About Book
Gender, Sex and the City explores the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the city of Lucknow, which was the centre of a flourishing Indo-Persian culture. Through its ground-breaking analysis, it demonstrates how rek_h_ti (a type of Urdu poetry whose distinguishing features are a female speaker and a focus on women’s lives) and to some degree, non-mystical rek_h_ta(mainstream Urdu poetry with a male speaker), for the first time in Urdu represent women (both of conventional families and courtesan households) as important shapers of urban culture, especially urban speech.
Vanita analyses how rek_h_ti¯ becomes a catalyst for the transformation of the g_h_azal, first, by focusing it not on love alone but on the practices, spaces and rituals of everyday life; second, by bringing subordinated figures, such as women as well as servants centre-stage; and, third, by challenging the g_h_azal’s ideal of perfect love as framed by separation and suffering.
Women characters in rek_h_ti¯ fall in love, but they also work, shop, dress, sing, dance, eat, fast, chat, quarrel, pray, invoke spirits, and voice opinions on many matters. The author explores the way rek_h_ti¯ reconfigures the city from women’s perspective, depicting a parallel world of urban women’s meeting places, networks and rituals.
The first book-length study in English of rek_h_ti¯ and also of non-mystical rek_h_ta, it demonstrates the interplay between the twoin language, form and content. Including many first-time translations and also analyses of neglected poems, such as Rangin’s Mas?nawi Dilpazir and Jur’at’s K_h_w?a¯ja H?asan-o? Bak_h_shi¯ T?wa¯’if, (a romance with a courtesan heroine), it also studies in detail the works of Insha and Nisbat, among others.
With several more transcribed poems than in its US edition, this book is a must-read for students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies and culture studies.
About Author
Ruth Vanita is Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at the University of Montana, USA. She was formerly Reader at the University of Delhi, India, and was founding co-editor of India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, Manushi.