Modes of Resistance And Articulation of Female Subjectivity: Tavaifs in Nineteenth Century Lucknow (With Special Reference To Umrao Jan Ada)

<h3 data-fontsize="17" data-lineheight="23">Abstract</h3> <p>In certain Indian and English novels in the nineteenth century, namely Mansfield Park , Indira , and Indulekha , women’s subjectivities are articulated within the normative realm of domesticity and conjugality. In a case like that of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, one encounters a feminized self whose selfhood is rooted in the operations of the thinking, deliberative, judgment-making mind, at the cost of repression or even erasure of sexuality. The aim of my paper is to explore female subjectivity as it gets articulated in an unorthodox, extra-mural space ? the kotha or brothel. Here’s a public domain untrammelled by the social mores and moral obligations of domestic life, hence relatively congenial for the birth and growth of woman’s subjectivity. Unlike Fanny, in texts like Chokher Bali and Vanity Fair , one can see the talented woman deploying not only her talents of the mind, but also her sexuality for achieving certain ends; a sexuality which is predicated on its independence from matrimony and motherhood. It is this very clever and crafty deployment of sexuality that one sees in full play in Umrao Jan Ada, where we begin to move away from the domestic realm, away from the idea of monogamous marriage, the subject of inquiry being the life story of a courtesan/tavaif of nineteenth century Lucknow. The unanchored femininity that is seen in figures such as Binodini, and Becky Sharp, in that both are excluded from the domestic realm, the former by virtue of being a widow, and the latter’s case determined largely by class, will here find its crystallization in the figure of Umrao Jan.</p&gt