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Women of ‘Ill Repute’: Ethics and Urdu literature in colonial India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2014

SARAH WAHEED*
Affiliation:
Oberlin College, Ohio, USA Email: swaheed@oberlin.edu

Abstract

The courtesan, the embodiment of both threat and allure, was a central figure in the moral discourses of the Muslim ‘respectable’ classes of colonial North India. Since women are seen as the bearers of culture, tradition, the honour of the family, community, and nation, control over women's sexuality becomes a central feature in the process of forming identity and community. As a public woman, the courtesan became the target of severe moral regulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The way in which the courtesan was invoked within aesthetic, ethical, and legal domains shifted over time, and by the third decade of the twentieth century, there appeared a new way of speaking and writing about the ‘fallen woman’ within the Urdu public sphere. A social critique emerged which heralded the prostitute-courtesan as an ethical figure struggling against an unjust social order. Since the courtesan symbolized both elite Mughal court culture as well as its decay, she was a convenient foil for some nationalists to challenge the dominant idioms of nationalist and communitarian politics. Moreover, certain late medieval and early modern Indo-Persian ethical concepts were redeployed by twentieth century writers for ‘progressive’ ends. This illustrated a turn to progressive cultural politics that was simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-communitarian, while maintaining a critical posture towards the dominant idioms of Indian nationalism.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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4 Māh Lāqa Bai Chanda, Akhlāq se to apne vāqif jahān hogā/par āp ko ghalat kuch ab tak guman hoga. See Petievich, Carla, ‘Feminine Authorship and Urdu Poetic Tradition: Baharistan-i-Naz vs. Tazkira-i-Rekhti’ in Hansen, Kathryn and Lelyveld, David (eds), Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 228Google Scholar.

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6 Partha Chatterjee has argued that the women's question formed the cornerstone of nineteenth century debates on Indian nationalism: the issue was that Indians were divided between those who saw Indian women as intrinsic to the ‘sacred sphere’ of the domestic realm untouched by the evils of colonial modernity and who insisted that women remain there as per ‘tradition’, and those who argued that the struggle against colonial rule required the modernization of Indian society, in which the women's question had to be subject to reform. Feminist historians have shown how prior historiography has not acknowledged women's agency within the colonial period. Partha Chatterjee examines literature, written mostly by men, to argue that the women's question ‘disappeared’ with the rise of nationalism because its issues had been ‘resolved’. Using gender as an analytical category to demonstrate how nationalist discourse was made up of dichotomies of the inner/outer, spiritual/material worlds, which Chatterjee sees as feminine/masculine respectively, he claims that Indian women represented the inner, spiritual world of the home and therefore was burdened with an authentic national identity. Turning to women's writing, feminist historians have contested this claim, emphasizing that this notion of the nationalist resolution of the women's question is problematic, because it tends to reify women as symbolic of larger phenomena, as opposed to viewing them as agents of social and political change. See Chatterjee, Partha, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question’ in Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (eds), Recasting Women (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989)Google Scholar.

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19 Literature and scholarship about prostitutes prior to this period show that they lived together either in their own, or royal, households, with various roles and divided into hierarchies, such as tawā’if, khangī, and randī. Social values and Mughal state patronage allowed both the upper class courtesans and the lower class prostitutes to enjoy a relatively privileged place in Indian society. They were officially recognized as an important professional community, at times associated with religious auspiciousness, but never exclusively defined by sexual entertainment. See Banerjee, Sumanta, Dangerous Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998)Google Scholar. For more on the hierarchies between prostitutes, see Oldenburg, Veena, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Speaking for Others/Speaking for Self: Women of Color’, pp. 259–287.

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22 The Contagious Diseases Act was established in response to alarm about increasing rates of venereal disease among British soldiers; as colonial military and medical authorities debated laws that forbade lower class British soldiers to bring their wives to India, the Act permitted Indian prostitutes to pursue their occupation by establishing lal bazars but severely curbed their movement by imposing mandatory registration at police stations, medical examination at certified clinics, confinement to specified areas of cities and towns, and heavy penalties for violation of these regulations. See Balhattchett, Kenneth, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Camelot Press, 1980)Google Scholar. See also Bannerjee, Dangerous Outcast, p. 70.

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29 As Charu Gupta has noted, prostitutes were increasingly held responsible for the increase in crime and the declining sanitary conditions of the cities. Furthermore, the views of colonial authorities meshed with those of Hindu publicists who were concerned about public order in the city, through bylaws that regulated spaces of entertainment and shifting prostitutes to more remote areas. See Gupta, Charu, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 The passage where Umrā’o Jan reveals how she loses her virginity is a good example. The passage illustrates Ruswa's strategy: the veracity of the story is reinforced by Ruswa's searching questions and jests, to which Umrā’o responds by claiming that he is embellishing. The embellishments are then replaced with the ‘true’ account; it is an act of building a story around a conversation, in which information is supplied in a question-and-answer format. The poetry also weaves together the ethnography, which is ‘indigenously’ performed to provide it with greater truth value. Umrā’o Jan is increasingly depicted as embodying a past, which is then reflected back as nostalgia. Claims to objectivity resituate the tawaif within contemporary parameters of morality.

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45 It is unclear if Ghaffar's novel was inspired by his relationship with his wife, Sakina Begum, although it can be safely assumed that his views about social norms preventing or castigating tawa’ifs from marrying into respectable, middle-class families were informed by his own marital choices.

46 Ghaffar, Qazi Abdul, Laila Ke Khutut (Lahore: Almatbata-ul-Arabiya, reprinted edition 2004; Punjab: Daruladab, first edition 1932), p. 39Google Scholar.

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52 Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 161.

53 See Kugle, Scott Alan, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2001), pp. 257313CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anderson, Michael, ‘Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India’ in Arnold, David and Robb, Peter (eds), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader (London: Curzon Press Ltd., 1993), pp. 165185Google Scholar.

54 This punishment applied to the ‘male persons’ who were accused of detaining or seducing women in any place ‘with [the] intent that she may have sexual intercourse with any man other than her lawful husband’. Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act, 1933, Sections 8 and 9, L/PJ/7/753, IOR.

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57 Rai Bahadur Babu Vikramjit, for instance, quoted a Persian couplet from the Shahnama, arguing, ‘The [couplet means that] they were so proud of the chastity of women—what to say of men, even the sun had not seen her naked.’ Member of Assembly, Extract from the Proceedings of the United Provinces Legislative Council, dated 17 February 1933, L/PJ/7/509, IOR.

58 Member of Assembly, Extract from the proceedings of the United Provinces Legislative Council, dated 17 February 1933, L/PJ/7/509, IOR. Emphasis mine.

59 Extracts from the proceedings of the Punjab Legislative Council held on 28 October and 21 November 1935 relating to the Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Bill. The Punjab Suppression of Immoral Traffic Act 1933, L/PJ/7/753, IOR.

60 Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 31.

61 Ibid, p. 98.

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71 Ibid, p. 162.

72 Qazi Abdul Ghaffar was not alone in this endeavour. The poet Sher Khan ‘Boom’ Meerathi narrated the tale of a prostitute named Tamīzan (her name literally means ‘manners’) who was murdered by the eldest son of a landlord's family when she refused to marry him. Boom wrote a satirical poem about the incident called ‘Qatl-i-Tamīzan’ (‘Murder of Tameezan’) which is still printed in Meerut as a chapbook in Urdu and Hindi. Boom used to recite and sell the poem himself in the streets of Meerut during the 1940s. Another short story in epistolary form, which takes on the voice of the tawā’if, is Krishan Chander's Ek Tawaif Ki Khat: Jawaharlal Nehru aur Muhammad Ali Jinnah Ke Nam (A Letter from a Prostitute to Nehru and Jinnah), written shortly after 1947. The letter humbly beseeches the leaders of the new nation-states of India and Pakistan to visit the tawā’if's home in Bombay, where she is taking care of two women sexually violated and rendered homeless by Partition.

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75 Laila accuses men of producing weak children since they are sexually enervated due to their narrow-mindedness. See Ghaffar, Laila Ke Khutut, p. 93.

76 Ibid, p. 95.

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80 Ibid, p.113.

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84 Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan and Sharma, Sunil (eds), Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman From Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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