In Indian popular imagination, few figures are as overburdened with symbolism as the sex worker—and no machine has shaped that symbolism more powerfully than Indian cinema. From the silk-and-itr (perfume) world of the tawaif (courtesan) to the neon grit of Mumbai dance bars and today’s prestige biopics, the screen has repeatedly asked the same question in different costumes: is she a woman with izzat [honour] denied by society, or a “problem” to be rescued, punished, or erased?
The earliest mainstream phase largely didn’t begin with the street, but with the kotha (courtesan house)—a space coded as both cultural salon and moral “elsewhere.” Films such as Pakeezah (1972), with Meena Kumari as Sahibjaan, and Umrao Jaan (1981), with Rekha as the poet-courtesan of Lucknow, set the template: refined Urdu aesthetics, shayari [poetry], and the hypnotic grammar of the mujra (courtesan dance performance). These works offered a paradoxical reverence—cinema celebrates the courtesan as keeper of music and etiquette, while the story often insists she cannot cross into “respectable” domesticity. Even the title Pakeezah (often translated as “pure”) is a deliberate provocation: purity is made to coexist with stigma.
This “heritage courtesan” phase also minted some of Hindi cinema’s most iconic female performances. Meena Kumari’s ache, Rekha’s controlled fire, and the choreography of longing turned the tawaif into an art object—beautiful, doomed, and endlessly quoted. Yet the reverence comes with a cage: the character’s sexuality is aestheticised, her labour is rarely named as labour, and her future is usually decided by melodrama. Even when she speaks like a queen, the world treats her as badnaam (disreputable).
From the 1970s into the 1990s, the dominant mainstream lens hardened into the “fallen woman” arc. Here, the sex worker is less cultural muse and more moral lesson—often “pushed” into the trade through poverty, assault, or trafficking, and then offered only two exits: male rescue or tragic sacrifice. This isn’t merely conservative storytelling; it mirrors a social reflex in which “sympathy” is granted only if agency is denied. In other words, she must be innocent to be worthy of compassion. The camera, frequently aligned with the male gaze, converts her into a site of both desire and social warning: you can look, but you must also condemn.
Parallel cinema complicated that binary by shifting attention from individual sin to social machinery—hypocrisy, policing, and class power. Shyam Benegal’s Mandi (1983) is crucial here: it treats the brothel as a community and exposes the double standards of public morality campaigns, with Shabana Azmi’s Rukmini Bai embodying both caretaker and strategist in a system designed to scapegoat women. The point is not that the brothel is romantic; it’s that the city’s “respectable” men remain customers while demanding the women’s removal to the margins.
By the early 2000s, another urban archetype took center stage: the bar dancer and the underworld-adjacent survivor. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Chandni Bar (2001), anchored by Tabu, replaced the embroidered anarkali silhouette with fluorescent realism—migration, coercion, violence, and the intergenerational cost of stigma. Its critical recognition (including multiple National Awards) helped legitimise “sex work-adjacent” stories as serious social cinema, even as the narrative remained haunted by a familiar fatalism: the system is so total that escape feels almost mythical.
The newest phase is marked by a careful, contested arrival of agency—sometimes through the biopic, sometimes through streaming-era crime sagas, and often through “female-led” prestige filmmaking. Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022), starring Alia Bhatt, is the headline example: a sex worker turned local power broker and advocate, framed with political rhetoric and public voice rather than pure victimhood. Whatever one thinks of its stylisation, the film resonated beyond cineplex debate; reporting from Reuters described how it struck a chord with sex workers themselves and intersected with broader conversations about dignity, documentation, and rights.
Interestingly, this contemporary moment is also producing a new afterlife for the “classic courtesan” era, not as nostalgia but as heritage restoration. Umrao Jaan has been revived via a digitally restored 4K theatrical re-release tied to India’s film preservation efforts, reminding audiences that the courtesan figure sits at the heart of cinematic history even when she remains at society’s edge.
Across these phases, cinema’s obsession reveals less about sex workers than about the culture watching them. The recurring Hindi vocabulary—sharam (shame), izzat (honour), pyaar (love), majboori (compulsion)—acts like a social script, telling viewers what they are allowed to feel. Indian cinema has expanded from the tragic muse to the social realist to the political heroine, and the list of actresses who carried these roles—Meena Kumari, Rekha, Shabana Azmi, Tabu, Alia Bhatt—reads like a parallel history of women’s performance itself. The unresolved question is whether the next wave will finally show sex workers not as metaphors for society’s morality, but as citizens with ordinary contradictions: work, family, ageing, friendship, humour, strategy—and rights that don’t depend on tragedy.
I didn’t learn about India’s most “infamous” women from textbooks or court judgments. I learnt about them from my Indian friends—over tea, over wine, over late-night WhatsApp voice notes—friends who spoke about these characters the way other people speak about old lovers. With affection. With pride. With a sharp awareness that admiration does not mean naïveté.
They talked about courtesans and bar dancers the way you talk about women who knew the world before the world pretended to be decent. Women who sang, negotiated, survived. Women who were never allowed to be sanskaari [proper], yet somehow carried more emotional intelligence than the men judging them. And yes, they talked about the actresses with the same reverence. Because playing these roles was never just acting—it was cultural labour.
What struck me was this: my friends didn’t love these characters despite their stigma. They loved them because of it. Because these women spoke truths polite society refused to utter. Because they knew the price of desire, hypocrisy, and male power. Because they paid that price upfront, without pretending otherwise. In a country obsessed with izzat [honour], these women were denied it publicly and reclaimed it privately, through wit, art, and sheer stubborn survival.
Indian cinema, for all its moral contortions, accidentally created a gallery of women who refuse to disappear. The camera may punish them, kill them, exile them—but audiences remember them. People quote their dialogues. They hum their songs. They defend them in arguments with uncles who insist on “values.” That tells you something important: stigma doesn’t always win the emotional war.
And let’s talk about the actresses. It takes a particular kind of courage to inhabit a character that polite society wants to consume but not acknowledge. These performances weren’t about titillation; they were about control. Controlled anger. Controlled sorrow. Controlled seduction. Women playing women who understand the rules of the game better than anyone else in the room. No wonder generations of viewers—especially women—felt seen.
But admiration has its limits. Loving these characters does not mean we should accept the conditions that produced them. The problem begins when cinema allows only two options: tragic martyr or exceptional boss lady. Real women live in the middle—aging, working, raising children, forming friendships, negotiating safety, demanding rights without needing redemption arcs.
My Indian friends taught me something else too. They said: “We know these stories aren’t fair. But they’re ours.” And that, perhaps, is the most radical thing of all. Not pretending the gaze was kind—but claiming the woman anyway.