Voices in Verses

Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India

Farhat Hasan

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009453042
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Reviews
• Voices in Verses
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Unravelling the Texts: Memory, Reforms, and Literary Sulh-i-Kul
• 3 Representing an Inclusive Literary Culture: Women Poets in the Bazaars and Kothas
• 4 Representing the Kothas: The Two Sisters in the Literary Sphere
• 5 Commemorating Women Poets: Memory, Gender, and the Literary Culture in the Persianate World
• 6 Secluded Poets in Literary Spaces: Memorializing Female Rulers, Consorts, and Memsahibs
• 7 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index