Chaste Bodies, Chaste Canon: Nationalist Discourse and the Female Performing Body in Munshi Premchand’s Sevasadan

Abstract

Through a close reading of Munshi Premchand’s 1917 novel Sevasadan, the essay attempts to examine how constructions of the female performing body in early 20th century Indian fiction were shaped by the discourses of womanly chastity, domesticity and piety. The essay proposes to discuss how the Hindi literary tradition, that came of age in the early decades of the 20th century, and whose evolution paralleled the genesis of a newly constituted national, autonomous cultural order, accommodated the female performing body within its narrative framework. As the yardstick of “normative” womanhood embodied in the figure of the chaste Hindu wife crucially informed the constructions of femininity around this time, women performers like the tawaifs came to be derided in public debates and popular imagination as embodiments of moral decline. The central dilemma of the nationalist literary imagination, as reflected in the novel’s narrative design, is to resolve the many ambiguities that emerge from the delineation of the non-monogamous, unconventional sexual practices of the courtesan in the chaste idiom of Hindi. The resolution of this tension is worked out through certain narrative templates whereby the courtesan experiences a series of “shifts” – topographical, ideological, and cultural – which position her outside the envisioned “respectable” national order followed by her reconfiguration in a rhetoric of domesticity and piety that enables her assimilation into the nation-space as well as into the national literary canon. Through an interdisciplinary approach which looks at the intersections between gender, sexuality, nation and performance in the Indian colonial context, the essay intends to establish how the claims for a chaste literary canon were premised upon the erasure of the courtesan’s sexual burden and her embodiment of the standards of womanly chastity.