Women in Mughal India,” written by Rekha Mishra, is a book devoted to women in the Mughal period, as she believes that the women of that period have not been paid the sufficient attention they deserved. In this work, she has made a humble attempt to depict the position of women, chiefly of the aristocratic class, of the Mughal period. She identifies a major research gap in how archives and court chronicles did not speak much about women. Mrs. Mishra explains how difficult it was to read a vast body of primary literature yet obtain only very minor information about this group. This text is a pivotal piece of this archive, since the Mughal harem consisted of courtesans and women passionate about the arts. This book is not just a text to be read to learn about the voices of women, but should also be treated as an intervention for us. 

This article traces the history of prostitution as labor in India from ancient devadasi traditions through Mughal, colonial, and post-independence periods, examining religious, social, legal, and economic influences while highlighting persistent marginalization and the need for rights-based policies for sex workers. 

This essay by Veena Oldenburg draws on archival work in Lucknow alongside ethnographic engagement with courtesan communities in the 1970s and 1980s. It is often read as an important intervention in that it attempts to foreground courtesans’ voices within dominant narratives that have historically constructed the Tawaif through external, moralizing, or colonial lenses. However, this inclusion also raises questions about mediation, as these voices are necessarily filtered through archival and ethnographic frameworks, rather than accessed in an unmediated form. 

This entry highlights a dissertation examining British representations of courtesans, or nautch-girls, and their role in shaping colonial ideas of Indian womanhood from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Early encounters during the nabob period framed nautch as a site of cultural exchange, but later Victorian moral frameworks recast courtesans as symbols of degeneracy and sexual excess. The study argues that these shifting representations were central to imperial ideology, allowing the British to justify colonial rule as a moral and civilizing mission.

This article examines Pakeezah as a key text within the historical courtesan film genre, analyzing how it navigates tensions between romanticizing courtesan culture and critiquing its constrained social realities. It explores how the film situates itself between nostalgia for the feudal kotha and a desire for transformation into modernity. By engaging with the concept of “chronotope,” the article argues that the film reworks the spatial and temporal conventions of the genre, presenting the courtesan’s world as both aesthetically rich and structurally limiting, while gesturing toward the possibility of reimagined subjectivity beyond it.