<i>Voices in Verses: Women's Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth Century India</i> by FarhatHasan, Cambridge University Press, 2024, ISBN: 978‐1‐0094‐5306‐6.

In Voices in Verses, Farhat Hasan's project is bifocal: recovering a marginalised archive of North Indian Muslim women's poetry written in Urdu and Persian, and examining the ways in which this poetry was remembered, compiled and received in contemporary literary circles. Hasan's primary sources are two late-nineteenth century Tazkiras, or anthologies: Baharistan-i Naz, or Blandishments of Spring (1864) by Hakim Fasihuddin (b.1836–d.85), whose nom de plume was Ranj, and Tazkirat-i Nisa, or Women's Life Stories (1884) by Durga Prasad Nadir (b.1833–d.1903). Ranj was and still is a well-known poet, and was also in fact the first to develop a women's Tazkira. Nadir was a trained clerk and taught Persian, Urdu and mathematics at Delhi College. His Tazkira was an imitation of Ranj, from whom he borrowed heavily. Some of the poetry in Hasan's collection has been studied by other scholars, upon whom Hasan draws. What is distinctive about this book is that it uses the two compiled Tazkiras as an entryway into analysing the historical context of their production in late colonial India, by examining the modes of representation of the women poets in their appended biographical notes, and interpreting the featured poetry in light of these biographical glosses. The Tazkiras were intended as pedagogical texts to be used by ‘respectable' households and especially women readers to develop literary taste. Some of the poems collected in these Tazkiras were recorded from oral performances, while others were copied from hearsay. The poets included belonged to periods from the Middle Ages (e.g. Razia Sultana) to the late-nineteenth century (e.g. Umrao Jan Ada). Most of them were courtesans, prostitutes and even enslaved women forced to work in these roles, but others were princesses and begums (wives and daughters of nobles). The poetry thus represents a range of socio-economic and moral positionalities that cannot be encapsulated within any singular paradigm. Only some of the poets, usually those more affluent, fitted contemporary gender norms while others plied their trade closer to the market and did not live up to gendered ideals. The kotha was the space within which courtesans usually resided and performed recitations, songs or dances, but because they also gave commissioned performances in private households, their activities pushed the public–private boundary. Many of the poets in the Tazkiras were acclaimed in their own times, and some still are. For the compilers, to collect and record their work was what Hasan calls a self-conscious ‘act of epistemic disobedience’, to counter the contemporary colonial mindset that Indian women were essentially backward. By including medieval and early modern women poets, usually from royal or aristocratic families or the royal harem, Hasan argues that these compilers were resisting the popular assumption that the Mughals were repressive toward women's literary arts. By showcasing a diverse array of women, the Tazkiras also provided an alternative to British-influenced curricula of Urdu language pedagogical texts. They therefore constituted a kind of challenge, albeit within narrow bounds, to prevalent Victorian-inflected morality that was being disseminated through textbooks recommended by the education departments of the British government in India: the women authors were praised not for their domestic skills or marital felicity but for their education, literary taste (zauq), and skill at versification. Hasan gives two memorable examples of women's poetry from the Tazkiras that both resist heteronormative economy and eroticism: a prostitute whose poetry reflected her own experiences, and who portrayed the marital bond not as providing restful companionship but as creating experiences of empty loneliness; and a courtesan whose poetry communicated desire for her female companion rather than yearning for her male lover. However, the socio-moral challenge presented by the Tazkiras was heavily circumscribed. The compilers based their descriptions of the poets within their own moral typologies. In their appended biographical notes routinely described some as ‘veiled’ (pardah nashin) and secluded, hence respectable, and others as ‘market women’ (bazari aurat) with all the negative connotations of the term. The notes, in Hasan's view, similarly impose a hegemonic and disciplinary template, presenting some works as good and useful but others as ‘obscene’. Hasan himself however arguably disciplines his readers as well, by often embedding his source material too thickly within a wide array of theoretical lenses. As a result his book can sometimes feel spread out, not focused on any one historiographical argument. For example, in the first chapters Hasan cites postcolonial feminist theory as well as theories about the role of performance in South Asian poetry, while the last chapters invoke a cohort of ideas from well-known historians of emotions. Even though there is not much systematic analysis of ‘emotions’ as such in Hasan's book, he presents considerations of which the reader should be aware when gauging the ‘emotions’ in the poetry of these Tazkiras. Following previous scholars, Hasan tells us that most of the poems in the collections were performed, so to grasp their meaning one must not be restricted to a merely textual analysis. Rather, one must imagine vividly the atmosphere of the kotha. Hasan critiques William Reddy, a renowned historian of emotions, for excluding non-verbal aspects from his analysis of the communication of emotions, such as the ones that may have played an important role in the environment of kothas: fragrance, clapping, hand gestures, intonation and the sexually charged atmosphere. In fact, in Navigation of Feeling Reddy has discussed the part played by non-verbal factors in shaping the expression of emotions. In the analyses of many historians of emotions, generally speaking, emotions are seen as performed acts. Hasan assumes that non-verbal cues in the performance of poetry and affect are ‘non-linguistic’, a statement that is not clear in its meaning, as non-verbal factors are also usually shaped through language and socio-political cultures. Despite spending quite some time on the centrality of performance on the one hand, while on the other pointing out that it was not unusual for verses to be improvised or their meanings to be circumstantially contingent, Hasan argues that the communication of the poet's emotions in this poetry was reflective and constitutive of their inner ‘selfhood’, ‘deep interiority’ and ‘core self’. I find this stance somewhat contradictory. How could this poetry reflect the individual poet's ‘selfhood’ or ‘deep core interiority’ when, as Hasan argues elsewhere in the book, it did not give rise to a sense of either ‘autonomous selfhood’ or even ‘gender’, which in his own analysis remained always mediated by class, religion, familial lineage and other factors? Citing Afsaneh Najmabadi, the well-known historian of gender in the Middle East, Hasan in fact states that the abstract categories of ‘gender’ and ‘class’ are not as useful when analysing Indo-Persianate or South Asian texts. At yet another point, Hasan acknowledges that despite employing new metaphors at times, these women for the most part followed the dominant paradigms of Urdu poetry, hardly ever drifting away from standards established by men. The poetry thus tended to be highly formulaic, adhering to well-established conventions of the genre. The book seems to make a larger conflicting argument, that despite being highly derivative and formalised and at other times highly contingent, women's poetry reflected their unique and individual ‘selfhood’ and ‘deep interiority’ set apart from the normative world. Hasan attempts to unpersuasively resolve this contradiction by stating somewhat cursorily that the ‘entanglement of women … [within categories of] clan, community, country did not undermine a sense of self so much as frame their multiple and varied expressions of interiority’. More than a few times, Hasan defends the position that North Indian women's poetry should be seen as ‘autobiographical texts’, agentic and modern self-narrativizing acts of producing subjectivities. While I agree that at times women's poetry communicated their lived experiences, and as such shed light on their lives, it is difficult for me to see these authors as producing autobiographized selves. The deeper problem I note is that Hasan is trying to establish the secular rather than the religious ‘modernity’ of a significant portion of the poetry discussed. If the nineteenth-century Indian compilers wanted to classify their Indian women interlocutors according to their own moral criteria, then Hasan wants to re-present these women within what seems to be one of our new moral criteria, as possessing a sense of secular modern interior ‘selfhood’. The poetry of these women, it appears, is legitimised as a proper object of historical study through framing it as reflecting ‘selfhood’: can a non-European historical text be rehabilitated only through the entrenching of another Eurocentric category? Taken from the historian Margot Badron, ‘veiled poetry’ and its ‘unveiling’ are the overarching metaphors that Hasan employs to describe his project of considering the understudied Tazkiras as well as ‘unveiling’ women's ‘selves’ and voices. To me though, the use of the metaphor of ‘veiled selves and voices’ to indicate the invisibility of this poetry in historical studies, and ‘unveiled’ to indicate their rescuing from academic oblivion, is slightly problematic. ‘Veil’ links the systematic exclusion of these women poets to a Muslim practice rather than to more modern, Westernised influences that organise current academic praxis in South Asia and elsewhere. I wonder if it would have been worthwhile to question this rather (for me at least) Western idea, where the act of ‘unveiling’ stands for revealing some ‘inner’ agentic selfhood and interiority. Do Muslim conceptual paradigms and epistemes imagine one's expression of agency in terms of ‘unveiling’? If so, how? Along similar lines, I feel that Hasan has presented a somewhat genteel translation of some key terms. For example, he translates bazari aurat as ‘public women’, thus taking the sting out of the original Urdu. Bazari aurat emphasises selling one's body as a commodity rather than participation in ‘public’ life, and the negativity of the term is made plain by the fact that no equivalent exists for men. The other term that Hasan translates in a euphemistic way is kotha, which he renders as ‘salon’, a word with strong associations of French Enlightenment culture. Even though some well-patronised kothas could be spaces of cultural activity, I would question their characterisation as salons. A more nuanced justification for choosing ‘salon’ to refer to kotha would not have been misplaced in a discussion dedicated to unpacking some of the contextual and literal meanings of the poetry presented. Moreover, whereas Ranj used the terms fazail (virtues) and sharafat (moral excellence) to describe the goals of a good education in his notes about the benefits of educating women, Hasan has translated these words as ‘intellect’. Ranj does want women to develop their intellect through reading, but the end goal was for women to achieve virtue, not intellect for its own sake. In fact, both Ranj and Nadir emphasise women's obtaining education in order to improve their morals and especially their religious knowledge, as is evident in the compilers’ notes reproduced in the appendices of this book. Yet, Hasan does not discuss the compilers’ endorsement of women's poetry for religious edification or conversely their instrumental invocation of a religious vocabulary to justify using women's poetry, even that of courtesans and prostitutes, for women's (or people's) education. Again, I think, Hasan adopts the term ‘intellect’ to discipline the reader to see these works as reflecting secular ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘selfhood’. In light of such observations, I think that instead of constituting a tightly presented monograph with sustained threads of argument, Hasan's book works well as a selection of verses from significant works of Indian women's poetry. But given the richness of Hasan's critical discussion and the well-documented and translated poetry it presents, the book will be very valuable for anyone interested in modern Urdu poetry and its various contexts.