I'm being lazy and posting an excerpt from something I wrote earlier about Angare. Your posts should not be this long (just five to seven lines--or more should you wish). This post is about a third Zaheer story, Dulari.
If Jannat
kī Bashārat and Nīnd nā āye critique
respectively the spheres of Muslim religious and political life, then Sajjad
Zaheer’s third story, Dulārī,
interrogates the sharīf household as
the breeding place of a compromised Muslim morality. Dulārī is a young
maidservant who has grown up in the house of Shaikh Nazim Ali. Loved by the
entire household, she is maintained, nevertheless, in a position subordinate to
that of her employers. One year, during the festival of Shab-e Barāt, she has a
sexual encounter with Kazim, the rebellious elder son of Shaikh Nazim that in
her innocent mind takes on the significance of intense and eternal feeling. By
the next year, however, Kazim is married to a girl of the same sharīf class as himself, devastating Dulārī
who runs away from the house, and is found a few months later in the red light
district of the city. She is brought back to the house by the old servant who
finds her and roundly scolded by several of the family members, but upon
hearing Kazim’s voice and seeing his new wife on his arm, she leaves the house
again, unable to break free of the shackles of class. Overtly, the story is the
least complex of the three—it is simply an exposé of the way class is enacted
in the bourgeois Muslim home. I suggest we read Dulārī as the most radical of Zaheer’s triumvirate because it is
here that not only the idea of sharāfat
(whose literal meaning evokes moral decency and piety) or the quality of being
from the ashrāf is questioned, but
also where the figure of the Muslim prostitute is represented as emerging
directly out of this atypically immovable, and impenetrable social class.
The underlying theme of the story is the sharīf Muslim identity and the
implications it has for the maidservant Dulārī. She is slowly separated from
her childhood playmate for as the daughter of the house, a sharīfzādī, the latter had to busy herself with her studies, and
skills such as stitching etc. After the girl’s shameful return to the house
from the prostitutes’ quarters, Haseena comforts herself with regards to Dulārī’s
destroyed honor with the argument that it would have been dishonor had it
happened to a sharīfzādī such as
herself. Sharāfat in Muslim women,
then is associated with pākīzgī
(literally, purity) and ‘ișmat (literally,
abstinence), tenets that Dulārī defies both within and outside of Sheikh
Nazim’s house.[1]
Yet, it is Dulārī’s gaze, just before her final exit, that puts the entire
house to shame as it correctly refracts the evils she has faced upon their sharīf existence. I would argue that
Zaheer is quite directly pointing to the ashrāf
here as the class that through its utterly self-conscious sense of being and
its never fully embraced fall from aristocracy after the events of 1857 is
responsible for the disintegration of what was previously “respectable” or
protected into what can be plundered or bought, whether it be the Muslim woman
or more broadly, Muslim culture. The subject of Zaheer’s ironies is not the elite
Muslim as a minoritized or struggling figure, rather it is the premise of an
elite class as the protector and dispenser of social morality that is dispelled
in Dulārī. If members of this elite
were the objects of Zaheer’s censure in Nīnd
nā āye and Jannat kī Bashārat,
here their claim to autonomous subjectivity is held to task. The domestic unit
in which Dulārī spent the whole of her life, and that provided her with
temporary identity is incapable of sustaining her figure once it becomes
desirous of equality and permanence. In other words, the sharīf class is structured entirely around the existence of a
disenfranchised group that the former must simultaneously nourish and suppress.
Dulārī, though a resident in the havēlī,
is a member of the subaltern class that confirms the continuity of the ashrāf. In the story, her circulation
from the bourgeois home to presumably the prostitutes’ district suggests a
relationship between the two locales that reflects the desire of the former for
the latter. As a woman not of the sharīf class,
Dulārī can exist only in the zenānā
of the havēlī as a servant with
unrequited feelings for the man who took sexual advantage of her innocence, or
in the red light district as a retailer of sex. In both places, she remains a
sexually exploited subject that has been produced by the morality of the elite
class. Circulating between the elite Muslim home and the brothel, Dulārī
becomes a signifier of the limits within which the subaltern class she
represents can exist. ‘Işlāh or
reform falls apart here, giving way to the overwhelming feeling of a national
shame that is felt by the family as they gain hints of Dulārī’s reasons for
fleeing, and by Dulārī, as she goes from one place of sexual control to
another. While Zaheer’s afore-mentioned stories allow for correction, Dulārī points to the utter impossibility
of return. Dulārī can never go back in the way that it was possible for Maulvi
Daud, and neither can she be helped as Akbar could have been; instead, her
figure becomes representative of the Muslim bourgeoisie’s emergence as a class
that defined itself through the degraded existence of one below it, and that
therefore became a class barred from progressiveness to begin with.
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