This article is available for free online at India Today: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/maya-devi-the-doyenne-of-the-dancing-girls-and-most-celebrated-of-g.b.-road-madams/1/371434.html
This 1983 article features an interview with Maya Devi, a successful tawaif with a career stretching back to 1946, providing a profile of her life and career and the changes in social and cultural attitudes towards tawaifs over four decades. While Maya Devi treats the position of tawaif and its history with reverence and pride, she also argues that contemporary attitudes towards tawaifs, and the declining incomes that accompany them, risk killing their way of life, predicting “[y]our children may never see a tawaif.”