Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan-Dancer
Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12872259 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thobani (0000-0002-8697-2753, Michigan United, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 138-153 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-24 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1703-289X • E-ISSN: 1703-289X |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.3138/jrpc.2020-0014 |
| OpenAlex | W3201871595 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
The development of the Hindi/Urdu cinema is intimately connected to the history of artistic performance in India in two important ways. Not only did hereditary music and dance practitioners play key roles in building this cinema, representations of these performers and their practices have been, and continue to be, the subject of Indian film narratives, genres, and tropes. I begin with this history in order to explore the Muslim religio-cultural and artistic inheritance that informs Hindi/Urdu cinema, as well as examine how this heritage has been incorporated into the cinematic narratives that help construct distinct gendered, religious, and national identities. My specific focus is on the figure of the tawa’if dancer, often equated with North Indian culture and nautch dance performance. Analyzing the ways in which traces of the tawa’if appear in two recent films, Dedh Ishqiya and Begum Jaan, I show how this figure is placed in a larger representational regime that sustains nationalist formations of contemporary Indian identity. As I demonstrate, even in the most blatant attempts to define the Indian nation as “Hindu,” the “Muslimness” of the tawa’if—and by extension the cinema she informed in ways both real and representational—is far from relinquished
Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Hindi · Hinduism · Linguistics · Literature · Movie theater · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Urdu · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |