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Voices in Verses Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)

Voices in Verses By Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)

Voices in Verses by Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)

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Summary

Opens up an archive of women's verses found in the women's biographical compendia written in the nineteenth century that draw our attention to their memories in cultural spaces. It studies the women's voices in these texts to explore their aesthetic sensibilities, literary interventions, and representations of body, gender and love.

Voices in Verses Summary

Voices in Verses: Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India by Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)

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.

Voices in Verses Reviews

'Voices in Versestakes us into the markets and palaces, brothels and salons, of nineteenth century India to hear women speak of their lives and feelings through poetry. Rare biographical compendia, known astazkiras, are treated to a wonderfully sensitive analysis that reveals women's compositions to be at once exemplary and defiant of their literary and social worlds. An inspired and inspiring book that is a joy to read.' Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, University of Sheffield
'Farhat Hasan must be commended for his evocative, nuanced, and multifaceted explorations of women's Urdu and Persian verses women from public, secluded, royal, and ordinary walks of life as compiled in a couple of nineteenth century compendia, the tazkirat-i-zanana. These compositions come mediated through male authors and prefaced with biographical sketches that direct and constrict meaning-making. Hasan displays his masterly historian's skills in unpacking layered striations of words, performances, textures, and gestures the sensoria through which we may grasp their variegated fields of significations. By facilitating access to this as yet veiled literary archive, Hasan opens up subjugated knowledge to assert its insistent and salient presence in shaping literary and cultural praxis in the richly varied world of Persianate Hindustan. Voices in Verses tells of the deep and diverse histories of cultural inheritances embedded in South Asian ethos before the complicities and complexities of colonial and national confinements. This volume is a triumph of gendered reading that enriches the discipline of South Asian history.' Anshu Malhotra, University of California
'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

About Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)

Farhat Hasan is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asian History at the Department of History, University of Delhi. He is one of the most well established and renowned historians of South Asia. His areas of interest include Medieval India, with particular interests in court culture, identities and gender relations in the period, and Islam in India during the Medieval and colonial period, in particular, religious thought and practices. He is the author of Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India, published with the Press in 2021.

Table of Contents

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.

Additional information

GOR013939544
9781009453035
1009453033
Voices in Verses: Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India by Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)
Farhat Hasan (University of Delhi)
Used - Like New
Hardback
Cambridge University Press
2024-09-30
230
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
The book has been read, but looks new. The book cover has no visible wear, and the dust jacket is included if applicable. No missing or damaged pages, no tears, possible very minimal creasing, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins

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