Thursday, December 3, 2009
Umrao Jan and Pre-Colonialism
As the semester progressed, we were taken by our novels further and further from this time, or memory of a time, before colonialism. I wanted to reflect on the ways Umrao Jan served as a sort of living vessel of what the post-colonial era had done away with. I think it's very poetic, that she seems such a tragic figure; although she enjoyed, to an extent, her life as a courtesan, she was taken violently from her family and forced into this life. In her "imprisonment", she learned all the arts of a dying culture, including poetry, which I find is an extremely powerful medium (when used to taste, I should say). I think I fixated on her learning poetry because it reminded me a lot of what I think of when I think of the arts, the great renaissances and times of learning across the globe, and high culture. It also, as I've mention, reminds me of Sufism and spirituality. Umrao Jan's ability to learn and create such poetry imbibed a bit of spirituality in her--to me--that she denied she had before giving up her ways to become a devout Muslim.
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I agree that Umrao may have had a degree of spirituality with her all along throughout the novel She naturally grew into the role of a poet in her profession, and it was obviously important to her because she stuck with it for so many years of her life. For example, she is still reciting poetry for pleasure with Ruswa at the end of the novel, after she is done telling her whole story. It does seem natural then, for her to latch on to a religion to find meaning for her life, because poetry had had the same effect in her life.
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