Empowerment to exploitation, the many lives of Umrao Jan Ada

THe domain number one met Umrao Jan ( triticum spelta Jaan sometimes) Ada eavesdropping on an insinuate assemblage of poets. Enraptured by a particularly well-crafted couplet, she praises it and reveals herself to the group. Instantly, they invite her to join them, which she gracefully does. Umrao Jan, though not the first strongly etched female character in the late 19th century — Urdu literature at the time was influenced by reformist zeal that made a case for women to come out of the purdah and receive an education — was certainly unlike any other tawaif (courtesan) that the reader would have come across. The eponymously titled novel that came out in 1899, a little more than four decades into colonial rule under the British crown, told the story of an older, reflective, erudite and accomplished woman. Some believe it to be the first modern Indian novel. The author, Mirza Mohammed Hadi ‘Ruswa’ introduced her as the novel’s second first-person narrator, and muted his voice when Umrao spoke.On June 26, 2025, a plush theatre in Bandra Kurla Complex fell silent as Umrao spoke, this time, from a big screen. In a glittering event that saw the who’s who of the Hindi film industry attend, Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 film, Umrao Jaan, was re-released in 4k, restored from a release print, by the National Film Development Corporation-National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI). To celebrate its return to the big screen, actor Rekha, who played Umrao in the film, singer Asha Bhonsle, who lent her voice to Umrao’s ghazals, and the director spoke about the character and the film, as the audience comprising the likes of producers Anandji Virji Shah (one half of the duo Kalyanji Anandji), SK Jain, Ketan Mehta, actors Hema Malini, Raj Babbar, Aamir Khan, Tabu, and the younger crop including Aalia Bhatt, and Jhanvi Kapoor, listened in rapt attention. Rekha recited a few stanzas from the film’s ever popular ghazals, and Bhonsle sang snatches of a song. The 90-year-old singer said, “When Ali sahib approached me to sing for this film, I read the script and became Umrao Jan.”Unlike other famous courtesans of Hindi cinema and literature — in movies such as Pakeezah and Mughal-e-Azam — Umrao’s story has been revisited time and again over the last 125 years, her iconic status reinforced with each re-telling. And there have been many, albeit with different aims: in SM Yusuf’s 1958 film, Mehendi, Umrao marries her lover, Nawab Sultan, and gains respectability; a 1972 film made by Pakistani director Hasan Tariq, on the other hand, kills Umrao off; in 2006, J.P Dutta cast Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Umrao, cast out by lover, family and friends. There have also been theatrical productions and a television series. In 2004, the Centre Pompidou in Paris held an exhibition on Bollywood, and selected Ali’s film to be part of it. The 1981 film also travelled to international film festivals in Berlin, Moscow, Venice and Locarno.Ruswa’s novel, written in Urdu, quickly became one of the most popular and multiple editions flooded the market. In it, Umrao talks about the mundane — buying bangles; losing her virginity much to the chagrin of her brothel madame — as well as the traumatic: she is kidnapped and sold to a brothel as a child; displaced by colonial vendetta following the 1857 uprising against the English East India company. We encounter themes of ageing, love, oblivion, and death throughout the novel. We also experience her joy and pleasure. Umrao recites couplets and banters with Ruswa and the other poets who bow before her superior craft.The form of the novel certainly helped cement her stature. Its arrival in the subcontinent signalled a modernity that would go on to transform literature in colonial India — the pithy, sometimes serialised, social commentary that aimed to reflect the world of the reader back to him had found great popularity in England and the West in the 19th century. For Ruswa to pick this form to narrate the quotidian story of a courtesan was nothing short of remarkable. To further allegorise Umrao’s losses as representative of the colonial stamping out of a cultural ecosystem of the court, where literature, arts, music, dance, and poetry thrived under royal patronage, was revolutionary.The English swiftly crushed the 1857 uprising, but the Empire’s reprisals were brutal and long-lasting for the tawaif. As scholar Veena Talwar Oldenburg writes, these women “were in the highest tax bracket, with the largest individual incomes of any in the city. The courtesans’ names were also on lists of property: (houses, orchards, manufacturing and retail establishments for food and luxury items) confiscated by British officials for their proven involvement in the siege of Lucknow and the rebellion against British rule in 1857.” After independence, princely states were stripped of their power and asked to join our newly-formed republic. A decade before Muzaffar Ali made Umrao Jaan, India banned the princes’ privy purses that were granted to them in return for their accession to India.Though Ruswa’s novel is a chronicle of a death foretold, in the book, Umrao Jan survives. The way of her world remains in the memories of Awadhi and Lucknowi residents, in their styles of speaking and maintaining relationships, and love for exchanging couplets.Ali, whose ancestors were also members of Awadhi royalty, wrote about his impetus to depict the famous courtesan in the newly released photo book, “Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan” edited by Sathya Saran and Meera Ali, and published by Mapin which accompanied the re-release of his film.“There are people beyond the screen who moulded my thoughts even before I made them. The rational, historical, humanistic outlook of my father, Raja Syed Sajid Husain of Kotwara, and the compassionate, culturally-oriented life of my mother, Rani Kaniz Hyder— both are mirrors to the timeless types that existed in Awadh. Through them, these types found their way to the outer world and to the inner world of the sensitive, feminine feudal culture of Umrao Jaan,” Ali writes.“I was actually dealing with a certain kind of delicacy, of place, manners, customs, culture and it is very difficult to recreate it unless you have lived with it,” Ali said. He recalled recording the novel in the voice of Salma Siddiqui, a member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and an Urdu novelist, and hearing it repeatedly while driving down to work, for days on end. At the time, Ali was an employee of Air India and lived in what was then Bombay. “[Umrao] was in my head all the time. Along with the rain, the sea, the storm, the sunset, and everything else Bombay,” he said.Umrao’s stature as icon grew exponentially following the film, not least because of the star power of Rekha, who to this date, is associated with the character. “The myth of Rekha goes into the reading of who they’ve portrayed on screen. On social media and through memes that pop up making random connections, Rekha is never not in conversation. The noise around her — as the recluse, the woman who never married anyone else because her lover is married — gets pulled into the cultural discourse around Umrao too. Umrao is an icon because Rekha is an icon,” said Prathyush Parasuraman, author of On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali.Umrao also became a significant icon for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer community (LGBTQ+), who saw her as not just as a symbol of an empowered sexuality that operated outside the boundaries of respectability, but also as a victim of the social opprobrium they could identify with. The film’s songs and Rekha’s performance, in particular, were hugely popular in underground gay parties and in the mujras that they would dress up for and perform in privacy of their living rooms. Rainbow Literature Festival director Sharif Rangnekar, who grew up in the 1990s-early 2000s in New Delhi, said, “Two tracks from the film quietly entered the gay party scene. The whole idea of ‘In aankhon ki masti mein’ was the gaydar and eye contact that was all that many of us could fall back on to identify other gay men. ‘Dil cheez hain aap meri jaan li jiye’ conveyed the desperation for love, the idea of sacrifice to give up anything for real love, which felt real for us. So those two songs and the life of Umrao Jaan became ours!”“I was a young gay boy with no vocabulary for myself… The world around me had no space for someone like me. But Umrao Jaan opened a portal. In Rekha’s eyes, I saw dance in grace. In the character of Umrao, I saw a woman broken by fate and stitched back together by art, beauty, poetry and dignity. And, in her, I found the first version of myself that felt whole,” New York-based chef Suvir Saran, who grew up in New Delhi, writes in the book, “Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan”.Icons survive if they have an afterlife. Umrao Jan’s story invokes a nostalgia for a pre-colonial past where arts and music were part of the social fabric, and sex work, while still prevalent within an exploitative context, also managed to accord the woman wealth and stature. It remains relevant in a post-colonial world where women’s work, equal pay, and respectability continue to dog the cultural discourse on gender. “Every now needs a then,” said Ali, when asked if Umrao will continue to remain an icon. “Yes, without a doubt, she will.”