Q. Tell us about your journey and experiences as a writer.
MG: There are no experiences without a journey and no journey complete without experience. I’ve had my fair share of both. I’ve never planned it and therein lies my story as a writer.
Q. You have talked about how you decided to write about your mother’s remarkable life in The Last Courtesan, but that being Rekhabai’s son narrating her story is “incidental”. What were some of the challenges and experiences—emotional and otherwise—of writing your mother’s memoir with a certain objectivity?
MG: As early as 17 is when I wanted to tell her story. I was writing a daily diary then. I was writing short stories. I attempted the first chapter but gave up. It took me twenty years to return to her story and rightfully so, because as you mention, I had by then read enough, traveled, reported as a journalist, written sufficiently to know how to approach it with objectivity and not be caught by my private emotions.
Q. Rekhabai’s life was rife with violence and oppression, but also moments of joys and celebration. What are some of your fondest memories with your mother?
MG: My fondest memories were looking after her during the lockdown when she had taken ill. I became my mother’s mother. It taught me to experience love and comfort I didn’t know I had in me to give to her, and by that extension if I can give to anyone else.
Q. Why do you think people should read The Last Courtesan?
MG: I have met perhaps only a handful of people who have lived with such ferocity of spirit. Also, you don’t have to be someone’s something to be a great woman. A woman is her own person before anyone else’s. My mother happens to be one such woman; she is a woman of her own making. If we can’t tell, read, share her story, who else should we celebrate?
Q. The dedication to The Last Courtesan mentions how your mother sang a lullaby to you and “melodiously hummed for our hearts to love.” What role did your mother play in your understanding of love/Love?
MG: To be fearless in love, and own it. It really is pyaar kiya toh darna kya!
Q. I loved your debut novel, Lean Days, because of how deftly it intersects the travelogue-novel-memoir spectrum, and narrates the stories of a gay man’s sexual and emotional encounters across Indian cities with a dry but irresistible humour. How has your personal and professional journey led you to The Last Courtesan? Do you think your own experiences have been shaped and inspired by your mother’s through some parallels—a future repeating her past, like you mention in the dedication of Courtesan?
MG: Thank you for reading that book. It was around the release of Lean Days in 2018, when an essay I wrote for Arre about growing up in the kotha that got me a book deal. Lean Days has a chapter Calcutta Days briefly explaining what has turned into TLC now.
Q. Lean Days is also remarkable for its many literary references, from Proust to Ghalib. From poetry to music, to food, the chapters are interspersed with various quotes and references. Rekhabai was herself an artist par excellence, as the memoir testifies. What was Rekhabai’s influence in your artistic and literary development? And how do you think art is a source of courage and expression for the marginalized?
MG: My mother did not think of herself as an artist as such. She was merely making a living from what was not even considered art in her time. She was not educated or trained in the arts from a gharana. We did not have baithaks and poets walking in for mujras. So I can’t say I grew up in an evolved atmosphere. It certainly isn’t like the Hindi films would have you believe. But yes, by going to a boarding school where English was my first language, I happened to self-cultivate an interest in literature. I would say her influence on me has been indirectly through the colorful, loud, brash, and yet musical environment I have seen at home. Art certainly empowers the marginalized and gives them a voice to express. In my mother’s case, survival was more important than expression when the art itself was forbidden.
Q. The history of tawaifs and nautch girls in India is the history of art and culture. They trained themselves tirelessly to sing and dance masterfully. But in many ways, the moral policing of this culture has reduced it to a spectacle of abjection. What are your thoughts on how our society has abandoned and besmirched the rich history and heritage of tawaif culture?
MG: My thoughts are exactly as you mentioned, it’s done and dusted, and we should also move on. We cannot upturn it. It can be revived on stage, as a spectacle, and be kept alive as a blast from the past, but it is never going to return as your gully-mohalla ka kotha. Where are the gully-mohallas? We live in high-rises now. So maybe if it comes back in a modern avatar.
Q. Which are some of your favourite literary and/or cinematic representations of tawaifs? And how do you think cinema or literature has failed to or succeeded in representing their (emotionally) intense personal histories?
MG: I like Shyam Benegal’s Mandi and Sardari Begum as faithful representations. Of course, there is Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan for the pathos but Benegal manages to depict the tawaif as she is, alive, and kicking, with all her mood swings, closest to reality without missing out on how funny, wild, crazy, silly she can be. He humanizes her, the others idolize her. I cannot speak for other writers writing about tawaifs because they don’t have first-hand experience, so it is always what they are told and what is left to be imagined, and so the personal histories may get lost in translation.
Q. Your work aims to blend the personal and the political—from your novel to your mother’s memoir, as well as your tweets and articles. As a writer, what do you think is the value of this conflation of the personal and the political?
MG: I think as long as one is telling their truth it will resonate with those who are feeling but don’t have the words for it, so maybe that’s what I’m doing as a writer, speaking for another, and hopefully for our collective conscience though that’s not what I set out to do – it’s a small voice in an echo chamber of many voices, lucky if heard.
In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast
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