Jha, Shweta Sachdeva. “Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-Making in Colonial India.” African and Asian Studies 8 (2009): 268-287.

From the abstract: “Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of
Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one’s
identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two
Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget
their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa’if singers and
actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within
the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level
case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an
arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture,
I shall extend our perception of historical ‘archive’ to include a varied set of materials such
as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and
history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider
debates of migration and identity-making.”