With over 60 performances and a new EP, the project by vocalists and performers Avanti Patel and Rutuja Lad pays tribute to the women who shaped India’s classical traditions while confronting the stigma that silenced them
Deep into the research phase of a musical project dedicated to India’s courtesan history, Hindustani classical musician Avanti Patel was struck by a realization: most mainstream media representations focused on the dancers, completely overlooking the singers. “None of them [were showing] singers, which is ridiculous, because all the big names whose music has come through that generation are women musicians,” she tells Rolling Stone India, referencing the likes of Gauhar Jaan, one of India’s first recording artists, Jankibai, a celebrated performer from Allahabad, and Rasoolanbai, a specialist in the Purab Ang style of thumri. This, she pointed out, was likely because some of the most notable films and portrayals of courtesan culture, from Umrao Jaan to Heeramandi, were helmed by men.
Popularly known as tawaifs, these courtesans—highly accomplished in the arts of singing, dancing, and poetry—played a central role in shaping India’s pre-independence musical legacy. Yet they were often reduced to a highly sexualized image because their autonomy and freedom defied the norms imposed on women at the time. They were also casually dismissed with the derogatory label “naachne gaanewali.” So when Patel set out to flip the script and transform their stories into a musical tribute, the name O Gaanewali felt like a natural fit.
With more than 60 live performances across the country since 2022, and a recently released six-track EP called O Gaanewali Session 1 that serves as a digital extension of their on-stage experience, the musical project is dedicated to the women performers who shaped the evolution of classical forms, including thumri, dadra, ghazal, hori, and more.
The show features Patel alongside vocalist Rutuja Lad, who she trained with under Padma Shri awardee Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, as well as a rotating cast of musicians who play the tabla, sarangi, and harmonium—all instruments considered essential in evoking the soundscape of a 19th-century kotha. Each live performance threads together contemporary interpretations of the classical traditions with the most extraordinary stories from the golden age of tawaifs.
Referring to the O Gaanewali performance as an “alive experience,” Patel points out that the beauty of the show is that it is always changing. “The music and stories are so vast that we can’t possibly bring it all together in a 120-minute show. So, depending on what time of the year it is, what season it is, we change the script, the songs, and the set list.”
Whether recounting the bewildering anecdote of Gauhar Jaan spending thousands of rupees on her cat’s wedding (an extravagance unheard of at the time), or correcting new-age adaptations that alter the lyrics of the song “Phool gendwa na maaro, laage jobanwa pe chot” from jobanwa (body) to karejwa (heart), each performance attempts to conjure a vivid portrait of these women’s storied lives.
Having extensively researched the subject through books, conferences, and panel discussions by the likes of Saba Dewan, Vikram Sampath, Yatindra Mishra, Shubha Mudgal, and other historians, the project takes on an almost journalistic rigor, careful not to propagate stories that cannot be factually corroborated. “There’s an incident mentioned in Saba Dewan’s book where an artist is performing at a pre-wedding ceremony,” recounts Patel. “When she finishes, money showers down on her from a tree, showing how wealthy the family [she was performing for] was. Then, there are gunshots and a scene of suspense unfolds. She’s kidnapped, and eventually escapes. These are the kinds of stories we haven’t brought into the show, because so much of it is hearsay and can’t be verified.”
But it is these very stories, Patel points out, that infuse the music with a deeper context. Lad chimes in that the show has helped her tap into a more introspective side of herself as a vocalist, allowing her to access emotions she might not ordinarily have been able to.
“We tend to focus on the content of the song, but there are so many other things that affect one’s musicality,” she explains. Working with a team of theatre directors, Lad was able to grasp the different ways she could communicate the same line—through intonation, accents, subtext and even restraint. “These things were not a part of my work as a performer, but O Gaanewali has allowed me to express an idea musically, and shown me that the way you think and speak can also seep into the way you sing. Now, the general inclination is [to ask questions like] in what period this was sung, or, who were the composers? What was the kind of life that they led at that time? And how did these other factors [impact the] music. Because these are all interrelated factors.”
From their first release, “Muddat Hui Hai,” a ghazal by Mirza Ghalib that was famously sung by Iqbal Bano, to “Rangi Saari,” a thumri popularized by vocalist Shobha Gurtu (which got a popular Bollywood reimagining sung by Kavita and Kanishk Seth), to “Chha Rahi Kali Ghata,” a thumri by Begum Akhtar that was also performed on Coke Studio Pakistan in 2013, each of O Gaanewali’s interpretations play with different treatments and musical arrangements. Their music swells with an ethereal grandiosity, intimate but haunting. Powerful yet laced with a fragile tremble, each track echoes the voices that once drifted through royal courts and salons, carrying stories of longing, defiance, and grace.
When asked how they translated the nuances of a live performance reliant on the kind of ornamentation and flourishes that can only come from a certain physical presence, Patel answers without hesitation: “Some of the songs are really contemporized in their arrangement, but in terms of the vocal ornamentation, the flourishes, the alaps, the bol banau, all of that definitely has grounding that comes from our taalis,” she explains. “So it doesn’t feel like a quote, unquote song, while still bringing you the essence of what a thumri or a dadra should have.”
What also sets their EP apart, according to Patel, is that while much of today’s music industry races to produce short, easily digestible tracks, they rebel against these standards, allowing their songs to breathe—often stretching to lengths of over nine minutes. Lad, meanwhile, points out that while the live performance gives them room to improvise, translating it into a digital format requires greater precision with each vocal progression—something she likens to how 30-minute-long khayals had to be condensed into just three minutes with the advent of the recording age.
The two also emphasize that while the EP offers their listeners a way to relive the on-stage experience, it is by no means a replacement, with upcoming shows slated for Sept. 9 and 10, 2025, at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre, and more baithak-style sessions expected later this year.
Through this project, the pair hopes to give tawaifs the credit they were denied, drawing parallels to the state of female musicians in India today. At the height of their fame, women like Gauhar Jaan and Jankibai were wealthy and influential, yet their success made them targets of suspicion, lawsuits, and exploitation. While Gauhar Jaan was hounded by false heirs to her fortune, Jankibai was stripped of vast property in Allahabad. “They were living these like very glamorous lives with a lot of so-called status symbols, but, at the same time, their lives ended in ways that were very abysmal and sad. And in a sense, even though we’ve come a long, long way, women artists today still don’t get the same kind of space that male artists have.”