‘Nautch Boy’: Manish Gaekwad’s memoir is also a social document about the politics of respectability

A woman in labour, caught between life and death, chooses her own survival over the unborn child. Manish Gaekwad’s Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas opens not in the comfort of nostalgia but in the rawness of a difficult yet pragmatic choice. The woman’s decision does not render her a callous, selfish, or cruel mother; it reveals a different kind of love, connection, and agency too. Rekha Bai, the mother, a courtesan, does not want her child condemned to a slow, daily death. Having pre-empted the fate usually reserved for the son of a kothewali, where the weight of stigma can suffocate long before life begins, Rekha Bai grants absolute liberation to the unborn.

The twist: both the mother and child live.

Nautch Boy moves like a slow unveiling: of memory, ignominy, love, laughter, tragedy, and pathos, all woven by poetry, artistry, music, and surely dance. A memoir of not only the son of a tawaif, nor confined to a checkered childhood navigating between kothas and classrooms; the nautch boy of this story reclaims voice and space; insists on and persists in the dignity and integrity inherent in lives many prefer to skirt past. As a teller of his own story, Gaekwad builds on...

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