The absence of the female body in Indian classical music: Thumri – a historical overview

This article seeks to foreground the discourse of the body within the discursive formation of the Hindustani music tradition, highlighting how the body in Khyal is constructed as powerful and prominently visible, while in Thumri bodily expressions are carefully mediated, stylized or filtered through layers of cultural and aesthetic restraint in the post-independence period. In the Indian classical music tradition, the body of the musician is equally important as the voice in signing. Hindustani musical forms like Khyal and its archaic forms like Dhrupad have been regarded with their gambheera swabhav (‘powerful nature’) as masculine, whereas Thumri, an emotive genre, has acclaimed as the feminine voice of Hindustani music. The visibility of the female body has been a persistent concern in the classical Indian aesthetic tradition – particularly in Thumri, which evolved within a cultural milieu where the female body was often objectified for male pleasure. The Tawaif culture and the artistic body that symbolizes it became problematic in the modern period. This article examines the extent to which the visibility of the female body within the Hindustani music system has been regulated by male-elite authority. Focusing specifically on Thumri, it analyses the mechanisms through which the genre underwent a process of sanitization over time – marked by the marginalization of Tawaif culture and the subsequent ‘purification’ of the form to align with elite, patriarchal respectability.