“This project explores the architectural histories of courtesans in South Asia, asking how the built environment can help us recover the lives, labour, networks, and cultural worlds of women whose histories have often been marginalised or erased.

We approach architecture at multiple scales: from the urban neighbourhoods shaped by kothas and the markets that grew around them, to gardens, mansions, mosques, imambaras, tombs and other structures commissioned or patronised by elite courtesans. We also turn to the more intimate and ephemeral spaces of everyday life—the kotha, the mehf/il, the caravanserai, the travelling camp—asking how their spatial arrangements, objects, materials and technologies shaped performance, sociability, domestic life and professional networks.

The project brings together architectural and urban history with archival research, visual and material culture, oral history and ethnographic approaches. It is particularly attentive to the processes through which colonial and postcolonial regimes of morality and respectability transformed courtesans’ relationships to property, cities and architecture, even as traces of their presence persisted in buildings, neighbourhoods, stories and memories.

By reading architecture alongside these fragmentary traces, we seek to understand courtesanship not simply as a profession or cultural practice, but as a spatial and social world that helped shape South Asian cities.”

– Dr Parshati Dutta, Architectural Historian

Image by Dr Parshati Dutta