From the medieval Bhakti and Sufi traditions to contemporary narratives such as Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas, queer literature in South Asia has remained deeply responsive to its time while constantly evolving and unsettling social norms. Nautch Boy (2025) is Manish Gaekwad’s memoir of growing up queer, as the son of a tawaif [courtesan] in a kotha, surrounded by performing women, shaped by the portrayal of tawaifs in mainstream Hindi cinema, and marked by the gradual decline of tawaif culture as it gives way to sex work. Traditionally, a kotha was a space where a tawaif performed music and dance in a mehfil (musical soirée). Within the kotha, Gaekwad reflects that ‘a boy’s masculinity can become a curse, but his femininity is never a blessing. I had to balance the two’ (pp. 26-27). This observation offers vivid insight into his lived vulnerability and precarity, which together shape the experiential and affective core of his writing. Although Gaekwad is well-known as a reporter, screenwriter and novelist, Nautch Boy foregrounds his unique strength as a memoirist, rendering personal vulnerability through a nuanced narrative framework that draws on individual testimony, acts of memorialization, literature, Hindi cinema, the fading world of the kothas and tawaif culture, disparate queer urban experiences, and a string of sexual and romantic encounters unfolding across the distinct environments of boarding school and the kothas, ranging from playful role-play to explicit explorations of desire. While Gaekwad’s mother wanted him to pursue a profession such as medicine to gain social standing, the memoir shows that he rejects this middle-class prudery and hypocrisy. Instead, Gaekwad turns to a lucid, unsparing realism that exposes the ‘secrets and lies’ (p. 41) underlying both his family and his own life.
Nautch Boy: A Memoir of My Life in the Kothas is the sequel to The Last Courtesan: Writing My Mother’s Memoir. While the earlier memoir evocatively chronicles the life and times of Gaekwad’s tawaif mother, Rekhabai, the sequel offers a raw, direct depiction of Gaekwad’s own existence in the shadow of his mother’s chequered life. Reflecting on the act of composing the obituary of the renowned Urdu poet Nida Fazli, Gaekwad notes that ‘writing heals’ (p. 139), a realization that mirrors his own mourning for those ‘we do not see but seek’ (p. 138). Writing thus becomes, for him, a means for ‘breaking shackles’ and overcoming the ‘stigma’ (p. 85) of being regarded as a queer ‘randi ka beta, son of a whore’ (p. 49). Yet these reflections on the liberatory and transformative power of writing are inseparable from the stark familial memories that shape them. Gaekwad recalls his biological father, Rehmat Khan, as a ‘naked stranger’ who shared the only bed in their cramped living space, and to ‘whose post-coital kerfuffle’ (p. 68) he learned, even as a child, to respond with practiced indifference. His stepfather, Kothari, likewise exploited his mother, using her for ‘her body, her money, [and] her jewellery’ (p. 85). Set against this troubled backdrop, the memoir describes Gaekwad’s childhood in Bundook Gully, Kolkata, before charting his later boyhood in the Kurseong and Darjeeling boarding schools. The texture of the narrative and linguistic registers change with the shifting locations. Interweaving the vernacular with English in a felicitous style, the memoir adopts a tone which is at once self-indulgent and self-deprecatory, shaped by lived experiences of suffering, and an enduring journey through struggles toward self-acceptance.
In Nautch Boy, the memoir functions as a site where heteronormative structures are delegitimized through the lens of a queer subject situated within the marginalized world of the kotha. The evolution of Gaekwad’s queer self progresses in intimate entanglement with the lives, memories, and narratives of others. This dynamic deeply resonates with Wendy Moffat’s insistence on memory and identity as foundational to queer writing (p. 219). The interconnection between memory and identity becomes particularly evident when Gaekwad describes himself as a ‘repository of [his mother’s] secrets and lies’ (p. 41), even as he acknowledges that his own history ‘preced[es] his memory’ (p. 7) and remains essentially rooted in her struggle. By chronicling her life in his memoir, he validates and affirms his own existence as a ‘nautch boy’. Moving beyond personal reminiscences, Gaekwad further situates his selfhood within what he terms the ‘queer of caste’ (p. 176), emphasizing the urgency of documenting the histories of the Bedia and Kanjar, some of the most vulnerable tribes of India, alongside the dying world of tawaif culture so that these lives do not remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to cultural margins. Consequently, Nautch Boy emerges as a reconstruction of a shared mnemonic archive, functioning as an assemblage of voices drawn from his mother’s sisters (his aunts), his cousins, and other members of the tawaif community, through which Gaekwad ultimately pieces together his life story.
Gaekwad’s memoir constructs queer selfhood not as an isolated interior truth but as something assembled through Bollywood cinema, maternal labour, marginalized social histories, literature, and the feminized social world of the kotha. This approach perfectly aligns with Wendy Moffat’s notion of queer biography as ‘reparative work because it is so full of surprises’ (p. 225). Beyond consistently ‘puncturing our theoretical ‘understandings’ (Moffat, p. 225) of life-writing, one such surprise emerges in how these narratives continue to suggest new ways to tell intimate life stories. It is guided by precisely this impulse that Gaekwad repeatedly reframes his key life moments through the visual grammar and narrative idiom of Bollywood cinema as a ‘primal source of imagination’ (p. 46). Presenting his life and experiences through this cinematic lens, he draws upon songs, dances, and the attendant celebrity culture of Hindi mainstream cinema to foreground and navigate his complex familial reality. The impact of cinema is evident in his personal details: his nickname, Monty, was inspired by the screen name of the popular hero Rishi Kapoor in Karz, a film in which his mother worked as an extra. He even altered the spelling of his last name to ‘match the spelling of Shivaji Rao Gaekwad, or Rajinikanth’ (p. 41), the legendary Indian actor and cultural icon, an act which underscores cinema’s intimate impression on his sense of self. Drawing further on the cultural familiarity of grand cinematic kothas to highlight the despicable and miserable reality of his own life, Gaekwad compares the claustrophobic kotha of his childhood, which was built without a view of the outside world, to the ‘entombment of Anarkali’ in the Hindi film Mughal-E-Azam (p. 20). All the major events of his life are consistently enunciated through the frames of Hindi mainstream cinema. While he describes his own ‘violent birth’ (p. 1) during ‘thunder and lightning’ (p. xvii) as an event that sounds as ‘hokey as a Hindi-film flashback’ (p. xvii), he portrays his mother’s frantic escape from the hospital after childbirth as the act of an ‘emotional heroine on the run’ (p. xii). Seen through the lens of screen legends, his mother sometimes appears like a ‘junior artiste in a Hindi film’ (p. 5), and at others she resembles the heroines of popular star-driven cinema (p. 24). Gaekwad’s own performative identifications manifest more noticeably in his imitation of Sridevi’s dance moves from films like Himmatwala and Mr India. He states that his obsession with Sridevi was a ‘strong indicator’ of being ‘more than just a little bit queer’ (p. 40). Hindi film songs, more broadly, provide Gaekwad with an emotional vocabulary through which to process the sorrow and pain of his upbringing.
In Nautch Boy, Gaekwad not only exposes the fictions of compulsory heterosexuality but also queers heteronormative understandings of identity by offering ways of self-representation that finally seek to normalize those positioned at their centre. In doing so, the memoir both queers and actively fashions practices of queer self-narrativization grounded in excess, theatricality, parodic humour, and performativity. Central to this project of queer self-representation are Gaekwad’s performances of subjectivity, humour and repartee, through which he frequently constructs his identity in the idioms of Hindi popular cinema. He imitates the popular Hindi mainstream actress Sridevi, whom he viewed as an ‘on-screen mother’ (p. 40), making ‘dizzyingly high heels’ (p. 18) from tin boxes in his youth and rehearsing her feminine gestures and sensuous dance movements. By doing so, he transforms frequent taunts like naazuk [fragile] (p. 71) into a theatrical strategy for survival. This fun-loving, spirited impulse further extends to linguistic play, which he deploys to subvert the ‘macho’ expectations imposed by his teachers. By observing that the word ‘macho’ phonetically moves ‘dangerously close’ to the common invective ‘machod (motherfuck)’, he exposes the instability and excess within masculinity that the word seeks to enforce (p. 51).
Similarly, in describing his relationship with his ageing and ailing mother, Gaekwad deploys absurdist humour to capture the ‘role reversal’ of caregiving, jesting that he might have to ‘breastfeed her’ (p. 155) if he puts on more weight, or describing his landlady, ‘a paediatrician—perfect to take care of his “child-mother”’ (p. 170). Through this sustained use of humour, Gaekwad tackles the repugnant and grimy realities of his life while retaining a scintillating creativity, ultimately distinguishing his narrative as one of candour and significant literary value.
The memoir shows Gaekwad’s uncanny ability to circumnavigate the various obstacles in his life as he moves between the marginalized ‘filthy gullies’ (p. 115) of his childhood and the elite spaces of the contemporary literary and media marketplace, writing scripts for Netflix and working with production houses like Red Chillies Entertainment (p. 186) that enable him to bring kotha narratives into the global mainstream on his own terms. Thus, Gaekwad’s trajectory is inextricably linked to his precariousness and vulnerability. The memoir recalls how, when bullied at school for being ‘a girl, chhakka and sissy’, he would take refuge in the library, embracing it as a ‘safe place to distract my thoughts’ (p. 52), and to imagine alternative stories for himself. Here, Gaekwad turned to literature such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint to navigate his ‘inner turmoil’ (p. 84) and validate his sense of identity. He also modelled his candid, unflinching prose style on the raw directness he encountered in authors such as Somerset Maugham, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Franz Kafka.
By reimagining queerness, kinship, family, and belonging through the feminized social world of the kotha and the afterlives of tawaif culture, Nautch Boy demonstrates how queer life-writing functions as a counter-narrative to dominant cultural discourses. In doing so, Gaekwad queers the genre of autobiography itself, opening up a space that challenges the form’s heteronormative assumptions while foregrounding the everyday negotiations of queer identity, recovery, memory, and loss, alongside the socio-cultural ramifications of living within or against closeted identities. Within this extended framework, Gaekwad’s embrace of queer companionship enables him to move more deeply into the ongoing process of coming out through autobiography. The memoir’s self-reflexivity, however, refrains from reductive solipsism. Instead, it encourages readers to step back from the cultural and identitarian systems they inhabit and to question the narratives that often structure how we engage with one another and with ourselves. In this way, Nautch Boy reshapes our understanding of queer self-representation as a viable self-reflexive aesthetic of power anchored in experiential and epistemic authority.
Works cited
Moffat, Wendy. ‘The Narrative Case for Queer Biography’. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, Ohio State University Press, 2015, p. xx.
Nishat Haider is Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia (Central University), New Delhi.