Empowerment to exploitation, the numerous lives of Umrao Jan Ada

On June 26, 2025, a luxurious theatre in Bandra Kurla Complex fell silent as Umrao spoke, this time, from an enormous display. In a glittering occasion that noticed the who’s who of the Hindi movie business attend, Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 movie, Umrao Jaan, was re-released in 4k, restored from a launch print, by the National Film Development Corporation-National Film Archive of India (NFDC-NFAI). To have fun its return to the large display, actor Rekha, who performed Umrao within the movie, singer Asha Bhonsle, who lent her voice to Umrao’s ghazals, and the director spoke concerning the character and the movie, because the viewers 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 youthful crop together with Aalia Bhatt, and Jhanvi Kapoor, listened in rapt consideration. Rekha recited a couple of stanzas from the movie’s ever common ghazals, and Bhonsle sang snatches of a music. The 90-year-old singer mentioned, “When Ali sahib approached me to sing for this movie, I learn the script and have become Umrao Jan.”

Unlike different well-known courtesans of Hindi cinema and literature — in motion pictures reminiscent of Pakeezah and Mughal-e-Azam — Umrao’s story has been revisited repeatedly over the past 125 years, her iconic standing strengthened with every re-telling. And there have been many, albeit with totally different goals: in SM Yusuf’s 1958 movie, Mehendi, Umrao marries her lover, Nawab Sultan, and features respectability; a 1972 movie made by Pakistani director Hasan Tariq, however, kills Umrao off; in 2006, J.P Dutta solid Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as Umrao, solid out by lover, household and pals. There have additionally been theatrical productions and a tv sequence. In 2004, the Centre Pompidou in Paris held an exhibition on Bollywood, and chosen Ali’s movie to be a part of it. The 1981 movie additionally travelled to worldwide movie festivals in Berlin, Moscow, Venice and Locarno.

Ruswa’s novel, written in Urdu, rapidly turned some of the common and a number of editions flooded the market. In it, Umrao talks concerning the mundane — shopping for bangles; dropping her virginity a lot to the chagrin of her brothel madame — in addition to the traumatic: she is kidnapped and bought to a brothel as a baby; displaced by colonial vendetta following the 1857 rebellion in opposition to the English East India firm. We encounter themes of ageing, love, oblivion, and dying all through the novel. We additionally expertise her pleasure and pleasure. Umrao recites couplets and banters with Ruswa and the opposite poets who bow earlier than her superior craft.

The type of the novel definitely helped cement her stature. Its arrival within the subcontinent signalled a modernity that will go on to rework literature in colonial India — the pithy, generally serialised, social commentary that aimed to replicate the world of the reader again to him had discovered nice recognition in England and the West within the nineteenth century. For Ruswa to choose this kind to relate the quotidian story of a courtesan was nothing in need of outstanding. To additional allegorise Umrao’s losses as consultant of the colonial stamping out of a cultural ecosystem of the courtroom, the place literature, arts, music, dance, and poetry thrived below royal patronage, was revolutionary.

The English swiftly crushed the 1857 rebellion, however the Empire’s reprisals had been brutal and long-lasting for the tawaif. As scholar Veena Talwar Oldenburg writes, these ladies “had been within the highest tax bracket, with the biggest particular person incomes of any within the metropolis. The courtesans’ names had been additionally on lists of property: (homes, orchards, manufacturing and retail institutions for meals and luxurious gadgets) confiscated by British officers for his or her confirmed involvement within the siege of Lucknow and the insurrection in opposition to British rule in 1857.” After independence, princely states had been stripped of their energy and requested to affix our newly-formed republic. A decade earlier than Muzaffar Ali made Umrao Jaan, India banned the princes’ privy purses that had been granted to them in return for his or her accession to India.

Though Ruswa’s novel is a chronicle of a dying foretold, within the guide, Umrao Jan survives. The manner of her world stays within the recollections of Awadhi and Lucknowi residents, of their types of talking and sustaining relationships, and love for exchanging couplets.

Ali, whose ancestors had been additionally members of Awadhi royalty, wrote about his impetus to depict the well-known courtesan within the newly launched picture guide, “Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan” edited by Sathya Saran and Meera Ali, and revealed by Mapin which accompanied the re-release of his movie.

“There are individuals past the display who moulded my ideas even earlier than I made them. The rational, historic, humanistic outlook of my father, Raja Syed Sajid Husain of Kotwara, and the compassionate, culturally-oriented lifetime of my mom, Rani Kaniz Hyder— each are mirrors to the timeless sorts that existed in Awadh. Through them, these sorts discovered their approach to the outer world and to the inside world of the delicate, female feudal tradition of Umrao Jaan,” Ali writes.

“I used to be truly coping with a sure sort of delicacy, of place, manners, customs, tradition and it is extremely troublesome to recreate it except you may have lived with it,” Ali mentioned. He recalled recording the novel within the voice of Salma Siddiqui, a member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and an Urdu novelist, and listening to it repeatedly whereas driving all the way down to work, for days on finish. At the time, Ali was an worker of Air India and lived in what was then Bombay. “[Umrao] was in my head on a regular basis. Along with the rain, the ocean, the storm, the sundown, and all the pieces else Bombay,” he mentioned.

Umrao’s stature as icon grew exponentially following the movie, not least due to the star energy of Rekha, who to this date, is related to the character. “The fantasy of Rekha goes into the studying of who they’ve portrayed on display. On social media and thru memes that pop up making random connections, Rekha is rarely not in dialog. The noise round her — because the recluse, the lady who by no means married anybody else as a result of her lover is married — will get pulled into the cultural discourse round Umrao too. Umrao is an icon as a result of Rekha is an icon,” mentioned Prathyush Parasuraman, creator of On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

Umrao additionally turned a major icon for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer group (LGBTQ+), who noticed her as not simply as a logo of an empowered sexuality that operated outdoors the boundaries of respectability, but additionally as a sufferer of the social opprobrium they might establish with. The movie’s songs and Rekha’s efficiency, particularly, had been vastly common in underground homosexual events and within the mujras that they’d costume up for and carry out in privateness of their dwelling rooms. Rainbow Literature Festival director Sharif Rangnekar, who grew up within the Nineties-early 2000s in New Delhi, mentioned, “Two tracks from the movie quietly entered the homosexual get together scene. The entire concept of ‘In aankhon ki masti mein’ was the gaydar and eye contact that was all that many people may fall again on to establish different homosexual males. ‘Dil cheez hain aap meri jaan li jiye’ conveyed the desperation for love, the concept of sacrifice to surrender something for actual love, which felt actual for us. So these two songs and the lifetime of Umrao Jaan turned ours!”

“I used to be a younger homosexual boy with no vocabulary for myself… The world round me had no house for somebody like me. But Umrao Jaan opened a portal. In Rekha’s eyes, I noticed dance in grace. In the character of Umrao, I noticed a girl damaged by destiny and stitched again collectively by artwork, magnificence, poetry and dignity. And, in her, I discovered the primary model of myself that felt entire,” New York-based chef Suvir Saran, who grew up in New Delhi, writes within the guide, “Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan”.

Icons survive if they’ve an afterlife. Umrao Jan’s story invokes a nostalgia for a pre-colonial previous the place arts and music had been a part of the social material, and intercourse work, whereas nonetheless prevalent inside an exploitative context, additionally managed to accord the lady wealth and stature. It stays related in a post-colonial world the place ladies’s work, equal pay, and respectability proceed to canine the cultural discourse on gender. “Every now wants a then,” mentioned Ali, when requested if Umrao will proceed to stay an icon. “Yes, undoubtedly, she’s going to.”