Virtue in Vice: Courtesans and the Myth of ‘Mother India’ in Bollywood (PG Dissertation)

This dissertation was written in 2025

To what extent did Mother India ideology shape the depictions of courtesans in Hindi cinema?

Abstract

This dissertation examines the evolution of the courtesan in Hindi cinema as a moral instrument through which India narrates its modernity. Once esteemed as a guardian of art and etiquette in pre-colonial courts, the courtesan was recast under colonial and nationalist regimes as a symbol of moral pollution. By tracing this historical transformation, from the colonial “nautch girl” to the sacrificial mother of post-Independence cinema – this study argues that the courtesan’s body becomes a site where the nation’s anxieties about purity, progress, and sexuality are negotiated. Through close readings of Khilona (1970), Sadak (1991), and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), it demonstrates how shifting political economies, from socialism to liberalisation to neoliberalism, reshape, but never dismantle, the patriarchal logic of purification. Each film reimagines the courtesan’s redemption as the restoration of moral order: her suffering sanctifies the nation. The analysis situates these cinematic tropes within longer ideological genealogies of dharma, Bharat Mata, and Nehruvian socialism, showing how even modern portrayals of women’s independence remain bound to narratives of chastity and sacrifice. Ultimately, the dissertation contends that the cinematic courtesan is not an alternative to Mother India but her shadow – her endurance ensuring that the nation’s virtue remains intact.

Introduction: The Tawaif and the Nation: Purity, Sacrifice, and Cinematic Womanhood -

In Hindi cinema, the courtesan never disappears – she transforms. Across decades of shifting politics and economies, she reappears as artist, captive, and provider, her body acting as the screen upon which India writes its moral anxieties. This dissertation argues that the courtesan – once a figure of aesthetic sophistication and intellect, becomes an essential tool of India’s ethical construct. From the socialist idealism of the 1950s to the neoliberal self-making of the 2000s, her story remains the same – she must be purified so the nation may endure. Reading Khilona (1970), Sadak (1991), and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), this study traces how Hindi cinema transforms women’s suffering into national virtue, reworking the courtesan’s fall and redemption into a ritual of patriarchal continuity.

The courtesan, or in this case tawaif occupies a paradoxical place in India’s cultural imagination: historically a guardian of high art and etiquette, yet persistently recast as the nation’s moral outside. Before colonial intervention, tawa’ifs were neither marginal nor merely sexualised, but instead revered for combining “feminine graces and sensual charms with courtly etiquette and the arts of singing and dancing” embodying “the nakazat and nafasat (the delicacy and finesse) of Lucknow ehzeeb (culture).”[1] Embedded within elite circuits of patronage, the courtesan acted as a “dispenser of the aesthetic graces of courtly culture,” however my previous study Nauth the Whites Away traced how the British colonial state collapsed a nuanced ecosystem of performers including temple dancers, hereditary musicians, sex workers and tawa’ifs into the single, stigmatised category of the “nautch girl.” This vocation was therefore “doomed to gradual extinction, as a casualty of the transition to bourgeois patronage.”[2]  Through medicalised surveillance (lock hospitals) and moral policing (the Contagious Diseases Acts)[3], the colonial regime remapped the tawaif’s body from a site of artistic performance to a site of contagion. These measures were magnified by Anti-Nautch campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and were subsequently mirrored by elite nationalists like Gandhi, who regarded courtesans as “fallen sisters.”[4] This served to “help define modern bourgeois constructions of chastity, morality, family, and ethnic and religious identity,” purifying the nation by relocating female sexuality into marriage and sacrificial motherhood. My other paper, From Sati Survivor to Bharat Mata, extends this argument. It situates the colonial fixation with sati (widow self-immolation) as both the justification for imperial intervention and the site where Indian womanhood was redefined. As Gayatri Spivak observes, colonial narratives depended on “white men [claiming to be] saving brown women from brown men,”[5] a script that muted female voices altogether. Anticolonial nationalism responded by consecrating Bharat Mata/Mother India – the ideology of mother-as-nation often seen in literature, art, and eventually temple worship, fusing devotional imagery with cartography (the Mother as India’s map) to insight devotion to her chastity and redemption.[6] Whether as “superslave” or “superhuman,” women bore the burden of moral purity – the colonial state demarcated the female body, while the nationalist elite sanctuarised it.

This matrix of control found a natural home in the cinematic imagination. Early Hindi films “upheld the society’s traditional patriarchal models,” [7] subordinating women to marriage and domestic virtue. Glorifying Hindu familial values, even when regressive consolidated representations of “dominating males and submissive females.”[8]  Women who upheld the home were rewarded; those who transgressed were punished. The film industry thus became a pedagogical arm of Nehruvian socialism – what Brigitte Schulze describes as a “catalyst of Nehru’s politics,” projecting secular, socialist ideals as “the generally accepted social and ethical consciousness of India.”[9] Nehru’s state idealism centred on discipline, unity, and progress, ultimately casting cinema as a tool of national education. Despite the push towards secular ideation, the romanticization of a pre-colonial India, fuelled by Hindu morality came into fruition during this period. “He attributed a common ‘past’ to all the different cultures of the subcontinent, and from this constructed a common ‘dream’ for the future” with a “central leitmotif” of an “imagined India” with “an unchangeable ‘Hinduism.’”[10] Much of cinema from Independence onwards was therefore “concerned with what it means to be ‘Indian’” with Hindi cinema “aim[ing] to address the new Indian citizen.”[11] Therefore dharma became a critical ideological framework, incorporating “cosmic order, duty, law, [and] religion,”[12] into the moral architecture of Nehruvian nation-building. Directors such as Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, and Raj Kapoor used melodrama to render Nehru socialism sacred: family, labour, and sacrifice were reimagined as divine duties. Released ten years after Independence, Khan’s Mother India (1957) epitomises this cultural moment, coalescing modernisation and  motherhood. Its heroine Radha embodies “the intense suffering and sacrifice an Indian woman should experience to be an ideal mother,”[13] with the climactic image of Radha inaugurating a village dam, signifying national rebirth through female pain. The primary roles adopted by women in the dharmatic convention, according to Vijay Mishra, are “the sacrificial/devoted wife/mother/female companion,”[14] however in Schulze’s terms, women equally “became the dead icons of the nation,” functioning “merely symbolically.”[15]

The romanticization of the pre-colonial era and Hindu rationality, is perhaps most instrumental in shaping Bollywood’s persistent portrayal of courtesans as embodiments of a lost, refined aesthetic from Indian history. In these films, courtesans became symbols of a sophisticated pre-colonial cultural heritage. Inserting courtesans into this discourse exposes how “the distinctions between women who are prostitutes and women who are not are sharply and explicitly drawn,” yet “the slippages between the two categories are frequent and significant.”[16] These tinctures allow room to redefine the boundaries of acceptable womanhood, in doing so promoting seemingly progressive narratives that allow courtesans a path to redemption. This tension runs through the canon of post-Independence courtesan films: Pakeezah (1972), Umrao Jaan (1981), and Devdas (2002) immortalised the courtesan as a figure of tragic artistry and aspirational purity, at times awarded mitigation and reintegration into respectable society.

However, much like the devoted mother, courtesans have been historically regarded as “tragic, fragile, poetic and desirable… figure[s] of love and sacrifice,”[17] ultimately reinforcing a regressive moral economy rooted in the sacrificial purity of Mother India. Gregory Booth substantiates this, writing that the courtesan may act, perform, or even rescue the hero, but “the goal of a tawaif’s heroic quest is the achievement of, or return to, a male-centred domesticity.”[18] Even when filmmakers depict courtesans as victims of systemic exploitation, her transgression must culminate in repentance, therefore her agency exists only to be revoked. The gendered logic of purification, in which female virtue becomes the measure of national morality also continues to persist. As Krishnaraj observes, “Motherhood should be understood as a more complex reality than domestic labour within capitalism because it is a patriarchal institution”[19] ensuring control over gender roles. The cinematic courtesan is therefore reframed not as a rebel but as a moral instrument, in which she is portrayed as a victim of feudal exploitation, whose pleasure must be erased for the nation to heal.[20] Her connection to patriotic duty spans the ages, therefore situating courtesans “as precursors of a particular type of twentieth and twenty-first-century urban Indian woman.”[21] Modern cinema, as I will illustrate, has persisted on this course, as films continue to “celebrate the courtesan as an oppressed but struggling mother, emblematic of the oppressed motherland.”[22] As well as this, “cinematic tawaifs morph into shape-shifters, becoming all things to all men”[23] – icons of adaptability that remain bound by male desire. Even in their apparent multiplicity, these figures are recuperated into a single moral trajectory – the redemption of woman as mother, and through her, the redemption of the nation.

This dissertation consciously explores less examined but more revealing films: Khilona (1970), Sadak (1991), and Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), with each translating the courtesan myth to its distinct contextual period. Throughout this dissertation, the term courtesan is used deliberately for its ambiguity. It encompasses the overlapping figures of the tawaif, the dancer, and the sex worker – categories that colonial and nationalist discourses collapsed into one. The term thus retains both its historical prestige and its moral stigma, allowing for analysis across various practices of female commodification. In Khilona, the tawaif’s artistry is erased by domestic virtue with Chand becoming the redemptive wife. In Sadak, on the cusp of liberalisation, the courtesan is reimagined as captive, and Pooja’s purity is guaranteed by infantilisation and imprisonment. In Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, neoliberal discourse reframes sex work as sacrificial labour, where Vaibhavari’s “stain” is narratively cleansed through providing for her family. Across these decades, the political economy changes, yet the moral economy does not.

Whether in the family home, the brothel, or the global city, I hypothesise that the resolution is the same: the woman’s suffering redeems the social body. She is exalted yet expendable, liberated yet domesticated – a shadow of Bharat Mata – her body bearing the contradictions of the nation’s development so that the nation need not.

Chapter One: Khilona (1970): The Pure Courtesan in Nehruvian Socialism -

Released in 1970, Khilona (dir. Chander Vohra) bridges the moral idealism of Nehru’s India and the emerging disillusionments of the 1970s. Its title ‘Toy’ forewarns the film’s governing metaphor of use and disposability, an allegory that frames both its unstable hero, Vijay (Sanjeev Kumar), and its tawaif protagonist, Chand (Mumtaz). This chapter argues that Khilona rearticulates the post-Independence pedagogy of Mother India (1957) in a domestic key: Chand’s legitimacy is earned through endurance, maternal care, and a ritual purification that effaces artistry and desire. She is validated as wife/mother rather than as artist/subject, translating the socialist ethic of service into a currency of feminine sacrifice.

Vijay, a poet, is driven mad by the loss of his love, leading his father to prescribe a courtesan to impersonate a wife to soothe Vijay back to health. Although Chand is hired not for sex but for service; she is restricted by frameworks that confine her social position and identify her as an “outcast.”[24] This sentiment is echoed in Devdas (dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2003) by “supposed Bengali bhadralok (gentleman) Devdas Mukherjee, an Indian educated in Britain with ideals of dignity, morality and well-refined roles of women”[25]: “Aurat maa hoti hai, behen hoti hai, patni hoti hai, dost hoti hai, aur jab who kuch nahi hoti ta who tawaif hoti hai” (A woman is a mother, sister, wife and a friend, and when she is none of these, she is a tawaif).[26] It is in the film’s opening scene where the questioning of belonging is first introduced. In the hegemonic masculine view of Hindi cinema, “any woman would rather be respectably married to a man and dependent on him than be a tawaif.”[27] Not only are men at the centre of this, but the home remains an integral site of transformation and consolidation to producing a credible devi. “Indian cinema’s habitual world was, and remains structured by Hindu mythology… Consequently, it furnishes prescriptive norms for the father, mother, son and daughter. Moreover, home becomes crucial, as most Indian Gods belong to a domestic household.’[28] It is therefore inevitable that the opportunity presented to Chand incites the following comments: “For the first time, I felt I have come from darkness to light.”[29] This is a common trope, wherein “the not-home is negative theology that reinforces the paradise of home. And with the destruction of not-home, the family regains the domestic ideal.”[30] Chand is not fulfilled in the kotha, so instead longs for a life beyond, however the extent of her desire reaches only domesticity, a clear reinforcement of masculine-centred tenets in Bollywood.

Upon Chand’s arrival to Vijay’s house she is immediately branded a contaminant, with the shame of her labour wantonly opposing the indispensability of her care. Here, the ‘toy’ motif aligns Chand with Vijay, particularly during the song ‘Khilona Jaan Kar’, which laments being played with and discarded. Ruth Vanita analyses this sequence through the grammar of imprisonment, as Vijay is shown “behind a carved jharokha,” then “behind plain iron bars,” followed by a “shredded kite,” a sign of being “untethered to family.” [31] The gap is somewhat bridged between courtesan and poet, marking both as social outliers. The pedagogy here is simple: the household redeems only what it can tame.

Throughout the industry’s classical period, films consolidated an ideal of womanhood organised around traditional Hindu structures, centring chastity, marriage, and service – “the ideal conduct of a true wife” was “destined to serve the family without expecting anything at all in return.”[32] Mother India provides the strongest template, with the film’s final scene positioning Radha to uphold another woman’s honour, “heroically but tragically”, even against her son.[33] Khilona resituates this concept indoors, converting the agrarian icon into a domestic saint. Radha “acts as the saviour of all Indian women’s reputation,” and Chand is a fitting continuation of the rhetoric that women “are trapped or restricted” by “unyielding moral codes to protect their izzat or “honour/chastity.”[34] This is perhaps most evident when Vijay’s sister (also interestingly named Radha) attempts to run away with Bihari, the villainous neighbour. Acting as the orchestrator and enforcer of morality, Chand pleads, “I want you and this house to be happy, I won’t let you or this family’s honour go to dust.”[35] Chand remains true to her honour, alarmingly, even when this culminates in further abuse from Vijay’s family.

Khilona also relies on a familiar repertoire of further tawaif-recuperation tactics. As Gregory Booth observes, filmmakers “must also somehow convince their audience that their tawaif has actually become a devi; alternatively, they must oppose the polarity itself,” with “most tawaif films offer[ing] a combination of redemptive elements.”[36] Renunciation alone is “not usually enough,”[37] respectable parentage, saintly comportment, and care work must coincide. These narrative and visual tactics sit within longer representational conventions. From the 1970s onward, the cinematic tawaif must change costumes and dance styles, “play[ing] girlfriend, wife, mother, flirt and villain all at once,” typically “redeemed into marriage at the end.”[38] Khilona requires Chand to do exactly this – s she performs multiple scripts as nurse, wife, saint, mother; until the courtesan is fully converted into domestic labour. Chand’s tendencies become devotional, “bringing Vijay his food and generally caring for him as a wife would do,”[39] all whilst enduring abuse from both Vijay and this family. Simultaneously, the obligation for tawaifs to unveil some of their sexual proclivities is equally essential, as even on the threshold of redemption, the film asserts that “an illicit eroticism imbues the courtesan.”[40] Vanita notes that Khilona’s explicit transpositions of Vijay seeing his dead beloved’s face “on the body of a reformed tawaif,” while his brother Mohan sees Chand’s face “on that of an unreformed tawaif”[41] is proof that the courtesan’s erotic surplus cannot be eliminated; it must be domesticated into wifely sacrifice.

Khilona rehearses that pattern and then folds it into a redemptive conclusion where Chand’s propensity for suffering is recoded as assurance of her purity. The approach here mirrors a broader pattern in popular Hindi cinema in which women are too often confined to “stereotypical roles of subordination,” with male abuse often “glorified.”[42] This materialises what Darshana Chakrabarty identifies as cinema’s normalisation of violence against women[43], a construct repeatedly reaffirmed throughout Khilona. Chand even reassures Vijay’s father, insisting “Even if I lose my life in the process, I’ll assume I found life”[44] – a promise persistently tested, most notably when Vijay, believing the ruse and “attracted by her beauty,” rapes Chand “in the midst of his insanity.”[45] The act is narratively permissible by rendering him “not guilty by reason of insanity,”[46] thus preserving his hero status while moving Chand toward sacrificial motherhood. This display is not incidental; but rather integral to the industry’s privileging of male centrality, where female endurance is repeatedly made to carry the burden of resolution.[47] The rape becomes an unsettling opportunity to purify Chand, with her eventual pregnancy being framed not as injustice but as fate; as motherhood will re-code the child as blessing and Chand as saint. In other words, sexual violence is fated purification, translating violation into virtue.

The narrative also engineers a lineage revelation to launder her origins, an inevitable narrative convention. “By the 1970s, a courtesan character’s links to her mother have to be erased in order for her to be recuperated into respectable society. Even if the mother does not die, she disappeared from the narrative without explanation.”[48] Although Chand’s courtesan mother Heerabhai remains honourable and motherly, professing “Mamta ki koi qeemat nahin hoti” (A mother’s love cannot be priced),[49] her dignity is only symbolic. On her deathbed, Heerabhai confesses to kidnapping Chand, who is revealed to be the orphaned daughter of Vijay’s family friend. The film not only eliminates Chand’s courtesan descent, but Heerabhai’s subsequent death seals this erasure; her paan box (a common piece of iconography in the courtesan’s kotha and “signifier of selling sex”[50]) “clangs shut,” marking “the end of Chand’s relationship with the tawaif lineage.”[51]

The film also mobilises the visual code that separates the virtuous heroine from the vamp. From the 1930s onward, Hindi cinema has policed this divide through costume and conduct, contrasting “decent sarees and submissive demeanour” with sequined Western glamour — “both catered to the male gaze,” yet the former was “glorified and deemed right,” while the latter, was condemned as “vulgar and disrespectful.”[52] In Khilona, Chand’s modest veiling, her domestic piety, and her denial of mujra inheritance signify the triumph of “cultured traditional Indian virtues”[53] over corrupt modernity. Rosy, by contrast, embodies the figure of the fallen modern woman — communicating primarily in English with the clothes to match, Rosie’s primary function is to opportunistically lure men into adultery for self-interest and economic gain. As an employee of Vijay’s family business, she weaponizes sexuality for mobility, fulfilling the archetype of the “Westernised, highly sexed”[54] vamp whose liberation is framed as moral decay. The narrative punishes this transgression by expelling Rosy from the moral order it restores to Chand, reiterating that “the true Indian woman enters her husband’s home when she marries and leaves it only when she dies… [and] will never sell her chastity for any price on earth.” [55] Through this binary, Khilona secures the ideological framework of its world: purity is rewarded with sanctification, desire with destruction. The vamp’s visibility legitimises the heroine’s virtue, allowing the film to eroticise both figures while reaffirming that only submission, not sensuality, ensures a woman’s belonging within the Hindu-nationalist family.

Khilona continues locating Chand’s service within a nationalist apparatus, with song and imagery performing an ideological purification that connects the domestic to the national. The song ‘Yeh Natak Kavi Likh Gaye Kalidas’ is particularly demonstrative of this, due to its abridged reference to Shakuntala, thereby embedding Chand in a mythic-national continuum. Shakuntala, in Kalidasa’s classical Sanskrit play, embodying both karma and dharma. In it, she must reconcile erotic love with social duty, dramatizing the moral economy of purity, forgiveness, and return.[56] In this song, Khilona translates Chand’s suffering into a nationalist allegory, as she imagines herself as Shakuntala and Vijay as Dushyanta after reading Kalidasa’s Abhijnanasakuntalam, transforming her trauma into a divine romance inscribed by destiny. In this act of symbolic transfiguration, Khilona domesticates the tawaif’s sensuality, absorbing it into the moral grammar of the nation-state. Chand’s dance is therefore a ritual of sacrifice, ultimately ensuring her continued subordination within patriarchal and nationalist ideologies that sanctify, rather than free, the suffering woman. Vanita argues that “the abbreviated Shakuntala story” further propels the family in Khilona as “symbol[s] of the nation.”[57] Visually, the sequence fortifies this, with Chand dressed in saffron, white and gold, dancing within a pastoral landscape that evokes the agrarian heart of Mother India. Holding clay pots and collecting water from a river, she is absorbed into the iconography of fertility, service, and sacrifice that has defined the nationalist feminine ideal since Mother India. What was once erotic is now made devotional in the name of the nation.

One could imagine a different trajectory in which courtesans are precursors of modern urban independence, “single and intellectually inclined,” living with women friends, “serv[ing] liquor to guests,” marked by lifestyle rather than stigma.[58] Khilona glances at that horizon through Chand’s taste, her admiration for poetry and verbal steel; but forecloses it in favour of incorporation. The “toy” metaphor that first named Vijay’s fragility ultimately names Chand’s fate: she is played with, used, and then, only after sufficient suffering, kept, on the strict condition that her past be buried. In this sense, Khilona is paradigmatic of the socialist melodrama’s repurposing of the courtesan as moral labour. The film’s economy is not monetary but ethical: Chand must generate surplus virtue to offset the stigma she has inherited from her tainted past. The means are familiar: a dichotomy of “them and us”, ‘between the uncultured modern western vulgarity and the cultured traditional Indian virtues’[59] – a sacrificial service over self-assertion. The end is equally familiar – assimilation into the family as the only legitimate horizon for female subjectivity. Khilona thus perfects a melodramatic formula whose logics will persist into liberalisation and neoliberalism, as the courtesan can survive in the national imaginary only as wife, mother, and martyr.

Chapter Two: Sadak (1991): The Princess Courtesan at the Edge of Liberalisation -

Released at the brink of India’s neoliberal turn, Sadak (Road, dir. Mahesh Bhatt, 1992) relocates the melodrama of purity, sacrifice, and salvation from the agrarian landscape of Mother India and the bourgeois domesticity of Khilona into the grimy underbelly of an urban brothel in Bombay. Sadak belongs to a moment of profound economic and cultural transformation, framed by India’s globalisation in the 1990s. Despite the emergence of global economies in India, “the globalizing process did not engulf [Bombay’s] entire economy… This unevenness in the internal structure of the economy manifests itself in the way inequalities in the city are structured.”[60] The 1990s urban landscape therefore became a cinematic terrain of anxiety – global capital promised freedom but rendered cities sites of corruption, crime, and moral dislocation. The film follows Ravi (Sanjay Dutt), a haunted taxi driver who falls in love with Pooja (Pooja Bhatt), a young woman forced into prostitution by the hijra brothel-keeper Maharani (Sadashiv Amrapurkar). Set against the polluted skyline of a city entering capitalist modernity, Sadak renders the Mother India myth anew for the 1990s – the brothel replaces the village, the prostitute replaces the peasant, and moral salvation is once again located in female purity and male redemption. The brothel stands as the dystopian emblem of globalisation, with purity threatened by modern vice, the nation’s virtue is held hostage in an urban underworld that must be purged by male heroism and devotion to the motherland.

The film’s narrative of rescue situates Pooja as the princess courtesan, a figure whose virtue is proven through endurance and salvation. Like Chand in Khilona, she embodies the paradox of purity in captivity, and her value lies in the suffering and purity she endures while her redemption depends on male intervention. Within films of this canon, ‘the woman’s perspective was not in focus, but rather, it was the man’s point of view and the hero’s rise to the occasion to save the damsel in distress’[61] that foregrounded these films. As Ruth Vanita observes, when “a tawaif acquires the narrative potential or desire to become a partner for a film’s hero”[62] she additionally acquires what Anneke Smelik writes as “a desire-to-be-desired.”[63] However in some instances, the courtesan remains disqualified by “assumptions about her sexual history” and her entanglement with “criminal elements.”[64] Yet in Sadak, Pooja’s must instead “retain a carefully noted sexual chasteness without which tragedy is the only possible outcome”[65] – without this, the possibility of her agency is foreclosed, her only moral horizon is rescue.

Like Vijay in Khilona, Ravi is a tormented hero; the trauma of losing his sister becomes narrative justification for dharmic action — the restoration of moral order first symbolised when Ravi returns his uncle’s stolen taxi, and later through his determination to rescue Pooja from the brothel. This notion of heroism is augmented by the painful recollection of his sister Roopa’s coercion into sex work and the disease she contracts while imprisoned by Maharani. While Ravi’s dada rejects Roopa for her sexual ‘contamination’ insisting, “she’s not Roopa anymore, she’s been spoiled… Our family has been a priest’s family for 3 generations… She has chosen her hell. Let’s go, we’ll perform her last rites,”[66] the film articulates the patriarchal axiom that a woman who transgresses purity codes is already socially dead. Ravi’s refusal: “If you’re going to perform her last rites, perform mine too. I’m not leaving her”[67] — positions him as the lone figure capable of resisting Hindu honour/caste culture. The narrative affirms exactly what scholars identify as the hegemonic masculine view in Hindi cinema that “a male is expected to fulfil his duties in the public domain, act as the provider and control the household with his authoritative powers.”[68] His compassion is thus weaponised as heroism, sanctifying male authority while reinscribing the logic that women’s salvation is not their own.

When we first meet Pooja, she is holding a small birdcage, a gesture of care that also prefigures her own fate. The cage’s meaning is twofold: on one hand, it underscores her gentleness and moral purity, aligning her with the archetype of the nurturing Indian woman; on the other, it foreshadows her entrapment in Maharani’s brothel, where the compassion that once defined her freedom becomes the condition of her confinement – the caged bird becomes her mirror, a silent emblem of innocence. This introduction instructs the viewer on how to read Pooja – she is already marked as the victim before she speaks, already enclosed within the moral vocabulary of the film. The caged bird, “a common trope in Bombay films… symbolizing the imprisoned courtesan,”[69] therefore performs the work of both prophecy and pedagogy, informing the audience that her purity will endure precisely because she will be imprisoned. Crucially, Pooja’s innocence is not only visualised through captivity but ritually affirmed. The film repeatedly frames her performing Hindu gestures of devotion, most notably in the song ‘Tumhein Apna Banane Ki’.[70] It is telling that this song (the film’s most celebrated romantic sequence) locates Ravi’s desire within Pooja’s devotional ritual; she is framed offering puja in a temple even as the soundtrack voices his longing, binding erotic attraction to religious piety. The temple sequence also depicts Pooja in a red sari, which is a visual shorthand for marital auspiciousness and devi-like purity, thus pre-emptively casting her in the role of the dutiful Hindu wife. In aligning her desirability with ritual piety, the film confirms the patriarchal principle that “the true identity of an Indian woman lies in her chastity and honour,”[71] grounding womanhood in ideal conduct, thus legitimising Ravi’s desire while pledging her sexuality as dutiful rather than deviant. The brothel, though a site of exploitation, cannot morally taint her because she remains a Hindu daughter, not a sexual subject — thereby redeeming Pooja not through resistance but through obedience to purity – proving that female endurance, not agency, is the foundation of deliverance.

Sadak was widely described as “a revolution in the portrayal of the third gender,” as the first major Hindi film to feature a hijra antagonist – “something very new and shocking for viewers of Hindi cinema.”[72] However, the film garnered commercial acclaim precisely because of this narrative choice, becoming the second highest-grossing Hindi film of 1991 and the seventh highest-grossing Hindi film of the 1990s.[73] This reveals how comfortably audiences accepted an image of gender nonconformity coupled with criminality. “The film highlights the struggle of Ravi to rescue Pooja from the clenches of Maharani”[74] – therefore, the moral calculus is absolute - heterosexual virtue has been assaulted, female chastity imperilled, and the third gender reimagined as evil incarnate. The film’s mise-en-scène makes this moral binary visible. Maharani’s costuming announces her position in the visual hierarchy of sin and sanctity: throughout the film, she is dressed in black and red, “symbolising power, evil, death, and dominance,” appearing in a blue sari only once – “with her hair pinned with flowers; make-up done, wearing jewellery and fake breasts.”[75] The film establishes Mahrani’s performance of gender as a mimicry of femininity – intended to connote perversion, thus situating Mahrani as the antithesis of Pooja’s conventional heteronormative femininity, further vilifying Mahrani. As one critic noted, “No doubt Sadak gave a lot of screen space to a transgender character, but the film also justifies the negative representation of the third gender. Maharani as third gender poses a great threat to heterosexuality in the film, thus evoking deep-rooted anger and hatred towards the third gender.”[76] Mahrani’s characterisation collapses gender nonconformity into villainy, further validating Pooja as the innocent, virtuous princess, worthy of being saved.

Mahrani’s brothel is constructed as a tower of corruption, with rooms stacked like cages above the street. Rupinder Singh and Sneha Singh discuss the “antithesis of home, [or] the ‘not home’, that is, the villain’s lair.” They insist that “the antagonist almost always threatens the protagonists domestic ideal and the antagonist’s hide-out is a rarefied not home, where [s]he is at home.” [77] Pooja occupies the uppermost level of Maharani’s lair, framed by barred windows that ensure both visibility and confinement. In this elevated enclosure, she once assumes the symbolic position of the caged bird, however this visual metaphor can alternatively be read as Rapunzel’s tower. Pooja is the captive princess gazing down, while Ravi, her rescuer, stands below, his upward gaze both reverent and determined. The shot composition repeats throughout the film with Pooja behind iron bars, her face illuminated by the city’s artificial glow, and Ravi looking up from the darkness. The visual of her standing in the window, high above the street, not only signifies her spiritual elevation but also underscores her removal from agency – her gaze signifying not agency but longing, a yearning for deliverance from Ravi that reaffirms patriarchal salvation. This imagery draws directly from both Western fairy tale and Hindu mythology, the latter of which structures Indian cinema’s habitual world.[78] The Rapunzel tower, a European emblem of purity in captivity, becomes an urbanised echo of Sita’s imprisonment in Ramayana. The film’s narrative conclusion, in which Ravi burns Maharani’s brothel – symbolizes “burning of the evil in Ramayana; where Hanuman burns Lanka to save Sita.”[79] The fire transforms vigilante violence into a ritual act of dharma, and Pooja, like Sita, is redeemed through rescue and fire.

The film’s Rapunzel sequence, viewed alongside the birdcage and imagery of fire, thus forms the aesthetic and ideological core of the narrative. All visual motifs sanctify entrapment as proof of virtue. – her suffering must be aestheticized, her silence eroticised, her rescue ritualised, while the visual chain from cage to window to flame, traces the journey of purity through stages of spectacle: innocent, imprisoned, purified. Waugh’s reading of Maharani as a figure “bedecked with… signs of revolt and marginality”[80] gestures toward the possibility of subversion, but this is foreclosed by purification and erasure. The burning brothel becomes a moral cleansing of the sadak (road), an act that restores patriarchal order under the guise of divine justice. Sadak thus reanimates the ideological structure of the courtesan film in the language of neoliberal urbanism – the woman as object of rescue, the man as saviour, and the queer as pollutant. The fire consumes not just the villain but the possibility of alternative kinship and desire.

The gendered geography of Sadak parallels the domestic hierarchy of earlier melodramas. As scholars have noted, “The living rooms should decidedly be masculine, while the kitchen feminine. Even a matriarch is expressed as a replacement by being positioned in the living room on the ‘throne’ otherwise reserved for the patriarch.”[81] In Sadak, that spatial hierarchy is transposed onto the city: the streets are masculine spaces of mobility and redemption; the brothel is feminine, a claustrophobic interior of stagnation and moral decay. When Ravi enters the brothel, he crosses into the feminised interior to perform masculine purification. The city becomes a distorted echo of Nehru’s moral architecture, a space where the promise of modernisation and liberation instead gives way to corruption and decay. As India teeters on the edge of liberalisation, Sadak reimagines the urban landscape as the new domestic sphere of dharmic struggle. The hero is not only a saviour to the courtesan/mother figure, but also to the corrupt interiors of the nation that must be cleansed to restore moral order. In this way, the brothel is not merely a site of vice but a cinematic metaphor for the endangered moral core of the post-socialist city.

If Sadak’s contemporaries like Tamanna (1996) were revered for addressing the complexities of the hijra community, Sadak remains emblematic of an earlier anxiety of perversion and contagion. Its ending offers no social transformation, only moral restoration. Pooja’s purity is re-inscribed as dependence; her freedom results only from rescue. The bird flies only because the cage is burnt, and even then, it flies toward the arms of a man. In this way, Sadak becomes a quintessential text of post-liberalisation India – outwardly modern, internally feudal. It dresses its patriarchal morality in urban realism, translating the village myth of Mother India into the neon-lit alleys of Bombay. Yet the ethical structure remains unchanged. The woman’s body is still the battleground of virtue; the man’s redemption is still secured through violence; and the queer body is still rendered monstrous. The road of Sadak does not lead toward liberation but back to the sanctified binaries of an older moral order, where purity exists only in opposition to pollution, and where the flames of purification continue to define what it means to be pure.

Chapter Three: Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007): The Provider Courtesan in Neoliberal India -

If Sadak marked the moral geography of post-liberalisation India through the opposition of brothel and temple, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (dir. Pradeep Sarkar, 2007) relocates that same drama of purity and pollution into the polished interiors of neoliberal India. Produced by Yash Raj Films – a studio long aligned with the cultural conservatism of Hindu middle-class respectability – the film retells the courtesan myth for a new economic order. Its heroine, Vaibhavari Sahay (Rani Mukerji), a pious, small-town girl from Banaras, transforms into Natasha, a high-class escort in Mumbai, to rescue her family from poverty. On its surface, this transformation signals women’s entry to capitalistic mobility; but beneath the glamour lies the same moral economy that has structured Hindi cinema since Mother India: the woman as redeemer, the man as saviour, and the stain of female labour.

The historical context, as ever, is crucial to this era, as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “played an important role in the success of Bollywood” since their “major support came from businessmen and traders within the film industry. Indian cultural values, Hindu traditions, ideal women and their codes of conduct that the BJP advocated were reflected in the films.”[82] Liberalisation thus introduced “an influx of women into the workforce”[83] but constrained their presence within a Hindu moral framework. Economic aspiration and feminine respectability became intertwined – as women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, Hindi cinema struggled to reconcile visibility with virtue. The BJP’s cultural nationalism, with its emphasis on the Hindu woman as bearer of morality, saturates Yash Raj’s post-2000 cinema. In this climate, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag offers itself as allegory – a film that appears to liberate its heroine through labour but ultimately restores her to domesticity through sex work and ultimately marriage. This process crystallised the figure of the new woman: “traditional as well as modern,” permitted to work “only when she had fulfilled her traditional roles as a mother and wife,” her body defining “the limits and boundaries of both cosmopolitanism and Indianness.” [84]  Vaibhavari (Vibha) embodies this governed duality, much like her predecessors we have discussed: mobility without liberation, labour without autonomy, sexuality without pleasure. Neoliberal visibility becomes a new form of patriarchal discipline. The film’s title itself – Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (“My veil has been stained”) – invokes the symbolic garment of Hindu womanhood, the chunari that both conceals and defines chastity, with the stain marking the boundary between woman as goddess and woman as pollutant.

The ideological architecture of Laaga Chunari Mein Daag is signalled from its opening song, which frames Banaras and the Ganga as the sacred locus of Indian culture, morality, and feminine sacrifice. Wide shots of the river, ghats, and small-town labour echo Mother India’s celebration of rural purity and working-class endurance, aligning the narrative with what one critic calls Bollywood’s role as the “protector of the official culture and the history of the nation.”[85] The lyrics explicitly mobilise Nehruvian secular nationalism, proudly invoking a street where temple and mosque stand side-by-side –  a nostalgic gesture toward the “liberal, secular and progressive future”[86] celebrated in post-Independence cinema. Yet, even within this secular ideal, gender hierarchy is embedded in the language of sacrifice. The song refers to “amma bechari” (“poor mother”), glorifying her suffering as the foundation of communal life, reinforcing this ideal as “the proverbial Hindu mother who works to support her family, giving up her own dreams for her family and upholding Hindu traditions.”[87] This reflects the continuous process of how “patriarchy, whether in its more traditional or modern form, constantly tries to glorify motherhood as the most prized vocation for women.”[88] Being as men are not lauded for their participation in domesticity, unlike women who “uphold familial values on screen” and “are praised and rewarded” only when they bear its burdens[89] - therefore it is unsurprising that Vibha’s father is inert and resistant to change. Even the film’s representation of modernity is pre-coded by tradition – Vibha is introduced as the quintessential small-town daughter, wearing bright salwar kameez and moving through the market with carefree innocence – her attraction lies not in eroticism but in traditionality and the moral beauty of national obligation. Vibha is therefore introduced as joyful yet obedient, reflecting tendencies of femininity in Indian cinema in which women were “expected to be cheerful, attractive, sensuous and efficiently work in the kitchen, manage the household affairs and serve the men in the family.”[90] Before Bombay appears, the moral contract is already written: the village is the ethical homeland, the mother the guarantor of its sanctity, and the daughter the renewable resource through whom the nation will be economically sustained, spiritually purified, and narratively redeemed.

When the family’s financial crisis deepens, Vibha leaves her studies, sacrificing her potential agency to sustain the family’s moral code. Her decision to move to Mumbai, ostensibly to work, becomes a sacrificial urban pilgrimage that mirrors Radha’s moral suffering in Mother India. However, the city demands a different offering. Failing to secure employment, Vibha enters sex work, rebranding herself as Natasha – an Indo-Western name signalling cosmopolitan reinvention. “She changes from being a traditional and traditionally dressed village girl to being a courtesan in western dress and makeup, compromising her respectability as a Hindu woman.”[91] This is the neoliberal reconfiguration of the courtesan, whereby her transaction becomes a sacrament of piety towards her parents, ultimately embodying what Mishra calls the paradox of the courtesan in Indian cinema – “the woman who exists outside of what is acceptable for an Indian woman” yet whose suffering “gives reassurance to the ‘family audience’, which is the mainstay of the film industry.”[92] The film’s moral grammar thus fuses labour, sexuality, and devotion into a single act of service. In one of its most revealing scenes, Vibha steps into the shower after her first night as a call girl, “washing away her sin and cleansing herself… symbolic of her washing away her identity as Vaibhavari and assuming the identity of Natasha.”[93] The water does not cleanse in a religious sense; it functions as a boundary marker between two coerced identities – the dutiful daughter who leaves home, and the commodity who returns nightly to support it. The scene makes visible the cost of this arrangement and the emotional labour that underpins her financial labour. Rather than signalling rebirth, the shower underscores that she can never truly shed the “stain” of her work, the film’s title reminds us that the chunari, the veil as a symbol of feminine honour, is “symbolically stained by the profession she chooses.”[94] The shot therefore exposes the cruel paradox of neoliberal womanhood – she must be desirable but untouched, sexualised but selfless, active in the world yet defined entirely by service to others. Vibha’s metamorphosis is staged through the recurring image of the chuniri, which covers her body modestly at the film’s beginning, glowing with the bright colours of Banaras. When she becomes Natasha, the chunari is discarded, replaced by “figure-hugging black dresses and vamp-ish makeup, suggesting impurity.”[95] The title song, “Chunari Mein Daag,” literalises the metaphor: “Kore badan si kori chunariya” (“A pure body like a pure veil”) – the veil represents the soul, and its stain is maya, worldly desire.[96] The call girl’s labour, then, is the worldly pleasure that contaminates a woman’s purity and value. However, this is reconciled by Vibha’s unequivocal devotion to her family, faith and femininity.  This act of narrative cleansing has deep ideological roots. As one critic notes, post-2000 films resolved “the conflict between traditional and modern outlooks” by ensuring that “the dangers of Western cultural intrusion were symbolised by provocative attire, smoking, or drinking,” and equilibrium was restored “when women recognised their imperative role as mothers and nurturers.”[97] Vibha’s arc precisely enacts this moral choreography – her Westernisation is permissible only as temporary deviation, the conclusion must reaffirm her identity as Hindu daughter, wife, and goddess.

The film briefly gestures toward a different horizon through Vibha’s sister, Shubhavari [Chutki] (Konkona Sen Sharma), and her partner Vivaan (Kunal Kapoor). Their storyline introduces the language of cosmopolitan modernity: equality, partnership, the rejection of patriarchal shame – Chutki is empowered at work, travels the world and explores a romantic relationship with Vivaan. However, this window of progress quickly closes. In a powerful scene, Vivaan delivers a speech defending the dignity of working women, appearing to momentarily fracture the film’s conservative architecture, suggesting a modern Indian masculinity capable of empathy rather than domination. However the binaries are reinstated as the quintessential Indian woman is described as “computer and mobile savvy, but never fails to pray. On top of things at work, but family comes first. She’s groomed and dressed for success, but her smile is her biggest asset. The new average Jane is a bombshell with a brain.”[98] Even the progressive man can only imagine female empowerment when it serves traditional and capitalistic virtues, with his praise reinscribing the same conditional femininity that governs Vaibhavari’s arc – professional achievement is permissible only when paired with devotional humility and domestic dedication. The rebellious potential of Chutki’s storyline is therefore neutralised as modernity becomes another modality of obedience.

In aesthetic terms, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag visualises this duality through colour, costume, and architecture. Early sequences in Banaras bathe Vaibhavari in golden light, her movements framed by the ghats and temple bells. The camera lingers on her as embodiment of the goddess: “In Indian cinema, the female protagonist is an embodiment of the goddess, and so even a sister, a daughter, or a courtesan, can carry this quality.”[99] When she relocates to Mumbai, the palette darkens to metallic hues, while reflective surfaces (mirrors and glass towers) replace the warmth of the home. Yet these modern spaces merely replicate the brothel’s containment, as Natasha is again an image behind glass, a commodity to be viewed, transforming the goddess into an object of display. The film’s symbolic geography thus links modern labour to ancient sin, while the irony is exact – economic autonomy requires self-erasure. Natasha emerges reborn but hollow—a sainted sinner whose virtue lies in suffering. The ideological clarity of this moral order reflects the broader climate of cultural nationalism. As Chakrabarty observes, “Bollywood’s unique portrayal of Indian familial values of glorifying Hinduism and hailing the patriarchal structure gained popularity among the audience, despite its representation and advocacy of regressive outdates values and laws.”[100] Laaga Chunari Mein Daag performs this function perfectly. It translates Hindu ritual and patriarchal purity codes into cinematic spectacle, packaging regression as glamour and bounty. Vibha’s journey from Banaras to Mumbai and back is less an emancipation than a familiar pilgrimage of transgression to renewed obedience.

The film’s resolution reverses Vibha’s stain through marriage where she and her love interest Rohan (Abhishek Bachchan) marry alongside Chutki and Vivaan in a double wedding feature, absorbing rebellion into reconciliation. The modern man’s liberalism functions as the latest instrument of patriarchal restoration, as he rescues without reforming, by identifying her ‘polluted’ body as sacred river, declaring: “You are Ganga to me.”[101] “Hindu symbolism also engages God as mother,”[102] allowing male redemption to coexist with the continued sanctification of women’s suffering, thus recycling patriarchy through religious reverence. The courtesan becomes a purified devi, and her erotic labour is rewritten as divine endurance. Marriage saves her from this, allowing her to become Vaibhavari once more, clothed again in traditional dress, veiled and sanctified. The narrative grants her survival only through assimilation: the bad woman must be tamed, the stain bleached by matrimony. The conclusion delivers ideological closure, while the marriage ceremony reinstates the chunari, restoring visible purity. Marriage, therefore does not liberate, it launders. The final tableau of Vibha marrying Rohan depicts her re-veiled, domesticated, smiling; however the connotation is less conclusion and more so reset, as much of the film’s social progression is rendered futile. Cosmopolitanism has been used not to expand femininity’s boundaries but to reaffirm them, proving that her labour, sexuality, and suffering are valuable only when they culminate in marriage. The emotional high point of the film occurs not in love or rebellion but in recognition, when mother and daughter reconcile, tears purify the transgression. The spectacle of female suffering produces what Vanita describes as “cathartic moments that legitimise the transformations at the heart of these films.”[103] Vibha’s tears validate her reintegration as pain becomes proof of purity. As in earlier tawaif films, the woman’s redemption depends on the suppression of her own desire – through its layering of Hindu symbolism, neoliberal aspiration, and patriarchal morality, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag offers a textbook example of how post-2000 Bollywood continues to discipline femininity under the guise of empowerment. The courtesan has been rebranded as the call girl, the brothel as the luxury hotel, but the moral equation is unchanged. The woman’s virtue lies in her endurance, her sexuality remains a transaction, and her redemption still requires a man.

Laaga Chunari Mein Daag dresses patriarchy in neoliberal glamour, beneath its gloss of urban mobility and self-made womanhood, the film returns to the Nehruvian template of moral renewal through female sacrifice. The home, not the city, remains the site of redemption, while the family, not the individual are the measure of progress. Like Mother India, it imagines national regeneration through a woman’s endurance, translating Radha’s agrarian suffering into Vibha’s urban repentance. The language of choice conceals the persistence of duty, as Vibha’s labour and desire are redeemed only when they restore patriarchal order. In this sense, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag fulfils Nehru’s ideal of disciplined modernity while re-inscribing the dharmic law that “cosmic order, duty, [and] religion”[104] are again sustained by women’s obedience and male heroism. The stain on the veil is not erased by liberation but by surrender. Through her purification, the film revives the founding myth of Mother India – that the nation’s progress is measured not by women’s freedom but by their capacity to endure, and that her virtue remains the true index of modernity.

Conclusion: The Persistence of Mother India in a Globalised Nation -

Across the temporal and ideological span of this dissertation, from the socialist 1970s to neoliberal modernity, the courtesan has remained the crucible through which Indian cinema negotiates the meaning of womanhood. In Khilona (1970), Chand’s suffering sanctified the moral home; in Sadak (1991), Pooja’s captivity re-moralised the corrupt city; in Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), Vibhavari’s self-commodification reconciled global capitalism with familial duty. Each film translated Mother India’s moral template into its own historical idiom, demonstrating the astonishing endurance of a nationalist imaginary in which female purity secures the moral integrity of the nation. Purity and sacrifice, first inscribed within the cinematic medium on Radha’s body in 1957, have survived every political and economic transition.

However, with the rise of women filmmakers and urban audiences, Hindi cinema after the 2000s appeared to inaugurate a new epoch, as many critics announced the arrival of the “strong woman”, who was “real, empowered, independent” – now autonomous, articulate, and unburdened by patriarchal morality[105]. As one study notes, “With the changing times and more women participating in the film industry, films are currently showing more focused views on strong womanhood that are not subject to the male lead.”[106] This proliferation of female perspectives, exemplified by directors such as Aparna Sen, Mira Nair, Gauri Shinde, and Meghna Gulzar, did open representational space for women as agents rather than symbols. Films such as No One Killed Jessica (2011), Kahaani (2012), Pink (2016), and Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016) foregrounded women’s anger, friendship, and professional competence, rejecting the moral binaries that once confined them to wifehood or martyrdom. Film such as these “make it abundantly clear that there is no one Indian woman, and it is no longer possible to present the Indian woman onscreen as a symbol of India.”[107] Instead, Pramanik and Mishra assert that women “are the driving force behind the plots… They have moved beyond playing the roles of the mother, sister, and lover of the hero.”[108] This shift reflected a larger cultural transformation in post-liberalisation India – the visibility of women in the workforce, education, and politics, and the consequent negotiation between modern aspiration and traditional morality. On the surface, this represents a radical departure from Mother India’s sacrificial moralism.

Yet the ruptures continue to persist, as even the most progressive films often reinscribe conventional femininity as the ultimate moral horizon. Female agency continues to be tethered to collective morality as the rhetoric of empowerment operates within an unchanged moral economy: the good woman is still defined by her capacity to nurture, endure, and redeem. The cinematic mother may enter the marketplace, but she carries the nation’s conscience with her,  remaining “active agents in the nation-building process” rather than autonomous subjects.[109]

The resurgence of cultural nationalism in Modi’s India since 2014 has transformed the cinematic discourse on womanhood from liberal pluralism to moral revivalism. State-endorsed blockbusters increasingly position women as emblems of Hindu virtue – devoted daughters, warrior mothers, or spiritual leaders – while marginalising sexual or religious minorities. The feminine ideal has been recast in explicitly Hindu-centric terms: chaste, sacrificial, and patriotic. Films such as Padmaavat (2018), Tanhaji (2020), and The Kashmir Files (2022) mobilise women’s suffering as evidence of national purity, reviving the mythic moralism of Mother India. Even when female protagonists appear powerful, their agency is ordained by devotion to family, faith, or homeland – the Bharat Mata trope has been re-inscribed as political orthodoxy.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022), though celebrated as feminist spectacle, epitomises what feminist scholars have long identified as Bollywood’s “stereotypical roles of subordination,” where women’s empowerment is subsumed within moral service to the nation.[110] Its heroine, a sex worker turned political leader, gains legitimacy only by transforming herself into a maternal protector of her community. Her campaign for the rights of prostitutes is articulated through the rhetoric of motherhood – she becomes ‘Ganga Maa’ to her girls, her authority grounded in sacrificial leadership rather than political acumen. The film’s Hindu iconography: Ganga’s white sari, temple bells, and goddess imagery – reclaims the prostitute for the moral nation while erasing the courtesan’s historical agency. This ideological pattern persists in Bhansali’s recent Netflix series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (2024), which is cloaked in the splendour of pre-Independence Lucknow. The series converts the kotha into a national space, aligning the courtesan’s suffering with the purity of Bharat Mata. Like Gangubai, Heeramandi constructs its women as devis, divine yet domesticated heroines whose endurance and longing for a life beyond the kotha legitimises their identities. Such works exemplify the Modi era’s cultural hegemony, where the spectacle of female agency “animate[s] and mobilise[s] such identity politics in ways that have become increasingly urgent” with Modi’s “rhetoric of ‘India First’.[111] Through lavish visuals and devotional metaphors, Bhansali’s cinema participates in this moral economy: the courtesan may now speak, but she speaks only in the language of nationalism. The synthesis of global capitalism and moral conservatism marks the ideological culmination of the courtesan’s cinematic journey. From Chand’s home to Pooja’s brothel to Vibhavari’s hotel room, women’s labour has been narratively purified through sacrifice; in Modi’s India, that purification has become a national virtue.

It is tempting to read the proliferation of female-centred or courtesan films as evidence of social progress, and indeed many offer vital correctives to earlier representations. Yet the persistence of moral motherhood beneath their emancipatory surfaces reveals the endurance of nationalist patriarchy. The contemporary heroine may reject the sari for jeans, but she still carries the burden of cultural authenticity. Even as filmmakers celebrate choice, the acceptable choices remain those that reaffirm community and faith. The courtesan’s story, traced across this dissertation, thus mirrors the broader narrative of India’s gender politics: a cycle of transformation and containment. Each new economic order redefines the terms of female virtue without dismantling its necessity. The socialist courtesan laboured for the family, the liberalised courtesan suffered for love, the neoliberal courtesan provided for both – and the nationalist woman of Modi’s India canonises them all. What began in Mother India endured throughout the 20th century and persists in the 21st century: women are draped not merely in silk but in the moral weight of the nation.

[1] Singh, Vijay Prakash. "From Tawaif to nautch girl: The transition of the Lucknow courtesan." South Asian Review 35.2 (2014): 180

[2] Ibid, 179

[3] Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. "Lifestyle as resistance: The case of the courtesans of Lucknow, India." Feminist Studies 16.2 (1990): 260

[4] Gandhi, Mahatma. “Speech at Madras”, 15 September 1921, Madras, quoted in The collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, (1958).

[5] Morris, Rosalind C., ed. Can the subaltern speak?: Reflections on the history of an idea. Columbia University Press, 2010: 48

[6] Mukherjee, Bidisha. "NATION AS MOTHERLAND: DECONSTRUCTING THE IMAGE OF “BHARAT MATA”.": 584

[7] Chakrabarty, Darshana. "Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films." Cinematic Representations of Women in Modern Celebrity Culture, 1900–1950. Routledge, 2022: 120

[8] Ibid, 120-1

[9] Schulze, Brigitte. “The Cinematic Discovery of India’: Mehboob’s Re-Invention of the Nation in Mother India.” Social Scientist, vol. 30, no/9/10 (2002): 78

[10] Ibid, 77

[11] Dwyer, Rachel. Bollywood’s India: Hindi cinema as a guide to contemporary India: Reaktion Books, 2014: 37, 79)

[12] San Chirico, Kerry. "Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema: From Nehru through Modi." Journal for Religion, Film and Media (JRFM) 6.1 (2020): 74

[13] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 129

[14] Mishra, Vijay. "Understanding Bollywood." The handbook of global communication and media ethics 1 (2011): 579

[15] ‘The Cinematic Discovery of India’, Schulze: 78

[16] Chatterji, Shoma A. "The evolution of representing female sexuality in Hindi cinema 1991–2010." Routledge handbook of Indian cinemas. Routledge, 2013: 184

[17] Mishra, Vijay. "Re-mapping Bollywood Cinema: A Postcolonial Case-Study." The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, London: SAGE (2008): 481

[18] Booth, Gregory D. “Making a woman from a tawaif: Courtesans as heroes in Hindi cinema.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9.2 (2007): 12

[19] Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. Motherhood in India: Glorification without empowerment?. Routledge India, 2012: 22

[20] Vanita, Ruth. Dancing with the nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018: 130

[21] Ibid, 24

[22] Ibid, 154

[23] Ibid, 24-5

[24] Ganguly, Jayati. “Reading the ‘Tawaif’: A Study of Pakeezah, Umrao Jaan, Tawaif and Devdas." Middle Flight 7.1 (2018): 240

[25] “Reading the Tawaif.”, Ganguly: 240

[26] Devdas. Directed by Sanjay L. Bhansali, Red Chillies Entertainment, 2002: (1:16:24)

[27] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 16-7

[28] Singh, Rupinder, and Sneha Singh. "The Cultural Codes of Home in Indian Cinema." Home Cultures 21.1 (2024): 73

[29] Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970: (00:22:40)

[30] “The Cultural Codes of Home in Indian Cinema”, Singh: 80

[31] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 130

[32] Ibid, 131

[33] Ibid, 132

[34] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 131

[35] Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970: (02:02:28)

[36] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 12

[37] Ibid, 15

[38] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 24-5

[39] Ibid, 16-7

[40] Ibid, 67

[41] Ibid, 67

[42] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 131

[43] Ibid, 134

[44] Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970: (00:29:00)

[45] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 16-7

[46] Ibid, 16-7

[47] Pramanik, Pratyusha, and Ajit K. Mishra. “Changing stories, changing lives: Reconfiguration of mother practices in contemporary Bollywood.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 42.2 (2025): 581-2

[48] Ibid, 34

[49] Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970: (00:11:38)

[50] Dancing the Nation, 95

[51] Ibid, 34

[52] Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970: (00:11:30)

[53] Ibid, 134

[54] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 10

[55] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty: 134

[56] Yousuf, Ghulam-Sarwar. "Religious and Spiritual Values In Kalidasa’s Shakuntala." KATHA-The Official Journal of the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue 1.1 (2005): 29

[57] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 152-3

[58] Ibid, 24

[59] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty: 134

[60] Patel, Sujata. "11 Bombay/Mumbai: globalization, inequalities, and politics." World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and Inequality (2004): 332

[61] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 125

[62] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 12

[63] Smelik, Anneke. And the mirror cracked: feminist cinema and film theory. Springer, 1998: 13

[64] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 12

[65] Ibid, 13

[66] Sadak. Directed by Mahesh Butt, NH Studioz, 1991: (00:27:30)

[67] Ibid, (00:28:20)

[68] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty: 131

[69] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 130

[70] Sadak. Directed by Mahesh Butt, NH Studioz, 1991: (00:43:52)

[71] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty: 132

[72] Mushtaq, Toyeba, and Ahmed, Aliya. “Third Gender Portrayal in Bollywood: An Analysis of Sadak” (2019): 18

[73] Ibid, 18

[74] Ibid, 19

[75] Ibid, 20

[76] Ibid, 21

[77] “The Cultural Codes of Home in Indian Cinema”, Singh: 80

[78] Ibid, 73

[79] Ibid, 20

[80] Waugh, Thomas. "Queer Bollywood: Same-sex sexuality, gender transgression and ‘otherness' in Indian popular cinema of the 1990s 1." The Other in South Asian Religion, Literature and Film. Routledge, 2014: 132

[81] Ibid, 76-7

[82] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 124

[83] “Changing stories, changing lives”, Pramanik, Pratyusha, and Ajit K. Mishra, 581

[84] Ibid, 581

[85] “The Cinematic Discovery of India”, Schulze, Brigitte, 78

[86] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 136

[87] Ramkissoon, Nikita. “Representations of women in Bollywood cinema: characterization, songs, dance, and dress in Yash Raj films from 1997 to 2007”. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009: 68-9

[88] Motherhood in India, Krishnaraj: 159

[89] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty: 125

[90] Ibid, 125

[91] Ibid, 64-5

[92] Ibid, 97

[93] Ibid, 79

[94] Ibid, 97

[95] Ibid, 75-6

[96] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 190-1

[97] “Changing stories, changing lives”, Pramanik, Pratyusha, and Ajit K. Mishra, 581-2

[98] Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. Directed by Pradeep Sarkar, Yash Chopra Films, 2007: (01:30:00)

[99] “The Cultural Codes of Home in Indian Cinema”, Singh and Singh, 73

[100] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 120-1

[101] Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. Directed by Pradeep Sarkar, Yash Chopra Films, 2007: (02:04:50)

[102] Dancing the Nation, Vanita: 190

[103] “Making a woman from a tawaif”, Booth: 18

[104] “Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema”, San Chirico: 74

[105] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 137

[106] Ibid, 137

[107] Gupta, Sukanya. "Kahaani, Gulaab Gang and Queen: Remaking the queens of bollywood." South Asian Popular Culture 13.2 (2015): 108

[108] “Changing stories, changing lives”, Pramanik, Pratyusha and Ajit K. Mishra, 579

[109] Ibid, 580

[110] “Deconstructing Femininity and Progression of Women in 20th-Century Bollywood Films”, Chakrabarty, 131

[111] Putcha, Rumya S. "the modern courtesan: gender, religion and dance in transnational India." Feminist Review 126.1 (2020): 60

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Ganguly, Jayati. "Reading the ‘Tawaif’: A Study of Pakeezah, Umrao Jaan, Tawaif and Devdas." Middle Flight 7.1 (2018)

Gupta, Sukanya. "Kahaani, Gulaab Gang and Queen: Remaking the queens of bollywood." South Asian Popular Culture 13.2 (2015): 107-123.

Howard, Grace. Courtesans in Colonial India: Representations of British Power through Understandings of Nautch-Girls, Devadasis, Tawa'ifs, and Sex-Work, c. 1750-1883. Diss. University of Guelph, 2019: 160)

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Mishra, Vijay. "Understanding Bollywood." The handbook of global communication and media ethics 1 (2011): 577-601.

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Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. "Lifestyle as resistance: The case of the courtesans of Lucknow, India." Feminist Studies 16.2 (1990): 259-287.

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Pramanik, Pratyusha, and Ajit K. Mishra. "Changing stories, changing lives: Reconfiguration of mothering practices in contemporary Bollywood." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 42.2 (2025): 579-601.

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Filmography:

Devdas. Directed by Sanjay L. Bhansali, Red Chillies Entertainment, 2002

Khilona. Directed by Chander Vohra, Prasad Productions Pvt. Ltd., 1970.
Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. Directed by Pradeep Sarkar, Yash Chopra Films, 2007.

Mother India. Directed by Mehboob Khan, Mehboob Productions, 1957.
Pakeezah. Directed by Kamal Amrohi, Mahal Pictures Pvt. Ltd & Sangeeta Enterprises, 1972.

Sadak. Directed by Mahesh Butt, NH Studioz, 1991.