Who Gets Remembered: The Song or the Woman Who Sang It?

What does it mean to be seen, to be remembered? Across history, women’s artistry has often been consumed without recognition, their names fading even as their creations endure. From the mehfils of courtesans—where presence, wit, and artistry carried transformative power—to today’s digital platforms where algorithms dictate visibility, the question of authorship and attention remains urgent. If art is born of lived experience, what happens when both are stripped away, leaving only the product but not the person?

From Relational to Transactional Attention

The difference between these two economies lies in their treatment of presence. The mehfil engaged in making relational attention: desire was negotiated, co-created, and transformative. But algorithms, on the other hand, reduce attention to the transactional unit—something that's measurable, commodifiable, and monetizable.

 These consequences also have effects on gendered labour; just as it was called "fallen" work despite its artistic tenor by the courtesan, women's labour online - whether it be emotional labour, lifestyle making, or aesthetic self-making - is often disavowed even while being extracted for monetary profit.

The Courtesan’s Quiet Power

In the late 19th century, a woman visited a recording studio in Calcutta, sang into a horn and three minutes later declared, "My name is Gauhar Jaan!" She was India’s first recording artist, and that simple declaration was radical. It was a declaration not simply to the record-keepers, but refusal to allow her name, and therefore her power, to be erased. In an age when women's artistry was consumed in the background of a male-dominated society, Gauhar Jaan demanded to be named.

Courtesans like Gauhar Jaan were not strictly entertainers, however. They were vehicles of taste; teachers of both social moral etiquette (tehzeeb) and poetry and music. When kings and poets attended their mehfils, they were not simply there to listen. A single pause in a thumri could silence a house. A single glance could shift desire. Faced with power trying to constrain them, courtesans constructed power through their performance, presence, and wit.

Of course, history was cruel. Colonial morality and the nationalistic reform axis relegated courtesans as "fallen women," stripping their intellectual and artistic authority. The songs and ghazals of courtesans have since been assimilated into a "tradition," and their names long faded from memory. The art has subsisted. The artist has disappeared.

Algorithms and the New Erasure

Today’s creators: poets on Instagram, singers on YouTube, dancers on TikTok, similarly find themselves in odd circumstances. They might produce art that plays out in spaces built by a power dynamic beyond their control.

Now, though, it is algorithms and not patrons or reformers who decide. The neat poem might simply disappear into the scroll as Instagram prioritizes reels; the singer may condense their voice into a 15-second hook in order to adhere to the trends of virality; here, agency is as thin as it has ever been. The creators are no longer in control of who sees their work. Platforms like Meta, Google, or TikTok have agency over the engagement, and if attention is the currency of our time, the platforms now run the bank.

And this is not simply a matter of visibility but of authorship. AI systems built on large datasets scrape poems, stories, and songs to create and produce, generally with no attribution. When an AI generates a ghazal in milliseconds, it feels lovely, but beneath that is an entire lineage of poets that we do not know who taught the algorithm its cadence. Just the same as thumris of courtesans were edited into an anonymously named "classical tradition," artifacts of the digital age of creation risk erasure based on a data bank they swim in.

So, the question returns: Who gets remembered—the song, or the woman who sang it?

In the past, the erasure was shaped by colonial morality and patriarchal reform. Today, it is coded into the very architecture of digital platforms. Both forms of power reduce women’s labor into raw material—beautiful, useful, consumable—but detached from the women themselves.

When a ghazal drifts through history without its singer, or when an AI generates poetry without acknowledging its sources, something essential is lost: not just credit, but the sense that art is born of lived experience. A courtesan’s glance, her silence, her choice to withhold or reveal—these were not reproducible. Neither is the human messiness of a poem written at 3 a.m. in heartbreak.

To Be Named, To Be Remembered

To remember Gauhar Jaan is to recall not just her voice, but her insistence on naming herself. To honor today’s digital creators is to resist their reduction into anonymous trends or algorithmic fragments. What is at stake is more than recognition; it is the acknowledgment that art cannot exist apart from the lived experiences, bodies, and voices that bring it into being.

So we return to the same question: what does it mean to be seen, to be remembered? Do we value only the song, or also the woman who dares to sing it?