Voices in Verses: Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781009453035)

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.

Author: Farhat Hasan
ISBN-10: 1009453033
ISBN-13: 9781009453035
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/21/2024
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d