For my research this month, I researched the ghazal form and read a chapter of my friend Emma Kalb’s thesis regarding courtesan films. For guidance on comments, see the unanswered questions/areas for future exploration at the end of each section, as well as whatever insights occur to you.
(1) On the Ghazal Form:
I first encountered the ghazal not as a kathak dancer, but as a poetic form translated into English. As I was refamiliarizing myself with the form, it gave me an idea about an internet based choreographic experiment that we could try.
According to Agha Shahid Ali, the ghazal couples formal tightness with a thematic freedom verging on arbitrariness. Composed of thematically independent couplets, every line in a ghazal must have the same number of syllables. The first couplet sets up a rhyme scheme and a refrain that must be followed throughout the rest of the poem, but other than the opening couplet, the refrain occurs only in the second line. The last couplet often ends with a signature couplet in which the poet mentions his/her name.
(See “The Charms of a Considered Disunity” by Agha Shahid Ali in The Practice of Poetry. Also see http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781 for more details and actual examples.)
Since the four of us in Post Natyam have quite different voices, it struck me that perhaps the ghazal could be formally translated into a dance-for-camera choreographic exercise whereby we are given total expressive freedom in terms of content but are locked together by having to strictly follow certain choreographic rules. The rules might look something like this:
(1 1. One person is selected to create the opening couplet. This couplet is composed of two 5 second phrases, each ending in the same gesture.
(2 2. All of us then create 3 phrases, each exactly 10 seconds long.
a. All the movement phrases should be choreographed for the camera.
b. Each phrase should be complete in itself (like a gem); there should be no attempt to link them to each other on any emotional or narrative level.
c. Each phrase should end with the same gesture established by the opening “couplet.”
d. One phrase should somehow reference your name, however obliquely.
(3 3. After creating the phrases, we edit together the footage and see what transpired!
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:
In his article, Ali does not talk much about the emotional content of the ghazal (implying any content is okay). Nevertheless ghazals do tend to revolve around longing, the Beloved, love, and ponderings about the universe – staples of Urdu poetry and thematic anchors that might connect us more clearly to the subject matter of our long-distance project. My question is how to make that connection without sacrificing the thematic freedom and arbitrariness made possible by the ghazal formally.
(2) Research Notes on “The Nautch Girl, In Print and On Film: An Ambivalent History, An Ambivalent Nation” Emma Kalb, 2006, Senior Thesis in Asian Studies, Swarthmore College.
Chapter on “The Courtesan Film”:
On Bollywood Films and Social Hegemony:
“These are not open-ended films intended to guide the viewer toward rebellion or a cataclysmic rethinking of social norms. Bollywood offers a purging pleasure, in which events tie up nicely, wounds are healed, and dangerous, chaotic forces are tamed or exterminated.” (Nayar 1997)
“the structure of the film is... designed to accommodate deep fantasies belonging to an extraordinarily varied group of people, from illiterate workers to sophisticated urbanites.” (Mishra 2002)
“Such films works to delineate an “idealised moral universe” that “upholds the ‘official’ definition of femininity within the main plot, and then to provide ‘unofficial’ erotic pleasures… through the song and dance sequences.” (Pinney)
On the Figure of the Tawaif:
“The erotic, seductive, and independent tawaif writes the proscribed narrative of a fissiparous and still contingent nation.” (Poonam Arora)
“many celebrated tawai'ifs were in effect highly educated career women, often accomplished poets and musicians, who valued their financial and personal independence from male authority.” (Lutgendorf)
On Courtesan Films
-unique in their focus on Muslim communities, women protagonists
-reveal a nostalgia “arising from the decline and disappearance of courtesan culture.” (Dwyer and Patel)
-Films such as Umrao Jaan depict the “poetry-smitten world of 19th century Islamicate urban culture, in which all educated people were aspiring Urdu poets, and evenings were spent in mehfils or poetic gatherings.”
Womanhood and Morality: Domesticating the Courtesan?
-The films reveal a tension “between notions of ideal womanhood and historical as well as contemporary facts of how (at least some) women live.” (69)
-stories of “unrealizable desire” “transgressive love”
-direct quotations from films:
Pakeezah: “any whore is a dead body.”
Umrao Jaan: “a public woman who can never truly claim a man”
-Courtesans are usually portrayed as longing for respectability, wishing to be a wife and a proper woman:
-“the genre of the “courtesan film” strains to domesticate the whore and fit her into a wifely role (Virdi, 132)
-“The films could express something of the power and independence that come with being a tawaif, but in fact they render her the opposite, powerless and caged by what is written as natural for a woman to yearn for: respectability, the life of a wife or a daughter.”
-courtesan as “a lotus in the muck”
-“the courtesan films delineate a morality at an impasse. The courtesan may be sympathized with, but she can never truly have a happy ending.”
- “The films strain to accomplish a balancing act, giving rein to transgressive love and other normally unacceptable behaviors even as they recuperate the transgressors in one way or another back into the nation, finding a resolution that does not challenge the moral bases of society.”
-“It may refuse to portray the courtesan as anything but as close to a pure Hindu wife as a Muslim prostitute living in a bordello can be, but there is a necessary ambivalence to that image.”
Works Cited:
Dwyer, Rachel and Divia Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Lutgendorf, Philip. philip’s fil-ums: notes on Indian popular cinema. [http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eincinema/index.html].
Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temple of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Nayar, Sheila. “The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts.” Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1997, p. 73-91.
Pinney, Christopher. “Public, Popular, and Other Cultures” in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds. Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001
Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
INSIGHTS AND QUESTIONS FOR FUTURE EXPLORATION:
The contradictory tension between an ideal notion of womanhood and the lived reality of women (both historical and contemporary) seems like a possible thematic throughline in our work. If so, I would then ask: How have these idealized notions of womanhood (particularly a Hindu nationalist patriarchal version) impacted each of us personally? How has our dance been implicated in that? How, if at all, do you feel like breaking that mold? Is Bollywood and its representations of women dancers implicated in this and how?
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