Muffled Voices in the Zenana and Beyond

The Fiction and Life Writings of Selected South Asian Muslim Women Writers

Sabreen Ahmed

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040404591
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores subaltern subjecthood, resistance and sexual agency in the works of Muslim women writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh since the early 20th century. Locating the Muslim woman in the fiction of these countries from a sub-continental locus, it incorporates concepts of race, diaspora and postcolonial feminism in its reading of selected texts along with precepts of Islamic feminist hermeneutics in the South Asian context. It rejects the homogenization of sub-continental Muslim women as a monolithic victim subject and focuses on the multiplicity of voices that emerge from their writing both in the colonial and the postcolonial contexts.

The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, gender studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction: The Spatial Polemics of Zenana
• 2 A “Stained Dawn”: Zenana in Pre-Partition Texts
• 3 Tale of One’s Own: Zenana in the Fiction of Contemporary Indian Muslim Women Novelists
• 4 Neighbourhood Mysteries: Women and Islam in Pakistani English Fiction
• 5 Sister Concerns: Liberty, Identity and Language in Bangladeshi Women’s Fiction
• 6 Conclusion: The Zenana as a Spatial Closure
• Bibliography
• Index