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