The Construction of the Courtesan in Ulysses and Sin: Notes on Irish and Indian Orientalism

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author

School of English, Dublin City University

Abstract

The present article offers a creative and critical ‘reconstruction’ of Wajida Tabassum as a ‘lost modernist’ through an analysis of possible networks of affinities between Indian and Irish modernisms, with an emphasis on the operations of new orientalisms in the twentieth-century, through a close reading of the construction of the courtesan in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Wajida Tabassum’s Sin, translated into English by Reema Abbasi. The lack of research and critical sources in English on Wajida Tabassum, and her own marginal position as a non-elite female Indian Modernist writer (compared to other female Indian Modernists such as Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chugtai) offers an avenue to read James Joyce ‘against the grain’ or in the mode of ‘creative disaffiliation’ such that an unsettling of Joyce’s hypercanonicity renders distinct the “aesthetic qualities of minoritised literatures” (Ward 2022, 343). In this paper, I enter this debate from a comparative perspective as I examine the construction(s) and representation(s) of Eastern domestic locations such as the ‘harem’ in representative Irish and Indian Modernist texts, with a focus on James Joyce’s and Wajida Tabassum’s historic and understudied connections, their representations of colonial domestic spaces, and the representation of the feminine and ethnic other linked to the construction of the courtesan in the twentieth-century.

Keywords

References

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