The Mughal Aviary - (Literary Studies) by Sabiha Huq (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This volume delves into the literary lives of four Muslim women in pre-modern India. Three of them, Gulbadan Begam (1523-1603), the youngest daughter of Emperor Babur, Jahanara (1614-1681), the eldest daughter of Emperor Shah Jahan, and Zeb-un-Nissa (1638-1702), the eldest daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb, belonged to royalty. Thus, they were inhabitants of the Mughal 'zenana', an enigmatic liminal space of qualified autonomy and complex equations of gender politics. Amidst such constructs, Gulbadan Begam's 'Humayun-Nama' (biography of her half-brother Humayun, reflecting on the lives of Babur's wives and daughters), Jahanara's hagiographies glorifying Mughal monarchy, and Zeb-un-Nissa's free-spirited poetry that landed her in Aurangzeb's prison, are discursive literary outputs from a position of gendered subalternity. While the subjective selves of these women never much surfaced under extant rigid conventions, their indomitable understanding of 'home-world' antinomies determinedly emerge from their works. This monograph explores the political imagination of these Mughal women that was constructed through statist interactions of their royal fathers and brothers, and how such knowledge percolated through the relatively cloistered communal life of the 'zenana'. The fourth woman, Habba Khatoon (1554-1609), famously known as 'the Nightingale of Kashmir', offers an interesting counterpoint to her royal peers. As a common woman who married into royalty (her husband Yusuf Shah Chak was the ruler of Kashmir in 1579-1586), her happiness was short-lived with her husband being treacherously exiled by Emperor Akbar. Khatoon's verse, which voices the pangs of separation, was that of an ascetic who allegedly roamed the valley, and is famed to have introduced the 'lol' (lyric) into Kashmiri poetry. Across genres and social positions of all these writers, this volume intends to cast hitherto unfocused light on the emergent literary sensibilities shown by Muslim women in pre-modern India.

Review Quotes

"Sabiha Huq's 'Mughal Aviary' will go a long way in filling a gap in recent scholarship in women's writings in the pre-modern and pre-colonial India in bringing to light four forgotten women writers of the Mughal period, engaged in a struggle to find a place alongside the more prominent male writers of their time. With painstaking research, compassion, and refreshing insights into their personal and social lives, Huq investigates the reasons why each should be studied in their own right for their powerful work in hagiography, biography or poetry. The book shows quality scholarship in four particular areas: in its analysis of how the women writers appropriated the male language and undercut its dominance and power by bringing into play female sensibility and the subtle use of female language; its emphasis on the need to place these writers against the complex political, social and gender issues of their time for an understanding of how they fought for their creative autonomy; its rejection of the western stereotyping of Asian women as historically muted and as inferior sexed subjects by showing the strength of the women in rising above their limitations, and its success in presenting a more rounded portrait of these women as trailblazers, achievers, fighters and creators of a countercanon which influenced many later writers and scholars."

Syed Manzoorul Islam

University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh

"The book should appeal to anyone interested in the Mughal period of Indian history, aristocratic Muslim women's lives in the period, and Indian women's writing and feminism in general. It will undoubtedly attract readers interested in reading about women who transcend the limitations imposed on them by the age in which they live and write. While the work is original in conception, individual chapters reveal Huq's conscientious dependence on pertinent scholarship."

Fakrul Alam

UGC Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka