ABSTRACT

In late colonial India, the bourgeoning middle class was getting increasingly invested in gendered notions of respectable behaviour and morality which ostensibly framed not only the national community but its culture as well. In this discourse, it was women singers and actresses—euphemistically, ‘public women’—who became the embodiment of obscenity and moral corruption. Concurrently, the middle class also became the biggest consumers of new cultural technologies, such as the gramophone, which prominently featured these ‘public women’. This paper seeks to explore how the ‘publicness’ of these singers and the connotations attached to the same were tied up in the early growth of this form of popular culture. The ambiguities of eroticism and desire mapped onto the disembodied voice of the ‘public woman’ went a long way in shaping the tastes, habits and conventions that structured the early relations of consumption of these technologies. I argue that these new conditions opened up a cultural space that female singers negotiated by cultivating distinct public personas.

摘要

在殖民后期的印度，蓬勃发展的中产阶级越来越多地投入到受人尊敬的行为和道德的性别观念中，这些观念表面上不仅构成了民族社区，还构成了其文化。在这种话语中，女歌手和女演员——委婉地称为“公众女性”——成为淫秽和道德败坏的化身。与此同时，中产阶级也成为新文化技术的最大消费者，例如留声机，这些“公共女性”的形象尤为突出。本文试图探讨这些歌手的“公开性”及其相关内涵如何与这种流行文化形式的早期发展联系在一起。映射到“公众女性”无形的声音上的色情和欲望的模糊性在很大程度上影响了品味，习惯和习俗构成了这些技术的早期消费关系。我认为这些新条件开辟了一个文化空间，女歌手通过培养不同的公众角色来协商。