Visiting Fellow, Daniela Bredi, to speak about Women, Language and Literature

The South Asian Studies Council is pleased to host Daniela Bredi for a talk titled “Women, Language and Literature: Begamatî zabân”.

4.30pm, November 2 · Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Daniela Bredi is a Visiting Fellow with the Southa Asian Studies Council for Fall 2011.  She is based at the University Sapienza of Rome (Italy), where she is Associate Professor of History of Islam in South Asia and Lecturer in Muslim Law in the Department of Oriental Studies, and where she also teaches Urdu language and literature. Her research focuses on questions of national integration, gender, and the relation of law and society. Recent publications include “Continuity and change in women‘s role in Indo-Muslim society seen through a few female members of the Tyabji family”, in Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Identities: Studies In South Asian Reform Movements (Oxford, 2008) and “The Destiny of Urdu in Independent India” in Redefining Urdu Politics in India (Oxford, 2006).

Abstract for “Women, Language and Literature”
Until modern times the voice of women was seldom given a chance of being heard in Urdu literature. Women aspiring to be inscribed in the number of literati had to master the high language of male poets. When Urdu the Persian mode gained exclusive dominance in Urdu ghazal everywhere in India, the feminine voice disappeared altogether but for a quite curious genre of poetry that made use of the specific female idiom of Urdu.  Begamatî zabân, the language of women, whose adoption was denied to cultured women willing to share, at least intellectually, the space reserved for men, was taken up by male poets, giving birth to the rekhtî  genre.  Rekhtî  intentionally makes use of a language crudely realistic, and although there is no evidence that this kind of literature was popular with women, nevertheless rekhtî gives voice to women in so much that it mostly depicts a woman speaking to another about her delusions and anxieties, the infidelity of husbands or the daring of her companions who ventured into social taboos. And, linguistically, it provides a good collection concerning the idioms spoken by the women of the time, items that are precious for a socio-historical reconstruction of their way of living and their environment. Whatever the intentions of rekhtî poets in assuming the idiom of women as their poetic language, they preserved a precious instrument for the knowledge of the non-official aspects of Indo-Muslim culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, begamatî zabân was the mark of a subculture heavily imbued with pre-Islamic local beliefs, equally shared by women belonging to all strata of society, and quite far from scripturalist religion. The reforming of women became then an imperative for the westernised and modernising élite: zanâna culture  had to disappear to make room for the new woman that the new man and the changing times needed. Upper and middle class women, especially those who attended English-medium schools dropped progressively the words and expressions of begamatî zabân. Women, increasingly alienated from the culture of the harem, made their voice heard in standard, mainstream Urdu and English, and went beyond.