Songs, Movies and Minorities: Hindi Film Song Sequences and the Representation of Indian Cultural Minorities

Nostalgia for the Muslim Past, Part 2

Reading

In the selections above, Rachel Dwyer and Mukul Kesavan explore the dominance of Islamicate cultures in popular Hindi cinema discussed in the previous session, and they explore how the nostalgic depiction of the decadent nineteenth-century Lucknawi courtesan and nawab culture serves to narrate the history of Muslims' relationship to contemporary understanding of Indian national identity. The present political environment in India has witnessed a resurgence of Hindu nationalism, i.e. the belief that Indian identity and the Indian nation correspond to Hindu identity, and that Muslims and Christians represent perpetual outsiders or foreigners to the Indian nation at the risk of their being treated as second-class citizens.

Kesavan's article focuses partly on the prominence of the Urdu language itself within the so-called Hindi film among other forms of the Islamicate, but it also focuses on the popularity of the courtesan film genre, which focuses on the nineteenth-century tawaif (courtesan).
The tawaif was not merely a prostitute, though she served that purpose; pure prostitution was the domain of the randi. The tawaif catered comprehensively to the needs of the cultivated man-about-town, she was more the accomplished courtesan, a sort of geisha. If Awadhi lore is to be taken seriously, it was the tawaif who undertook the social education of the sons of the gentry. She taught them a proper appreciation of the finer things in life: music, dance, conversation and etiquette-the legendary courtliness of Awadhi manners, Lucknow's nazakat and tehzeeb were her stock-in-trade. In this sublimated understanding of the tawaif even her dance, the mujra, is not an erotic performance but a choreographed ritual of salutation. The word mujra is related both to majra which indicates a place where anything runs or is made to flow, and mijra'i, a person who pays his respects, such as a servant or a minister. The dance floor, thus, becomes a theatre in the round in which the tawaif and her patrons from polite society stage their little drama of politesse, where everyone knows their lines, where every cue finds its rehearsed response.
In Kesavan's telling, the tawaif is not an outcast at the margins of society, but instead a celebrated woman who uses her education and intelligence to accumulate considerable social and economic power—to the extent that she dictated the standards of society itself through her performances to elite audiences in the kotha. The following clip from Umrao Jaan illustrates the process in which the courtesan Umrao Jaan studies dancing, poetry, and singing to eventually become a celebrated courtesan.

As Kesavan notes, the film Umrao Jaan presents a particularly interesting role for an Indian woman, insofar as her sensuality—conventionally criticized in conservative spaces—is incorporated within the fundamental social framework.
The most literal rendering of this rarefied conception of the tawaifs to be found in Muzaffar Ali's film Umrao Jaan, but in the generality of Hindi films, the tawaif is a more carnal figure. This doesn't necessarily result in a visually explicit film; it simply means that the tawaifs' accumulated experience in sensuality counterpoints the heroine's modesty (if she is married) and virginity (if she isn't). Since virtue and sexuality (at least assertive sexuality as distinct from demure succulence) can't co-exist in the same woman in the Hindi film they are often split into two female bodies, the heroine and the scarlet other woman. The tawaif is the other woman socially institutionalised.
Rachel Dwyer in her selection also focuses on the tawaifs but begins her commentary with the particular forms of pleasure offered by the courtesan film genre:
One of the greatest pleasures of the courtesan film is undoubtedly nostalgia, largely for a lost Islamic world. Memory and nostalgia, pain and loss, are themes of the ghazal... with an added historical dimension emerging with modern ideas about linear history.
The ghazal form is used throughout many of Umrao Jaan's songs, penned by the late lyricist and poet Shahyar. Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif) and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often the poet’s. In the Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism. Practically speaking, a ghazal is composed of an odd numbered chain of couplets, where each couplet is an independent poem. It will contain "a refrain of one to three words that repeat, and an inline rhyme that precedes the refrain. Lines 1 and 2, then every second line, has this refrain and inline rhyme, and the last couplet should refer to the authors pen-name... The rhyming scheme is AA bA cA dA eA etc."

In the following song, "Dil Cheez Kya Hai," Umrao Jaan performs a mujra to an elite audience within the kotha, and unbeknownst to her, her exquisite poetry attracts the ear of an admirer outside who cannot see her performance but is revealed in the last shot. As a true connoisseur of her art, he will become the love of her life.
After you watch the song above, revisit the lyrics, and trace the ghazal rhyme scheme.
Dwyer goes on to suggest the following:

Islamicate films give pleasure to Muslims and Hindus but I suggest they are very different pleasures. Clearly a possible reading—perhaps that experienced by many Muslims—suggested by the above is one of nostalgia for the loss of a glorious past, which could be interpreted as being destroyed by the advent of modernity and westernisation. This could be augmented by sorrow at the present low status of Muslims in India, perhaps also by mourning for the genre of the ghazal, itself nostalgic with its tales of unrequited love and depictions of beauty, which is being reduced to the filmi ghazal and the audiotape rather than the rich poetry of the mushaira. There may also be sadness at the loss of the pleasures shown in many elements of performance, which, since they are unacceptable to orthodox Islam that rejects alcohol, illicit sex and performance of dance and music, are no longer available to those who wish to remain within the Muslim community of India.

I should like to suggest another more sinister reading that underlies the pleasure of these films. In these films, Islamic culture is located in a woman who lives outside respectable society. However exotic and desirable, this woman makes her living as a prostitute and represents a socially unacceptable sexual but non-reproductive femininity like the beloved of the ghazal.This behaviour marginalises her, positioning her outside the domain of the modern female citizen by creating a powerful image of a decadent femininity, very different from the active sexuality of the Hindu woman within the bounds of marriage and the family, explored by the Hindi film. This marginality is enforced by these films which locate Muslims in the past, albeit a glamorous and exotic past, meaning that their presence in the modern world is anachronistic, for they are archaic, outmoded and non-modern, even if they are exotic and beguiling. This reading is not exclusive but may underlie other possible readings of this film. However strong its presence, I argue that this pleasure is alarming in that this dominant form of Indian public culture continues to position the Muslim as 'other', making it unclear how the Muslim can be a citizen of secular India, let alone of a Hindutva-ised state.

Writing Assignment In a short essay of 300-500 words, analyze the lyrics and visual information in the song sequence "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" to argue in support or against Dwyer's position that the courtesan film further marginalizes Muslims within India today, even as it celebrates their past.

Author Biography

Nilanjana Bhattacharjya's research focuses on popular music, film, and visual culture from South Asia and its diasporic communities. She is affiliated with the Center for Asian Research and the South Asia Council at ASU. Her articles and essays appear in journals including Asian Music, Framework, and South Asian History and Culture, as well as in the edited collections Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance and South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the Twentieth Century. In fall 2012, she co-edited with Peter Kvetko the first ever issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture devoted entirely to music. 

Professor Bhattacharjya is presently focusing on the changing status of the film song sequence in contemporary Hindi films. She has published previously on the circulation of Hindi film music, particularly in diasporic contexts, and the dancer Uday Shankar's reception in India and abroad, and upcoming publications focus on music and art in London's Bangladeshi communities and the film Fan. 

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