Removing the veil

Before the advent of the NRI sagas propagating DKNY campuses and values of the Hindu undivided family, the "Muslim social" used to be one of the most popular genres of filmmaking in Bollywood.

It lost its appeal around the mid-1970s and early 1980s, caught as it were between the worlds of the angry young men and teeny bopper lovers. In the times of Godhra, of course, such reel representations have completely lost their place.

The mores, cultural and social, ignored at best by mainstream cinema, baited at worst. The characters, usually The Others in a slick, urban world of Barbies-over-burkhas; always marginalised, on the fringes thanks to redefined versions of Indian-ness where Pakistan-bashing often passes for patriotism.

Yet if you remember, the world of shararas and gararas, decadent nawabs, graceful courtesans, mujras and poetry in that most beautiful of all languages, Urdu, could be seductive. The images are all cliches, of course.

Stereotypes propagated by the likes of Pakeezah, Mehboob ki Mehndi, Umrao Jaan. But beautiful, romantic and tragic in the way none of today's plastic people populating screenspace can hope to be.

Like films, there are few books today available to a larger mainstream audience that try to recapture that lost world. One that does, however, is a recent edition of Zohra, a novel by Zeenuth Futehally.

The book was first published in 1951. This one is a re-edited version by Futehally's daughter Rummana, who records her mother's "profound disappointment at the lack of editing on the part of the (earlier) editor".

Suitable amendments have ostensibly been made by way of grammar and such while retaining the original idiom. And how thankful are we for this endeavour without which the account that holds as much "" if not more "" interest for twenty-first century readers as for its earlier intended audience would have been inevitably lost.

Zohra, through its protagonist, delineates life as it were in upper-class Muslim households of Hyderabad in the early twentieth century. It is a world of the inner courtyard, conservative and placing innumerable restrictions upon its women folk.

Yet it is also a social order caught in the whirlwind of change where idealist young men aspire to being more than genteel landlords and young women expected to live out their lives as veiled wives begin to feel the strange stirrings of romance and rebellion.

The freedom struggle forms a backdrop to this tale, Gandhi firing the imagination of an entire generation as in real life. But Zohra is not a political story in that sense. It is a love story. It traces the life of its young heroine, artistic and creative by temperament, who must repress all individualistic stirrings and go through a life of conformity locked up in a marriage (arranged) to a man who scarcely understands her, all the while hopelessly in love with his brother, her soul mate.

The plot is hardly unique. Not in the least because it is reminiscent of the Tagore classic "Noshtoneer" (Charulata, the film version). Similarly the characters too are familiar. The begums and fading nawabs, poets and star-crossed lovers, all staples of countless "Muslim socials" you may have encountered elsewhere. But none of that takes away from Zohra.

The characters may be familiar but they are never caricatures. These are flesh and blood people. The stern mother-in-law is indulgent, strangely progressive too, you could say, preferring the daughter-in-law, illicit love affair or no, to her own daughter.

And while Zohra's cut and dry doctor-husband may not understand her, you can never question his devotion. Zohra herself fits the tragi-heroic paradigm, "wandering 'twixt two worlds/The one dead, the other yet unborn" and finally crushed between the two.

As such she is representative of an entire generation belonging physically to a restricting milieu but spiritually to a much freer world: "One night she went to theatre with Jacque and another couple also artists, who were friends of his. Zohra was quite taken aback when she learnt that although unmarried they were living together and made no secret of it. At the same time she felt a deep envy. What would her own life have been like, she wondered, if she has lived in a liberal society? The sense of injustice brought tears to her eyes."

The editor's note says that the account came about because the author felt an urgency to record a way of life that "owing to the passage of time was fast disappearing". Nostalgia apart, the book's biggest appeal lies in the fact that this is not just an exotic world it portrays but one identifiable even today. And not just from a gender point of view. In the land of arranged marriages, a society where a woman's sexuality is still linked to family honour, where patriarchal set-ups would still control the way a woman must live, behave, marry, breed and indeed breathe, the account is indeed poignant. But more than that it is interesting from a sociological point of view.

Many a custom that Futehally records, especially pertaining to marriage, are in practise today "" not just in a specific Muslim community "" but in many Hindu ones too. The "haldi" ceremony, where turmeric paste is rubbed on the bride-to-be by seven young matrons "both the number and their marital status considered auspicious", the churis, the hennaed hands, the singing and the dancing reminiscent of a modern-day "ladies' sangeet" and even a celebratory splashing of colour as with the "Hindu festival of Holi", they all point to a common heritage. Not Hindu, not Muslim, somewhere in between.

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ZOHRA

Zeenuth Futehally (Edited by Rummana Futehally Denby)
Oxford University Press
Pages: 264, Price:Rs 350