Culture

These highly skilled courtesans sang, danced, wrote poetry, and were the purveyors of all that was considered good taste and high fashion. Tawaifs, the Awadhi term for highly skilled courtesans, rose to prominence between the 18th and 19th centuries in the royal courts of Awadh, part of present-day Uttar Pradesh. For the majority of us, our exposure to tawaifs and their way of life has mainly been through their depiction in popular Bollywood cinema. When we come across the word ‘Tawaif’. The first image that comes to our mind is that of a sensual seductress, equivalent to prostitutes. Iconic movies like Devdas, Umrao Jaan, Pakheeza, and Mughal-E-Azam portrayed the tawaif as a fallen woman. Wrapping up their stories with admonitory diktats on morality. Their existence in these narra...

Pope Francis became the first pope in 728 years to open the Holy Door of a 13th-century basilica in L’Aquila, Italy, on Sunday. The pope participated in a centuries-old tradition, the Celestinian Forgiveness, known in Italian as the Perdonanza Celestiniana. The ceremony of Forgiveness, only with a modern term called “Perdonanza”, was particularly enriched after 1327. When the remains of Pope Celestino were “transferred” from Ferentino (near Frosinone), where they were kept, to Collemaggio. And his relics were displayed to the people. It was in the fifteenth century, however, that the custom of entering Collemaggio through the Holy Door placed on the left side of the sacred building became established. According to what happened in the Roman patriarchal basilicas on the occasion of ...