Locating the Tawa'if Courtesan-Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation.

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...

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Publicado en:Journal of Religion & Popular Culture Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 138 - 154
Autor principal: Thobani, Sitara
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: University of California Press Fall2021
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Locating the Tawa'if Courtesan-Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation.
      aug:
        au: Thobani, Sitara
        affil: Michigan State University — Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan, United States
      su:
        Narration in motion pictures
        Indian films
        Muslim identity
        Religions
        Dance in motion pictures, television, etc.
        Mosques
        India
      sug:
        subj:
          India
          Narration in motion pictures
          Indian films
          Muslim identity
          Religions
          Dance in motion pictures, television, etc.
          Mosques
      keyword:
        Hindi/Urdu cinema
        nautch
        religious nationalism
        tawa'if
      ab: 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.
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    language: English
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