Book review: Farhat Hasan,Voices in Verses: Women’s Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth-Century India

Farhat Hasan, Voices in Verses: Women’s Poetry and Cultural Memory in Nineteenth-Century India, 2024, 205 pp., ₹1,095, Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-1-009-45303-5.

This is a study of two Urdu tazkirat from late 19th-century North India. Neither the Baharistan-i-Naz (‘The Blandishments of Spring’; 1882/1965) by Hakim Fasihuddin ‘Ranj’, the first Urdu compendium of women’s verse to be published, nor the Tazkirat-un-Nisa (‘Women’s Life Stories’; 1884/2016) by Durga Prashad ‘Nadir’ has received book-length treatment thus far. Farhat Hasan’s interest in this material as a historian of ‘Hindustan’ makes an important beginning.

The tazkira is a significant genre of critical biographical and literary writing in Urdu. As Frances Pritchett and others have noted, its travels from Persian to Urdu have been consequential for the construction of poetic traditions (Pritchett, 2003). Critical labour in this genre is distributed between the collection and compilation of verse, biographical information on poets, and literary commentary. By the mid-19th century, the tazkira was a well-established part of Urdu literary culture, often including verse in both Persian and Urdu. However, Ranj and Nadir’s compendia made two choices which set them apart from other texts: the first was to focus on women’s verse. The second, in some ways more interesting, was to include poetry by courtesans as well as the ‘parda-nashin’ embodiments of respectability. As the introductions tell us, the aim was to encourage women’s education by presenting models of learning and poetic accomplishment to their readers (43–50). These texts seem to point to the post-1857 political landscape and the search for new kinds of patrons and publics on the part of North Indian literati. Hasan’s reading, however, locates them differently.

Organised alphabetically according to the takhallus or poetic names adopted by Urdu poets, in these compendia ‘Kamman’, the poetic bhang-seller of Bharatpur, is followed by ‘Kaifi’, a ‘princess of the House of Taimur’ (Baharistan, pp. 187–188; Hasan, p. 90). Hasan rightly notes the absence of Victorian moralism and links these editorial choices, instead, in the larger Persianate world of aesthetics and self-fashioning. In an argument drawn from the influential work of Kia (2020), he claims that they exemplify an ‘early modern’ sensibility that does not recognise national borders, and connects life and word through the practice of adab (here, ‘norms of writing and criticism’ but broadly ‘ethical conduct’, pace Barbara Metcalf). Thus, instead of the modern emphasis on national origins separable from the autonomous individual artist’s voice, in the biographical notes and the editorial imagination of these compendia, lineage, teaching pedigree, occupation, even the intellectual and physical qualities of the poets, are inextricably tied to the poetry itself (172).

Strangely enough, the analysis runs along that quintessentially Victorian divide between the home and the world. Two out of the five chapters discuss in some detail the verse produced by courtesans, while the last substantive chapter discusses the poetry of ‘secluded women’. This group includes erstwhile royalty of Mughal and other provenance (Sultan Raziya, Gulbadan Begum, Nur Jahan, Jahanara Begum, the Begums of Awadh), contemporary rulers (the Begums of Bhopal), and ‘memsahibs’ or British women who learned the language and wrote poetry, usually under the tutelage of their ustad. The ‘Conclusion’ restates the arguments made in the book, claiming for the Baharistan and Tazkirat the status of Persianate texts that set out to represent an inclusive, multi-sited literary culture.

The material is undoubtedly rich. Literary battles, reformist ideals, gossip, voices and texts of very different tones and timbre meet in the pages of Ranj and Nadir’s volumes. Voices in Verses lets the differences breathe, and provides the modern reader with the full range of the variation represented in these compendia. The most important contribution made by this book is a glimpse of the original texts through the translations that appear at the end of every chapter, including verse which is also transliterated from the Urdu.

Unfortunately, we are presented with two formidable barriers to enjoying this material: An incoherent theoretical frame and an inexplicable lack of attention to the actual text. On the one hand, Hasan claims that the poetry contained in the tazkira ‘should be read as a kind of life story, involving an effort at self-articulation, and an act of unveiling in a society that insisted on veiling [the poets]—their bodies and speech’ (p. 4) [emphasis added]. A few pages later, however, we read that ‘the important thing for us is to see how these women were remembered in literary spaces, and … make a sense, however vague and imprecise, of popular perceptions of subjectivity and agency’ (p. 10) [emphasis added]. This follows the revelation that much of this verse may be ‘apocryphal’, and our compendia can only provide evidence of the desire of two male litterateurs to represent a range of women’s ‘voices in verse’. This foundational confusion between a historical subject (e.g., Mah Laqa Bai of Hyderabad) and its traces in popular memory (‘Chanda randi’, as the Baharistan refers to her, or indeed A Woman Poet of Persianate Hindustan) haunts the argument throughout. Memory and history may indeed ‘enrich each other’, but this assertion does not help clarify matters.

This has consequences for other parts of the argument. Whether the biographical note is to be approached as an external imposition, as modern readers are wont to do, or to be treated as part of the literary output itself is the kind of Derridean question the genre of the tazkira invites us to ask. It is not taken up consistently here. On the one hand, these texts partake of the fluid ‘Persianate self’ where the strict separation between ‘conformity and creativity’ (frame and text) characteristic of ‘Western thought’ does not hold (p. 13). On the other hand, our post-1857 editors apparently attempt to ‘discipline’ the poets and guide the reader’s judgement, in certain cases, through biographical entries that acknowledge male tutors (p. 20). This sounds very much like the Romantic figure of the individual artist being suppressed by traditions of poetic composition. The ‘multiple mediations’ involved in the production and reception of these texts needed more careful attention. This would mean, at the very least, pushing against binaries like ‘Persian’/‘European’– especially in the period under consideration (p. 12).

Additionally, small mistakes are scattered throughout the book: The mistranslation of Nazakat, Farhat, and the witty Mushtari’s verse (80, 90, 116); the details of the Jang-e-Jamal episode in Islamic history have been printed incorrectly (p. 124).

Certain errors are more interesting than others. Staying with the example of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the couplet included in the Baharistan and Tazkirat is wrongly transcribed, followed by the wrong translation (p. 83): The Dakhani hega (‘is’) in the original is changed to the Rekhta rahega (‘will be’) with bizarre results. The correct couplet and translation can be found in Carla Petievich’s critique of Ranj, which is cited in the book (2005, p. 228). Thus we get:

Akhlaq se to apne waqif jahan hega

Par aapko ghalat kucch ab tak guman hega

This is accompanied by a derisive comment in the Baharistan (‘we had a good laugh over the radif of this couplet’, referring to the last word of each sentence).

Hopefully some of these errors can be corrected in future editions. will no doubt encourage more scholarship on the under-discussed genre of the tazkira, and for that literary and cultural historians, not to mention Urdu-Farsi readers, can only be grateful.