Roshan Ara Begum Performing Classical Music, Gender, and Muslim Nationalism in Pakistan Fawzia Afzal-Khan The performance — or lack thereof — of (North Indian) classical music in Pakistan, and espe- cially the obstacles women performers have faced, cannot only be blamed on Islam’s putative hostility to the musical and performing arts in general and to women performing in public in particular. Rather, the discourse of a religiously inflected nationalism collides with gendered, classed bodies within the performative space of a political imaginary such that the role played by music both constitutes and deconstructs this history. Women singers’ roles are crucial in Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar/Professor of English at Montclair State University and Visiting Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the author of Cultural Imperialism: Genre and Ideology in the Indo-English Novel (Penn State Press, 1993), A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan(Seagull Press, 2005), and Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends Pakistani Style (Syracuse University Press, 2010); and editor of The PreOccupation of Postcolonial Studies (Duke University Press, 2000) and Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (Interlink Books, 2005). Siren Song: Pakistani Women Singers is her award-winning NEH- funded short film and forthcoming book from Oxford University Press. She is an Indian classical singer, a playwright, and a poet.
[email protected] TDR: The Drama Review 62:4 (T240) Winter 2018. ©2018 8 Fawzia Afzal-Khan Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram_a_00790 by guest on 02 October 2021 both shaping and resisting this politically performative historical space of the Pakistani nation, yet are hardly well understood or appreciated.