11
FOILED rebellions, soiled as they are with loss, are often forgotten rebellions. So it has been, in large part, for the War of Independence of 1857-1858, when the Muslims of India, along with others, made their stand against the colonising British. Where the men who led that doomed effort to fend off colonialism are largely forgotten, it is no surprise that women have been shoved to even deeper depths of historical memory.
It is in these depths that the story of Begum Hazrat Mahal can be found. One of the wives of Wajid Ali Shah, one of the last nawabs of Awadh, it was her band of survivors (which included Raja Jai Lal Singh and later the Maulvi of Faizabad) that rebelled against the East India Company and its intrusive designs of domination.
As the historian William Dalrymple writes in his book The Last Mughal, Begum Hazrat Mahal drew attention to the fact that the British commitment to the freedom of religion was largely false: “To eat pigs and drink wine, to bite greased cartridges and to mix pig’s fat with sweetmeats, to destroy Hindu and Mussalman temples on pretence of making roads, to build churches, to send clergymen into the streets to preach the Christian religion, to institute English schools, and pay people a monthly stipend for learning the English sciences, while the places of worship of Hindus and Mussalmans are to this day entirely neglected; with all this, how can people believe that religion will not be interfered with?”
The British colonisers labelling of a vast cadre of women involved in cultural production has endured.
Her words may have been prescient but they did not lead to victory. They did, however, make her and an entire class of women the subject of British vengeance. Begum Hazrat Mahal was born a courtesan at a time when being one was not a subject of disrespect and societal ostracism. That second accomplishment, the grouping of the entire tawaif class, was colonialism’s revenge against one of the most prominent women of the uprising.
Soon after the rebellion failed and the British annexed Awadh, legislation essentially labelled all women who performed in public “prostitutes”. This meant that all women, dancers and poets were, under the imprimatur of the British, now criminals guilty of what they deemed prostitution. If this were not enough, the safeguarding of British soldiers from these criminal women required them to submit to demeaning health examinations for sexually transmitted diseases.
Using the language of morality and public protection, the British were able to accomplish several things. First, Muslim women who were part of the public culture of the Muslim princely states were now shut out, the possibility of being labelled with slurs an efficient way of getting them to shut up. Second, the source of cultural decay was located within the practices of Lucknow society and cultural production, thus making the British the benevolent improvers rather than the callous colonisers. Finally, the labelling of traditional Lucknow cultural production (which included women from diverse economic classes) as immoral and tainted meant its neglect and eventual evisceration.
This easily made way for British cultural production in the decades to come as Muslims would have to take on the ways and words of the colonisers; this efficiently doled-out death would see future populations disconnected from their own history, raised to think, act and judge just like the British.
One venue of judging the more immediate impact of the British criminalisation of what they considered prostitution (and the labelling of nearly all women engaged in dance or poetry as ‘prostitutes’) can be seen in Mirza Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada. For contemporary Muslims in the subcontinent, it is Rekha’s (and then Aishwarya Rai’s) cinematic rendition rather than the actual novel that captures the story.
Those who have actually read the novel would find its reflective heroine Umrao Jan presenting a dismal and depressing picture of life as a tawaif. Literature, however compelling even in its cinematic versions, is not history. It has, however, been taken as such. In this sense, a man’s rendition of what he imagined these women’s lives to be, has taken precedence over the life of an actual woman such as Hazrat Mahal.
Written at the end of the 19th century, three decades after the British annexation of Awadh and hence Lucknow, it represents more than anything the author’s revulsion against the culture that existed, of women as endlessly victimised. Indeed, if one takes Umrao Jan’s qualms seriously, one cannot even imagine that a woman like Hazrat Mahal could have even existed.
The British colonial establishment’s labelling of a vast cadre of women involved in cultural production, in music and art and poetry and dancing, has endured. Even post-independence women appearing in public roles in Pakistan bear the taint. To justify their role in cultural production, they must take extraordinary measures to underscore their moral purity.
Since women as cultural producers are part of the history of Muslim Lucknow, this has meant both a disregard for that history and revulsion toward it. Women like Hazrat Mahal who stood up so bravely to the colonial bosses, who were not ashamed of their existence or apologetic for it, who ascended from the ordinary to royal rebel, have had their names become obscure, suppressed by the shame of those who have come after them.
History is indeed written by the victors. Always sly, the British were quick to note the Muslim predilection for patriarchy, and the burden of losing was hence imposed squarely on any woman exerting any power in the public sphere. With all of them labelled ‘prostitutes’ the burden for the demise of a civilisation, a culture and a way of life, was placed on their shoulders, on their moral failings. In turn, the British got a Muslim population that hated its own women instead of the white men who were its new masters.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2016
