Idhar Dil Jawaan Hai

Benazir (1964).

“Though tawa'ifs were not always Muslims, their origin is tied to particular sites of Muslim court culture. While the tawa'if, unlike the Hindu devadasi, can be considered a secular institution, tawa'ifs are always popularly imagined in reference to Islamic culture; an imagination that is strengthened through Bollywood's associations of tawa'ifs with Urdu, ghazals (a particular form of Urdu poem) and Lucknow. Thus, though the tawa'if as both a concrete historical subject and a Bollywood character may not be a Muslim, she is intricately tied to certain tropes that emerge from ideas about nawabi court culture and Muslim cultural identity more generally. She cannot be separated from ideas about the Muslim subject in South Asia. At the same time, Kesavan's term ‘Islamicate’ is useful for understanding how these associations with Muslim cultural forms are not necessarily constitutive of a relationship with Islam as a religious discourse...

Although I have argued that the tawa'if is contradictorily positioned, I have also pointed out how Bollywood representations have surrounded her with the tropes of urbane Muslim cultural identity, decadence and sultry use of Urdu. These tropes make it very difficult to interpret the tawa'if in any way but incongruent to Gandhi's construction of nationhood and women's role in it. Sujata Patel argues that Gandhi's ideas created the backbone of secular nationalist constructions of women's place.She shows how men and women were constructed in Gandhian nationalism as having distinct biological qualities, different but complimentary in nation-building. Also, in the Gandhian view, women are cast not as playthings, but as wives and mothers, doing work in the domestic realm, vital to the progress of the nation. Woman's most important quality, he said, was purity; sex was necessary for procreation, but it sapped their inherent courage, patience and honourable suffering. In fact, Gandhi once claimed that if a woman was forced as a consequence of entering the public sphere to compromise her domestic role, she should ‘kill herself through sheer will force’. It is clear that the decadent tawa'if represents an opposite to these Gandhian ideals; she is a throwback to a pre-Independence feudal (and Muslim-controlled) past saturated with wanton feminine sexuality...

I would extend Mufti's argument to include the tawa'if's collusion with a decadent nawabi Muslim past that again contrasts the Gandhian ideals of suffering nationhood. Kesavan argues that the tawa'if's linking to an opulent Lucknow helps construct Muslims as essentially selfish, backward, feudal and unproductive members of society—anachronistic to the post-colonial modernising project of nation-building.”

-- ‘There are Thousands Drunk by the Passion of These Eyes’. Bollywood's Tawa'if: Narrating the Nation and ‘The Muslim’, Usamah Ansari,                   South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2008).

Benazir is not a courtesan film per se, but I pair these excerpts with screencaps from the film because Benazir throws up some compelling questions about Muslim womanhood as depicted in cinema outside of the courtesan role. In particular, I am interested by the persistence of performance in crafting Muslim women characters. I want to start considering this with Benazir and maybe move on to other Muslim social films later.

In Benazir, Meena Kumari plays a woman who can only be accurately described as a performer, because the exact nature of her profession remains ambiguous. Is she a stage actress with a weakness for certain (male) fans? Is she a new-age tawaaif, transferred from the kotha to the theater? It’s unclear if the distinction is clear-cut enough to be articulated. She easily slips between evening shows onstage and late-night mujras (upon request) at a kind of welcoming party for a newborn son-- it is critical that this a ‘family-friendly’ function, even though she performs solely for the men of the party. The spectre of ‘wanton feminine sexuality’, as Ansari puts it, hovers but never quite descends on the proceedings as a result. Similarly, she is in a very ambiguous relationship with Ashok Kumar-- are they having an affair that involves sitting around and drinking tea only or is it actual adultery? WHO KNOWS LOL it’s Hindi cinema, try figuring out that subtext! Therefore, again the ghost of the tawaaif stalks in the shadows but seems too shy to make an appearance.

I posted some musings about this a long time ago, but again it’s fascinating to consider the stage actress of cinema, who treads the line between vulgarity and respectability, especially when that character is Muslim, given the consistent association of the Muslim woman with the tawaaif in Hindi cinema. I think it is, however, essential to note how caste played/s a central role in the respectability politics of female performative arts, before going into the communal dimensions. To put it shortly since I am not well-versed enough on this subject to put it longly, many performative arts such as dance-- bharatnatyam being a prominent example-- and theater-- particularly folk theater-- were the trade of low-caste women. Such professions were deemed lowly, and their practicioners as vulgar and loose women, by the upper-castes, especially the Hindu reformist lot of the 19th century onwards. (Even early cinema suffered from this charge-- no ‘respectable’ Hindu woman was expected to become an actress until Durga Khote did it in the 30s or so.) Gradually, these Hindu reformists managed to sanitize these art forms by appropriating them-- this is what happened with bharatnatyam. When the upper-caste woman takes up the performative trade is when it becomes respectable, but the low-caste women who pioneered the trade are not elevated with their art-- they are simply robbed of it. It is key to note that this appropriation process goes hand in hand with a perceived “desexualization” of the performance to make it palatable for the Hindu middle class.

When I see the Muslim stage actress in a film, I can’t help but get the impression that the same sort of process is unfolding, where the threatening ‘vulgarity’ of the tawaaif is being subsumed and transformed into a woman that is marginally more respectable. The question remains, though, why? Why is it necessary to appropriate the tawaaif and create ‘respectable’ Muslim women when cinema is invested in the Othering of the Muslim anyway? What could be gained by trying to mainstream the Other in this way? Watching Benazir, I gradually came to the conclusion that by foregrounding the stage actress, who is potentially threatening but somehow suppressed, Muslim women characters more broadly are pushed into a ‘performative’ role where you cannot ignore the danger of the Other and her sexuality. When a tawaaif is around, it is easy for a viewer to delineate the boundaries of morality and which characters fall on which sides of the boundary. However, when the tawaaif lurks, the seductive, destructive potential of her sexuality permeates all female characterization. That is why a scene in Benazir, where a bunch of girlfriends are singing and dancing for a newly engaged friend (Tanuja), they are not allowed the privilege of being happy, innocent schoolgirls singing for themselves as they would if they were Hindu. Instead, as Muslim women (because girls are not allowed to be girls when they are oversexualized like this), their exuberance immediately becomes a performance, one in which they mirror the typical postures and steps of a tawaaif at work, complete with similar costumes.