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This book opens up an archive of women's verses found in the extant, but overlooked, women's biographical compendia (tazkira-i zenana) written in the nineteenth century. As commemorative texts, these compendia written in Urdu draw our attention to their memories - celebrated and contested - in cultural spaces. In drawing connections between memory and literature, this study contests the commonplace assumption that the literary public sphere was markedly homosocial and gender exclusive, and argues instead that the women poets, coming from a wide variety of social groups, actively participated in shaping the norms of aesthetics and literary expression; they introduced fresh signifiers, and signifying practices to apprehend their emotions, experiences and world-views. This work suggests that the women's tazkiras performed an act of 'epistemic disobedience' contesting not only the British imperial representations of India, but also the Indo-Muslim modern reformers on issues of domesticity, conjugal companionship, and love and desire.
Sommario
List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; A Note on Transliteration; 1. Introduction; 2. Unraveling the Texts: Memory, Reforms, and Literary Sulh-i-Kul; 3. Representing an Inclusive Literary Culture: Women Poets in the Bazars and Kothas; 4. Representing the Kothas: The Two Sisters in the Literary Sphere; 5. Commemorating the Women Poets: Memory, Gender and the Literary Culture in the Persianate World; 6. Secluded Poets in Literary Spaces: Memorializing the Female Rulers, Consorts and Memsahibs; 7. Conclusion; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.
Info autore
Farhat Hasan is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asian History at the Department of History, University of Delhi. He is one of the most well established and renowned historians of South Asia. His areas of interest include Medieval India, with particular interests in court culture, identities and gender relations in the period, and Islam in India during the Medieval and colonial period, in particular, religious thought and practices. He is the author of Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India, published with the Press in 2021.
Riassunto
Opens up an archive of women's verses found in the women's biographical compendia written in the nineteenth century that draw our attention to their memories in cultural spaces. It studies the women's voices in these texts to explore their aesthetic sensibilities, literary interventions, and representations of body, gender and love.
