Tracing the obsession of the two filmmakers with the figure of the courtesan, actor, and sex-worker, often rolled into one lonely, headstrong character type
Notice the similarity in posture in the poster for Mandi (Benegal, 1983, top photo) and Gangubai Kathiawadi (Bhansali, 2022). What else do you notice?
Although the web series Heeramandi was all over our screens in the summer of 2024, I had successfully avoided it. I thought of Sanjay Bhansali much later that year when I started writing an essay on the filmmaker Shyam Benegal. His debut feature Ankur had released in 1974, and 2024 marked 50 years of the superb novelistic film, and Benegal’s rich filmography. As it happened, he would pass away at the end of the year. It was when I was going through his first stunning decade of filmmaking (1974 to the mid-1980s) and rewatching the marvellous comedy Mandi that the similarity first struck me. Benegal’s filmography is marked by an abiding interest in the figure of the performing woman—the tawaif or courtesan, the actor, the sex worker —a preoccupation that perhaps only Bhansali’s (still-growing) filmography shares to the same extent among prominent Hindi filmmakers of both their generations.
Consider the evidence. In 1977, three years after his debut Ankur, Benegal made Bhumika based on the Marathi screen idol Hansa Wadkar’s autobiography Sangta Aike, starring Smita Patil as the protagonist. Patil is incandescent here, and the film is both complex and joyful. Films about performing women have a tendency to be maudlin—how social censure burns up these talented, golden-hearted women. Bhumika averts this, carrying unexpected spurts of joy, without simplifying the complicated story of the 1940s Marathi screen legend, who descended from a line of female performers.
In 1983, Benegal made Mandi, a delightful, high-energy farce set in a brothel in Hyderabad that won’t let you stop smiling. The story is about a warm-hearted madam and her gifted troupe of trained singer and dancer girls, who also perform sex work to keep the establishment running. But they see themselves as kalakaar —artists striving to keep their music and dance alive in prudish, post-colonial India with Victorian morals.
And from 1994 to 2001, Benegal made what I call his womanhood trilogy – Mammo (1994), Sardari Begum (1997) and Zubeidaa (2001)— stories of three headstrong women seeking to be their own person, citizens in their own right. Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa are about performing women, the former about a young woman from a so-called respectable family who is determined to study music, and the latter about a young woman in the early decades of the 20th century who dreamt of being in the movies. (Mammo is not about a performing woman, but the story of a woman who is thrown out of her marital home after her husband’s death and is literally not recognised as a citizen in her home country, India. In a sense, the story of an everywoman.)
Who is the Performing Woman, Really?
The courtesan is distinct from the actor, and both are distinct from the sex worker. Am I conflating different things under the label of the performing woman? Indeed. My definition of the performing woman is a woman who labours with her body. Singing, dancing, acting and sex work are all corporeal labours. Furthermore, there is an overlap between the categories of courtesan and early Indian film actors. A significant number of actors in the early decades of Indian cinemas came from performing lineages, note the scholars Usha Iyer in Dancing Women and Debashree Mukherjee in Bombay Hustle—both men and women performers. But the women especially, because cinema was considered disreputable and women from ‘good families’ would not be permitted to work in film.
Next, the distinction between courtesan and sex-worker is not firm in Hindi cinema’s depiction of the figure—the tawaif is shown as having sexual relationships with certain clients; some of these are romantic relationships as well. From the (emotional) sighs emitted on screen, it would seem that courtesans do not have much say in the matter, but as viewers, our interpretations of their liaisons suggest a good degree of choice. The tawaif selects which clients she spends her time with. But she is, first of all, a skilled singer and/or dancer. This is the main difference with sex workers—they are paid primarily for sex. But even here, there are slippages: in Benegal’s Mandi, certain women are invited to perform at soirees in the homes of wealthy businessmen, and some women who live in the brothel are expected to earn their keep by sex work. In Bhansali’s Heeramandi, every resident woman (barring the help) is a performer, but sometimes the performers are expected to perform sexual services in addition to song and/or dance.
Bhansali’s Fascination for Performing Women
Now, here is Bhansali: His debut Khamoshi (1998) is the story of a young woman called Annie, born of deaf-mute parents, who wants to be a singer. In the film, her grandmother is played by the dancer woman in Hindi films, Helen—the loveliest bit of casting in all his filmography. In Devdas (2002), the hero’s second love, Chandramukhi, is a well-known tawaif, renowned for her performances across Calcutta. In Saawariya (2007), Bhansali’s most prominent flop, Rani Mukherjee plays Gulab, a sex worker who acts as the hero’s confidante.
In 2022, in the middle of the pandemic lockdown, Bhansali delivered a blockbuster in Gangubai Kathiawadi. Based on a story in the bestselling non-fiction book Mafia Queens of Mumbai titled ‘The Matriarch of Kamathipura’, it tells the story of a wealthy schoolgirl who eloped from home because she wanted to act in the movies in Bombay. Sold by her husband to a brothel, Ganga Harjeevandas Kathiawadi would become known as Gangubai Kathiawadi, a legendary madam whose photographs were lovingly preserved on the walls of Kamathipura brothels long after she was gone, because of how she successfully lobbied to prevent the displacement of the red light area on the of basis of a neighbourhood school’s complaint that the sex-workers were a bad influence on the children.
In 2024, Bhansali made his foray into long-form OTT storytelling with Heera Mandi, featuring a cast of women in one brothel ruled by the iron grip of the Miss Havisham-like Mallikajaan (Manisha Koirala) in pre-Partition Lahore. The women in Heera Mandi are skilled singers and performers, the best in the city, unlike the women in Gangubai Kathiawadi who are sex workers. But the admiration for performing exists here too: Gangubai remains a lifelong fan of the movies, although it was her girlhood infatuation that led to her life in the brothel.
In a memorable interview to the writer and editor Nisha Susan in Tehelka (no longer available on the web), Bhansali recalled being mesmerised by the shooting of a Hindi film song sequence starring Sanjay Khan and Mumtaz in his boyhood. It was then that he realised that he was happiest on a film set. Like his Gangubai, Bhansali himself is fascinated by performers, the atmospherics of performing, the sizzling alchemy of performance. As I see it, all his performing women—even Khamoshi’s Annie who might feel like a misfit in the list—are shaped by this fascination.
Screenshots from Khamoshi (Bhansali, 1998)
A Clear Cinematic Continuity
There is a pose in Benegal’s Mandi, captured in one of the film’s most recognisable posters, of the women in the brothel laughing and arranging themselves near the doorway of their quarters to solicit customers that is replicated in Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi. In Gangubai, the lead Alia Bhatt is being taught to arrange herself in that way, while in Mandi a gaggle of women are engaged in it. There is no laughter in Bhatt’s moment; there is fragility. The posture is not precisely the same as the one in Mandi. But the similarity is unmistakeable, is it not? (Interestingly, one of the women standing to solicit customers in Mandi is Soni Razdan, Bhatt’s real-life mother, who plays a sullen, grey character in Benegal’s madcap farce.)
In Mandi too, Rukmini Bai’s brothel is displaced due to a righteous women’s right’s campaign run by a politically well-connected woman called Shanti Devi with Brahminical ideas. Bhansali’s film is based on a non-fiction account, thus different from a feature. But the story reinforces the similarities between the films.
The Dull and the Delicious / The Frugal and the Maximalist
But how can you compare the sacred and the profane, the Benegal fans may (likely) sayid when they stormed out at the title of the present essay. Or, the dull and the delicious, as Bhansali fans might say.
Bhansali is known for his extravagant budgets and over-wrought aesthetic. For excess. Benegal, on the other hand, is known for his realistic aesthetic and slender budgets. Many of his films carry the mention of Films Division and NFDC—sources of government funding. The story of his crowdfunding his third film Manthan) is well-known—he collected Rs 2 each from 500,000 dairy co-operative members. In the pre-internet-banking age, this meant collecting money manually from individuals, and a good quantity of travel. A man who understands the value of every rupee, a man of the best middle-class instincts, if you asked a generation of parents who brought up children in the fraught decade of a just-Liberalised India like mine.
One is a Nehruvian Socialist;, the other (going by his budgets) is a Neo-Liberal maximalist, demanding budgets running into hundreds of crores. Benegal is the guardian of the Hindi New Wave movement birthed in 1969, Bhansali is the diva of the Bollywood box office with corporate film studios running after him.
And yet, do look past this (admittedly large) difference in appearance to the stories they tell. My hope with this essay is to make you walk past this outer surface. It’s not only the figure of the performing woman. Both maintain a deep interest in women’s lives in general. To discuss this would be well beyond the ambit and word limit of this essay, but let me put it in the context of the performing woman figure itself.
What the performing woman represents is the independent woman—the woman who can brave social censure, the powerful, (often) financially successful, skilled woman who can survive on her own. In pre-modern India, when women here had little registered presence outside the private sphere of the home, this was primarily the courtesan. Arguably, this continues to this day—certain forms of the performing arts and sex work are avenues that provide less formalised entry to women for earning a livelihood compared to structured professions such as nursing, medicine, teaching, law or anything that requires formal higher education.
The Songs
There is also the memorable music in their films, perhaps natural, given the interest in the performing woman. Another thread that binds them, perhaps naturally given the interest in the performing woman, is music. Both Benegal and Bhansali’s filmographies are studded with memorable songs drawn chiefly from the rich register of music in the Indian sub-continent. What do I mean by this? That the music of their films pays attention to the setting. When Bhansali sets a film in Rajasthan-Gujarat, such as Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam or Goliyon ki Raasleela Ramleela, the music references the cultural traditions and sounds of the region. Hence, the energetic kite-flying song ‘Kai Po Che’ in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, and the garba song ‘Nagada Sang Dhol’ in Goliyon ki Raasleela Ramleela. Incidentally, neither film features a performing woman, but the women dance to traditional music as if they have been doing it forever. It is difficult to think of any of his contemporaries—Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Farhan Akhtar—whose films have the same attentiveness in their music. All of them have competent to good music by Hindi film standards, but there is little or no regional specificity. You might say Ashutosh Gowariker, but he relies on the maestro AR Rahman to do the close listening. Since 2010, Bhansali has been composing the music for his films himself.
Benegal relied on his longtime collaborator Vanraj Bhatia for nearly all of his career. Together they created stunning songs, many of them based on lyrics or poetry by figures such as the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (‘Shamsheer Barehna Mang Ghazab’ in Mandi) and the 16th sultan of Golconda Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (‘Piya Baaj Pyala’ in Nishant). Towards the end of his career, in Zubeidaa (2001), he worked with AR Rahman.
One of the delights in Benegal’s films is the pleasure the women take in singing for its own sake. In Bhumika, Smita Patil is spell-bound by her grandmother’s singing and keeps seeking the beauty of her song all her life. There is a tremendous scene where film star Smita comes home and sits down to sing and play the tanpura with her grandmother, her face alight with joy. In Mandi, the wonderfully melodramatic Shabana Azmi’s Rukmini Bai asks Smita Patil’s Zeenat to hum to her while she presses her head. Bhansali’s performing women mostly do not do this;, they only perform. The pleasure in singing, or dancing, for its own sake is missing.
Screenshots from Bhumika. Notice the grandmother-grand-daughter dynamic that we see in Bhansali’s Khamoshi (images above)?
The Dancer’s Influence
And music brings me to the third (and perhaps most direct) link between them—–Vasant Kumar Shivashankar Padukone, better known as Guru Dutt. In his interviews, Bhansali has often spoken of Guru Dutt as one of his gods alongside Raj Kapoor, V Shantaram and Bimal Roy. But unlike the others, Guru Dutt was a dancer, who trained with the great Indian modern dancer Uday Shankar. Bhansali, too, is a trained Odissi dancer, and the distinctiveness of the choreography in his films suggests his signature. Dutt’s films have relatively minimal choreography but the dancer’s eye is unmistakeable—think of the way Waheeda Rehman scampers with beauty in the beloved song ‘Jaane Kya Tune Kahi’, like a spirit casting a spell on us with her gait. Or Rehman and Dutt’s own exaggerated yet delightful abhinaya in ‘Bhanwra Bada Nadaan Hai’ in Sahib, Biwi Aur Ghulam.
Where does Benegal figure in this? Guru Dutt and Benegal are second cousins. In an interview to the Youtube journalist Samdish Bhatia, Benegal named Guru Dutt as one of the filmmakers he envied in India (Satyajit Ray being the one he admired). “I used to not admire but envy him because of his success,” he said. “But by and large, he had a very restless mind and he used to try out different things often without success. He made some wonderful films like Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam. But he also made a Kaagaz ke Phool which fell on its face.”
Benegal’s songs have not achieved the cult status that his cousin’s have. But seek them out, and you’ll see a genuine flair for the form, often with a touch of wit. And there is one other affinity too: two of the eight films Guru Dutt directed—indeed his best-known ones, Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool—feature the performing woman. In Pyaasa, Waheeda Rehman plays a sex worker, and in Kaagaz ke Phool, she is an actor.
Perhaps you will return, like I did, to the unforgettable Geeta Dutt singing Jaane Kya Tune Kahi, Rehman scampering with supernatural grace on the streets of Calcutta and a spellbound Guru Dutt following her. Perhaps you will see Benegal behind one of the colossal pillars of the colonial city, and Bhansali behind another, watching just as spellbound as Dutt.
This essay was published on Motherland magazine’s Cinema issue, December 2025. Available for Rs 750 at their store. Pdf available on emailing me sohinichat@gmail.com if you agree to write an analysis of the essay : )