"Tell…the truth, but tell it slant": Form and fiction in Rusva's Umrao Jan Ada1. (March 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pillai, Sharon
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 51:Number 1(2016:Mar.)
• Page Start: 110
• Page End: 126
• Publication Date: 2016-03
• Subjects: Umrao Jan -- Rusva -- realism and realist novel -- mushaira and ghazal -- rekhti -- rekhta and gendered narrativity -- courtesans of Lucknow -- poetics of indirection -- 1857 -- aesthetic experimentation -- nawabi culture; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989414553241
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva is best remembered today for Umrao Jan Ada, his Urdu novel about a Lucknavi courtesan by the same name, published in 1899. More than a century on, Umrao Jan Ada is praised, on the one hand, for being the first proper novel in Urdu. On the other, the novel is lauded for its accomplished portrayal of Lucknow a few years before and after the watershed events of 1857. Much of the Anglophone critical evaluation of Umrao Jan Ada, however, displays a singular preoccupation with the question of realism. The critical consensus around realism has metamorphosed from a useful framework for parsing Rusva's novel from multiple vantage points into a hardened carapace of convention that in fact obstructs fresh engagements with the text. This essay argues for the need to move beyond the debates around realism. It attempts to ask new questions and seek different narrative possibilities in Umrao Jan Ada . Its principal contention is that despite ostensible evidence to the contrary, Umrao Jan Ada is a consciously contrived text straining after a novel poetics of expression, a poetics of indirection, which given the character and the times makes especial historical and situational sense. The novel also constitutes a significant bid at aesthetic experimentation in the face of prevailing indigenous and colonial modes of narrativity, something for which Rusva is not always given nearly enough credit.