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Srinagar, March 11 -- What was a free floating metaphor was now placed in time and space; they had beckoned the classical beloved from the metaphysical balcony where she stood with her face lit up with an afterglow of wine in her transgender glory; Chehra farogh-i-mye se gulistaan kiye hue (Ghalib).
These were the times when Iqbal still dominated the literary scene. The woman in Iqbal's poetry doesn't appear as a beloved but mostly in the image of the mother who, despite her inability to deliver Plato's dialogues, delivers Plato himself. Here the woman remains a procreative womb, the ancient fertility goddess with a small head.
Akbar Illahabadi, another prominent poet, mocked women going around without hijab: Poochha kisi ne aap ka purdah kidhar gaya / Hans kar kaha ke aql pe mardon ki parr gaya (when asked where the veil has disappeared / they laughed and said it fell on the sanity of men). At the same time Deputy Nazir Ahmad, a benevolent patriarch, was giving helping tips to ashrafiya women who, with Bahishti Zevar under their pillows, were hoping for a good match.
Among these trends, Ruswa's novel Uao Jan Ada was a departure from the mirthless and de-sexed baji-culture of Deputy Nazir; it was a delicious sneak into the courtesan culture. Modelled on the courtesans of Lucknow, during the last days of the Muslim empire, Umaro was a biography of a dera dar tawaif gifted in the arts of music, dance and poetry. By embodying art itself she reincarnated the cultural metaphor of the classical beloved, the heroine of Urdu poetry.
If Umaro Jan Ada was an eroding diva of the Muslim empire, the post industrial assertion of the female in social politics and literature significantly appeared in the short stories of Ismat Chughtai and Manto, and in the poetry of Rashed and Miraji. In these circumstances the classical beloved, a symbol of nishat, the Eros, was threatened by the new social change. But though a dying flame of the empire's glory, her shadow still hovered over the poets.
The progressives tried to exorcise the ghost of the past by stripping her of her androgyny and turning her 'disinterested pleasure' into something useful. Majaz in his poem "Aik nojawaan kahtoon se,"...