‘There are Thousands Drunk by the Passion of These Eyes’. Bollywood's Tawa'if: Narrating the Nation and ‘The Muslim’

Abstract

EDITORIAL NOTE

Usamah Ansari, a 23-year-old graduate student at York University, Canada, was killed in a road accident at Toronto on 13 April 2008, just days before we were to finalise publication of his paper. Usamah's mother graciously gave us permission to proceed with its publication. May the paper stand as a tribute to a very promising career tragically cut short.

Notes

¹ Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p.12.

² Sara Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol.18, no.4 (1992), pp.756–69.

³ Makul Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawa'if: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1994), p.251.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Bollywood is a vernacular term referring to Hindi- and Urdu-language movies that are usually made specifically within the Mumbai film industry. Jjotika Virdi, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Film as Social History (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

⁶ Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.10.

⁷ Jane Scoular, ‘The “Subject” of Prostitution: Interpreting the Discursive, Symbolic and Material Position of Sex/Work in Feminist Theory’, in Feminist Theory, Vol.5, no.3 (2004), p.343.

⁸ Evelina Giobbe, ‘Confronting the Liberal Lies about Prostitution’, in Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice Raymond (eds), The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), p.77.

⁹ Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press, 1987); see also Gail Pheterson (ed.), A Vindication of the Rights of Whores (Seattle: Seal Press, 1987).

¹⁰ Svati Shah, ‘Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence’, in Gender and History, Vol.16, no.3 (2004), p.806.

¹¹ Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, in Feminist Studies, Vol.16, no.2 (1990), p.279.

¹² Belinda Carpenter, Re-Thinking Prostitution: Feminism, Sex and the Self (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), p.62.

¹³ Scoular, ‘The “Subject” of Prostitution: Interpreting the Discursive, Symbolic and Material Position of Sex/Work in Feminist Theory’, p.347.

¹⁴ Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

¹⁵ Jo Doezema, ‘Ouch! Western Feminists’ Wounded Attachment to the Third World Prostitute', in Feminist Review, Vol.67 (2001), p.16.

¹⁶ Joanna Liddle and Shirin Rai, ‘Feminism, Imperialism and the Challenge of the “Indian Woman’”, in Women's History Review, Vol.7, no.4 (1998), p.507.

¹⁷ Bell, Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the ProstituteBody.

¹⁸ Robert Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997), p.87.

¹⁹ Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

²⁰ See Fareed Kazmi, ‘Muslim Socials and the Female Protagonist: Seeing a Dominant Discourse at Work’, in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1994), pp.226–43.

²¹ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, pp.259–87.

²² Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”, p.67.

²³ See, for example, Aamir Mufti, ‘A Greater Story Than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (eds), Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp.2–36; and Jennifer Post, ‘Professional Women in Indian Music: The Death of the Courtesan Tradition’, in Ellen Koskoff (ed.), Women and Music in a Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp.97–110.

²⁴ The mut'a is a Muslim marriage contract that can be uttered privately without a religious leader. It allows a man and woman to enter sexual and domestic relations for an allotted amount of time while outlining any custodial and financial obligations. This is discussed at length in Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'i Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989). Though some believe it is sanctioned by verse 4:23 of the Quran, it was outlawed by the second caliph, Umar, in the 7th century (ibid). Its use continues, however, especially amongst Shi'a Muslims. Since the Lucknow nawabs were largely Shi'a, the mut'a was a normalised and religiously-sanctioned custom. Haeri discusses its relationship to prostitution in Shi'a Iran: ‘The ulama maintain that temporary marriage, while performing a similar sexual function for the individual [as prostitution], symbolises social control that finds its harmonious niche within the social order. Those who practise the custom, therefore, are considered to follow a divinely recommended way in order to satisfy some “natural” needs … it actually is perceived to combat corruption and immorality’ (ibid, p.6). It was thus possible in gender-segregated Lucknow for Muslim nawabs to legitimately undertake contractual sexual relations with tawa'ifs ‘unceremoniously by simply uttering the mut'a marriage formula privately’ (ibid, p.15).

²⁵ Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”, p.69.

²⁶ Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

²⁷ Michael Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987).

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Sharharya Khan, The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (New York: St. Martin Press, 2000).

³⁰ Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’.

³¹ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, pp.259–87.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid., p.279.

³⁴ The most famous of these is Mirza Ruswa's 1899 classic novel, Umrao Jaan Ada. See Mirza Ruswa, Umrao Jaan Ada: Translated by David Mathews (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1996). This novel is the basis for Muzzafir Ali's 1981 film, Umrao Jaan, and the 2006 remake.

³⁵ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, p.264.

³⁶ Ibid., pp.267–9.

³⁷ Ibid.; Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow: 1856–1877 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); Amir Hasan, Palace Culture of Lucknow (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation, 1983); Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals; and Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.

³⁸ Urdu, due to its heavy Arabic and Persian lexicon and formation under Mughal rule, is associated with Indian Muslims. It is also the official language of Pakistan. Since Partition, there has been an attempt to virtually erase it from official use in India. See Daud Rahbar, ‘Gandhi and the Hindi-Urdu Question’, in Harold Coward (ed.), Indian Critiques of Gandhi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). It has been noted that Bollywood cinema clearly uses Urdu for expressing key emotional and rhetorical moments. See Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawa'if: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, pp.244–57. And though the distinction between Hindi and Urdu is blurred at best, it is significant that production companies label most movies as Hindi only while classifying these ‘Muslim socials’ as Urdu or Urdu-Hindi. See Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema.

³⁹ Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow: 1856–1877.

⁴⁰ Rustum Kidwai, Lucknow: The Lost Paradise (Lucknow: S.R. Publications, 1993).

⁴¹ Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals.

⁴² Hasan, Palace Culture of Lucknow.

⁴³ Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’, pp.43–4.

⁴⁴ Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p.10.

⁴⁷ Chakravarty, National identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987.

⁴⁸ Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1980), p.162.

⁴⁹ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, p.268.

⁵⁰ Ratnabali Chatterjee, ‘Indian Prostitute as a Colonial Subject’, in Reproductions, Vol.2 (April 1999), p.534.

⁵¹ Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905, p.168.

⁵² Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.

⁵³ Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’, p.111.

⁵⁴ Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905, p.168; and Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India, p.61.

⁵⁵ Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.

⁵⁶ Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’.

⁵⁷ Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p.65.

⁵⁹ Bell, Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute Body.

⁶⁰ For a substantive discussion on the relationship between begum and tawa'if, see Ollikkala's biography of the famous Urdu ghazal singer Begum Akthar. He outlines the transformation of this singer from a prosperous tawa'if to a demure begum in order to find space for herself in post-Independence India. She changed her title from Akthari Bai Faizabadi, roughly meaning ‘Akhtar the court-entertainer from Faizabad’, to Begum Akhtar. She also married a Lucknow lawyer to join the ranks of ‘respectable’ women. This all occurred soon after Independence was achieved in 1947 and exemplifies the bolstering of Hindu middle-class moral hegemony. Ollikkala argues that even though ghazals were traditionally sung by tawa'ifs, the ‘New India’ could never legitimise a singing whore. Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’.

⁶¹ As Oldenburg notes, however, some tawa'ifs enacted veiling in certain spaces. There is a category of women in kothas, khangi, who only engage in liaisons in a clandestine manner, maintaining their status as ‘private women’. The boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in reference to prostitutes is thus more fluid and conflicting than feminist discourses account for. With that said, in Chaudhvin ka Chand (1960), Pakeezah (1971) and Umrao Jaan (1981) there is a clear distinction between Muslim women of the kotha not being veiled or behind a curtain around men while other Muslim women are. Indeed the narrative of Chaudhvin ka Chand is organised around the protagonist not being able to recognise his beloved because she was veiled.

⁶² Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, p.275.

⁶³ The ghazal, Ollikkala argues, represents the refinements of Lucknow: ‘stand[ing] as a symbol of the grandeur and cultural accomplishments that are associated with the memory of Avadh’. He argues that the classic ghazal form has been watered down in Bollywood: ‘the “light-classical” ghazal and its performers, were symbols of Mughal (or at least Muslim) authority … . Elite Urdu metaphors—the language itself was connected with Muslim rule in India—were commonly replaced by Hindi terms and images’. See Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”, p.279. He thus argues that the modern film ghazal is actually a ‘Hinduised’ form of the original, with fewer Persian and Arabic words, but maintains a ‘classy’ association with a memory of polished Lucknow Muslim manners (abab). These forms of ghazals thus do not provide a clearly-pointed challenge to the growing hegemony of Hindi in northern India that threatens the vivacity of Urdu. It is threatening enough, however, to a Hindu national narrative to have All India Radio avoid playing too many ghazals to ‘emphasise indigenous (that is, non-Muslim) references’. Ibid., p.281.

⁶⁴ See Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawa'if: the Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, p.248.

⁶⁵ Greg Booth, ‘Pandits in the Movies: Contesting the Identity of Hindustani Classical Music and Musicians in the Hindi Popular Cinema’, in Asian Music, Vol.36, no.1 (2005), pp.60–86. The peshwaz is a long dress worn atop churidars, which resemble tights; the gharara appears similar to a skirt but is actually divided between the legs and flares from the knees. See Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996). The churidar, worn also in parts of Iran and Afghanistan, and a choice item for the Mughals, is clearly historically associated with a Muslim presence in South Asia and its cultural identity. For dancers, Lalli notes how the long peshwaz and tight-fitting churidars are tied to a Mughal style as compared to the Rajput style, which is presumably associated with more of a Hindu influence. See Gina Lalli, ‘A North Indian Classical Dance Form: Lucknow Kathak’ in Visual Anthropology, Vol.17, no.1 (2004), pp.19–43. The churidar, however, is worn today by both Muslims and Hindus, and was the dress of choice for Nehru. It is the contrast of wearing saris and bindhis before the tawa'ifs are seen inside the kotha, with completely altered attire once inside it—along with all the other ‘maidens’ in their vicinity—that illustrates the links between tawa'ifs and certain tropes of Muslim cultural artefacts transcribed onto women's bodies. And even though these items of clothing may be worn by Hindus, as Tarlo discusses, certain items identified as Muslim attire have important political consequences, not limited to marking communal identity. Indeed Tarlo problematises conventional academic notions that clothes in South Asia are prescribed causally by caste and religion, arguing for a more fluid, spontaneous and dynamic model. Furthermore, since identities are multiple and conflicting, clothing is also a site of conflicted negotiations. With that said, clothes still serve as important political and identity markers. For example, she links the proliferation of stitched styles of clothing (including churidars, peshwaaz, gharara, etc.) with the migration of Muslims into South Asia. Even though these clothing styles have been popularised amongst Hindus, there is still an association with Muslims and items such as the gharara. Thus, it is important to note how clothes are used to define boundaries, to reveal, to conceal and to communicate important political and cultural information. As Cook demonstrates, ‘clothing—an embodied set of cultural codes—is a vital part of performing subjectivity and enacting power’ for South Asian Muslim women. See Nancy Cook, ’What To Wear, What To Wear?: Western Women and Imperialism in Gilgit, Pakistan’, in Qualitative Sociology, Vol.28, no.4 (2005), p.357.

⁶⁶ Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India.

⁶⁷ Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (New York: Verso, 2000).

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

⁷⁰ Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. It is interesting to note how far the symbolic currency of Pakeezah goes. Brown, in her discussion on contemporary dancing girls in the red-light district of Lahore (Heera Bazar), discusses how these women incorporate the image of Pakeezah into their own identity construction. She claims that Pakeezah is well suited to describe their contradictory positioning: the film both romanticises and damns them. See Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore (New York: Harper-Collins, 2005).

⁷¹ This foot-fetishism is present in other tawa'if-centred films. For example in Ghungroo (1983), Kesarbai's feet become representative of her status as a prostitute. Her lover, Senapati Singh, tells her that she will never need to wear her foot-bells again and so she should bury them somewhere where even an earthquake cannot reach. He promises her that with the disposal of these foot-bells she will forever live in respect. Due to a narrative twist, however, Kesarbai is forced to perform at Senapati Singh's wedding to another woman. Due to custom, Senapati Singh is asked to put the foot-bells on the dancing girl (Kaserbai). This is the ultimate humiliation for Kaserbai who had thought that she was going to be marrying Senapati Singh. After he gives her the bells to wear, the camera displays a series of close-up shots of her feet dancing. This foot-fetishism theme could emerge from the nature of dancing that is based on footwork. It could also, however, be referring to pollution due to the foot's association with the ground.

⁷² Another interesting component of this dirt/purity theme is the title itself. ‘The Pure One’ is obviously a play on the notion of chastity and propriety. There also appears to be a connection between ‘Pakeezah’ and ‘Pakistan,’ with the latter meaning ‘The Land of the Pure’. Sahibjaan's constant search for a ‘pure’ place might be parodying Muslims’ search for another ‘pure’ place: Pakistan.

⁷³ This in itself was a sort of insult to Salim's aristocratic family as it was Salim's uncle who had fathered Sahibjaan and whose in-laws had not accepted her mother, Nargis. Thus Sahibjaan's aunt almost forces Salim to marry her niece to address the injustice enacted on her sister.

⁷⁴ Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyles of Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow’, pp.259–87.

⁷⁵ Chakravarty, National identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p.280.

⁷⁷ Transliterated as:

Phir meri awara lash is gulaabi maqbara mai.n dafan hone keliye lot ay'i hai

Har tawa'if aik lash hai, mai.n bhee aik lash hu.n aur tu bhee

Humara ye bazaar aik qabristaan hai

Aisi aurto.n ka, jiski ruuh marjati hai aur jism zinda rehte hai.n

Ye hamare baadakhane aur kothe hamare maqbare hai.n

Jin me hum murda aurto.n ke zinda jananze sajh ke rakh di jati hai.n

Hamare qabr pakkee nahi.n jati, khule chordi jati hai.n

Main aisi khuli hu'i qabr kee aik besabr laash hu.n

⁷⁸ I suggest Saba Mahmood's ‘Agency, Performativity, and the Feminist Subject’, in Ellen Armour and Susan St. Ville (eds), Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) for an impressive discussion on how certain types of agency articulated by women cannot be understood through the liberal rubric of resistance nor the post-structural lens on the subversive. She highlights types of human flourishing that are clearly agency but may not be working for liberating or subversive ends at all.

⁷⁹ Harbans Mukhia, ‘The Celebration of Dissent in Urdu Ghazal’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.33, no.4 (1999), pp.861–81.

⁸⁰ Bell, Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute Body.

⁸¹ Kazmi, ‘Muslim Socials and the Female Protagonist: Seeing a Dominant Discourse at Work’, p.238.

⁸² Booth, ‘Pandits in the Movies: Contesting the Identity of Hindustani Classical Music and Musicians in the Hindi Popular Cinema’, pp.60–86.

⁸³ Bell, Reading, Writing and Re-Writing the Prostitute Body.

⁸⁴ Sujata Patel, ‘The Construction and Reconstruction of Women in Gandhi’, in Alice Thorner and Maitreyi Krishnaraj (eds), Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History (Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1998), pp.288–321.

⁸⁵ Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Women and Reform of Indian Tradition: Gandhian Alternative to Liberalism’, in Leela Kasturi and Vina Mazumdar (eds), Women and Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1994), p.7; and Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late Colonial India’, in Feminist Studies, Vol.26, no.3 (2000), pp.645–60.

⁸⁶ Mondal Anshuman, ‘The Emblematics of Gender and Sexuality in Indian Nationalist Discourse’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol.36, no.4 (2002), p.924.

⁸⁷ Patel, ‘The Construction and Reconstruction of Women in Gandhi’, p.294.

⁸⁸ Anshuman, ‘The Emblematics of Gender and Sexuality in Indian Nationalist Discourse’, p.926.

⁸⁹ Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p.41.

⁹⁰ See, for example, Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India (London: British Film Institute, 2002); Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987; and Virdi, The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Film as Social History.

⁹¹ See Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002). Indeed Mishra goes beyond the notion of a national mother to the realm of deity: Radha is the name of the Hindu goddess who is the consort of Krishna. The undertones of a Hindu narrative are thus further confirmed. It is interesting to also note how in Pakeezah the potential for a tawa'if to be a mother is effectively prevented; when Sahibjaan is born, her tawa'if mother Nargis simultaneously dies.

⁹² Ollikkala discusses the distinctions between the ghazal and the qawwaili. Though both are associated with Muslim positioning, the ghazal is a more secular tradition while the qawwali style is based on more Persio-Arabic and South Asian Sufistic tradition. See Ollikkala, ‘Concerning Begum Akhtar: “Queen of Ghazal”’.

⁹³ Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia.

⁹⁴ Mufti, ‘A Greater Story Than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, pp.4–5.

⁹⁵ Ibid., p.5.

⁹⁶ Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawa'if: The Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, pp.226–43. Urdu is also part of this ‘selfish’ construction of Muslims. Indeed Gandhi specifically attacked Urdu as a fracturing and overly-decadent language (Mufti, p.8) that should be erased for the unifying use of Hindi (Rahbar, pp.217–38). See Mufti, ‘A Greater Story Than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, p.8; and Rahbar, ‘Gandhi and the Hindi-Urdu Question’, pp.217–38.

⁹⁷ See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Introduction’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1987). Foucault also relates certain period-piece films to the fight over popular memory. He claims they can re-program popular memory as ‘people are shown not what they were but what they must remember having been’. This process is vital in administering and controlling memory. See Michel Foucault, ‘Film and Popular Memory’, in Radical Philosophy, Vol.11 (1975), pp.24–9. Since Hindu nationalism depends so much on constructing a past in which Muslims are invaders and over-decadent despots, reprogramming memory in a certain way indeed appears part of a Hindutva agenda. Bollywood images of tawa'ifs can thus be interpreted as part of this contemporary agenda as well.

⁹⁸ Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals.

⁹⁹ Poonam Arora, ‘Sanctioned and Proscribed Narrative in Postcolonial India: A Bicultural Reading of the Courtesan Film’, in Kostas Myrsiades and Jerry McGuire (eds), Order and Partialities: Theory, Pedagogy, and the ‘Postcolonial’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp.67, 77.

¹⁰⁰ Rahbar, ‘Gandhi and the Hindi-Urdu Question’, pp.217–38.

¹⁰¹ Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawa'if: the Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema’, pp.248–9.

¹⁰² Faisal Devji, ‘Hindu/Muslim/Indian’, in Public Culture, Vol.5, no.1 (1992), pp.1–18.

¹⁰³ Arora, ‘Sanctioned and Proscribed Narrative in Postcolonial India: A Bicultural Reading of the Courtesan Film’, p.68.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid.

¹⁰⁵ Booth, ‘Pandits in the Movies: Contesting the Identity of Hindustani Classical Music and Musicians in the Hindi Popular Cinema’, pp.60–86.

¹⁰⁶ Mufti, ‘A Greater Story Than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, pp.2–36.

¹⁰⁷ Kazmi, ‘Muslim Socials and the Female Protagonist: Seeing a Dominant Discourse at Work’, pp.226–43.

¹⁰⁸ Devji, ‘Hindu/Muslim/Indian’, pp.1–18.

¹⁰⁹ Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987, p.281.

¹¹⁰ Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’, pp.756–69.

¹¹¹ Carrol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai, ‘Public Modernity in India’, in Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp.1–20.

¹¹² A remake of Umrao Jaan directed by J.P. Dutta was released in 2006, as well as Goustam Ghosh's Yatra released in 2007. The latter film explores the relationship between a novelist and a Lucknow tawa'if who resides in the historic Mehndi Bazaar in Hyderabad.