectification that sustained her obsolescent livelihood.

In 1856 the British usurped Awadh, disbanding the court of Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab—and a poet and thumri composer.¹ He was sent into exile, eastward to Bengal. Aristocrats fled with him, with musicians and entertainers following, forced to seek opportunities in emerging cosmopolitan centers like Calcutta. British colonial governance imposed greater strictures on daily life in India: subjecting bodies to inspection, closing courtesans’ salons, and leveling heavy taxes. The subtleties of syncretism and fluid gender roles, to say nothing of the transactions inherent in courtesan life, had no place within the narrow confines of Victorian morality.

The historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg traces the tradition’s decline after 1857 in her study of courtesan culture in Lucknow. She writes:

The imposition of the contagious diseases, regulations, and heavy fines and penalties on the courtesans for their role in the rebellion signaled the gradual debasement of an esteemed cultural institution into common prostitution. Women who had once consorted with kings and courtiers, enjoyed a fabulously opulent living, manipulated men and means for their own social and political ends, been the custodians of culture and the setters of fashion trends, were left in an extremely dubious and vulnerable position under the British. “Singing and dancing girls” was the classification invented to describe them in the civic tax ledgers and encapsulates one of the many profound cultural misunderstandings of “exotic” Indian women by colonial authorities.

The collapse of the feudal system, along with the constraints of colonial power, relegated this class of entertainers to the margins of society. The complex hierarchical system that organized and ensconced tawa’ifs and bais along the lines of training, talent, and affiliation with more powerful patrons—the greater the financial support, the greater the renown—was eventually flattened out.² Indian social reformers also adopted harsh attitudes toward this class of women, further threatening their social position. Twentieth-century nationalists striving to advance an ideal of a Hindu India remade their society in the image of their conquerors. Hindu reformers committed to narratives of national progress conducted large-scale campaigns to erase courtesans associated with Islamic decadence from the face of society. They saw the potential to direct people’s sensibilities away from music’s profligate past and toward a more acceptable, “serious” future. Between 1897 and 1908, the Hindu musician V.N. Bhatkhande visited music colleges throughout India. His goal was to unite Hindustani music with its Sanskrit origins by interviewing scholars and musicians, collecting classical music texts, and comparing them to the actual practices he observed. He sought to show, through careful analysis, how ancient musical compositions had become debauched under Islamic reign. But according to his diaries, he ignored the royal courts that still housed professional female artists, deeming them unable to help him systematize music. His historiography of music wiped out the tawa’if’s role in preserving thumri.

New media, however, offered the possibility of lengthening thumri’s life. With the introduction of the gramophone to the Indian colony at the turn of the twentieth century came a process for collecting and commercializing India’s musical traditions. The gramophone extracted the beauty of thumri from the picture of free, dissolute courtesans who performed it, and thumri recordings took on a palatable, even respectable valence. With courtesans’ bodies hidden from view, removed from the male gaze, the decadent connotations of thumri are no longer visible. Musical compositions became more abstract—less folksy, coquettish, effete, or histrionic. Thumri became an art form that Hindu élites deemed purer; so sanitized, thumri took its place within a hierarchy of Indian classical music.

This technological intervention allowed thumri entertainers to become economically independent and Indian middle-class listeners to access their heritage and carry it forward. Between 1902 and 1908, Fred Gaisberg of the Gramophone Company (GC) preserved the voice of Calcutta singer Gauhar Jaan on hundreds of 78 rpm recordings. (Jaan—literally, “beloved”—is another title this class of female entertainers took.) While Gauhar Jaan wasn’t the first professional entertainer to record Indian music, she was the most prolific. Her industriousness, together with the commercial apparatus of the GC, transferred the locus of musical production from the mehfil to HMV studios, concert halls, and All India Radio (AIR began in 1930 and broadcast throughout the colony). AIR required female artists to produce marriage certificates before performing on air. Some singers, including Anwari Bai, refused, boycotting the radio station for years, while others, including Rasoolan Bai, chose to show their certificates. Their thumris survived because these married women could successfully negotiate the constraints placed on their craft.

Akhtaribai Faizabadi is the name Begum Akhtar used before she got married and before she appeared in Ray’s film Jalsaghar. She represents one of the last links to Lucknow’s history of artistic patronage. Her illustrious career also signaled a path out of the stigmas that thumri couldn’t shake. Her mother, Mushtaribai, was a court singer at Faizabad, in Uttar Pradesh, and belonged to a professional class of entertainers; her singing rankled her husband’s conservative Muslim family. Taking the title bai brought Akhtar into this lineage of professional singers. She trained under a series of ustads throughout Uttar Pradesh before debuting at a concert in Calcutta in 1927. Inspired by Gauhar Jaan, she recorded hundreds of thumris and ghazals, love poems of Islamic origin, often set to music. More than any other classical singer Akhtaribai Faizabadi transformed thumri’s reputation. With her marriage to a barrister in 1945, however, she became a begum, a title for a high-ranking Muslim woman. Changing her name either represented her choice to be a woman of the home or was a decision her husband’s family made for her. Her singing career came to an abrupt halt after her marriage. When she began singing professionally again, from the 1950s until her death in 1974, her career soared once more.

When film was introduced to the Indian colony in 1913, there were even more avenues for preserving the stories of India’s history and mythology. Directors could represent a vanished past while creating a distinct South Asian consciousness united by the visual language of cinema. Distributors learned that music and dance drew huge crowds in the 1930s and 1940s. As the industry took off, filmmakers in a newly independent India once again had to face the question of women. How to contend, on-screen, with the besmirched character the British had laid at the feet of India’s women? Cinema followed the music industry in sanitizing the image of the very figures responsible for producing and preserving India’s artistic past. Actresses such as Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, explains the scholar Usha Iyer, show how India’s iconic dancing girls shed their image as low-caste bais and refashioned themselves into devis (literally, “goddesses,” or women of excellence), creating a new national ideal of femininity. This woman, embodied by the mythos of “Mother India,” was pure, domestic, maternal—nothing like the bais, symbols of feudal authority who sang of heartbreak, exile, and memories lost to time.

Thumri received one final, prominent, and perhaps all too glamorous revival on-screen in 1972, in Kamal Amrohi’s period film Pakeezah. Set in Lucknow at the turn of the twentieth century, this cinematic masterpiece tells the story of Sahib Jaan, a fictional courtesan who yearns to leave the world of tawa’ifs and become a married woman. She is trapped in a public life of dancing for men and making herself sexually available, which shuts her out of a private life of marriage and respect. Amrohi began filming in 1958, casting his wife, the poet and singer Meena Kumari, in the starring role. He invited the legendary classical music composer Naushad Ali to assemble the film’s romantic thumris. With these exquisite songs, a world run by courtesans and a society at the edge of collapse comes alive on-screen. And yet Pakeezah is steeped in tragedy. The songs that audiences remember from the film—the ones that continue to color our understanding of India’s musical past today—are ostentatious dance spectacles. Amrohi pushed his wife to perform them perfectly but had to halt production on the film for a decade, due to her struggle with alcoholism. (Meena Kumari died at thirty-eight, two months after the film premiered.) What Amrohi got right, and what Ray might say was a proper use of Hindustani music on-screen, was blending thumris throughout the scenes, shading all the shimmering dialogue with a context for Sahib Jaan’s longing.

After Ray struggled to find backing for his earlier film Pather Panchali (1955), which lacked song-and-dance performances, he learned the important role these forms played for drawing crowds to the theater. But Jalsaghar went a step further. It revealed the possibility of going to the movies to listen to classical music. Begum Akhtar’s lament “My eyes grow full of tears” makes Roy’s commitment to making thumris visible clear. She sits with her eyes closed at times and with her back to a large mirror. Roy’s guests face her, and the camera picks up their reflection in the mirror, just past her. Although she takes center stage in the music room, time seems to look beyond her, eclipsing the bai. With the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1956, the princely states and landed estates across India were incorporated into the newly independent India, leaving rulers to surrender their land, revenue, and military forces, in exchange for accepting honorary titles and privy purses. Following this, zamindars were deposed, relegated to the Indian bourgeoisie. In Jalsaghar, they can’t see it yet, but their old signifiers of taste will all but deteriorate. The thumris remain, but their context is gone. The voices sound far away, dispersed.

¹ The province of Awadh was annexed in 1856 by the British East India Company. The following year, the rebellion known as the Sepoy Mutiny broke out, during which Indian sepoys recruited for the company revolted against the social, political, and religious changes the British were forcing on indigenous life. Outbreaks spread to civilians (both nobles and peasants), who had grown restless and discontent. Bloody sieges followed; the British responded by massacring hundreds of thousands of Indians. With the ousting of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Delhi fell into the hands of the British, sealing the fate of India as a colony. ↩

² For further reading, see Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow: 1856–1877 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) ↩