Love across Boundaries of Caste and Class

The romances discussed so far feature a pair of lovers who are by birth social equals. In two of the tales, the hero after falling in love declines in rank, becoming unfit as a marriage partner for the heroine: Majnun goes mad and becomes a destitute beggar, Ranjha works as a cowherd and servant to Hir's family. Other Nautankis accentuate the transgressive nature of romantic love and bring out the theme of the lover's self-surrender by situating the lovers in different classes or castes. In these stories, the beloved is ordinarily a princess or daughter of nobility, whereas the lover may be a merchant, an artisan, or other social inferior. It should be mentioned that hypergamy is the normative pattern for marriage in North India, that is, alliance of a groom with a bride whose family is of somewhat lower rank. The transgression inherent in the romantic liaison between the high-born female and lower-born male has two possible outcomes in the Nautanki plays. It may provoke an act of treachery leading to the deaths of both lovers—the tragic pattern of earlier narratives—or it may lead to an execution threat and a redemptive counterstrike by the beloved, followed by marriage—a melodrama with a happy ending.

In Shirin farhad , an example of the former type, the stonecutter Far-had falls in love with queen Shirin while engaged in building a canal for her. Shirin's paramour, the king Khusro, hoping to get rid of his rival, assigns Farhad the task of digging a tunnel through an impenetrable mountain. Farhad recites Shirin's name continuously to invigorate himself, passes the difficult test, and wins her heart. Khusro then plants an old crone who falsely bewails Shirin's demise, causing Farhad to commit suicide; Shirin follows him soon after in death. The lovers Shirin and Farhad, often quoted in the same breath as the example of Laila and Majnun, embody the same brand of intemperate passion that knows no social boundaries. The character of Shirin is particularly impetuous in the Nautanki version; she rides forth to find Khusro when they are courting and later takes a bold stand, pursuing Farhad despite the difference in rank between them. She also manifests a certain degree of

haughty disdain: at first she rebuffs Farhad and demands that he earn her love. The act of carving through an obdurate mass of stone remains as a striking metaphor for the pursuit of romantic love in North Indian society—the tunneling underground matching the surreptitious designs that lovers must implement to break through society's massive resistance.^[11]

Another early addition to the Nautanki repertoire, and an example of the melodrama plot, is Saudagar vo syahposh . This is the tale of a merchant's son, Gabru, who attempts to win the hand of Jamal, the daughter of a minister of state, after being enchanted by hearing her read from the Koran. While visiting Jamal, Gabru is apprehended one night by the king, who is touring the city disguised as a police constable to ensure its safety. Gabru is sentenced to hang; at the scene of the gallows, he waits anxiously for a final vision of his beloved. Jamal at the last moment appears dressed as a man all in black (syahposh ), riding a horse, wielding a dagger and sword. She threatens to commit suicide by stabbing herself or drinking a cup of poison. The king is persuaded of the true love of the couple and marries them on the spot.^[12]

A similar tale of perilous love between a highly placed valorous woman and a commoner is Lakha banjara , which relates the love between a princess and Lakha, the son of a trader.^[13] Reminiscent of Syahposh in many details, it culminates in Lakha's being arrested by a policeman while returning from the princess one night, his death sentence by the king, and the appearance of the princess at the gallows to plead with her father for her lover's release. In this story, however, the king does not relent. Lakha is killed, and the lovers are united only after Guru Gorakhnath arrives and resuscitates the dead Lakha. The final events of these two tales are remarkably close to those of Nautanki shahzadi . After the discovery of the affair between the princess Nautanki and Phul Singh, Phul Singh is sentenced to hang. As he awaits his execution, Nautanki suddenly arrives at the gallows, dressed as a man and armed with sword and dagger. She pulls out a cup of poison and prepares to commit suicide, vowing to die as Shirin died for Farhad and Laila for Majnun. As the executioners advance to pull the cord, she rushes with her dagger and drives them off. She then turns her sword on her father, demanding he pardon her lover immediately. The king consents to the marriage and the two are wed at once.

Although details differ, these stories all involve a romantic quest fraught with danger. The danger is expressed not only in the lover's travails in reaching the princess and obtaining her consent to love, but

in the life-threatening sentence meted out for the violation of an upper-class woman's honor. The social distance between the lovers increases the risk, particularly for the male. His transgression offends the law of the land and must be punished with execution by the king, while in earlier narratives the opposition was primarily from family and clan and never involved a criminal charge. The high-ranking female, in contrast, ignores family censure and has the liberty to behave in even imperious ways. In each case, the princess becomes her lover's rescuer. She braves public opinion, daring to leave the seclusion of her palace and appear in public; she challenges the chief representative of society's moral order, the king or her father (frequently one and the same), pleading for permission to marry and even threatening violence against him. To carry out her brave resolve, she may adopt the avenging persona of the virangana , the woman transformed into a warrior figure outfitted with weapons and riding a horse.^[14]

On the one hand, we may interpret these tales as lauding the exalted love that dares to overstep lines of caste and community. Romantic love here moves beyond the limits prescribed by the social hierarchies. It reverses the dominance of the upper castes over the lower and of the male over the female, much as tales like Laila majnun and Hir ranjha questioned the authority of elders over the young. The legitimacy of romantic love, as these tales' heroes and heroines continuously recite, resides not in its legal sanction or propriety but in its spontaneity, its irrepressibility, its sheer persistence in the face of opposition. The stories with happy endings seem further to suggest that an affair of the heart having illicit beginnings may transform itself into the approved state of marriage, even of intercaste marriage, once the lovers convince the guardians of the bride of their overwhelming commitment to each other (which they usually demonstrate by their willingness to sacrifice themselves and die). These dramas thus illustrate that within the social domain some space remains for deep feeling. They play on the possibilities within that space, keeping alive the attachment to the ideal of romance while mildly debunking the rigidities of caste and class.

On the other hand, the consistent assignment of the female to the dominating position perhaps proceeds from a feudal concept of hierarchy and a notion of courtly love consonant with patriarchal values. The superior status of the beloved, although bestowing on her undoubted power and privilege vis-à-vis society, gives her the potential to oppress her lover. The Nautanki dramas do not particularly stress this configuration; nevertheless, the status differential at least hints at the

haughty beloved found in court-based genres of Indo-Persian literature. The high position of the beloved in that tradition provides a means of representing the degradation and social opprobrium that the true lover gladly undergoes. His suffering is testimony to his constancy and moral fitness for the supreme trial of love. We are reminded of the deplorable condition of Majnun, the important difference being that society's ridicule and his own self-abandonment lead to Majnun's becoming an out-caste, whereas in the Urdu ghazal for example, it is the beloved herself who is usually responsible for the sufferings of the lover, inflicting pain out of cruelty.

In our Nautankis, the princess Shirin comes the closest to this attitude, although eventually she is won over by Farhad's valor and comes to love him equally. The other princesses respond more favorably to their lovers from the start. Even when they assume the aggressive virangana guise, their motivation is to protect a suitor's life; they turn their attacks against society and its authorities, not against the lover. Nonetheless, the high status accorded to these heroines erases the obstacles they face as women in patriarchal society, especially in comparison with tales such as Laila majnun and Hir ranjha . The social reality of being female vanishes from the text, yielding to an artificially elevated ideal of womanhood that aggrandizes the male's self-sacrifice and ignores the female's experience. Furthermore, the high-born beloved motif reinforces the association of superior beauty, power, and merit with high caste or class, providing support for the logic of hierarchical organization, even though the narrative ending of intercaste marriage overrides that hierarchy.

The prototypical love affair between a highly placed female and a beseeching subordinate male is generally thought of as an Islamic legacy, just as the prevalence of unrequited love and the tragic ending are traced to Muslim sensibility and considered anathema to the Hindu mind. Within the body of romantic tales found in the Nautanki literature, however, the tidiness of these distinctions breaks down. Some classic romances like Laila majnun or Shirin farhad that end in both lovers' deaths clearly traveled from the Islamic Middle East to Indo-Pakistan. Others equally tragic (Hir ranjha, Sorath bija ) have roots in the subcontinent and are thought of as the cultural property of a cross-section of communities. Similarly, the high-status beloved is not limited to one particular religious tradition. It is commonly linked to the Sufi mystical allegory, wherein the earthly beloved (mahbub ) is portrayed as lofty and inaccessible because such are the attributes of God, whom the be-

loved symbolizes. Yet the motif occurs in other contexts where a Sufistic interpretation would be inappropriate.

A good example is found in the Alha cycle—a story corpus indigenous to the middle Hindu castes of North India. Incidentally, this well-known non-Islamic narrative ends in tragedy, insofar as most of the heroes are killed in a great battle. Within this larger frame a number of smaller battles take place, and almost all revolve around the marriage-capture of a bride whose family is more highly placed than the Banaphar clan of Rajputs who are the suitors. The Banaphar heroes succeed in each of these encounters but only after enduring abuse and insults and resorting to physical combat. In the Alha legend the high status of the beloved, while calling up the code of chivalry and courtly love, primarily provides a pretext for the Rajput warrior to prove his mettle. Love backed by force triumphs and leads to marriage, reversing the claims of caste distinction.

Intercaste love is a common theme in more recent Nautanki stories as well. No particular rule governs the assignment of lower status to the male or female in these stories. Indeed, low status often seems to be associated with rejection by or loss of a parental figure, a plight that affects children of both sexes. In many of these "modern" tales, the hero's or heroine's misfortune leads to a situation of mistaken identity. A low-caste person volunteers to raise the abandoned child, bestowing his or her caste identity upon it. The leading characters, having become adults, subsequently fall in love across caste lines, but the conclusion typically involves a discovery of the original high caste of the abandoned child, and the finale of marriage thus brings together individuals who in fact socially match each other.

The drama Mali ka beta (The gardener's son) exemplifies these themes and also incorporates a number of aspects of both the Laila-Majnun story and the melodrama plot.

The prince Firoz is born to his royal parents after years of childlessness. The dying king wills his kingdom to his son, placing his minister Afzal on the throne to rule until Firoz attains the age of majority. Afzal, fearing loss of his power, has the prince sent to the forest for execution. There he is rescued by a gardener, who takes the boy home and brings him up as his son.

Soon after, Afzal's daughter Shamsha is born. Independent and indifferent to the idea of marriage, she falls in love with Firoz when he delivers her flowers on her sixteenth birthday. The lovers vow to love each other until death and be remembered like Laila and Majnun. They suffer various persecutions from Tagril, Shamsha's suitor, and Afzal.

When Firoz goes to look for water for the tormented Shamsha, he is stoned by the townspeople. He then proposes to kill himself to give her the blood of his heart (khun-e-jigar^[*] ) to drink. Finally Shamsha resolves to die rather than marry Tagril, on condition that she be buried next to Firoz. Firoz's last wish is that he meet his father. The gardener appears, reveals the truth about Firoz's birth, and explains Afzal's role in the deceptive execution plot. The nobles turn against Afzal, place Firoz on the throne, and the lovers are married.^[15]

The previous pattern of romance between a high-born female and low-born male, ending in a suspenseful execution scene, becomes even more melodramatic here. The narrowly avoided execution is replicated at the beginning of the story, following a sequence in which the boy heir is first abandoned by his dying father and then betrayed by the power-hungry minister. Within this outline, the pathos of the drama is heightened by numerous references to the Laila-Majnun story: the lovers' vows to be remembered like the immortal pair, the pelting of Firoz by the townspeople, his willingness to sacrifice himself for her well-being, and the couple's resolve to die together and be buried next to each other. The theme of passion in defiance of class differences operates as the foundation, the chief departure from earlier tales being that in the end the status of the lovers turns out to be equal. The lovers' compatibility of rank and the revelation of the minister's treachery, rather than the sheer depth of the lovers' feeling, reverse public opinion and pave the way for their union.

The abandoned daughter, counterpart to the hapless boy Firoz, is the focus of sympathy in Andhi dulhin (The blind bride).^[16] Again a much desired child, Pyari, is finally born to a royal couple, but the queen dies soon after, and the grieving daughter weeps herself into blindness. The king is faced with the impossible task of marrying a disabled daughter and abandons her in the forest. Instead of being raised by a low-caste family, the girl in this story takes to begging. The Nautanki proper begins when a certain prince, Jaipal, is forcibly married to Pyari as punishment for disrespecting his father. Through a series of difficult adventures, the couple demonstrate their virtue and constant devotion to each other and are eventually rewarded with the return of Jaipal's father's kingdom and their real identities. Here love prospers despite the unequal stature of the partners and, as in Mali ka beta , the apparently disadvantaged Pyari turns out not only to be worthy but to have high rank. A strong ideal of self-sacrifice emanates from this love story, which

evokes a sufficient measure of pity through the sad circumstances accompanying the child's "handicap."

The fixation on childhood abandonment in these two dramas (and others like them) points to a questioning of social structures and the stability they are supposed to provide for the young. The stories seem to indicate that the social umbrella made up of family, clan, and caste alliances is not always effective in protecting children. The loss of a parent is a threat not only to the physical and psychological health of the boy or girl, but also to the child's social identity; caste affiliation as well as family connections are easily obliterated by the removal of the guardian figure. Together with this sense of insecurity, the stories show the continuing romantic attraction exercised across caste lines. They repeatedly invoke true love as greater than caste, greater than family. In dramas with the mistaken identity motif, however, love leads to a marriage that conforms to caste rules, fulfilling a conservative desire to reproduce the status quo. These stories confirm, too, the larger rationale that credits moral superiority to high birth: the abandoned children manifest the goodness inherent in their superior birth-status, even when that status is unknown to them. A powerful romantic ideal challenging the social order thus engages with a narrative structure that removes the discomfort of that very challenge and eases it into harmonious marriage within conventional bounds.