CONTINUING our discussion of the dastan fiction in Urdu, I would like to comment on how female characters in these nawabi tales of war and conquest, killing and plunder, magic and deception are categorised and treated by the protagonists, the dastan-makers and their listeners/readers under an agreed system of gender values. In one virtual corner of the fictional world, there are the womenfolk of the heroes of the Lashkar-i Islam — literally confined in a single, bewitching word namoos — that engulfs all the individual characteristics that these women might possibly have possessed. In one of the — obviously temporary — battle setbacks, described in Tilism-i Hoshruba, the Ayyars safely transport the female contingent of the heroes to a nearby mountain:

“The lashkar suffered a defeat and people carried the Badshah on a stretcher and hurried away. The Ayyars put their lives in danger and took the namoos of the Sahibqaran safely to a nearby mountain. All the sardars took shelter along with the king on the slopes and in the valleys of mountains.”

“When the badshah came to, he ordered to be tied to the back of a horse and sent into the enemy’s lashkar, as living without honour is worse than fighting and dying. Upon hearing this, there rose a commotion among the namoos of the Amir … At last Laqa got defeated and ran away into the Fort of Aqeeq Koh. Sahirs all fled toward the Tilism and many of them perished. Amir looted all the possessions of the enemy and had the Bargah-i Sulemani erected at the same place where it previously stood. The lashkar rested, bazaars opened, the namoos and the king came down from the mountain and entered the lashkar. Everyone’s wounds were sewn and mended.”

The contents of the namoos are difficult to discern as it is precisely meant to hide the purdah-nasheen bibis, and the otherwise verbose narrative of the dastan becomes extremely terse and economical while talking about the ladies of the heroic household. Now namoos — as its synonyms like izzat etc. — literally means ‘reputation’. According to the values privileged in the dastan as well as the traditional feudal way of life that it represents, the ‘honour’ of a man of high status resided — not in his own personal activities and exploits, no, perish the thought, but rather — in the effectiveness with which he could control the sexuality of his women: mother, sisters, wives, daughters, nieces, female in-laws and so on. In order for them to be and remain completely chaste, not only do they have to be confined inside women’s quarters — even while travelling as a part of the lashkar to conquer infidel lands — but also lose all their individual features in case they have any. Even when boarding a horse — or ox-driven cart, they have to be safely shielded away from the sight of the na-mehram males of whichever religious belief.

Until the late 19th century, the north Indian Muslim shurafa women would travel within a town or village in a doli, carried on the shoulders by kahars. More ghairatmand shurafa males would make sure that a few heavy stones were also put in the doli along with the girl or woman, so that the strange men carrying the female burden would never so much as know the actual weight. Any expression of interest in the namoos in the outside world, exclusively the male domain, was unforgivable. Dr Ibadat Barelvi, famous Urdu critic and scholar who taught in a college in Lahore after migrating there following 1947, mentions in his autobiography Yaad-i Ehd-i Rafta (1988) how his grandfather, travelling from one small town in UP to another on horseback behind the bail-gari which carried his namoos, saw a teenage girl of the family peeping out of a hole in the sheet of thick cloth covering the cart from all sides. He promptly brought out his ghulail [slingshot] and blinded the youthful eye, thus neutralising the potential threat to his honour.

In our uncritical reading and admiration of the traditional texts — sometimes even called ‘classics’ for no apparent reason except their supposedly ancient origin — it is often disregarded how they actually mirror the social values that refuse to become history. This useful attitude helps us shield ourselves from changed reality. If a fiction writer tries to bring forth the inconvenient truth, he is conveniently ignored for one reason or another. Abul Fazl Siddiqi is one such outstanding writer who came from a UP zamindar (landlord) background and wrote extensively and sensitively about the deeply caste-ridden feudal set-up of his ancestral milieu. In one of his stories he paints an insightful picture of an honour killing arranged by the loving parents of a teenage girl and executed by a worldly wise and kind-hearted uncle. Gender and caste roles and sexual exploitation of the low-born in a typical feudal society are among the subjects he writes on in a mercilessly realistic style.

Keeping one’s namoos under strict control was not so difficult until things began to change in our part of the subcontinent roughly in the earlier half of the 20th century. However, the custodians of our cherished traditional values decided to put up a fierce resistance to the long overdue social change. Mulla Vahidi was one such buzurg who migrated from Delhi to Karachi and wrote an extremely readable account of his days in both places in his book Mere Zamane ki Dilli (1959). Talking about the changed times, and recalling his buzurgs, Mulla Sahib writes:

“The progress that Dilli-wallahs have made in be-pardagi (casting off the hijab) after arriving in Pakistan, they had not done in the Dilli under the British. The roshan-khayali (liberalism) of 1956-57 was nowhere on the horizon until 1947 ... Munshi Zakaullah [1832-1910] was of a disciplined and taciturn nature. He did not have a daughter. If he had one, and had she ever made a mistake such as you see around today, Munshi Zakaullah would have slow poisoned her and quietly laid her in her grave. Maulvi Nazir Ahmad [1830-1912], on the other hand, had a bearing that resembled the late Sultan Ibn-e Saud; he would have openly and publicly stoned the erring girl and the erring boy to death.”

I am not sure whether the criminal expectations of these two leading figures of North Indian Urdu culture on the part of Mulla Vahidi were realistic; however, it is abundantly clear that he himself did not consider the murder of an erring daughter of the shurafa background a crime at all — on the contrary, this seems to be a morally correct practice in his highly cultured view.

The non-shurafa women, on the other hand, are another story. They are fair game for the storyteller, his noble audience and the even nobler protagonists of the dastan; more so if they belong, as they always do, to the other, non-Muslim community. In fact, according to Aziz Ahmad, renowned Urdu novelist, critic and scholar, the real colourful characters in the Tilism-i Hoshruba are women who have been modelled on the real, extremely lively and fun-loving ladies of Lucknow and the rest of Oudh. Strangely enough, the antagonists in many cases comprise of Sahir women and their female assistants.

Prince Asad is captured — with the help of a magic spell — by a Sahir princess, Sandal Jadoo, and sent to work with other captives to work as a gardener — lowly menial work which he gracefully refuses to do:

“In the evening the khawas (maidservants) brought food (for the captives). The prince rose from his place to scold the women and ordered them to just leave the food there and go back. When the maids realised that he was in a belligerent mood, they called out to the captives that the damned sanda (raging bull) was about to snatch their meal. They all ran to save their food. Asad broke a few skulls using the handle of his sword, gave the maids a few tight slaps, kicked the women carrying trays of food, snatched all the food and had them remove all their clothes. Then he started eating, making a show of it for the fellow captives. The maids returned to their mistress, all in tears and naked.”

“Princess Sandal Jadoo happened to be present in Afrasiab’s durbar when the maids came there crying their heart out. The princess asked them what had come to pass. They said that ‘there was a new entrant who neither plucks flowers nor makes gehnas (ornaments) out of them, and bullies everyone around on top of it. So he beat us and the captives and snatched all the food.’ The princess ordered that the next time meheldar (chief of the palace staff) and kaharis (tough women of doli-carriers) will bring food to the inmates. In compliance of the princess’s order, the lady meheldar, holding the Ganga-Jamni staff in her hand, made the kaharis carry trays of food on their heads. When they reached near Prince Asad, she said to him: ‘Why are you asking for trouble, eh? Beating the sarkari officials and snatching food from them — do you know the consequences of such unruly behaviour? And look at you, you have the cheek to openly eat the sarkari food as if you have had it cooked yourself!’ Hearing this Asad got into a rage and said to himself: ‘You have been troubled too much, now you should beat these women too’. So he got up to beat the meheldar woman black and blue, and robbed her of her staff, dupatta and the gold bangles. The kaharis put the food trays on the ground and ran away. The captives hid themselves here and there. Asad ran after the kaharis. In short, there was a big hangama.”

“Hearing the noise, the princess came out of her palace. She saw that a handsome brat, the reincarnation of Yusuf in beauty, with raging youthfulness, in a totally drunken state, making the dead rise with his insane gait, was chasing the kaharis. She fell for him at first sight and called out: ‘Han han ay naujawan, yeh kya karta hai?’ (Hey young man, what do you think you are doing?)”

Young Muslim men of the northern subcontinent, raised generation after generation on such fascinating and wish-fulfilling fiction, might feel rather puzzled if the kafir haseenas do not duly fall in love with them at first sight, here or abroad.

AJMAL KAMAL edits and publishes Aaj, an Urdu quarterly journal, from Karachi and runs a publishing house and bookshop. He translates and occasionally writes for English and Urdu publications.