Dear You, 

Trauma doesn’t need aesthetics, but your story does.

Abducted as a child you were sold to a madam who reared you as a courtesan. You learned to dance, sing and compose the finest poetry, just as you learned to play your sensual charm. You became a star of some sort and then became the property of anyone who happened to come along.

When you could finally return to your village and met your grown-up little brother, he cursed you and accused you of being what you were: a whore, and guilty for that. 

And you - you shamed yourself.
Shamed for being abducted, shamed for being sold.
Shame on you, because fate put you in a bottomless pit. 

Or as my neighbourhood grandma, with her piercing moral gaze, says with much aversion and righteousness,
“It’s ALL her fault.”

Trauma doesn’t need aesthetics, but your story does.

Etched in our collective memory, created by books, films and our un-lived fantasies - you are the temptress, the tawaif.

Financially independent, yet, on the fringes of the patriarchal society. Sitting bejewelled, with her thin delicate lips sensually parted, as her cascading hair curls down as far as her waist. 

From there on, if I could, in my shoddy attempt, time travel from 1868 to 1948, here is how your appeal, attached to our morality, plummeted:

In 1868, the British decided to cleanse & civilise the then colonial India. They censored your kind and branded you as prostitutes.

By the early 20th century, most of you gave up the mujra (dancing) to acquire dignity in the new found radio and cinema as actors & singers.

Post Independence, fresh with idealism and nationalism, we internalised and adopted the Victorian Value System. Thereon, the leaders and cultural evangelists of the new India (read: middle class and liberal), flocked to rescue the dance and music from the clutches of whores. Basically, you. They cleansed it, purified it, nationalized it and then institutionalized it.

But it isn’t just you, across the world, keeping up with the western canon of intellect, we kept forging new double standards. Constructing binaries of high art & low art, classical & folk, worthy & unworthy, insulating the privileged and outcasting the oppressed.

Trauma doesn’t need aesthetics, but re-telling your story again and again and again, full of atrocities and self-mutilation needs the creation of this facade.

Yours faithfully, Me.