Synopses & Reviews
This book explores the urban, cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Lucknow, which was the center of a flourishing Indo-Islamic culture. Ruth Vanita analyzes Rekhti, a type of Urdu poetry distinguished by a female speaker and a focus on women's lives, and shows how it became a catalyst for the transformation of the love poem.
Review
"The book belongs to my favorite genre, where the translations, excellent as they are, push the reader toward tasting the 'original. - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, series editor (with Hosam Aboul-Ela) of Theory in the World
Synopsis
Explores the urban, cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Lucknow. Ruth Vanita analyzes Rekhti, a type of Urdu poetry distinguished by a female speaker and a focus on women's lives, and shows how it becamea catalyst for the transformation of the ghazal.
About the Author
Ruth Vanita is a visiting professor in the South Asia Language Area Center at the University of Chicago.
Table of Contents
Women in the City: Inner and Outer Worlds * Women in the City: Fashioning the Self * Eloquent Parrots: Gender and Language *Servants, Vendors, Providers: the City's Many Voices * Neither Straight Nor Crooked: Love and Friendship in the City * Challenging and Changing Literary Convention: Sex in the City * 'I'm a real sweetheart': Masculinity and Male-Male Desire * Styling Urban Glamour: Courtesan and Poet* Camping it Up: Jan Saheb and His Followers * The Poetics of Play: Hybridity, Difference, Modernity * Play, Pleasure, and the Modern Indian Imagination