If we were to ask you to name a few contemporary Hindi poets, chances are you'd come up with Javed Akhtar, Gulzar and Prasoon Joshi. But take a second to wonder why that is. The straightforward reason is that Bollywood has provided these personalities with a vehicle that has driven their words to every corner of the country, and they thus have mass appeal. But that of course wasn't the case in the mid-19th century. So poets back then had to employ a different medium to enter the popular imagination — courtesans, who would sing their verses in the form of ghazals that the public would lap up with glee.

And yet, those same courtesans have been unkindly dismissed as "tawaifs" and "baijis" in the annals of history. Their morals have been questioned. Their calibre has been ignored. They have generally been denied the due credit for playing a cultural role that no one else did back then. But a performance at the Royal Opera House this evening aims to correct this. Titled The Legend of Nawab Jaan and Mirza Ghalib, it puts the spotlight on the possible relationship that a courtesan in Old Delhi shared in the 1850s with arguably the greatest Urdu poet.