Gender and the First Sound Films in 1930s Bombay
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/7v1sd-ac283
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear is often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
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The coming of sound in Bombay cinema in the 1930s dovetailed with discussions concerning men and women’s roles in modern Indian society and filmmakers’ efforts to establish the cinema as a respectable medium that was integral to Indian nationalist aspirations. With sound now essential to a film’s diegesis, film producers adjusted narrative strategies and how they aurally and visually presented a character as male or female, such as through voice, language/accent, and music. Christine Ehrick reminds us, gender is “represented, contested, and reinforced through the aural.” What did the addition of sound to cinema mean for presenting fe/male bodies and voices on screen? Scholars such as Laura Mulvey have famously demonstrated how film visual editing can lead to women’s objectification in cinema. The sounds and narrative of Dokhtar-e Lor “The Lor Girl” (1933)—the first Persian-language sound film—extend Mulvey’s argument by letting us hear the early sound film’s role in gendering bodies within the wider socio-political context of colonial modernity, as well as the impact the film would have on later Indian and Iranian cinematic conventions.
Although usually featured in histories of Iranian cinema, The Lor Girl was made in Bombay in collaboration between Iranian scholar and expatriate, Abdolhossein Sepanta, and Ardeshir Irani, film producer and owner of the Imperial Film Company. Irani, who is known as the father of the first Indian talkie and Urdu-language film Alam Ara, was also a prominent member of the Bombay Parsis. Irani sought to establish his Imperial Film Company as a global film center and produced a number of the first talkie films in several other languages in India. Sepanta and Irani decided to collaborate on a Persian-language film for Parsi audiences in Bombay and for distribution in Iran. India was already establishing itself as a major global film power while Iran had not yet invested in the technology necessary to make a sound film.
The film’s first scene opens with a close up shot of Golnar’s gyrating hips and the sounds of a reed flute, oud, tabla, and male singing voices. The camera zooms out, and we see that Golnar is shaking a tambourine and performing for an audience of mostly male patrons in the café. The audience members – as indicated by their clothing – include local men of Lor and Arab backgrounds, which remind us of the café’s location near Iran’s border with modern day Iraq.. The men, as well as an ensemble of male musicians, sit in large circle around Golnar. As Golnar dances and the ensemble plays, we hear the audience clapping and yelling “very good, very good!” in encouragement. Through their jeers and taunts, the film sonically casts the men in the audience as vulgar, and its visual construction of Arabs dovetail with Orientalist aesthetics that Rosie Thomas argues were found in contemporaneous Hollywood, European, and Bombay cinemas. The sonic characteristics of these men that we hear throughout the film also reinforce the one-dimensional Orientalist, racist visual codes; the Arab sheikh’s high-pitched, cackling voice sounds simultaneously evil and weak, while the bandits’ voices cast them as brutish and uneducated.
When the song ends, Golnar skips around the circle holding out a basket to collect tips from the audience members who oblige her to flirt with them before they hand her money. After a short private conversation between Ramazan and the Arab sheikh in which both men cackle over the sheikh’s plan to visit Golnar in her room at night, the next scene shows another dancing sequence similar to the first – although this time Golnar dances for a smaller group of men in Ramazan’s lair. In both dance scenes, the sonic landscape is simultaneously seductive and threatening, elements reinforced by Golnar’s vulnerable yet enticing positioning and the audience’s leering, eager stares and shouts. The film casts men as voyeuristic listeners and consumers of sound, and through Golnar’s dancing – a role considered and reinforced by the film as disreputable – sound produces Golnar as object for the male listeners’ pleasure. While other contemporaneous Bombay films featured more spectacular song and dance sequences, Hamid Naficy notes that this scene in The Lor Girl still hints at the cabaret and café sequences which later emerged in Indian and Iranian commercial cinemas. This, is turn, demonstrates how cinematic codes – informed by discourses on gender and nation – move and are shared transnationally through co-production and exchange.
Now that cinema included both sound and images, filmmakers drew on elements of music, dancing, and other aspects of existing local performance traditions, such as Parsi theater. Representations of gender in Parsi theater were characterized by flexibility; Kathryn Hansen notes that due to concerns about female actors performing for male audiences and in public in general, female characters were often played by men. The acceptance of cross-dressing – not only in terms of body, but also voice – allowed for fluidity in terms of how femininity and masculinity were visually and aurally represented. Yet sound cinema did not allow the same flexibility in terms of gender performance due to aesthetic concerns, as well as sound cinema’s intersection with national and modernist discourses. While women’s voices on radio and records became increasingly commonplace and accepted in Bombay in the 1930s, the audiovisual experience that the sound film provided presented a challenge. Cinema was still not widely regarded as a “respectable” medium, and many of Indian cinema’s early actresses came from what were considered questionable backgrounds.
The trajectory of Golnar and Jafar’s characters encapsulates this tension between gender identities and modernity. Jafar wears a military uniform and mustache associated with the “pre-modern” Qajars. Throughout most of the film while in Iran, Golnar wears long braids and a long dress, clothing that indicates that Golnar hails from the “chaotic” Lorestan province, and that mark her as traditional and backwards in the context of colonial modernity.
Although Jafar rescues Golnar initially, the film ultimately casts Golnar as more capable of outsmarting the bandits. Golnar saves Jafar from the bandits several times throughout the film, moments that cast her as strong and brave similar to the virangana (warrior woman) trope that was widely circulated and popular in early 20th century Indian popular culture which Rosie Thomas notes in Bombay Before Bollywood “implied gender ambivalence and multiple modes of femininity” (111).
Golnar’s high-pitched voice and regional Kermani accent associate her with the countryside – especially in contrast to Jafar’s sophisticated, cultured Persian. But her voice’s firm and confident presence resonates across the soundtrack. In the scenes in which she searches for and saves Jafar, she calls his name repeatedly, sonic moments that emphasize her role as Jafar’s rescuer. To negotiate with and escape from the bandits in other scenes, Golnar uses what seems to be her familiarity with the bandit and countryside way of life, as well as her voice; she bravely yells at the bandits and Ramazan’s henchmen while in captivity. At one point, pretending to seem frightened and intimidated by her captors through fake tears and whimpers, Golnar manages to use bandit’s whip against him and steal his horse. Golnar escapes captivity another time when she uses her brazen and coy voice and speaking style to trick Qoli Khan into letting her leave the cave to supposedly find and help capture Jafar.
Yet Golnar and Jafar experience significant transformations by the end of the film and upon their arrival in Bombay. Happy piano music plays on the soundtrack as the film shows us buildings and monuments of modern Bombay. Afterwards, intertitles inform us of the spectacular changes that have taken place in Iran while Jafar and Golnar have been in Bombay now that a new shah has come to power. In the next scene, we are in the couple’s grand living room of their house in Bombay; a servant cleans their grand staircase while we hear and see Golnar at the piano. Jafar enters the room and notes how well she has learned to play. While initially positioned similar to the virangana, Golnar now wears a European-style dress and short haircut. In Bombay Cinema: an Archive of the City, Ranjani Mazumdar discusses how in emerging Indian nationalism, “Victorian ideology entered into a comfortable alliance with Indian myths to reinvent the “virtues” and “purity” of the Indian woman,” casting her as associated with the bourgeois domestic space of the home, and interested in European-associated pursuits such as the piano (82).
Meanwhile, Jafar, who appeared inept at his role as soldier and potentially effeminate, now is clean-shaven and wearing a Pahlavi hat and suit. Golnar’s near silence in this scene and attentive listening contrasts dramatically with the presence of her voice in the previous scenes when she argued and negotiated with the bandits, sang solos, confidently flirted with Jafar and talked with him about the differences between notions of love in the modern city and the countryside. Now, nearly silent in terms of her voice, but providing musical accompaniment to Jafar’s nationalistic song through the piano, Golnar demonstrates the more limited essentialized femininity of the new, modern, middle-class woman, and one characterized by its association with culture. Later, reading the newspaper together, Jafar suggests that they return to Iran now that it has become modern like Bombay. Golnar quietly listens to Jafar, and assents with his desire to return.
The Lor Girl’s importance in Iranian cinema histories – and its near absence historiography of cinema in India – is reflective of how national cinema frameworks limit how we understand the early sounds of Iranian and Indian cinemas. The film was produced at a time when national cinema was not yet articulated with a specific language and when transnational elements played a key role in film production. In addition to its role in sonically gendering bodies, The Lor Girl demonstrates the sound film’s role in participating in the association of language and nation.
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Featured Image: The Lor Girl (1933) Film Poster
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Claire Cooley is a PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests center on overlapping Middle East and South Asia film histories. Claire’s dissertation project traces connections between Egyptian, Iranian, and Indian cinemas with a focus on the 1930s-1960s, and uses sound as a framework to capture the dynamics of cinematic circulations across this contiguous region. In 2010, she received her BA from Tufts University, and from 2010-2013 she lived in Cairo, Egypt where she pursued a project translating, mapping, and blogging about graffiti during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Claire also teaches Persian and Arabic.
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Hearing “Media-Capitalism” in Egypt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/746jq-hqk39
As I began researching my first book Ordinary Egyptians, a study of Egyptian culture from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, sounds and early sound media were the last thing on my mind. However, When I dug more deeply into the historical sources, I realized the importance of music and the comedic theater in the urban culture of turn of the century Egypt. This made me expand the scope of my research to incorporate the vernacular culture of Egypt as an entire media-system, which as I showed in my book, was instrumental in constructing a modern Egyptian national identity. Music, songs, plays, chants, speeches, conversations and chatter, were very influential in forming an Egyptian national culture at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in a society with low literacy rates. By incorporating performance and sound media–especially the rising record industry–my book strives to expand the historical study of this period beyond just the visual and the printed to include sound, and aural/oral expressions of culture.
Ordinary Egyptians also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. It introduces the concept of “media-capitalism,” which expands the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond just print and silent reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media. By integrating these new media, especially the burgeoning record industry, my book attempts to make room for both the “ear” and the “eye”—for the aural and oral alongside the visual—and in the process provides a more comprehensive explanation for how individuals and communities digest and embody cultural information. As this excerpt explains, cultural productions, in any form, are not socially relevant unless they are communally and socially activated; they must be discussed, breathed, and animated in the routine of everyday life.
The following is an excerpt from Ordinary Egyptians, with thanks to Stanford University Press. Notes have been included in the text to conform to Sounding Out!‘s style sheet.
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Mundane Nationalism
Egypt’s new mass media reflected on relevant everyday political, economic, and cultural concerns, and amplified them on the national stage in a comprehensible, locally pertinent and entertaining form. The repeated themes of many of these media included: bemoaning the lack of economic opportunities for native Egyptians, portraying the economic exploitation of Egyptians by foreigners, warning of perceived declines in national “morality,” satirizing and at times insulting British and native officials, and rousing patriotism and a sense of collective national solidarity.
However, the most effective way that national identity and a sense of nationhood was ‘absorbed’ was not only through these overstated themes and methods, but through the mundane media portrayals and representations of everyday “national” life and the internalization of these modes in actual practice. As Michael Billig describes in Banal Nationalism, nationalist ideology “might appear banal, routine, almost invisible,” however, these “subconscious” matter-of-fact representations create a common sense “naturalness of belonging to a nation” (15-16). Billig explains that often there is “continual ‘flagging’, or reminding, of nationhood,” as on a daily basis, citizens are reminded of their national identity. This reminding however, is “so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding” (8). Mundane and unstated representations of Egyptian-ness abounded in most forms of mass culture, where “Egyptians” distinctively spoke and acted and were clearly, though tacitly, differentiated from non-Egyptians. Most of the media examined in this study implicitly addressed their listeners, viewers and readers as members of an Egyptian “nation.” To be sure, the most influential aspect of vaudeville and the satirical press were not necessarily the outwardly nationalistic messages of many of their articles, cartoons, and dialogues, but the recurring and mundane representations of colloquial Cairene as the de-facto dialect of all Egyptians, and the implicit understanding that flawlessly speaking and understanding it was the basic marker of a “modern” Egyptian national identity. Only an “authentic” ibn or bint al-balad (son or daughter of the country) would employ Egyptian Arabic and grasp its multiple meanings and nuances and hence participate in this new mass-produced colloquial culture. In fact, many of the comedic dialogues depicted in political cartoons and vaudeville repeatedly contrasted the mispronunciations of foreigners—who often played unsympathetic or villainous roles—with the “correct” pronunciation of affable Egyptian characters. This repeated portrayal of Cairene as the only “authentic” Egyptian accent reified it as an unofficial dialect of all Egyptians, even if back in the villages and towns of the Sa‛id more localized modes of expression were employed. By way of media-capitalism, Cairo’s dialect and culture was overwhelming—colonizing, if you will— the multitude of other localized dialects and cultures in Egypt. Thus, paradoxically, Cairene Arabic was the primary tool for nationalist, anti-imperialist discourse, and simultaneously, through internal-colonialism, it imposed its own culture on the “nation” [Note: This is very similar to what was happening in France during roughly the same time period. See Eugen Weber’s Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, 486-88].
The Sensorium and the Public Sphere
The efficacy of the new mass media and its potential for mass mobilization was best demonstrated during times of national crisis. The 1906 Dinshaway Incident and the 1919 Revolution in particular reveal how all forms of mass media functioned together to effectively document, memorialize, celebrate, and mobilize on a national scale. The growth of popular Egyptian mass culture, articulated almost exclusively in colloquial Egyptian, was the pivotal factor in the popularization and dissemination of an Egyptian national identity. The evolution and universalization of a colloquial Egyptian middle culture, made possible especially through the utilization of sound and audiovisual media, allowed for a shared and “uniquely” Egyptian cultural landscape. It is primarily within this non-official web of colloquial Egyptian mass culture, driven in large part by media-capitalism, that Egyptian national identity was widely disseminated and popularized.
One crucial aspect of this study was the critical role coffee shops played as cultural hubs, where differing mass media from newspapers to recorded music were publicly merged, negotiated, and digested. Many of the songs initially written for musical and comedic plays were recorded and played, or performed by street musicians at coffee shops and even in the streets and sidewalks. The role of the thousands of urban cafés and other public meeting areas in the broadcasting and reception of these new cultural productions is central to understanding the potency and effectiveness of this developing nationwide culture. Indeed, coffeehouses, as Peter Burke has remarked in A Social History of the Media, “inspired the creation of imagined communities of oral communication” (30).
However, as discussed in previous chapters, this was never a one way conversation, as writers of these vernacular media were plugged into the streets and public squares through these very same cafés. As we have observed in this study, it can be said that the entire vaudeville theater industry arose out of the cafés on ‘Imad al-Din Street, where most of the vaudeville theaters were housed [Note: See Ibrahim Ramzi, Masrahuna ’Ayyam Zaman wa Tarikh al-Fananin al-Qudama’ (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Salam (1984), 25. There were at least three major cafés in Imad al-Din Street that were frequented by actors, singers, writers, and musicians— Qahwat al-Fan (The Arts Café), Qahwat Barun (The Baron Cafés), and Qahwat Misr (The Egypt Café)]. It was through these dialogical “physical” interactions with the people in the streets, market places, and cafés that the writers, musicians and performers of these media (re)calibrated with the subtleties, textures, and flavors of everyday Egyptian life. As Mikhail Bakhtin cautions in The Dialogic Imagination, we must not ignore the “social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages;” for it is in these public spheres that Egyptian mass culture is embodied into everyday life, acquiring its socio-economic, political relevance, and more importantly perhaps, its perceived authenticity, and contemporaneity (259). Indeed, access to any form of knowledge— be it visual, aural, tactile, gustatory or olfactory—is corporally mediated and is acquired through a living dialogical engagement. Or as Bakhtin elaborates in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, “the single adequate form to verbally expressing authentic human life is the open ended dialogue . . . In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life, with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, within his whole body and deeds” (293). In other words texts alone are meaningless when viewed in isolation of the socially embodied realities of their production, and more importantly perhaps, their reception on the street. It is in their interrelationship with social life that texts become meaningfully activated and authenticated as genuinely reflecting popular concerns and realities. As we have seen throughout this book, colloquial Egyptian culture is better equipped in engaging in this dialogue with the everyday, and hence guaranteeing its circulation and popularity.
(Ordinary Egyptians, p. 170-172)
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Featured Image: View 042: Egypt – Street in Native Quarter, Cairo., n.d., T. H. McAllister, Manufacturing Optician. 49 Nassau Street, New York. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9785).
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Ziad Fahmy is an Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at the department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy received his History Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, where his dissertation “Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism” was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award (2008) from the Middle East Studies Association. His first book, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Professor Fahmy is currently beginning another book project tentatively titled, Listening to the Nation: Sounds, Soundscapes, and Mass Culture in Interwar Egypt. In 2011-2012, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where the focal theme was “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, and Politics.”
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