Umrao Jan Ada’s Pakistan

If you know Urdu and are in touch with Pakistani culture and media, you must know how popular the serialized TV plays are in Pakistan. You might have heard about a recent serialized television play called Umrao Jan Ada, which was aired on Geo TV in 2003. The serial was based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s early twentieth century Urdu novel with the same title.

In what follows, are excerpts from an article, entitled “The Courtesans in the Living Room,” by Kamran Ali, published in the ISIM Review in Spring 2005. The article analyzes the politics behind the recuperation of the Umrao Jan Ada story from the past by the predominantly liberal media for the purpose of influencing the contemporary moral discourse in Pakistan. The below analysis shows that media does more than merely reflecting the ground reality; it actively seeks to construct and mold public opinion in certain directions. The analysis in this article also provides a good example to explore the broader secular-liberal politics in the social and political spheres of the Pakistani society, especially, during the past few years of “enlightenment”. I hinted at this politics in an earlier post where I talked about the ‘discovery’ of Bulleh Shah by our pop culture.

Before you read the excerpts, please do note that my intension in this post is to just highlight the liberal politics and the role of media. I do not intend to get into a discussion about the merits or problems of liberal notions of liberation, justice, and tolerance, and in contrast, what may be the alternative ways of looking at women’s status and problems in Pakistan. Also, below is not a summary of the abovementioned article; I am only focusing only on certain aspects.

The Courtesans

“The courtesan (tawaif) has been a stock character in popular South Asian literature and movies. Indeed the “fallen woman” is universal in its appeal among readers of pulp and highbrow fiction. Yet in Pakistani films and literature the courtesan’s character remains intertwined in a morality play and almost always achieves a tragic end (mostly commits suicide), repents for her “wayward” behaviour or, extremely rarely, becomes a sharif bibi (respectable woman), which for a courtesan may be akin to a social death. In contrast, in Rusva’s novel the protagonist not only survives, but becomes a respectable poet and a wealthy patron of art without renouncing her past profession. In this sense the novel is unique in its empathetic treatment of courtesan culture.

“These interventions do put forward an argument for re-evaluating the space of sex workers in contemporary Pakistani society; Geo TV’s initiative can be understood as an extension of this thematic interest in courtesan life by liberal intellectuals. This opening allows Geo to produce Umrao in a country where extra marital sex legally remains a crime against the state and where memories of severe punishment for sexual liaisons under the Hudood Ordinance of the Zia-ul Haq era in the 1980s still resonate among the populace. Unlike the modest reach of the above-mentioned academic works, Geo’s production brought courtesan life into domestic spaces (50 million of 150 million Pakistanis have access to TV) as it also intervened into a debate on morality, sexuality, and gender politics in present day Pakistan. Why, one might ask, have Pakistan’s liberal intelligentsia and feminists chosen at this juncture to depict the life-world of the prostitute and the figure of the courtesan as metaphors to argue for sexual freedom and women’s autonomy?

Inside the Kotha

“As Umrao grows up accomplished in the various skills of courtesan life, she is much sought after by many members of the elite that frequent the kotha. She is eventually “given” for the first time to a respectable Nawab who retains the exclusive right to her company and maintains her through gifts and cash. This man becomes the first of many with whom Umrao is shown to, within the parameters of Pakistan’s censors, have a sustained sexual relationship. There are many twists and turns in the story, but Umrao is always characterized as an extremely sympathetic person — a victim of circumstances beyond her control — with whom the audience can empathize and identify. Periodically the play does remind us that Umrao is a courtesan (with its contemporary connotation of a prostitute) and hence allows for the audience to create a distance from her guilt-free sexual relationships. Yet despite the techniques that the director uses to distance us from the protagonist’s assertive sexual practices—perhaps to satisfy the censor—the audience is constantly exposed to and remains engrossed in Umrao’s various relationships.

In addition, life in the kotha itself is portrayed in extremely women friendly terms. There is camaraderie among the younger women in the household and the audience gets the sense of a caring family. The strongest person in the entire household is the chief courtesan, Khanum, who rules over the household as a deft diplomat who has the power of coercion always at her disposal. The interesting aspect of this household is the secondary and dependent nature of the men. In traditional kothas, as depicted in the serial, men occupied the more subservient roles of servants, doormen, musicians, and instructors. Men, of course, were also wealthy patrons and benefactors. But even they, within this domain, deferred to the immense power that these women wielded in their own space and treated the courtesans as equals.

A Liberal Fantasy of What “Tolerant Islam” Should Look Like

“Further, in contrast to Pakistan’s recent history of rising Islamic radicalism and the Islamization process of the Zia era, the play seeks to display a much more tolerant atmosphere not only in terms of gender relationships, but also in its depiction of Islamic authority. There is a retainer in the kotha, Moulvi Saheb, who is married to the main female servant in the household. Moulvi Saheb teaches Umrao the Quran and religion, literature, and morals. He is portrayed as a man of religion, yet accepts the lifestyle of his surroundings with ease and grace. Similarly, in one episode Umrao runs away with her paramour and ends up in an unknown village after being abandoned. Here she finds the shaykh of the local mosque who generously gives her shelter and then helps her to establish herself as a local courtesan with her own kotha and clientele. These portrayals use the midnineteenth century Muslim society in North India, and its imagined tolerant social space where religious leaders and courtesans could co-exist, to implicitly critique the moral and theological extremism of contemporary life.

The Politics

“The choice of Umrao Jan Ada to argue for women’s liberation and religious tolerance is an intriguing one. Historically modernist Muslim reformers of late nineteenth century opposed Nawabi culture, of which courtesan life was an integral part. Post-1857 Muslim reformers like the author Nazir Ahmed, Sayed Ahmed, the founder of Aligarh Muslim University, and the poet Altaf Husein Hali (inlcluding Deobandi religious reformers) in their writings argued against the extravagance, impiety, and ignorance of the Nawabi era, which according to them was the cause of Muslim backwardness. In contrast they advocated the pursuit of knowledge, piety, and restraint.

“It appears that the female director and script writer of Umrao sought to make an implicit argument against those tendencies of Muslim reformist thought, whether secular or religious (Deobandi), that asked women to distance themselves from the realm of custom which was deemed superstitious, un-Islamic, and irrational. This reformism indeed aided some women to gain more rights within the emerging middle-class household. For example, literacy skills along with modes of reformed behaviour did open spaces for women to articulate their rights in marriage and property. Yet, these gains were at the cost of losing separate spheres of female activity that were condemned by the modern reformists as the realm of the nafs, the area of lack of control and disorder. The creators of this play through their depiction of female spaces, use the mid-nineteenth century milieu to invoke this sense of disorder/sexual themes and link it to an older oral tradition of women’s narrative construction and other forms of popular performances—the arena of reformist attack—to make a more contemporary case for women’s emancipation and equity.

In invoking this past the producers present an alternative narrative of custom, traditional space, and Muslim religious practice. This move to reinvent the past as tolerant and inclusive is linked to a liberal political agenda that is in opposition to an earlier generation of modernist thinkers. Using late-nineteenth century North India as a backdrop, this serial confronts the more homogenizing elements of Islamic politics in Pakistani society; a major political task for liberals in present day Pakistan. The play’s implicit portrayal of a more tolerant and inclusive national entity interestingly enough also relates to President General Musharraf’s propagated rhetoric of a modern, moderate, and Muslim Pakistan. This resonance perhaps allows liberal intellectuals the space to use media outlets to promote agendas of diverse freedoms and tolerance without the fear of state censorship. The long-term implications of this tentative cultural alliance between liberals and the Military junta require a detailed discussion and analysis that cannot be provided here. However, in conclusion I would raise another politically important question that the liberal intelligentsia rarely confronts. As issues of gender equity and tolerant Islam are emphasized in the play, the idiom of this discussion remains within the parameters of high Urdu culture. In this play as in others, the depiction of late nineteenth century North Indian life is depicted as Pakistani Muslim culture and in doing so remains oblivious to extremely vital issues of cultural and linguistic diversity within Pakistan.

The Question of Diversity

“Since Pakistan’s independence in 1947, Urdu’s dominance of the cultural center has bred a sense of exclusion among other linguistic groups (Pashtun, Sindhi, Punjabi, Baluch, among others) hindering the emergence of a national culture that democratically includes the diverse voices and languages present in Pakistani cultural spectrum. Where Geo’s Umrao Jan Ada tackles the issue of female emancipation using North Indian ashraf (respectable Muslim elite) culture, it addresses an audience that is also culturally steeped in other traditions, vernaculars, and cultural ethos. The imposition of nineteenth century high Urdu culture, though in this case ostensibly well meaning, retains within it the hegemonic aspect of centralizing state projects of cultural homogeneity which have continued to undermine the rights of the various linguistic and cultural groups that constitute Pakistan. In this sense the liberal feminist agenda in its attempt to re-interpret “tradition” and Muslim social practice in South Asia, may still be entangled in modernist projects where experiences of specific linguistic groups who have a longer urban history (as in the case with Urdu speakers) takes precedence over practices of other ethnicities. A more inclusive cultural politics may yet require a sensitivity toward the diverse histories of the various peoples who inhabit Pakistan.”

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Insightful and provocative, isn’t it! I won’t comment any further on the above analysis, but would like to point to a useful sociological framework to evaluate the abovementioned politics.

The above analysis helps us identify the different players/groups competing in, what Bourdieu would call, the “cultural field“. They each bring their “habitus” (outlook, cultural values, practices) and their capital (ability to influence) to dominate the field. The players in this case are the liberals, the reformist-Islamists, the traditionalists, and the non-Urdu-speaking groups. Depending on a group’s capital, as well as support from the adjacent fields (of political and economic, among others), a group is able to gain dominance in the cultural field, if only for sometime. Other groups keep exerting their opposition to resist this dominance, so the dominant group has to continuously invest its energies to maintain its dominance. In the cultural field, it would be through continuously shaping public opinion and cultural discourse.

Now, if we place the different players of the Pakistani cultural politics in this framework, we can see how certain groups were dominant under Zia-ul Haq’s regime and how others are under Musharraf’s blessings. And how in each episode, the dominant group tried to re-write history and shape cultural discourse, through all available means of reaching out to the people. Print and electronic news and entertainment media is one example. Re-writing textbooks and formation of education boards with set agendas under both regimes is another.

This framework should also help us analyze the competition surrounding the very existential question for Pakistan for the last sixty years: What is Pakistan’s identity, who should we – the Pakistanis – identify with in our cultural outlook and practices, or should we have our own unique culture, but who would determine that culture and on what basis, and why should others allow one person or group to do this determination for all others?!!