Courtesans in the Academia?
Basuli Deb The National Women’s Studies Association in the US selected “Outsider Feminisms” as one of the sub-themes for their annual conference at Denver, Colorado, in November 2010. The conference itself was themed “Difficult Dialogues II” in continuation with the previous year’s topic. Drawing on outsider feminisms as a mode of critique, this was an attempt to engage in difficult dialogues around the performative arts which have been the disenfranchised areas of feminist inquiry within the US academia. In this context, I often keep on wondering how such dispossession is intensified in the context of transnational encounters between US academic feminism and the figure of the woman artist from beyond the borders? So, I thought I’d revisit Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan (1981), based on Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s 1905 Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada about the life of the nineteenth century dancer courtesan, Umrao Jaan and think through the issue. Is it possible for performative feminism to get an entry into feminist inquiry by way of US film studies? So, this is an attempt to think and if possible, reinvent the position and role of outsider feminisms (like performative feminisms) within the structures of the academia. The larger question is about internal disciplinary hierarchies and boundaries within social sciences and humanities and ultimately about the politics of the job market. First, using the film Umrao Jaan as our lens, I’d like to think about the relationship in which feminist performative art, especially those embedded in a non Euro-American tradition, stands with respect to Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies departments/programs in the US. Transnational feminism happens to be the current buzzword within feminist inquiry, and departments and programs look cutting edge and frankly fashionable when such an area of feminist inquiry is introduced. But how has transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the idea of crossing borders, incorporated the figure of the woman artist from beyond the Euro-American cultural tradition? What is transnational feminism’s response to women artists, such as Umrao Jaan, who inhabit the courts of the Muslim aristocracy in the nineteenth century British empire in India? How much interest does transnational feminism have in getting to know the lives of these women courtesans who were caught in the double bind of being highly valued as artists and defamed as prostitutes? Why such women, despite their tragic stories of abduction from their natal families and being sold into prostitution, not eligible for entry into feminist studies, while human trafficking is becoming an increasingly significant area of feminist analysis? To draw on Audre Lorde’s famous description of multiple social locations of disenfranchisement for women, Umrao Jaan is perhaps the “sister outsider” of feminist studies; the likes of her hardly enter feminist inquiry, and more so when she belongs not to the underclass of Europe or America, but to the margins of the Indian aristocracy. What other factors make it so hard for some one like Umrao to enter the realm of feminist inquiry in the US academia? It is true that performance itself remains largely an untheorized and neglected area within feminist scholarship. But Umrao, in her relationship with Nawab Sultan, also embodies romantic love between an aristocrat and a courtesan that has little hope for culminating into wedded bliss. “Under western eyes” Umrao Jaan could have been lumped with the motley crowd of “Third World women”, rendered faceless and homogenous by their victim status. But Chandra Mohanty has already dismantled the authority of such feminisms by exposing the underlying imperialist, and by extension racist, assumptions that mark them. Umrao Jaan could possibly have entered the domain of feminist inquiry as the woman artist, but her art speaks another language—incomprehensible to US academic feminism with its meager interest in cultural studies and art forms outside the Euro-American tradition. This is true even when positions in Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs and departments are opened up in transnational feminism. Contemporary art forms from elsewhere can still make an entry into the rarefied world of academic feminism, but the likes of Umrao Jaan, with their classical traditions and aristocratic affiliations, rarely do. Umrao’s chosen dance form, the mujra, as we know, sprang during the Mughal period and was heavily patronized by India’s Muslim aristocracy. Mujra is a hybrid form that the pre-sixteenth century theatrical storytellers routinely performed in the courtyards of the Hindu temples space. In mujra, kathak intersect with the vocal musical forms of the thumri and the ghazal. The thumri is the musical form which has an intimate and material relationship of women for Lord Krishna. Pangs of loss or separation, so central to the internal dynamics of the workings of the genre of the ghazal, takes a more formal shape sometime in the sixth century. Umrao, who performs the mujra for the royalty and the aristocracy of India, represents an excess in the realm of feminist inquiry—the sister outsider, debarred from entry even into the domain of transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the elsewhere—beyond the borders of the familiar. She is not Phoolan Devi—the bandit queen of India—the beloved of transnational feminist inquiry into Bollywood—the lower caste woman, the outlaw of the postcolonial state, the sensational exception to the rule of Third World women’s victimhood that “Western feminism” loves. Her nuanced, median position becomes her undoing even in the highly slotted academic space as it used to be in her known world. But what if Umrao Jaan tries to enter the realm of critical inquiry via an analytic of the British Empire in India in the nineteenth century? It is in the context of the 1857 series of wars between the British and the natives of India and the British repression of resistance against foreign rule that we need to understand the figure of Umrao. The British, in their imperial interests to rule India, annexed large territories of the princely states by dethroning the native kings of the region, often by claiming that they were inefficient rulers because their
Lunatic Asylums Arrive in Calcutta
Amit Ranjan Basu The arrival of psychiatry in India was a disjuncture from the practices that already existed for mental healing. Not only were these practices based on concepts that did not follow the Cartesian mind/body binary, but I also consider it inappropriate to call those practices psychiatry though many historians of Indian medicine do. It is one thing to use ’mental health’ or ’psychiatry’ or ’psychology’ interchangeably as a rhetoric while elaborating on indigenous systems in English, but to reduce different culturally saturated practices with their own terminologies to an all-engulfing western word psychiatry, is another. For, it tends to produce a narrative that simplistically brings psychiatry in a line where pre-colonial systems at once lose their characteristics and any autonomous domain. It is not true that mad persons were not confined in houses before the colonialists came. A brief historical overview on the Indian Lunacy Act, 1912 mentioned Mahmud Khilji (1436-69), who established a ’mental hospital’ at Dhar, near Mandu in Madhya Pradesh with Maulana Fazular Lah Hakim as the appointed physician.’[1] In fact, the concept of hospitals was first conceived and practised in Arabian medicine in all the countries ruled by Muslims, and served as a model for the European hospitals. The first such hospital was founded by Walid b. Abdal Malik in AD 707. Two types of hospitals emerged. One was the ’fixed hospital’ located in particular places and the other, the ’mobile’ one that used to move from place to place and stopped at one place as long as it was necessary. Insane persons were kept locked up and chained in hospitals specified for them under regular supervision. Firuz Shah, successor of Mohmmad Bin Tuglak, added several hospitals to a list of 70 hospitals run by his predecessor in Delhi. Firuz Shah had ordered that everyone suffering from insanity should be captured, chained and kept in the hospital and treated with medicine ’prescribed by him’ which was found ’useful’. Moreover, he also provided a ’special diet’ for them.[2] In any case, it is not very difficult to imagine that wandering and violent people were kept in custody and not many hospitals for the insane came up as it happened with British colonialists, who brought in a rational system of western medicine, which saw a growth of many institutions by the mid-eighteenth century. Arrangements for keeping lunatics under private care but with the East India Company’s patronage had started by the late-eighteenth century in Calcutta. The first recorded evidence for it can be dated to 1787. D.G. Crawford, who wrote A History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913 in two volumes, gave a brief account of the establishment of this lunatic asylum in Calcutta: “The proceeding of the Calcutta Medical Board of 3rd April 1887, contain a memorial from surgeon G. M. Kenderdine in charge of the Insane Asylum …[t]he Board recommended to Government, in a letter dated 7th May 1787 the foundation of a regular asylum and nominated Assistant Surgeon William Dick to its charge … Dick was appointed on a salary of Rs. 200 per month. A Bengal Military letter dated 16th August 1787, reports in para 108-’Lunatic Hospital. Have accepted the proposals of Mr. Dick, an Asstt. Surgeon for the erection of one. The House (sic) is to be built at his Expense (sic) and rented by the company at Rs. 400 per month’ . A General letter from Bengal dated 6th November 1788, reports in para 98 that sanction has been given to the erection of a Lunatic Hospital for females, for which a rent of 200 rupees a month will be paid.”[3] During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ’trade in lunacy’ became a lucrative business for England and India. In Calcutta, a surgeon, Mr Beardsmore entered into a contract with the Government of Bengal, which lasted for 30 years, and the government provided from about Rs. 20,000-40,000 per year for taking care of, on an average, 20-40 lunatics. Compared to the Hanwell Asylum of England, the average cost per patient was seven to eight times more here![4] The asylum came up in Calcutta in 1817 exclusively for Europeans. Unlike the previous one, which had to close down, this asylum still exists in the city as the Institute of Psychiatry. Let us look at its emergence narrated by an Indian psychiatrist 50 years ago: ” [I]n 1817, Surgeon Mr. Beardsmore who was superintendent of a Government Lunatic Asylum found that the conditions in the lunatic hospital were not congenial for the patients and so he decided to erect the lunatic asylum at the outskirts of Calcutta immediately behind the Presidency Jail. This was solely due to the enterprise and enthusiasm of Mr. Beardsmore and the hospital was a private property. It was meant exclusively for Europeans. Govt. contributed five-sixth of its expenses while one-sixth was met by the contributions of the private patients themselves. When the hospital was started Mr. Beardsmore had hardly half a dozen patients but soon they increased to 50-60 in number. The asylum had a central house surrounded by several ranges of barracks, which were thrown together in no very definite plan but were added from time to time to suit the needs of the public. Every visitor was pleased with the cleanliness of the apartments and ventilation of the rooms. The gardens were beautiful and had a pleasing and refreshing appearance. Patients looked happy, cheerful and comfortable. The asylum was managed by a European superintendent and a steward. There was an Apothecary to look after the male patients and a Matron to watch the female patients. Restraint was in use but it was in extreme moderation. Excited patients were treated with morphia, opium and hot baths. Sometimes leeches had to be applied to such patients in order to alloy their excitements but venesection was never done. Blisters were found useful in chronic patients as it helped them to shorten the duration of their periodic excitements.”[5] By early nineteenth century, the Court of Directors of
Who is a Malayali Anyway?
G. Arunima In 1806, an Anglican priest called Claudius Buchanan travelled to Kerala from Bengal to understand the relationship between Hindus, Jews and Christians there. In a letter that he wrote back home to one Sandys (possibly a colleague), Buchanan declares: “the bonds of infidelity and superstition are loosening fast.” In an extraordinary travelogue, collected and edited in several volumes of memoirs, he describes the different religious groups he met all over Travancore, their histories as he understood them, and what he saw to be their most distinctive attributes. What makes this fascinating ethnography remarkable is the complexity of Buchanan’s point of view. He was at once an Anglican amongst Syrians and Latin Catholics, a white missionary amongst co-religionists of a different race, an observer with a partisan interest in spreading the word. Buchanan’s meticulously maintained diary becomes one of the earliest accounts of the religious complexity of Kerala, which is often taken for granted without adequate scrutiny in contemporary discussions of the region and its past. It is a different matter that his narratives also throw a light on the emergence of print technology and public sphere in Kerala. But that is another story. Buchanan narrates a delightful tale of his meeting with the priests (kasheesha) and elders in Mavelikara. Initially they were suspicious of whether he was a Christian at all and what his motivations were. Moreover, they were perturbed by his suggestions that they should translate their bible! They said that they could not depart from their bible because it was the true Bible of Antioch we have had in the mountains of Malabar for fourteen hundred years, or longer. They questioned Buchanan and his Western translations and in order to convince themselves that he was a true Christian and the copies he carried with him reliable. They set about to compare four copies of the third chapter of St. Mathew’s Gospel, in Eastern and Western Syrian, English and one Thomas’s translation in Malayalam. At the end of the exercise they found that all the translations were fine, except for the one into Malayalam. They had never seen a printed Syriac New Testament before and were astonished to see one, but every priest took a turn to read a portion from it, which they did fluently. Most of the places had ancient copies of the Scriptures, or of some part of them. Of these, the texts most commonly read were the Oreta, or the former part of the Old Testament, the Evangelion, the Praxeis and the Egarta. The Prophets were the rarest. In Buchanan’s account, despite the initial resistance, most of the priests were amenable to the idea of translating the Bible into Malayalam. In a letter to one Henry Thornton on 24 December 1806 he writes, “Syrian is still their sacred language,and some of the laymen understand it; but the Malayalim[sic] is the vulgar tongue. I proposed to send a Malayalim translation of the Bible to each of the Churches; and they assured me, that every man who could write would be glad to make a copy for his own family.” They also assured him that they would establish schools in each parish for Christian instruction in Malayalam, which would be undertaken by four of the chief elders there, where the Bible in Malayalam would be the principle text book. Two issues become apparent at this point. One, the complex mediation of Christianity in Kerala via the intervention of the Western church to the extent that even the idea of making the Bible available to the average parishioner in Malayalam appears to have come from outside. The second: that the initial need for print technology here, as in the case of Europe, too, seems to be coming from the desire to increase the circulation of the Bible. These two matters: that of language and of an emergent print culture has been central to discussions of modernity and the creation of ethnic identities, principally that of nationalism. But about that some other day. But the contemporary issues of Malayali identity also crucially go back to the pre-colonial interactions and today I’d like to talk about the originary myths of one particular group: the Syrian Christians. For more than a thousand years Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus have lived together in Kerala. By the 20th century, the term Malayali was used to designate all these people across community or caste difference. In fact, as soon as Kerala is viewed within the wider social geography of the Indian Ocean—an all together different ‘regional space,’ the story about the insider/and outsider, belonging and identity take a different meaning. If we examine Kerala’s history as the narrative of these different groups as an integral part of its social fabric, what is immediately evident is that such a cultural mix was possible only because Kerala was connected to an extended network: from the Arab world on the west towards China on the east with large parts of the present South East Asia linked to it through established networks of trade. This connection meant that Kerala not only nurtured a vibrant commercial culture but also that it had become home to people from diverse parts of this world, with their different cultural practices and belief systems. From religion and ritual, dietary and culinary practices, and new technological inputs, to a rich history of loan words that are an integral part of present day Malayalam language, today’s Kerala is shaped by the history of its geographical positioning. We gain an interesting tapestry if we consider the ‘origin myths’ about the arrival of the Jews, Syrian Christians, Mappilla Muslims and Nambudiri Brahmins – the four main groups that came and settled in Kerala somewhere between the 4th and 9th centuries CE. By juxtaposing conventional histories of Kerala with these stories of arrival and settlement, by means of trying to understand this complex past, one also hopes to isolate moments and contexts that are indicative of rather assertive religious identities at certain points of time. One of
A Life Less Ordinary
Yajnaseni Chakraborty Her tiny, birdlike frame seems lost in the embrace of a large, plush sofa in an anteroom of the business centre at the Oberoi Grand. But Nadine Gordimer still spells personality with a capital P. At 84, she is a beautiful woman, her delicate face framed by silver grey hair, her eyes a clear blue-black. I have been warned that she may terminate the interview if she doesn’t like the questions (she hates interviews anyway), so of course my list of questions seems totally inadequate. Besides, she has fixed me with a firm stare and announced that she refuses interviews that aren’t recorded. “I want you to write what I have said,” she tells me softly but clearly, with just a trace of her South African lilt. “Not what you think I’ve said, and I talk quickly, too.” I assure her I will faithfully write down every word, and she looks doubtful for a moment before compressing her lips and signaling me to get on with it. So I nervously do. Because Nadine Gordimer the anti-apartheid activist is so much part of Nadine Gordimer the writer, I start off asking her about the battles she has fought, and continues to fight. “I played a small role. I didn’t go to jail, as many of my comrades did. I went as far as my courage would allow,” she says. “You see, I am first of all a writer, I was born that way, but I am also a human being.” In a lecture delivered in Kolkata the previous evening, Gordimer has alluded to the moral and social responsibility of the writer, and when the question comes up again, now, she carefully dissociates such responsibility from “propaganda”. She categorises her writings alongside those of Athol Fugard and Andre Brink and Es’kia Mphahlele (which she pronounces ‘Empashlele’, and when I imitate her correctly, I earn the verbal equivalent of a pat on the back). “We were living at a time when we had to write the truth, the bits that were never reported in the newspapers. But then, governments never listen to writers.” Evidently they do, considering the bans imposed on three of her novels by the apartheid government. “I’m glad they were banned. No bans would have been worrying,” she says wryly. By now, Gordimer has unbent enough to discuss any possible crisis of faith that she may have faced, and I feel I am allowed to ask who she turned to during those crises. She agrees she is an atheist with left-wing sympathies, explains that the source of her faith is “our responsibility to each other”, and then wistfully turns to her favourite poet W.B. Yeats: “What do we know but that we face/ One another in this lonely place?” The question of ‘responsibility’ is evidently a significant one in her life. It is the single most important reason why she never really considered leaving South Africa. Her late husband, Reinhardt Cassirer, belonged to a notable family of Berlin Jews. He arrived in South Africa as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and studied in London and Heidelberg. “He wasn’t Africa born and bred like me, and he had a nostalgic love for London, I suppose, so we did toy with the idea of living there for a while, but in the end I realized I was too attached to Africa,” she smiles. As a white South African who established deeply personal bonds with the anti-apartheid movement, Gordimer nevertheless remains reserved and unsentimental about the risks she must have run as a supporter of the once outlawed African National Congress. But her face lights up in a rare smile when she recalls the experience of standing in a mixed-race queue to vote in her country’s first post-apartheid election. “It was the best experience of my life,” she says. Better than the Nobel Prize? “Yes it was, really.” Mixed race brings us to the question of Indians in South Africa, who, Gordimer notes approvingly, did not flee the country as those in Kenya did. “They stayed and went to prison,” she smiles again. And Kenya, the home of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s forefathers, naturally brings us to why she has called his Bend in the River “a racist book”. I point out that her remark is likely to be quoted out of context to indicate the man rather than his book. “You think so?” she replies. “I’m sorry to hear that. He’s a great writer, which is why the book disappointed me.” And then she adds, with no real remorse, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did, then.” It’s nearing the end of my allotted time, and Gordimer hasn’t glanced at her watch more than once, purely out of habit, I assume. We’ve covered a lot of ground, talking about the small but growing Black South African middle class with particular reference to the software industry, the Indian middle class too (“I loved Mr Varma’s Great Indian Middle Class”), the shanties outside Kolkata airport, the plight of poor, unemployed young people who take to violence (not least in South Africa), why the South African cricket team may never have the required share of Black players, and why South African president in waiting Jacob Zuma’s motto is: Bring Me My AK-47 (“he doesn’t say it much now, though”). She has shown me a sketch her granddaughter made in Mumbai (“she sketches beautifully”), and a newspaper clipping about parallels between India’s long-standing democracy and South Africa’s still-nascent one. I try to introduce Taslima Nasreen into the conversation, considering Gordimer has been on various anti-censorship boards, but she doesn’t respond, as I had hoped she would, with a brief tirade. Instead, her face aglow, she holds forth on how South Africa no longer has censorship, “except if someone actively preaches violence”. The pride on her face as she says this is proof enough, one feels, of a life less ordinary. Thank God she liked the questions. (This was recorded in November 2008) Yajnaseni Chakraborty is