Begum Urdu, Mother India, and Modern Social Thought

How medieval poetic drag influenced anticolonial nationalism (amongst other things)

The Indian past has never been more political. The Parallel Campaign is a fortnightly newsletter that questions the traditional (male, Hindu, upper-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.

There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation—on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.

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“When newspapers published the news, Shahid received a touching letter from my father-in-law, which ran thus: ‘Try to reason with Dulhan [Bride]. Tell her to chant the names of Allah and the Prophet. A lawsuit is bad enough! That too on obscenity! We are very worried. May God help you…’

Then filthy letters began to arrive. They were filled with such inventive and convoluted obscenities that had they been uttered before a corpse, it would have got up and run for cover. Not only me, but my whole family, including Shahid and my two-month-old baby daughter, were dragged in the muck…”

In the Name of Those Married Women, Ismat Chughtai

Happy Sunday, friends - and a belated happy 105th to Ismat! 

For those of you who don’t know her, this famous Urdu novelist was born August 21st, 1915, in Uttar Pradesh. Her name means chastity. In 1944, she stood trial for obscenity in the Lahore High Court for her short story ‘Lihaaf’, which explores female loneliness and lesbian intimacy between a wealthy begum and a maid, Rabbu, who is hired as her ‘masseuse’.

We’ve been thinking a lot about Ismat recently. In our last post, we spoke about nationalism as ‘imagined’ on the basis of certain characteristics like language. This week, we were going to talk about the long-running feud between ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ in North India—and about the choice by political elites to define language along religious lines.

But as we were working on that piece, we found it impossible to ignore how heavily the language debate was couched in terms of gender and female sexuality by actors on both sides of a supposedly immutable communal divide. 

For political elites to be able to make choices about narratives of Indian-ness that focused on something like religion or language, historians and social scientists first had to reify—simply, thingify into existence—a fixed object of study, called ‘Indian society’, that was able to supply the raw materials to craft those narratives. 

We suspected that the fact these historians and social scientists were all men was not just incidental to the importance of female sexuality in the language debate.

The reification of Indian society and the focus on women were crucially interrelated—with implications not just for Urdu as a language, but also for how we understand India’s relationship to its women today.

Ismat Chughtai with a Bollywood actress, Ashish Sawhny Papers

During Ismat’s trial in Lahore, prosecutors struggled to find a single Urdu word in ‘Lihaaf’ that could categorically be defined as obscene—the closest they got was ‘ashiq, or lover. Ismat was begrudgingly acquitted: her use of language met the standards of purity and respectability that educated men had long demanded of the women in their communities—even as the hate mail she received rivaled any of the maa-behen screeds we’re all so wearily accustomed to fielding from trolls online. (Oh, double standards. What would we do without you.) 

But by the 1940s, Urdu itself had come to acquire disreputable associations in much of North India—as a language of tawaifs, or courtesans, and the ‘degenerate’ society they represented, both of which needed to be stamped out. Tainted by its purportedly ribald associations to these women, a whole language was dismissed as insufficiently modern, excessively nostalgic, and not pure, chaste, or representative enough.

Zaban-e-urdu

Urdu, in one popular telling, originated as a camp language, born in the Mughal military as a way for soldiers from different parts of the empire to communicate with each other. Urdu is based on the Turkish word ordu, which means ‘army’ or ‘camp’ (fun fact: this is most likely the basis of the English word ‘horde’). 

But Shamsur Rahman Fahruqi’s thesis, one we agree with, is that Urdu comes from zaban-e-urdu-e mualla-e shahjahanabad (the Language of the exalted Court and City of Shahjahanabad, i.e. Delhi). The phrase shortened over time to ‘Urdu’. While Persian was the official court language and the language of power, many in the Mughal elite also spoke the language local to Delhi, known as Hindi/Hindvi/Dihlavi. 

Urdu calligraphy by a modern artist in Lucknow

Emperor Shah Alam II (1728-1806), in particular, gave Hindvi a new respectability by using it informally in his court. From then on, the term zaban-e-urdu-e mualla-e shahjahanabad began to mean Hindvi, such that over time the ‘Hindvi/Dihlavi’ language spoken around Delhi began to be known itself as ‘Urdu’ (challenging the idea that ‘Urdu’ is ‘Hindi’ with Persian forcibly added in). 

From these origins, we see that Urdu was always an urbane language, flourishing in the cities and qasbah market towns. But there’s a lot to be said about the way that sex-segregation in northern India affected everyday Urdu, and gave it a distinct character beyond its origins. 

Parde ke peeche kya hai? Probably cardamom

We know, for instance, that in writing ‘Lihaaf’, Ismat was inspired by the life of her own relative, who lived under pardah —a centuries-long ethic of modesty practised by elite women of many Indian, not just Muslim, lineages. (Another fun fact: today, witnesses in English trials are also required to “go into purdah” between court sessions to prevent being coached by their lawyers, as are British public servants in the run-up to an election.) 

Ladies of the zenana on a rooftop, attributed to Ruknuddin (1650-1697)

In many parts of the subcontinent—most famously the royal courts of Avadh, Vijayanagara, Rajputana, and Delhi—the powerful logistical and economic imperatives of maintaining harems, zenanas, and women-only spaces engendered the growth of homosocial, or same-sex, communities.

These divisions into male and female were often far more stark than those of caste or religion. One could even say that men and women lived in parallel societies, each with its own language, economy, and politics.

Men frequently transgressed into these ‘feminine’ spaces, writing fantastical reports—poetry, folktales, romances, and even detailed taxonomies of what they found. For example, the poet Insha Allah Khan (1756-1817) wrote a grammar of the Urdu language, Darya-e-latafat, which contained detailed linguistic references to the lives and habits of women in pardah. An entire genre of Urdu poetry, rekhti, operated on the sole conceit of male poets writing, and often performing, as women (medieval poetic drag is an episode of RuPaul waiting to happen). 

Men produced discourse. But not only did women not transgress into ‘male’ spaces, they also rarely represented their experiences in their own spaces as Ismat did—at least, not in ways that are available to us, decades and centuries later. Worlds designed to be hidden often leave few traces in primary sources and archives.  

This had consequences for Urdu. If in the West, ‘women’s speech’ has evolved to be polite, deferential, and euphemistic, pardah meant that begamati zubaan, the women’s language of Delhi, Lucknow, and other Urdu-speaking towns, evolved to be earthy, graphic, and colourful.

Women largely did not have to worry whether men thought them ‘ladylike’, because men were never party to the conversation. Pardah existence was rich in social interaction—women conversed on rooftops, sent messages through servants or food (feeding another woman cardamom, for example, was a symbolic declaration of sisterhood), and interacted with dozens of lower-status women who came home to offer services. 

Gail Minault has collected and analysed several amusing examples of this women’s Urdu from the mid-19th century in an insightful essay, showing how women drew on various local dialects to make the Urdu language expressive. 

This begamati zubaan was its own thing for a long time. But two significant political events of the late 18th century and early 19th century changed the relationship between women, language, and power.

Women-adoration (no, really)

As many indigenous dynasties of the 18th century began to face fragmentation and instability, the princely courts of northern India embraced an unofficial policy of auratparasti, or ‘women-adoration’. Male elites such as the nawabs of Avadh shared significant amounts of material and cultural power with court women as a form of security and loyalty in a politically complex and shifting context. 

Women were still subject to pardah, but on reconfigured terms that lent them more visibility and significance as political entrepreneurs and power brokers. (In this free article in the American Historical Review, Barbara Metcalf tells the story of one such remarkable woman, Nawab Shah Jahan Begum.) 

Nawab Shah Jahan Begum of Bhopal in the late 19th century, veiled, with her husband. American Historical Review

It was in this political context that Urdu experienced its heyday. As scholars like Ruth Vanita and Ruby Lal have argued, auratparasti in the native courts gave begamati zubaan a new cachet: the simultaneous hiddenness and political influence of women’s spaces gave women’s speech a kind of mystique.

A new crop of male poets—Saadat Yar Rangin, Insha Allah Khan, Qais, Nisbat, and Jur’at—began to represent and credit women as important shapers of urban culture and, through the mainstreaming of begamati zubaan, as makers of language. As the poet Abid Mirza claimed at a mushaira (a literary salon) in Hyderabad in 1800: 

Language is determined by women (zubaan ka faisla hai auraton par)
Where did wretched men get this speech? 

The women in this literature desire experience and pleasure from life, and often have amorous and intensely emotional relationships with one another in women-only spaces. It describes a world that, in Ruth Vanita’s words, “seethes with female emotions not primarily directed at husbands and children”—perhaps because women themselves contributed to and circulated this literature. 

A poem by Insha Allah Khan (who is incidentally also the author of the first known work of recognizably modern Hindi prose, Rani Ketaki ki Kahani, c. 1803)

Barbarism, blame, and the British

However, alongside this happy adoring development was a second, longer-lasting, change in political context. The British East India Company began to exercise power throughout most of north India. From the beginning, colonial administrators and European social scientists saw the prominence of women and harems in the North Indian political scene as evidence of barbarianism and degeneracy. Additionally, they proceeded on the assumption that ‘Indian society’ was a monolith—a coherent and knowable object of study.

Orientalism—a tradition of knowledge that saw India as fundamentally different and inferior to the West—took root as the British used tools such as philology, ethno-legal surveys, and forensics to come to their own ‘scientific’ conclusions about what ‘Indian society’ was and how it could be improved. In the process, they introduced practices of positivist description and classification, and provided a sort of genesis of ‘social sciences’ (or what Durba Mitra, a scholar of gender and sexuality at Harvard, calls ‘modern social thought’). 

These studies were at least partly self-interested. The colonial state relied on Orientalism to legitimise its own subjugation of Indians, insisting that the ‘primitive’ nature of Indian society showed that Indians were not worthy of self-rule (this is, for instance, how John Stuart Mill, that great defender of liberty, reconciled himself to the British empire).

The auratparasti—or, as the British would put it, the effeminacy—of the native dynasties was linked to their downfall before colonialism. The closeness of women to centres of power in these dispensations made them an easy scapegoat, in the eyes of both the British and Indians, for the failure of ‘Indian society’ to withstand foreign invasion. 

As British colonialism sidelined female rulers and power-brokers, Indian men from newly ascendant communities sought to attack the privileges and legitimacy of the old elite by questioning the fitness of Urdu as a language of power. 

It is no coincidence that the word randi, which until the early 19th century was simply a colloquial synonym for aurat, or woman, and often referred specifically to North Indian noblewomen, is now the epithet of choice for a prostitute. 

WAP (We’re All Prostitutes)

In the later nineteenth century, anticolonial nationalist elites came to rely on the work of early Indian historians and social scientists—men whom Durba Mitra calls social analysts. These were elite Hindu administrators, medical doctors, natural scientists, educators, dentists, university professors, and lawyers—none of them formally trained in ‘social science’, but largely self-styled and self-taught. 

These men used the same tools and modes of discourse as their colonisers—positivism, reification, and a focus on the danger of female sexuality to social order and political power—to present a competing but equally immutable conception of ‘Indian society’ that was deserving of autonomy. 

Mitra’s archival research into the work of these men suggests an obsession with the idea of the ‘prostitute’, a word used in colonial India to “describe virtually all women outside of monogamous Hindu upper-caste marriage, including [take a deep breath!] the tawa’if, the courtesan, the dancing girl, the devadasi, high-caste Hindu widows, Hindu and Muslim polygamous women, low-class Muslim women workers, indentured women transported across the British empire, beggars and vagrants, women followers of religious sects, mendicant performers, professional singers, the wives of sailors, women theatre actors, saleswomen, nurses, urban industrial labourers, and domestic servants”. 

A ‘family-tree’ of prostitutes from a 1929 textbook of social science, delineating the various types one must be on the lookout for, based on Sanskrit classifications of women in the Kamasutra. Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life

When virtually any woman in your society is potentially guilty of being a ‘prostitute’, it becomes easy to understand why the ‘science’ of your society—the key to upliftment, reform, and political power—becomes fixated on the enforcement of purity and chastity. 

And so the status of women became a barometer by which to measure the ‘progress’ of Indian society, and its fitness for autonomy. 

Women’s deviant sexuality is indexed to the ‘hiddenness’ of communities of women—these spaces must be exposed, controlled, and policed, in order to reform them. 

Europeans posited the reform of Indian women to fuel their own saviour complex—imagining brown women as needing to be rescued from brown men. 

Indians attempted to accumulate power by reversing this equation in two ways: (i) brown women needed to be saved, but from brown men of other communities; (ii) degenerate brown women actually needed to be saved from themselves, and Indian society needed to be saved from these women.

In particular, elite Hindu men used ideas about the necessity of women’s chastity to promote a vision of the upper-caste Hindu wife and mother as the ideal of Indian society (Mother India did not come from nowhere).

These ideas allowed them to emphasise their moral superiority over lower-caste people and Muslims as sexual deviants, positioning themselves, in Mitra’s words, as “the natural inheritors of the ruling apparatus of India”. 

Given that many of the Indian kingdoms now under the British had been ruled by Muslim dynasties, Mitra argues, “many Hindu social analysts found simultaneous explanations for the lack and lag of Hindu societies (sexual degradation at the hands of Muslim rulers) and a mechanism through which to regain social power and progress (Muslim exclusion and social control). Muslims were produced as the devolution of true Hindu civilization”.

(Though Mitra’s study is restricted to Bengal between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, men like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar produced these arguments almost verbatim at the other end of the country, in Maharashtra, not too much later.)

To sum up: one of the objectives of the project of making Urdu disreputable—like other projects of social reform—was to make it possible to label any woman a prostitute if she transgressed the female sphere and asserted a claim to political power or cultural authority—regardless of her actual life history.

The image below is one example of this discourse. From the women’s magazine Saraswati (1910), it shows “Begum Urdu”, dressed as a courtesan, addressing “Queen Devanagari”, who is dressed as a ‘proper Hindu wife’. “Under her rule,” the magazine argues, “people can make merry, become wealthy, carry on their business, and learn wisdom”—a pitch that appears to be deliberately targeted at the Hindu merchant castes, who would not have had the access to Urdu and Persian that more established elites, like Kayasths, would have had.

Conversely, Begum Urdu, the skimpy dancer, is associated with Prince Passion-Addict Khan, Emperor Ease-Love, and Begum Wanton-Pleasure. 

These languages are caricatured as women for a reason. It’s a reminder of the ease with which women are collapsed into archetypes created by male political elites.

This is much more than a story about language—it is also about authority, about expertise, and about women and the manner in which they are allowed to live and speak. 

It is tempting to pretend in a newsletter about history that these are the concerns of a long-gone past, irrelevant to our present. But the tropes about women in this country remain relentless: just think of our contemporary public obsession with policing sex workers and bar girls, decrying love jihad and ‘honour’ killings, victim-blaming women who are raped, the communally selective focus on sexual violence in riots and Twitter debates, and—especially this week—the witch hunt unleashed upon Rhea Chakraborty.  

We have much more that we would like to say on this, but we have been cruelly truncated by (patriarchal??) Gmail inbox limits—please write us letters, our comments are open!

Postscripts

• This translation of the progressive writer Ghulam Abbas’ classic 1940 short story, Anandi: City of Joy is a great literary illustration of the arguments that Mitra makes. A city council decides to evict ‘prostitutes’ from its bazaar, so they set up their business in a remote, undesirable location—only to have the entire city follow them and the cycle begin once again. 

• Aparna Kapadia writes in Scroll about the scant historical records of women at work, and about one of our all-time favourite historical figures, Begam Samru. 

Lastly, if you have but one takeaway from this newsletter, let it be this perfect 11-word summary. It’s not an Urdu couplet, but hey:  

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