Nautch Boy: Manish Gaekwad's book sheds light on lives of boys in a 'kotha'

Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life 

in the Kothas

by Manish Gaekwad 

Published by HarperCollins India

216 pages, ₹499

  In The Last Courtesan, Writing My Mother’s Memoir, Manish Gaekwad creates a formidable image of his mother, Rekhabai, and her single-minded determination to live on her terms despite the cards that life and society had dealt her. That memoir read like an action-packed film featuring adventures across dargahs, melas, goons, fire and murders in kothas. Her desire, at all times, was to provide a better future to her siblings and, later, her son. She put him in boarding school at the age of five, afraid of how he would fare in her environment. She didn’t know what he thought or felt, for he was always silent. In Nautch Boy, Gaekwad breaks his silence to express how violence shaped it in the first place. 

 

Nautch, a corrupted pronunciation of naach, fascinated the author in his childhood. As a practice, the tawaifs didn’t let their children near their performances and patrons. But children learnt to mimic their environment, they got together and danced in the kothas, often for the entertainment of the courtesans. Gaekwad was deeply fascinated by Sridevi, his “onscreen mother — a superb dancer training me in Mother’s absence”. In his boarding school, he dressed up as a girl and danced on stage to songs such as “Naach Mayuri” and “Sun Sahiba Sun”. He enjoyed it thoroughly but was berated by teachers for not acting like a boy. He was called a sissy many times in his adolescent years; if he remained unaffected by it all, the credit went to his mother. “The constructs of masculinity did not trouble me when everyone around me was losing their minds calling me names. […] Not once did my mother tease or taunt me, or ask me to man up,” he writes. 

For all that, his relationship with Rekhabai was fraught. As a child, he perceived his mother’s violent protection as abandonment and neglect. She sent him to boarding school under a false surname, sent money for a grand celebration of his birthday, but was always absent. When he returned to the kotha for winter vacations, he found her entertaining a patron and imbibing alcohol. He detested both. Living in one small room, he was often a reluctant witness to his mother’s private business at night. He experienced his first kiss in the kotha, followed by many others in the boarding school, often bordering abuse. These incidents evoke discomfort and disbelief at the child’s ability to move on as if it were all normal, his normal. 

The author invests his childhood with the emotional complexity of a boy who yearned for his mother’s love and rebelled against her dreams for him. Readers will be surprised with the change of tone from the raunchy voice of his mother in The Last Courtesan, to a sophisticated and literary telling of his life in Nautch Boy.  

Gaekwad grew up believing his mother was “every bit a daredevil, and I a scaredy mouse”. It is evident, however, that he has inherited his mother’s spirit in the matter-of-fact narration of his story. Yet, his self-reflective prose moves slowly, engages with the complication of his circumstances and emotions, and provides a very different perspective of Rekhabai. 

Gaekwad’s English-medium education shaped his career to the point that in this memoir, he often addresses his mother as Mother, as Camus does in The Outsider. He left home and his mother behind in Calcutta in 2002 for a call centre job in Gurugram, only to return as a writer. “Seventeen Years Later,” his essays on his mother’s life, went viral and won him a book deal. In this book, he explores his fraught relationship with his ailing mother vis-à-vis his struggle to provide for her medical expenses, which led him  to a role in Red Chillies Entertainment after a short, disappointing gig with Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

Nautch Boy showcases  Gaekwad’s brilliance as a writer. Notably, he harbours no bitterness about his life and queer identity despite the abuse and his mother’s lack of acknowledgement of  his queerness. 

 

The book sheds light on the lives of boys in a kotha, and the power of English education in India to change the public perception of a person with roots in minority caste and religion. It leaves the reader rooting  for another book from Gaekwad.  For the  best reading experience, Nautch Boy  should ideally be read back-to-back with.  The Last Courtesan. 

---

 

The reviewer is an independent writer based in Sambalpur, Odisha. She is @geekyliterati on Instagram/X