Voices in Verses(English, Hardcover, Hasan Farhat)

Know about the book -

Voices in Verses(English, Hardcover, Hasan Farhat) is written by Hasan Farhat and published by Cambridge University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1009453033 (ISBN 10) and 9781009453035 (ISBN 13).

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.