Review: Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad
Nautch Boy by Manish Gaekwad is a significant contribution to Indian queer literature for confronting not only sex, desire, and bodily indignity, but also poverty and class and their potent intersections
I recently complained to a friend that Indian writing in English often uses a voice curated for the Western reader, overexplaining or exoticizing local phrases and idiosyncrasies. It can get tiresome to see sindoor turn into “red vermillion” or a samosa described as a “pastry with a potato filling,” not least because such voices eviscerate our desi zaika, with verisimilitude diluted to the point where even well-fleshed-out characters feel less relatable than in Hindi cinema.
How refreshing then to chance upon a wholly cinematic book chock-full of phrases like jee ghabrana (feeling anxious), English-Vinglish, and Krismas ka prasad for cake distributed on Christmas. Each phrase captures a specific quirk so rooted in its context that anyone raised in Hindi-speaking India will be reminded of an uncle, aunt or other rishtedaar. This was the first thing that struck me as I began reading Manish Gaekwad’s straight-from-the-heart sequel, Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas, to his earlier book, The Last Courtesan. The prose isn’t the only thing rich in the book. The world Gaekwad conjures — with commendable candour — of his childhood in Bundook Gully, Kolkata, and later of his boyhood in the boarding schools of Kurseong and Darjeeling, is wonderfully textured, too.
At its heart, Nautch Boy is the story of a queer boy growing up in a man’s world but surrounded by women. These aren’t just any women, but those of Bowbazaar Kotha in Bundook Gully, where his mother, Rekhabai, was a courtesan. The title Nautch Boy, however, is a slight hook if one’s expecting the literal male equivalent of ‘nautch girl’, a boy dancing for male onlookers. Rather, it is a metaphor for several interconnected allusions: growing up in a kotha, a space coded as feminine, erotic, and taboo, especially for a boy who’s at home with the ambient music and dance even as he’s discomfited by his inner femininity; his time at boarding school where he’s labelled a ‘sissy’ even as boys dally with him for their pubescent pleasures; and ultimately his journey — born in, and moulded by, hardship — into manhood and self-acceptance, thanks not in small part to his single mother’s sacrifices. In the backdrop, there’s ‘the silvery sounds of payal, the soapy smell of freshly shampooed hair with shikakai and amla, the rustle of shimmering silk fabrics and powdery lashes’, and the hum of Mere haathon mein nau nau choodiyan hain, Main teri dushman and Dhak dhak karne laga. The tale is cinematically vivid, often evoking in the mind the half-imagined sets of Devdas and Mughl-e-Azam; fitting, since the writer is also a scriptwriter.
The book begins, though, with a stark unveiling: Gaekwad’s mother thought of killing him in her womb. Yet, as the narrative unfolds, she transforms into his saviour — fleeing to Bombay for his protection, only to return to Bowbazaar. This sets the stage for a journey at whose heart lies the mother-son relationship, not always rosy, often complicated. Still, the mother’s fierce protectiveness of her son radiates. Growing up in the kotha, he watches her navigate a man’s world as she ‘dances to survive’. She yells at a paanwallah for speaking inappropriately with her boy and does everything to shield him from the seedier goings-on around them. Despite lacking formal education, she’s determined to give him the best. Even though he’s labelled naazuk (delicate), she raises him with an iron hand, thrashing him for coming second or third in class: anything less than first is unacceptable. During winter vacations, she takes him on visits to temples and mosques — it’s her idea of a holiday, or perhaps, as Gaekwad notes with a mixture of tenderness and humour, a detox tour for herself. We come to see a formidable woman who does all she can.
While this mother-son relationship is the book’s anchor, it is Gaekwad’s experiences at school and college that shimmer. Visceral and searingly honest, this section is a graphic account of growing up queer not just in India, but perhaps anywhere. It lays everything bare, reliving pain so close to the bone and in a manner few have so ably done, particularly in showing us how more effeminate queer boys are exploited by others who can easily “pass” in a heteronormative world. Gaekwad remembers himself as “the kid who preferred keeping strangeness to himself.” “Boys stopped interacting with me, singling me out like I was diseased with a dancing disorder,” he writes. In one poignant scene, he imagines himself married to a boy named Vaibhav. But when they’re ‘caught in the act’, others use it as a licence to abuse him. “I was the vamp,” he says, with a sadness tinged with humour, revealing his perceptive outsider’s gaze. The pain of being used but never chosen threads through his youth, crystallizing a sad truth: “a girl was always the real thing. I simply could not compete with that.”
Through these painful formative experiences life always circles back to the kotha, his mother, their songs, and struggles. The music and film actors strewn along the narrative, however, aren’t throwaway references; they’re lifelines connecting mother and son. Sridevi, Meena Kumari, Sonu Nigam, and Shah Rukh Khan all play their parts; indeed, each animates the duo’s imagination as much as their professional and personal lives. If child Manish loved Sridevi in Chalbaaz, to which the adult narrator aptly remarks, ‘a boy obsessed with Sridevi is another strong indicator that this child is more than just a little bit queer’, then his mother’s comment about a modern dancer moving her chest (“there is no nazakat, elegance”) evinces the aesthetics of an older, lost age.
As he enters adulthood, English education creates a gulf between him and his family. Living in a slum, he makes desi liquor, but when the police raid, his cousins are hauled away while he’s spared — a sign of his changed social status. He works as a telemarketer, reads Plato and Freud, and searches for his path. His mother, once central, slowly recedes as education and work take him to new pastures and, finally, to screenwriting.
But 17 years later, Gaekwad returns home. His mother now lives alone in a crumbling building, her smile worn down by gutka, time, and solitude. The mujra trade has vanished, its patrons having moved to dance-bars with air-conditioning. Yet she endures, wistfully remembering the past. In a wrenching moment, she recalls her child marriage while watching Bandit Queen, tears brimming as Phoolan Devi resists her husband’s violence. The roles reverse: Gaekwad is the caregiver, torn between duty and exhaustion — a segment echoing the emotional knots of Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom. But even now, the theme of queerness permeates. “Woh galat raste peh chala gaya hai”, the mother says of someone gay. “As if he took a bend in the road that led to a ditch,” Gaekwad wryly observes. Even after all these years, he sees that in the slum community — perhaps in much of the country — men must still be macho. “The in-betweeners, the queers, need to either belong to the weaker section, such as hijras, or correct themselves.” And so, he doesn’t explicitly come out to her, perhaps to preserve the hope that he might still ‘settle down.’
There is a small complaint that the writing can at times feel overloaded, with vignettes moving quickly before the previous one can fully sink in. Nevertheless, Nautch Boy is a significant contribution to Indian queer literature for confronting not only sex, desire, and bodily indignity, but also poverty and class and their potent intersections.
Somewhere in the middle, Gaekwad asks, “Which son goes out into the world to speak of his courtesan mother, when, right from birth, the world never forgets to remind him that he is a man, macho and all, and there is no place for a macho man inside the kotha?” And yet, he has done exactly that, because silence never protected him. The kotha is a world he longed to escape even as it shaped him. He yearned to be held and loved, exposing the loneliness of queer life, yet drew on his mother’s strength to continue, forging a story shaped by a harsh world —all the while keeping it dancingly alive with hope, humour and humanity.
Siddharth Kapila is a lawyer turned writer. He is the author of Tripping Down the Ganga.
