Event Date
Ideas concerning women’s literary expression and cultural memory emerge from a rich yet often overlooked archive preserved in the nineteenth-century Urdu biographical compendia known as tazkira-i zenana. These commemorative texts assemble the lives and verses of women poets, drawing attention to the ways their memories were both celebrated and contested within shared cultural spaces. Long assumed to be peripheral to a predominantly male, homosocial literary public sphere, these writings instead reveal women from diverse social backgrounds actively shaping aesthetic norms and practices of expression. Introducing new vocabularies and modes of signification, they articulate distinct experiences, emotions, and worldviews. This lecture explores how such texts complicate dominant narratives of literary history, and argues that women’s tazkiras enacted a form of “epistemic disobedience,” challenging not only British imperial representations of India but also the prescriptive ideals of Indo-Muslim reformers on questions of domesticity, companionship, and desire.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Farhat Hasan is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern South Asian History at the Department of History, University of Delhi. His work explores a broad range of issues concerning Mughal India. He has studied court culture, identities and gender relations in Mughal India as well as religious thoughts and practice from the medieval to the colonial period. His monographs, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and most recently, Voices in Verses Women’s Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India (Cambridge University Press, 2024) are testaments to the innovative questions that he has brought in to the study of the Mughal state.
