Muslim Indian Women Writing in English by Elizabeth Jackson

Author:Elizabeth Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2017-11-09T10:15:21+00:00

Narratives of Wedding Ceremonies

R. K. Kaul and Jasbir Jain observe that “English novels by Indian writers often resort to documentation of manners and mores, largely for the benefit of foreign readers. Ceremonies and rituals connected with marriage are often chosen for detailed, sometimes tedious description.” (2001, 26) Readers of Zeenuth Futehally’s 1951 novel Zohra and even Samina Ali’s 2004 novel Madras on Rainy Days might be tempted to agree with this assessment. Indeed, the wedding ceremony in Zohra, lasting several days, is described in vivid detail, and it is emphasized that Zohra, the exhausted bride, “felt bewildered and deeply unhappy” (51). The bridegroom, too, “found the whole ordeal unpalatable” (55). As if to justify such close and sustained attention to the spectacle and proceedings of the ceremony, the third-person narrator tells us that: “Marriages and births hold a fascination for all women; but to those in purdah, they are the pivots around which their entire lives revolve” (106).

Attia Hosain echoes this idea in her Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), but interestingly, Laila the narrator does not describe her own wedding at all. Referring briefly to her cousin Zahra’s marriage ceremony, she simply explains that “spread over many days of feasting, music and dancing… [it] coloured and brightened the secluded life of the community” (112). Here the narrative emphasis is on the bride as a spectacle:←84 | 85→

Anointed with oil and attar, dressed in scarlet and covered with jewels, her hair gold-dusted, the palms and soles of her feet henna’d, her face covered with a cascade of flowers and a veil of fine gold threads, Zahra was carried into the room where the women and girls waited impatiently to see the bride.

I felt curiously detached towards that glittering, scented bundle, no longer Zahra but the symbol of others’ desires. (114)

In “The Street of the Moon” from the Phoenix Fled collection (1953), Hosain portrays a more modest wedding between a servant girl and a cook. But here too the descriptions of the colours, clothing, and jewellery emphasize the position of the young bride as a limp vehicle for lavish ornamentation (39). In this story the function of the wedding ceremony and gifts as forms of bribery for the bride in a sexual bargain is made disturbingly explicit. After the wedding Hasina enjoyed for several days “her luxury of idleness, and her possessions. She accepted with fatalism the unpleasant price she paid with her unwilling body, but the days were sufficiently long to prepare her for the nights and to forget them” (41–42).

The two later novels, Tara Lane (1993) by Shama Futehally and Madras on Rainy Days (2004) by Samina Ali, contrast with each other not only in the attitudes of the protagonists toward their arranged marriages, but also in the nature of the wedding ceremonies themselves. A Muslim wedding is known as a “nikah” in Urdu, and contemporary nikah practices vary considerably throughout the world and, to some extent, even within India itself, because many wedding customs are a matter of culture and not of Islam (Maqsood 2009).

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