I couldn’t read Umrao Jan Ada without hearing echoes of Foucault’s “Lives of Infamous Men.” It's a preface for his never-completed “anthology of existences” (157), which were supposed to be compiled from an archive of medieval French administrative records of everyday criminals. He and Mirza Ruswa, I think, struggled with versions of the same struggle, just inscribed by their different geographies, moments, and histories.
Foucault introduces his project with some thoughts on a rupture in the logic of Western European systems of power. At some point in modern European history, as the monarchies consolidated their power more thoroughly, they came to concern themselves with the everyday disorders of the infamous. That is, everyday people. “This scandalous monk, this beaten woman, this inveterate and furious drunkard, this quarrelsome merchant” (163). This involved, of course, recording it. Before, state power looked to chronicle “the actions of great men… only blood, birth, and exploit gave a right to history.” In this moment, it came to behave as though “in the everyday run of things, [there was] something like a secret to raise, that the inessential might be, in a certain way, important… the blank gaze power came to rest on these miniscule commotions” (169). The state could not ascertain this on its own. It required the collaboration of infamous lives to report these commotions to the state. But these commotions were:
1) in the vernacular oral language of infamous life and
2) of huge volume.
This necessitated the creation of an intermediary to translate the millions of grievances of infamous lives into the language of power: that intermediary was the administrative state. That language of power was a new one: no longer the flowery language of the chronicle, but a standardized formal language of the law and records.
Modern literature was also born at this moment. It, like the new administrative state, sought to translate infamous life into a permanent record. It, too, preserves traces of life “destined to pass beneath any discourse and disappear without ever having been told” through their “brief, incisive, often enigmatic… point of their instantaneous contact with power” (161). In the case of the life of Umrao Jan, that brief moment of contact with power was with Mirza Ruswa Sahib. Of course, this poses an ethical problem for those who care about literature. What are the ethical consequences that the act of translation that constitutes literature follows the same paradigm as a process of the administrative state?
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In favor of the translation of infamous life and against the chronicler, Mirza Sahib wrote (as highlighted by his translator, Khushwant Singh):
The most paying and interesting subject of study in this world is what happens to human beings; not only their external behaviour but also their inner feelings and thoughts. These can be depicted through a novel, provided an effort is made to present the picture truthfully… In our own circle of friends and relatives there are bound to be many whose experiences are truly strange and fascinating. The trouble is that we do not pay heed to them because we cannot spare time from poring over the tomes of the histories of Alexander the Great, Mahmud of Ghazni, Henry VIII, Queen Anne, Napoleon Bonaparte etc. (8)
Like Foucault, generations and continents away, Mirza Sahib struggles with the ethics of what he is doing. The novel’s opening line is his narrator (his portrayal of Umrao Jan) asking him: “Mirza Ruswa, why do you provoke me and try to wheedle out of me the facts of my life? What interest can you possibly have in the life-story of a woman like me?” (17). The novel opens with an author’s portrayal of how this infamous life perceives his act of translation. She is confused.
Mirza Ruswa Sahib’s desire to represent infamous life makes for a wonderfully organic read. It is easy to get lost in his rendition of Umrao Jan’s conversational prose, who reminisces on her life in first person. Mirza Sahib indulges in some variation in form, though, often switching into dialogue sequences that feel more deeply embedded in the moment of the story being told. I call this an indulgence because these sequences feel like inventions of the written form; they are the inventions of an author translating from an oral register to a written one. The narrator’s oscillation in temporality from the nostalgic “I still wonder…” (30) to the immediacy of dramatic dialogue make for a great read, though.
But these are not the only two temporalities: what struck me most (especially given the time when it was written!) was that Umrao Jan would switch to the second person, directly addressing Mirza Sahib. In my notes, I positioned this switch as “breaking the fourth wall.” Now though, I disagree with this reading: Mirza Sahib is not breaking the fourth wall because the moment of his conversation with Umrao Jan is within the dramatic frame of the novel. When Umrao Jan’s character and Mirza Sahib’s character debate the morality of a story she has just told, this becomes abundantly clear. Of course, she is a fictive narrator (as all narrators must be), but he is a character, too. She is the one speaking in the first person, he is referred to in the third person (151-152). The novel includes a meta-level: the author renders himself, his subject, and their dynamics in the process of creating the novel.
One of my favorite exchanges between the two is when they have a little jest by exchanging rhyming couplets. Mirza Ruswa Sahib's self-rendition says: “I went on a pilgrimage to Kaaba but it was in vain / My sinful feet found the path of human love again.” His Umrao Jan retorts: “I turned my back on Kaaba with much disdain / Gave up my faith and took the path of human love again” (46). He never directly challenges this retort. Mirza Ruswa Sahib portrays his past self as coming up with a couplet in which the narrator ruefully forsakes God and feels heavy with sin in their pursuit of human love. But he lets his Umrao Jan have the final word: for her, faith is unworthy; faith is an object of disdain. Her choice to take the path of human love is unapologetic. The fact that she has the final word on this matter — and that the book exists in the form it does, which is by no means an unflattering portrait of Umrao Jan as a woman — makes it seem Mirza Ruswa Sahib is dramatically representing a moment in which Umrao Jan teaches him about love. The author, in a position of power, is educated about love by an infamous life.
An added twist is that the register in which this happens is in a highly formalized, literary form: the ghazal rhyming couplet. Though the relationship between Mirza Ruswa Sahib and Umrao Jan is definitely one in which he is on the side of power (as the translator of infamous life into literature), her claim to older Hindustani traditions complicates this dynamic.
Right after this, his Umrao Jan offers the couplet: “This I hold against the fair daughter of wine / Only her memory cometh, when it’s for her I pine” (48). She recites these lines from Mirza Sahib’s perspective. On an initial reading, the desire that Umrao Jan points to feels sexual or lusting. I don’t necessarily dispute that, but there is much more going on here. Mirza Ruswa Sahib goes out of his way to portray the infamous life looking at his authorly project and making fun of the sexuality (or at least desire) embedded in it. The line “Only her memory cometh, when it’s for her I pine” resonates in itself: at the end of the day, the goal of the author is to capture infamous life itself, is to capture her, but only her memory cometh. Here, the infamous life points out the ultimate irony of the author’s project: he wants to portray her in a register deeper than memory alone, but he can never really transcend the register of her memory. He is always bound to it in his writing. What I love about his work, though, is that his writing is so active in this struggle and so unafraid to confront it.
But in the end, Mirza Sahib has his Umrao Jan resolve his ongoing struggle with the ethics of translating infamous life. She tells him:
Mirza Sahib, when I saw your manuscript on my life I was so angry that I wanted to tear it up into tiny bits and throw it away… Then without really meaning to, I began to read it. When I had finished the first page, I turned it over and read another few lines of the second. By then I got so absorbed in reading about my own doings that I wanted to go on and on. I had never enjoyed reading other stories as much because I could never forget that they were fabrications of the mind without any truth or substance. All the incidents that you have penned in my biography did, in fact, come to pass. And they passed before my eyes exactly as they had taken place. (176-177)
Though it begins with anger, the final reaction that infamous life has with its translation into a literary form is fascination. The book ends with an endorsement of the ethics of its own project. It has the character that represents its subject condone it.
Perhaps this is what an author must think to do their work.