Anna Morcom’s book opens with a portrait of Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah, one of Indian cinema’s best known courtesans. Sahib Jan, played by Meena Kumari, falls in love with a nobleman and tries to break with her tainted past. Accepted by her lover, Sahib Jan is still overcome by shame and returns to the brothel. In the end, it turns out by happy coincidence that she too is the daughter of a noble, and is finally able to marry her lover. But not before a dramatic sequence where she dances on shattered glass and ruins her feet, ending her avatar as a tawaif.

It is this stigma and exclusion faces by Indian courtesans and the denial of their place in the country’s performing arts culture which forms the core of Morcom’s book. Courtesans, Bar Girls and Dancing Boys – The Illicit World of Indian Dance is not the pacy, page-turner its title suggests but an academic text which draws on research and interviews to trace the path of the “nautch-girls” from the pre-colonial to the modern era.

Morcom, a senior lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, was drawn to this subject quite by chance. She set out to research Bollywood dance and followed up leads to bar girls in Mumbai. “I then found myself in the loop of an underworld of Indian dance,” she writes. Her book is a sympathetic and scholarly portrayal of this subterranean world which spans hereditary performers across communities, devdasis and even transgender erotic performers. “None of this is visible in general accounts of Indian culture.

The book aims to tell untold stories, reveal unseen cultures,” writes Morcom. In doing so, she hopes to correct a long-standing injustice. Since the courtesan lineage remains problematic for performers, it is rarely mentioned. For instance, the Incredible India series published in association with the Indian government “makes no mention of devdasis in relation to Bharatanatyam or of courtesans in relation to kathak.”

The book traces the social downfall of the courtesans who were once patronised by royalty and enjoyed considerable influence. Their decline began in the colonial era during which the census identified them in negative ways, classifying them as prostitutes. Then came laws meant to protect British officers from venereal disease. This included laws providing for relocating courtesans outside the city’s borders. The Criminal Tribes Act which targeted nomadic tribes, also worked against them.

Yet the categorisation of “nautch” as a social evil continued even after Independence with the performers targeted by obscenity regulations and laws against soliciting and trafficking. The loss of princely courts also threw many traditional performers into destitution and prostitution. At the same time, classical dance forms saw the purge of hereditary dancers and increasingly became the preserve of upper caste “respectable women.” But change was in the offing with the Bollywood dance revolution which gentrified public performances. Over time, dancing was no longer restricted to vamps who were phased out by the heroines themselves. Dancing in the film industry became an acceptable career for women from middle class homes.

The emergence of dance bars in Mumbai in the mid-1980s provided another lucrative avenue for hereditary performers. “Girls earned good money dancing in these bars,” the book points out. They were also seen as icons of glamour and beauty, but now danced for the common man instead of nawabs. When the bars were banned in 2005, the state ironically used the same moralistic arguments used against nautch-girls in 19century India: that they were prostitutes or were being exploited and needed to be saved.

The real gem in this work is the absorbing account of the tribes and communities of traditional dancers like the Nat and Bedia performers from North India who later found their way into Mumbai’s beer bars as dancers. Also, the Kanjar, Deredar and Kolhati communities, the last being associated with Maharashtra’s lavani and tamasha performances. The Kolhati artistes have perhaps received the greatest social approval, with Lavani being promoted by the state with pride as Maharashtrian culture. It also has a fascinating sketch of transgender erotic performers or kothi artistes. They found their place in genres including the Ramlila, the Nautanki dance-drama, the Badhava wedding troupes and Hindu Jagrans. However, they faced even greater stigma than female performers. Most of the kothi dancers she met used to “perform secretly by sneaking off and making excuses to family.” Dancing as a female was seen as “even more disgraceful than dancing as a male”. The book’s strength is its rigour and rich fieldwork but it has not been able to overcome its academic moorings. It is written more like a research paper and may not be the book one might like to take on a long flight. In this, it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its eye-catching title.