Page 95 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

80 Lotte Hoek

of their samaj (society) or class” (73). For Muslim women too, proper com-
portment was linked to the representation of their society, community, or
class (shomaj) in colonial Bengal (Sarkar 2001). The move to public female
propriety among middle-class Muslims also came with a redefinition of
marriage and privacy. “Shongshar means home, husband and children,
these are a woman’s moral possessions, the cornerstone of modern Bengali
Muslim femininity” (Ahmed 1999, 119, emphasis in original).
In Shima’s conceptualization of her own position within the FDC, her
concern about her presence in public, her preference for remaining appar-
ently sheltered within the dubbing studio, and the pressure from her in-
laws, the echoes of the debates set out by Ahmed can be heard. Jenny’s
position was constructed in a similar social force field. From a working-
class background, Jenny had used her acting career to acquire a certain
amount of wealth and has climbed the social ladder to her present lower
middle-class position. Married with children, she embodied this middle-
class “modern Bengali Muslim femininity.” Her “moral possessions” at
hand, in public with all modesty, her cinematic other was effectively
effaced by her quotidian veneer. She was unrecognizable as the woman
who reached out from the posters on the city walls. Both Shima and Jenny
could extricate themselves from the public by only being available to them
in a very particular form.
Although porda has generally been understood to relate to limitations
placed on the visibility of the female body, Jenny’s changing visual form
shows that rather than a withdrawing from view, porda has to be under-
stood as a becoming visible in a particular form. Porda, as a socially, mor-
ally and religiously formed aesthetic claim on female comportment, should
be understood as describing the ways in which women’s bodies can become
publicly available as “proper” rather than the ways in which they are hid-
den or withdrawn from view. In my view the veil does not hide or seclude
but makes women visible and available in a particular style. This is not
limited to the visual sense. Sound is similarly bound up with gendered
notions of proper aural presence. Both speech roles as well as vocal pitch
are regimented through gendered notions of permissible public presence.
James Wilce (1998) has elaborately described the possible speech roles

available for women in rural Bangladesh and notes that cultural and social
structures prescribe the ways in which women can become aurally sensible
in public. He suggests that these can be considered a form of “discursive
pardā” (6). In my view, this refers not merely to the limits set for female
speech, but constitutes the forms through which the female voice can
become audible. In the dubbing studio, such discursive porda translated
into the use of vocal artists who gave female characters middle-class, or
“clear,” accents and made them speak in high pitched voices, marked by