By Poonam Arora

The narratives of Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan both play out the internalised guilt of the Muslim diaspora quite explicitly. Pakeezah initially introduces a woman who, because she is a tawaif, is rejected as an unfit bride by her lover’s family. She subsequently dies after giving birth to a daughter who later also becomes a tawaif and falls in love with a man who is her father’s brother’s son. This patriliny is unknown to the lovers. The daughter, in turn, is spurned by her lover’s family. This man, however, rejects his family in favour of the tawaif whom he wishes to marry. In an effort at rehabilitating the tawaif and giving her a new identity, he gives her a new name - Pakeezah - meaning “pure woman”. The name resonates with the associations of another name - Pakistan - which literally means the homeland of the pure. Despite her love for the man, Pakeezah refuses to consent to the marriage, because she is ashamed of being a tawaif and is unwilling to ruin the man’s good name. Pakeezah consents to the marriage only when, in a highly melodramatic final sequence, she is revealed to be the daughter of the very family that had rejected both her and her mother as unfit brides. Thus it is only when Pakeezah is reunited with, and accepted by, her father that she can honourably marry her lover/cousin. Since in Muslim kinship groups, marriage between paternal first cousins is considered the ideal match, this marriage reconciles Pakeezah to both her natal family and her family through marriage. What is more, order is restored through a rehabilitation not just of Pakeezah, but, belatedly, of her wronged mother as well. The fact that the roles of both mother and daughter are played by the same actress - Meena Kumari - is significant because this dual role establishes a continuity between the suffering of mother and daughter. In the film’s last scene, Pakeezah is bid farewell by her father and received into her husband’s family. This movement - daughter to bride - is unexceptional for a tawaif, who is, by definition, outside the institution of marriage and the arena of respectability. The unusual nature of her trajectory is underscored by the following voice-over, which occurs in the final scene:

Hazaro sal nargis apne banure pa rote ha,
Bare mushkil sa hota ha chaman mai dedavar paida.
(For thousands of years the lonesome Nargis flower
Bemoans her desolate and uncharmed existence,
For it is after many misfortunes
That this flower meets an admirer.)

Despite the happy ending, Pakeezah remains a profoundly pessimistic film. It is not the happy ending that the film is remembered for, rather it is its gloomy portrayal of unsheltered women which is memorable.

Umrao Jaan is based on the life of a tawaif, Umrao Jaan Ada, who lived in Lucknow in the second half of the nineteenth century. The plot of this film is strikingly similar to that of Pakeezah. Like Pakeezah, who grows up an orphan, Umrao Jaan is kidnapped from her natal home and is raised away from her parents. While still a child, she is inducted into the institution of the kotha. As a tawaif, Umrao Jaan falls in love with a nawab from her native town, who she expects will marry her and thereby return her to respectability. However, the latter is prevented by his mother from marrying Umrao and is instead married to a maid-servant of the mother. Like Umrao, this maidservant too had been kidnapped from her parents’ home and subsequently spent a few days of captivity with Umrao. This shared childhood experience figuratively makes the two women into close siblings, one of whom marries the man. A despondent Umrao, meanwhile, continues to devise ways of escaping from the kotha and returning to her natal home. When she does eventually return, Umrao is rejected by her family because she has lived as an unsheltered woman and sullied the honour of the family.

The protagonists of both films seek their natal families and attempt to gain acceptance in respectable society through marriage with the men that they love. Whereas Pakeezah finds such acceptance, Umrao continues to be a social outcast. The final shot of Pakeezah shows the veil lowered on the bride; this signals the reclamation of the hitherto unsheltered woman into respectable society. Conversely, since no man is prepared to protect Umrao’s honour, she remains an outsider and the final shot of the film shows her facing her solitary image in a mirror.
The different endings to the careers of the two tawaif’s reflect the Muslim community’s changing perceptions of their prospects of a reconciliation with their separated (now Pakistani) kin as well as of their acceptance into mainstream Indian society. The production of Pakeezah began in 1955, but it was not until 1971 that the film was finally released. During this period the optimism of those Indian Muslims who believed that they would one day find a legitimate space within Indian nationalist culture was dampened considerably by three successive wars between India and Pakistan and spates of Hindu-Muslim communal tension and violence. While majority populations in India have refused to recognise Muslims as equal partners in the nationalist project, Muslims, for fear of jeopardising their claim to Indianness, have been unable to build political, religious, economic or cultural alliances with Muslims elsewhere. This double crisis came to a head in 1971 (the year of Pakeezah’s release) when India and Pakistan fought a major war over the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan. Thereafter, any normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan became an even more remote possibility.

By the time Umrao Jaan was released in 1981, the ongoing hostilities between India and Pakistan no longer permitted the Muslims of the subcontinent to entertain even the fantasy of a reconciliation with their brethren. Umrao’s abortive guest for reunification with her family is symptomatic of this futility and Umrao Jaan is the last film made by a Muslim director to address the nostalgia for a “pure” and innocent homeland either in its narrative or in the lyrics of the film’s songs.

The lyrics of the songs in Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan extend the underscore the political resonances of their ostensibly conventional romantic plots. Songs play a crucial role in Indian popular cinema. Audiences remember the psychological import of a film’s narrative through its songs, which are in mass circulation well beyond the film’s exhibition. The most prominent songs of Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan are sung in the films by the respective tawaifs. Audiences understand that the lyrics of the songs are composed by the tawaifs themselves, since the most famous tawaifs, Umrao Jaan among them, were eminent poets. Their songs generally express the singer’s disillusionment with the world she lives in, and they articulate a wish to escape to an idylic, innocent and originary/natal homeland, where the tawaif may be able to transcend her “sullied” reputation. Even though the tawaif’s tainted reputation derives from her open sexuality, her desire to escape from her present ignominious existence, either by returning to a childhood past or to a future in another idyllic world, resonates meaningfully with her Muslim audiences. Hence, for example, when the protagonist despairs of her status as an unsheltered and therefore tainted woman she confesses as follows:

Jo kahe gaye na mujhsa vo zamana keh raha ha,
Ka fasana ban gaye ha mare bat talta talta.
(The secret which I had virtually repressed, the whole world speaks of it now,
My story has become a household scandal.)

The tawaif goes on to sublimate this guilt/dishonour with her lover. Together they sing:

Chalo dildar chalo, chand ke paar chalo.
(O beloved, let us escape to the other side of the moon.)

It may be suggested that the tawaif’s lyrics both elicit and are symptomatic of, the Muslim community’s sense of separation from those who are now on the other side of the national divide. Further, in the absence of acceptance by the majority Hindu population, the tawaif’s lyrics may be seen to express the Muslim community’s desire for recognition in the Indian state.

Let me illustrate this via a scene from Umrao Jaan in which the tawaif finally returns to her parents’ home and attempts to exonerate herself. Umrao Jaan sings:

Ya kya jaga ha dosto, ya kaunsa dyar ha,
Hada nigah tak jahan ghubar he ghubar ha...
Tamam umr ka hisab mangti ha zindage,
Ya mara dil kaha to kya, ya khud sa sharmsar ha...
Bula raha ha kaun mujhko chilmano ka us taraf,
Mara liya bhi kya koe udas bakarar ha...
(Where till the limits of one’s gaze one sees only destruction...
Now an account of my entire existence is demanded, as the pre-condition of my life,
What can I say to explain my actions, when I am so full of shame and guilt...
Who beckons me from the other side of the divide?
Is it possible that in my absence, others have been as sad and restless for me as I have been for them!)

During this scene in her parental home the camera pans from the public/masculine space of the home where Umrao is performing before an audience of men to the private/feminine space. The two spaces are divided by a bamboo screen which conceals Umrao’s mother from her. In a gesture uncharacteristic both of the tawaif who may not leave her audience, and the mother who is not permitted to come out of the zenana (female quarters), both women traverse the distance that divides the public and the private domain. They meet in a half-way space where they have the following conversation:

Kya tum he Lucknow sa aye ho?
Je han.
Tumhara naam kya ha?
Nam jan kar kya kariyaga?
Kya tum zat ke paturiya ho?
Je nahin, halat na bana diya ha.
Kucch to batao bate apna bara mai. Kaun ho tum?
Kya bataoo ka man kaun hoo.
Tumhara aslu vatan kahan ha?
Asle vatan to yeh ha jahan mai khare hoo.
Mother: Are you the one who has come from Lucknow?
Daughter: Yes.
Mother: What is your name
Daughter: What is the point in knowing my name? (She has been renamed since her abduction.)
Mother: Are you a prostitute by birth?
Daughter: No, circumstances have made me one.
Mother: Please tell me something about yourself. Who are you?
Daughter: How shall I say who I am?
Mother: Where is your actual home?
Daughter: My actual home is right where I am standing.

It is significant that Umrao uses the word vatan to refer to her natal home. Even though vatan in Urdu originally meant homeland, the word has now taken on connotations of the word “nation”. Umrao’s choice of the word vatan casts her yearning for acceptance by her natal family in distinctly diasporic terms. The brief meeting between the mother and the daughter is the climatic and cathartic moment in the film. If Umrao suffers from the shame of being an impure woman, her parent suffers from the shame of failing to protect her from that ignominy. Neither, however, can erase the past.

The scene between the daughter and the mother is intercut with flashbacks from the opening sequence of the film where the young Umrao was being ceremoniously adorned for her engagement ceremony. By emphasising that Umrao is engaged but never married, the film reinforces the fractured nature of an otherwise archetypal narrative. The mother-daughter reunion is cut short by Umrao’s brother, who disowns her and asks Umrao to leave the family home. Umrao returns to her house where, in the last shot of the film, she wipes a dusty mirror to gaze more clearly at her image. Given the traumatic separation from the mother in the previous scene, the final shot in which Umrao’s unveiled gaze is directed at herself in the mirror portends the formation of a new and mature identity. It is significant that the film does not recount the entire life-history of Umrao Jaan Ada, as the biography on which this film is based had done. Instead it terminates at the point where the woman decides to reconcile herself to her life as an outcast and eschew continued attempts at reconciliation with her natal family.

Despite her ultimate rejection, Umrao’s ability to return, albeit briefly, to her natal home is a fitting climax for this narrative of yearning, separation, and arrested growth. To audiences who have identified with the tawaif’s sense of displacement and subsequent desire to return to her originary home wherein she seeks the acceptance of traditional kinship groups, the film sends a clear message: it is no longer possible to return to formerly unified social orders and old identities. To want to do so is regressive. Nevertheless, Umrao’s career is laudable, especially from the point of view of the Indian Muslim diaspora, because by attempting to return to her natal home she figuratively erases those cultural and political boundaries which continue to be highly restrictive.

Pakeezah, too, emerges as a narrative about loss, and it too in some ways encodes the Muslim subject’s search for respectability in post-Partition India. In the last decade of the independence movement, the Muslims who lived in what has now become India were uncertain of their fate. Unlike the Muslim League, which made it clear that Hindus living in the predominantly Muslim parts of the subcontinent would have to leave, the Indian National Congress, because of its professed secular ideals, did not actively repatriate the Muslims. Consequently, Muslims living in what was certain to become India had to make conscious and very difficult choices as to whether they should stay behind in the concentrated Muslim pockets of a putatively secular India where they had lived for generations, or make a very dangerous journey through bloody riots to get to a new country with whose population they shared a relition but not a language or local customs. The eventual division of the Muslim population of the subcontinent into Indians and Pakistanis (and later Bangladeshis) tore asunder thousands of close-knit communities and extended families, who lost contact with each other for longer periods of time. The governments of these separate nations forbade their respective citizens from having any contact with the “ememy,” during this period. The tawaif film transforms the forced separation of the Muslim community into a romantic narrative; it dissimulates that secret yearning which has all too often been read as a dangerous political statement of defection into a melodramatic narrative.