June, 2012

Sex and sensibility

Sex and sensibility

Pakistan’s ugly, fat, loud stage dancer is a degenerate reincarnation of the Dancing Girl of India

Harris Bin Munawar

 

The Dancing Girl of the Indus Valley Civilization was slender, subtle, sensual and naked. Lahore’s popular dancer Nargis is voluptuous, bold, crude, and dressed loud.

In the 3000 BC bronze figurine that shocked archaeologists, the Dancing Girl clasps her hand, joining the tips of the thumb and the index finger, to make the traditional Indian dance posture that signifies a lotus bud. Nargis clasps her hand too, but slides the index finger down the thumb, to make a hole that signifies an invitation to copulation.

The Dancing Girl is a figurine and cannot speak. Her hair, jewellery and posture are the media that mirror the social life of the Indus Valley Civilization about 4,500 years ago. Nargis is the queen of pun. She speaks loud and always accentuates social and moral dysfunction.

What is common between Nargis and the Dancing Girl of India is their chin-up self-assurance.

“Of what use is the truth that wastes your youth?” Ambapali asked a disciple of Buddha meditating in her Mango grove in Vaishali. “Absolute happiness can only be attained this way. The happiness you seek is transitory pleasure,” the monk replied.

Ambapali was a Nagarvadhu – or the wife of the city. In those times, about 2,500 years ago, beautiful women competed to become Nagarvadhus. They were made courtesans, and danced and had sex for money. It was not taboo. 

“Leave this delusion and enjoy my hospitality, which even the royalty desires to experience,” she said to the monk. The month gave her a mango fruit and told her to keep it fresh until he returned. A month later, having been permitted by Buddha to be Ambapali’s guest, the monk returned asked her for the fruit.

He showed her the rotten skin and the stone. “The beauty, aroma and taste are gone,” he said, “but the seed is intact. It is not the youth but the eternal soul that needs to be protected.”

Ambapali renounced her profession and donated her belongings to Buddha and his disciples. When Buddha later visited Vaishali, he stayed in her grove.

Begum Samru, born as Farzana Zaibunnisa and raised to be a Tawaif, eventually became Joanna Nobilis Sombre, one of the most important political figures of 18th Century northern India.

The Tawaif profession developed because of the Mughal patronage of music and dance in India. Girls were taught north Indian classical singing and dance, poetry and etiquettes to become courtesans. Young princes were sent to these women to learn arts and etiquettes. By the 18th Century, they had become central to the north Indian culture.

European mercenary Walter Reinhardt Sombre fell in love with a 14-year-old Farzana and she began to advise him in political matters.

Soon, the 4.5-feet tall woman wore a turban and rode on horseback every time she led her mercenary troops – European as well as Indian – to a battle. There were myths that she was a sorceress and could subdue anyone.

Farzana was also courted by French officer Le Vassoult. After a rumor in 1793 that she had married Le Vassoult, the army rebelled and the couple fled secretly. She survived a suicide attempt but her lover died. 

When her husband Walter Reinhardt Sombre died, she inherited his immense riches (an income of about 90,000 pounds a year), and she retained her possessions as an independent ruler after the imposition of British rule in India. Her inheritance was assessed at 55.5 million Gold Marks in 1923.

Moran Sarkar, an influential Muslim Tawaif, was courted by Sikh emperor Ranjeet Singh and eventually became the Maharani. She was known for her philanthropy, understanding of governance, and refined literary taste. Moran used to dance in Ranjeet Singh’s Baradari between Amritsar and Lahore. The place was renamed from Pul Kanjri to Pul Moran. The Sikh emperor built a mosque in Lahore on her request. It was renamed from Masjid Tawaifan to Mai Moran Masjid.

“In Bombay, European prostitutes were concentrated at Cursetji Sukhlaji Street in the Kamathipura area. Here, the missionaries who formed themselves into a vigilante midnight mission to stamp out the nefarious practice found themselves, whilst patrolling the street, showered with water and oil and other unpleasant fluids by prostitutes occupying the upper loots of the street’s buildings,” Coralie Younger writes in her provocatively titled book Wicked Women of the Raj.

“In response, the midnight missionaries changed their attack and decided to man each end of the thoroughfare in order to harass the men who attempted to enter and patronise Cursetji Street’s brothels.”

The missionaries complained that the verbal abuse and discomfort of drenching fluids and the assault by enraged clients was nothing compared to women missionaries’ having to suffer the indignity of being mistaken for the `unfortunates’.”

But, “equally distressing was the fact that many of the prostitutes did not consider themselves ill used at all and did not want to be rescued”.

One Malcolm Moss had a tricycle on which he “follows home the carriages of some of the aristocratic official frequenters of the great European vice market of Bombay, finds their names and addresses, then sends them through the post letter of religious advice, tracts and purity literature”.

But it was not just the missionaries who were upset with this violation of morality. In a note to the deputy governor, the council of the East India Company wrote:

“Whereas some of these women have grown scandalous to our nation, religion and government interest, we require you to give them fair warning that they do apply themselves to a more sober and Christian conversation.”

Although prostitution had been seen as disturbing the English society and detrimental to the empire for long, so were drunkenness or blasphemy. Prostitution and other sexually immoral acts were not elevated to the special status of a great social evil until the 19th century.

This change was a byproduct of the Enlightenment approach. Michel Foucault speaks of a “need to take sex ‘into account’, to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well.” In his History of Sexuality, he said, “It was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its own existence.”

But science continued to theorise sex, and had soon taxonomised those who did not fit into the reproductive norm: the homosexual, the prostitute, the pervert, and so on.

At the time when the British Raj was dealing sternly with prostitution, Younger writes, “extramarital relations as a practice were not scorned by a society that saw its women take flight every hot season into the cooler climes of the morally relaxed hill stations. In Simla, Mussoorie and Ooty, it was taken for granted that married women and men on leave were free to indulge their passions as long as they were relatively discreet.

For example, at the lavish balls, dinner parties and receptions held at the maharajah of Kapurthalas residence in Mussoorie, the best wines and champagne flowed freely...The maharajah’s military secretary wrote that evenings concluded with men and women taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the Chateau de Kapurthalas large and densely planted gardens.”

The Victorian bourgeoisie built the family and its sexuality around the demarcation of the public and the private spheres. And those who violated the distinction were seen as threats to the social order. Queen Victoria gave the Indian subcontinent a comprehensive system of laws that was based on abstract, universal, scientific principles in line with the character of Victorian England.

The legal and social models India’s middle and upper classes adopted include public prudence that contradicts our private behaviour, sexual restraint, and strict adherence to the social codes of conduct. Pakistan’s key moral concerns therefore continue to be the prostitutes, those who watch pornography on the Internet, and those who date in parks.

The violation of Victorian codes of conduct by ‘the general public’, - such as those who watch ‘stage dancer’ Nargis – is seen by many as the end of the last remnants of the British Raj in Pakistan.

Nargis is perhaps a degenerate form of the temple dancer that has come back to haunt us and avenge her suppression. If that is true, what will happen if we suppress Nargis?

 

The author is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He gets email at [email protected] and tweets @paagalinsaan

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