¹ Forbes-Lindsay, C.H., India: Past and Present (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates & Co., 1903), Vol. II, p. 84Google Scholar.

² Ahmed, Nazir, Fasana-e-Mubtala (Republished by Qaumi Council Barae Farogh Urdu Zuban, New Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Urdu Academy, Lucknow, 2005; first published 1885)Google Scholar.

³ The singular ‘ta’ifa’ is derived from the Arabic ‘ta’if’ which means ‘circumabulator’ and is also the name of a town near Mecca. See Standard Twentieth Century Dictionary: Urdu Into English (Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 2006), pp. 422, 425.

⁴ Māh Lāqa Bai Chanda, Akhlāq se to apne vāqif jahān hogā/par āp ko ghalat kuch ab tak guman hoga. See Petievich, Carla, ‘Feminine Authorship and Urdu Poetic Tradition: Baharistan-i-Naz vs. Tazkira-i-Rekhti’ in Hansen, Kathryn and Lelyveld, David (eds), Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 228Google Scholar.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Partha Chatterjee has argued that the women's question formed the cornerstone of nineteenth century debates on Indian nationalism: the issue was that Indians were divided between those who saw Indian women as intrinsic to the ‘sacred sphere’ of the domestic realm untouched by the evils of colonial modernity and who insisted that women remain there as per ‘tradition’, and those who argued that the struggle against colonial rule required the modernization of Indian society, in which the women's question had to be subject to reform. Feminist historians have shown how prior historiography has not acknowledged women's agency within the colonial period. Partha Chatterjee examines literature, written mostly by men, to argue that the women's question ‘disappeared’ with the rise of nationalism because its issues had been ‘resolved’. Using gender as an analytical category to demonstrate how nationalist discourse was made up of dichotomies of the inner/outer, spiritual/material worlds, which Chatterjee sees as feminine/masculine respectively, he claims that Indian women represented the inner, spiritual world of the home and therefore was burdened with an authentic national identity. Turning to women's writing, feminist historians have contested this claim, emphasizing that this notion of the nationalist resolution of the women's question is problematic, because it tends to reify women as symbolic of larger phenomena, as opposed to viewing them as agents of social and political change. See Chatterjee, Partha, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question’ in Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (eds), Recasting Women (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁷ Barbara Metcalf has defined the term ‘adab’ as ‘a concept, a literary genre, and a quality of personality . . . which reflects a high valuation of the employment of the will in proper discrimination of correct order, behavior, and taste. It implicitly or explicitly distinguishes cultivated behavior from that deemed vulgar, often defined as pre-Islamic custom. Adab means discipline and training. It denotes as well the good breeding and refinement that results from such training.’ See Metcalf, Barbara, Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 3Google Scholar.

⁸ Akhlāq has long been part of the Islamic tradition of ethics, ranging from treatises on the refinement of character, to critiques of political state craft. The literary genre of ‘ilm al-akhlāq, which emerged within the first three centuries of Islamicate cultures of the Near East, means ‘the science of innate dispositions’ and the emergence of discourses of civility, called adab, was the most prominent context in which ethical debate emerged. See Walzer, R., Bearman, Th., Bianquis, C. E., van Donzel Bosworth, E. and Heinrichs, W. P., ‘Akhlaq’ in Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2008; Brill online)Google Scholar.

⁹ Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam: 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 10–12Google Scholar

¹⁰ Devji, Faisal, ‘Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's Reform 1857–1900’ in Hasan, Zoya (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Ahmad, Nazir, Mirat ‘ul-Arus (Karachi: Sultān Husain Press, 1963; reprint)Google Scholar.

¹² Qatun, A.R., Kahaniyan (Karachi: Welcome Book Port Limited, Main Urdu Bazar, 2001 edition)Google Scholar.

¹³ See Metcalf, Barbara, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi's ‘Bihishti Zewar’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Pritchett, Frances W., Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 36Google Scholar. See also Minault, Gail, Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Jalal, Ayesha, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge Press, 2001), pp. 70–72Google Scholar.

¹⁶ See novel, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's, Sharīfzada (Respectable Scion) (New Delhi: Maktaba Jamia Ltd., reprinted edition, 2000; first published in 1900), p. 83Google Scholar, in which he writes that there were to be ‘no domnis, dancing girls, or prostitutes invited to perform at the wedding’ of the chief character's daughter, despite the insistence of the women of the family, for ‘these are low, base rituals’.

¹⁷ Kidwai, Saleem, ‘The Singing Ladies Find a Voice’, Seminar, 540 (August 2004)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ For a study on the favourable position of courtesans in respect of property and inheritance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Pinch, Vijay, ‘Gosain Tawaif: Slaves, Sex, and Ascetics in Rasdhan, ca. 1800–1857’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 559–597CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Literature and scholarship about prostitutes prior to this period show that they lived together either in their own, or royal, households, with various roles and divided into hierarchies, such as tawā’if, khangī, and randī. Social values and Mughal state patronage allowed both the upper class courtesans and the lower class prostitutes to enjoy a relatively privileged place in Indian society. They were officially recognized as an important professional community, at times associated with religious auspiciousness, but never exclusively defined by sexual entertainment. See Banerjee, Sumanta, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998)Google Scholar. For more on the hierarchies between prostitutes, see Oldenburg, Veena, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Speaking for Others/Speaking for Self: Women of Color’, pp. 259–287.

²⁰ See Wald, Erica, ‘From Begums and Bibis to Abandoned Females and Idle Women: Sexual Relationships, Venereal Disease, and the Redefinition of Prostitution in Early Nineteenth Century India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46, 1 (2009), pp. 5–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance’.

²² The Contagious Diseases Act was established in response to alarm about increasing rates of venereal disease among British soldiers; as colonial military and medical authorities debated laws that forbade lower class British soldiers to bring their wives to India, the Act permitted Indian prostitutes to pursue their occupation by establishing lal bazars but severely curbed their movement by imposing mandatory registration at police stations, medical examination at certified clinics, confinement to specified areas of cities and towns, and heavy penalties for violation of these regulations. See Balhattchett, Kenneth, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Camelot Press, 1980)Google Scholar. See also Bannerjee, Dangerous Outcast, p. 70.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Stoler, Ann L., ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonical Cultures’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No. 4 (November 1989), p. 646Google Scholar.

²⁵ Banerjee, Dangerous Outcast.

²⁶ Report of the Committee on Prostitution (1893), p. 286. SOAS Library.

²⁷ Allen, W.H., Peoples of India (1872). India Office LibraryGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Joshi, Sanjay, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 64–65Google Scholar.

²⁹ As Charu Gupta has noted, prostitutes were increasingly held responsible for the increase in crime and the declining sanitary conditions of the cities. Furthermore, the views of colonial authorities meshed with those of Hindu publicists who were concerned about public order in the city, through bylaws that regulated spaces of entertainment and shifting prostitutes to more remote areas. See Gupta, Charu, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Nasim-i-Hind, 15 June 1896, Native Newspaper Reports, National Archives of India (hereafter NAI).

³¹ Awaz-i-Khalq, 16 August 1911, Native Newspaper Reports, NAI.

³² Rai, Munshi Danpat, Shah Begum: Yaane Ek Bazari Mehvish ka Fasana (Lahore, 1903), p. 47Google Scholar. Vernacular Tract (VT) 3867b, India Office Records, British Library (hereafter IOR).

³³ Ibid. Munshi Danpat Rai adds, ‘Whether or not one heeds it, to give good counsel is my duty’, p. 64.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community.

³⁶ DrHusain, Saiyid Ghulam, Tadbir Baqae-Nasl-i-Insan (On diseases peculiar to men and women and their treatment) (Sahna, district Gurgaon: Mahfuz Husain and Brothers, 1912)Google Scholar. VT3952d, IOR.

³⁷ Niaz Fatehpuri remarks that it was a necessary part of Lucknow society in those days, ‘that the aristocrats should freely attend gatherings of music and dance, and learn the etiquette of society in the company of some of the well-known courtesans of the city’. See Niaz Fatepuri's reminiscenses in Ansari, Khizar Humayun, Emergence of Socialist Thought Amongst North Indian Muslims (Lahore: Book Traders, 1990), p. 130Google Scholar.

³⁸ Husain, Aijaz, Meri Yadein (Lucknow: Lucknow Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Sharar, Abul Halim, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (Mashraqi tamaddun ka akhri namunah), trans. and eds Harcourt, E.S. and Hussain, Fakhir (Boulder: Westview Press, 1976), p. 98Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ The passage where Umrā’o Jan reveals how she loses her virginity is a good example. The passage illustrates Ruswa's strategy: the veracity of the story is reinforced by Ruswa's searching questions and jests, to which Umrā’o responds by claiming that he is embellishing. The embellishments are then replaced with the ‘true’ account; it is an act of building a story around a conversation, in which information is supplied in a question-and-answer format. The poetry also weaves together the ethnography, which is ‘indigenously’ performed to provide it with greater truth value. Umrā’o Jan is increasingly depicted as embodying a past, which is then reflected back as nostalgia. Claims to objectivity resituate the tawaif within contemporary parameters of morality.

⁴¹ Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad Hadi, Umrā’o Jān Adā (Karachi: Sang-e-Meel, 2003), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁴² Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad Hadi, Sharīfzada (New Delhi: Maktaba Jamia Ltd., reprinted edition 2000), pp. 7–11Google Scholar.

⁴³ Asaduddin, M., ‘First Urdu Novel: Contesting Claims and Disclaimers’, Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 16 (2001), p 93Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ See Naim, C.M., ‘The Earliest Extant Review of Umrā’o Jān Adā’, Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 15 (2000)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ It is unclear if Ghaffar's novel was inspired by his relationship with his wife, Sakina Begum, although it can be safely assumed that his views about social norms preventing or castigating tawa’ifs from marrying into respectable, middle-class families were informed by his own marital choices.

⁴⁶ Ghaffar, Qazi Abdul, Laila Ke Khutut (Lahore: Almatbata-ul-Arabiya, reprinted edition 2004; Punjab: Daruladab, first edition 1932), p. 39Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Jalal, Ayesha, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jalal, Ayesha, Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 56.

⁴⁹ Ibid. p. 81.

⁵⁰ Ibid. p. 61.

⁵¹ Farina Mir, ‘The Social Space of Language: Punjabi Popular Narrative in Colonial India, c. 1850–1900’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2002, p. 287.

⁵² Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 161.

⁵³ See Kugle, Scott Alan, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2001), pp. 257–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Michael, ‘Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India’ in Arnold, David and Robb, Peter (eds), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader (London: Curzon Press Ltd., 1993), pp. 165–185Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ This punishment applied to the ‘male persons’ who were accused of detaining or seducing women in any place ‘with [the] intent that she may have sexual intercourse with any man other than her lawful husband’. Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act, 1933, Sections 8 and 9, L/PJ/7/753, IOR.

⁵⁵ Indrani Chatterji, ‘Refracting Reality: The 1935 Police Survey of Prostitutes’, Manushi (Delhi) 57 (March–April 1990), pp. 26–36.

⁵⁶ Khan Bahadur Maulvi Fasih-uddin, Member of Assembly, Extract from the Proceedings of the United Provinces Legislative Council, dated 17 February 1933, L/PJ/7/509, IOR.

⁵⁷ Rai Bahadur Babu Vikramjit, for instance, quoted a Persian couplet from the Shahnama, arguing, ‘The [couplet means that] they were so proud of the chastity of women—what to say of men, even the sun had not seen her naked.’ Member of Assembly, Extract from the Proceedings of the United Provinces Legislative Council, dated 17 February 1933, L/PJ/7/509, IOR.

⁵⁸ Member of Assembly, Extract from the proceedings of the United Provinces Legislative Council, dated 17 February 1933, L/PJ/7/509, IOR. Emphasis mine.

⁵⁹ Extracts from the proceedings of the Punjab Legislative Council held on 28 October and 21 November 1935 relating to the Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Bill. The Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act 1933, L/PJ/7/753, IOR.

⁶⁰ Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 31.

⁶¹ Ibid, p. 98.

⁶² See Sangari and Vaid (eds), Recasting Women.

⁶³ Daechsel, Markus, The Politics of Self-Expression, The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid- Twentieth Century India and Pakistan (New York: Routledge Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community.

⁶⁵ Gupta, Charu, ‘(Im)possible Love and Sexual Pleasure in Late-Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 2002), p. 196CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Orsini, Francesca, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 276Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Minault, Gail, Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ In her memoir Hameeda Akhtar Husain Raipuri praises Laila Ke Khutut for its progressive views towards women, and mentions her husband's surprise when she mentioned she was familiar with Qazi Abdul Ghaffar's work. She admits to him that her mother did not know that she was reading such books, and that many of her school friends had read the novella. Upon meeting Qazi Abdul Ghaffar and his wife, she remembers, ‘The real Laila was just as beautiful as I had imagined.’ See Raipuri, Hameeda Akhtar Husain, My Fellow Traveller, A Translation of Humsafar, trans. Azfar, Amina (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Rusva, Mirza Muhammad Hādi, Umrā’o Jān Ada (New Delhi: Maktabah-e Jamiya, 1971), p. 98Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 14.

⁷¹ Ibid, p. 162.

⁷² Qazi Abdul Ghaffar was not alone in this endeavour. The poet Sher Khan ‘Boom’ Meerathi narrated the tale of a prostitute named Tamīzan (her name literally means ‘manners’) who was murdered by the eldest son of a landlord's family when she refused to marry him. Boom wrote a satirical poem about the incident called ‘Qatl-i-Tamīzan’ (‘Murder of Tameezan’) which is still printed in Meerut as a chapbook in Urdu and Hindi. Boom used to recite and sell the poem himself in the streets of Meerut during the 1940s. Another short story in epistolary form, which takes on the voice of the tawā’if, is Krishan Chander's Ek Tawaif Ki Khat: Jawaharlal Nehru aur Muhammad Ali Jinnah Ke Nam (A Letter from a Prostitute to Nehru and Jinnah), written shortly after 1947. The letter humbly beseeches the leaders of the new nation-states of India and Pakistan to visit the tawā’if's home in Bombay, where she is taking care of two women sexually violated and rendered homeless by Partition.

⁷³ Thanvi, Maulana Ashraf Ali, Adab al-Mu’asharat (Delhi: n.d.)Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 89.

⁷⁵ Laila accuses men of producing weak children since they are sexually enervated due to their narrow-mindedness. See Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 93.

⁷⁶ Ibid, p. 95.

⁷⁷ Chatterjee, Indrani, Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 90–91Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, pp. 118–119.

⁷⁹ Daechsel, Markus, The Politics of Self-Expression, The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid- Twentieth Century India and Pakistan (New York: Routledge Press, 2006), p. 106Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Ibid, p.113.

⁸¹ Ibid, p. 34.

⁸² Orsini, Francesca, The Hindi Public Sphere: 1920–1940, Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 284Google Scholar.

⁸³ Ibid, pp. 266–275.

⁸⁴ Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan and Sharma, Sunil (eds), Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman From Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸⁶ Abbas, Ghulam, ‘Anandi (City of Joy)’, trans Chaussee, G.A., Annual of Urdu Studies, Vol. 18 (2003)Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Duara, Prasenjit, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 2Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ There are few narratives and memoirs written by this demi-monde class of women in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially after the term tawā’if acquired negative connotations. One of the few available narratives of this kind is by Malka Pukhraj, who was the court singer and dancer associated with Maharaja Hari Singh's court in Jammu and Kashmir. Her memoir, translated into English by Saleem Kidwai, is a fascinating account of both her life as well as events in Kashmir during the decolonizing period. See Pukhraj, Malka, Kidwai, Saleem, Song Sung True: A Memoir (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ See Ahmed, Talat, Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism: The Progressive Episode in South Asia, 1932–1956 (New Delhi: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Ali, Kamran Asdar, ‘‘Progressives and ‘Perverts’: Partition Stories and Pakistan's Future’, Social Text 108, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall 2011Google Scholar; Gopal, Priyamvada, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation, and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyder, Syed Akbar, ‘Up, Urdu's Progressive Wit: Sulaiman Khatib, Sarvar Danda, and the Subaltern Satirists Who Spoke’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, no. 20, 2005, pp. 99–126Google Scholar; Mufti, Aamir, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Mir, Ali Husain and Mir, Raza, Anthems of Resistance : A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: India Ink Publishing, 2006)Google Scholar.