Heeramandi: The District the Goddess Lost

The idol of the goddess cannot be completed without a handful of soil from the courtesan’s doorstep. — the punya mati tradition of the Bengal Durga Puja

In the folk practice that surrounds the Durga Puja of Bengal, the idol of the goddess is said to be incomplete without a handful of earth taken from outside the home of a courtesan — the punya mati, the “blessed soil,” gathered from the nishiddho palli, the forbidden quarter. The priest must go to the doorstep and ask for it. Without it the goddess cannot be installed. Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (Netflix, 2024) is set inside that doorstep, in the courtesans’ quarter itself, at the precise historical moment when the modern state was deciding the woman on whose threshold that soil accumulates would have no legal right to remain in her home. This paper argues that Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s series is not a period drama about fallen women. It is a theological document about a desecration — and, on the reading offered here, the most explicitly political film he has made.

I. The Wager

The wager extends an earlier one. The institute’s reading of Devdas argued that the courtesan Chandramukhi is a figure of the sacred feminine — the tawaif as jogan, the woman whose devotion the household’s honor cannot touch. This paper claims that Heeramandi performs the same argument at a scale Devdas could not: not one courtesan’s individual realization but an entire community’s collective sacred identity, and not the private tragedy of a household but the public, legislated destruction of a civilization of women. Where Devdas encoded the punya mati logic in a single gesture, Heeramandi makes it the premise of eight hours of television and the geography of an entire district. The claim is that Bhansali knows exactly what he is arguing, that the argument is theological before it is melodramatic, and that its subject is a desecration the modern nation-states of the subcontinent inherited from colonial law and chose to complete rather than repair.

II. The Sacred Soil at Civilizational Scale

Begin with the tradition, because it is the paper’s spine. The punya mati practice encodes a theology that inverts the respectable order’s judgment: the soil of the courtesan’s doorstep is blessed, indispensable to the goddess, precisely because it is the threshold the respectable world has declared forbidden. The Navakanya tradition — the nine classes of women whose worship completes the Durga Puja — names among them the Nati, the dancer, and the Vaishya, the courtesan. The sacred, in this stratum of the tradition, does not merely tolerate the woman the moral order casts out. It requires her. The idol is unfinished without her.

Heeramandi stages this at the scale of a district. Its entire geography is punya mati — a whole quarter of women who are, in the theology the series draws on, the soil the goddess needs and the tradition the respectable world cannot bear. When the series insists, through Bhansali’s characteristic visual maximalism, that these women are not objects of pity or candidates for reform but bearers of an art and a lineage — custodians of Kathak, of Hindustani classical music, of Urdu poetry and the refinements of adab — it is making the punya mati claim in dramatic form. The destruction of Heeramandi as an institution, the series argues, was not social progress. It was the removal of the soil, the unmaking of the goddess’s own requirement. The desecration is liturgical, not merely historical.

III. The Legal Chain

The series sits, deliberately, on a legal hinge, and the hinge is the paper’s second load-bearing structure. The tawaif was not always a “prostitute” in the eyes of the law; she was reclassified into one, by a sequence of colonial instruments whose broad arc is well established in the historical scholarship. The Contagious Diseases legislation of the 1860s subjected women in the entertainment quarters to compulsory medical inspection, folding an artistic profession into a sanitary-policing category. The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 placed whole hereditary performing communities under permanent police surveillance. The Anti-Nautch campaigns of the 1890s onward fused classical dance with prostitution in the reformist imagination and drove toward the legislative suppression of the devadasi and the nautch. And the mid-twentieth-century anti-trafficking law that the independent states inherited (the Suppression of Immoral Traffic legislation of 1956 and its successors) completed the reclassification, giving magistrates the power to order women removed from their own premises — the practical continuation of a colonial removal mechanism under a national flag.

Heeramandi is set at the exact moment (the series spans 1920 to 1947) when this chain was being locked in — when the anti-nautch reformism was hardening into statute and the new nation was about to inherit and extend the colonial category rather than dismantle it. The precise details of the post-1947 legal apparatus on both sides of the new border — the specific Pakistani statutes, the survival of colonial-era regulations for decades after independence — are matters the paper flags for its claims register rather than asserts here; what is not in doubt is the shape of the arc. A profession the tradition called sacred was, across roughly a century of law, redefined into a crime, and both successor states chose to keep the redefinition. Bhansali places his women at the hinge of that century, and the placement is the argument: they are living through the moment their sacredness is being converted, by legislation, into illegality.

IV. Nationalist Respectability as the Thieves at Scale

The series’ sharpest and most uncomfortable claim is political, and it is where the panj chor return at civilizational scale. The independence movement, Heeramandi insists, was not innocent of the tawaif’s destruction. Nationalist respectability politics required the movement to distance itself from the kotha — associated as it was with Mughal court culture, with a compromised colonial-era economy, with everything the new nation wished to disown before the same colonial gaze it was overthrowing. Many tawaifs, the historical record shows and the series dramatizes through Bibbojaan, materially supported the freedom struggle — with funds, with shelter, with intelligence. They were erased from the nationalist story anyway, because the nation being born needed to perform a respectability legible to its former masters.

Read through Gurmat, this is ahankar and moh operating at the scale of a civilization: the pride that cannot accept a gift from a source it has deemed beneath it, the attachment to an image of national purity that could not accommodate the women who were actually funding the cause. The five thieves, in the companion reading of the two films, are the system’s agents installed in the individual self. Heeramandi shows the same agents installed in the national self — a movement so bound by its attachment to respectability that it could not receive the sacred gift the tawaif community was extending, and destroyed the givers to protect the image. The tragedy is not that the colonizer suppressed the courtesan. It is that the liberation reproduced the suppression, because it had internalized the colonizer’s thieves. This is the Masands Cycle at the founding of a nation: the revolution completing the work of the order it replaced.

V. The Syncretic Sacred Partition Severed

There is a dimension Heeramandi carries that Devdas does not, and the paper must engage it honestly. The kotha of Lahore is not the Hindu-Bengali world of Devdas. It is the Mughal-successor cultural world — Islamicate, shaped by Persian poetry, the ghazal, Sufi devotional practice, the refinements of the Mughal court. The divine feminine here speaks in more than one tongue: the punya mati and Navakanya logic of the Hindu tradition, and the feminine of the ghazal — the soul’s longing for the divine Beloved, the mujra as a form with devotional resonance in some Sufi contexts. Bhansali is depicting a tradition that was both — a syncretic sacred culture in which Hindu and Islamicate forms coexisted in the same quarter, served the same patrons across communal lines, and observed both calendars.

That syncretism is precisely what Partition could not survive. The tawaif community had historically operated across the very line Partition drew — serving Hindu and Muslim patrons alike, embodying a hybridity the new identity-fixing states could not tolerate. When the subcontinent was cut in two along communal lines, the community whose entire existence was the refusal of that line was among the least able to survive it. Lahore’s Shahi Mohalla ended up on the Pakistani side, its Hindu-Islamicate syncretism severed from the subcontinental cultural memory that might have preserved it. The desecration, in Heeramandi, comes from both directions at once: colonial law from below, nationalist respectability from within, and Partition’s identity-fixing across the middle. The series mourns a sacred culture that was destroyed not by one enemy but by the convergence of three, and it assigns the blame with a evenhandedness that spares neither successor state.

VI. Turner’s Threshold, Destroyed at the Founding

The anthropologist Victor Turner argued that every social order generates liminal, threshold spaces — zones of ambiguity and communitas that the dominant structure both needs and cannot fully control — and that the structure’s impulse, when it consolidates, is to destroy the threshold it cannot govern. The kotha is exactly such a threshold: a space between household and market, sacred and profane, Hindu and Muslim, that served the order precisely by standing outside its categories. Heeramandi is the record of what the new nation-state does to the threshold at the moment of its own consolidation. Partition itself was a Turner event on a monstrous scale — the dissolution of one ambiguous order (colonial hybridity) and the violent imposition of fixed identities. The tawaif, the being of the threshold, was the being least able to survive the fixing. That the destruction came at the founding — as one of the new order’s first acts of cultural consolidation — is Turner’s thesis dramatized: the structure announces itself by unmaking the threshold, and the goddess loses her district in the same act by which the nation gains its border.

VII. The Series as the Sacred Remainder

The reading closes where the corpus closes, on the sacred remainder. Devdas left the memory of a love in the person of Chandramukhi, who survived to hold it. Heeramandi leaves no survivors in that sense — the community it depicts was destroyed, its quarter converted, its art driven underground or into disrepute, its women severed from the memory that might have honored them. What survives is the series itself. Heeramandi is the punya mati recovered: an act of sacred restoration for a community both successor states chose to inherit the suppression of rather than repair. When Bhansali reconstructs the kotha in maximalist gold and insists on the sacredness of women a century of law and two nations agreed to degrade, he is doing what the sant does at the end of every reading in this series — holding the naam, the true name of what was real, against the forgetting the material order demands. The goddess lost her district. The series is the handful of soil, gathered late, from the doorstep of a house that is no longer there.

Counter-case

The strongest objection is that this reads a lavish streaming melodrama as a theological treatise it never intended to be. Heeramandi is, by many accounts, a soap opera in period dress — rivalries, betrayals, opulent sets, uneven history — and Bhansali is a maximalist stylist, not a theologian or a legal historian. To load it with the punya mati tradition, the Navakanya, a century of colonial statute, Turner’s liminality, and a Gurmat theory of national self-deception is to make the series carry an argument the show is far too busy being entertaining to advance. And there is a sharper form of the objection: that celebrating the “sacred courtesan” romanticizes a profession shaped by real coercion, and that the theological frame risks aestheticizing exploitation.

Both forms deserve an answer. To the first: the paper does not claim Bhansali consciously assembled a treatise; it claims the series operates as one, and that the punya mati logic is not imported from outside but is the tradition the material itself descends from — the sacred-courtesan structure is in the sources, not in the critic. A maximalist can encode a theology precisely because maximalism reaches for the sacred register by instinct. To the second, sharper objection the paper concedes real ground: the sacred-feminine reading must never become a denial of the coercion, and the series is strongest exactly where it refuses to sentimentalize — where it shows the kotha as a place of both artistry and entrapment, sanctity and violence. The claim is not that the courtesan’s life was blessed. It is that the tradition located the sacred in the woman the order degraded, and that the order’s response was to legislate her out of existence. Holding the coercion and the sacredness in the same frame is not romanticizing. It is the punya mati tradition’s own paradox: the soil is blessed and it is gathered from the forbidden quarter, and the tradition never pretended otherwise.

Stakes

This paper carries the SICI wager to its most demanding arena. Reading two art films through Indic grammar is one thing; reading a mass-market streaming series about colonial law, Partition, and the founding violence of two nations is another, because the stakes are historical and the risk of overreach is real. If the reading holds — if Heeramandi genuinely operates as sacred restoration, if the punya mati logic and the panj chor at civilizational scale and the Turnerian threshold are the deep structure and not a frame imposed on a soap opera — then the institute has shown that its grammar can read not only the individual soul but the national one, and can name a desecration that conventional political and film-critical vocabularies register only as “the decline of a profession.” It also completes the arc that began with the reading of Chandramukhi as the sacred feminine: what was one woman’s realization in Devdas is, in Heeramandi, a whole civilization’s loss, and the series is the soil gathered late for an idol that can no longer be installed. The goddess, in the tradition, cannot be completed without the courtesan’s doorstep. Heeramandi is Bhansali arguing that a subcontinent chose to complete itself without her — and counting the cost.

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Sources

• Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (Netflix, 2024), created by Sanjay Leela Bhansali; set in Lahore’s Heeramandi, 1920–1947.
• The punya mati / nishiddho palli tradition of the Bengal Durga Puja, and the Navakanya (nine classes of women worshipped in the Puja, including the Nati and the Vaishya).
• Veena Talwar Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1990).
• The colonial legal arc (Contagious Diseases legislation, 1860s; Criminal Tribes Act, 1871; the Anti-Nautch campaigns; the Suppression of Immoral Traffic legislation, 1956, and successors). Specific post-1947 statutes on both sides of the border are flagged for the claims register.
• Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969), on liminality and communitas.
• On the five thieves at scale and the afterlife of liberation: the institute’s Panj Chor and Masands Cycle frameworks.
• Companion readings: Moulin Rouge! and Devdas; Dukh and the Duke.