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South Asian Popular Culture

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Shifting the gaze: Colonial and postcolonial portraits of the zenana in Hindi and Euro-American cinema
Angma D. Jhala
a a

History, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA

Version of record first published: 24 Oct 2011

To cite this article: Angma D. Jhala (2011): Shifting the gaze: Colonial and postcolonial portraits of the zenana in Hindi and Euro-American cinema, South Asian Popular Culture, 9:3, 259-271 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2011.597957

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South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 9, No. 3, October 2011, 259271

Shifting the gaze: Colonial and postcolonial portraits of the zenana in Hindi and Euro-American cinema
Angma D. Jhala*
History, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA This article will examine depictions of the zenana and pardah in Hindi and EuroAmerican cinema. The zenana was the womens courts or female quarters of the palace in Indian princely states where aristocratic and royal women, as well as their attendants, lived behind pardah (literally translating as the veil or curtain) in partial seclusion. Until Indias Independence, there were between ve and six hundred semiautonomous kingdoms or princely states of varying religious (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh) and ethnic backgrounds; many of which had their own zenana courts. Early twentieth-century Bombay lm houses were inuenced by regional cinematic traditions, which themselves had adapted the courtly culture of nautch dance and music associated with zenana courts. In certain cases, Hindi lms were shot in the palaces of former princely states and were produced and directed by princely scions. In the decades following Independence, lms such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Pakeezah (1972) and Umrao Jaan (1981) became megahits, popularizing a romanticized nostalgia for a pre-Partition Indo-Islamic history and the splendour of a lost princely past. With the liberalization of the Indian economy after the 1990s, zenana lms have come to express a reinvigorated nationalism, as illustrative of the past, but reective of a millennial present with lms such as Jodhaa Akbar (2008). At the same time, EuroAmerican cinema, particularly the work of Merchant Ivory, has created lush period piece dramas on princely India and the zenana, such as Autobiography of a Princess (1975) and Hullabaloo Over Georgie And Bonnies Pictures (1978). I will also investigate the ways in which these Merchant Ivory portraits replay old colonial pathologies in branding zenana women as submissive and silenced while employing the language of another form of nostalgia: Euro-American longings for the high noon of the British Raj.

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Introduction The veiled courtesan or princess, hidden behind the screens and lattices of a palace interior, has been a reoccurring image of the zenana since the medieval age. Epics, plays, courtly chronicles, ballads, songs, travelogues, novels, diaries, memoirs and biographies have attempted to describe the intimacies of this female-centered world to a larger audience. Originally a Persian institution, the zenana was the womens courts or female quarters of the palace in Indian princely states where courtly women, as well as their attendants, lived behind pardah (literally translating as the curtain) in partial seclusion. It arrived in India during the thirteenth century with the spread of Islam and was adopted alongside the practice of pardah by Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist as well as Muslim royal courts. With the marriages of Mughal Emperor Akbar to Hindu Rajput princesses in the latter half of the sixteenth century, Mughal ideas of gendered architecture and courtly life

*Email: ajhala@bentley.edu
ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2011.597957 http://www.tandfonline.com

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were further imitated and adopted by non-Muslim elites.1 Until Indias Independence from British colonial rule in 1947, there were between ve and six hundred semi-autonomous kingdoms or princely states of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds, many of which had their own zenana courts. The advent of lm in the early twentieth century brought this longstanding fascination for the princely pardahnashin, by both indigenous and western audiences, to the silver screen. From their earliest origins, Bombay lm houses incorporated regional cinematic traditions which themselves had adapted the courtly culture of nautch dance and music from local zenana courts. In certain cases, Hindi lms were shot in the palaces of former princely states and produced and directed by princely scions. After Independence, despite the lapse of monarchy and integration of the princely states into the new republic, lms with courtly settings remained popular and critical successes. Blockbuster hits such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Umrao Jaan (1971), which had courtesans or royal princesses as heroines, invoked the glory days of aristocratic magnicence through an emphasis on courtly costumes, regal architecture and rened music, often expressed through Urdu poetics, such as the ghazal. For post-Partition audiences, both in South Asia and the diaspora, these lms evoked a nostalgia for an earlier high culture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity reected in the aesthetic, religious and cultural cosmopolitanism of Akbars harem or the Lucknow kotha. Recent lms with zenana settings released since the liberalization of Indias economy in the 1990s, such as Jodhaa Akbar (2008), portray a zenana past in an altogether different way: not as emblematic of a lost history, but illustrative of Indias present day economic vitality. Such lms use royal material culture to represent a celebratory and triumphant millennial present, reecting Indias current geopolitical ascendency, and are used to showcase indigenous forms of authentic luxury such as palace tourism and haute couture fashion. At the same time, Euro-American cinema, particularly the lms of Merchant Ivory, have continued to exoticize the zenana for western viewers. While best known for AngloEuropean period piece dramas, Merchant Ivory has also produced several lms on princely India; a number of which focus on zenana women and zenana courts, such as Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Hullabaloo Over Georgie And Bonnies Pictures (1978) and Heat and Dust (1982). Such lms were in many ways the products of Thatcherite Britain, which was experiencing its own self-reective nostalgia by returning to themes of history: in its case, mourning, and reliving, a former colonial empire. Such tales of the Raj allowed viewers to vicariously experience the material realities of British imperialism, while simultaneously reinforcing perceptions of Indian women as repressed by tradition and in need of western intervention. All three lms had scripts by the Booker Prize-winning novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and her branding of the veiled woman perpetuated orientalist readings of the zenana and princely India. This article will examine the inuence of courtly aesthetics and narratives on Hindi and Euro-American cinema, and the lm industrys postcolonial depiction of the courtly Indian woman. Hindi cinema and the courtly heroine: the rise of the tawaif narrative Although the Indian princely states lapsed with Indias Independence from British colonial rule in 1947, they have remained a vibrant part of national popular culture through Hindi cinema. Stories of the zenana have captured the imagination of directors, producers and cinematic audiences since the era of silent lm. Royal women, both courtesans and princesses, have been popular heroines in Raj Nartaki (1941), Mughal-e-Azam (1960),

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Pakeezah (1972), Umrao Jaan (1981), Zubeidaa (2001), Eklavya (2007) and Jodhaa Akbar (2008). Due to limitations of space, I shall focus on Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan in this article. These lms became exclusive windows into the screened interior of pardah compartments, whether those of a sophisticated tawaif (courtesan) in an urbane kotha (salon) or the harem/zenana quarters of a royal palace. Through such lms, the pardahnashin was unveiled and her person corporally, psychologically and spiritually made visible to the audience. Such lms highlight the continued interest in courtly, pardah women and their inuence on popular culture, some 60 years after the lapse of monarchy in India. The connection between the Bombay lm industry and princely aesthetics is an old one. Several early Bombay pictures were shot in local princely states and produced by directors who had grown up in a zenana culture. Dhiren Gangulys Lotus Film Company was founded with the patronage of the Nizam of Hyderabad in the 1920s, where he shot his historical Razia, a lm about the only ruling Muslim queen of Delhi (Bose 68 69). After the Nizam expressed displeasure with the lm, Ganguly subsequently gained the support of the Maharaja of Jaipur, where he continued to shoot movies using local princely settings and architecture (Bose 70). The director P.C. Barua, son of the Raja of Gauripur, made the rst sound adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyays novel Devdas in 1935, which was a huge success, and has been described as revolutionizing the future of Indian social pictures (Bose 89 90). From the beginning, these directors utilized the music, dance and dress of zenana courts, and employed the male and female descendents of courtesans from royal households who were skilled in the musical and literary arts. Princely courtesans also brought their stories to the big screen and became actresses. The notorious Malabar Hill Murder, which came to trial in the Bombay High Court in 1925, involved a Muslim dancing girl and courtesan, Mumtaz Begum, and her princely lover, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar of Indore. Mumtaz survived an abduction attempt and lived to give damning oral evidence, which eventually forced the Maharaja to abdicate in 1926. She thereafter took her tale of sex, murder and royal depravity to Bombay where it was made into Kulinkanta (d. Homi Master, 1925). Later, she left for Hollywood (Bhaumik 88). Her contemporary, Sitara Devi, a performer at the court of the Nawab of Rampur, became a prominent lm actress in the 1930s (Bhaumik 169). With the success of these early lms, the opulent settings and romanticism of the tawaif were dramatically brought to life with the partial colour and colour lms of the 1960s through the 1980s, and more recently in remakes of earlier classics since the 1990s. Several Bollywood lms have reproduced tales of the tawaif, particularly in the historic setting of Lucknow (Ansari 295). Invariably the part of the courtesan was given to the most popular (and beautiful) lm actress of her generation, such as Meena Kumari in Pakeezah, Rekha in Muzaffar Alis Umrao Jaan and Aishwarya Rai in its recent 2006 remake (Dwyer 85). Film was particularly conducive to showcasing the skills of courtesans to new generations of audience members. Most tawaifs were trained to move only certain parts of their bodies and the panning technique, where the camera zoomed into the actresss face, belly or bosom during particular sections of music or dance, was able to convey a mood once intimately exchanged in a princes audience hall between dancer and aristocratic patron, to the moviegoer through the intermediary of the cinema screen. Thus, the zenana woman serves as conduit through which the non-aristocratic viewer accesses the largely forbidden, exclusive world of the court, thereby acquiring the elevated status of connoisseur and patron of royal aesthetics.

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Kamal Amrohis Pakeezah (1972) in particular was an homage to the cultural cosmopolitanism of erstwhile princely India, made bittersweet as it was released one year after the lapse of the Privy Purse. In 1971, Indira Gandhis Congress government abolished the constitutionally granted Privy Purse (a percentage of the revenue of their former states), which erstwhile princes were granted at the time of accession and integration in 1947 49 (Richter 344 345), thereby affecting traditional forms of patronage. Pakeezah is often described as the quintessential tawaif movie (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen; Ansari 303). The story is set in Lucknow and begins with the tale of Nargis a tawaif who fell in love with a Muslim nobleman and attempted to marry him. However, when her prospective in-laws learn about her background and reject her, she kills herself in a graveyard, after giving birth to their daughter, Sahibjaan. Sahibjaan is saved by her maternal aunt, who raises her as a tawaif in her kotha, where the young woman becomes a skilled dancer, singer and poet. One day while traveling by train, Sahibjaan falls asleep, waking to discover a note from an unnamed admirer, which reads: I saw your feet, they are very beautiful. Do not place them on the ground. Subsequently, the lm focuses on her attempt to nd the author of this note, Salim, whom she falls in love with, and to win his admiration and the respect of his family, which proves to be the same one that rejected her mother years before. In a famous scene of resistance, Sahibjaan dances on broken shards of glass, painting the oor red with her blood, during a performance at her lovers familys home; an act which compels her aunt to disclose her true paternity through a public expression of shaming. Usamah Ansari suggests that these themes from Pakeezah run through many of the resonant tawaif dramas, such as the glamorized environment of the courtesan, as reected in her ne clothes and jewelry, kotha, servants and elegant, courtly Urdu. (Ansari 305). In this lm the discourse on purity and impurity, chastity and immorality is particularly heightened with the focus on the courtesans feet. The image of the pure foot which should not be dirtied by the polluting inuence of the ground serves as a metaphor for Sahibjaans own position, on the one hand, as an inspiring, uplifting muse (to the romantic impulses of Salim as poet/admirer) and, on the other, as a decadent, diseased, downtrodden prostitute, part of a outmoded, decaying institution. Films like Pakeezah have become iconic representations of South Asian femininity, culture and history when further interpreted and adapted by diasporic moviegoers and lmmakers. For South Asian British viewers,
the scene where the male star (Raaj Kumar) falls in love with the feet of an unknown woman as she is sleeping on a train was fondly recalled in conversations, as was the scene where Meena Kumari dances on the shattered pieces of glass from a fallen chandelier. (Puwar 84)

Such scenes encapsulate a repertoire of shared memory of both a distant country (in terms of migration in space) and a remembered past (a pre-Independent India). Recalled and retold, these lms and scenes within lms become reied readings of a sense of home, loss, love, woman or family for diasporic communities. These classic images are in turn co-opted and re-categorized in new cultural, social and political contexts. Scenes from Pakeezah are displayed on the walls of South Asian dance clubs in foreign locations, including gay and lesbian venues such as Club Kali in London, or redeployed in diaspora movies (Kawale 83). Ten years later, director Muzaffar Ali again returned to princely Lucknow for inspiration in his lm Umrao Jaan (1981). This lm similarly celebrated the material, lavishness of the zenana in its depiction of a nineteenth-century Lucknow kotha. Based on Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswas novel Umrao Jaan Ada (1905), Ali chronicles the life of

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a young courtesan and her loves against the background of the rise of East India Company rule and the Mutiny. The story arc commences in 1840 and continues past 1857, during which time the young Umrao is abducted from her family, sold to the madam of a kotha, educated in music and dance and gains acclaim as a renowned poet and performer of verse, like Sahibjaan (Hogan 201). She subsequently attracts the attention of a number of inuential men, including a local nawab and a prosperous bandit. Patrick Colm Hogan argues that Muzaffar Ali, when editing the lm, cuts the scenes in such a way to juxtapose certain images, which heighten Su and bhakti readings within the text, especially those of longing and absence (epitomized in the relationships of mother/child, devotee/god and lover/beloved). Umrao Jaans alienation from her parental home, her desire to nd a life outside the kotha through the men she encounters, and her nal rejection by the external world reinforce this desire for mystical union in moments of alienation and separation (Hogan 206). Much of this sense of loss and longing is reiterated by Alis own understanding of the social realities and historic ramications of the world he is visually recreating. Himself a member of the Lucknow aristocracy, Ali was keenly aware of this courtly world as one distinctly lost in history rst through the annexation of Awadh by the British and then the later political rejection of the princely states in republican India. Umrao Jaan, the woman, becomes a metaphor for a lost cultural form of expression and political system. To give the lm added authenticity as an archive of his ancestral city, Ali is meticulous in recreating the material culture of the kotha and the nawabi courts that inhabit Umrao Jaan. The lm incorporates the use of silver paan dans, hookahs, hand spun rich brocades and Jadau jewelry by local Lucknow artisans, which highlight the role of regional aesthetic objects (Janan). Having a background in fashion design, Ali was also careful in recreating historical details for the clothing and lm sets, personally selecting the costumes, dress and jewelry for his actors, which were based on nineteenth century data of the Awadhi court (Shahryar). Films such as Pakeezah and Umrao Jaan recount not only a lost nineteenth-century Indo-Persian cosmopolitanism and a pre-Independent royal past, but also a then contemporary postcolonial princely reality. Independence, democracy and Nehruvian socialism had largely eclipsed the princely states rst by incorporating their territories into the new nation and then stripping their former rulers of executive, legal or administrative functions. With Indira Gandhis election as Prime Minister, the princes were dealt a further economic and political blow: without traditional forms of capital in the Privy Purse courtly patterns of life became threatened. Pre-existing aesthetic traditions, such as Hindustani music and classical Indian dance and the maintenance of royal architectural spaces associated with them, such as zenana palaces and kotha havelis, appeared to be on the brink of extinction. These lms, particularly by aristocratic directors such as Muzaffar Ali, were seen as swansongs not only to a colonial past but also to a then dying present. In the moment of their production and release, they were as much historical relics as the narratives they depicted or so their producers and contemporary audiences then believed. Merchant Ivorys princely India: colonialist re-brandings of the courtly heroine This fascination for the zenana and pardah women was not limited to Hindi lm but also inuenced Anglophone cinema, in particular the movies of Merchant Ivory. While known for their Euro-American heritage dramas, Merchant Ivorys rst 20 years together were largely spent producing lms set in India. Of their several Indian movies, which crossed

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multiple genres from documentary to feature lm, three had zenana women as leading characters: Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Hullabaloo Over Georgie And Bonnies Pictures (1978) and Heat and Dust (1982). I will focus on the rst two lms in this discussion. The 1980s has been described as a period of Raj nostalgia. The TV series Jewel in the Crown (1984), The Far Pavilions (1984) and Kim (1984) as well as the lms Gandhi (1982) and A Passage to India (1984) reected Thatcherite Britains attempts to reconstruct the halcyon days of imperial glory in an era of postwar diminishment (Shohat and Stam 136). Merchant Ivorys Indian lms, particularly Heat and Dust, were seen in this context and in many ways their earlier productions from the mid to late 1970s foresaw this later wave of nostalgia lms. This image of imperial England was particularly attractive to American viewers who enjoyed the visual richness of these lms and the complex social relationships of upper class British society as an affordable luxury: self indulgent, richly delicious, and intellectually fattening without any of the associated historical guilt (Hipsky 102). Merchant Ivory Productions itself was a transnational, triumvirate partnership between the Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant, the Oregonian director James Ivory and German Jewish novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who was married to a Parsi architect. As many critics have noted, their collaboration was a merging of three cultures, Indian, European and American, and this uniquely multicultural lens inuenced their understanding and depiction of princely India and its relationship with the metropole (Pym 13). Ismail Merchant, who was born into a Su Muslim family in Bombay in 1936, grew up enamored by Bollywood lm; a passion he would bring to these English medium productions by incorporating actors such as Shashi Kapoor, who played male leads in their princely Indian lms (Kapoor himself was partially a product of the Bombay lm industry and the Indian theatre), and Zakir Hussain, an acclaimed tabla performer who acted in a supporting role in Heat and Dust. At the same time, Merchant Ivory lms reected the continued legacy of a postcolonial Occidental exoticism of the Orient due to Ruth Prawer Jhabvalas renditions of colonial princely India in their screenplays. Jhabvala herself was a liminal gure as a foreign-born bahu. Born into a Jewish family living in Cologne, she narrowly escaped deportation to the German concentration camps as her father held Polish nationality and eventually emigrated to England in 1939 (Long 20 21). There she cultivated her love for literature, reading George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Henry James, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov. She married the Indian C.S.H. Jhabvala, who was nishing his architectural degree in London, and moved to New Delhi (Pym 26 28; Long 21), where she continued to write. Like Hindi lmic depictions of the tawaif, her screenplays for Merchant Ivory are similarly laced with nostalgia for a royal past, albeit in this case the high noon of the colonial Raj. Her scripts cinematically evoke the grandeur of imperial rule the darbars, viceregal banquets, shikar excursions, royal marriages on a grand scale in a larger discourse on memory and longing. At the same time, this rendition of the princely past and, in certain cases, the princely present echoes the language of early nineteenth-century British political and social reformers who expressly conceptualized the zenana and harem as indolent, oppressive, ruled by barbarous sentiments and ruthless intrigue. Colonial renditions of Indian rulers often portrayed them in three ways: as quixotic members of a feudal chivalric order, brutal Oriental despots or emasculated puppets of the colonial state. The diaries of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial ofcials

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abound with stories of poisoning, psychological malaise and immorality in the zenana (see Fitze; George). British women were as complicit as their male contemporaries. European women travel writers, such as Fanny Parks and Lady Montague, became celebrated and widely read for their detailed descriptions of the impenetrable zenana, but these female writers also reinforced orientalised, colonial tropes by employing the male gaze of the patriarchal, metropolitan auteur in recreating the eastern harem for a western, popular readership (Parks; Montague; Ghose ch. 3). Such colonial debates introduced legislation, which targeted the insalubrious conditions of the zenana, including the prohibition of sati (widow immolation) in 1829, the widow remarriage act in 1857 and the Age of Consent Act, which increased the marriageable age, in 1891. In addition, colonial reformers strongly attempted to inuence indigenous female education. Upper caste and upper class nineteenth-century Hindu women adopted the model of the grihalakshmi, a female archetype who combined Victorian virtues of household hygiene and womens education with the continued observation of indigenous family traditions in the kula or clan (Chakrabarty 224 228). This discourse on the zenana inuenced colonial and later postcolonial novelistic and lmic depictions of pardah women. E.M. Forsters A Passage to India, J.R. Ackerleys Hindoo Holiday, and later Paul Scotts Raj Quartet continued to sideline veiled women as peripheral, but sexualized gures in colonial dramas. The early lms of the 1930s and 1940s, termed empire lms which were popular both in Britain and abroad, invariably focused on the sucessful campaigns of British agents to control recalcitrant ambitious tribal chief[s] (Aldea 213). These were largely adventure narratives, which celebrated European masculinity as a fundamental part of the imperial project and legitimated the rule of British law, order and might (Webster 86). In the 1920s, the German lm The Sultan of Delhi depicted a harem with 300 women, while the American Indian Raja had a protagonist who abducted white girls and kept them in a big American harem (Arora 50). In The Drum (d. Zoltan Korda, 1938), oriental women appeared as part of a pardah system, veiled from view, or as nautch dancers imbued with a dangerous sexuality. Prem Chowdhry has argued that in such lms the western spectatorial position [is] that of a lone male whose desire is to to unveil and penetrate the oriental female who remains outside his access and gaze (72). This highly colored view of the zenana in colonial literary and lmic depictions in turn inuenced Jhabvalas own interpretations of the zenana. Jhabvala describes pardah in the familiar language of repression, antiquarianism, traditionalism and excess. She clearly was inuenced by both the ctional and nonctional work of E.M. Forster (Crane 84). Jhabvalas female characters Indian and English have a sentimental attachment to the world of the court. They enjoy the lavish palatial settings (cinematically deployed in close ups of palace architecture, gardens, lakes, paintings, entertainment, clothes and jewelry), royal feasting and festivals and stylized forms of etiquette and speech. Yet, they simultaneously yearn to escape both the walled perimeters of the zenana compound and its social expectations. This portrait of pardah women correlates with the longstanding colonial reication of the zenana/harem and the perceived bounded gaze of its inhabitants, who have a partial view of the outside world through screened windows and curtained cars. Jhabvalas zenana ladies (a number of whom were based on living women from the 1970s) are often oppressed by courtly hierarchies and patriarchal restrictions, and literally chafe under the vestiges of pardah. One cannot help but wonder if this is Jhabvalas own reactions to life in India as a married woman. Certainly, she was increasingly disillusioned by India during the course of her marriage and eventually moved to New York City in 1975.

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In reality, the life stories of historical zenana women, as I have written elsewhere, and will discuss in greater detail here, reveal far more agency and authority than Jhabvala allows them (Jhala Courtly Indian Women). In some sense, her portraits of palace life continue an earlier reductive colonial project. These are neo-imperialist readings of the disenfranchised colonized woman in a postcolonial present, who longs for the relative sexual freedom and anonymity of her European female contemporaries. According to Jhabvalas scripts, the eastern woman still requires the social and cultural reforms of the West so vigorously introduced earlier in nineteenth-century colonial legislation; only now she desires these changes herself and sees her own world with a Europeanized gaze. Autobiography of a Princess (1975), which rst featured a zenana heroine, was a unique collaboration between Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala as it merged both documentary and feature lmmaking. The 60-minute movie was largely shot in a Kensington, London at, and recounts the meeting of an erstwhile Rajput princess and her fathers English friend, Cyril Sahib, who has now retired to a small village in the English countryside. Over afternoon tea, the middle-aged princess and elderly Englishman remember their former lives as residents of an Indian kingdom and the legacy of the last Maharaja, the Princesss father. Innovatively imbedded within this narrative lm are several sequences of archival footage from the 1920s and 1930s of Rajasthani kingdoms, including Jodhpur and Jaipur, as well as contemporary interviews from the 1970s with the erstwhile Maharaja of Jodhpur, Gaj Singh II, Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and her son, Maharajkumar Jagat Singh. From the start, the lm seems to move organically between the worlds of ction and fact, the past and present, historic reality and romanticized memory. Produced in the years soon following the abolition of the Privy Purse and subsequent authoritarian rule during the Emergency, the lm is a revealing exposition on the precarious position of the erstwhile princely states some 25 years after Independence. Midway through the lm, Cyril hesitatingly admits that he is haunted by his memoires of the zenana. He recalls the images of the silent and empty cenotaphs of deceased, pardah women as terrifying reminders of the superstitious religious practices and irrational traditions of palace life. The Princess, herself a colonial product, having been schooled abroad, sympathizes with Cyrils observations. She admits that it was indeed a dark age when female infanticide and sati were still performed, voicing colonial reservations on two of the most highly contentious traditions associated with the zenana.2 However, she qualies her comments with the admission that sati was not an act of suicide but one of love, a sacred symbol of wifely devotion.3 Such paradoxical comments reect the Princesss confusion over her own past. Throughout the lm, she seems conicted. On the one hand, she emphasizes that the Maharaja wished to enact more progressive legislation, but was hampered in his reform efforts by the interference of traditional forces: family priests and old aunts. Yet she simultaneously concedes that he was swayed by customary practice. While he brought her out of pardah and educated her,4 rst through a European governess and then Swiss and English boarding schools, against the wishes of conservative members of the family, he still expected her to accept an arranged marriage. Her education allowed her to become a modern woman in a modern world along with everyone else, but only so far, as she was forced into a marriage of alliance with a man who, while from the appropriate religion, rank and family, was an opium addict. As in earlier colonial writings, Autobiography portrays the princely order as antiquated and lapsed; an impression reinforced by the sepia tinted archival footage within the ctional narrative. The Indian princes appear weighed down by the rigidity of their own conventions, while at the same time forgotten in postcolonial India with its whirlwind

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changing political and social realities. The lm portrays a world of repression and excess in regards to indigenous women, reinforcing colonial stereotypes of the zenana. Merchant Ivorys next princely India production, Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnies Pictures, retains several of the settings, characters and narrative tropes introduced in Autobiography. The lm is shot largely within Jodhpurs Umaid Bhavan Palace. The lm loosely recounts the story of two competing western art collectors, the American millionaire Clark Haven and the English aristocratic museum curator Lady Gwyneth McLaren Pugh (Lady Gee), who attempt to buy the priceless Tasveer miniature painting collection owned by the Rajput Maharaja of Tasveer and collected by this ancestors. The Maharaja, nicknamed Georgie by his Scottish governess, however, believes the paintings should remain in the familys possession, while his sister, the Maharani of Timarpur (aka Bonnie), keen to have nancial freedom of her own, is open to the sale (Long 90 91). Throughout, the lm has a lighthearted tone mixing the genres of treasure hunt and romance, as Georgie embarks on an affair with Lady Gees traveling companion, Lynn, while Bonnie is wooed by Clark Haven. As in Autobiography, zenana women in this lm long to break free of perceived barriers of spatial and economic limitation. Bonnie appears a woman struggling with the legacy of a pardah past. Just like the princess in Autobiography, she too has suffered an unhappy arranged marriage, returning to live in her brothers home. She too condemns pardah and sati, noting disparagingly that the women of her family stayed locked up in dingy little rooms and threw themselves upon their husbands funeral pyres. Bonnie seems trapped by social obligations she cannot fulll and dissatised by a modern reality, where the specter of personal fulllment (through western romance and sex as symbolized by Havens advances) is unattainable. The lmmakers suggest that her only option, like that of the earlier princess, is freedom through ight and economic independence. Bonnies desire to sell ancestral heirlooms is a metaphorical act of release from traditional societal expectations. If the paintings, which she often emphasizes belong to her and Georgie jointly, are sold, then she might have the capital to make a new life abroad (like the princess in Autobiography who relocated to a Kensington at). Nonetheless, in the end, both women are stymied by the authoritarian choices of the patriarchal Maharaja, father or brother. In Hullabaloo, Bonnies brother, the ex-Maharaja, stages a re and pretends that the collection has been destroyed, thereby successfully managing to fend off the foreign buyers, while, in Autobiography, the Maharaja married his European educated daughter to a dissolute member of his own princely order. In both cases, the patriarchal dynast ignored the wishes of the zenana women themselves. However, the real women that these ctional characters were loosely based upon have completely different lives to these stylized renditions. The princess in Autobiography was partly based upon Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur (1919 2009), who was interviewed for the lm, and Baiji, the great aunt of Maharaja Gaj Singh II of Jodhpur, who ran his successful hotel enterprise much of her life (Pym 66).5 Both Gayatri Devi and Baiji, like the ctionalized princess, were born or married into Rajput royal families and educated overseas in Swiss and English boarding schools. However, neither had a loveless, arranged marriage or ed pardah to live solely abroad even though they had the ability to do so. Baiji, who never married after her studies in Europe, became a powerful gure within her fathers home, as an able administrator and close family associate of the erstwhile royal family. Her public relations skills would assist them in successfully constructing a tourist empire in Jodhpur during the period of economic constraint and entrepreneurship in the post-Privy Purse age. Rajmata Gayatri Devi, after her education abroad during the 1930s,

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returned to India to marry Maharaja Man Singh II of Jaipur in 1940 for love, not arrangement, and while she practiced pardah in Jaipur, was not prohibited engagement in the public sphere. She opened girls schools for Rajput women, supported charitable and arts organizations and later had a successful career in politics, rst as a Swatantra Member of Parliament and then as a Minister of Tourism in Rajasthan. When Autobiography was released in 1975, Gayatri Devi herself was incarcerated in the Tihar jail as a member of the Congress Opposition by Indira Gandhi, who had recently declared the Emergency one of the most authoritarian periods of modern Indian history, when the Prime Minister acquired the right to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties (Devi). Neither she nor Baiji appear without agency in their traditional societies, nor are they active to relinquish ancestral duties or customary practices for a life led alone in the West. As Gayatri Devi admits in her interview within the lm, she planned to spend her time (as she did subsequently for the next 30 years) partially in Jaipur, England (her birthplace) and on visits to new countries (such as America and the Far East). This answer of transnational cosmopolitanism hints at the fact that zenana women historically crossed multiple geographies from their semi-remote princely states, the metropolitan cities of India such as Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta to global locations at the heart of empire despite the perceived limitations of pardah. Similarly, Bonnie in Hullabaloo has contemporary historic counterparts. In the movie, she is loosely depicted as the Tasveer Maharajas married sister who has returned to live in her brothers home. The real life women of her generation could not have been more different to Merchant Ivorys creation. Gaj Singh IIs own sister, Maharajkumari Chandresh Kumari of Jodhpur, had a successful career in politics following her marriage to a scion of Kangra-Lambagoan. She served as a Member of the Himachal Pradesh Assembly from 1972 to 1977, a Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) from 1982 1984, President of the All India Mahila Congress (1999 2003), Cabinet Minister, Government of Himachal Pradesh (2003 2004), and is today the sitting Member of Parliament from Jodhpur itself.6 Her contemporary in age, Maharajkumari Vasundaraje of Gwalior, married the erstwhile Maharaja of Dholpur. After separating from her husband soon into her marriage, she, like her mother before her, became an eminent politician in the Bharatiya Janata Party during the 1980s, serving as MLA in the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly and then later held four consecutive terms in the Lok Sabha, eventually becoming Chief Minister of Rajasthan from 2003 to 2008.7 Such instances of historic personages question the depiction of the isolated, deprived and frustrated zenana woman, which emerge in Merchant Ivorys orientalized productions, and suggest a very different reality to this cinematic myth. I suggest this myth is based upon a highly subjective reading of gender relations, which expresses Jhabvalas own encounter and disenchantment with the subcontinent, reinforced by her interpretations of British colonial ction. One wonders if Jhabvalas biases prevented her from fully seeing and encountering the postcolonial zenana or its inhabitants as her depictions resonate with the all-too-familiar vocabulary of nineteenth-century British reform and censure. Conclusion: the continued fascination with zenana dramas As I have argued in this article, the institution of the zenana has become symbolic of the Indian woman in both Hindi and Anglophone cinema. Both lm industries reied the zenana and its aesthetic history. While the Hindi lm industry emphasized a pre-Partition era of cultural hybridity and courtly sophistication, its Euro-American counterpart highlighted the visual panoply of the Raj. For both, the zenana was an object of nostalgic

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reection: for South Asian audiences, the memory of a dynamic indigenous royal past, and for western viewers, a colonial idyll of power, leisure and social reform. While their depictions of pardah women vary dramatically, both systems fundamentally associate the zenana with the material culture of the court its architecture, jewelry, dress, poetry, music and dance. The woman becomes the iconic symbol and preserver of traditional arts. With the growing reach of cinema globally, these portraits have inuenced wider and wider audiences. The lms I have discussed here were released up through the early 1980s, suggesting that both Hindi and western cinemas interest in zenana narratives has since waned. This could not be farther from the truth. Hindi cinema especially has seen a resurgent emphasis on courtly epics and romances since the 1990s and during the rst decade of the twenty-rst century, most notably Ashutosh Gowarikers Jodhaa Akbar (2008). These lms not only express a yearning for past grandeur, but also a late twentiethcentury reinvigorated nationalist sentiment, which mirrors Indias growing economic prosperity and political stability on the international stage. Jodhaa Akbar, which narrates the ctional romance of Mughal Emperor Akbar and his Hindu wife, Jodhaa, a Rajput princess from Amer, returns to the earlier setting of Bollywood classic Mughal-eAzam, but with a twist. This lm is not laced with nostalgic loss but triumphant celebration. It gives wide access to private female spaces from Jodhaas childhood zenana in a Rajput palace to her personal quarters in the Mughal imperial harem, and ends not with a sense of cultural fracture but exuberant optimism and national unity. Released in 2008, it joined the ranks of the all-time top moneymakers of Bombay cinema with US $12,380,000 at the box ofce8 and was a huge critical success, winning numerous lm awards in India and abroad (Khan 189). Such lms reect audiences continued fascination for zenana lives and interiors. They also exhibit Indias current heritage hotels, fashion designers, jewellers and craftsmen (which are often utilized in the production of these lms) as illustrative of the past, but accessible for the viewer (as lmgoer, tourist or property buyer) of a present reality. This new use of the lm as a tourist brochure and luxury product catalogue is supported by the Indian government, especially in Rajasthan (Bollywood & Tourism). Not only has there been a rise in domestic tourism, but foreign visitors, including global celebrities, are increasingly using zenana palaces for destination weddings (Silverman). In this way, the mystique of the zenana continues to attract the gaze of lm viewers and tourists alike, who are eager to penetrate the pardah and enter an elusive interior.

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Notes
1. For a more detailed history of the zenana, refer to Jhala Courtly Indian Women, and Lal Domesticity and Power. 2. For more discussion on sati, refer to Lata Mani. 3. This is not dissimilar to the attitudes held by many Rajput women: see Harlan. 4. During the early twentieth century, reform minded rulers, such as Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwar of Baroda and Begum Sultan Jahan of Bhopal, among others, began introducing western education in their states as well as their personal households, limiting the practice of pardah and sending their daughters overseas for their education. Rajmata Gayatri Devis mother, Indira Devi of Baroda, was among the rst Indian women to emerge from pardah and study overseas in the nineteen teens. 5. For more on Gaj Singh IIs successful career in heritage tourism, refer to Jhala, The Jodhpur Regency. 6. Detailed Prole: Smt. Chandresh Kumari Katoch ,http://india.gov.in/govt/loksabhampbi odata.php?mpcode2994.

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7. Vasundhara Raje Politician ,http://connect.in.com/vasundhara-raje/biography-1377.html. . 8. See ,www.BoxOfce India.com..

Notes on contributor
Angma D. Jhala is an assistant professor of South Asian history at Bentley University. She received her DPhil from Oxford (Christ Church) and MDiv and AB from Harvard University. She is the author of Courtly Indian Women in Late Imperial India (2008) and Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India (2011). Her work has been published in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, South Asian History and Culture, the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Civilizations and various edited volumes.

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