Voices in Verses
Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India

Based on the women's biographical compendia, this is a study of the memory of women in the literary culture in early modern India.

Farhat Hasan (Author)

9781009453035, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 November 2024

224 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'In Voices in Verses, Farhat Hasan reads the tazkira archive along and against the grain to recover and interpret for us the verses and biographies of Urdu women poets. A wide and rich corpus comes into view that plays with codes of veiling and unveiling and nuances emotions of joy and loss.' Francesca Orsini, SOAS University of London

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]