Voices in Verses

"This book opens up an archive of women's verses found in the extant, but overlooked, women's biographical compendia (tazkira-i zanåana) 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. Women's poetry was a kind of 'subjugated'/'erudite' knowledge that enriched the literary culture, even as it evoked considerable anxieties, and stood in a paradoxical relationship with the dominant episteme, both reinforcing and challenging its cultural assumptions and truth-claims. Their lyrics were forms of self-narratives or an act of 'unveiling', but in order to appreciate their meanings we need to be sensitive to the multi-medial mode of meaning-apprehension. 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"--