One Sunday morning in Karachi — I was eight — I heard my mother telling my father about a film she’d seen that Sunday morning, titled Zindagi Ya Toofan.

She had been reading a novel called Umrao Jan Ada and was making a careful comparison of the ambivalent character of the novel’s eponymous narrator — a famous courtesan who had retired from life but, rather than repenting, had few regrets about the life she had lived — and the film’s idealised heroine, who longed for love and for an escape from her destiny.

A later Pakistani film version would also present a truncated and romanticised version of the novel which, like the Indian version, concentrated on the heroine’s romance with a young man, which transgressed the social boundaries of the time and of her profession.

The same sort of nostalgic romanticism pervades Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah. There have been other and arguably more faithful adaptations of Umrao Jan Ada in more recent years, which are more faithful to the novel’s complexities, notably the Pakistani tv series beautifully scripted by poet Zehra Nigah and directed by Rana Shaikh.

It was only in 1970, at the age of 15, when I picked up a translation of the novel by the renowned Khushwant Singh from a pavement book stall in Bombay, that I learned of this novel’s status as an abiding classic of Urdu prose.

I spent several hours immersed in the era it portrayed, which began during the reign of Wajid Ali Shah of Lucknow, spanned the tumultuous events of 1857, and ended with a portrait of the city in decline. I lost my copy of the novel at Beirut airport, and didn’t think about it again when I immersed myself in my new life as a student in London.

I can’t remember how I felt when, in 1975, I was presented with a copy of the novel by my tutor Shah Saheb. He was preparing me for an A-Level exam in Urdu, which I could only nominally claim as a mother tongue, so that I could enter SOAS. It was to be the key text for my grounding in the written language.

My teenaged reading of the book had acquainted me with a feisty heroine who was also a talented singer, and historical information about the changing mores of the 19th century. Now, an inveterate reader, I could appreciate the elegance and grace of the original language, and the complexity of the narrative form in which Umrao Jan narrates her story from childhood to old age, to Mirza Hadi Ruswa, the author who transcribes it.

She occasionally comments and revises his version of events, which gives a metafictional element to the novel, which also presents a compelling picture of the life of courtesans, how superficial, fleeting and often tragic it was, and of its central character as a redoubtable survivor.

In fact, years later, Qurratulain Hyder, the doyenne of Urdu literature, was to tell me that Umrao Jan was a real person, and other commentators over the years have said she actually did dictate sections of the novel, casting doubt on Ruswa’s sole authorship.

Three years later, I studied Umrao Jan Ada again at SOAS, with the renowned David Matthews, who would publish his own very readable translation of the text in 1996.

Seminars focused on the novel’s similarity to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (I disagreed then, and do so more emphatically now), and on the proliferation of coincidences and neatly tied-up ends, which connect the novel to traditional modes of storytelling. Speaking of coincidences, it was in the year that I graduated that, on a winter trip to Delhi, I watched Muzaffar Ali’s exquisite version of the novel with my father.

This year, there has been a revived interest in the world of the courtesan with the release of the opulent Heeramandi, which attempts with a high degree of anachronism to transport the world of 19th century Lucknow to the Lahore of the 1930s. A new version of Umrao Jan Ada has also been announced, with a glittering array of Pakistani stars.

During this period, I’ve also been reminded of Nashtar, a late 19th century translation, by Sajjad Husain Kasmandvi, of an autobiographical romance by Hasan Shah, an 18th century clerk in the East India Company. The story of the novel’s discoveries and rediscoveries is intriguing: several critics denied its veracity as a translation, until Qurratulain Hyder, who translated the novel into English with detailed comment, actually found the original Persian text in a library.

The story recounts Hasan Shah’s relationship, cordial at first, with a Company officer named ‘Ming’ — possibly a distortion of Manning — whose boorish Western manners he attempts to improve. At the centre of this fictionalised memoir — for that is what the modern reader will perceive it — is the figure of Khanum Jan, the dancing girl, who Hasan Shah marries, though he fails to rescue her from the clutches of the British predator.

Focusing more on the doomed heroine than on the book’s significance as a chronicle of the tense relationship of the Indian narrator and his British master — which prefigures the annals of colonial power structures — Hyder chose to retitle her translation The Dancing Girl for the American edition. She writes in her Afterword:

“Many learned courtesans held their own salons, attended by the most eminent scholars of the day. In a society where the housewife was not supposed to step out of her courtyard … the courtesan provided intellectual company to the male elite.”

Hyder had explored the world of the courtesan in her splendid novel Gardish- i-Rang-i-Chaman, but courtesans as depicted in Nashtar are at an overwhelming distance from the luxuries of the courtesans’ palatial establishments as glamorised in a number of cinematic and literary representations.

Nashtar presents a group of impoverished camp followers, and the lives of many women who were exploited by their families, forced to survive on their wits, instead of being recognised mainly for their performative talents — as Umrao Jan, who was also kidnapped and sold into human bondage but became a talented singer, struggled to do.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 14th, 2024