2-09-16 Pakeezah

Pakeezah is a rather dramatic film that tells a story about a young woman born into the life of a courtesan from a young age despite being the daughter of a wealthy nobleman, Shabbudin, and a courtesan, Nargis whose relationship was forsaken by Shabbudin's father thus compelling Nargis to slowly kill herself alone in a graveyard. The rest of the story follows the life of their daughter, now young woman, Sahibjan and her life within the kotha or brothel. Sahibjan represents an archetypal role to that of the courtesan in distress that can soon escape the confines of the kotha in which she lives and works at the aid of Salim and also his and technically her familial ties to Shabbudin. Despite what Veena Talwar Oldenburg says in her essay “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow.” the reputable courtesans being the “influential female elite” they were, they were still essentially property rather than employees as the birdcage given to Sahibjan symbolizes and also what the scene where Sahibjan is returned to the palace after crashing on the houseboat insinuates as her owners go searching for her not necessarily out of fear for her safety but fear for their loss in a trained and sought after financial prospect.

These courtesans are largely still trapped under the thumb of the patriarchy but the very existence of the kotha run solely by women and the presumable amount of the wealth they sustain in this field of work shows the power that these women have that combats the traditional views of women as being subservient That said, examples like these are repeatedly contested or qualified by patriarchal figures, showing how simplistic and irreverent the men are towards women in the film.

The element of these women's lives that speaks the loudest to the impinging growth of female presence to become a steadfast act against the waves of a normative patriarchal society is that these women in the koth have reached a level of notoriety and status as their own business owners, exercising their entrepreneurial spirits. The problem with this victory is that it can only be made by objectifying women further and also by perpetuating roles of dominance between men and women as men are the ones keeping these women in business because they are selling themselves. This is problematic for feminist struggles toward independence and equality to men as they are still set back in a place with limited power. In the very beginning of the film, Shabbudin's father denounces Nargis, a courtesan of high caliber simply because of her job title. Her death is then a literal representation of the patriarchy's squelching of this feminine transgressivity in society.

Oldenburg states that these women “celebrate womanhood in the privacy of their apartments by resisting and inverting the rules of gender of the larger society of which they are part” and this is a genuine resistance to patriarchal values but this traditional patriarchy demands such control over women that the only way in which women can express themselves as they see fit and not as the normative societal values mandate is to do so within their own microcosm of women.

Again, within this microcosm Oldenburg suggests in her essay, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow,” “female sexuality has the chance of being more fairly and fearlessly constructed by women.”

A strong critique against the traditional patriarchy is also the character Salim as well and the existence of color symbolism. Salim is seen numerous times in mostly colorful clothing or the black that we seem him initially in the train car. Conversely, the vast majority of male oppressors or people that are seen shouting “whore” to Sahibjan towards the end of the movie, wear white clothes to symbolize their “purity” ironically. The only time that Salim is seen wearing all or mostly white clothing is when he is with Sahibjan and simultaneously Sahibjan is then also seen wearing white rather than her usual colorful and embroidered garb. This is a critique against men as they traditionally view themselves as being pure and ultimately the ideal sex, whereas the male protagonist Salim, one of the few men with any redeeming qualities, wears these many colors from time to time and courts Sahibjan. His existence in this regard is a critique of traditional patriarchy.

The last two scenes that show this critique begins where Salim brings Sahibjan atop a large plateau to get married and where Sahibjan can run away from her complicated yet oppressive life within the koth to be viewed as an object for sexual entertainment. Sahibjan panics and runs away from the marriage back to the koth where she at first expresses her acceptance of her position but performs one last miraculous dance to purify herself because she knows that Salim can't do that for her just through marriage. She must save herself in this way. Wearing all white, Sahibjan dances over broken glass, her feet bleeding. This scene shows, as professor Ghosh mentions in her blogpost, that “her feet are cleansed if you will by her own blood that replaces the alta.”

By the end of the film, we're then left with a woman free from this objectifying and oppressive profession, again wearing white, standing along side a pillar looking outward on her old home with the narrator referring to her, saying “only then comes the one, truly worthy of praise” one last testament against the looming influence of patriarchy as we hear that Sahibjan, a woman, is the only one worthy of any praise.