Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas Manish Gaekwad

“My mother entertained the thought of killing me. A few hours before I was born. In  the hierarchy of noble thoughts, I ranked second in priority. Her own life claimed the top spot—and with good reason: She had to survive before any of this. Whether my story or even hers, was possible.”

This is the first line of Manish Gaekwad’s searing memoir Nautch Boy, dedicated to the mother whose dance shaped his dreams and titled after one of the many epithets accorded to him over the course of his extraordinary life. The introduction goes on to explain why his mother Rekha had thought of letting him go. Daughters born to tawaifs like her could carry on the community trade, but sons were not as useful. The unborn baby’s illegitimate father Rehmat Khan had refused to lend his name or presence to the child. “Was there a more cursed life than to be born an orphan? She knew perfectly well how difficult it would be for me. She had seen a worse fate—as a child, she had been used to pay off a debt to a Bedia family, dressed as a child bride, raped by her husband and then sold to a kotha. When a family offered no guarantees, could one be better off without it?”

Mother and Son both survived. Father suggested at one point that the boy should be named Aurangzeb, but refused still to grant his surname. Rekha Bai - also known as Rehana - named him Manish instead. She had been an extra during the filming of the song Om Shanti Om, sitting in the audience while Rishi Kapoor danced under pink disco lights with his character name M-O-N-T-Y lit up behind him. Monty became Manish’s daak naam pet name. His surname was made Gaikwad after the principal at a boarding school in Darjeeling misheard his mother’s mumbled answer to who her son’s father was. Manish changed the spelling to Gaekwad later, with an ‘e’ instead of ‘i’, to match the spelling of Shivaji Rao Gaekwad “Rajinikanth.”

“Naazuk” was a word used to describe the author by both his mother and the other young men of his age: a lesser pejorative from the parent, and deliberately cruel from the peers. Sports held little appeal and books were preferred companions for a boy living away from home who knew that he was queer before he was familiar with the vocabulary of this difference or had the confidence to articulate it in ownership.

There were other insults too, alongside thinly veiled fetishization, as tends to happen for those who do not conform. In his early experiments with performing on stage for Founder’s Day (partly motivated by the promise of extra food for all those who contributed), Manish danced to Sun Sahiba Sun and a hostile crowd of students. “An English teacher named Suzanna had warned me backstage before my performance. Boys don’t do these things, she had said in a sharp disciplinarian tone. That must have shaken my confidence. I did not have the time to react as she announced my name to perform. She was a teacher I idolized for her larger-than-life-persona. She was always so immaculately dressed in bright pink and yellow minis, wore polished patent leather high heels, chunky gold jewellery, had the reddest lipstick possible that would contrast with skin as fair as hers, and matched with a perfectly coiffured bouffant—really a modern English version of a tawaif, if there was such a thing.”

A keen observer of life around him - at the Kolkata kotha and the Darjeeling boarding school - Manish’s sense of the world also began to be shaped by the books he read. Pivoting to theatre after the cold reception received by his filmy dances, he decided to adapt Cinderella into a gender-swapped play called Cinderarchie with him in the lead role (after nobody else accepted the part) and a girl named Manisha as Princess Charming who proposes to him on stage. “I froze. I forgot my line. One word. I was supposed to say yes… The curtain dropped on my promising career on stage. I stopped putting up my name for quizzes, extempores, elocutions and poetry recitals… I grew into even more of an introvert.”

Even when he was no longer looking for a spotlight, it would be thrust upon him. In literature class, a speech by Cassius in Julius Caesar gave the boys ammunition for another mean nickname: “But, woe the while, our fathers’ minds are dead / And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits / Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish.” “Wo-Manish”. He did not react to the mocking laughter. Instead, he acknowledged the significance of those lines to his own life.

Like the protagonist in Anton Chekhov’s The Bet, Manish read as widely as he could and began writing soon after: a daily journal, translations of the ghazal lyrics practiced by the tawaifs, news features, essays, profiles of his fascinating beautiful complex tawaif mother, movie scripts, a debut novel Lean Days, a critically-acclaimed biography The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir, and Nautch Boy. 

Violence is a running theme through this memoir. The shadows of what it leaves behind colour the experiences of both Mother and Son as they grow up and grow old. Some of it is political - the Bowbazar bomb blasts in 1993 which wiped out most kothas; much of it is societal - stigma, crude conflations, financial hardship. There is a seventeen-year-gap in the book after which the narrative resumes in 2019. Many of the early loops of the story - and the intertwined lives of Rekha and Manish - find poetic rhythms of settling. The Son becomes Mother to the woman who had birthed him. He records her voice and writes her story.

“She has nothing to hide, protect or hold sacred. She will no doubt leave out intimate details, she will not have proof to back her claims, she will not have a chronology, an almanack of records or paperwork, not even photographs (actually, she does have a few).” One photograph that survives is of her ill-fated sister Hasina—on the cover of the 1983 Merchant-Ivory documentary The Courtesans of Bombay. The other sisters Laccha, Rajjo, and Laxmi had sad fates as well, but with the added burden-blessing of obscurity. “Rekha” itself is fate, in one sense—when a doctor asks what her name means, she stretches out her hand to show him the lines on her palm. Slender threads of destiny braid together a family whose maternal ancestral surname had possibly been the nomadic Tamaich. To Manish, the word “savarna” was initially associated with dressing up (“sajna-savarna”), and only later took on the personal and political classification of Denotified Tribal identity. His own self was shaped less by these notions, more by his family, most by his mother.

Love is the other current in this book — it begins, remains, destroys — and crescendoes as the Mother remembers the tender-fierce lullaby written by Sahir Ludhianvi for the film Trishul which she used to sing to the Son when he was in her womb: “Tera koi bhi nahin mere siwa / Mera koi bhi nahin tere siwa / Tu mere saath rahega, Munne.” Rekha saw herself in Waheeda Rehman’s character. Echoes would have resonated against the story of Sahir Ludhianvi’s own mother Sardar Begum. The story is eternal. Music and memory coalesce for Mother and Son in this swan song ode to a life vanishing and a legacy preserved.

The First Australians who migrated out of Africa 70,000 years ago lived a fluid notion of Dreamtime “time-before-time everywhen” which corresponds better to our civilizational sense of continuity than the standardized Prime Meridian Time whose 0° longitude originates in Great Britain as a colonial centre. Globalization has happened many times in large language families much before these most recent centuries of rediscovery. Two genetic mutations on the mtDNA of modern Australian aborigines align perfectly with the Baiga tribe of central India and the Birhor of eastern India from 55,000 years ago. “So whatever the twists and turns Munda genealogy has taken in the last few thousand years,” writes Peggy Mohan in her fascinating book Father Tongue, Motherland, “it is fair to say that Mundas trace back all the way to the first modern humans in the subcontinent.”

Austro-Asiatic ancestry in Munda genealogy around 4000 years ago introduced new words and japonica rice. 9000 years ago, in another agricultural churn, Iranian farmers shifted from Zagros to Balochistan. 200 years ago, a cultivation migration of Bhojpuri-speaking Indians into Trinidad’s plantation economy created a new language which race-focused colonial scholarship cannot adequately explain. But Dr Mohan, who inherited Trinidian English Creole as her ancestral language, makes an intervention: “What if pidgins and primordial chaos are not actually a part of the process that made creoles? This thought is exciting because it is a rare moment when we in India get to use our own languages to challenge linguistic theory and posit one that is better.”

Primordial unity is revealed when diverse layers of vocabulary and grammar are detached from language palimpsests. Northern Dehlavi and Southern Dakkhini illuminate how languages adapt through shared lexicons despite differences in grammatical gender rules. Telugu, Marathi, and Kannada cohere in multilingual Deccan syncretism. Within the Hindi Heartland of Uttar Pradesh, branches of Khari Boli, Awadhi, Maithili, Bundeli, and Brajbhasha have been unevenly crowned to literature. “Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili, while they became literary quite early, never had their literature supported by those in power.” The written language of the elite is often at odds with the oral language of the everyday community. There seems to be a recurring pattern of migrant men, native women — father tongue, motherland.

In searching for the foundational Language X of the Indus Valley Civilization, Dr Mohan draws comparisons between Sanskrit, prakrits, and the modern languages of Punjabi and Sindhi which have emerged from the northwest of the subcontinent. The features she discusses are retroflexion (d versus ḍ as in ‘daant’ and ‘ḍaant’), aspiration (both voiced and voiceless as in bh and th), word order (typically Subject-Object-Verb in Indic languages), light verbs (an Indian love for nouns instead), ergativity and gender (verb agreement with subjects and objects within grammar structures), compound verbs (regularly found in Tibeto-Burman languages), reduplication (yes-yes I know this sentence is becoming too long), and honorifics (thank you for reading, ji). Indian English is a prakrit too: linear language recalibrated by people who belong to cyclical times.

“Was this the sort of social hierarchy the Indus Valley people would have had, a civilization with no temples or palaces?” When we see how Language X lines up on the eight parameters listed above with Tamil in the southern peninsula, the language isolate Burushaski deep in the Karakoram mountains, and the geographically isolated pastoralist Brahui of Balochistan—“A big surprise is how similar Burushaski, Brahui and Tamil look in terms of these features, how much of a resemblance you find when you are not looking at the words themselves or the fine morphological details that make Burushaski such an enigma. Language X comes across as a Dravidian-type language that has Burushaski-style ergativity, an early form of ergativity that simply had markers in all tenses on the subject-as-agent, in sentences with direct objects, and without the flips in alignment that you get in the modern languages of the area that tell of Sanskrit and prakrit influence… Connecting the dots, we could also imagine that Language X would have done its verbs as stems with agreement markers, the way that Tamil, Burushaski and Munda languages do, with person markers for I and you, but gender markers for he, she and it.”

Modern boundaries maintain and destroy complex multilingual histories. In India today, bilingualism has surrendered to a diglossia whose vocabulary is an Internet English percolating from oft-uncredited African American English. To censure a younger generation for stripping language would be unfair. “Brat” is often considered to be derived from the Celtic Old Irish “bratt” meaning “cloth” but could also have emerged from the Marathi-Bangla “vratyal brattyo” for “disobedient child”; “brat” today has different connotations for parents who use it to describe their wilful teenagers who use it to describe their wilful summers. “kamala IS brat,” tweeted British Indian-origin singer Charli XCX in 2024; the Indian-American presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s social media team changed their page backdrop to lime-green soon after to capitalize on this moment of popular culture.

We are all migrants. As globalization accelerates again in this decade of large language machines, our accents are code-switching out of polyphonic plurality. “Some people feel embarrassed of speaking in their mother tongue because they think it’s a villager’s language; it doesn’t seem as polished as English or Hindi,” says YouTuber India in Pixels in a video on Awadhi. Hopefully this will not always be true. “Ganwaar” has become an insult in the same way as being reminded of your auqaat. But time could return these words to their origins. In the meanwhile, the song of language echoes — discordant, eternal, re-sounding in the stillness of yesterday and tomorrow.