Imagination and the Gendered Self in South Asia

Abstract

For anyone studying women’s histories, it has become an essential task to forewarn that these stories do not yield transparent subjects. The following review looks at five different texts which commit to this undertaking, offering overlapping and divergent ways to read women’s writings in South Asia. Stretched across the early modern, modern and contemporary period, these scholars delve into how women writers have confronted issues of embodiment, labour, kinship, desire and politics. Appreciative of how the regulation of intimacy between bodies has produced histories of both liberation and oppression, their studies acknowledge that sometimes the writer will only be available as a spectre haunting the overdetermined archives of colonialism, religion and caste. Still, taking on Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, they enquire what practices of listening might help us read narratives of/by the gendered subaltern. In Piro and the Gulabdasis, Anshu Malholtra offers a microhistory of a ‘dera’, a sect, of the monist Guru Gulabdas, while focusing on one of its members who was both an everywoman and singular in her literary expression of multiple marginalities. The primary text under consideration is Ik Sau Sath Kafian (160 Kafis) by a Gulabdasi named Piro, an autobiographical ‘fragment’ as opposed to a comprehensive story of her life. Malhotra’s intention is not to ‘fill the gaps’ within the kafis but read through the text to ‘apprehend the processes’ around someone who was a Muslim prostitute/courtesan from Lahore, deemed ‘lower caste’ and who chose to join a devotional sect.1 The ‘micro’-ness of this historical narrative might refer to a smallness of scale but can also allude to the everyday oppressions Piro highlights because she speaks from an ‘anomalous’ standpoint.2 Her work takes on ‘larger conglomerations’ as she sharply criticises ‘Hindus’ or ‘Turks’/’Musalmans’ for professing religion through