Sharīf codes of conduct: the tawā’if and the gentleman

Respectability for the Indo-Muslim middle and upper classes—the ashrāf (literally ‘respectable classes’)—was defined principally in terms of two interdependent codes of Muslim moral conduct: adab and akhlāq. Adab refers to manners, etiquette, and proper comportment, but it is also that facet of Islamic tradition in which didactic morality is the subject of frequent treatment; in this sense, adab has also been defined as internalizing correct behaviour through one's education and formation as a Muslim, a quality of personality meant to distinguish those with cultivated tastes from the vulgar.Footnote ⁷ Intimately related to adab, is akhlāq (ethical conduct), but whereas adab has tended to correspond to that which is practical, such as the behaviour associated with speaking to one's superiors or the kinds of dress worn for specific occasions, akhlāq has referred to one's innate behaviour, character, and moral conduct.Footnote ⁸ Contextualizing the historical transformations of such concepts, Muzaffar Alam has argued that the akhlāq texts circulating in the Mughal political world by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were chiefly concerned with providing ‘a philosophical, non-sectarian, and humane solution to emergent problems that India's Muslim society encountered’, thus redefining the parameters of shari’a (Islamic law) itself, by questioning its overly legalistic approach.Footnote ⁹

Throughout the late nineteenth century, as Muslim social reformers responded to colonial modernity, expounding upon the condition of women in society, akhlāq literature was reformulated as a corrective. Many novels of this genre focused on the need to educate ashrāf women. Otherwise, it was widely surmised, the world of the zenānā (women's quarters), seen as dark, ignorant, and susceptible to the influences of lower-class women—who moved between the domestic quarters and the public bazār—would keep upper-class women from becoming proper wives and mothers. Late nineteenth century reform movements sought to impose orthodox Islamic values on the purportedly ‘pagan’ private sphere that women inhabited, and the process was intimately related to the loss of power and authority that Muslim men had experienced as a result of the consolidation of colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁰ The limitations of the colonial public sphere for the urban ashrāf led Muslim men in India to view the home as the bastion of Muslim civilization.

Inspired by the reformist trends set by educator Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a new kind of akhlāq literature confronted the reading public and flooded educational institutions. This was epitomized by Nazir Ahmed's novels, which idealized the educated housewife, knowledgeable about arithmetic, reading, writing, and religious scriptures (Qur’ān), thus enabling her to skilfully manage a household. In Mirāt ‘ul-Arūs (The Bride's Mirror), for instance, Asghari, as opposed to her sister, Akbari, embodies all the traits of a properly educated woman: she is practical as opposed to superstitious, rids the house of a thieving maid, and even reforms her husband so that he is able to obtain a high post in the government offices.Footnote ¹¹ Many of these themes continued into the twentieth century: the writings of A.R. Khātūn, a woman writer who elaborated upon the benefits of mastering proper housewifely duties, is a case in point. Her stories mirror those of Nazir Ahmed: instead of Asghari and Akbari, there is Saliqa Begum and Barbadi Begum, or ‘Ms Proper’ and ‘Ms Destroyed’, respectively.Footnote ¹²

Overall, the educated housewife served as the embodiment of ashrāf morality. Other nineteenth century works, such as Maulana Ashraf Thanwi's Bihishti Zevar (Heavenly Ornaments),Footnote ¹³ insisted on breaking down women's spaces with its rituals of gossip and social visiting, by placing women—educated, self-disciplined, and properly Muslim— securely within the home and under the ambit of their husbands’ control. Hence, even as women were empowered with literacy, they were pushed into a newly created ‘private’ sphere where they were to develop modern forms of housewifery. Such akhlāq literature focused on governing the sexuality of women, especially those who were seen to be contravening middle-class social norms. The genre was inflected with the Victorian values of the late colonial period, echoing the adages of thrift, hard work, and moral rectitude, and identifying the home as the most influential source of civilization.Footnote ¹⁴ Prevailing attitudes towards women within these discourses of reform distinguished between ‘woman as ornament, and woman as prostitute’.Footnote ¹⁵ Nineteenth century salaried and professional Indo-Muslim men, in their efforts to preserve a distinctive, religiously informed cultural identity, were anxious to protect ‘their’ women from the ‘evil’ influences of colonial modernity: thus a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘wicked’ women emerged, symbolic of the sharīf household as opposed the world of the bazār (market).

The tawā’if undermined these ashrāf codes of moral conduct for she was a figure who lived outside the normative moral order of marriage, occupied public space, and hence was viewed as a chief source of fitnā (social chaos); increasingly any female entertainer began to be tainted with the label of prostitute.Footnote ¹⁶ In order to understand how these women became a beleaguered community, a brief sketch of the tawā’if is necessary: the term originally referred to a class of women in Mughal North India associated with aristocrats and royal courts, trained in classical music, dance, and poetry, living in lavish establishments supported by nobles. At all Hindu and Muslim courts in the many Mughal subahs and kingdoms that made up South Asia before the British began to conquer them and displace their rulers, courtesans constituted an influential female elite. They were highly educated and, at times, even quite active in political affairs. An example is Begum Samru (1753–1836), who began her professional life as a young tawā’if in Delhi, before becoming the ruler of Sardhana, a principality near Meerut. The Mughal ruler Shah Alam (1759–1806) acknowledged Begum Samru as an esteemed protector, and military strategists of the East India Company considered her crucial to their territorial ambitions: her acquisition of great political, military, and economic clout as well as her acumen for diplomacy, and her movement between the worlds of English, Mughal, and French political interests have been documented.Footnote ¹⁷ Her palace in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, was a place where the Indian and British elites of the late Mughal capital would gather to watch the skilled performances of professional tawā’ifs. Courtesans were perhaps the only class of women in this region who could be educated, but, more importantly, their kothā (salons) served as ‘finishing schools’ for young aristocratic men. Men sought the company of the courtesans not simply for entertainment, but to obtain an education in adab: manners, social etiquette, and the ethics of comportment. By the late nineteenth century, however, akhlāq (ethical conduct)—the term that Māh Lāqa Bai Chanda used to satirically denote her virtue—came to define a moral world quite apart from cultivated, high-ranking women of property and influence.Footnote ¹⁸ After the revolt of 1857, the term tawā’if was conflated by the ashrāf and referred to a wide range of ‘disreputable’ women, including courtesans, female entertainers, and prostitutes.Footnote ¹⁹

In part, much of the hostility visited upon the tawā’if by ashrāf spokesmen emerged from protracted nineteenth century colonial interventions. Moral and medical boundaries, which were established in the early nineteenth century around women deemed to be ‘prostitutes’, paved the way for later moral condemnation and their criminalization, and dramatically altered their social and legal status. The reshaping of social and sexual relationships in early nineteenth century India was intimately bound to the threat that Indian women were seen to pose to the East India Company's army: the women's separation from what was regarded as ‘respectable’ Indian society and their insertion into a ‘criminal’ category was crucial to the surgeons’ and administrators’ attempts to justify the invasive and socially disruptive methods they proposed to control venereal disease among the European soldiery.Footnote ²⁰ The official seizing of state power by the British, which forced the Mughal sovereigns and their courtiers into exile, dealt a blow to courtesans generally. The colonial authorities’ imposition of heavy fines on courtesans for their assistance to rebels during the revolt, as well as the Contagious Diseases Act (1868), which forced prostitutes and ‘singing and dancing girls’ to be medically inspected for venereal disease and to be placed under far greater surveillance and in greater numbers than before, led to the debasement of the courtesan culture into prostitution.Footnote ²¹ The new regulations, which allowed for the medical inspection and regulation of the bodies of native women had to do with concerns that soldiers were ensured ‘healthy sex’.Footnote ²² The legislation was tied to British fears about racial miscegenation and concerns about regulating the city.Footnote ²³ As Ann Stoler has pointed out (in the context of concubinage in Sumatra), ‘an overlapping set of discourses provided the psychological and economic underpinnings for colonial distinctions of difference, linking fears of sexual contamination to the moral breakdown to a European colonial identity with a racist and class-specific core’—what she calls the ‘cultural hygiene of colonialism’.Footnote ²⁴ In British India, such policies allowed the police authorities to mete out atrocities upon ‘common prostitutes’, a category that included women from the poorer classes, and to target members of the upper strata of these women, like the tawā’ifs.Footnote ²⁵ As a result, especially after 1857 when the navābs of urban North India had lost much of their power, property, and influence, courtesans—stripped of their association with the respectable salon (kothā)—began to inhabit the same public space as the prostitutes. This group of women was pushed into a narrowly defined social category, where connotations of artistic accomplishment or religious auspiciousness disappeared as they became exclusively linked to sexual entertainment. The female entertainer, now understood as prostitute, was no longer a person with a trade or craft, but a commodified body. This is poignantly illustrated in the comments of a woman serving in the British cantonments of Ambala: ‘the natives expect us to sit and talk for hours and to give them pipes and pān. The British soldier comes, does his business, and is gone.’Footnote ²⁶ In colonial ethnography, the courtesan culture was depicted as tantamount to ‘slavery’, and this was used to justify British legal interventions, for ‘customs formerly existent can hardly now escape punishment’.Footnote ²⁷

Arguably, the changing nature of prostitution cannot be attributed solely to British power and colonial structures—as early as the 1850s there had been calls for the removal of tawā’ifs by a class of men who were previously excluded from the soirees of the royal elite; such calls were related to the desire to destroy symbols of an older order.Footnote ²⁸ The commodification of the prostitute also had to do with the increasing commercialization of rural areas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The removal of prostitutes from city spaces by the 1910s was due to the emergence of the conservative sexual politics of urban reformers and revivalists who saw prostitutes as threatening a new moral order in which companionate marriage had become the norm.Footnote ²⁹ Additionally, courtesans, in Hindu public discourse, began to be associated with notions of Muslim decadence and corruption, reflecting the Hindi-Urdu debates of the period: Hindi language proponents negatively identified Urdu as a language of excessive eroticism and debauchery, the language of tawā’ifs. By contrast, Hindi was a language symbolized by the morally upright woman of the home. In many ways, ashrāf attitudes towards prostitutes were no different from their Hindu counterparts. From the late nineteenth century onwards, prostitutes were a source of alarm for the ashrāf middle-class public, embodying filth, disease, and moral corruption. Newspaper reports of the period are replete with calls to the local authorities to remove prostitutes from public view and out of the city, amid complaints that the women caused moral depravation among ‘respectable young men’. The category ‘prostitute’ remained a tenuous one, since ‘singing and dancing girls’ were included in the category of such ‘objectionable persons’ in towns and other localities. Even sharing a train compartment with such women was seen to be a problem as testified by fears expressed in the Nasīm-i-Hind in 1896 about ‘contamination with fallen women’. Railway authorities were called upon to ‘warn station masters against permitting bad women to sit in the special carriages . . . expressly reserved for the accommodation of respectable native females’.Footnote ³⁰ The fear that respectable women ‘have fallen into the clutches of disreputable women’ brought the editor of Awāz-i-Khalq to point out that ‘sections 372 and 373 of the Indian Penal Code are not adequate to suppress the evil of prostitution [since] they are not applicable to cases where the age of the girls exceeds 16 years’ and demanded that ‘Municipal Commissioners . . . prepare a list of public houses of ill fame and of disreputable women and prostitutes’ and ‘take steps to have them removed from the locality’.Footnote ³¹

Throughout the early twentieth century, Urdu novellas and chapbooks repeatedly warned readers to keep their distance from prostitutes, lest they be drawn into a world of debt, disease, and disrepute. In the 1903 novel, Shāh Begum: Story of a Bazār Beauty, a former cantonment prostitute who moves into the city with her mother seduces the hero, Pyāre Lāl, by ‘inventing a tale of woe’.Footnote ³² The author ends the story by informing the reader that had Pyāre Lāl not ventured near the ‘mischief-making Shāh Begum’ he would not have had to pay so high a price: not only did he contract a venereal disease, but he lacked the money to pay for his cure.Footnote ³³ These kinds of texts warned their readers in poetic form as well: ‘Kar na chāh tawā’if ke liye/Bachāo jān o javāni varz-e khuda ke liye’ (‘Do not love for a prostitute's sake; protect your life and youth for God's sake’).Footnote ³⁴ Hence, the prostitute was banished from the world of the properly moral, reviled as the source of chaos and evil, and physically removed from the city.Footnote ³⁵ For the ashrāf, the prostitute came to represent all the moral wrongs of Muslim society, for she existed outside the norms of akhlāq as defined within the reformist literature meant to discipline family life. Medical texts, too, warned that keeping company with such ‘professional-women’ was a sure route to ‘incurring financial loss . . . for thousands of wealthy men, becoming engrossed in such activities, have become helpless and continue to become so’.Footnote ³⁶ In much of the Urdu public sphere, tawā’ifs were depicted as figures who were likely to sap the strength—bodily or financial—of the ashrāf man.

Even as the tawā’if became generally tainted as a prostitute who embodied disease and filth, the figure of the elite courtesan, especially of Lucknow, held out a curious allure as she was still perceived as a symbol of Mughal aristocratic cultural refinement. Intimate association with a cultivated tawā’if continued to represent elite status well into the early twentieth century, especially among the literary memoirs of men from an emergent bourgeoisie with ties to an aristocratic way of life. As late as the mid-1960s, the poet Niāz Fatehpūrī recalled, ‘my father started sending me to these gatherings and it was here that my literary career was inaugurated . . . the status of the well-known courtesans of the city was that of a mu’ālim (learned scholar) from whose conversations and manners the elite learnt the correct etiquettes of Lucknow’.Footnote ³⁷ Nor were upper-class tawā’ifs precluded from visiting the homes of respectable families. The poet Aijaz Husain remarked that in his grandfather's house, great care was taken to treat the tawā’ifs lavishly, that as a child he looked upon them as aunts, and that, ‘it was also ensured that arrangements for purdāh were made for them’, indicating that they shared a status of respectability with the other women in the home. Husain recalls that the tawā’ifs were often more well read than Masters students of literature, and possessed copies of poetry collections passed down for generations; he also admitted that he had taken some of these books home with him. In the 1920s, Husain recollects, ‘the salons were not centers solely for spectacle (tamāsh-bīn) and play, but gatherings of adab (adab nashist) and circles of the civilized (tamīz o tehzīb kī dars- gāh)’.Footnote ³⁸ For early twentieth century Lucknow chronicler, Maulana Abdul Halim Sharar, ‘these absurdities [of frequenting the tawā’if’s quarters] went so far that it was said . . . until a person had association with courtesans he was not a polished man’ and furthermore, ‘although these practices may have had a deteriorating effect on morals, at the same time, manners and social finesse improved’.Footnote ³⁹ In a twist of metonymic nostalgia, the passage is followed by a footnote directing the reader to Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel, Umrā’o Jān Adā: Courtesan of Lucknow (1899).

Ruswa's project is at once an ethnographic, nostalgic, and moral one. It is an ethnographic project narrated in a nostalgic register while also deploying notions of moral propriety, all presented in didactic fashion. It is ethnographic because Ruswa elicits the courtesan's confession in order to know her as a typical tawā’if of the Mughal world prior to 1857. Or, to put it in other words, the body of the tawā’if is rewritten and transformed into a body of knowledge about tawā’ifs. It is nostalgic because Ruswa tricks Umrā’o into divulging her story through the flirtatious art of lyrical interlude captured by the Persianate poetic tradition of the ghazal. Hence he gains her trust by his ‘insider’ status, both through alluding to their former liaison as well as to their shared experience of being affected by the loss of Mughal patronage.Footnote ⁴⁰

And it is a moral project because it seeks to fix the tawā’if as an object of the past, as a figure who is redeemed because she regrets her life: by the end of the novel, Umrā’o Jān regards the randī (whore/prostitute) as a fool. She refers to herself as a bazāri aurat (woman of the market) who will never receive God's blessing of true love, but has faith that her biography will serve a purpose: moral usefulness. Separated from her community—a ‘family’ of tawā’ifs—as well as a wider social world, Umrā’o Jān is exiled into solitude, residing in private apartments, and connected to others only by virtue of her relationship to Urdu poetry.

Yet, it is exile—dispersed from the world of Mughal sovereignty and projected into a new, colonial modernity—that made the novel possible in the first place. The circumstances under which Umrā’o Jān Adā came to be recorded and written, claims Ruswa, was during a poetry reading (mushā’ira): as a gathering of his friends exchange couplets, a woman from the apartment next door was overheard voicing her appreciation. He persuades her to join them, where she recites:

Within the body of the courtesan resides the lyrical history of the ashrāf. The Urdu verb bītna means ‘to pass’—the passing of the self (autobiography) and the passing of an age are intertwined through the practice of pleasure associated with the Avadh court. Thus, Umrā’o Jān Adā's story is nothing short of a description of a period of history and of a specific place: Lucknow. The couplet reflects Ruswa's commitment to a combination of lyricism and objectivist history-writing. He declares that, unlike his contemporaries, who ‘construct a plot to convey a message and fill in the details accordingly’, his ‘objective is to portray reality as faithfully as I can’ and that ‘my novels should be regarded as a history of our times, and, I hope, it will be found a useful one’.Footnote ⁴² In telling the story of the life of its heroine, the novel depicts the decay of Mughal culture, and the demise of an entire epoch. By the end of the novel, Lucknow has been destroyed, and the Urdu centre of Indo-Muslim power and excellence has shifted to Hyderabad. Thus, even though it is Umrao's life around which most of events of the novel revolve, Ruswa has woven a tale about the entire socio-cultural world of Lucknow and life in smaller qasbāhs such as Kanpur and Faizabad, around the city. Ruswa is mostly interested in what the tawā’ifs represent: a social and cultural way of life in and around Lucknow.Footnote ⁴³ The kothā is not simply the courtesan's world alone, but also a place where the city's inhabitants, from various class and social positions, congregate. The sophisticated Navab Sultan, who is Umrā’o's desired paramour; the charming Navab Chabban; the notorious bandit, Faiz Ali, passing himself off as a jagīrdar; the Maulvi who teaches Umrā’o and her childhood friends to read, write, and appreciate poetry; the elderly Navāb who is the object of ridicule by Umrāo's rival, Bismillah—all convene in Khanam's house of ill- repute. In summoning the linguistic idioms specific to these individuals’ class and social position, Ruswa re-creates the social texture of an entire city, a city that has since become the site of the ashrāf's obsessive nostalgia which is at odds with Lucknow's actual political relevance in late colonial and post-colonial India.

The ethnographic and moral commitment of Ruswa's novel also becomes evident in the concern shown in its earliest review over its realism, which appeared in the Urdu journal, Me’yār, in 1899. It is compared to a contemporary English novel, Rosa Lambert, in which prostitutes represent a different morality for changing Victorian British sensibilities than they do for the North Indian Muslim middle-upper classes. In this review, the ethnographic and moral aspects of the text are intertwined: Ruswa's novel is praised for being acceptable reading material for the zenāna (women's quarters); it is also lauded for being an authentic account since Umrā’o Jān doesn't ‘flaunt her indiscretions’ like Rosa Lambert, but instead shows contrition, hence making for ‘natural scenes’.Footnote ⁴⁴Umrā’o Jān Adā is classified as high culture and the review authenticates the tawā’if by fixing her in narrative redemption: Umrā’o Jān was brought into the kothā against her will, as opposed to Lambert's ‘spiteful’ decision to enter the profession.

This is the same ‘realism’ and ‘sentimentalism’ that informs Ruswa's ethnographic and nostalgic project, since it is situated in a period where the tawā’if was narrowly defined as prostitute. Ultimately, Ruswa's moral project is inseparable from the novel's narrative of exchange: Umrā’o Jān as a trope for nostalgia functions as symbolic capital. In exchange for the pleasure of his company, Ruswa procures Umrā’o Jān's story, and thereby knowledge about the tawā’if. The body of knowledge that lives in Umrā’o Jān is commodified: it is both a story that sells (i.e. in the market) and a narrative that sells a story about moral redemption. Indeed, that this is the case is evident in the name of the last signifier of the courtesan, Adā. Adā in Urdu has two meanings. One is from the Arabic, and has to do with exchange, execution, and transaction, that is, to fulfil a contractual obligation; the second meaning is of Persian etymology, and refers to the manner, style or ways specific to one's personality; it is also closely tied to coquetry, alluding to emotive gestures, though not exclusively, and the sensual and sexual space of one's body.

This bifurcated meaning of adā, which refracts the tensions therein, indicates why it is this novel in particular that became the quintessential tale of Muslim identity in colonial North India. The novel points to the ashrāf's ambivalence towards the market and thus Umrā’o Jān is morally corrupted due to her status as a sexual being available for exchange; on the other hand, to denounce her was also to relinquish a culture that was not only distinctive, but also emblematic of the superiority of having once been part of the regal and courtly Mughal world.

Umrā’o Jān Adā was not the earliest Urdu novel, but it was the first to be written in the first person: in offering the listener a choice between the story of the self and the story of the age, Umrā’o Jān collapses the two. She represents adab (ethical comportment and decorum) which refers both to Lucknow's extant nobility and to the emerging Muslim middle class. It was this narrative of decline among the Muslim propertied classes that elicited its broad appeal. By the 1920s, the tawā’if within the Hindu public sphere was associated with feudal depravity, representing a decadent Muslim subject antithetical to the national project, a narrative that justified the subordinate position assigned to Muslims in India. For the Muslim upper classes of the same period, however, the tawā’if was not only a reminder of a failed aristocratic past, but was also invoked by ashrāf as a symbolic figure that helped make sense of such a position in relation to the emergent nation, because she alluded to a sovereign Mughal past (i.e. Lucknow as the epicentre of Indo-Muslim culture and civilization). Since Urdu had become so closely bound up with the rewriting of a past in which Mughal sovereignty loomed large as a real political loss, the tawā’if was perceived as both a threat to respectable society and as a figure that marked Muslim cultural identity as distinctive.

Epistles of a ‘prostitute’

The paradoxical figure of the tawā’if discussed in the previous section continued to embody the tension between the commodification of culture and articulations of ethical and moral selfhood within ashrāf society well into the twentieth century. The tawā’if remained very much a figure on the margins of respectable society, a theme explicitly explored in Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār's popular novella, Laila Ke Khutūt (Laila's Letters), first published in 1932. The entire text is narrated by a critical first-person female voice, a fictional tawā’if named Laila. Laila Ke Khutūt is structured as a series of 52 letters: each letter is titled with a number (i.e. ‘The First Letter’, ‘The Second Letter’, and so on). Although there is a letter for each week of the year, it is unclear why Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār organized the text in such a fashion. The language of the letters is direct. While it is emotive in parts, as Laila responds with indignation to her social ostracization, the text is also straightforward and logical, as she outlines her thoughts about the double standards by which men and women are treated in ashrāf society.

At the heart of Laila's Letters is the cry against the commodification of women, as well as a larger critique of capitalist modernity at work: men are charged with prostituting themselves before the double standards of society and before political bodies of authority. In this collection of letters, the kothā (salon/brothel) itself becomes a stage from where the tawā’if performs, embodies, and voices a condemnation of social hypocrisy. Laila, the name itself inspired by the emblematic beloved of the Indo-Persian romance epic, is unrelenting in her criticisms of patriarchal authority, and pursues a meticulous re-evaluation of akhlāq (ethical conduct) as defined by Ġhaffār's contemporaries, the social reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The text challenged both the contemporary legal definition of the ‘prostitute as criminal’ from whom an idealized Indian nation needed rescuing, and common attitudes towards the tawā’if as the harbinger of moral depravity within many quarters of ashrāf society. Furthermore, this text aimed to discipline male sexual desire while simultaneously criticizing conservative moral and political authority within Muslim middle-class society.

Little has been written about the life and work of Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār (1885–1956), either from within the Urdu literary canon or elsewhere. He dedicated much of his life to journalism: he edited the Urdu journal Payām and was actively involved in the nationalist struggle, working closely with several influential political figures of the period, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalām Azad, and Muhammad and Shaukat Ali. He also translated the Indian constitution into Urdu, worked to rehabilitate Hyderabad after it was occupied by the Indian Army in 1948, and was involved in efforts to promote Urdu, becoming secretary of Anjuman-e-Taraqqi Urdu (The Society for Advancement of Urdu) in 1949. On the literary front, he was briefly involved in the Progressive Writers’ Movement, wrote novels (Laila Ke Khutut and Majnun Ki Diari being the most popular), several short stories, and a travelogue, in which he outlined his views about the causes of the failure of the Khilafat movement as a viable political project for Indian Muslims. He was demonized by the national elite for his criticisms of the Indian military while it occupied Hyderabad in the late 1940s, accused in some quarters of being partial to Muslims, and had also been long berated by some ‘ulema in his own community for his views on women. After the death of his first wife—and against considerable societal and familial opposition—he contracted a marriage to a tawā’if from Nainital named Munni Jān. She was reportedly an accomplished singer and tabla player, who converted to Islam upon her marriage and changed her name to Sakina Begum.Footnote ⁴⁵

While there is little evidence to suggest that Munni Jān/Sakina Begum had a substantial role in the writing of Laila's Letters, what is clear is that Ġhaffār's novel engages directly with the question of akhlāq (ethics) and situates the voice of the prostitute as a form of political protest. In spite of Ġhaffār's grim description of Laila in the preface, portraying her as a victim of her social world and her story as a woeful one, the bulk of the text depicts a Laila who refuses claims to victimhood, redemption, and rehabilitation. The text is not so much an autobiographical narrative as it is a critical account of sharīf norms of social propriety, marriage, and sexuality as the narrator assumes the role of educating her beloved—the reader to whom the text is addressed. Laila begins the text by referring to herself as ‘a philosopher of husn-faroshī (beauty-trade)’, arguing that, ‘you may have seen many a master, but I am the expert on this subject’.Footnote ⁴⁶ After identifying herself as an authority, Laila elaborates upon such subjects as shari’a (Islamic legal codes), adabiyāt (the culture of literary refinement), and jihād (struggle). For Laila, thinking on such concepts was monopolized by a patriarchal elite authority. Laila refers, for instance, to adabiyāt as a disease, claiming that the editors of literary journals, although purporting to produce refined literature, wrote only for self-promotion. She sees the law as an inherently deceptive set of rules to guide moral behaviour, nothing more than ‘a cloak’ behind which the powerful hide to cover their weaknesses. Laila's private quarters are depicted as a space of enlightened thinking, for, as she constantly reminds her reader, she never sleeps, she is always awake, alert, and listening. Thus, her femininity—far from signifying an inner, spiritual domain invested with the urgency of preserving the sanctity of a national and/or communitarian culture—is defined by how the author perceives that social prescriptions and practices of ‘religion’ stem from public unreason. In Ġhaffār's text, akhlāq (ethical conduct) is constantly posited against qānūn (law). This distinction between the ethical and legislative domains of human life is not an anomalous one. The intrinsic distinction between the temporal and sacred aspects of Islamic concepts (such as jihād), as well as the distinctions between ‘religion as social demarcator’ and ‘religion as faith’, is key to understanding how Muslim identity was restructured within specific historical contexts.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Laila's Letters, the tawā’if constantly alludes to this distinction between the ethical and the legislative and argues that human beings as individuals must make moral and ethical decisions without blind adherence to religious or political authority.

The term ‘ashrāf-ul-makhluqāt’, specific to the Islamic tradition, which appears in the Quran to refer to mankind, and literally means the most noble of creatures (i.e. man), comes under renewed scrutiny within Ġhaffār's text. Laila argues that the ashraf-ul-makhluqāt—referring to the men of her society—comprise a community ‘who has achieved respectability through fraud and deception, practicing these mostly upon women’.Footnote ⁴⁸ She reserves her harshest criticisms for men who ‘clothe themselves in the garb of religion and law’, who publicly speak out against the vices of prostitution, yet ‘pronounce epithets of love for me in my private quarters’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The three bodies of authority that Laila criticises most fiercely are religious leaders (mullah, maulvi), government representatives (leader, vakil-lawyer), and the literati (adīb-writers, shaiyar-poets), claiming that the latter tend to plagiarize her writings and publish them for public consumption. Laila's criticisms are delivered in a satirical mode:

Laila here makes a mockery of male leadership, essentially calling the social reformers ‘cowards’ and ‘licentious’, who can only achieve greater social and political status by blaming prostitutes for the ills of society. As Farina Mir has shown in her work about the Punjabi narrative, Hir-Ranjha, the heroine, Hir, appears in various texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ridiculing the qāzi and the mullah in similar ways, so that although the narrative may appear in a Muslim idiom, the tale is universal in its critique of religious authorities.Footnote ⁵¹

Ġhaffār's primary emphasis is upon the way in which the qāwi (powerful) oppress the zaīf (weak), in particular subjecting women to harsh punishment and social ostracization for the ‘sins’ of zinā—expressing their sexuality outside the normative marital order—as opposed to the laxity shown by society towards men who are at liberty to pursue their ‘selfish desires’. The relationship between the powerful and the weak is expressed through metaphors of consumption: politics (siyāsat), according to Laila, is the ‘digesting of one qaum (community) by another qaum’. Hence, women, who constitute a community apart from men within this moral order (either as wives or as prostitutes), exist only for men, to ‘be enjoyed like chutney’, ‘be consumed like wine’, and ‘satisfy their thirst’.Footnote ⁵² The Urdu word ‘qaum’, which has been used to refer to a clan, religious community or sect, is here employed—at the peak of the nationalist movement in colonial India—not to mean ‘nation’, but a social grouping (women). The reference to communities eating one another up is a formidable critique about laying claims to representation and is especially pointed, given a political climate of intensifying communitarian strife.

How are we to read these criticisms of national politics as violent consumption? The text is a universalist critique, mediated not through the lens of religion per se, but through ethics; the socio-economic sphere and re-evaluation of moral conduct in society thus give it political meaning. To truly appreciate Ġhaffār's renewed interpretation of ethics from within the Indo-Islamic tradition, it is important to see how the concerns of Laila's Letters stand in marked contrast to nationalist legislative definitions of civilization, prostitution, and female sexuality during the 1920s and 1930s. First, though, a few words about Ġhaffār are in order.

As his name suggests, Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār inherited his title—qāzī (judge)—from his forefathers, who served in high-ranking judicial positions within the Mughal courts. His title may have been ceremonial, given that figures such as his grandfather, the head qāzī of Muradabad, faced suspicion and potential punishment by the colonial state following the 1857 revolt: the British laid the blame for the revolt largely on the ‘fanatical Musalmans’. The devolution of the qāzī’s role in Indian society, from a local arbitrator of justice, independent judge, and interpreter of Islamic fiqh (jurisprudence) to a mere native assistant in nineteenth century colonial law courts who was expected to simply direct the British legislator in administering the ‘correct’ Muslim law, has been well documented.Footnote ⁵³ Of some significance here is the fact that Ġhaffār's familial background, coupled with his role in politics, suggests some degree of familiarity with both local and emerging national judicial realms. He was sent into government service by his father after dropping out of Aligarh University, entered politics as a staunch supporter of the Khilafat movement (working as assistant to Maulana Muhammad Ali) and the Indian National Congress, was an active member of the All-India Muslim League Council, and later served as one of Jawaharlal Nehru's Hyderabad correspondents. Given his association with high-ranking nationalist leaders, Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār's novella has a relationship with the all-India legislative domain, for the intended audience of the novella seems to be an Indian national male leadership. In fact, over a decade after its publication, when the All-India Progressive Writers Association met in Hyderabad in 1945 and proposed a resolution against obscenity in literature, the motion was defeated because of the opposition of renowned literary figures such as Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār.

Laila's Letters reads as a charged riposte against the legal prescriptions of prostitution, which were being renewed in the early decades of the twentieth century. During this period, reformers and legislators were constructing and revising the definition of prostitution in a series of legislation known as the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts. It does not seem coincidental that the acronym, which spells out ‘Sita’—the name of the chaste, loyal, and pure wife of Lord Ram—was appropriated from the Ramayana by nationalist reformers as the embodiment of ideal Indian womanhood, since the legislation, ostensibly about ‘rescuing minor girls from brothels’, had more to do with nationalist renderings of ideal femininity than with any concerns over the condition of prostitutes’ lives. By the early 1930s, it seemed that the legislation was aimed more at rescuing male honour, while defining female sexuality in accordance with normative middle-class prescriptions of monogamous marriage. The new laws imposed harsher penalties upon prostitutes and their procurers, from fines to prison sentences, and in some cases, ‘whipping’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Amendments included removing clauses that prevented ‘buyers’ from being punished; empowering landlords to rid their premises of ‘objectionable tenants’; and including, for the first time, a distinction between the upper-class dancing girl and the ‘common prostitute’—however, the ‘caste of such women’ was to be decided by elite men within local bodies of authority. If the upper-class tawā’if was ‘protected’ in legislation, it was only because upper-class men found it convenient to do so.

Indian patriarchal elites had thus found a discursive space in which to describe ideal Indian womanhood, in which marriage was defined as virtue, and prostitution as vice.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the Suppression of Immoral Traffic Acts, it was considered that ‘the good name of India’ was in need of rescue since ‘prostitution was a slur [upon it]’, and the thrust of the legislation was to define it in opposition to earlier colonialist renderings of prostitution in India as Oriental custom.Footnote ⁵⁶ This legislative forum proved to be a nationalist public sphere in which both Hindu and Muslim men could come together in order to uphold the nation as one worthy of being called civilized. Nationalists such as Rai Bahadur Babu Vikramjit Singh and Chaudhri Muhammad Ali of the United Provinces legislative assembly cited classical texts, such as the Sanskrit Shastras, and Persian epics, such as Shāhnāmā, and exchanged Urdu poetic couplets to claim that anything akin to prostitution was a blot on the character of the otherwise pure Indian woman.Footnote ⁵⁷ In spite of slight modifications of definitions of prostitution, it was clear from discussions in the provincial legislative assemblies that it was the expression of women's sexuality outside of marriage that was the real source of nationalist anxieties. In the United Provinces legislative assembly in that same year, Khan Bahadur Maulvi Fasiuddin claimed that:

Maulvi Fasiuddin's remark is indicative of the widespread hostility that the Indian middle classes harboured towards the appearance of the sexual woman in public (i.e. women who in any way threatened the normative moral order were perceived as ‘outside the nation’). The ‘public woman’ was seen to be a contradiction in terms. Prostitution in legislative discourse was synonymous with unrestrained female sexuality, enjoyed outside the domains of monogamous marriage, viewed as immoral and criminal. Certainly, it was a crime to force a woman against her will to have sexual intercourse, but only if the man was someone other than her legal husband. In discussions about the amendments, it was mostly men's honour that was at stake, evidenced by remarks made by a member of the Punjab legislative assembly who pointed out that, ‘If a person happens to get into the clutches of a bad woman she has only to lodge a complaint . . . immediately that person will be arrested whatever may be his position in life, it will surely lead to blackmailing . . . Do not punish the innocent man.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Against this legislative rendering of the prostitute, Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār announced that although women would enjoy reading Laila's Letters, the book would not be appreciated in several quarters, for ‘the oppressor does not like to see his image reflected back to him in the mirror’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, the heroine of the epistolary novel challenges the social reformer and legislator directly: ‘You think selling one's body is such a crime? You, who sell akhlāq and faith . . . are these not sins?’Footnote ⁶¹ The text was written for both a male and female audience: on the one hand, it was meant to redress the moral conduct of male authority; on the other, it sought to empower women by producing a series of arguments about sexual exploitation, which could inform their conversations with men in positions of power. At the same time, the epistolary novel was also attempting to influence nationalist discourse in its critique of ashrāf identity politics.

Historians of colonial India have examined the moral and sexual anxieties of the British and the aspiring Indian middle classes, which was linked with a coercive and symbolic regulation of women that helped to reify colonial authority, modernize indigenous patriarchy, and articulate a collective identity.Footnote ⁶² In the Urdu public sphere, attempts were made by Muslim publicists and literati from the ashrāf classes to redefine literature, entertainment, and the domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, and to forge a respectable, civilized, and distinct Muslim cultural and political identity.Footnote ⁶³ Some historians have also noted that relatively little has been written on how, at the same time, a wide variety of literary practices and complexities of cultural imagination were placing limits upon certain notions of respectability and homogeneity.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this sense, there was no single fixed system of Muslim middle-class morality and self-expression, nor did sexual conservatism in this period have the final word, for the efficacy of such notions was challenged and undermined by texts such as Laila's Letters. As Charu Gupta notes:

Laila's Letters hints at the variety of such practices, subverting notions of ashrāf respectability. In the Hindi public sphere, letters and first-person fictional narratives written by women introduced a sense of urgency and a powerful element of the personal: the reader was forced to confront the cruelty experienced by women. Life stories legitimized women's voices, as well as women's right to suggest solutions to their own problems, thus giving them a new sense of individual self-worth and emotional life.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such narratives also allowed for critiques of social and family norms.

There were fewer women's journals in Urdu, which reflects the decline of Urdu publications and presses at the time, and fewer Urdu-educated Muslim women could access the public sphere in such ways.Footnote ⁶⁷ While Laila's Letters had much in common with the strategies and concerns of the new Hindi women's journals, it was written by a man who adopted the female voice in order to present a satire about the double standards of men and women in society. Although it is difficult to gauge the precise breadth of its reception, by some accounts the text was quite popular and was read by ashrāf women, often in secret.Footnote ⁶⁸ Whereas in the legal sphere, the women being talked about were not included in the discussions, in the discourse on ethics from which Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār situated the tawā’if, Laila did all the talking. In this sense, Ġhaffār's epistolary novella was an incitement against nationalism as identity politics.

Ethical critiques, the ‘civilizing’ prostitute, and respectable Muslim society

I have already outlined the more general aspects of the moral ashrāf discourse concerning the role of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some ways, Laila's Letters bears some remarkable similarities to Umrā’o Jān Adā. Like Ruswa, Ġhaffār writes in the voice of the tawā’if; like Umrā’o, who narrates her story in relation to an aristocratic society in moral decline, Laila also conceives of her society as characterized by moral depravity.

Yet, these are cosmetic similarities, for Ġhaffār's novella stands in strong contrast to Umra’o Jān Adā. Umrā’o Jān is allowed entry to the respectable society inhabited by Ruswa only as a reformed, repentant woman: Umrā’o classifies three types of women in society—‘the virtuous, the depraved, and the whores’—before adding that, ‘most prostitutes have brought destruction on themselves’, and that ‘[after] I repented . . . the thought occurred to me that I might settle down with some respectable gentleman’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Laila, however, adamantly refuses to enter into a social world that she deems to be full of hypocrisy. Gone too are the poetic couplets and the commitment to objective history-writing. The series of letters that Laila addresses to her lover(s) is written as a polemic directed specifically against the men whose claims to political authority and leadership within Muslim society are tenuous on moral and ethical grounds.

Laila's Letters is a text that not only gives a voice to the prostitute, destabilizing common sharīf views of marriage and conjugality, but heralds the tawā’if as a kind of civilizing figure. What is the ‘civilizing process’ that is at stake, and for whom does Qāzī ºAbdul Ġhaffār invoke the tawā’if? Unlike Umrā’o Jān Adā, whose virtue is ultimately to be found in redemption and who is hollowed out as repository for nostalgia for the elite lifestyle of the Avadh courts, Laila is not a signifier for a specific place or city in the ashrāf imagination (in fact, no specific city is mentioned). Laila writes, ‘It is not so important how I came to this place (of the brothel), but how this brothel has come to be, because of you.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Laila is thus not depicted as symbolic of a particular place or time, but rather as a person in her own right who indicts the men of her society as inhumane. To be a fully civilized man, in Ġhaffār's view, is to perceive women as people with rights, and to privilege feminine subjectivity within the public realm. For Ġhaffār, a tawā’if, in and of herself, was already a fully formed person. The problem for Ġhaffār was that qānūn (law) was being privileged over ethics (akhlāq); he argued that any revaluation drawn from scriptural texts was interpretive and up to the individual. As Laila puts it, ‘You may be able to remove the apparel of my humanity and denude me; you may be able to attack my chastity (ismat); you may be able to make me your mistress. But faith (imān) is such a thing, not even the most powerful can take it from the most weak!’Footnote ⁷¹

Ġhaffār strategically adopts the voice of the tawā’if in order to challenge how akhlāq was practised by ashrāf men of his period and portrayed as ethical conduct.Footnote ⁷²

In doing so, he draws from an older Indo-Islamic tradition of akhlāq literature wherein administrators advised sovereigns on proper political and moral conduct. He also borrows heavily from an established modern didacticism in the literature of reform. Concepts of justice and equity for ordinary people had never been entirely alien to notions of akhlāq and adab, and neither was social equity neglected in the works of nineteenth and twentieth century ashrāf litterateurs, nor that of the ‘ulema for that matter. An example of this comes from a late nineteenth century tract by the Muslim scholar and theologian, Maulana Ashraf Ali Thānvi (1863–1943), who wrote prolifically about Islamic ethics in his Adab al-Mu’asharat (Ethical Conduct of Society) and who published a series of letters with commentary from those seeking his advice:

While Laila's Letters is not a normative akhlāq text as such, Laila sees herself as highly educated in matters of moral conduct, writing that, ‘I was taught Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and I not only was instructed in the rudimentary aspects of scriptural education, but have since read thousands of books in Urdu on matters of religion . . . I am a Muslim . . . had I not been pushed into this world of sin, then today I would have been a maulana (religious teacher).’Footnote ⁷⁴ Furthermore, the text assesses masculine selfhood by representing the prostitute not simply as commentator or even heroine, but as a judge, whose experiences as a socially marginalized figure are privileged as a protest against a moral order defined by men who ‘lack self-control’ and impose their ‘animalistic urges’ on women. It aims to discipline male sexuality. Laila is staking her place in the world of the ashrāf, and makes it clear that while a tawā’if may come from a particular socio-religious community, she has no religion as such. The critique of Indian nationalism also redefines masculine subjectivity. For instance, Ġhaffār turns the modern discourse of eugenics on its head: men who are unable to see women as anything beyond objects for sexual consumption are weak, and will in turn produce weak children, thus diminishing the strength of the nation.Footnote ⁷⁵

Marriage, for both the ashrāf and the Hindu middle classes of the twentieth century, had been sanctioned with a moral vision; its purpose was seen as the creation of families, thus producing the future citizens of the nation. In this schema, sex could legitimately occur only within the disciplined confines of marriage. Laila argues that both marriage and prostitution are structured according to the desires of men, who act on baser instincts, pointing out a lack of civilizé on the part of men from her particular community, the ashrāf. She defines nikāh, not as a legal Islamic marriage contract, but as the sexual violation of a virgin woman by her husband, for ‘when you men listen to the marriage sermon, you envision the beautiful body of a girl or a woman . . . and that imminent night when her delicate body will be presented upon a platter for your desires’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The supposedly sacred codes of conduct here are violated through the practices of commodification. In this sense, for a woman, ‘nikāh happens only once in a life-time, no matter how many times she may appear before a man unveiled’. Hence, Laila views marriage as a social institution that has little to do with sexual purity, and much to do with the violence of consumption. Her definition of nikāh—as a way of legitimizing sexual liaisons between masters and slaves—is also reminiscent of older eighteenth century definitions of nikāh as a customary rather than a contractual arrangement. In the case of the Bengal Nazim's royal household, as Indrani Chatterjee's work shows, nikāh did not have the same kind of legitimate status as a shādi, though both referred to marriage. Women of the royal household played a significant part in arranging a nikāh, which informally confirmed relationships between female slaves and princes, as well as the shādi, which was celebrated publicly. Colonial legislators, however, viewed shādi as a customary practice, but nikāh as a legal binding contract—a reversal of the reality of marriage practices of the time.Footnote ⁷⁷

Laila is acutely aware that such binding contracts emerged not only from the realms of patriarchal power, but were mediated through new forms of consumption: the ostensibly sacred marriage practices among the ashrāf are described as a farce where women are treated no better than ‘pets’. While her suitors try to convince her to either marry them or enter a profession on the stage, Laila staunchly refuses; she prefers her measure of independence, albeit as a public prostitute, rather than a prostitute in the home (as a wife), or to work for someone else (as she would if she entered the entertainment industry). In this interpretation, it is not women who are depicted as the embodiment of shame, but men because of their lack of civility. All that is vulgar, obscene, and uncouth—terms that typically are used to describe the prostitute—are inverted to apply to men of high social status. Although men seek to reform women, so they can ‘form them in any way they so choose’, Laila argues that it is men who need reforming.

Laila also enumerates the classes of men who frequent her salon—all of whom, she claims, ‘behave like animals’ despite their pretensions to being religious philosophers, khadi-wearing leaders, and properly educated writers. Each of them is categorized within a typology, like an ethnographic census, and is subject to an entry: the specificity of their desires, the type of deceit and duplicity they perform based on their profession, the food they consume—even the clothing they wear corresponds to the form of their misogyny. She writes, for instance, of the leader and lawyer:

Akhlāq in this text is reformulated as a critique of commodity, consumption, and commercialization. Laila's is a condemnation of social hypocrisy, for she consistently reiterates the injustices wrought by those who speak in the name of proper moral conduct for the entire community, but proceed to subvert those norms when it serves their purpose. The uncivilized man is defined as one who seeks satisfaction only from a woman's body, rather than her mind. Ġhaffār places the za’īf, embodied by Laila, in the position of didactically instructing men upon proper moral conduct, inducing them to treat their wives with respect. Ethical conduct is redefined here so that the socially weak (za’īf) members of society keep account of the failure of moral leadership defined by the elites. The tawā’if here assumes the position of a woman who evaluates the ashrāf man on his lack of civility. In this way, she is upheld as a figure of political desire: as a reformative prescription for the nationalist man.

At one level in Laila's Letters, Ġhaffār draws upon an older tradition of viewing the courtesan's quarters as the space from which elite men learned decorum befitting the status of nobility. Read at another level, however, Laila's Letters aims to discipline male sexual desire in the context of rising communitarian strife and a national political culture which increasingly emphasized the virtues of self-control. Marcus Daeschel has pointed out that during the 1930s and 1940s, a prevailing concern for the body, associated with hygiene, food, and sex, was central to self-definitions and social identity among the Urdu middle class, as reformist concerns in newspapers, medical tracts, and pamphlets focused on the dangers of easy pleasure.Footnote ⁷⁹ The generation who expressed their sexual desire through activities such as going to dancing saloons, reading ‘cheap novels’, and watching films was viewed with disdain by reformists who were in the business of defining proper middle-class conduct. Daeschel argues that this was not simply about upholding ideals of frugality and hard work, but that middle-class political culture was influenced by fascistic tendencies which, in turn, created regimes of bio-power: this was evident by the emphasis that was placed on the inner world of individuals who increasingly came to understand politics as a route to personal salvation. This reorientation of politics was the result of social transformations wrought by the arrival of a consumer society.Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, for Daeschel, the purpose of politics was to find salvation through the expression of a ‘purified inner self’ (through, for instance, control over the body, avoiding particular foods, controlling sexual indulgence, and so on), an ideal that reflected a lack of political power. Self-expression which stressed the importance of achieving corporeal and mental strength—through clothing, ingesting foods, and the body—was ‘the ideological vehicle of a marginalized middle class’.Footnote ⁸¹

Yet, a concern with individual selfhood did not necessarily lead to the kind of politics of ‘inner purification’ and self-expressionist discourse in which individuals were equated to nations. Not all nationalists who explored the issue of individual identity assumed such an equivalency. Indeed, while Ġhaffār's text is concerned with the individual self of the tawā’if, it attempts to influence nationalist discourse through a recourse to ethics. Meanwhile, even as Ġhaffār's text criticizes patriarchal legal prescriptions as well as the excesses of male sexual desire, it does not abandon discourses of pleasure altogether, as can be seen in its structure as a series of love letters. Laila is not only openly critical of consumption and excess, but links these things to oppression and connects them to the way the upholders of morality treat the socially marginal members of society as objects. Pleasure here is inscribed in a way that is oppositional to Ruswa's project: if Ruswa mediated pleasure through poetry, by fixing the tawā’if as moral subject, then Qazi Abdul Ġhaffār restructures the discourse of pleasure by impersonating and staging a critical female voice. Laila's Letters is a text that confronts both the established cultural understandings of the tawā’if, as posited in Ruswa's novel, as well as legislative definitions of the tawā’if. As Francesca Orsini has shown, the hybrid genres such as confessional and epistolary novels, more than articles on social reform, mixed instruction with entertainment and allowed taboo issues concerning women to be raised directly. The epistolary novel became a popular genre from the 1920s onwards, with a first-person critical female voice, thus allowing a space for self-reflection.Footnote ⁸²

Laila's Letters emerged during a period when women in colonial North India were taking a more active role in the public sphere. Throughout the mid to late 1920s, with increasing numbers of educated women, there was a greater proliferation of women's journals: female readership was being recognized in mainstream news magazines, as newly educated women wrote letters to editors about problems such as purdāh, child-widows, and education. Writing about the Hindi public sphere, Orsini has shown how the new magazine, Chamd (circa 1922) broke with the late nineteenth century stri-upyogi (‘useful for women’) genre. It addressed women as protagonists and active subjects of Indian society and the movement for national regeneration, not only symbolically, but also as empowered individuals. It aimed to make women equally knowledgeable about all sorts of political, economic, social, and historical questions. Furthermore, the journal played an important role in introducing and popularizing a notion of the ‘right to feel’, highlighting tensions between the individual and society, and requesting a renegotiation of social and family norms.Footnote ⁸³ In the Urdu sphere of the time, the question of social reform for Muslim women also predominated. The issue of purdāh (veiled seclusion) was especially salient in the ashrāf community, the raison d’etre of middle-class Muslim identity itself. By the 1920s and 1930s, the writings of several notable ashrāf women who had made the decision to leave purdāh were made public. Some—for example, Atiya Fyzee—began to participate actively in the arts, culture, and travel.Footnote ⁸⁴ Many ashrāf women echoed their male counterparts’ views regarding the ‘backwardness’ of the Muslim community in relation to Hindus.

Ġhaffār's text emerges during a decade in which tawā’ifs were both increasingly punished by the legal instruments of the colonial state for their perceived immoralities, and ostracized in Indo-Muslim middle-class moral discourses as well as nationalist public spheres of the period. It is a text that redefines civilized behaviour, by upending existing notions of akhlāq. As prostitutes were being pushed out by legislation and conservative moral norms, Ġhaffār resuscitates the tawā’if, not as a redemptive figure, but as the voice of reason. She who calls for a re-evaluation of ethics, questions patriarchal political leadership, and places the onus of ‘sin’ on those who ‘from business, politics, and even from the pulpit of knowledge and from the seat of the court of law sell akhlāq, sell faith’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The tawā’if is recast as a civilizing figure. She is cultivated because she can perform adab in dress, speech, and manners, and she is civilized because she argues for striving towards a just, humane world, in which women are subjects with rights, and because she aims to liberate women from the tyranny of sexual hierarchies. In this sense, the notion of the tawā’if's salon as the space in which lettered, sharīf men are to be educated is rearticulated: now, ethical comportment (adab) in dress, speech, and manners must necessarily be conjoined with a renewed notion of ethical conduct (akhlāq) in behaviour, character, and moral sense.

That it is from the social peripheries—from the tawā’if's interior compartments—that the ethical world is recentred as civilized, is also poignantly illustrated in the Urdu short story, Ānandī (City of Joy), written by progressive author Ghulam Abbas in 1940. This critique of commodification went hand-in-hand with a redefinition of civilization within the Urdu literary sphere. In Ānandī, the prostitutes—the zanān-e-bāzārī (literally ‘the women of the bazar’)—of an unnamed city are banished by the municipal authorities who see them as a threat to the moral order of their society. The women are forced to reside on a stretch of barren land several miles away from the city centre. As the prostitutes begin to rebuild their homes, a whole society follows them: upon the heels of the labourers contracted to reconstruct the kothā (who also repair a nearby well and the ruins of a mosque), come the water-sellers; food vendors; tongā-wallahs; flower, tobacco, and incense hawkers; fruit and vegetable traders, and so forth. One of the labourers happens to see smoke rising out of the tomb of a forgotten saint, which lies not far from the new residence: it is dressed up by a local mendicant (fakīr), built anew by the prostitutes themselves, and people begin to visit it regularly from the nearby village to hear the musicians who sing at the shrine. The hustle and bustle increases as the women's wealthier clients begin to arrive in carriages and cars, leading some locals to begin to build shops beneath and around the kothā. Soon, the barren stretch of land turns into a thriving commercial town. Some decades later, it has become a populated city—but its original name, Husnabad (City of Beauties), named after the tawāi’fs who first built their home there, is changed to Ānandī (City of Joy), and shortly afterwards, municipal authorities begin to contemplate forcing the prostitutes out of the city. This circular tale, in which the edifice of the city is built by the very women who are pushed onto its margins—in fact, by a whole world of subalterns—illustrates how Urdu writers commented on the centres and peripheries of lived, ethical space. The tawā’ifs in this tale are at the very centre of civilized life—that is, civilized life begins with them.

Abbas's tale is an extraordinary reversal of a much older theme within Islamicate understandings of civilization. In the twelfth century, historian Ibn Khaldun's assessment—which became a template for many classical Islamic theories of civilization—was that the rise and fall of civilizations followed from the moral failings of the cosmopolitan, cultured people within urban centres, leaving them weak and thus open to invasion by the uncouth, but god-fearing nomads who lived in the peripheries of civilized (i.e. urbane) life. For Abbas, civilized life begins and ends with the tawā’if—whom the municipal authorities see as ‘an unsightly and intolerable stain on the skirt of humanity, nobility, and culture’.Footnote ⁸⁶