WOMEN, LANGUAGE, AND WOMEN AS LANGUAGE: THE PARADOXICAL DOMESTICITY AND SEXUALITY OF MUSLIM WOMEN AND URDU IN POST-1857 INDIAN LITERATURE AND NATIONAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

Although, since the late 1980s, much attention has been paid to the woman/mother as nation trope in multicultural colonial and post-colonial scholarship, what remains largely unexplored is the concept of woman as language functioning as scaffold for a gendered, cultural-linguistic nationalism deployed by Hindu Indians in colonial India. These “language woman,” a term political scientist Asha Sarangi coined in 2009, are diametrically opposed: the feminine anthropomorphic dutiful, mother Hindi, fit to represent India, and the unruly, courtesan Urdu who has no place in the incipient nation. In the last decade, scholarly engagement with Begum Urdu has been limited to structuring this characterization as demeaning, with Indian Muslims failing to subvert the marginalized linguistic representation in the fundamentally Hindi-speaking, Hindu project of the Indian nation state. Such a gender essentialist reading of anthropomorphic Urdu perpetuates the very androcentric society-approved gender roles it seeks to denounce, aligning with colonial Indian nationalists’ and British imperialists’ myopic ideology of one appropriate type of woman. Why must the courtesan lack agency or respectability and require reformation? This project offers an alternative view of Begum Urdu, recasting the language courtesan as empowered through the application of, among others, Foucault’s theory on authorized forms of sexuality eventually rupturing societal norms combined with sociolinguist Robin Lakoff’s interpretations of authoritative woman’s language viewed from both inside and outside the socio-political frame encompassing it. Drawing on feminist, linguistic, and colonial studies and bridging them with the concept of metonymy through contiguity in prose realism, this work offer a new metaphorical reading of Muslim female characters as representing both the Indian Muslim woman and Urdu in seven Urdu prose realist works: Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad; Abdul Halim Sharar’s Flora Florinda; Nazir Ahmed Dehlvi’s Mirat-ul Uroos, Banaat-ul Naash, Taubat-un Nasuh, and Fasana-e-Mubtala; and finally, Muhammad Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada and Junoon-e-Intezaar in which the metaphorical language woman is transformed into a real, round character and woman in the real world who functions with authority and agency as not only a character but an author. The Muslim and Urdu-language woman who emerges from these texts in the latter half of the 19th century gradually mesh the spheres of acceptable domestic sexuality and disreputable public sexuality to conceive a woman, who despite being untethered from societal norms, is a compelling representation of Muslim women and Urdu. In restructuring courtesan Urdu as reputable, this dissertation corrects scholarships’ sustainment of the linguistic hierarchy of Hindi over Urdu and the colonial symbolic Indian Hindu woman over her Muslim counterpart. Dismantling the British imperial and Indian colonial construction of a debased Urdu is imperative to redress the continued global devaluation of Urdu and even its speakers, including in Pakistan, where Urdu is the sole national and one of the two official languages. This dissertation answers Gyatri Spivak’s question of if the subaltern woman can speak with a resounding “yes, she can” and explores the various ways in which the marginalized and repressed can use language as a tool in an attempt to dismantle colonialism and subvert the authority of colonial oppressors while creating a singular identity, much in the way Aamir Mufti approaches the power of language.