The Zenana or Women's Quarters
Why has the zenana or women's quarters been a subject of curiosity for writers?
The zenana or women’s quarters have been a subject of curiosity in a number of narratives. When the British colonised India, the space invited intrigue. Emma Roberts, a woman traveller who allegedly came to India in 1828, describes the zenana halls in her poem ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’:
“And there from the Zenana’s halls,
Stealing when eve reveals its stars,
The dark-eyed maid holds festivals,
And listens to the soft sitars,
Hymning those sweet and gentle tunes,
Which young hearts picture in their dreams.”
The exoticising gaze and the romanticising impulse of the Western poet are apparent. The poet’s gaze is empowered in that it is exhaustive and can survey the inner quarters.
In Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), Edward Said describes the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as periods of unparalleled European expansion, which coincided with an advancement in the discursive creation of the ‘Orient’ as the ‘Other’ of the ‘Occident’. This meant a proliferation of a vast body of works that described the ‘Orient’ as “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Said, Introduction, Orientalism). ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’ can be read as an example of such narratives.
In the anti-colonial nationalist discourse in India, on the other hand, the space of the ‘home’, including the zenana, was constructed in opposition to the ‘world’. In ‘The Nationalist Resolution to the Women’s Question’, Partha Chatterjee writes that the dichotomy of ‘home’ — the inner and the spiritual domain — and ‘world’ — the outer and the material domain — was constructed by Indian nationalists to promote the idea that while the West had superiority in the outside world, it had failed to colonise the home, which was the essential cultural marker of the East. Chatterjee writes,
“The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world — and the woman its representative.”
In this discourse, once more, we see the romanticising impulse through which the home — and by extension, the zenana — becomes almost sacred.
Rashid Jahan, an Urdu writer associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association, overturns both these discourses in her short story ‘Behind the Veil’. Jahan unveils some ‘truths’ about life in the zenana.
Her story presents the plight of two women, Mahmudi Begum and Aftab Begum. The women discuss the many drudgeries of domestic life: giving birth to many children, taking care of them, being treated as sex objects by their husbands, living under the threat of the husband’s infidelity and of divorce, and sickness of both the body and the mind.
The story challenges both the romanticised vision of the Western poet and the rhetoric of the nationalist discourse. Mahmudi Begum remarks,
“[I] look like an old woman of seventy, sick every day, hakeems and doctors every day, and giving birth to a child every year. Right, who can be as lucky as me?”
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