“This is an intellectually stimulating and theoretically sophisticated

book generating new directions in feminist analysis and in the field

of Women and Gender Studies. It is an amalgamation of aesthetic
theory with more recent transdisciplinary approaches from Women
and Gender Studies to explore and reimagine feminist aesthetics
and gender binaries through diverse art forms, including clay sculp-
ture from the Indus valley, rasa theory, and the ‘rekhta’ ghazal.
Theoretically rich and complex, the book promises to be an impor-
tant document in the way it connects diverse and seemingly dispa-
rate fields. Its marshalling of arguments shows a vast range of
reading, a sure grasp of diverse disciplines and the ability and artic-
ulation to bring it all together to develop a coherent and convinc-
ing narrative.”
Meenakshi Malhotra, Associate Professor of English, Hansraj
College, University of Delhi; Editorial Board Member, Borderless;
Member of the Department Research Committee of the School of
Gender and Development Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open
University; and Member of the Board of Studies for English, SRM
University, Sonepat, India
 FEMINIST THEORY AND THE AESTHETICS
WITHIN

This book re-examines feminist theory through the lens of South Asian aesthetic con-
ventions drawn from iconography, philosophy, Indo-Islamic mystic folk traditions and
poetics. It discusses alternate fluid representations of gender and intersectional identi-
ties and interrelationships in some dominant as well as non-elite Indic aesthetic tradi-
tions. The book explores pre-Vedic sculptural and Indus terracotta iconographies, the
classical aesthetic philosophy of rasa, mystic folk poetry of Bhakti and Sufi move-
ments, and ghazal and Urdu poetics to understand the political dimension of feminist
theory in India as well as its implications for trans-continental feminist aesthetics
across South Asia and the West. By interlinking prehistoric, classical, medieval, pre-
modern and contemporary aesthetic and literary traditions of South Asia through a
gendered perspective, the book bridges a major gap in feminist theory.
An interdisciplinary work, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of
feminist theory, women’s studies, gender studies, art and aesthetics, philosophy, lit-
erature, cultural studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, political studies, sociology
and South Asian studies.

Anu Aneja is currently Director of the Women and Gender Studies program at
George Mason University, USA. She has research interests in the areas of transnational
feminist theory and aesthetics, particularly their inventive crossings across South Asia
and the West. Other areas of interest include contemporary French, francophone and
Indian literatures, feminist perspectives on mothering, and feminist pedagogy. She is
the co-author (with Shubhangi Vaidya) of Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from
Contemporary India (2016). Her edited collections include a comprehensive anthol-
ogy, Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings (2019), which maps the con-
temporary contours of the field, and an edited volume on Gender & Distance
Education: Indian and International Contexts (2019). She has also published a
Hindustani translation of Hélène Cixous’s French play L’Indiade our l’Inde de leurs
rêves. Her research articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited
anthologies. Aneja currently serves as Area Advisor of ‘Gender and Education’ for the
digital edition of Oxford Bibliographies and on the Editorial Board of the Gender and
Education journal. She has previously taught at the School of Gender and Development
Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University, and at the Ohio Wesleyan University,
where she was the recipient of the Rebecca Brown Professor of Literature award. She
received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Penn State University and a
Bachelor’s in French from Jawaharlal Nehru University.
 FEMINIST THEORY AND
THE AESTHETICS WITHIN
A Perspective from South Asia

Anu Aneja
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Anu Aneja
The right of Anu Aneja to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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ISBN: 978-0-367-21901-7 (hbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995
Typeset in Sabon
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To my parents,
and to all those others who carted fragments
of memories, images, songs and ghazals
across the space-times of partitioned South Asian sands.
 CONTENTS

List of figures x
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Feminist theory and the aesthetic re-turn 14

2 Sculpting gender and sexuality by the Indus 28

3 Rasa: in dialogue with feminist aesthetics 63

4 The errant feminine of Bhakti and Sufi aesthetics 91

5 ‘Speaking with Women’: the promise of the pre-modern

Urdu ghazal 121

6 Traveling with the ghazal: a transnational feminist aesthetic 152

7 Turning back towards the future: feminist conversations

with South Asian art 193

Index 199

ix
 FIGURES

2.1 Standing figure of the mother goddess 31

2.2 Female figurine with fan-shaped headdress 32
2.3 Three male figurines from Harappa 38
2.4 Male figurine with a fan-shaped headdress from Harappa 38
2.5 Female figurine with a decorated belt and ‘skirt’ from Harappa 39
2.6 Seated male pre-history, 2700–2100 BCE, hand-modelled,
Harappa 41
2.7 The terracotta model from its left side 43
2.8 Detail of the same group. Left side, from a different angle 43
2.9 From the left side, the terracotta figurines sit along the
broadsides, and the central aisle is in the middle. Females
and males are alternated, and the females are in front 44
2.10 The enthroned lady 45
2.11 The enthroned lady from left 46
2.12 The model seen frontally 47
2.13 The last female and male figurines of the left side 48
2.14 The ‘prow’ from rear, with two male ‘attendants’ standing
aside the staircase and the red-slipped cavity behind the
bull’s head 50
2.15 Bronze dancing girl from Mohanjo-daro 56
3.1 Image of two women in pleasure on the outer walls of the
Konark Sun Temple, Odisha, thirteenth century 75

x
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of this book, in particular its

gendered analysis of South Asian iconography and poetry, has been contin-
gent on the kindness of various people and organizations who provided
prompt assistance with images, poems and permissions. The discussion of
Indus valley clay figurines that touches upon critical issues recurring
throughout the book would not have been feasible without the timely sup-
port of several individuals from whom I obtained original photographs for
reproduction. For the images sourced from Harappa.com that appear in
Chapter 2, I am most thankful to Dr. Omar Khan for his generosity (with
due credit for copyright permissions to Richard H. Meadow/Harappa.com,
courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of
Pakistan). For the fascinating photographs by Federica Aghadian that first
appeared in the book Lady of the Spiked Throne, I am very grateful to the
author, Dr. Massimo Vidale, who kindly provided the permissions for
reproducing the images here (courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL SpA).
I would like to acknowledge the ready help provided by the curators at the
National Museum, New Delhi, for the use of three Indus valley images that
are included in the same chapter.
Likewise, this book would have been quite incomplete without the poems
and ghazals cited in various chapters. These include the elegant translations
of some of Meera’s songs by Shama Futehally that were cited in Chapter 4
and that appeared in an early edition of her collection In the Dark of the
Heart: Songs of Meera. I am indebted to several eminent scholars of Sanskrit
and Urdu poetry and literature for allowing me to use their translations of
verses that appear in various chapters. Among these are Sheldon Pollock,
whose brilliant analyses of rasa theory in his Rasa Reader and in other
scholarship helped me to visualize the grounding for envisaging new femi-
nist rasas. Anne Murphy, who kindly shared her insightful scholarship on
Sufi thought and literature with me; Renuka Narayanan, who writes widely
on religion and culture; and Shemeem Burney Abbas, whose work on the
female voice in Sufism highlights the importance of women ethnographers
in the field, were all generous enough to permit the use of their English

xi
 A cknowledgements

translations of some of Bulle Shah’s timeless verses from Punjabi. I continue

to benefit from their thoughtful work.
During the spring semester of 1996, I had the singular and most pleasur-
able opportunity to sit in on a course on the Urdu Ghazal offered by the
esteemed writer and teacher, Aditya Behl, at the University of California
Berkeley. I will remain eternally grateful to him for introducing me to the
elegance of the ghazal form and its many nuanced textures through the
work of several illustrious Urdu poets and scholars. For most of the ghazal
excerpts cited in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book, I am immensely grateful to
the Rekhta Foundation for their courtesy. An investigation of the genre of
the ghazal from a gendered perspective has been integral to my conceptual-
izing of a dialogue between feminist theory and South Asian aesthetic tradi-
tions. Excerpts from ghazals by pre-modern as well as contemporary poets,
including Ishrat Aafreen, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed, sourced from
Rekhta.org, have been vital for this discussion, which otherwise would have
remained quite lacking.
Without the generosity of the poets whose verse has inspired and ani-
mated some of my reflections, this book would have unquestionably lacked
vibrancy. Patricia Smith was kind enough to grant me the permission to
publish her lively ‘Hip-Hop Ghazal’ that energizes the ghazal form with
fresh innovative energies and speaks to it from unexplored margins. I would
like to extend a special thanks to Heather McHugh for granting me permis-
sion to reprint her poem, ‘Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun’, which originally
appeared in the 1999 edition of The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan
University Press, © Heather McHugh). I am equally grateful to Carole
Stone for allowing me to reproduce her exquisite moonlit poem ‘Summer’s
End’ as part of a discussion of the ghazal form in Chapter 6 and to Muse-
Pie Press and Shot Glass Journal for facilitating the permissions. Agha
Shahid Ali, whom I had the rare fortune to get to know (albeit briefly) dur-
ing graduate student days at Penn State, will remain forever spirited and
vivacious in my memory, just as he was then. To his timeless ghazals and
poems, I owe many of my reading pleasures and inspiration for delving into
the mysteries of the ghazal form across genders and continents. I am
indebted to W. W. Norton for granting me the permission to cite from some
of Shahid’s unfading verse.
Thanks to Taylor & Francis for permitting the inclusion of a substan-
tially revised version of my chapter ‘Feminist theory and the aesthetic re-
turn’ that first appeared in Women’s and Gender Studies: Crossings (2019)
and that became the premise for many of the ideas advanced and devel-
oped in this book. For their helpful preliminary readings of an earlier ver-
sion of this chapter and for their many insightful comments, I remain most
grateful to Meenakshi Malhotra and Deepti Priya Mehrotra. As always,
thanks to Shoma Choudhury for her gracious behind-the-scenes support
and to Rimina Mohapatra for her attentive care in overseeing this manu-
script to completion.

xii
 A cknowledgements

Finally, all of my family, many friends who are now family, and various
generous colleagues, old as well as new, have been part of the transtemporal
and transcontinental voyage that this book embarks upon and that also
quite literally became my own during its evolution. Their warmth, concern
and unflagging enthusiasm ensured the safe culmination of both journeys.
To all of them I owe two happy landings.

xiii
 INTRODUCTION

The title of this book brings together three terms – ‘feminist theory’,
‘aesthetics’ and ‘South Asia’ – each laden with its own histories, contours,
epistemologies and interpretations. Let me then begin by expanding on these
terms and their interlinkages as these have been envisioned in this study. The
first two – ‘feminist theory’ and ‘aesthetics’ – have been adequately addressed
within the disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains of philosophy, aesthet-
ics, gender studies, and literary and cultural studies, among others. In this
book, their juxtaposition underscores the feminist approach that undergirds
my readings of past aesthetic traditions in South Asia. The third term, ‘South
Asia’, lays out the geo-­political and geographic boundaries that determine
the scope of this study, although within this region, my focus has largely
been delimited to the northern and northwestern provinces of the Indo-­
Pakistan subcontinent, the rationale for which I return to shortly.
Though I discuss the relationship between feminist theory and aesthetics
in greater detail in the ensuing chapter, let me preface those comments here
by dwelling briefly on their interplay, as has been undertaken in a growing
body of scholarship in the field of feminist aesthetics.1 The term ‘aesthetics’
itself has been the subject of varying disciplinary opinions in recent times.
Peg Brand, in her excellent summation of some of the developments in the
field in the West, remarks that although ‘aesthetics is sometimes considered
synonymous with the philosophy of art’ it is ‘a field within philosophy –
generally regarded as a more recent area of study beginning in the eigh-
teenth century – involving theories of perception that focus on the
apprehension of beauty and other qualities of intrinsic value’ (2007: 254).
In its most rudimentary interpretation, ‘feminist aesthetics’ qualifies
‘aesthetics’ through the deployment of feminist perspectives brought to bear
on the latter. Feminist incursions into the overlapping domains of aesthetics
and philosophy, as Brand goes on to show, have introduced and emphasized
the relevance of a variety of previously overlooked subjects, including non-­
aesthetic and contextual aspects such as ‘ethics, politics, or history’, that
were previously ‘considered extraneous to the work of art’ (2007: 255).
Brand’s characterisation of the term ‘feminist aesthetics’ as ‘the interplay of
feminist theorizing and aesthetics’ (2007: 255) suggests an intimate

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-1 1
 INTRODUCTION

connection between the two terms, and it is the weight of this interchange in
the context of South Asia that I attempt to address here.
In encapsulating the work of feminist approaches in aesthetics, Brand
recapitulates some significant efforts that continue to evolve. Consequently,
the ‘reclamation of artists from obscurity’ (Brand 2007: 256) that laid the
foundation to the field of feminist aesthetics has been followed by feminist
challenges to the privileging of disinterestedness in classic Western aesthet-
ics and feminist interruptions of such instances through the insertion of
contextual factors, including ethical, socio-­political, cultural and historical,
that were conventionally considered ‘non-­ aesthetic’ (Brand 2007: 257–
258). The resistance to such incursions by analytic aesthetics in the West is,
in fact, viewed by Brand as at least partially responsible for the slower
acceptance of feminist approaches within the field of aesthetics (see Brand
2007: 257), an issue with which I engage more fully in the next chapter, in
international contexts as well as in the specific context of India, where the
relationship between feminist theory and aesthetics has been shaped by the
history of the women’s movement.
Brand’s discussion of the interaction between ‘feminism’ and ‘aesthetics’
illuminates a common ground between the two domains, increasingly
acknowledged across the fields of feminist theory and philosophy in current
times. This common ground, I believe, stems from the shared, critical role
played by transformative imagination, an idea and process that is central to
both feminist theory and aesthetics; where feminist theorizing relies on the
ideation made possible by imagination to envision a transformation in per-
ceptions of identity within a larger network of social relations, fantasy and
its transformative emotive effects are defining elements within the domain
of aesthetics. Through the revolutionary power of the imagination, both
feminism and aesthetics hold the capability to bring about shifts in percep-
tions of reality, the scattered effects of which continue to shape experience
in its empirical as well as emotive configurations, much like the sustained
‘delayed release’ impact of certain prescription medicines. When these
effects impinge upon questions of identity, its social constructedness, and its
shifting dynamics within a larger network of social relations in ways that
interrupt and re-­route their taken-­for-­granted delineations, such events sig-
nal the common ‘political’ impetus that may be detected in both feminism
and aesthetics.
It seems to me that the central role of imagination in the dialectical rela-
tion between feminism and aesthetics offers a viable bridge to the context
of South Asia and a suitable methodological approach for bringing together
this triad of terms in this study. In her discussion of some of the envisioned
interdisciplinary and intersectional developments that may emerge in the
composite domain of feminist aesthetics, Peg Brand has remarked that ‘phi-
losophers crossing disciplines are voraciously interested in the makeup and
functions of emotions, psychological studies on perception and resultant
value judgments, and the role of imagination in creating fictions’ (263).

2
 INTRODUCTION

From a South Asian ‘positionality’, an interdisciplinary methodological

framework that encompasses theories of culture, value and sexuality and
embraces the role of imagination in revised gendered approaches to art
seems particularly germane in bringing to the fore subterranean meanings
of bygone aesthetic traditions that represent world views as divergent as
myth, folklore, religion, philosophical theorizations on art, affect and sen-
sory pleasure, mystic attitudes towards creative activity, and poetry as
shared cultural knowledge and as a form of witness to social protest, among
many others. An imagination-­ based interdisciplinary approach has the
additional value of functioning as a conduit between the seemingly distinct
disciplinary evolutions of aesthetics in the separate worlds of the West and
South Asia because it enables the deployment of common lenses of gender,
sexuality, class, religion and other forms of intersectional identity, even
though the results of such analyses could lead to entirely distinct, contextu-
alized outcomes.
Of course, contextual interdisciplinary approaches are not confined to
Western feminist scholarship. Beyond the West, contextual approaches have
been emphasized in recent years by scholars interested in gendered perspec-
tives in the domain of archaeology, an area of scholarship with which
I engage in the context of the ancient clay art of the Indus valley. In their
work on Southwest Asian prehistory, for instance, Diane Bolger and Rita P.
Wright (2013), highlight a recent shift towards contextual gendered
approaches that they find especially useful in combating the ‘gender ideolo-
gies’ that have burdened much prior work in prehistoric archaeology.
According to Bolger and Wright, gender ideologies transform social realities
(386) because ‘ideologies convey powerful messages by masking or natural-
izing a particular view of the world and by confounding the social and the
natural order’ (387). Their perceptive commentary prompts us to remain
attentive to the critical necessity of teasing out repressed meanings in our
readings of artworks of the past, especially those that may have been
masked over by masculist ideologies and interpretations.
As we zoom in from this broad transnational context to the more specific
one of South Asia, particularly that of Indic art, we find similar emphases
on interdisciplinarity and the role of affect and imagination in some recent
scholarship. For instance, Shubhangana Atre (2011) places an analogous
emphasis on interdisciplinary, eclectic perspectives in her exploration of
archaeological approaches to the archetypal feminine in Indic prehistory
and mythology. Citing the work of Wendy O’Flaherty, Atre emphasizes the
use of an interdisciplinary, eclectic ‘bricolage’ that has the ability to unravel
the correspondences between ‘myth and theory, myth and life’ (O’Flaherty
cited in Atre 2011: 174). Such an eclectic approach may prove most fruitful
in the broad context of South Asian aesthetics where, as already noted, the
evolution of artistic traditions has been witness to concurrent emphases on
philosophical and religious thought, on epistemological concerns and on
the realm of myth, metaphor and fantasy. A heterogeneous, resourceful

3
 INTRODUCTION

feminist lens that attempts to interpret the traces of faded markings that lie
concealed underneath dominant ideological readings can gain from this
‘toolbox’ (Atre 2011: 173) approach, particularly in its encounter with aes-
thetic traditions homed in realms as diverse as iconography, philosophical
inquiry, mysticism and poetry.
Additionally, in the context of prehistoric South Asian art, I find most
expedient Atre’s cue about Robert Graves’s notion of ‘analepsis’ (see Atre
2011: 164), a perspective I take up again in my discussion of the art of the
Indus valley civilization. Suffice it to say, here, that in regard to ancient
archetypal forms, stories and meanings sculpted onto clay and stone, ‘ana-
lepsis’ offers a particularly revelatory way of approaching past narratives to
make sense of the present and even perhaps to hint at clues to the future.
Atre acknowledges that analepsis is ‘not a valid historical methodology’ for
historians, for whom ‘myths, which have come down by oral tradition and
have all the appearance of imaginary fabrications are the last choice’ (2011:
164–165). However, as she points out in the context of prehistoric archae-
ology, analepsis with its reliance on the role of imagination and fantasy may
provide the most fitting entry into the meanings of the past. This is a jour-
ney that takes us into a remote ‘time-­before-­time’ past where

the sense of specific chronology transforms into the sense of a

broader time stratum: each stratum enlarging and becoming haz-
ier than the later till it is left mostly unavailable to primary
cognition. … There are certain undercurrents that emerge in the
way of commonalities during the free interplay of ideas. These
commonalities are our clues to the prehistoric and historic human
mind and its creations.
(2011: 165)

Here, in the absence of written narratives, ‘[t]he “unavailable-­to-­primary-­

cognition” layers of poetic myths and the hidden sources of human creativ-
ity reflected in the artifacts can be reached only through analepsis, often at
the risk of stepping out of the bounds of historical methodology’ (2011:
165). In bringing to bear contemporary feminist theoretical perspectives on
the ancient aesthetic traditions of South Asia, this turn to the imaginative
powers of memory, flashback and reconstruction may promise a relatively
more ‘efficient’ manner of chiselling out repressed meanings; where these
have direct consequences for revised gendered understandings of ancient
art, they may also inaugurate contextualized political alliances between
feminist theory and aesthetics.
Interestingly, the etymology of ‘analepsis’ transports us back to the Greek
analēpsis, to the act of ‘taking up’, and its subsequent uplifting, restorative
connotations in middle English and French. In medical vocabulary, analep-
tics have restorative, invigorating effects on the central nervous system. In
literary terms, analeptic strategies suggest a recovery through retrospection

4
 INTRODUCTION

and anachrony, an interruption of present narratives through flashbacks

that recover and imbue new meanings into the present. An analeptic
approach thus invites re-­visitations of the past not for a mere chronological
recording of history but rather for bringing the past into the present in
recuperative ways. In all of these healing and invigorating connotations,
analepsis thus helps to conjoin the past and the present with a futurity
envisioned through an anachronous revivification. In other words, the past
becomes accessible through a re-­imagination that probes beyond its empir-
ical verité, in an attempt to seek out its abiding experiential links with the
present and the future.
Where analepsis enables us to re-­interpret the past with the help of imagi-
nation, the Sankofa2 bird from Ghana offers an equally suggestive symbol
of learning from the past for navigating the future. With its head rotated
backwards and holding an egg in its beak, the Sankofa bird evokes the
birthing and nurturing of knowledge as a bridge between past, present and
future. This symbolism seems to me especially meaningful in re-­traversing
the layered cultural heritage of South Asian aesthetic traditions that have
evolved on the basis of the gradual accretion of philosophical and aesthetic
concepts whetted by epistemological questions that artists and philosophers
have grappled with through the ages in the domain of art.
In such a telescopic, uninterrupted view of the past as a zone that lives on
in our present and future experiences through its continuities and deferred
influences, it may become possible to adopt the analeptic stance, like the
rotated head of the Sankofa bird, as a manner of identifying endurances
that reject the idea of past, present and future as distinct periodic stages. In
reminiscing about a paper he presented at a conference in Aurangabad,
Makarand Paranjape reminds us of these deep temporal interconnections in
his musings on time: ‘Time past suddenly becomes time present; the past
persists into the present, showing its hand most unexpectedly. It is not so
much that time is cyclical, but all time is present at this very moment’
(2016). This almost Borgesian view of time as anachrony, and not merely
cyclic, disrupts the notion of knowledge as evolutionary progress with one
that suggests a layered unfurling of knowledge across time. In such a world
view, the past is no longer cherished as the domain of interred artefacts to
be examined from an insurmountable distance; rather, it allows us to recog-
nize the legacies that continue to reside within us and that, in fact, consti-
tute our present subjectivities in the manner of mnemonic genomes.
Here, it would be important to distinguish between those gendered read-
ings of the past that have been burdened under the weight of masculist ideo-
logical constructions and avowedly feminist approaches that seek to unearth
alternate ways in which gender, sexuality and other axes of identity may
have been shaped in the past. Annapurna Garimella’s incisive analysis of
such gendered ideological approaches in the context of Indian art history
may prove equally illuminating in the larger South Asian context. In her
survey of the discourse on Indian art history, Garimella suggests that

5
 INTRODUCTION

although colonial perspectives in service of the European imperialist project

shaped the readings of Indian art as ‘effeminate’ or ‘enervated’, and the
‘Indian artistic mind’ as ‘fantastic and irrational’ and even ‘degenerate’, sub-
sequent nationalist efforts to redeem Indian culture and thought from such a
‘feminizing’ project, by Anand Coomaraswamy, for instance, resulted in a
‘counterdiscourse’ that was equally burdened by ‘gendered metaphors’
(Garimella 1997: 22). Consequently, Garimella argues throughout her essay
that ‘gender has been manipulated to diminish Indian art’ (1997: 22) and
that its history can be read ‘as a gendered and racialized discourse’ (1997: 30)
resulting from subjection to processes of orientalism and nationalism.
In what Garimella describes as the ‘dimorphic representational tool’
(1997: 23) of gender, polarized binary oppositions of masculine and femi-
nine end up getting synthesized only within a hierarchical structure that
firmly establishes the primacy of the former (1997: 24). If, as Teresa de
Lauretis claims and Garimella reiterates, gender is a semiotic apparatus
(Garimella 1997: 24), that is, if gender produces meaning as well as shapes
reality through its ‘meaning-­effects’ (1997: 24), the significance of revising
these meaning-­ effects through feminist theorizations that unravel and
undo overdetermined gendered readings must not be underestimated. The
gendering of discourse and its dispersed socio-­political effects have direct
consequences on how meanings are produced and how these impact not
only women’s gendered and intersectional experiences but equally those
of queer and transgendered persons, refugees and those others conceived
in perpetual estrangement in social structures that rely on exclusivity for
a consolidation of majoritarian power. The discursive elaborations that
theory brings to its subjects of analysis can in no way be isolated from
their larger political effects since theoretical analysis embodies the capa-
bility to bring to the surface curbed meanings that may have very immedi-
ate as well as scattered social and cultural implications. Feminist
perspectives on art thus can bring to light this particular bond between
theorizing, aesthetics and politics. Proceeding from this hypothesis,
I attempt two interlinked moves in this study: the first is to push back, as
suggested by Garimella and others, against prior ideological readings that
have proved burdensome in progressing towards a feminist futurity; the
second, and more significant, effort in the context of this project is a move
forward that seeks present and future interlinkages between feminist the-
ory and the alternate ways in which gender and sexuality were conceived
and represented in select South Asian aesthetic traditions in the past. In
the next chapter, I elaborate on these efforts to establish transtemporal
and liminal interlinkages with the past as a way of conceiving present
challenges and future possibilities.
In her discussion, Garimella poses a provocative question – ‘whether gen-
der, as a representative technology, enables an empowering counterdis-
course’ (1997: 34) – one which, towards the end of her analysis, leaves her
asking ‘if feminisation as representational strategy ever signifies anything

6
 INTRODUCTION

but an inadequacy or lack?’ (1997: 37). Figuring that an onerous legacy of

too much historical ‘overdetermination’ (Garimella 1997: 37) cancels the
possibility of ‘a simple reversal’, she infers that ‘feminization is a dubious
strategy for empowerment’ in such an intellectual and political sphere
(1997: 38). Moving beyond this caveat, Garimella proceeds to stress the
critical importance of trenchant critiques that undo the gendered strategies
of colonial as well as nationalist perspectives so that such strategies ‘no
longer have the capacity to signify historical practices in polarized, gen-
dered terms’ but serve rather as an articulation of femininity and masculin-
ity as differential categories (1997: 38). Garimella’s call for a move beyond
‘generalizations rendered in gendered language’, the need to ‘read against
the grain to imagine alternative histories’ and her speculative hope that
‘perhaps it may become possible to write of other space, texts, times when
gender operated in other ways’ (1997: 38) inspires us to push beyond mere
‘feminization’ and intervene with feminist re-­visionings of past aesthetic
and epistemological traditions. It thus brings us back to the critical role of
feminist theory in its imaginative ‘interplay’ with aesthetics.
By reading against the grain, as Garimella invites us to do, I hope not
only to generate, even if fortuitously, feminist perceptions and interroga-
tions at the heart of Indic aesthetic theories, within aesthetic traditions con-
ventionally associated with ‘authentic’ culture, but equally to counter
(South Asian) culture’s way of habitually locating feminist viewpoints as
foreign to itself. In this process, I wish to suggest an alternative to the reac-
tive and adversarial position into which feminism is repeatedly cornered in
the context of South Asia and perhaps beyond its borders too. Particularly
in contemporary India, the part of South Asia most familiar to me, the ‘pur-
ist’ impulse to relegate feminism to an outsider role in a relentless solidifica-
tion of East/West and Culture/Feminism divides needs to be called into
question since it does so by cannily representing feminism as a polluting
influence – one that does not belong to ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’ but instead
threatens these from a foreign (that is, Western) vantage point. A feminist
dialogue with indigenous aesthetic traditions becomes all the more urgent
given the centrality and significance of ‘culture’ and its associated signs and
symbols in contemporary social and political discourse. At this crucial junc-
ture, feminist aesthetics, by interacting with ‘culture’ and aesthetic theory
from within, may help test and illuminate the porosity of culture and its
receptivity towards revision and progressive change. Here, I am mindful of
the very diverse ways in which ‘culture’ has interfaced with feminist histo-
ries in the West and in India, as has been persuasively argued by Mary E.
John (2019), for instance. But these differences, as John asserts, should not
become ‘cause for paralysis’ (John 2019: 39).
How, then, do we move forward and resist such a paralysis? Makarand
Paranjape’s counsel may prove helpful in this context. In order to seek out
the offerings that the past can hold out for present and future times, Paranjape
proposes that it is important, paradoxically, to approach tradition in

7
 INTRODUCTION

‘radically unpredictable ways’ (Paranjape 2016). To his own rhetorical

question ‘who upholds tradition, who renews it?’, Paranjape responds:

Not always the official custodian, the accepted law-­giver, or cus-

tomary agent of the past. Only the exemplar, one who lives it, can
renew tradition. The exemplary figure is exceptional, but not
uncommon, occurring at all levels and strata of society.
(2016)

The notion of such an exemplary but ‘not uncommon’ figure brings to mind
the image of someone fired by imagination, perhaps the artist, the revolu-
tionary or the feminist. Advancing Paranjape’s line of reasoning, I suggest
that feminist theory’s ability to position itself in imaginative stances towards
culture and tradition may offer a manner of unravelling and bringing to
bear the past in the unexpected and unpredictable ways that Paranjape
declares are essential for a renewal of present and future times. Tradition
and culture in such an inventive approach are not carried forward in the
form of dead relics to be revered and protected from contamination by
privileged custodians, but as revivified experiences open to diverse, novel
possibilities that can surface across social strata. The centrality of imagina-
tion in these efforts foregrounds, again, feminist theory’s contiguity with an
aesthetic perception of the world. It reminds us that feminism and aesthetics
have a common ‘poeticalness’ where the embedded term ‘poetry’ implies an
aesthetic impulse larger than its conventional narrow definition. As
Paranjape declares, ‘Here, we see art (Kunst), poetry, as a setting-­into-­work
of truth, not just an expression, but a safeguarding, so to speak, of truth.
Poetry illuminates the self-­concealment of being. Poetry shows us how
everything, the fourfold, belongs together’ (2016).
With this we arrive at the last of the three terms in the title of this
study – last but not least at all since the term both encompasses and delimits
the scope of the work at hand. The paradoxical category of ‘South Asia’
suggests a geographical unity and temporal continuity of shared histories,
religions, cultures and languages, when in fact it also maps the location of
various fractured national, religious and cultural identities, including those
of the Indo-­Pakistan subcontinent, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,
Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, each of which lays claim to a rich cultural
legacy of its own.
Given the extreme detrimental effects of political fractures and conflic-
tual histories in this part of the world on human lives, destinies, inter-­
personal and inter-­cultural relations, some contemporary critics have called
for the privileging of a common heritage as a way of building bridges.
Referring to an ‘unfractured civilizational history of over three thousand
years’, Harish Trivedi argues that ‘it is this long, common and continuous
literary history that finds reflection in South Asian Literature’ (Trivedi 2005:
189). Given that ‘all of South Asia’ comprises ‘one contiguous and

8
 INTRODUCTION

continuous land-­mass’ (2005: 189), ‘South Asian literature’ is proposed by

Trivedi as a more useful category over other, dated terminologies such as
‘third world’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘commonwealth’ that have, according to
him, outlived their relevance (see 2005: 188). Declaring the term ‘postcolo-
nial’ as having derived ‘its main impetus from the American academy’ and
its ‘compensatory generosity’ and therefore as the ‘most hegemonic’ of all
these labels (2005: 188–189), and ‘third world’ and ‘commonwealth’ as
overburdened by a colonial history of subjugation by the West, Trivedi pro-
poses that to describe the literature of these nations by the collective term
‘South Asian Literature’ has distinct advantages (2005: 189). To convey the
measure of Trivedi’s argument, I cite him here at some length:

Firstly, it comprises literature in our own languages and, secondly,

it comprises not only colonial and postcolonial literature, but also
all of our pre-­colonial literature, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali and Persian,
and in the twenty or more major modern languages directly deriv-
ing from them. Through including the pre-­colonial and the non-­
colonial — for the truth is that the subaltern was never half as
thoroughly colonized or “hybridized” as were the Anglophone
native elite or bhadralok—South Asian Literature signifies a radical
new departure. It runs through, and round, the colonial to draw a
line which connects the pre-­colonial to the postcolonial, and in
the  process it signals a radical departure, to become truly
post-­postcolonial.
To think of our literatures not through Western labels but rather
as South Asian Literature is thus to return to the local and the
indigenous. It is to affirm our long literary history and, further-
more, it is also to align ourselves to our geography.
(189)

As Trivedi argues, South Asia may comprise

separate sovereign nations, and technically we may be foreigners to

each other governed by the regulations of passport and visa. But
the universal republic of poetry, as many of us still believe, is not
subject to the same vagaries as the despotism of politics. In any
case, the notion of the nation itself has in recent years been sub-
jected to intense theoretical and ideological scrutiny as well as cre-
ative interrogation.
(2005: 188)

Trivedi is not alone in his faith in the collective, restorative conception of a

South Asian identity that may help heal the divisive wounds caused by some
of the ruptures of the past. In a similar vein, Sukrita Paul Kumar recalls the
shared civilizational roots of South Asian cultures, particularly those of

9
 INTRODUCTION

Pakistan and India, that may be traced back to the ancient civilization of
Mohenjo-­Daro (Kumar 1997: 82). In the increasingly polarized societies
created in the aftermath of globalization in South Asia, critics like Trivedi
and Kumar remind us about the significance of a return to a common heri-
tage in the articulation of a repressed, plural cultural identity. In recent
years, as has become evident, this pluralist identity may have been dimin-
ished in the wake of an overt, aggressive rhetoric of narrow religious, cul-
tural and national identitarianism that favours fragmentations such as that
of Islam from Muslimness, of Hinduism from Hindutva, of Bharat and
Hindustan from India, and of gender, caste and religious divides in the
interest of its ideological agendas. It is against the backdrop of these con-
flicted contexts that it becomes possible to locate the promise of poetry, art
and literature for a renewal of common memories, shared values and vistas
of a collective future.
In some of the chapters that follow, the possibility of such a syncretic
perception steers my discussion as, for instance, in the context of the mystic
traditions of Bhakti and Sufism as well as of the pre-­modern Urdu ghazal.
That these shared visions also have the capability to transport us beyond
South Asia and relate likeminded transnational endeavours in sympathetic
and synchronic ways becomes evident in the ghazal’s journey across conti-
nental boundaries and to its unlikely, surprising contemporary Western
homes. The evolution of Urdu language and literature in the postcolonial
moment must also make us attentive to the particular language politics
generated by national, religious and gendered ideologies that loom menac-
ingly over the idea of a common and restorative literary and cultural legacy
in South Asia. Against such a backdrop, the genre of the ghazal, with its
double thematic of pleasure and protest and its capability to function as a
‘poetry of witness’ in diverse circumstances, appears to me to be full of
promise. For this reason, I devote considerable attention, in the last couple
of chapters of this book, to the journey of the ghazal from pre-­modern to
contemporary times within and beyond South Asia.
The question of geo-­spatial locales also brings me to the attention paid in
this book to the aesthetic traditions that have evolved in the north and
northwestern regions of the Indo-­Pakistan subcontinent. ‘South Asia’, as
already noted above, is a rather vast and diverse territory. Despite the age-­
old common cultural heritage that undergirds its many contemporary polit-
ical boundaries, this diversity-­in-­unity equally encompasses distinct local
traditions of literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance and poetry, each of
which embodies particularities of cultural and regional values, stylistic rep-
resentations, performative histories and methodologies of interpretation. To
eschew the risk of doing injustice to their individual rich legacies, I have not
attempted the overly ambitious task of bringing them under a common
umbrella. Within the larger ambit of South Asia, therefore, I have trained
my lens largely on the northern and northwestern provinces that run across
what is today a territory occupied by India and Pakistan, although the

10
 INTRODUCTION

discussion often veers away from this part of the world wherever the con-
text makes this necessary as, for instance, in the discussion of rasa theory
and of the Bhakti and Sufi traditions whose sway extended across large
parts of the subcontinent and beyond.
The reasons for this geo-­spatial delimitation are twofold. The primary
among these is the shared heritage that this region embodies in terms of its
geography, history, linguistic connections, cultural and ethical values and
frameworks, which, as I try to show, make themselves perceptible in the
evolving patterns of its aesthetic traditions. The popular belief in this part
of the world, that oral narratives and poetry comprise a common cultural
knowledge3, only fortifies this idea. As Harish Trivedi observes about
South Asia:

But what truly unites us, even more than our physical geography
and our broadly common (but sometimes conflictual) political his-
tory, is our common culture, the shared mode and idiom of daily
existence as it has evolved through mutual give and take over the
ages. … It is not that we do not have cultural differences; it is rather
that of all our differences of many kinds, the cultural differences
are the least acute or significant.
(2005: 190)

The second, and perhaps secondary, reason is autobiographical: my own

personal history of growing up in India as the daughter of ‘refugees’ who
witnessed the partition of 1947 and who made the fateful one-­way journey
across the border from Pakistan into India weighed down by a burdensome
luggage of ‘common’ memories. To be the inheritor of effects set into motion
by an accident of history, but one that links my present to a lost ancestry in
and around the regions in proximity of the Indus river, was perhaps also
something of an impetus for delving deeper into the misty cultural past of
this region. Although these two histories – the first a larger geo-­political and
socio-­cultural one and the second a narrowly defined personal one – may
seem distinct from each other, I encountered their deep connectedness at
each step of this journey, becoming acutely aware of their inextricability.
This is not to locate my positionality as any kind of privileged ‘native infor-
mant’ or, worse still, to discourage others from undertaking research in this
part of the world. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that the feminist theo-
retical positions I rely upon in this project are in some ways also deeply
personal and that my scholarly positionality remains intermeshed and
informed by the many individual, subjective histories that are part of a col-
lective mnemonic legacy of knowledge in South Asia. If this influences
(adversely or otherwise) or constrains the manner in which I approach the
relationship between feminist aesthetics and ‘South Asia’ in the discussions
that follow, it is a risk that I readily acknowledge and for which I must
admit accountability.

11
 INTRODUCTION

Taking into account my present ‘positionality’ in between South Asia and

the West, then, I attempt first to establish a theoretical framework for femi-
nist theorizing in the West and in India – both parts of the world that I
continue to engage with personally and academically – and then to adopt
this framing as a way of approaching some of the aesthetic traditions of the
northern regions of South Asia. Given India’s dominant political role in the
region, there remains, of course, the not unfounded risk in deploying an
‘Indian’ perch for looking at other parts of South Asia. As Trivedi cautions
us about the term ‘South Asia’, ‘Is it, as some persons from outside India
may suspect, just India by another name?’ (2005: 192). I have therefore
tried to be mindful of Trivedi’s admonitory advice: ‘It is therefore incum-
bent on us in India to be especially solicitous of the sensitivities of the other
constituents of South Asia’ (2005: 193). In traversing the political and cul-
tural borders between India and other parts of South Asia and those between
South Asia and other parts of the world, my effort has been, in these increas-
ingly divisive times, to find common ground and possible alliances between
feminist theorizing and South Asian aesthetic traditions, between South
Asian aesthetic world views and their transnational counterparts.

Notes
1 See, for instance, Battersby, C. (1989) Gender and Genius: Towards a New
Feminist Aesthetics, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University
Press; Brand, P. and Devereaux, M., eds. (2003) Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 18 (Fall/Winter), Special Issue: Women, Art, and Aesthetics; Brand,
P. and Korsmeyer, C., eds. (1990) The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
48 (4), Special Issue: Feminism and Traditional Aesthetics; Devereaux, M.
(2003) “Feminist Aesthetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J.
Levinson, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 647–666; Felski,
R. (1989) Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Hein, H. and Korsmeyer, C., eds.
(1990) Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 5 (2), Special Issue: Feminism
and Aesthetics;
2 The Sankofa bird, an image from the Akan tribe in Ghana, symbolizes turning
back to the learning of the past for mapping future pathways. I first came across
this inspiring image on the webpage of the Centre for Culture, Equity &
Empowerment of George Mason University.
3 See Ali 2016: 4–5 as cited in Chapter 4: Ali, N. (2016) ‘From Hallaj to Heer:
Poetic Knowledge and the Muslim Tradition’, Journal of Narrative Politics, 3
(1): 2–26.

References
Atre, Shubhangana. 2011. ‘The Feminine as Archetype’, Annals of the Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 92: 151–193.
Bolger, Diane and Rita P. Wright. 2013. ‘Gender in Southwest Asian Prehistory’, in
Diane Bolger (ed.), A Companion to Gender Prehistory, pp. 372–394. Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

12
 INTRODUCTION

Brand, Peg. 2007. ‘Feminism and Aesthetics’ (Chapter 14), in Linda Alcoff and Eva
Feder Kittay (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, pp. 254–265.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Garimella, Annapurna. 1997. ‘Engendering Indian Art’, in Vidya Dehejia (ed.),
Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, pp. 22–41. New Delhi: Kali
for Women with Book Review Literary Trust.
John, Mary E. 2019. ‘Feminist Crossings in Time and Space: The Question of
Culture’, in Anu Aneja (ed.), Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, pp.
30–42. New Delhi: Routledge.
Kumar, Sukrita Paul. 1997. ‘Cementing the Fissure: Urdu Literature from across the
Border’, India International Centre Quarterly, 24 (2/3): 79–91.
O’Flaherty, Wendy. (1979: 4–5, 11)/1978. Sexual Metaphors and Animal Symbols in
Indian Mythology. New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Paranjape, Makarand R. 2016. Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial
Prospects, Colourful Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities. New Delhi:
Routledge.
Trivedi, Harish. 2005. ‘South Asian Literature: Reflections in a Confluence’, Indian
Literature, 49 (5 (229)): 186–194.

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 1
FEMINIST THEORY AND THE
AESTHETIC RE-TURN 1

Feminist aesthetics shares with feminist theory a common contestatory

vision that pursues epistemological investigations from an ethical perspec-
tive to envisage a re-­thinking of gender and other socially constructed iden-
tities. It is therefore critical to examine the place of aesthetics in shaping
ethical conceptualization for feminist discourse. As I discuss here, the
aesthetic imaginary can be located at the heart of feminist theory; in light of
the vital role played by aesthetics, one may wonder about the relatively
slow growth of the field of feminist aesthetics. At the outset, I situate the
intersection between feminist theory and aesthetics internationally and in
India, determined as it is by the theory/praxis cleft within Women’s &
Gender Studies (WGS). In particular, by considering the marginalization of
the aesthetic within feminist theory, I examine the relevance of such an
exploration in the context of the relationship between Indic aesthetics and
feminist theory. Although the discussion in this section is circumscribed to
the specific context of Indic, the privileging of feminist praxis over feminist
theory may have wider relevance in the larger context of the subcontinent.
In light of some of the implications arrived at, I discuss the centrality of
aesthetics in the Indian subcontinent’s metaphysical traditions to argue that
feminist theory can explore trans-­temporal linkages with the past to arrive
at alternate definitions of the ‘political’ with a view towards present and
future re-­workings of gender and other intersectional identities within the
larger discourse of WGS.

Feminist theory and aesthetics: international perspectives

It may be worthwhile to begin with an unravelling of the relations between
theory, feminist theory and aesthetics. It is evident that theory mulls over
ideas and distils experiential awareness with the help of the imagination. In
its simplest terms, according to Griselda Pollock, theory ‘just means think-
ing about things, puzzling closely over what is going on, reflecting intently
on the process of that puzzling and thinking’ (Pollock 2007: xiv). In this
aspect of ‘thinking about things’, theory draws upon experiential knowl-
edge, crystallizing and reconfiguring this knowledge at an ideational level.

14 DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-2
 F E M I N I S T T H E O RY A N D T H E A E S T H E T I C R E - T U R N

As feminist theory has shown, this is not necessarily a universalizing exer-

cise. Feminist theory works particularly with the idea of difference to cri-
tique existing social inequalities as well as to imagine a futurity for women’s
freedoms by analysing experiences and by ideating specific, localized trans-
formative strategies to achieve feminist goals. Feminist theory, in particular,
puzzles over and articulates gendered experience2 since ‘its credibility is
tested in women’s experience’ (Hein 1990: 282). Similarly, aesthetics
extracts from certain experiences rarefied impressions that then are given
form and shape through art. According to Hilde Hein, it is this common
‘experiential reference’ (282) that locates aesthetics at the centre of feminist
theory. In the discussion that follows, the term ‘feminist theory’ often will
be used to encompass this central aesthetic impulse. The Stanford
Encyclopedia defines feminist aesthetics as ‘a set of perspectives that pursue
certain questions about philosophical theories and assumptions regarding
art and aesthetic categories’ to ‘inquire into the ways that gender influences
the formation of ideas about art, artists, and aesthetic value’ (2017: 1). Hein
observes that feminist aesthetics functions as a prologue to feminist theory
which is ‘at present, hindered by the lack of an adequate aesthetic theory’
(Hein 1990: 282). Despite its central importance to feminist theory, a simi-
lar marginalization of the aesthetic has been noted by other feminist phi-
losophers (see Ziarek 2012).
If, as suggested by Hilde Hein, the aesthetic lies at the heart of feminist
theory and philosophy, what, we might wonder, are the possible reasons for
such a marginalization? Ewa P. Ziarek has proposed that the subordination
of the aesthetic is achieved in favour of ‘the more pressing questions of poli-
tics’ (Ziarek 2012: 388), an observation that may reverberate in the context
of feminist discourses in India (taken up in the next part). This prioritiza-
tion of ‘politics’ over questions of aesthetics is reflective of what others, like
Robyn Wiegman, have deciphered as ‘a certain understanding of the politi-
cal’ that establishes ‘distinct priorities for politically legitimate feminist
knowledge production’ (Wiegman 2002: 20) with obvious disciplinary
implications within the field of WGS. Marianne DeKoven observes that
‘feminist scholarship is now dominated by social-­sciences inflected, tightly
reasoned, archivally and/or statistically documented, social, cultural, politi-
cal, historical analysis’ while ‘freestanding literary theory or criticism of any
kind has become marginalized’ (DeKoven 2006: 1693). Many feminist
scholars, of course, have consistently argued against such a narrow under-
standing of the political and oppose, as Amy Mullin succinctly puts it,
‘modernity’s separation of art, politics, and knowledge into three distinct
spheres’ (Mullin 1996: 122). Notably, a clear-­cut demarcation between aes-
thetics and politics has also been refuted in philosophical debates regarding
the nature of aesthetics; for instance, Jacques Rancière disassembles the
radicality of art and politics at their very intersection – a common inter-
linked impulse that pursues a reconfiguration of the sensible and invokes, in
both, the sense of a situated, discursive community (Rancière 2011).

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Notwithstanding, more manifest understandings of the two domains have

persisted in sustaining distinct conceptualizations that reduce the space for
such fuzzy boundaries.
It is possible to trace the artificial bifurcation between politics and aes-
thetics within feminist theory in the context of the evolution of feminism.
Movement-­based politics has held pride of place as the origin story of femi-
nism internationally, subsequently nurturing the growth of the academic
wing of Women’s Studies. Wiegman favours a critique of the ‘activist origin
story as the disciplinary foundation of feminism as an academic field’ in
order to interrupt the ‘demand for the immediate political applicability of
feminist thought’ (Wiegman 2002: 24–25). The curtailed understanding of
the political generated in such a prioritization leads to a hierarchization of
knowledge areas in which the interpretative discourses of the humanities
and qualitative social sciences are viewed as the ‘domain of a certain kind
of anti-­practical theoretical obsession’ (Wiegman 2002: 21). In the construc-
tion of such binaries, the work of feminist theory, especially that inspired by
the aesthetic, risks being interpreted as a disregard of the hard-­won achieve-
ments of grassroots feminism when it is evaluated by a similar yardstick,
namely in terms of its immediate and direct impact on lived realities and
social transformation. The theory/praxis separation within feminism is
founded on an ideational/materialist divide that lends to the different kinds
of work a deceptive air of mutual exclusivity. Because such a divide veils the
relationality of thought and action, more specifically the capacity of imagi-
nation to inspire future material transformative activities, it may very well
be a false opposition, as was suggested by poststructuralist theory (see, for
instance, Joan Scott 1988: 34). Even in extremely meticulous and attentive
readings (such as one offered by Nalini Persram) which refute an antagonis-
tic relationship between discursive constructs and women’s lived realities
and seek to assiduously analyse their interdependence, the shadow of the
(not always unfounded) ‘fear that theory has a tendency to ignore reality’
(Persram 1994: 301) hangs ominously over feminist attempts at the recon-
ciliation of the symbolic with the real. It seems to me that although such
readings acknowledge the dynamic relationship of metaphor and metonymy
and emphasize the significance of re-­theorizing symbolic categories based
upon real women’s lives, the political power of metaphor in influencing real-
ity tends to slide under the latter’s metonymic valuations. In de-­privileging
the effects of the imagination, particularly its utopic aspects, we may risk
blocking out attention to aesthetics and associated alternate notions of ‘poli-
tics’ particularly relevant for feminist discourse or be prevented from discov-
ering what Amy Mullin terms ‘the progressive potential of art’ (Mullin 1996:
131), a notion I return to in the final section of this chapter.
In the West, feminist theory has seen an oscillating trajectory since the
latter half of the twentieth century. During the nineties, the exceedingly
textual scholarship of continental theorists led, on the part of some
American feminists, to a post-­nineties suspicion of theory as being too far

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removed from women’s experiential realities, interpreted largely in terms of

empirically observable facts rather than less palpable psychic components of
experience. The phase that was witness to this split between theory-­and
non-­theory-­oriented feminists in the two decades following the 1970s has
been variously described in terms of the ‘theoretical turn’ (Pollock 2007: xiv)
and the ‘cultural turn’ (Elliott 2006: 1698). After the heyday of the theoreti-
cal turn in the 1990s, once high theory became repetitive, re-­cycled and
‘tired’ in its ‘post-­theory moment’ (Pollock 2007: xiv), a phase of ennui set
in. The ‘boredom’ with a theory that was frequently reprocessing poststruc-
turalist notions has been noted by others (see Jane Elliott 2006) as well.
This has not deterred some feminists from emphasizing the transforma-
tive potential of feminist theory and the inherent link between theorizing
and articulating alternative ways of thinking about gender (Scott 1988: 33),
nor has it dissuaded others from arguing against the fear of repetition. Jane
Elliott makes a strong case against the rejection of untimely repetitiveness
so that we do not ‘miss the opportunity to see what our boredom might
have to tell us’ (Elliott 2006: 1701). Even though the varied effects of praxis
and theory may impinge either directly upon present realities or indirectly
on an imagined futurity, any imposed separation between them overwrites
their common transformatory feminist potential while submerging the
political impulse of the aesthetic. Mullin describes the transformative
knowledge of art as one ‘which leads to an alternative perception of the
world through an unsettling of fixed assumptions and identities’ (Mullin
1996: 120–121). Feminist theory’s recognition of its aesthetic centre
becomes consequential because the aesthetic imaginary ignites theory to
conjure up the censured, prohibited future subject; the utopic aspect of aes-
thetic theory is, in that sense, very much a political act.
Consequently, a wariness towards the aesthetic basis of feminist theory
may leave in its wake a lacuna marked by a de-­emphasized utopic vision,
critical for imagining and working towards feminist goals. Considering this
risk, Robyn Wiegman suggests ‘a return to utopian thought, which by neces-
sity entails a non-­instrumental relation to critical imagination’ (Wiegman
2002: 35, footnote). It is significant that, internationally, feminist utopias
(such as Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Herland) have exerted vast and lasting influences on feminist thought since
utopias concretize shared fantasies by positing worlds that unveil joyful
unrealized possibilities and function as catalysts of discontentment (with
the present) and hope (for the future), marking utopias as inherently trans-­
temporal in their transformational intent.

Feminist theory, praxis and the aesthetic in India

Feminist theory’s engagement with the aesthetic in India may be charted in
the context of the larger rubric of WGS. It would be impossible to do this
without first investigating the place of feminist theory in relationship to the

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women’s movement since these have been closely allied in the Indian con-
text. Although we may find some limited similarities with the Western tra-
jectory, feminism’s path in India shows significant departures. Owing to the
historical association of the women’s movement with the nationalist move-
ment against colonial rule and the subsequent emergence of Women’s
Studies as an academic field in India, a similar ‘origin story’ of movement-­
based feminism followed by closely linked academic work can be traced
here; Women’s Studies is projected as the ‘intellectual arm’ of the women’s
movement (Bagchi 2013: 18) and envisaged as vital in restoring ‘social
investigations to their original role’ (Mazumdar 1994: 44). The detailed
evolution of WGS in India needs no rehearsing as it has already been well
documented by various scholars (Desai et al. 1984; Mazumdar 1994;
Poonacha 2003; Ghosal 2005; John 2008; Bagchi 2013, among others).
The historical domination of ‘brahmanical patriarchy’ leading to gender,
caste and class divides within Indian society created specific circumstances
demanding a critical focus on women’s status within the socio-­cultural
environment (see Chakravarti 1993). Post-­independence, urgent concerns
such as poverty alleviation, health and education influenced in turn by the
deeply entrenched social stratification of Indian society have meant an
ongoing close partnership between women activists and academics, many
of whom are involved in both kinds of work. Unlike in the West where, as
we have seen, an ideational/materialist opposition may have led to a move-
ment/theory schism for feminism, in India, feminist discourse, influenced to
a large extent by Marxist and socialist persuasions in the post-­independence
period, has retained an inherent compatibility between material and ideo-
logical spheres and rightly refuses a clear-­cut separation between the two.
However, in such a coalescing, compulsions emanating from a prioritiza-
tion of immediate concerns and their resolution may result in a slant
towards the empirical and the documented over the imaginary and the
inventive within feminist discourse. Unsurprisingly, the question of the
place of feminist theory within feminist discourse in India is variously
couched in terms of its ‘embeddedness’ within culture and history, its poten-
tial for an ‘ethical critique’ (Panjabi 2004) and as a response to the need for
‘concrete analysis’ (Chaudhuri 2012). Some, like Sunder Rajan, have pushed
for a refusal of the ‘polarisation of the imagined and real, culture and soci-
ety, language and the world, discourse and materiality’ (Rajan 2008: 70).
Despite nuanced differences in perceptions of the raison d’être of feminist
theory, the prevailing understanding appears to be that feminist theory is
‘defined by feminist practice and feminist goals’ (Jain 2018: 44) even to the
extent that ‘as different from feminist practice’, it does not exist ‘as a body
of knowledge in India’ (Jain 2018: 99).
Given such a privileging of feminist practice over theoretical work, the
excavation of the materiality of discourse as manifested by the transforma-
tional potential of the aesthetic remains a work in progress, its slower tide
reflected in the positing of theory as apolitical, and a suspicion of ‘high

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theory’, especially in its postmodern and poststructuralist avatars. It is

feared that an attention to theory per se may lead to ‘a gross neglect of his-
torical and concrete analysis of the constraints of social institutions’
(Chaudhuri 2012: 20). Added to this are doubts about the limited relevance
of Western theories for indigenous circumstances, seen as they often are as
proponents of ‘neo-­ liberal ideology and the “difference”-obsessed post-­
modernism, both of which posed threats to the search for social equality’
(Bagchi 2013: 19). Others have been apprehensive that the ‘pursuit of theo-
retical rigor within an autonomous framework encourages elitism and a
drifting away from the burning concerns of the majority of women’
(Mazumdar 1994: 50). In its alienated, textual avatar, theory can portend a
‘politics of retreat’ and a ‘diverting energy and attention away from feminist
activism’ towards a possible de-­ radicalization of Women’s Studies
(Sabbarwal 2000: 273–274). It may also be associated with standards of
‘theoretical sophistication’ that are ‘largely determined by male academics’
which make ‘women’s studies scholars tend to forget the political aims of
women’s studies scholarship’ (Poonacha 2003: 2655). Under these circum-
stances, it is likely that feminist theory is put to the test on the basis of
urgent, present understandings of the political rather than alternate con-
notations that may be generated from within sources as varied as non-­elite
indigenous perspectives, feminist philosophy or feminist art theories, espe-
cially those that establish epistemological linkages between art and truth.
According to Mullin, ‘what is particularly fruitful about feminist art theory
is its reconception of relations between art and politics’ and she suggests
that ‘this is a potent resource for feminist epistemology’s reconception of
relations between politics and truth’ (Mullin 1996: 123). Similarly, Kalpana
Ram emphasizes ‘the claim of aesthetics to represent a specific form of
knowledge, which need not be identical with historical knowledge’ (Ram
2011: S160). Depending upon the relative prioritization of material or epis-
temological concerns, feminist theory and its engagement with the aesthetic
may reflect the predominance of one over the other.
This is not to imply that there is not an ongoing prolific feminist engage-
ment with literature, cinema, folk, performance and visual arts in India,
work which continues to inform both theoretical and movement-­based
feminism. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present by Tharu and
Lalita (1991, 1993) indisputably established the rich and diverse tradition
of women’s literary writings across the ages. Work by Rajeswari Sunder
Rajan (1993), Deepti Priya Mehrotra (2006), Jasbir Jain (2011), Kalpana
Ram (2011) among many others has thrown light on the significant place
occupied by discourse, life narratives, representation, and aesthetic tradi-
tions within Women’s Studies. A rich body of scholarly work continues to
be built up in the field of literary, film, media and cultural studies. At the
same time, the belated inclusion of literary and aesthetic studies in feminist
scholarship and the ‘limited scenario’ generated by the ‘minimal role’ of
literature in Women’s Studies has also been noticed (Jain 2011: xii).

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Given the particular circumstances and ideological concerns that have

influenced the women’s movement, as far as feminist literary theory is con-
cerned, there remains a concurrent expectation to ally the ideational to
empirical and material aspects of experience rather than the realm of the
discursive aesthetic, perhaps much more so than in the West. ‘High theory’,
which works more closely with representations of the aesthetic and the
psychic, has become synonymous with literary and cultural theory, philoso-
phy and psychoanalysis, disciplines seen as somewhat removed from the
daily struggles of rural and urban women’s lived realities. Interpretative
discourses may more easily invite the accusation of ‘elitism’ because of their
close association with the virtual world of the illusory and the incompletely
explored impact of imagined virtualities on future actualities. Feminist aes-
thetic theory, in particular, located at an extreme cusp of interpretative dis-
courses, may have unclear linkages to pressing issues such as health and
development that have historically taken precedence over others such as
bodies and sexualities (see Banerjee, Sen and Dhawan 2012: xxxi). That
there is a recent diversification and reconstitution of the field of WGS and a
call for inclusion of discussions around marginalized sexual identities and
reconceptualizations of masculinity is evident from the work of various
scholars (see John and Nair 2000; Niranjana 2007; Banerjee, Sen and
Dhawan 2012: xxxi; Srivastava 2014). Moreover, the increasing depen-
dence within right-­wing public discourse on symbols and symbolic gestures
which are intended to embody hyper ‘cultural’ and ‘nationalistic’ significa-
tions but which play into a fracturing of communal, religious, caste, dis/
abled and gendered boundaries makes it even more imperative to address
questions of identity at the level of the materiality of discursive representa-
tions. Feminist aesthetic theory, with its deep excavation of the seams that
sew together experience and discourse, may prove particularly enlightening
in this regard.
One way to unravel the theory/praxis conundrum and its varied associa-
tions with material/ideational components may be to consider the transfor-
mation of material conditions and of ways of thinking as interlinked,
mutually productive and equally significant for conceptions of ‘experience’
(defined not only in terms of embodiment but equally in terms of its psychic
quotient). A turn towards the aesthetic, and the recognition of the political
potential of imagination and utopic vision as it appears within feminist
theory, may help in conceptualizing altered, contextualized subjectivities of
gender, sexuality, caste, class and religion for the futurity of feminist thought.
It is significant that feminists concerned with issues of alternate, marginal-
ized sexual identities continue to draw from queer and feminist theory that
has evolved in interpretative disciplinary areas such as literature, psycho-
analysis and philosophy. Ruth Vanita’s use of the terms ‘repair’ and ‘rethink-
ing’ in the context of the women’s movement speaks to the need for such a
dual perspective (Vanita 2012: 6). According to Vanita, Indian feminism has
tended to focus largely on the former although Indian history exemplifies

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enough examples of attempts at the latter, especially seen in the lives of

mystics (Vanita 2012: 8). The alignment between feminist theory, the mysti-
cal and the aesthetic, as flagged by Vanita and others before her (see also
Clément and Kakar 1993), should also provoke us to investigate its benefits
for feminism, a point I return to towards the end of this chapter.
We arrive then at a surprising concurrence between the prevailing per-
spective within Indian feminism that urges feminist theory to be embedded
in the experiential and the Western notion instantiated in Hilde Hein’s
observation that feminist theory is replete with experience (Hein 1990:
283), even while we must take into account the heterogeneity of such expe-
riences to keep at bay potential ethnocentric and universalizing discursive
moves. Hein argues that ‘feminist theory must revert to experience for its
formulation’ because ‘there is nowhere else to go, since theory in its mas-
culinist mold is suspect’ (Hein 1990: 284). According to her, this experi-
ence ‘must be aesthetically embodied’ through imagination and symbolism
for it to become reflective (Hein 1990: 284). Furthermore, she notes that
‘western philosophy places aesthetics at its periphery’ but that aesthetics is
at the centre of feminist theory (Hein 1990: 289), an observation in tune
with Michel Foucault’s (1978) discussion of the Western construction of
‘scientia sexualis’. Following Foucault’s distinction between the latter and
the non-­Western notion of ‘ars erotica’, the central place of the aesthetic in
the Indian metaphysical tradition continues to invite scholarly attention
(see Gautam 2016). Taking into account the import of aesthetics in Indian
metaphysics alongside the pivotal role of aesthetics in feminist theory, we
may reasonably ask what these aesthetic traditions may have to offer to
feminist theory in India and beyond, especially in terms of alternate con-
ceptions of the ‘political’ that may emerge from these. Further, given that
many of these aesthetic traditions are rooted in the much wider geo-­spatial
terrain of South Asia, this question may be extended beyond the geo-­
political boundaries of the Indian nation to address its expanded implica-
tions within a common South Asian cultural context as discussed in the
Introduction.
Particularly helpful here may be Ziarek’s insightful excavation of the
political within the aesthetic and a problematizing of the autonomy of these
spheres. Ziarek sees in feminist theory of aesthetics an alternative to the
subordination of art to politics as well as to the fetishization of art as trans-
formative practice (Ziarek 2012: 391–392). Such a crossing-­over between
aesthetics/politics with its implied dismantling of the theory/activism divide
may be suitably aligned with feminist discourse in India and in other parts
of South Asia, and the specific compulsions within which it is framed in
these contexts. An opening-­up of the term ‘political’ enabled by the aes-
thetic beyond its conventional connotations can uncover one dimension of
transformation as an initiation of altered understandings of identity to
move beyond what Ruth Vanita has termed women’s movements’ previous
‘stress on equity rather than liberation’ (Vanita 2012: 7).

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Theorizing feminism with/in Indic aesthetics

The Indian subcontinent’s aesthetic traditions nurtured across the ages offer
a vast and diverse canvas for such forays. In looking to the past, we may
take a cue from Pollock’s notions of ‘research as encounter’ and ‘travelling
concepts’ (Pollock 2007: xiii; xv) and ask which concepts travel across time
and may be re-­signified from a contemporary feminist perspective in the
Indic context. As noted earlier, Elliott has similarly urged against the com-
plete shelving of the past and in favour of ‘a practice of the untimely’ given
that ‘things may stay true longer than they stay interesting’ (Elliott 2006:
1701) while closer home, Jasbir Jain has warned against the dismissal of the
past ‘as irrelevant or as oppositional to the present’ or of minimizing ‘the
reality of evolving patterns rooted in Indian history and culture’ (Jain 2011:
1). Working simultaneously against absolutist temporal and cultural dis-
continuities while firmly positing the possibility of a feminist worldview
alongside Indic aesthetics, this discussion also contests what Ratna Kapur
succinctly terms ‘the crude divides of the West and the rest’ (Kapur 2006:
29). Rather, in counterposing the affirmative promise of diverse feminisms
against the outright dismissal of ‘feminism’ in its perceived uniquely Western
avatar, I attempt to steer clear of any binaries that locate ‘culture’ on the
side of non-­Western indigeneity and ‘feminism’ within a Western milieu,
such as in suggestions that refer to a ‘uniquely Indian, explicitly female but
not-­feminist approach’ (Lieder 2015: 614).
Pursuing the promise of feminist theory’s analeptic voyaging into past
aesthetic traditions for a contemporary re-­visioning of gender identities, I
pose the venture, then, in terms of two crossings: that of trans-­temporality
and of conceptual liminalities. By the notion of trans-­temporality, I by no
means wish to imply a privileging of any one overarching Indic aesthetic
tradition. That, indeed, would be an impossible task given the heterogene-
ity of aesthetic, cultural and literary historiographies in the various regions
of the Indian subcontinent. Instead, keeping in view the multiple aesthetic
traditions of these regions, we may find it more productive to adopt, like
the dilettante, a discerning, selective posture towards those aesthetic con-
ceptualizations that invite effective liaisons with present feminist concerns.
This would, first, prevent the risk of being beset by unwelcome, patriarchal
currents present within these aesthetic traditions and, second, contribute
to a hybrid interdisciplinary theorizing that attempts syncretic linkages
with the past. The metaphor of the palimpsest, which has no single core
but rather suggests a successive erasure and layering of concepts across
time, may be useful in conceiving such a feminist re-­turn to the subconti-
nent’s aesthetic traditions. I employ the correlated notion of conceptual
liminalities to suggest the uncovering of course corrections in our under-
standings of gender, class, caste and religion shored up by a scrutiny of
aesthetic approaches that illuminate overlapping ideational contiguities
across time periods.

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What, then, may be the possible interface between feminist theory and
South Asian aesthetic traditions, particularly those emerging in the northern
regions of the Indian subcontinent? Is it possible to isolate within Indic aes-
thetic philosophy singular concepts that establish its distinctiveness from
aesthetic philosophies emerging in other parts of the world and that point to
a cultural and historical ideational continuity within the area? This sounds
paradoxical, of course, given the protean nature of subcontinental cultural
traditions, many of which, like the theory of rasa, derive their vitality from
knotty and often unresolved debates around subtle elucidations of the nature
of art, truth, perception and experience. Antithetical construals inherent
within the larger metaphysical Hindu tradition frequently have been fore-
grounded, most recently instantiated by the contradictory reactions evoked
by the notion of ‘alternative’ forms of Hinduism implied in the title of Wendy
Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). Perhaps, then, it is in
the very enigmatic and labyrinthine nature of the aesthetic and philosophi-
cal traditions of the subcontinent, and in the heterogeneous debates and
disagreements they have generated over the ages, that we may find a reassur-
ing continuity. That a tension and reconciliation of disparate ideas frequently
energize philosophical as well as religious discourse in India is to state the
obvious. From the early monistic traditions of Sankara and the advaita
schools to various debates regarding matter/spirit and prakriti/purusha even
up to their contemporary reformulations within ecofeminist theories (as
explored by Vandana Shiva and Bina Aggarwal, among others), what has
endured within ‘Hindu’ metaphysics is an approach towards knowledge that
relies upon the elucidation of contrasting propositions whose nuances are
traditionally unravelled through subtle analyses. It may be worth adding
here that the operationalization of reductiveness by reactionary discourses
that from time to time have deployed univocal conceptions of complex ideas
to justify polarized ideologies in an effort to consolidate homogenized
notions of the ‘Hindu’ nation, culture and identity is only an affirmation of
such interpretive complexities rather than their negation.
The interrogative propensity of Indic aesthetics and metaphysics and the
resultant interpretive contingency these generate can offer inviting accesses
for feminist theory. The many debates generated from within a range of
realms – from the nuanced and fluid conceptions of gender emerging in an
‘elasticity’ of form in prehistoric art, the validation of gender conceptualiza-
tions beyond the woman/man binary in ancient Harappan sculpture, the
epistemological bent of rasa theory and its location of eros as an aesthetic
category, the consanguinity of the sensual and the sublime in subsequent
traditions such as Bhakti and Sufism, to the co-­occurrence of notions of
protest and pleasure in the Urdu ghazal – all may intersect with feminist
theorizing in rich and productive ways.
The realm of affect, in particular, integral to Indic aesthetic traditions,
presents one such promising site. It is explored from an epistemological and
typological standpoint in rasa theory and in lyrical and mystic

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exemplifications in later Bhakti and Sufi traditions that emphasize in par-

ticular the centrality of the emotion of love (prem/ishq). Rasa provides, as
stated by Sheldon Pollock in his comprehensive account of classical Indian
aesthetics, ‘a systematic account of how emotions are represented’ (Pollock
2016: 3) within aesthetic experience. Rasa philosophy appears to be less
interested in reflecting upon the nature and evaluation of art, definitions of
beauty and aesthetics, and questions that have been fundamental to
Western aesthetic traditions and more in a scrupulous examination of for-
mal qualities and effects of emotions by subjecting these to a typology of
micro-­classifications.
This typological, formal pursuit of affect, as exemplified in rasa theory,
may be significant in two ways for feminist theorization. On the one hand,
in its most obvious sense, it brings to the fore the centrality of emotions in
the domain of aesthetic expression and aesthetic experience. On the other,
it reveals how affect is deeply tied to its actualization, and the experienc-
ing of specific emotions is the very basis for remarking upon their exis-
tence, which then occurs through their methodological documentation.
The inseparability of affect and its emotive enactment works through, and
undoes, the dichotomy of the discursive and the empirical, of what is rep-
resented at the level of the symbolic (often in metaphorical terms in rasa
theory), and what it actually does to the emotive self. The conjoining of
the symbolic with the actional through the pursuit of a detailed formal
naming of emotions and their effects shows that they are together
accounted for first and foremost in language. Their conjoining, in illumi-
nating the transformational and thereby political potential of the sym-
bolic, equally suggests implications for a contemporary feminist undoing
of the aesthetics/politics binary. Such a feminist approach would yet
remain somewhat distinct from other sympathetically aligned perspectives
that view the aesthetic and the ideological as ‘related, interconnected, and
overlapping’ (Paranjape 2016: 96). In such a feminist theorization, the
aesthetic and the political collapse onto each other at the common junc-
ture of their transformative impulse. Similarly, in classical Indic aesthetics,
affect collapses with its own effects, working against the notion of ‘disin-
terestedness’ arising from within Western aesthetic theory. In recent years,
affect’s role in aesthetics has generated mounting interest and, as Sheldon
Pollock notes, ‘in the last decade there has been a growing unease with
these grand dismissals’ [of the role of emotion in art] (2016: 45). As we
know, the distanciation invoked by ‘disinterest’ has already been hotly
contested from within feminist circles. Feminism’s attentiveness to affect
as it relates to aesthetic experience thus may find surprising alliances as it
begins to approach corresponding perspectives within South Asian aes-
thetic traditions.
These contemporary currents propose a departure from prior concep-
tions of the dominant spiritual basis to Indic art, conceptualized in oriental-
ist ways during colonialism and in reactive formulations during postcolonial

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times – as a manner of constructing a different, ‘spiritual’, anti-­Western

cultural identity in defiance of capitalist imperialism. The popular views of
the spiritual basis of art as expounded by highly regarded scholars like
Ananda Coomaraswamy continue to be modulated (see, for instance,
Stadtner 1990). Newer approaches bring to the fore other embedded
aspects of Indic aesthetics that playfully display the easy juxtaposition of
the sensual and the spiritual, the ascetic and the sexual, and their allied
pleasures. The turn back, or re-­turn, to older currents in Indic aesthetic
thought where such cleavages were embraced with enthusiasm, without
privileging one over the other is testimony to the significance of bringing
about reconciliations between the past and the present and between the
symbolic and its empirical effects. For feminist theory, the re-­turn may
promise unanticipated effects. It is to some of these ideas that I turn in
subsequent chapters.

Conclusion
Even as we recall the notion of the obligation for feminist theory in the
Indian subcontinent to be an ‘embedded theory’, we discover that femi-
nism’s trans-­ temporal journey through the realm of the aesthetic can
endorse theory’s double embeddedness within aesthetic, ideational tradi-
tions as in material, cultural historiographies, making uncertain their taken-­
for-­granted demarcations. In undertaking such a journey, the aesthetic that
is at the heart of feminist theory reveals contingency as a recurring vulner-
ability within all divides (theory/praxis, ideational/material, present/past,
West/non-­West) and within all socially constructed identities (gendered,
religious, caste and class) and unleashes its political impulse in doing so. It
pushes feminist theory to keep musing upon and re-­thinking its current
concerns that are equally the concerns of the aesthetic.

Notes
1 This is a substantially revised version of a chapter that appeared in Aneja, A.
(2019) Women’s and Gender Studies: Crossings, New Delhi: Routledge, pp.
93–109.
2 I use the terms ‘experience’ and ‘gendered experience’ in this discussion guard-
edly: not in any universalizing sense that may amplify the notion of a liberal,
Western ‘women’s experience’ while glossing over differences of race, class, caste
and neo-­colonial hegemonies but rather in its specific connotations derived from
the ‘sensory’ that is at the heart of aesthetics. That the aesthetic manifestation of
the sensory in turn may be influenced by cultural, class, and other factors is
implicit in any reference to ‘experience’ and would be the subject of an entirely
different paper. My argument here, however, is for feminist theory’s acknowl-
edgement of its aesthetic centre as a discursive political enterprise, alongside the
social, while taking into account the latter’s shaping of lived experience. Given
the significance of the sensory in Indian aesthetic traditions such as rasa, I pro-
pose feminist theory’s political deployment of the sensory experience in its
exploration of these traditions.

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Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita. 1991, 1993. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the
Present. New York: Feminist Press.
Vanita, Ruth. 2012. ‘Thinking Beyond Gender in India’, Jura Gentium, 2: 1–10.
Wiegman, Robyn. 2002. ‘Academic Feminism against Itself’, NWSA Journal, 14 (2):
18–37.
Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. 2012. ‘Aesthetics: An Important Category of Feminist
Philosophy’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26 (2): 385–393.

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 2
SCULPTING GENDER AND
SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

Unearthing the stories behind art objects sculpted somewhere on the banks
of the Indus river c. 2000 BCE from a twenty-first-century feminist lens
might appear to be an idiosyncratic enterprise. Especially so since the dis-
ciplinary work of feminist aesthetics differs starkly from that of art histori-
ans and archaeologists, for whom the study of artefacts is a means of
providing knowledge about social norms and relations.1 In drawing upon
this knowledge, feminist aesthetics explores various interlinkages between
formal aspects of ancient iconography, gendered conceptualizations and
effects and their representations in art. My approach therefore will be
interdisciplinary: with the help of archaeological scholarship and illustra-
tive examples, I attempt to bring to light those aspects of Indus figurines
that may be re-interpreted for a productive engagement with feminist aes-
thetics. Here, I draw inspiration from recent efforts to bring feminist per-
spectives to work in interpreting the past, such as that delineated by Diane
Bolger and Rita P. Wright, according to whom gendered approaches ‘enable
us to move beyond the static, one-dimensional narratives of the past’ (2013:
372). Consequently, I locate this discussion in relation to feminist perspec-
tives in archaeology as well as those interdisciplinary theorizations of sexu-
ality which work with the aesthetical, as attempted by Bracha Ettinger
(2005, 2006), for instance. For attempting a non-linear journey to past and
future times, I employ the literary device of ‘analepsis’ and take inspiration
from the symbol of the Sankofa bird from Ghana (as discussed in the
Introduction), both of which enable a turn to the past for building bridges
with the present and the future. As stated by Shubhangana Atre in her allu-
sion to Robert Graves’s2 use of the term ‘analepsis’, ‘all history writing is
“Analepsis”, meaning that we as humans, are reconstructing our story with
an assumed view of the past’ (Atre 2011: 164). Atre proposes ‘analepsis’ as
a way of looking at prehistoric artefacts since historical methodology
proves to be an inadequate tool for unearthing the ‘layers of poetic myths
and the hidden sources of human creativity’ of a ‘time-before-time’ (2011,
165). What can an analeptic turn to a buried South Asian aesthetic archive
and its proleptic effects offer to feminism’s futurity? In responding to
such  questions, this chapter will attempt to excavate those conceptual

28 DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-3
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

linkages that may ‘speak’, however faintly over the vast time-gap of centu-
ries, to contemporary feminist theory.
Jonathan Kenoyer charts the periodization of the Indus civilization
between 4000 and 1500 BCE in terms of the pre-, early, mature, and late
Harappan phases and the peak urban phase between 2500 and 1900 BCE
– the Mature Harappan period (1991: 333). The geographical spread of
the Indus civilization ‘includes the highlands and plateaus of Baluchistan
to the west and the mountainous regions of northern Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and India to the northwest and north’, spanning the basins
of the two major river systems of the Indus and the erstwhile Ghaggar-
Hakra (1991: 339). The Mature Harappan phase, which represents a
crystallization of the ideological beliefs of the Indus people, has been the
focus of major archaeological work. Archaeological evidence in the form
of terracotta figurines, clay seals and other objects excavated from the
various sites of the Indus valley has provided insights into the ideological
world view, spiritual beliefs, cultural practices, economic and political
foundations, and ethnic roots of the Indus people. Through an analysis of
compositional and procedural features of Indus sculpted figurines,
I attempt to bring to the fore those ideological moorings that seem ame-
nable to an alignment with feminist interrogations of constructions of
sex, gender and sexuality.
One must acknowledge, at the outset, a lack of consensus on many
aspects of the Indus civilization given that the Indus script remains an unde-
ciphered enigma. For instance, there is no agreement about the evidence of
a mother goddess/virgin goddess–centred religion in the Indus valley civili-
zation or of links with Sumerian culture, speculations that continue to be
richly debated. There are also divergent views on the manufacture and use
of human and animal figurines – that is, whether these were made by adults
or children and whether they were intended primarily for ritualistic use or
magic or as playthings for amusement. On the other hand, there does seem
to be agreement on some essentials. In brief, these include a predominance
of female forms amongst the various terracotta figurines found abandoned
in many of the trash sites, variant and complex representations of sex, gen-
der, androgyny and gender roles, an emphasis on composite characteristics
of human and animal fantastic forms (such as the unicorn), the use of fan-
tasy in hand modelled plastic art, and the proliferation of terracotta figu-
rines through glyptic replication. In attending to these findings from a
feminist lens, I try to dwell on the nature of a prevailing ‘Indus aesthetic’
that precedes and contrasts with later Vedic binarism towards gendered
categories. As revealed through present archaeological scholarship, some of
the features of this aesthetic include an idealization of cross-gendered rep-
resentations of fertility figurines (which may or may not be associated with
a mother goddess cult), a process-oriented, non-teleological attitude towards
the manufacture and purpose of aesthetic objects, a central aesthetic vision
of evanescence and renewal, and a shared faith in the replication of art

29
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

objects for disseminating ideological beliefs that, in turn, were the result of
a diverse, cultural syncretism.

The goddess in question

Although it is not the aim of this chapter to uncover a goddess-centred
aesthetic in ancient Indic civilization or to pursue this well-trodden track
without the tools at the disposal of either the archaeologist or the histo-
rian, the goddess debate does provoke interesting questions around the
status of women and issues of sexuality as represented through art objects.
Consequently, for any feminist pursuit of the implications of Indus ico-
nography, a useful place to begin may be to account for the place of the
mother goddess question at the very outset. There have been ongoing
speculations about a matriarchate or a mother goddess–centred religion
in the ancient civilization of what now comprises northwestern India and
Pakistan, even in the midst of ongoing debates. Below, I briefly summarize
some of these efforts.
Preliminary research, which influenced much subsequent scholarship,
favoured one-dimensional, exotic or orientalist interpretations of the many
terracotta female figurines excavated across various Indus sites such as
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. The work of early-twentieth-century archae-
ologists such as John Marshall, Mortimer Wheeler and Stuart Piggott has
been cited to buttress arguments in favour of fertility cults (see, for exam-
ple, Ganesh 1990; Atre 2011). Gregory Possehl effectively summarizes these
paradigms (2019: 15–19) to point out some of the valuable insights they
offer as well as their inherent blind spots (see also Possehl 1997). Cross-
cultural linkages with Sumerian civilization of these early figurines celebrat-
ing life-giving abilities, especially those dating to Mehrgarh around 3000 to
2500 BCE, have also been proposed (see, for example, Sankalia 1981;
Ganesh 1990; Atre 2011). However, over-enthusiastic speculations regard-
ing a cross-cultural mother goddess cult whose influence spread across
Indo-Mesopotamian cultures have been called into question. Very early on,
Gordon and Gordon, even while acknowledging the preponderance of
female figurines excavated from various Indus valley sites, had summarily
debunked any association of these with Sumerian goddesses (1940: 11).
They also put to rest the proposition made previously by Mackay and oth-
ers, linking female clay figurines directly with mother earth. According to
Gordon and Gordon, the ‘magico-religious significance’ of figurines in such
interpretations had been over-emphasized (1940: 2). Possehl agrees that evi-
dence in support of similar hypotheses about the prevalence of mother god-
dess worship made in early archaeological work such as that of Marshall ‘is
not terribly robust’ (2019: 141). It is equally evident that an orientalist
discourse centring on animism and fertility symbols through overzealous
readings of a presumed mother goddess cult may have been part of a larger
colonizing project which rested on polarized dichotomies of West/East,

30
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

culture/nature and masculine/feminine in reconstructing ancient percep-

tions about religion and philosophy.3
Cautionary notes notwithstanding, the goddess question has continued
to invite scholarly interest and it is likely that the popularity of ‘Goddess
Feminism’ of the late twentieth century in the West was a catalyst for
research on this subject across varied parts of the world. Evidence of the
many sculpted female figurines has been used to support such views (see
Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Fabio Scialpi traces the prevalence of mother goddess
worship to Mehrgarh between the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, basing

Figure 2.1  Standing figure of the mother goddess. Terracotta Mohanjo-Daro; c.

2700–2100 BCE; 23 × 8.5 cm.
Source: National Museum, New Delhi; accession no. D. K. 3506/260.

31
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

Figure 2.2  Female figurine with fan-shaped headdress; approx. 5.3 × 14.3 × 3.4 cm.
Source: https://www.harappa.com/figurines/5.html (IMG0005). Copyright Richard H.
Meadow/Harappa.com, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government
of Pakistan.

this on clay figurines of females ‘with well marked sexual organs’ and sub-
sequent ones of women carrying children in their arms (2009: 366). He
proposes a historical continuity between these early figurines with the cult
of the mother goddess in Mohanjo-daro and Harappa of the third millen-
nium BCE, the submergence of which is traced according to a predictable
Aryan invasion theory; after the Aryan invasion, the goddess figure is seen
to be subsumed into various Vedic goddesses such as Aditi, Saraswati,
Prithvi, Gauri and Durga. Scialpi also subscribes to a familiar cross-cultural

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

‘diffusion’ paradigm to relate aspects of Indian goddesses to the Iranian

Anahita (2009: 373).
Various efforts have been made to trace a mother goddess tradition span-
ning pre-Vedic to Vedic cultures and its cross-cultural links throughout
South Asia and beyond. Shubhangana Atre interprets the reluctance to
acknowledge the centrality of the goddess figure in Harappan culture as an
androcentric bias in archaeological scholarship previously dominated by
male scholars (2011: 158). Atre claims that Western archaeological
approaches to India have adopted a largely ‘curatorial’ approach and focus
on description, documentation and classifying (2011: 165). From this
empiricist perspective, prehistoric female figurines are dismissed as part of
fertility cults (Atre 2011: 169) while employing the term ‘mother goddess’
as a blanket expression (2011: 176). In some of her early work, Atre had
drawn linkages between the oft-appearing figure of the unicorn and fertility
cults to conclude that the figurines found at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro
may very likely have represented a presiding Virgin goddess (1985: 5–6).
Subsequently, Atre (2011) draws upon a Jungian model of female arche-
types to construct parallels between ancient Sumerian and Indic traditions,
again a subject of historical debate. Similarly, Kamala Ganesh establishes
links between mother goddess traditions in Eastern cultures with the ancient
paleolithic venuses of the West, finding in the symbol of the bull motif a
reflection of Harappan fertility images that would reappear in Indian cul-
tural tradition in the form of the nude Lajjagauri (Ganesh 1990: 58–59),
whose iconography I have discussed elsewhere.4
Tempting as it may be to unravel cross-cultural linkages between female
fertility icons across the geographical area stretching from Mesopotamia to
the lands of the Indus, a region that Possehl refers to as ‘the Middle Asian
interaction sphere’ (Possehl 2019: 215), it would be prudent to step cau-
tiously into this thorny terrain. As Wendy Doniger reminds us, ‘hindsight
speculations about fertility sects’ may be tempting, but ‘not every image is
symbolic; not every woman is a goddess’ (Doniger 2009: 77). The possibil-
ity of presumed matriarchates in ancient Indic cultures may spark feminist
scholarly interest but should equally push us to remain vigilant against the
implied risks of assumptions about fertility goddess worship that may play
into orientalist construals emanating from gendered and cultural binaries.
In light of these complexities, the goddess question remains unresolved
and perhaps its corroboration is best left to future historical and archaeo-
logical scholarship. Moreover, from the perspective of a theorizing of gen-
der, the existence of a mother goddess cult or a matriarchate society may
have limited significance. It may be more helpful, rather, to unveil a differ-
ently constructed representational space occupied by the ‘feminine’ in Indus
art and culture through analeptic interpretations of its aesthetic. Debates
about the representation of the goddess in art objects bring to the fore,
minimally, the question of symbolic valuations of the feminine corporeal-
ized in the form of female figurines. Regardless of whether the Indus

33
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aesthetic was based on a goddess-centric cultural ideology, it quite evi-

dently sustains an acknowledgement of feminine powers harnessed in their
composite forms – in relation to the female body, the male body and
androgyny – an indication of the calibration of the feminine within a more
involved world view than may have been imagined by early archaeological
scholarship during colonial times.

Trans-disciplinary approaches
It is challenging, of course, to try to ferret out bygone conceptions of sex,
sexuality and gender in iconographies of cultures so far removed from us in
time. This rings especially true when we look at ancient clay figurines in
terms of sex/gender binaries that we have inherited from modernity. In our
attempts at an analeptic turn to the past, is it possible to move out of the
semiotic fields within which customary dualistic structurations of feminine
and masculine are enmeshed? From the perspective of interpreting the aes-
thetic traditions of South Asia, the detrimental effects of a gendered dis-
course reliant on received polarizations of feminine and masculine categories
have already been demonstrated. Annapurna Garimella (1997) elucidates
how such a polarization lent itself to the imperialist aims of a larger colo-
nialist and orientalist project in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to the extent that even the counter-discourse of Indian nationalists (such as
that of Coomaraswamy) fell prey to its discursive confinements and was
unable to function outside of an orientalising vocabulary. Given the ubiqui-
tous pervasiveness of culturally constructed value-steeped gender polarities,
Garimella wonders whether it is ever possible to deploy gender in the form
of an empowering counter-discourse. In a move paralleling French post-
structuralist feminism,5 she proposes the ongoing critique of hierarchized
discursive gender binaries, to be followed by an articulation of femininity
and masculinity in differential terms (Garimella 1997: 38).
Regardless of how liberating such poststructuralist strategies may be for
the contemporary feminist, they may present difficulties when deployed for
interpreting cultural objects from societies where it is uncertain whether
these binaries, and their associated differentials, operated along analogous
axes. For one, the positing of differential terms may remain constrained by
contemporary understandings of difference; an obvious example may be
the gendered polarities generated by Oedipality as expounded upon in post-
Freudian psychoanalysis and their subsequent poststructuralist deconstruc-
tion. Second, the positing of differentials suggests a reliable degree of
discreteness of categories that we are familiar with today but that may not
have had similar identifiable fields of meanings associated with them in the
ancient past. What if sex and gender, sexuality and spiritualism, masculine
and feminine and many such terms did not operate as distinct dichotomies
in certain ancient cultures? It may be more judicious then to adopt an
inside-out approach and begin searching for meanings from within the

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realm of their alternate conceptualizations even while we keep in view con-

temporary advances in theorizations of gender. Whatever may be the obvi-
ous limitations of such a strategy, ‘perhaps it may become possible to write
of other spaces, texts, times when gender operated in other ways’ (Garimella
1997: 38). It is possible that the complex aesthetic representations of sex,
gender and sexuality in the proto-historic period of South Asian history,
more specifically the Indus civilization, may offer one such other space and
time when gender did, most likely, operate in alternate ways. Taking into
account this hypothesis, I suggest that a trans-disciplinary framework and
an imaginative analeptic approach may help resuscitate some present and
future implications of Indus aesthetics for feminist theory.
Feminist approaches that sustain a criticality towards models of ‘gender
polarity’ (Bolger and Wright 2013: 376) provide one effective opening for
engaging with alternate formulations of gender. In the context of their work
on Southwest Asian prehistory, Diane Bolger and Rita Wright point out that
it is only recently that archaeological work has turned to ‘more socially
based’ approaches with gender issues playing ‘a more central interpretive
role’ (2013: 374–375). Sharri Clark’s work on Indus figurines offers a per-
tinent model for archaeological approaches that turn to ‘recent advances in
feminist theory that view sexual difference in the context of broader social
difference and identity’ (2003: 305). Clark addresses various misconcep-
tions regarding the exaggerated eroticisation of female figurines, the asso-
ciation of nudity with eroticism, the proportion of female to male figurines,
and a clear-cut division of labour based on gender in the Indus civilization.
She proceeds to show, with the help of anthropomorphic figurines from
Harappa, how each of these presumptions may be open to debate. Most
notably, she points out that nudity may have been unrelated to eroticism
and fertility and that virginity and chastity may not have had the same rel-
evance for the Indus people that may be assumed from a contemporary
feminist perspective (Clark 2003: 309–310). What Clark arrives at is a
much more graded and multipart picture of the way in which sex, gender
and sexuality would have functioned for the Indus people. With the help of
human clay figurines found discarded in trash and fill sites, Clark is able to
make several key observations: that there was not necessarily a higher pro-
portion of female figurines in Harappa, that there is a lack of exaggeration
of female physical attributes or of the male body through ithyphallic repre-
sentation, and that mixed attributes such as the pronounced nipples on
male and androgynous bodies were commonly used. Through these various
frames of reference, she infers that ‘fluid conceptions of gender were not
unusual and that other axes of difference such as life stage or age were
sometimes equally or more important to depict’ (Clark 2003: 322–323).
Her work reveals that sex, gender and sexuality operated as unstable shift-
ing taxonomies that were co-dependent and inseparable to such an extent
that it is possible to suggest their approximate boundaries only in relation
to each other.

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

As we have already seen in the discussion of mother goddess iconogra-

phy, this was not the predominant paradigm during early stages of the dis-
covery of the Indus valley civilization. During excavation work carried out
in the 1920s and 1930s, as Gregory Possehl demonstrates, there had been a
tendency to interpret distinguishable male and female clay figurines in reli-
gious terms, marking out distinct cults related to male and female deities,
especially linking the latter to the advent of Shaktism. Possehl’s discussion
of the paradigm put forward by Sir John Marshall exemplifies such a trend
(Possehl 2019: 16). Recent archaeological studies that incorporate gender
perspectives, such as those by Possehl and Clark, disrupt and complicate
this binarism. Possehl shows that although ‘gender made a difference’ and
that the men and women of the Indus age ‘participated in their sociocultural
system in different ways’ (2019: 177), he remains critical of any hasty
attempts to ascribe to these genders the ideological baggage of contempo-
rary times. Work by Clark and Possehl achieves significant progress towards
a gendered understanding of past socio-cultural processes to place us in
closer proximity to the ‘poetic myths’ of the past.
I find it expedient here to turn to interdisciplinary approaches that com-
bine feminist theorizations of sexuality with aesthetics and that enable a
different, inventive engagement with questions of gendered representations.
One such perspective – that brings to work psychoanalytic insights within
the domain of feminist aesthetics – is offered by Israeli artist Bracha Ettinger.
Her theorization of an originary feminine difference generated within the
‘matrixial space’ of pre-birth experiences suggests a non-polarized way of
looking at aesthetic representations of sexuality. In Ettinger’s work, the
encounter with the feminine is made possible within the realm of ­co-emerging
shared trans-subjectivities with the m/other, before its triangulation and
prior to the self’s entry into gendered polarities. Thus, Ettinger dwells on
related notions of the ‘borderlinkings’ and the ‘compassionate hospitality’
of the matrixial to reconceptualize the feminine as distinct from the mascu-
line/feminine polarity of Western psychoanalysis (see Ettinger 2005, 2006).
According to Ettinger, ‘the sexual difference of any human being (female or
male) is first of all staged with and against a female m/Other-woman figure
and in matrixial parameters… this difference is not a question of gender
identification’ (2006: 219). This ‘originary feminine difference’ (2006: 219)
does not deny subsequent Oedipalized sexual difference but operates
alongside it throughout life (2006: 220) so that we remain witness to our
several trans-subjectivities prior to, and alongside, the masculine/feminine
polarity of gendered time. In the ‘matrixial borderspace’, ‘each psyche is a
continuity of the psyche of the other’ (2005: 704). The ‘feminine field’ here
is perceived to be both ‘beyond-the-phallus’ and available ‘in both men and
women’, steering clear of sex and gender as conventionally understood
(2006: 218). According to Ettinger, it is through ‘artworking and art-works’
that the ‘borderlinking’ with this other difference becomes perceptible so
that ‘a spiritual knowledge of the Other and the Cosmos is born and

36
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

revealed’ leading ‘toward openness to the Cosmos’ (2005: 708). Since it is

particularly in and through artwork that encounters with this beyond-
polarity are manifested and communicated, we may wonder whether such
imaginative encounters have occurred in artwork across temporal and geo-
graphical boundaries.
A clue to this enquiry may be found in Griselda Pollock’s observation that
Ettinger’s aesthetic practice is an ‘aesthetic revelation of the shattering of the
belief in linear-historical time’ (Pollock 2004: 18). Given the non-linear
approach of Ettinger’s practice and its attention to a ‘pre-historic’ phase
(Pollock: 22), Pollock dwells on its implications for a future beyond the vio-
lence unleashed by modernity’s insistence on differences – ‘racism, homopho-
bia, misogyny’ (2004: 22). By neither coinciding with polarized sexual
difference nor rejecting it outright, the feminine in Ettinger’s work emerges
as a human potentiality that averts essentializing differences, in the tradition
of French poststructuralist feminists like Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, but
with a radical working-through of pre-birth trans-subjectivities. In this sense,
the feminine is a ‘sex difference from the beginning’, ‘not relative to the mas-
culine or based in any way on the division of the sexes we know as Oedipal
or as gender’ (Pollock 2004: 42). Although the ‘pre-historic’ appears here in
its aesthetical-psychoanalytic connotations of pre-birth encounters, its non-
linear grapheme may very well be mapped out across geographical and
chronological zones. Analeptic approaches that identify resonances in art-
work from ancient times are particularly hospitable for such an effort.
According to Pollock’s reading of Ettinger, the feminine marks ‘processes
that historical events and aesthetic encounters already know but have not
yet thought’ (2004: 42). How do we unravel those aesthetic encounters that
‘know’, before ‘thought’, an/other imagining of the feminine in its figuring
as an originary, shared trans-subjectivity, prior to Freudian and post-Freud-
ian polarizations, and socio-cultural entrenchments of gender? What bear-
ing might such ‘imagings’ have on our understanding of alternate
classifications of sex, sexuality and gender differences in the context of
Indus art? To respond to these questions, I take a closer look at the repre-
sentation of gendered forms in Indus figurines (see Figures 2.2–2.4).

Re-figuring composite sexualities in Indus art

The various enigmatic and often puzzling Indus figurines representing
mixed sexual attributes have led to a confusion regarding sexual identities
(see Figures 2.3 and 2.4). Gregory Possehl remarks,

It seems that the figurine makers of Mohenjo-daro sometimes chose

to show breasts in ways that lead the modern observer to wonder
which sex they were attempting to portray… The ambiguity of gen-
der markers in the figurines brings up the distinct possibility that
some Indus figurines may represent beings that were both male and

37
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

Figure 2.3  Three male figurines from Harappa. Approximate dimensions (W × H ×

D) of the largest figurine: 5.3 × 9.0 × 1.5 cm.
Source: https://www.harappa.com/figurines/21.html (IMG0021). Copyright Richard H.
Meadow/Harappa.com, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government
of Pakistan.

Figure 2.4  Male figurine with a fan-shaped headdress from Harappa; approx. 5.0 ×
13.2 × 3.0 cm.
Source: https://www.harappa.com/figurines/29.html. Copyright Richard H. Meadow/Harappa.
com, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan.

38
 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

female, or androgynous. Or the figures may represent possibly a

male or female who portrayed themselves as the opposite sex.
(Possehl 2019: 181)

Elsewhere, Clark (2009) calls attention to the formal aspects of constructing

androgynous anatomies in Harappan terracotta figurines. Given the deliber-
ate and recurrent structuration of human figurines formed from the conjoin-
ing of two vertical rolls of clay, she emphasizes the significance of androgynous
physical traits in conceptualizing the human body, beyond the practical
functionality of fusing two halves (see Figure 2.5). She sees in such mixed

Figure 2.5  Female figurine with a decorated belt and ‘skirt’ from Harappa.
Source: https://www.harappa.com/figurines/17.html, approx. 3.8 × 7.3 × 2.0 cm. Copyright
Richard H. Meadow/Harappa.com, courtesy of the Department of Archaeology and Museums,
Government of Pakistan.

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

gender conceptualizations a ‘re-enactment of the creation of life or birth and

a materialization of a duality in Harappan self-perception, perhaps reflect-
ing the integration of other essential “parts” of the self in representations of
the Harappan body’ (Clark 2009: 247). The anatomical embodiment of a
‘symbolic integration of halves’ (Clark 2009: 247) suggests the privileged
place occupied by an idealized conjoining of different sexualities within the
human body in the cosmology of the ancient Harappans, what Clark links
to ‘later Vedic notions of balance’ (2009: 243). It is possible, of course, that
the conjoined vertical core of human figurines was a mimetic device for
representing the anatomical symmetry of limbs and sensory organs – arms,
legs, breasts, eyes and ears on a vertical sculptural axis (see Figure 2.5) – or
just ‘simply the easiest way to construct separate legs’ (Clark 2009: 248).
However, when seen in the context of other forms of balance achieved in
terracotta art – such as the co-representation of mixed sexual organs in
ungendered bodies – the whole effort points to a deliberate impulse for giv-
ing shape to other ways in which the ancient people may have perceived
equilibrium in the universe around them – in sexual commingling, in the
birth–life–death cycle, and in the corporeal/spiritual divinity of the material
body. Such a preference for cosmological balance at the very core – that is,
through a compositional conjoining of dual attributes at the corporeal
core – is also prominently found in the figuration of the Harappan male
body which incorporates well-defined male genitalia as well as pronounced
nipples. Clark finds ‘cultural significance’ in this physiological feature and
deduces that the nipples mirror ‘female breasts as a symbolic repository of
male sex, gender, and sexuality’ (2009: 243). The sexual ‘equivalence’ in
representation of human bodies ‘suggests a complex and fluid conception
of sex and gender in the Harappan world’ (Clark 2009: 243).
The frequent recurrence of androgyny and gender ambiguity in terracotta
figurines, or ‘gender variance’ in Clark’s terms (2003: 319), opens up the
possibility of trans-gendered readings. Clark suggests that figures with
mixed male and female attributes may have been variously linked to her-
maphroditism, to the use of androgynous figurines as votives for ritualistic
practice, or to the representation of ‘a number of sexual and gender identi-
ties expressed through cross-dressing or androgyny’ (Clark 2003: 319). It is
evident that the deliberate foregrounding of sexual ambiguity represented
for the Indus people much more than the co-existence of female and male
sexual attributes and suggested an idealized body that was an integral part
of their cosmology. Whether the seated figurines with ‘raised hands pressed
together’ (2003: 319) (see Figure 2.6) were embodiments of androgynous
priests involved in ritualistic practice, possessing shamanistic, magical pow-
ers, or of devotees in the posture of prayer, there seems to be a distinct
association between androgyny and the supernatural (see Clark 2003: 319–
321). Perhaps, removed from the cultural baggage with which we now
imbue normative female and male bodies and the non-normative body of
the hermaphrodite, androgynous figurines represented a striving towards

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Figure 2.6  Seated male pre-history, 2700–2100 BCE, hand-modelled, Harappa, ter-
racotta, approx. 5 × 4 × 2 cm.
Source: National Museum, New Delhi; accession no. 3072/388. Credit: M.S. Vats.

wholeness suggested in composite forms (which often included human/ani-

mal attributes), much as in the account from ancient Greece provided by
Plato’s Aristophanes. From a more modern perspective, it equally evokes
associations with feminist musings on the role of androgyny in creativity, as
lyrically ruminated upon by Virginia Woolf (1929), for instance. Clark pro-
poses that even though androgynous figures do not prove that androgyny in
mortals was glorified, they do hint at an association of androgyny with
transcendence in ‘harnessing both male and female sexual potential’ (2003:
320). Such an aesthetically achieved ‘simulated androgyny’ in clay figurines
may have been, for the Harappans, a way of experiencing closeness to
divinity, a loftiness that transcended the mundane. It is interesting to note
that the notion of a venerated androgyny recurs in the form of an aesthetic
trope in transgender folklore in India and in the literary tradition of

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transgender life writing which has continued to subsist at the margins of a

dominant post-Vedic heteronormative culture (see, for example, Rath in
Aneja: 2019).
Clark proposes that the fluid, nuanced representations of sexuality of
Indus figurines suggest a complex pre-Vedic ideology prevalent prior to
Hinduism (2003: 323). The evidence for a discontinuity between pre-Vedic
and Vedic conceptions of gendered identities as represented in art objects
opens an analeptic pathway for feminist discussion to venture into a world
of alternate conceptualizations, removed from the exhausting burden of
later cultural prescriptions and against what has become an urgent majori-
tarian tendency to identify ‘Hindu’ religious corroborations as far back as
the proto-historic period.6 Indus cosmology and art make it possible to
imagine a re-thinking of gender boundaries away from their normative,
taken-for-granted associations and within an expanded intersectional
framework in which gender appears as just one marker in a cross-section of
life cycle, status and ethnicity. Such a cross-sectional view may help illumi-
nate, from a fresh perspective, an osmosis between the intersectional cate-
gories of gender, age, class and caste that we are familiar with today. Rather
than operating as binaries, sexual and gendered identities appear to have
functioned as mirror-terms, as reflective and even exchangeable energies
whose fullest potential is made manifest in the shaping of the androgynous
body. In a departure from the early-twentieth-century emphasis on female
fertility symbols and mother goddess iconography, more recent archaeo-
logical scholarship is suggestive of composite representations of female and
male sexual and reproductive organs that border on eternal questions of
creation, reproduction, death and divinity-through-androgyny. These obser-
vations bring into view the cultural ideation of an equilibrium achieved
through a co-existence of differences, paving the way for a feminist inter-
rogation of modernity’s polarities and their resultant epistemic violence.

‘The Lady of the Spiked Throne’: an exemplification of feminine

powers and composite sexuality
In this section, I turn to a startling example of the intermingling of the femi-
nine and the magical in the ‘controversial’ find of ‘The Lady of the Spiked
Throne’ by Massimo Vidale (2011). Although the terracotta artefact may
have been in the hands of smugglers before landing in the hands of a private
collector, Vidale authenticates its originality and dates it to c. 2700 BCE, the
Early Harappan/ Kot Dijan transitional phase (Vidale 2011: 31). The ‘cow-
boat’ artefact, as it is referred to by Vidale, stages a collective event in a
kind of chariot in which are placed 15 anthropomorphic figures – a presid-
ing female deity and 14 other hand-modelled and moulded figures (see
Figures 2.7 and 2.8).
The reigning queen/goddess figure sits on a throne decorated with seven
spokes or ‘rays’ and is flanked by four males standing in attendance (see

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Figure 2.7  The terracotta model from its left side.

Source: Photograph: IMG_3712, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

Figure 2.8  Detail of the same group. Left side, from a different angle.
Source: Photograph: IMG_3715, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

Figure 2.9  From the left side, the terracotta figurines sit along the broadsides, and
the central aisle is in the middle. Females and males are alternated, and
the females are in front.
Source: Photograph: IMG_3737, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

Figures 2.10 and 2.11). In front of her, eight seated figures (four female and
four male) are lined up along both sides of the central aisle of the chariot/
boat, and at the front end or bow, two male attendants are posted at the top
of a staircase that ends with the head of a bull leading the way (see Figures
2.7–2.9 and 2.12). Placed on relatively elevated stools in comparison with
male counterparts (Vidale 2011: 23), the female figures loom over the group
in size and position, with the queen ‘floating’ slightly above her seat (see
Figure 2.9). According to Vidale’s description, the enthroned queen/deity is
30 percent larger and towers above all the other members of the crew and
her head is almost touching the roof of the chariot (2011: 26). Her ener-
gized frame exhibits a ‘disturbing vitality’ (Vidale 2011: 27).
This fascinating representation of a reigning goddess-like figure from the
early Harappan period appears to coincide with other findings regarding the
cultural significance of powerful female figurines (regardless of their venera-
tion as mother goddesses). According to Vidale’s description of the artefact,

the leading role is played by the female gender. Not only the main
actor sitting on a radiating throne is female, but in the central row
of sitting personages women figurines come first and are higher and
more visible than male counterparts. Six figurines playing – without

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Figure 2.10  The enthroned lady.

Source: Photograph: IMG_3867, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

any doubt – the roles of subordinate attendants, are certainly males.

It is doubtless a feminine show of power and authority that needs
to be accepted as a very partial but important indicator in our
efforts at reconstructing the ideological and socio-political canvas
of the Early Indus societies.
(Vidale 2011: 40)

The divine powers wielded by this majestic female figure are made evident
by her throne decorated with seven spikes/spokes that suggest ‘supernatural
rays of light’ (Vidale 2011: 39; see Figures 2.10 and 2.11). Solar imagery is

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Figure 2.11  The enthroned lady from left.

Source: Photograph: IMG_3859, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

repeated in the symbol and rays etched on the forehead of the bull at the far
end of the chariot (Vidale 2011: 38; see also Figure 2.12). Vidale suggests
that the chariot’s structure leaves it open to being interpreted as a boat or a
cart or perhaps both (2011: 31). Given the dual function of the bull-shaped
supernatural vehicle of the goddess, which suggests latent associations with
later Hindu deities and their individual vahanas, the scene invokes both a
‘supernatural watery world’ (2011: 28) and a heavenly solar locale. Bringing
together in this way the two major elements that sustained life in the Indus
region – the sun and the river – it opens gateways to alternative interpreta-
tions. For instance, the boat imagery viewed alongside the symbolism of the
seven spoked throne brings to mind the saptasindhu, the river Indus with its
seven tributaries. In analogous cases, similar readings of the symbolism of
the number seven have been attempted (for instance, in Atre’s interpretation
of the commonly found inscription ‘Bad-Imin’7 on Indus seals in terms of
seven cities or seven rivers) (Atre 1983).
Coincidentally, the number seven not only is embedded in the number of
spokes on the throne but also finds its multiple in the 14 human figures in
the chariot. If the supernatural boat-chariot is intended to be travelling on
the heavenly waterways of the Indus, the saptasindhu imagery may not be
entirely far-fetched, especially in its extended association with the ‘seven
river sisters’ or ‘seven Mothers’, as they have elsewhere been referred to (see
Possehl 2019: 146). In such a reading of a chariot-boat (Vidale 2011: 37)

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Figure 2.12  The model seen frontally.

Source: Photograph: IMG_3800, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

splicing the waves of the Indus waterways, presided over by a reigning female
deity who controls the movements of the bull parting the currents at the
bow, the ‘Lady’ may well represent a goddess in charge of the seven rivers – a
personification of the mighty seven-pronged Indus herself. Regardless of
whether this is the case, what the artefact does reveal is the undeniable
power-wielding status of women in Early Harappan culture and the acknowl-
edgement of the association of feminine energy with divinity as well as its
intimate ties to the fierce masculinity embodied by the bull figure. What
Vidale interprets as a form of ‘hierarchy’ (2011: 37) between the female and
male figures may also suggest a recognition of the combined vitalities of the
river and the sun in a complex symbolism that threads together feminine and
masculine energies in the shape of a mighty river goddess.
Furthermore, the figurative aspects of the sculpted figures exemplify a
complex representation of sexual identities. Two striking aspects present

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themselves at an initial cursory glance – first, the visual predominance of the

female figures on account of their structural and positional ascendancy;
second, the artist’s exaggeration of certain physical attributes over others,
namely the unusually large heads and foregrounded limbs of the female
figures and their relatively un-demarcated sexual organs (see Figure 2.13).
All the female figures are nude and hand-modelled in contrast to the
moulded male figures, suggesting more careful artistic attention to the for-
mer. Vidale remarks upon their ‘unnatural’ appearance – prominent fore-
heads, long noses, elongated heads, and small nipples. If we were looking
for ‘fertility icons’, these female figures certainly would not fit the bill of the

Figure 2.13  The last female and male figurines of the left side.
Source: Photograph: IMG_3722, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

typical Mohenjo-daro amply endowed figurines. Yet their mysterious high

brows and over-sized faces exude a certain otherworldly intellectual prowess.
The anatomical resemblances of the female figures with the divine/superhu-
man figure of the queen make the intimate connection between them obvi-
ous; almost physical extensions of the queen-like figure, they appear to
partake of her magical dynamism. At the same time, they match their male
counterparts in physical strength – all the figures have their arms held up as
though holding the reins of the bull at the head of the boat-chariot. The males
are adorned with necklace-like ornaments, worn below a kind of choker, sug-
gesting sexual androgyny: ‘Flanked by two pellets in relief, possibly the nip-
ples, this ornament strangely resembles a penis’ (Vidale 2011: 21). Clearly, it
seemed important to the artist(s) to bring together the sexual potential of
both sexes in the variously gendered figures, making it difficult to tell apart
aspects of ‘femininity’ from those of ‘masculinity’. Enhancing this sexual
complexity in an ultimate gesture is the figurative shape of the bull’s head at
the bow, its forehead ornamented with the red dot (bindi) still used by women
in India, signalling both its mixed sexual attributes and a historical continuity
in terms of gendered symbolism (2011: 38) (see Figure 2.12).
According to Vidale, the parallel aesthetic structure of the queen at one
end and the bull at the other creates the impression of a distinct identifica-
tion between the presiding female deity and the hyper-masculine bull in a
kind of ultimate ‘bovine symbolism’ (40). Vidale interprets the theatrical
scene and its ‘moving’ imagery in a remarkable, vivid narrative whose plot
conjoins the two sexes located at the opposite ends of the vehicle. I cite it
here at length to convey the import of the drama it invokes (see alongside
Figure 2.14) and as an instance of imaginative readings of aesthetic tradi-
tions that revivify the past in the present.

As the two spaces are straightly linked by a passage, the central

aisle of the vehicle, the most obvious interpretation is that the lady
was meant to rise from her throne, step down from the red stool,
walk through the length of the bull-vehicle, to climb the four steps
of the staircase. Finally she would stand on the rear of the bull’s
head. Here, the cavity in the partial hump of the animal, carefully
shaped and slipped, cannot be considered a casual accident of con-
struction. I would venture to guess that the cavity was designed or
imagined as a sound-bow, through which her voice, if she sung,
talked to the people or prayed, would have sounded unnaturally
powerful. Her voice, if I am right, became “the voice of the bull”.
(2011: 40)

(See Figure 2.14.)

…

In this light, if the bull was joined with the vehicle, the lady became
the bull: the three elements were intimately mingled, a feature that

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

Figure 2.14  The ‘prow’ from rear, with two male ‘attendants’ standing aside the
staircase and the red-slipped cavity behind the bull's head.
Source: Photograph: IMG_3745, Federica Aghadian. Courtesy: Massimo Vidale and EURAL
SpA.

might recall other impressive hybrid images and composite unnatu-

ral beings later invented or adopted by the craftspeople of the Indus
valley.
(2011: 40)

Once the three elements – the queen/goddess, the bull and the vehicle –
‘move’ into each other, the voice of the female deity becomes indistinguish-
able from the roar of the masculinized bull or that of the waves crashing
against the boat, in a fusion of feminine and masculine energies. Were we to

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pursue our previous interpretation of an Indus goddess presiding over its

tributaries, one could well imagine the conjoined voices as the slosh of the
gushing waters of the river, churning up sound and life at once. Here, the
feminine in all its complexity far exceeds the symbolism of rudimentary
fertility icons that seem to be easily dismissed by archaeologists. Moreover,
the mixed attributes of the goddess–bull imagery have been identified with
the central motif of the humped bull iconography of the Indus valley (Atre
2011: 42). Read alongside the co-occurrence of mixed sexual and reproduc-
tive symbols such as breasts, penis and nipples on female and male figu-
rines, in their linkages with various regenerative fluid sites – river, water,
womb, semen and milk – what emerges is a view of sex, gender and sexual-
ity as aspects of an amalgamated aesthetic cosmology that intertwines sex-
ual and ecological tropes, not surprising in a civilization that drew much of
its subsistence from river waters.
Notably, the attention to the role played by water in Indus ecology, art
and architecture has been widely documented. Possehl terms the central
role of water and the significance of bathing and cleansing rituals in the
Indus valley civilization (as emblematized in the Great Bath of Mohenjo-
daro, for instance) as ‘wasserluxus’, roughly translated as ‘water splendor’
(Possehl 2019: 58), and views it as a central tenet of the Indus ideology
both in its ecological aspect of sustaining human, plant and animal life and
from a symbolic perspective (2019: 107). Others such as Kenoyer have
also remarked upon the significance of water by pointing to the many pri-
vate spaces for bathing and cleansing constructed by the Indus people
(1991: 353).
This pre-Vedic aesthetic imaging of exchangeable sexualities and androg-
ynous regenerative bodies enmeshed within a larger symbolic imagery
drawn from nature precedes the metaphysics of complementary dualism
represented in the purusha–prakriti/shakti triangulation in which the femi-
nine is located within nature and more firmly distinguished from its mas-
culine counterpart. Recent South Asian feminist critiques of ‘traditional’
nature–culture dichotomy could perhaps find sympathetic recourse in such
an eschewing of gender polarities in the ancient Indus world. For instance,
Bina Agarwal (2001), in her appraisal of Vandana Shiva’s (1988) delinea-
tion of the Prakriti–Shakti interrelationship, demurs to the ‘Indian’
approach to ecology as it rests firmly within the bounds of a homogenizing
Hindu metaphysics which, even while glorifying the Prakriti–Shakti alli-
ance, remains caught within feminine/masculine binaries (see Agarwal
2001: 420–424). From this perspective of locating the feminine and the
masculine within a larger ecological framework, proto-historic artworks
present an alternate pre-Vedic world view in which representations of
human sexuality sustain non-polarized interlinkages with nature and cul-
ture. However, despite the multifaceted representational effects achieved in
Indus art, it would be a leap in the dark to speculate about whether gender
inequalities and gendered privileges were already operative in the Indus

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era. Nonetheless, the Indus aesthetic does succeed in problematizing the

assumed originariness of the subsequent pre-colonial historiography of
polarized prakriti–purusha representations and roles. It may be worth-
while, therefore, to delve a little deeper into the construction of gender
roles among the Indus people.

Sexual ambiguity and gender roles

According to archaeologists, even as far back as the earliest phases of Indus
settlements in Mehrgarh, there is evidence of both male and female partici-
pation in parental roles as seen in the figure of a male figurine nursing an
infant (see Figure 10.6 in Possehl 2019: 179). As Possehl observes, although
there is on balance a slight tip ‘toward the concept of motherhood, fertility,
reproduction’ in the ‘ideal’ female forms of Mehrgarh, ‘the emergence of
males and males holding human infants suggests a shift in society … That
is, increased sharing of the birthing experience and a greater involvement of
males in the parenting process’ (Possehl 2019: 180–181). Possehl locates
the shift within larger forces of urbanization occurring at the time and com-
pares it to the contemporary participation of Western women in the public
sphere. Women’s active participation in food production is supported by
evidence such as that of the Harappan figurine of a woman who may be
kneading bread or grinding grain (see Figure 10.10 in Possehl 2019: 182–
183). Remarkably, as observed by Possehl, this labouring female is ‘all
dressed up’, complete with ‘hair fan, panniers, and head cone’ (2019: 182).
Is it possible that the representation of working ‘dressed up’ females points
to the likelihood of activities performed outside of the private domain of
the household (for instance, in a public space such as a granary)? If so, it
may raise doubts about underlying androcentric biases in the customary
interpretation that female figurines involved in food production primarily
represented women involved in kitchen activities such as kneading bread.
Sharri Clark interrogates such presumptions made on the basis of Harappan
female figurines in the act of cooking, grinding and kneading. Clark finds
that it may be ‘restrictive’ to assume that these figurines were involved in
household activities:

Perhaps these figurines represent women in other activities such as

grinding minerals for faience production or kneading clay for pot-
tery production, which could place Indus women in larger spheres
of production and provide a different perception of women’s roles
in Indus society
(Clark 2003: 318).

It is also plausible that males were associated with similar ‘typically female’
occupations, as seen in two figurines ‘that have nipples or smaller breasts’
(Clark 2003: 318). On the whole, one may infer the absence of an absolute

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division between gendered roles performed by males and females, with evi-
dence for the former being involved in bird keeping, animal husbandry,
grinding as well as infant care and the latter participating in both private
and public spheres of labour. The lack of a clear-cut demarcation of gender
roles, along with the conceptualization of gender ambiguity in terracotta
figurines, presents at least a partially completed puzzle of an integrated
image of gender and sexuality within Indus culture and aesthetics.

Reconstructing Indus aesthetics through art-i-facts

So far, we have examined the gendered implications of compositional and
symbolic features of terracotta figurines. In this section, I turn to various
other aspects, including the material process of manufacture, and the
intended function and ‘social life’ of sculpted figurines, for a different
engagement with the ancient Indus aesthetic.

Making matters
In ancient cultures largely dependent on agriculture for survival, the use of
terracotta has obvious implications, the most prominent of these being the
association of clay with mother earth, its fecundity and its regenerative
powers (see, for example, Clark 2009: 239). Except for some bronze pieces,
the majority of the figurines found in archaeological sites at Harappa and
Mohanjo-daro are sculpted in terracotta using a plastic or additive process,
although this is often combined with moulding procedures (as already seen
in the example of the ‘Lady of the Spiked Throne’), suggesting an absence
of hierarchical valuations between individual creativity and reproduction.
According to Monica Smith, what distinguishes accretionary/plastic media
from reductive/glyptic media is that ‘plastic media are additive as well as
malleable and changeable. Many plastic media are manufactured entities
whose forms are not evident in nature but are instead the result of human
imagination and technological prowess’ (Smith 2015: 26).
The malleability of terracotta as the primary sculpting material allows
for a free play of imagination as well as an elastic aesthetic of pliability
and movement available until the very final stages of drying and firing.
Terracotta is particularly suitable for hand modelling and facilitates a tac-
tile intimacy and a sensory connection between the artist and the art
object, veering away from the notion of art-making as a detached imper-
sonal activity and favouring rather a perception of the artistic creation as
a material extension of the artist’s body and subjectivity. The transforma-
tive potential of clay transmogrifies the art object just as much as the
artisan/artist, both transmuting each other through the mutuality of an
intimate aesthetic process. The aesthetic experience of the artist/artisan is
seeded into the creation for subsequent communion with the spectator.
One may infer from the large number of hand-modelled clay figurines that

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plastic art-making held a significant place in the personal and community

life of the Indus people.

An aesthetic of pleasure-in-process
An emphasis on the process of making is evidenced from the fact that many
of the figurines were left ‘unfinished’, a phenomenon that has been noted by
many Indus archaeologists. A widely used red wash as well as various slips
and glazes were frequently applied as finishes on terracotta objects (see, for
example, Gordon and Gordon 1940: 2, 6). But this seems to not have been
a universal norm, revealing the selective attention paid to the process of
completion. According to Sharri Clark, ‘the majority of the Harappan ter-
racotta figurines were not finished or decorated with pigments’ (2009: 252).
Overall, the focus seems to have been on the act of making rather than on
the finished product and its perpetuity. In her discussion of Harappan figu-
rines, Clark states that the privileging of hand modelling over the more
efficient practice of moulding ‘suggests a focus on the process and ideologi-
cal rather than practical choices in the materialization of the Harappan
human body’ (2009: 232). She adds that ‘the process of making Harappan
figurines was as important as the figurines themselves’, that the ‘act of hand-
modeling the figurines was ritually or symbolically important’ and that the
‘figurines’ value and meaning seem to have been tied to the process of pro-
ducing them individually – to figurines as a process’ (2009: 246).
Coincidentally, the practice of leaving terracotta art unfinished in many
cases appears to parallel a similar tendency in the case of ancient rock-cut
monuments. For instance, Vidya Dehejia and Peter Rockwell (2011), in
their study of ancient rock-cut art, state that ‘finish was a flexible concept’
(65) that revealed a ‘flexible attitude’ (65), concluding that ‘finishing’ or
completing rock-cut art was not necessarily an important aspect of ancient
Indian aesthetic. A similar perspective about the significance of the unfin-
ished aspect of Indian sculpture has been offered by Joanna Williams
(1986). Would it be possible, one may wonder, to speak of an ‘aesthetic of
incompletion’ (Samuel Parker cited in Dehejia and Rockwell 2011: 62) in
the context of Indus figurines? I suggest, rather, that such an aesthetic may
be affirmatively recast as an aesthetic of pleasure-in-process, in a generous,
analeptic reading of the ‘poetic myths’ of the past.
The framing of the Indus aesthetic as one of pleasure-in-process, stirred
by a non-teleological desire for creative play over the finality of ‘comple-
tion’, facilitates an appreciation of Indus art from the perspective of femi-
nist aesthetics, where process plays a particularly significant role. In Bracha
Ettinger’s work, for instance, process and experience are intimately linked
with the ‘aesthetical duration’ of prolongation and delay. These shape the
time-space for an ‘affective and effective participation’ and for ‘working
through traces of the Other in me’ so that ‘artworking, like psychoanalyti-
cal healing of long duration, is a compassionate encounter-event of

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prolonged generosity’ (Ettinger 2005: 707). According to Ettinger, it is par-

ticularly in art-making that several subjectivities emerge through ‘border-
linking and borderspacing’ encounters within a matrixial space ‘by way of
experiencing with an object or process of creation’ (2005: 711). The cre-
ation is proffered as gift, a link between artist and audience to be deci-
phered in its ‘wit(n)nessing’8 (Ettinger 2006: 220). In the previous chapter,
we have already noted the significant role of transformational experience in
a theorization of feminist aesthetics as offered by feminist scholars such as
Hilde Hein.9 In Ettinger’s realization, process in artwork overlaps with the
prolonging of a mutually transformational experience of compassion and
sharing. I juxtapose these analogous aspects of a proto-historic Indus aes-
thetic and the musings of a contemporary feminist artist – poles apart as
they may seem – as one instance of trans-temporal liminalities that may be
begotten through analeptic explorations of the aesthetic traditions of the
past from present perspectives.
Although I have focused primarily on terracotta figurines, no discussion
of an aesthetics of pleasure would be complete without at least a brief con-
sideration of the bronze dancing girl sculpture from Mohenjo-daro (see
Figure 2.15). Widely acknowledged for its naturalism and grace of move-
ment, the bronze figure shows a young girl with one arm placed on her
waist and with one raised leg in a dance-like posture. Her facial expression
and comportment exude an attitude of confidence and effrontery. Stella
Kramrisch notes the ‘wiry vigour’ (1981: 3) of the body-in-motion and
interprets its inner vitality or ‘innervation’ as an aspect specific to ancient
Indian sculpture (1981: 5), seeing in its naturalism an essential West/non-
West difference – ‘an unavoidable condition’ of Indian art (1981: 4).
Regardless of this association with a culturally essentialist aesthetic of natu-
ralism, the sassy figure of the dancing girl challenges the viewer’s gaze with
her impudence, her reflexivity and her absorption in dance conveying a
pleasure that is entirely her own. Mario Bussagli describes such dancing
postures representing ‘the instant intervening between two opposite rhyth-
mical movements’ as ‘movement in time’ (1951: 210). In such an aesthetic,
life’s joie de vivre is discovered in its ephemeral moments represented
through movement and dance. This transience which for Bussagli is ‘the
flow of all things relative’ (211) not only recurs as a central aspect of aes-
thetic representation but is materially embodied in the curtailed life of ter-
racotta objects, as I attempt to show in the next section.

The purpose of evanescent Indus art objects

A majority of the terracotta art objects excavated from Harappa and
Mohenjo-daro have been found discarded in trash sites, indicating that
their longevity was far less significant than the act of making them. Possehl
views such practices as manifesting a cultural ideology of ‘nihilism’ charac-
teristic of the Indus people (2019: 55–56). He employs the term not as the

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Figure 2.15  Bronze dancing girl from Mohanjo-daro; prehistoric, c. 2300–1750

BCE; approx. 10.5 × 5 × 2.5 cm.
Source: National Museum, New Delhi; accession no. 5721/195.

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negation of all meaning and purpose but in its radical affirmative connota-
tion – a willing abandonment of an old order of life and its replacement
with a new ideology ‘that espouses great, even revolutionary, change’ and
‘brings with it a sense of originality, something new and fresh’ (2019: 56).
The complete lack of monumental art in the Indus valley supports this dis-
regard for perpetuating legacies for the future. Instead, perishable artwork
in clay, much like the ‘disposable art’ of contemporary times, foregrounds
the ‘now’ moment in Indus aesthetic – an impulse to formalize and celebrate
life’s evanescence. We have previously seen how a non-polarized approach
to sex, gender and sexuality in their framing within multiple axes of life
cycles and the idealization of regenerative androgyny emphasize the con-
tinuum of life–death–rejuvenation, one that refuses divisions between ends
and beginnings, to gather momentum in its fluctuating ephemerality. What,
we may then ask, does the curtailed lifespan of the art object imply in terms
of its intended purpose?
A variety of explanations have been offered in this regard. Adopting an
approach previously neglected in ascribing religious function to terracotta
figurines, Ajay Pratap (2016) proposes that these were made primarily by
children for their apprenticeship in modelling and used as toys or play-
things and may also have functioned as votive objects (see Pratap 2016: 3,
6). He bases his conjecture on the ‘elementary character’ of figurines (2016:
5) that suggest to him that they were made by children. Dilip Chakrabarti
favours the religious function theory and views terracotta figurines as ritu-
alistic ‘offerings’ (2014: 348). Vidya Dehejia has also emphasized the time-
bound ritualistic function ascribed to mother goddess figurines (Dehejia
1997: 34). Possehl (2019) suggests that the temporary, disposable nature of
figurines points to their ritualistic, magical or religious function (180), a
possible precursor to the Hindu idolatrous practice of making and worship-
ping idols or murtis. However, like some others, Possehl acknowledges the
possibility of a dual role, where the figurines may have functioned as both
ritualistic votives and toys ‘created by imaginative adults for children to
enjoy’ (2019: 61).
These indicators of the double function of art objects present the possibil-
ity that the contrast between the gravity of ritual and the playfulness and
humour of children’s casual pastimes may not have been construed as an
incongruity by the Indus people. It is possible that the solemn and the cheer-
ful happily co-existed, as also seen in the refusal of absolute divisions in
other aspects of Indus aesthetics. Whether made by children and used by
them as playthings or made by skilled artists and artisans for magico-reli-
gious purposes, the freedom to decide when an art object was considered
complete and to intend it as a site of pleasure seems to have been integral to
such an aesthetic. The emphasis on joy and humour is also most visible in
terracotta objects that appear to have been expressly made for the amuse-
ment of children. Remarking upon the sense of humour of the Harappans
as reflected in the terracotta puppet figurines, Possehl notes: ‘These have

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

delightfulness that must come from the maker, and not merely my biased,
modern eye’ (Possehl 2019: 61). Possehl finds the animal puppets and some
of the other simpler Harappan terracotta figurines as reflective of a ‘sense of
delight and play; simple toys to amuse people, young and old, each in their
own way, often sharing the pleasure’ (2019: 124).

Meaning-making through creation and replication

In his book, The Social Life of Things (1986), Arjun Appadurai states
that ‘commodities, like persons, have social lives’ (3) and ‘life histories’
(17). According to Appadurai, aesthetic objects that are used for rituals
or as sacra undergo a ‘transvaluation’ that distances them from the econ-
omy of commodification and exchange (1986: 23). In their transvalua-
tion, art objects, like language, perform meaning-making and may be
‘read’ in specific ways within contexts of ritual and sacra. Appadurai sees
the divorce between ‘words’ and ‘things’ as a modern phenomenon that
may not have operated in similar terms for ancient cultures (1986: 4).
Rather, he observes, things have meanings through their forms, uses and
trajectories (1986: 5).
The uniformity and replication of terracotta art objects and their prolif-
eration throughout the Indus region buttress the view that the aesthetic
products of the Indus people were circulated as part of a common dis-
course, used to convey meaning by means of symbolic imagery that partici-
pated in a semiotics of shared signs. According to Jonathan Kenoyer, the
standardization and dissemination of artefacts throughout the larger Indus
valley area reflect a shared ideology and aesthetic (1991: 356), also evi-
denced in the common set of symbols engraved on clay seals (1991: 361,
363, 364). Similarly, Monica Smith concurs that an ‘aesthetics of unifor-
mity’… ‘provided an essential baseline of shared communication necessary
for maintaining mutual comprehension in densely concentrated popula-
tions’ (2015: 29).
Although the concept of replication may have derivative connotations
in the context of our contemporary regard for individual creativity, such a
disparaging of imitative artwork does not seem to have been operative
among the Indus people. According to Appadurai, the privileging of
authenticity is a contemporary concern and a copy or imitation may have
had its own legitimacy in earlier times (1986: 45). Frederick Barreda
Monge similarly points out that the originality vs. commercialization
polarity was of little concern for the ancient Harappans. Contrarily, a
reproduction could have suggested that the ‘best stage’ of an art form had
been achieved (Barreda Monge 1973: 162). In her discussion about the
innovation and replication of terracotta ornaments from Sisupalgarh,
Monica Smith proposes that an alternate notion of the ‘aesthetic desirabil-
ity of sameness’ (2015: 24) may have been valued in ancient urban centres.
Replication, according to Smith, not only facilitated shifting boundaries

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 SCULPTING GENDER AND SEXUALITY BY THE INDUS

between high and popular art (2015: 25) but also enabled belongingness
by allowing individuals to identify with a self-identified group (2015: 28).
More significantly, the ‘aesthetics of uniformity’ created space for shared
communication in an urbanized milieu which for Smith represents a kind
of ‘premodern modernity’ (2015: 29). Smith thus finds glyptic copying
(2015: 30) to be a distinct aesthetic of Indus urban culture equally reflected
in the proliferation of standardized handmade terracotta figurines in the
Mehrgarh region (2015: 29).
Possehl, too, emphasizes the aesthetic of replication as a characteristic of
the urban milieu and ideology of the Indus people, one that suggests larger
underlying ideological impulses that characterized a particularly coopera-
tive model of urbanism. As he points out, this view is supported by the
decentralized socio-political structure of the Indus people, their faith in a
‘hetarchy’, the absence of organized religion, and a scarcity of temples or
palaces for elites (Possehl 2019: 57). Possehl proposes that the art and
architecture of Mohenjo-daro, the ideological urban centre for the Indus
civilization, epitomizes the valuation of decentralized shared power and a
participatory social system (see Possehl 2019: 65, 185, 250) inspired by a
uniting ideology of diverse intercultural ideas and technological prowess
that today we associate with modernity. Kenoyer similarly emphasizes the
different conception of the idea of the ‘state’ prevalent at that time (1991:
366, 369) in a culture that was a synthesis of autochthonous traditions
(1991: 372). All of these point to an urbanism that draws its common ideo-
logical impulses from its rootedness in participatory diversity, not that far
removed from the modern cosmopolitanism of ‘unity in diversity’.
This may explain the effortless conjunction of individual creativity and
standardization and replication of art objects within a larger collective
impulse to establish a common discourse of diversity. That these figurines
were duplicated throughout the Indus region indicates, at the level of aes-
thetic practice, another connotation of ‘reproduction’ – a dissemination of
certain shared cosmological beliefs and ideological practices. For the Indus
valley people, the multiple re-productions of the human form in its compos-
ite shapes clearly represented an endless recurrence of creation and aban-
donment through the act of manufacture. The repetitive uniformity of
terracotta figurines is a counterpart to the role played by fantasy and imagi-
nation in the plasticity of their manufacture, evidenced in the vast number
of fantastic creatures with composite forms, such as the unicorn. It is pos-
sible, then, to surmise that shared symbols disseminated in the form of aes-
thetic objects created a sense of recognisability and a shared aesthetic
discourse for the Indus people, a language, as it were, of art and creativity.
Some of the recurring tropes in this discourse include an epistemological
reconciliation with evanescence, a celebration of renewal and regeneration,
the recognition of non-polarized sexual complexity, and a non-teleological
pleasure-in-process, all aspects amenable to a feminist exploration of proto-
historic South Asian aesthetics.

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Conclusion
As we have seen, the form and symbolism of Indus terracotta figurines cel-
ebrate feminine energies, androgyny and mixed sexual attributes within a
composite structuration of sex, sexuality and gender. Figurines that defy
gendered boundaries and idealize sexual vigour through androgynous attri-
butes invite an alignment of the joie de vivre of several sexual subjectivities
with a feminist aesthetics that privileges severality over polarity. Furthermore,
the process of manufacture and intended function of art objects foreground
a non-teleological aesthetics of pleasure-in-process in which making takes
precedence over finishing, regeneration over longevity, and shareability over
individual ownership. Indus figurines express a pleasure in creativity within
a social structure that easily reconciled what we now perceive as dualities –
binaries of masculine and feminine, sex and gender, gravity and humour,
invention and replication, birth and renaissance. The Indus aesthetic offers
up these in conjoined, composite forms rather than as conflicting forces. In
its refusal of polarities, the Indus aesthetic provides an alternate tradition
for approaching questions of sex and gender, one which remains surpris-
ingly relevant for interrogations of intersectional dichotomies.
Unfortunately, the Indus civilization with its life-affirming impulses was
short-lived, reaching its hiatus over a span of some 600 years. Because the
Indus people were too well adapted at social harmony, the lack of internal
conflict proved to be, in Possehl’s words, ‘too much of a good thing’ and
came to be perceived as a ‘sociocultural flaw’ (2019: 244). Brief as it was,
its aesthetic ideology may be a ‘timely’ reminder about the role of fantasy
in conjuring up composite models for gender identities and relations and
of focusing our attention on shareability as aesthetic as well as cultural
practice. For a feminist theory willing to probe deeper into ancient poetic
myths accessed through an imaginative reconstruction of South Asian aes-
thetics, these can offer alternate directions in contravention of the polar-
ized formulations of sex and gender that have informed so much of our
conception of our ancient cultural traditions. In so doing, it may reveal
just the trajectory from analepsis to prolepsis for sustaining a feminist
vision of the future.

Notes
1 Jessica Frazier describes the ‘artefactual’ or archaeological approach to art
objects as one that is furthest removed from aesthetic perspectives since it is
more interested in artefacts as a way of tracing social relations rather than for
their aesthetic form and content (see Frazier 2010: 4–5).
2 For Robert Graves’s discussion of ‘analepsis’ and ‘prolepsis’, see Chapter 19 in
Graves, R. (1966) The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
3 For an extensive discussion, see Garimella 1997.
4 See also my discussion of Lajjagauri in Aneja, A. and Vaidya, S. (2016)
Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India, Sage-Yoda
Press, pp. 4–7.

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5 For instance, the various works of poststructural French feminists like Hélène
Cixous and Luce Irigaray have contributed extensively to a deconstruction of
phallogocentric language in offering a ‘feminine’ mode of writing.
6 See, for instance, Ruchika Sharma, December 27, 2016, ‘“Parvati” in Mohenjo-
daro: New claims for the statuette are part of the continuing Hindutva project’,
https://sabrangindia.in/article/parvati-mohenjo-daro-new-claims-statuette-are-
part-continuing-hindutva-project, accessed on April 28, 2019.
7 Shubhangana Atre suggests that the symbol ‘Bad-Imin’ may refer to seven
enclosed cities located in the Indus region, of which Mohenjo-daro was the main
administrative centre from where Western trade was carried out, or it may refer
to the seven rivers – Sapta-Sindhvah/ Hapta-Hindu (Atre 1983: 21).
8 Ettinger describes ‘wit(h)nessing’ as: ‘witnessing while resonating with an-Other
in a trans-subjective encounter-event’ (Ettinger 2006: 220).
9 See especially, Hein, H. (1990) ‘The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist
Theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 (4): 281–291.

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 3
RASA
In dialogue with feminist aesthetics

Rasa theory offers an inside view on the pleasure of aesthetic experience by

taking us under the skin of our emotions. Among the salient notions on
which rasa is based are included the emotive and embodied nature of aes-
thetic pleasure and its transmission through a trans-subjective experiential
process. While, on the one hand, rasa theory centres the role of affect, on the
other, the nature of aesthetic pleasure remains bound up in extant regula-
tions of propriety determined by socially legitimized ethical values. Both of
these aspects – that is, the psycho-physical nature of aesthetic pleasure and
the inextricability of the aesthetic and the ethical – invite an engagement
with feminist aesthetics. Consequently, although rasa theory evolved during
historical periods largely unfavourable to women, feminist theory may find
it possible to engage with it dialogically. In bringing to bear feminist perspec-
tives onto rasa theory, I attempt to unfold, where available, fresh insights at
the boundaries of their conceptual fields. Such an initiative is facilitated by
the fact that rasa theory proposes aesthetic pleasure as an expansion and
transformation of the self, an event of experiential change that may speak to
similar perspectives within feminist aesthetics. In foregrounding the inter-
linkages between aesthetics, ethics and transformative experience, this dis-
cussion will seek to slide beneath the divide between aesthetics and politics,
following the lead performed by the term ‘feminist aesthetics’.
It helps, of course, that rasa theory has a rich history of welcoming inter-
rogation, debate, amendment and innovation over a period of several cen-
turies, privileging the flux of parampara over the frozen elitist textuality of
shastra. In keeping with the elasticity of such a live tradition, beginning
with Bharata’s Natyashastra, Indic aesthetic theory has witnessed an ongo-
ing reconsideration and honing of various key concepts. Although, as
Sheldon Pollock remarks, a ‘conceptual plenitude’ (2016: 41) in terms of
theorization is achieved in the seventeenth century, the influence of rasa
theory on the various classical arts, as well as on vernacular Bhakti and Sufi
traditions, has been deep and long-lasting. In recent years, a renewed inter-
est in rasa has seen its reclamation across the arts, including by feminists
and queer scholars. Indeed, Pollock himself has continued to bring to the
fore new dimensions for approaching rasa theory (see Pollock 2001).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-4 63
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Needless to say, it would be unjust to both feminist aesthetics and rasa

theory to dwell solely on their conjunctures and to ignore those aspects of the
latter that have been most recalcitrant to women and feminine ways of know-
ing and seeing. Fortuitously, the intrinsic interrogative parampara of rasa
makes room for its constituent concepts to be tested from within and without
its boundaries, thus enabling participatory and revisionist feminist
approaches. As notions of value (differently) undergird the moral–ethical
basis of rasa theory, the application of feminist ethical perspectives may
provide a suitable lens to illuminate their gendered effects.
In their discussion of applied ethics, Amanda Roth and Pieranna Garavaso
observe that feminist contributions across different fields have largely taken
two forms: ‘(a) intervening in an ongoing philosophical debate, but altering
its terms by introducing new major ideas, questions, or concerns or (b)
bringing up entirely new areas of thought’ (2018: 363). In the context of
rasa, the former may need to begin with a feminist interrogation of its
overtly masculist bias and its subordination of women and lower classes
and castes (of which there are numerous examples) even while taking into
account the influence of well-entrenched patriarchal social and literary tra-
ditions within which rasa theory evolved. The introduction of ‘new areas
of thought’, on the other hand, could lead to investigations of rasa theory’s
unforeseen relevance in contemporary contexts, as has been attempted by
queer scholars1 with a view to bring to the fore previously unchartered,
altered understandings of gender and identity. I suggest that in both of
these endeavours, rasa’s exploratory, elastic parampara accommodates a
participatory rather than an adversarial role for feminist perspectives,
enabling interrogation, revision and reconceptualization within and
beyond rasa’s conceptual boundaries. Thus, it may be possible to unravel
perspectives amenable to feminist theory within rasa just as much as to
imagine the rasa of feminist aesthetics. Although the allied functions of
interrogation and participatory revision and regeneration may not each be
evident at all junctures of this discussion, they constitute the commodious
backdrop against which I attempt to engage with rasa aesthetics for pos-
sible feminist re-deployments.
In light of the above, I begin by offering a brief background to rasa theory
and delineate its resistance to feminist perspectives before attempting a few
constructive dialogic interventions.

Rasa – a brief background

Rasa theory can be traced back to the Natyashastra (c. 100 BCE–200 CE),
a treatise on dramaturgy with resonances across the various arts, presum-
ably authored by the mythical sage Bharata, variously also referred to as
Bhartihari or Bharat Muni. In her discussion about the work’s authorship,
Kapila Vatsyayan (1996) proposes the possibility of multiple authors and a
rich oral tradition in which the Natyashastra most likely participated before

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being inscribed in textual form. Vatsyayan foregrounds, in the evolution

of rasa theory, the privileging of a live parampara and a process-oriented
creative act over the individual author or a finished product to which
authorship can be claimed. Manmohan Ghosh’s authoritative translation
of the Natyashastra (1951) succeeded in making the ur text on rasa theory
available to a wide English-speaking audience. The Natyashastra is
intended as both an exposition of aesthetics and a manual for the per-
forming arts. The originary text attributed to Bharata followed by the
many discussions and debates on rasa theory over the course of centuries
elaborates upon various details about the nature of aesthetic experience as
well as the methodology and praxis of performance and representation.
Rasa thus operates at the borders of theory and praxis, domains which we
may now see as separable, and introduces the notion of actionable experi-
ence at the heart of Indic aesthetics.
Quite simply, according to the Natyashastra (NS from here on), aesthetic
pleasure or rasa is that which ‘is capable of being tasted’ (Ghosh 1951:
105). Like well-prepared food, it leads ‘well-disposed persons’ (or rasikas)
to relish pleasure and enjoy satisfaction (Ghosh 1951: 105). From its subse-
quent elaborations in the NS, we can infer it to be an aesthetic experience
brought about by the transmutation of emotive states into a particular kind
of heightened pleasure available to a discerning and cultivated audience.
Bharata expounds upon four primary or generative rasas – erotic, furious
(or violent), heroic and macabre (or odious) – which along with the other
four – comic, tragic (or pathetic), fearful (or terrible) and fantastic (or
marvellous) – constitute the eight rasas. A ninth rasa of equanimity and
peace or santarasa was introduced later.2 Each of the eight rasas is linked
to  its corresponding stable or durable (dominant) emotional state or
sthayibhava: ‘love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust and astonish-
ment’ (1951: 102). In further sub-classifications, the NS lists 33 determi-
nants or transitory states (vyabhicharibhavas) (Ghosh 1951: 102) and eight
temperamental states or consequents (anubhavas) (Ghosh 1951: 101–102)
that comprise the gamut of emotive categories. Only the eight stable emo-
tions or sthayibhava are directly transformed into rasas.
Art, particularly dramaturgy which is the principal subject of Bharata’s
treatise, has the capability to elevate and distil the stable emotive states into
the nectar of rasa. So it is not surprising that rasa has been variously trans-
lated as taste, juice, essence and quintessence. That rasa is derived from
ordinary emotions, but not identical with them, allows its consistent repre-
sentation as pleasure, even when the emotion enacted on stage is an unpleas-
ant one. The nature of the pleasure of rasa is thus clearly aesthetic – one in
which the reader/spectator relishes the aesthetic representation of an emo-
tive state rather than the emotion itself. As S. K. De observes, ‘an ordinary
emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful, but a poetic sentiment
(rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted above
such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the essence of which is its relish itself’

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(De 1963: 13). The notion that art produces a pleasure more intense than
reality is developed subsequently, and, as observed by Sheldon Pollock, by
the time of Mahima Bhatta (c. 1025) the sensitive reader’s awareness of
emotions and the savouring of rasa come about because of ‘aesthetic ele-
ments’ which ‘do not exist in everyday life’ (Pollock 2016: 108).
In an ancient precursor to the notion of the ‘ideal reader’ advanced by struc-
turalist theory in the early part of the twentieth century3 in the West, Bharata
distinguishes the characteristics of competent rasikas who are to be admitted
into the community of spectators (see Ghosh 1951: 519–520). For these ideal,
cultured spectators, aesthetic activity transmogrifies the emotive state into a
rarefied experience so that rasikas are transformed by rasa’s wonder or cha-
matkar. Since the aesthetic experience of rasa is represented as an event of
experiential change, it becomes possible to conceive a dovetailing at the bor-
ders of rasa and feminist aesthetics, a subject I return to subsequently.
As cogently narrated by Sheldon Pollock in his comprehensive reader on
rasa (2016), a very rich and long history of around 15 centuries was witness
to the many nuanced debates on the various connotations of rasa, bhava, the
nature of aesthetic experience, its effects on the author, the performer, the
audience, and a vast range of various related notions. Pollock (2016) offers us
invaluable insights into the works of some of the most well-known scholars of
rasa theory, including Dandin (c. 700), Bhatta Lollata (c. 825), Anandavardhana
(c. 875), Bhatta Nayaka (c. 900), Mahima Bhatta (c. 1025), Bhoja (c. 1050),
Abhinavagupta (c. 1100), Vidyanatha (c. 1320), Rupa Goswamin (1541), Jiva
Gosvamin (c. 1550) and Jagannatha (c. 1650), among others.4 Kapila
Vatsyayan’s adept, impressionistic sketch of the contributions of some of the
major interpreters of the NS also offers fascinating insights into the scholarly
parampara of rasa debates spanning the centuries (Vatsyayan 1996: 137–161).
Among these names, the one that stands out is Abhinavagupta, the tenth/
eleventh-century Kashmiri Shaivite philosopher whose influence on future
scholars of rasa theory in the domains of philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics
and religion has been noteworthy. As mentioned earlier, following the lull
after the seventeenth century in the modern period, the exploration of rasa’s
varied facets across the arts and its location within Indian aesthetics as well as
its application in re-appropriated twenty-first-century contexts, has gained
significance (see Chakravorty 2004; Chatterjee and Lee 2012), especially in
light of a renewed interest in the role of affect in aesthetic experience. Feminist
investigations into rasa theory, or into particular rasas such as sringararasa,
have also been undertaken in Indian and international contexts (see, for
example, Higgins 2007; Thapalyal 2007/2014; Frazier 2010; Ram 2011).

Feminist critical perspectives on rasa theory

Rasa’s rootedness in a long patriarchal tradition going back to early Vedic
times presents a particular form of recalcitrance for feminist theorizing. The
rigid hierarchies of caste and gender that evolved in post-Vedic India were

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invariably reflected in classical Hindu texts on the arts, religion and spiritu-
ality. In contestation, of course, it has become commonplace to be reminded
about women’s active participation in the Vedic and post-Vedic philosophic
tradition, and the shining examples of luminaries like Lopamudra, Gargi
and Maitreyi are frequently cited. It is equally true that women’s historical
and ongoing contribution to the arts, particularly to vernacular Indian lit-
eratures, constitutes a parallel submerged canon, as Susie Tharu and
K. Lalitha so effectively demonstrated in their Women Writing in India
(1991). Rasa’s exposition in the various arts, particularly in the hands of
outstanding classical playwrights like Kalidasa, also evidences aesthetic sen-
sibilities that offer nuanced approaches to gendered representations of
affect through art. However, neither the NS nor the subsequent proponents
of rasa theory, all of whom without exception happen, unsurprisingly, to be
male, offer any deep or extensive critiques of the inferior position accorded
to women and to lower classes within this tradition. This lacuna under-
scores the defining boundaries of social (and literary) propriety or auchitya
within which aesthetic discourse operated across different time periods in
Indian history. The notion of propriety still holds much sway in contempo-
rary Indo-Islamic cultures in South Asia, where it has morphed into related
terms such as maryada and izzat, connoting facets of honour and social
respectability. It is striking that despite the scholarly capability of well-
regarded authorities on Sanskrit aesthetics to offer remarkable and icono-
clastic revisions to rasa theory, as offered by Bhoja (see Pollock 2016:
110–111), for instance, the social basis of the theory remains undisturbed
through the centuries, its taken-for-grantedness in Indic classical tradition
ensuring that it is what it is; the most highly regarded of classic Sanskrit
scholars appear to have been more interested in playing with ideas within
its boundaries than in questioning the very foundation on which these ideas
are built.5 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into a
detailed discussion of the marginalized position occupied by women and
lower castes in the various scholarly works dealing with rasa, I offer just a
few examples below to flag the need for further scholarship on the subject.
Hierarchical structuration and a status-oriented stance shape the archi-
tecture of the NS, and a ‘social aesthetics, rigorously relating rasa and sta-
tus’ is ‘presupposed everywhere’ (Pollock 2016: 27). This can be seen in the
multiple instances of rank-based classificatory lists, including those of the
various rasas, bhavas, characters, audience members and even types of ges-
tures and emotive expressions. Among the rasas, the sringararasa is accorded
the position of the king of all rasas; among the bhavas, the dominant or
stable states (sthayibhava) are privileged over determinants and conse-
quents in an analogy that likens them to a king and his attendants:

Just as among persons having some characteristics and similar

hands, feet and belly, some due to their birth, [superior] manners,
learning and skill in arts and crafts, attain kingship, while others

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endowed with an inferior intellect become their attendants, in and

identical manner, the Dominant States become masters because on
them Determinants (vibhava), and Consequents (anubhava) and
Transitory States (vyabhicarin) depend.
(Ghosh 1951: 120)

People are classified throughout the NS as high/superior, middling and

inferior. Women are almost invariably clubbed with the latter in Bharata’s
treatise and remain so in subsequent expositions of rasa. Propriety or
auchitya often devolves upon the proper association of linguistic registers
and emotional displays by those characters considered apposite for these.
In certain literary genres, the use of Sanskrit by female protagonists is
considered improper (see Pollock 2016: 209); similarly, certain emotive
states, such as the comic and disgust, are considered particularly suitable
for ‘women and persons of the inferior type’ (Ghosh 1951: 110; 125; see
also Pollock 2016: 27). A further sub-classification of types of laughter
sees an attribution of ‘the Slight Smile’ to superior persons and of ‘Vulgar
Laughter’ to persons of inferior type (Ghosh 1951: 111). Similarly, ‘sor-
row relates to women, persons of the inferior type, and it has its origin in
affliction [of any kind]’ just as reactions to sorrow reveal the social stand-
ing of the person experiencing it: ‘With relation to it, persons of the supe-
rior and middling types are distinguished by their patience and those of
the inferior type by their weeping’ (Ghosh 1951: 122). Furthermore,
weeping, an attribute of sorrow and women, is also of three kinds, includ-
ing weeping due to jealousy. On the other hand, the heroic rasa is almost
exclusively associated with men of high birth (Ghosh 1951: 114) whereas
‘fear (bhaya) relates to women and persons of the inferior type’ (Ghosh
1951: 124). In hindsight, from our twenty-first-century feminist perspec-
tive, of course, the association of unbridled laughter with women, it’s
‘madness’ inverted as it famously was by Hélène Cixous’s Medusa6, may
turn out to be a ‘happy’ coincidence. Regardless, it is impossible to ignore
the unchallenged positioning of women and lower classes as frequent
objects of ridicule, vulgarity and inferior stature through the several cen-
turies during which rasa theory evolved.
Equally problematic is the surgical dissection of emotions beginning with
Bharata, who offers what Higgins calls a ‘detailed taxonomy of emotions’
(Higgins 2007: 44). In this dissection of emotional anatomy, the reader is
invited to view, from a distance, a precision-oriented micro-structured anal-
ysis of emotions – their causes, their nature and their psychosomatic effects
are all systematically categorized and listed in descending hierarchies, bring-
ing to mind the Foucauldian critique of the discursive classificatory opera-
tions of power and knowledge. Of course, such a masculist anatomizing in
the domain of literary criticism is restricted neither to ancient history nor to
non-Western textual traditions.7 Clearly, classificatory dissection and analy-
sis through a reliance on ranked taxonomies have been common tools

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across cultures and time periods and Pollock views it as ‘standard proce-
dure in Indian science’ (2016: 27).
In dealing with emotions in this ‘objective’ and regulated manner, the
proponents of rasa theory perhaps hoped to put them to use where they are
most beneficial – in bringing the spectator closer to the ultimate of life’s
goals or purusharthas: liberation (moksha). But the masculist subjectivity
that undergirds the anatomizing of emotion does so at the expense of the
normalization of the objectified female body, invariably located as the aes-
thetic object that promises emotive and erotic pleasure. The beloved is often
compared to a beautiful rasa-laden poem. In Bhoja’s work (c. 1050), for
instance, the ‘body of the poem, like that of a beloved, must… be without
flaw, endowed with qualities and with ornaments’ (Pollock 2016: 123). The
pleasure experienced by the spectator during the depiction of a negative
emotion like sorrow is compared to ‘a woman saying no when she means
yes during the spanking and striking that occur in lovemaking’ with the
additional clarification that ‘rasikas cannot get enough of it’! (Pollock 2016:
178). It is evident that the question of the rasika-as-woman is completely
suppressed in all such formulations. Even when absorbed in sexual bliss,
female orgasmic bodies become means of salvation for the male poet-as-
subject. In a verse by the seventh-century poet Amaru, what ‘saves’ the male
narrator is ‘The face of a woman making love on top-/ hair mussed and
swaying, earrings swinging, makeup/ running from her sweat, eyes rolling
in ecstasy-/’ (Pollock 2016: 279).
Over all, rasa theory consistently reflects its dependence on post-Vedic
metaphysical traditions which often tolerate and entrench status hierarchies
based on gender, caste and class. The female reader of rasa theory thus may
very likely feel like an unwelcome interloper in what was designed to be a
single-sex debate hall, intruding upon literary and philosophical discussions
carried out over the centuries by highly regarded male interlocutors. While
observing that Indian aesthetic theory is as caught up in ‘politics of repre-
sentation of gender and caste’ as its Western counterpart, Parul Dave-
Mukherji advocates that this does not take away from their philosophical
value (2016: 80). However, a feminist ethical approach to rasa theory may
find it necessary to interrogate the gendered bases and constructions of
‘philosophical value’ before attempting dialogic exchange in areas of com-
mon concern.
As noted earlier, the parampara of rasa offers adequate space for dissent
and debate. In fact, a radical departure from established Vedic tradition is
encompassed in Bharata’s proposition that the Natyaveda (or Veda of dra-
maturgy) be considered a fifth Veda which proffers upon the arts the same
status as the other four Vedas while drawing upon their strengths (see
Ghosh 1951: 3–6; Vatsyayan 1996: 8–10). In centring the role of emotive
aesthetic experience as a legitimate way of approaching a state akin to ulti-
mate equanimity, rasa theory embeds within the post-Vedic epistemological
tradition the seeds of a revolutionary interlinkage between the sensory and

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the sublime. It is aided in this by the tripartite or trivarga philosophy, which

gives due recognition to emotional and sexual needs in the form of kama
alongside material and moral/social responsibilities of human life (artha
and dharma). Just as kama can raise sensory pleasures to spiritual heights,
the privileged notion of aesthetic bliss may mark a potential in the aesthetic
theory of rasa to move beyond its own socially determined identitarian hier-
archies. It is important to distinguish such a proposition from postcolonial
efforts that tended to subsume the sensory within the transcendental to
establish the spiritual ascendency of Indic culture. Commentaries on the
work of well-known scholars like Ananda Coomaraswamy and Stella
Kramrisch have countered these trends by locating such impulses as
responses to the cultural hegemonies of imperialism.8 Consequently, my
focus here is not on a sensory amalgamated into an orientalist view of Indic
metaphysical discourse but on a sensory which retains significant linkages
with philosophical questions of value and thereby speaks to core questions
in feminist ethics and feminist aesthetics.

Imagining a feminist dialogue with the nature, process

and effects of rasa
In its investigation of emotive states, rasa theory dwells on various constitu-
ent notions to illuminate the nature of aesthetic experience, including those
of taste, emotion, beauty, ornamentation, ‘commonization’, evocation,
inter-subjectivity and equanimity. It is at the interfaces of these concepts
that a feminist exploration of rasa’s epistemic framework becomes possible.
The detailed elaboration of aesthetic experience as a psychic state in rasa is
intriguing from the perspective of contemporary feminist aesthetics which,
in itself, has been effective in deepening the focus on notions of experience
and affect in the domain of aesthetics. Given the significance of affective
experience in its transformative aspect for feminist aesthetics (see Chapter
1), I examine those component terms of rasa theory that illuminate various
facets of this experience in the realm of art. Thus, I focus on (a) those
notions that tell us something about what rasa is (in other words, its causal
aspects and nature with a particular focus on sringararasa or the rasa of
love and beauty), (b) those that reveal how it is transmitted (that is, the
process of experiencing pleasure) and finally (c) those relating to what it
does (in other words, the effects of rasa). Because these functions overlap at
critical junctures, I will keep their boundaries porous, dipping back and
forth in order to clarify the discussion at relevant points.

What rasa is or the body-in-pleasure

In the sixth chapter of the NS, Bharata offers his famous aphorism on rasa:
‘Rasa arises from the conjunction of factors, reactions, and transitory emo-
tions’, subsequently elaborated upon, according to Sheldon Pollock, for a

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millennium and a half in various scholarly works (Pollock 2016: 7). The
‘factors’ or causal aspects are the emotive states or bhavas from which arise
the various rasas. The transmutation of emotional states into rasas has a
distinctly psychosomatic aspect. The emotions or bhavas proceed directly
from the heart and, once transmuted into rasa, pervade the entire body, as
famously explicated in a shloka that employs fire and wood as analogy for
rasa and the physical body:

The State proceeding from the thing which is congenial to the heart
is the source of the Sentiment and it pervades the body just as fire
spreads over the dry wood.
(Ghosh NS 1951: 120)

In another corporeal metaphor, the spectator becomes aware of rasa per-

vading the body just as one is aware of the taste of food, the physical diffu-
sion of its delectable flavours comparable to the effects of various spices
that garnish a well-prepared dish. According to Kalpana Ram, the resultant
pleasure is a distinctly epicurean one in which ‘time is slowed down… for
good flavours to be released’ (Ram 2011: S161). This process of slow-
cooked gourmet cuisine appeals particularly to the gustatory senses and
leads to an embodied pleasure. In this venerated vocabulary of physicality
and sensuality that centres the sensory in aesthetic and social cultivation,
we are far removed from the Platonic banishment of the artist from civic life
as well as from its pursuant Western tradition in which Kantian notions of
disinterested taste are subsequently located, an inference that has elicited
interest among Western feminist scholars. For instance, Higgins observes
that rasa theory, with its emphasis on inner psychological states, ‘serves as
an alternative to both the Kantian interplay of intellectual faculties and
Hume’s generic sentiment of taste’ and ‘reminds us of how much more there
is (whether on heaven or on earth) than contemporary Western philosophy
is willing to dream of’ (2007: 51).
Higgins’s comment conversely brings to the fore that some aspects of rasa
theory may sit in much closer proximity to the feminist critique of an aes-
thetics grounded in principles of detached observation. Metaphors inspired
by the sensory consuming of pleasure-as-food and of aesthetic fires smoul-
dering within the body seem much more akin to the embodied discourse of
écriture féminine (feminine writing) which, in defiance of the voyeuristic
gaze of disinterested art, locates the body at the heart of creative practice
and assertively imbues the artistic creation with the sensual trans-subjectiv-
ity of the writer and the reader. Although a study of rasa theory by no
means unveils an extant version of ‘writing the body’ (especially not the
woman writer’s body!), the body remains firmly at the centre of its discur-
sive analysis of emotions and their effects, heralding the possibility of a
reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic pleasure through feminism’s ana-
leptic and imaginative dialogue with rasa.

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A caveat may be in order here. Although the body operates as an experi-

ential medium for aesthetic pleasure in rasa theory, there have been timely
reminders that such a pleasure is not to be confused with ordinary hedonis-
tic desires. S. K. De makes the distinction amply clear by cautioning that we
must not ‘drag’ rasa ‘down to the level of a bodily pleasure, for this artistic
pleasure is given as almost equivalent to the philosophic bliss, known as
ananda, being lifted above worldly joy’ (De 1963: 55; see also 1963: 69).
Rasa theory elaborates on pleasure as pure bliss – an aesthetic rapture akin
to the jouissance of sensually produced art. That rasa is almost the same as
ananda – the ultimate mystical bliss that leads to moksha or liberation – but
not identical with it is dealt with extensively in the work of Abhinavagupta,
as we will see towards the close of this discussion. The (dis)similarity estab-
lishes pleasure derived from art as different from but comparable to the
ultimate bliss of spiritual liberation, thus bringing on par sensory and sub-
lime experiences without dissolving their distinctions.

Sringararasa: the pleasure of love and beauty

It is not surprising, given the emphasis on sensual experience, that sringara-
rasa or erotic sentiment has been afforded pride of place in the tradition
following the NS. The erotic rasa is associated with everything bright, ele-
gant and beautiful and arises from rati, the bhava of love and passion (see
Ghosh 1951: 108). It is dealt with first in the NS and thereby is often also
named the king of rasas. According to Pollock, Bhoja in his Light on Passion
(Srngaraprakasha, c. 1050) proffers a provocative theory of rasa in which
the erotic rasa of passion forms the basis of all other rasas (Pollock 2016:
110–111). In Pollock’s view, Bhoja’s concept of affective capacity derives
from Samkhya philosophy and the notion of an awareness of the self. Here,
passion in its highest form is seen as the core of all other emotions, compa-
rable, according to Pollock, to Rousseau’s amour de soi, a love for the self
which enables us to possess sensitivity and to experience a range of other
emotions (Pollock 2016: 112).
The term sringara, often employed contiguously with the notion of alan-
kara (beautification), collapses the distinctions between notions of love,
beauty and ornamentation. Sringararasa consequently may suggest the emo-
tion and art of love as well as evoke the concept of alankara, ornamentation-
as-beauty itself. As S. K. De has shown, the meaning of the term alankara
shifts with the nature of the scholarly debates surrounding it. At the begin-
ning of the ninth century, for Vamana ‘alamkara is beauty (saundaryamalam-
karah)’ in which usage ‘alamkara is primarily synonymous with the act of
embellishing, but in a secondary, instrumental sense it is applied to that
which embellishes or to the means of embellishment’ (De 1963: 26). For
Kuntaka (c. 975), however, ‘embellishments do not ‘belong’ to poetry, that is
to say, they are not added externally, but poetry is embellished speech itself,
the particular embellishment depending on the poetic imagination’ (De
1963: 36; see also Pollock 2016: 98–106). Thus, we find the meaning of

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alankara shifting between figures or ‘enhancements’ of speech (Pollock 2016:

57) that adorn poetry and poetry itself as embellished speech, with debates
ranging from the status of rasa as something ornamented to rasa as orna-
ment (see Pollock 2016: 130, 277). In all of these, the gendering of sringara-
rasa and alankara follows a predictable path. For Bhoja, the body of an
ornamented poem is comparable to a woman’s body adorned with pieces of
jewellery that always appear in combination and never singly (Pollock 2016:
127). At various junctures, alankara as sensory beautification appears indis-
tinguishable from the symbolic elements of poetic speech (see also Aneja
2019). Given that ornamentation and embellishment are consistently linked
with the female body and the feminine in the gendered discourse of Sanskrit
literature and, as Kalpana Ram puts it, alankara is ‘ubiquitous in India’
(Ram 2011: S166), what could the significant place and the gradual centring
of alankara in rasa theory imply for shifting definitions of the feminine?
The question brings into view the contours of a repressed feminine at the
margins of the conceptual boundaries of rasa theory, presaging its future
assertive manifestations. One such attempt at envisioning a particular kind of
alternate feminine evoked by sringararasa is offered by Ranjana Thapalyal
(2007/2014). By locating the concept of a ‘Hindu feminine’ within the aes-
thetic of sringararasa (2007/2014: 135), Thapalyal argues for its relevance in
the context of contemporary feminism. More specifically, in her examination
of Kalidasa’s famous Sanskrit play Abhijnana-sakuntalam (Sakuntala and the
Ring of Recollection; c. 500 CE), Thapalyal proposes the figure of Shakuntala’s
mother Menaka, the beautiful nymph-like apsara who flies between earthly
and divine worlds, as an enduring feminine icon negotiating different realms
of reality (2007/2014: 141). The literary figure of the mythical Menaka rep-
resents sringara in its aspects of beauty (saundarya), love and truth (Thapalyal
2007/2014: 137), thus equating beauty and truth at the level of the symbolic.
In Thapalyal’s view, the apsara offers a legitimate notion of the feminine
derived from the purusha–prakriti dualism of Samkhya philosophy.
In the Samkhya world view, the male principle or purusha identified with
the inert, material world of culture finds its complementary opposite in the
feminine prakriti (matter or nature) that is energized by the creative principle
of Shakti (energy or force). Rather than rejecting the philosophical roots of
the gendered purusha–prakriti binary that has determined the course of cen-
turies of epistemological debates, Thapalyal argues for the deployment of
masculine/feminine complementarity for critiquing gendered roles while
emphasizing ‘equal gendered essences’ (2007/2014: 146). Though construc-
tive in its intention, Thapalyal’s reliance on conceptual categories deriving
from gendered nature/culture divides remains caught within the quandaries
of equality/sameness debates, making it challenging to circumvent essential-
ist risks as acknowledged by the author (2007/2014: 136).
Thapalyal’s efforts, however, could encourage analogous investigations for
uncovering alternate, fluid models of the feminine inspired by sringararasa.
The elaboration of various aspects of sringararasa in the tradition of the
Kama Sutra (second century CE) in erotic Indic arts has been commented

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upon substantially, with Foucault among those to draw cultural distinctions

between non-Western ars erotica and Western scientia sexualis. Daud Ali
proposes that within the trivarga or tripartite structure of the three aims of
kama, artha and dharma, kama stands for a set of aesthetic practices much
larger than just sexuality (2011: 6) and is rather an ethical/practical frame-
work for the enjoyment of pleasures (2011: 6). Given their close associa-
tion, such expanded understandings of kama would equally have
implications for revised understandings of sringararasa which, beyond
Kalidasa’s plays, has continued to enjoy a dominant place in the classical
arts, including poetry, prose, music, dance, painting and architecture.
Among the most famous of the latter are the marvellous engravings of
Khajuraho (eleventh century CE) and Konark (thirteenth century CE).
These spellbinding temple engravings present some of the most captivating
sculptural elaborations of sringararasa in its physical and metaphysical
aspects. In Khajuraho as in Konark are represented sexual and social
regimes distinct from the ancient times of Bharata as well as from those that
later bind sexuality within the regulations of modern (hetero)normativity.
Kama pleasures are depicted in all of their imaginative forms encompassing
a variety of possibilities beyond male–female couplings. The image of two
women taking pleasure in each other’s beauty on the walls of the Konark
temple (see Figure 3.1) is but one instance of sringararasa’s embrace of
diverse and plural offerings to the temple of pleasure. Even singular exam-
ples such as this one from Konark indicate that the feminine rasa of sringara
manifests in diverse, multiple representations across the arts and was never
frozen in any one place in the long history of Indic aesthetics.

The process that is rasa: evoking shared pleasures

We know that rasa implies an experience of heightened pleasure but what
do we know about how this pleasure is invoked and communicated?
Sadharanikarana (‘making common’) and dhvani (‘evocation’) with its cor-
ollary abhasa (‘the semblance or appearance of emotion’) play a critical role
in the process by which rasa is made manifest, particularly in dramaturgy
and poetics. Below, I examine these notions to explore their potential affini-
ties with feminist aesthetics.

‘Commonization’ or what we share

To be distilled and condensed into the nectar of rasa, a bhava or emotive
state must undergo a ‘commonizing’ process which imbues it ‘with the qual-
ity of universality (samanya, lit. commonness)’ (Ghosh 1951: 120). Pollock
translates the term sadharanikarana as ‘commonization’ and states that
rasikas experience the refined, ‘commonized’ emotive pleasure on the basis
of ‘a homogeneous comprehension thanks to the concurrence of their pre-
dispositions’ (Pollock 2016: 195). The NS and its subsequent scholarly

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Figure 3.1  Image of two women in pleasure on the outer walls of the Konark Sun
Temple, Odisha, thirteenth century.
Source: Photograph by author

expositions draw a clear distinction between the felt emotion (that may
belong to the author or the character) and the pleasure experienced by the
spectator. For the latter, sadharanikarana leads from the agitation and dis-
quiet of ‘troublous personal emotion’ to ‘the serenity of contemplation of a
poetic sentiment’ (De 1963: 12).
Pollock traces the concept of ‘commonization’ to Bhatta Nayaka (early
tenth century), who was the first to locate the experience of rasa in the
reader/viewer (2016: 18) and shifted the emphasis from the aesthetic object
towards its reception. With Bhatta Nayaka, ‘commonization’ becomes a
thing shared by a ‘community of audience members’ (Pollock 2016: 195).
According to Pollock, when the notion is borrowed by Abhinavagupta in
the eleventh century, it is transformed into anuvyavasaya, a savouring of

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‘one’s own awareness’, a ‘secondary, or reflexive, awareness, or knowledge

of a knowledge’ (Pollock 2016: 190); this reflexive awareness is ‘universally
blissful’ (Pollock 2016: 210). In this bliss of the self brought about by the
complete interpenetration of the spectator’s awareness with the work of art,
no distinction remains between ‘the act of savoring and the object of savor-
ing’ (Pollock 2016: 178). By the fourteenth century, the notion is further
refined by Vishvanatha to connote ‘an imagined sense of commonality’
(Pollock 2016: 262).
In ironic contrast with the feminist critique of universalizing projects that
effect a levelling of gendered and other intersectional differences, rasa the-
ory exalts the ‘universal’ aesthetic experience of rasikas to the level of
unhindered bliss. But an important distinction in the way the terms are
employed belies their seemingly incongruous impulses. Notably, the aes-
thetic process of universalizing in rasa refers not to the construction of
hegemonizing subjectivities (Pollock uses the term ‘commonization’ to per-
haps eschew such inferences) but rather to a shared ‘experientialization’,
another neologism Pollock attributes to Bhatta Nayaka (Pollock 2016: 18).
The rasika is someone who is capable of ‘imitating the States’ or bhavas
represented on stage (Ghosh 1951: 520) – that is, someone endowed with
the empathic capacity to replicate and re-make the other’s emotion into her
or his own. Thus, the rasika is also known as sahrdaya (etymologically ‘with
heart’ or ‘at one in heart’) and it is the rasika’s oneness (in heart) that is the
ultimate proof of rasa (see De 1963: 56). Through sadharanikarana, the
individual rasika comes to participate in a trans-subjective, collective aes-
thetic experience leading to pleasure-in-oneness. Kapila Vatsyayan sees this
as a paradoxical move, one in which individuation ‘leads to impersonality
and universality and in turn to communication and understanding trans-
specific’ (1991: 164).
A further nuancing of the tonalities of rasa’s ‘commonization’ reveals its
apartness from the kind of indiscriminate universalism that has long been
subjected to feminist and postcolonial critiques. Priyadarshi Patnaik views
rasa’s sadharanikarana rather as a ‘provisional universality’ ‘based on empa-
thy and the deep-rooted belief that as human beings, across cultures, time,
and contexts, we still have the ability and inclination to share’ (2016: 47).
In Patnaik’s interpretation of rasa, the aesthetic experience is ‘an approxi-
mation of the universal’ (Patnaik 2016: 45) and its ‘provisional universals’
appeal precisely because they are based on structures of commonality
(Patnaik 2016: 49). Patnaik writes against the postcolonial project of asso-
ciating universality with colonial and imperial complicities (2016: 48).
Instead, he proposes that rasa’s relevance is tied to its foundational empha-
sis on the potential for sharing common ‘ownerless emotions’ (2016: 53)
and can bring about a reclaiming of the universal (2016: 47). This time-
bound empathic sharing of an emotive state that belongs to no one person
and lasts for the duration of aesthetic experience makes the notion of the
community of spectators itself a provisional one. Provisionality, moreover,

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is embedded at various other levels in rasa theory, such as in the elaboration

of transitory emotions (vyabhicharibhava) and consequents (anubhava)
and in the very act of the mimetic process of artistic creation or anukriti,9
indicating its significance in the communication of aesthetic pleasure.
The emotive oneness of rasikas, founded on their experiential accord,
provides a glimpse into the ethical basis of rasa aesthetics. ‘Commonization’
foregrounds two parallel aspects of aesthetic experience: a collapsing of the
distance between the spectator/reader and the object of art in affective iden-
tification and a provisional, emotive solidarity that draws together a com-
munity of spectators within a trans-subjective field of shared affect. Is it
possible then to perceive resonances between rasa’s ethic of pleasure-
in-solidarity and feminist trans-subjective experiential harmonizations envi-
sioned within and beyond the field of aesthetics? Feminist artwork that
draws upon multiple subjectivities may be particularly amenable for recov-
ering such echoes (see, for instance, Bracha Ettinger 2005, 2006 and discus-
sion in previous chapter). Also, beyond the domain of aesthetics,
trans-subjective impulses may find reverberations in feminist political recon-
figurations of experiential solidarities as extrapolated by Chandra Mohanty
in her proposition of ‘imagined communities of women’10 who despite their
diversity are ‘woven together by the political threads of opposition’ (2004:
46–47). As distinctly different as projected aesthetic and political solidari-
ties may be, their juxtaposition brings to the fore a common emphasis on
energizing cohesions built on emotive quotients of shared experience. It is
for feminist theory to imagine ways of channelling this collective energy
provisionally stirred up by transformed subjectivities, while rasa’s process
suggests that the domain of aesthetic experience may be a significant site for
undertaking such ventures.
Of course, rasa theory’s stratified status-based impulses should caution us
in any attempt at reclaiming its (political) effects for feminist theory. At the
very outset, it would be prudent to ask whether claims of affective solidarity
between rasikas are undermined by their individual class-oriented privi-
leges. It may be helpful here to re-visit the definition of the ideal rasika who
is described as someone predisposed to sensitivity and can savour rasa
based on ‘predispositions’ … ‘acquired both in the present existence and in
former ones’ (Pollock 2016: 267). But since the nature and manner of
acquiring ‘predispositions’ remain ambiguous, it leaves the question of the
link between privilege and merit open to interpretation. Bharata seems to
imply that the superior status of the rasika simply connotes a heightened
capability for sensitivity since the rasika is someone ‘whose heart is filled
with uncontaminated sensitivity’ (Pollock 2016: 194). The closest cognates
we may get to would be the aesthete or the connoisseur, namely someone
born with aesthetic proclivities rather than someone from a privileged class.
In an added emphasis on aesthetic nurturing, it appears that literary study
promotes the cultivation of sensitivity, and according to Abhinavagupta’s
school of thought, rasa manifests ‘for those who are receptive readers thanks

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to, among other things, their study of literature and their good karma from
past lives’ (Pollock 2016: 204) in an interesting mix of nature/culture influ-
ences. Although the reference to past lives may easily mislead readers to
assume the importance of destiny in configuring natural proclivities, the
insertion of ‘karma’ holds on to the notion of an implied freedom of will
(even if across lifetimes!) that may be easy to miss. Following this interpre-
tation, Higgins proposes that the ability of ‘empathetic response’ and

the capacity to take joy in the joys of others and feel sorrow in
response to the sorrows of others is crucial to the spectator’s ability
to thoroughly imbibe the emotional aspects of the drama and
thereby take them as objects of aesthetic savoring. In this sense, the
rasika (the connoisseur who experiences rasa) is characterized by a
superiority of moral character, not just eminence within society.
(2007: 47)

Apparently, then, despite its masculist hierarchized discourse, it may be pos-

sible to trace rasa’s ethical impulse not too far from the heart of a feminist
ethical theorizing of aesthetics.

Dhvani and Abhasa: implying (in)appropriate pleasures

Implicature is the “soul” of poetry and rasa is the “soul” of

implicature.
(Dhvanyaloka of Anadavardhana, cited in
Pollock 2016: 89; emphasis added)

In rasa theory, and particularly as demonstrated in poetry, dhvani operates at

the level of semantic seduction, winking at and flirting with the reader by
intermittently withholding its veiled subtexts which result in an ‘intense savor-
ing’ (Pollock 2016: 109). The dhvani theory developed by Ananda­vardhana in
his Light on Implicature (c. 875) proposes that rasa arises in poetry not from
that which is explicitly stated but rather from something implied or suggested
that is unravelled in a process of meaning-construction or interpretation. It is
this evocative sense that Sheldon Pollock refers to as ‘implicature’ (2016: 12).
Owing to the gender dualism that informs many of the ancient philo-
sophical frameworks (such as samkhya and mimansa) within which rasa
theory gets inscribed, the elaboration of dhvani by traditional scholars of
rasa remains trapped in the polarities of masculist viewership and female
objectification. Thus, it is not surprising to see, in Bhoja’s work (as cited by
Pollock 2016), the intended meaning of ordinary language compared to the
‘internal quality of the goddess of speech, like a woman’s sexual attraction’;
on the other hand, ‘implicature is the goddess’s external quality, like a wom-
an’s radiant physical beauty’ (Pollock 2016: 121). By the time of

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Abhinavagupta, the literary aspect of implicature is subsumed under loftier

metaphysical concerns, and literature, like scripture, is perceived to gener-
ate a ‘surplus comprehension’ (Pollock 2016: 194).
The dynamism of dhvani produces rasa in the interactive sphere in which
latent meanings are unveiled by the participatory rasika in a studied inter-
pretive process. It is no wonder, then, that the ideal rasika is one who is able
to discern, who reads the subtexts concealed ‘between the lines’ and who,
with the support of dhvani, becomes an agentic creator of meaning. When
these subtexts are at odds with the overt meaning of the text, they prise
open potential sub-versions, suggesting the deconstructive potential of
dhvani for feminist aesthetics.
To illustrate this aspect of dhvani, I borrow from Pollock (2001) an
intriguing verse that, according to him, is cited by Anandavardhana. Pollock
uses it to highlight how contradictory subtexts are generated by dhvani and
how latent meanings ultimately rest on the reader’s familiarity with an
occluded social register.

You’re free to go wandering, holy man.

The little dog was killed today
by the fierce lion making its lair
in the thicket on the banks of the Goda river.
(Pollock 2001: 200)11

In the overt message of this verse, the narrative voice seems to encourage a
wandering mendicant to resume his riverside sauntering by conveying that the
dog who may have previously kept him away from the area has been killed. As
Pollock elaborates, in Anandavardhana’s work, dhvani reveals the contrary
hidden subtext – to dissuade the old man from venturing near the spot because
of the implied threat of a ferocious lion. Both the overt and implied meanings,
however, remain incomplete because of a lack of context. Pollock demon-
strates how Anandavardhana, despite his familiarity with the subtleties of
dhvani, misses the point by focusing solely on the ‘bare narrative matter’
(Pollock 2001: 201) because of his dependence on a formalistic approach.
Pollock traces contextual clues found in subsequent commentaries,
including by Abhinavagupta, Bhoja and Mahimabhatta. Based on these, it
is revealed that the words are uttered by a woman who has planned a tryst
with her lover by the riverside. Eager to keep the old man away from her
rendezvous with her beloved, she embeds a subliminal message by raising
the even more intimidating (than the dog) spectre of a ferocious lion. By the
eleventh century, the ‘clever’ woman who has managed to dupe the ‘holy
man’ becomes, for Mahimabhatta, a ‘woman, hungry for the sweet pleasure
of undisturbed lovemaking’ (Pollock 2001: 204), and in the twelfth century,
in Hemachandra’s account, she is described as a ‘loose woman’ habituated
to sexual encounters: ‘A certain loose woman is always leaving her house,
under the pretext of fetching water from the river, in order to meet her lover

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in a thicket on the bank of the Godàvarî river’ (Pollock 2001: 204). Pollock
hypothesizes that it is only with this final interpretation ‘that things seem to
get fully sorted out’ (Pollock 2001: 204).
With the help of these later commentaries, Pollock emphasizes that
implied meanings depend upon a larger understanding of occluded social
contexts, essential for a fuller understanding of Sanskrit poetry. Pollock is
particularly interested in recuperating this social that grounds literary the-
ory (2001). In this particular verse, an understanding of the nature of gen-
der relations as well as of women’s active role in planning adulterous
escapades becomes key to unveiling latent meanings:

The gender relations that constitute the social of Prakrit poetry

demand that it is always the woman, never the man, who organizes
adultery. Only when we know such social-literary facts does the
real suggestion behind the poems become available: the formula-
tion of the statements – meaning without saying, communicating
by not communicating – suggests that the women speakers are
sophisticated and clever, and ardent to preserve, in the one case, a
place of lovemaking, and in the other, a girlfriend’s marriage (or
rather, affair). And in a way, once we know all this, our own read-
ing becomes a satisfying exercise in the revelation of our own
sophistication….
(Pollock 2001: 207–208)

Pollock’s attention to the social creates obvious unease for some scholars
of classical Sanskrit literature who would much rather focus on formal
elements of poetics, or kavya, such as figures of speech and stylistic con-
ventions, than venture a peek at social registers postulated through
women’s sexual escapades – particularly when these hint at a gendered
curtailment of women’s sexual freedom and women’s efforts at circum-
vention. The risk, from a patriarchal perspective, seems enormous. It
portends the ominous dismantling of a carefully preserved illusion
regarding women’s long-standing passive acceptance of rules of propri-
ety, based on which they earn social approval or opprobrium. It leads
some, therefore, to bristle at Pollock’s suggestions. According to Ashay
Naik, for instance, Pollock’s approach results in a disparaging represen-
tation of women (that is, women as knowing organizers of illicit sexual
relations such as adultery):

In other words, Pollock is saying that suggestion is fundamentally

‘social’ and not ‘linguistic’ and kavya must be interpreted in a way
to recover it. Needless to say, this can only lead to an Indian theory
of gender which sanctions the oppression of women by depicting
them in a derogatory fashion.
(Naik 2016)

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Naik is eager to preserve the kavya-bound sanctity of canonical literature

by staying clear of the social realm which threatens to open the troublesome
can of women’s sexual assertiveness, conflated here with their ‘derogatory’
representation.
What is interesting to note, in the above example of dhvani, is that not-
withstanding obvious disagreements about whether implicature works at a
linguistic or a social register, certain gendered assumptions seem to remain
intact. Women are consistently represented as clever, conniving, faithless,
adulterous and open to sexual promiscuity – temptresses liable to lead
weak-kneed men to their alluring beds, leaving open to question the feasi-
bility of establishing a feminist dialogue with rasa theory.
Fortunately, rasa theory does, however, leave another door open for
unforeseen channels. A notion closely related to dhvani – that of abhasa –
may make it possible for us to uncover subtexts not only occluded by what
appears here as a value-neutral ‘social’ but also obscured by the taken-for-
granted typecasting to which women are subjected. Abhasa, dealt with at
length in rasa theory, suggests a type of aesthetic pleasure experienced by
the reader when the representation of a situation runs contrary to auchitya
but still leads to the experience of genuine pleasure. Pollock translates it as
the ‘semblance of rasa’ (2016: 28), noting that it is particularly helpful in
legitimizing alternate notions of pleasure derived from certain types of aes-
thetic representations that were considered contrary to social propriety.
This contrarian abhasa promising gratifications contrary to propriety
seems particularly amenable to feminist (mis)readings of aesthetic pleasure.
As an illustration, a feminist reading of the same verse discussed above may
result in an abhasa quite different from the one elucidated by Anandavardhana
or a number of his literary successors. This would entail, of course, a gen-
dered re-alignment on the part of the reader, namely a reader who identifies
with the subjectivity of the woman ‘hungry for the sweet pleasure of undis-
turbed lovemaking’ and not with the ‘loose’ adulterous woman projected
by male commentators who judge her by rules of auchitya.
Pursuing such a reading of the same verse, the ‘holy man’ could come to
symbolize ‘the Law’ in the shape of the prohibitory, moralistic patriarch
and the ‘dog’ might stand in for patriarchy’s watchful sentinel. The ‘fierce
lion’, before whom the ‘little’ dog seems diminished in size, offers a fitting
image for the vigorous lover in whose company the female narrator seeks
unfettered sexual pleasure. An alternate reading of the verse then emerges:
a woman, eager to meet her lion-like lover, manages to trick the repressive
patriarch and his dedicated guardian to assert her sexual freedom – an
abhasa of a different kind. Such a construal is, of course, possible only when
our pleasure, rather than being derived from our ‘satisfaction at our own
sophistication’, coincides with the gratification of the narrative voice – a
woman who astutely manages, with her rhetorical sophistication, to sub-
vert the regulatory checks on her movements. Reading against the grain of
conventional interpretations thus enables us to experience a ‘semblance of

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pleasure’ in which linguistic adroitness makes language an ally in women’s

agency. Thus, dhvani and abhasa may unwittingly insinuate an alternate
‘feminine’ operating at the margins of the poem’s silhouettes, one that seeks
to emerge as agentic subject. Given the relativity of socially legitimized rules
of behaviour, such a reading reveals how quickly, in verse at least, subtexts
can transmute themselves into sub-versions.
Given the turn towards reception theory in rasa debates, it is surprising
that the relationship between implied meanings and their social contexts
has not been accorded due attention. It is only in Bhoja’s work, as Pollock
tells us, that the ‘embeddedness of these poems in a set of particular conven-
tions’ and the notion of a ‘social-literary competence’ is brought to the fore
(Pollock 2001: 207). This is why, for Bhoja, literary work leads to a general
unitary meaning that is linked to the social, moral order, a mahavakyartha
(literally, a grand or total meaning above all sentences) (see Pollock 2001:
216–217). This ultimate meaning, Pollock indicates, is contingent upon
larger rules and regulations of morality which make something appropriate
or inappropriate and devolves upon literature the function of making a
moral argument and effecting an ‘overall aesthetic impact’ (Pollock 2001:
218). It also envisages, as we have seen, pleasures that are considered nor-
mative and those that may be mere semblances, suggesting the projection of
ideal as well as unconventional readings. As Pollock states, ‘to produce
readers of Sanskrit literature is to produce certain kinds of social subjectivi-
ties’ (2001: 215). The production of feminist subjectivities through alter-
nate readings of Sanskrit poetry, as I have tried to show, does not remain
barred given rasa theory’s reliance on the subtle and layered process that
leads to interpretive pluralities.
We may infer that the social, vital to feminist interpretations, remains
‘invisibilized’ over the several centuries during which rasa theory evolved
because it keeps in place rules of auchitya or propriety whose undermining
threatens the entire moral edifice on which classical literary discourse is
constructed. Dhvani thus is predicated upon the idea that its implied mean-
ings operate within a well-defined and well-comprehended network of
social and moral propriety, and an understanding of its relationship with
taste remains ‘fundamentally constitutive’ to an understanding of the Indian
discourse on rasa (Pollock 2016: 43). But since social norms and aesthetic
propriety12 are concepts in flux and are liable to change over a period of
time, the process of dhvani and its allied notion of abhasa also lay bare the
shifting nature of aesthetic interpretations; rasa thus emphasizes through-
out art’s integral relationship to prevalent (but not timeless) moral and ethi-
cal arguments, an avenue that may be particularly amenable for feminist
approaches to art.
Dhvani’s foregrounding of an accretive process in meaning-making is sig-
nificant not only in poetry but across the arts, especially in non-verbal arts
like music, painting and sculpture. In music, it manifests as vyanjana (sug-
gestiveness), as elaborated upon by Mukund Lath (2016: 94). According to

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Lath, vyanjana, unlike denotative meaning or abhidha, ‘addresses emotive,

felt consciousness’ (2016: 95) and leads to a state of self-contemplation
(2016: 96–97). In classical music, it is made manifest through the process of
the deferral of finality and the various improvisations elaborated upon dur-
ing alapa, a dynamic process of innovation and deferral. Here, dhvani in its
manifestation as vyanjana privileges process over finality, the plurality of
imaginative possibilities over the finished product or dhun (see Lath 2016:
101–102), a notion that, as we have seen, was also at work in the ancient
Indus aesthetic (see previous chapter). Interestingly, rather than the peaceful
repose of rasa and its ekanta nature, rasa in music is vivified by the anekanta
of imagination (Lath 2016: 104) – perpetually creative, perpetually seeking.
From this perspective, rasa theory sets into motion an alternate take on
pleasure, one which revels in its own process rather than in achieving com-
pletion, thus conveying a completely different sense than is inherent in the
teleological samkhya philosophy of ultimate liberation and opening up a
pathway towards a process-based understanding of creativity that speaks to
feminist notions of aesthetic process.13 The emphasis on innovative sub-
versions generated through attention to progression, facilitated by alapa,
alludes to modified notions of value that may lie underneath the dominant
meaning of a work of art. In their nuancing impulse, alapa, dhvani and
abhasa all seem to work in congruity.
To summarize, the dual lenses of ‘commonization’ and evocation reveal
rasa’s emphasis on trans-subjective aesthetic bliss achieved through the
unearthing of latent meanings, but one which is circumscribed within
socially determined, contingent notions of propriety. Rasa theory thus fore-
grounds direct linkages between art and a moral–ethical order that is sub-
ject to change and interrogation. This makes way for its own future
subversions and impels, beyond the processes of rasa, a turn to its effects.

The miraculous effects of rasa for feminist theory: chamatkar, aesthetic

breakthroughs and santarasa
To mirror a famous analogy from Bharata, just as fire consumes firewood,
rasa, by kindling the glowing embers of the body, ignites wonder (chamat-
kar) in the mind. The term chamatkar, like miracle, has magico-religious
connotations; like the latter, it is revelatory and its mystical aspect has
invited scholarly interest (see Simonsson 1970: 193–194; Vatsyayan
1996: 151–152). Pollock refers to it as an ‘unhindered awareness’, the
action (kar) of enjoyment (chamatah) inherent in chamatkara (Pollock
2016: 195). Moreover, the experience of astonishment in the face of the
incredible – the adbhuta – is spellbinding and transformative, and the
analogy again is drawn from food: a transformation akin to turning milk
into yogurt (Pollock 2016: 262). Jessica Frazier compares its revelatory
character to Joycean epiphany, an experience that leads to an ‘improved
perception of reality’ (Frazier 2010: 7). From a feminist perspective, it is

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the magical, transformative capability of the chamatkar of rasa that may

be most intriguing.
In her discussion of various approaches to Hindu art, Frazier distin-
guishes the transformative approach as one that brings about ‘an affective
process of transformation of the spectator’ (2010: 8). Frazier believes that
the twin theatrical concepts of dristi and darshan – spectacle and viewing
– posit aesthetic experience as reciprocal and inter-subjective, whereby art
exists not only in the object but in the viewer. She reminds us that art draws
on ‘emotion’s “transformative, creative, generative power” to shape reality
as well as reveal it’ (Frazier 2010: 8–9), becoming ‘an event of change’ (9).
According to this approach to Hindu art, the change occurs because art’s
mystical aspect – its chamatkar – succeeds in bringing about an aesthetic
breakthrough in the mind of the spectator.
In rasa theory, the notion of a miraculous aesthetic breakthrough leads the
spectator from a state of sankocha or contraction within egoistic boundaries
to chittavistara or the unhindered expansion of the self towards a higher
consciousness (see Simonsson 1970: 193–194). In this regard, Higgins
(2007) notes that rasa is predicated on the ‘audience member’s transcen-
dence of narrow personal interest’ (45) and the ‘overcoming of egoism’ (49),
which are considered impediments in experiencing aesthetic breakthrough.
The event of aesthetic breakthrough allows the expanded self to experience
aesthetic pleasure in solidarity with others, in what may be seen as an inter-
linking of psychic and empirical events, and in surprising close contiguity
with contemporary feminist understandings of aesthetic experience as an
erotic, trans-subjective transformation of the self. At times, in reflecting upon
women’s mutual encounters, such feminist perspectives have brought to the
fore novel situated possibilities, as for instance in Rachel Jones’ insightful
reading of Luce Irigaray’s work where the erotic encounter between women
becomes a way of re-imagining pedagogical contexts (Jones 2007).14
In Abhinavagupta’s work, a further epistemological layering of break-
through is explored through the notion of santarasa or the rasa of peace and
tranquillity, which though not identical to moksha, is ‘both a foretaste of
moksa (liberation) and a means to understand it’ (Higgins 2007: 50);
according to Pollock, ‘it’s end result is spiritual liberation’ (Pollock 2016:
206). As Higgins, Pollock and others have remarked, Abhinavagupta’s
emphasis on this placid ninth rasa (subsequently added to the primary eight
rasas of the NS) that leads to equanimity reflects the life-affirming monistic
perspective of Kashmiri Shaivism according to which liberation or moksha
is achievable within this life.15 In locating a type of aesthetic experience as
a fourth purusartha or life goal alongside the trivarga or the three aims of
life that lead towards moksha, Abhinava expands the notion of the moral
and ethical basis of the manifestation of pleasure.
Despite this turn towards the metaphysical with Abhinavagupta, rasa
theory retains an essential relation with the aesthetic to which Abhinava
subjects his philosophical aims, which in turn are closely tied to notions of

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ethical morality. Thus, while santarasa may present ‘an aesthetic paradox’
in that ‘it is a state untroubled by emotion of any sort’ (Gerow 1994: 187),
it reveals, as Gerow avers, that not only do ‘Abhinava’s aesthetics infringe
upon the matter of his philosophy, but his account of philosophical matters
is distinctly “aesthetic”’ (Gerow 1994: 189). The refusal to bifurcate aes-
thetics from the domain of ethics and metaphysics is significant not merely
in the framing of Abhinava’s theory, as pointed out by Gerow, but equally
for achieving a more general understanding of the aesthetic underpinnings
of the Indic metaphysical tradition. Such an aesthetic construction of ethical
values infers direct linkages between art and social reality, as between for-
malist and ethical aspects of art. Pollock calls the centring of the ethical
within the aesthetic ‘a core feature of rasa, its ethical normativity’ (2016:
28). Of course, the intersection of art and value also happens to be the junc-
ture at which feminist aesthetics derives its political impetus.
According to Pollock, rasa theory presents a view entirely different from
the Western Kantian tradition because it emphasizes ‘literature’s capacity to
refine our moral imagination’ (2016: 33); unlike in Kant, here the aesthetic,
social and moral judgment often overlap. Ghosh has observed that Bharata’s
‘original’ text claims for drama the function of ‘a mimicry of actions and
conducts of people’ so that it becomes ‘instructive to all, through actions
and States (bhava) depicted in it, and through Sentiments, arising out of it’
(Ghosh 1951: 15). Aesthetic mimesis thus represents a compendium of all
of the values and tools necessary for living a good life and lends it a didactic
function: ‘There is no wise maxim, no learning, no art or craft, no device,
no action that is not found in the drama (natya)’ which is, in fact, a ‘mim-
icry of the world’ (Ghosh 1951: 15–16). In its prescriptive capacity, rasa
foregrounds the inseparability of affect and ethics since art’s transformative
effects act upon emotions to achieve moral and ethical refinement.
To align the ethical centrality of rasa with the interrogatory political
imagination of feminist aesthetics, we would, of course, need to begin by
undertaking an inquiry of notions of value in specific cultural and histori-
cal contexts. But given that phallogocentric frameworks of value and pro-
priety tend to work against the interests of women across cultures, there
may be some worth in identifying cross-cultural stratagems and solidari-
ties. As Roth and Garavaso (2018) observe, traditional value theory in the
Western context is characterized by its devaluation of women as well as of
feminine approaches to notions of justice and ethics but such an observa-
tion may have cross-cultural validity. Across cultures, masculist biases that
inform traditional ethics draw strength from accepted notions of moral
propriety that are prejudiced against women and lead to the marginaliza-
tion of women’s moral experiences. But propriety, as we also know, is sub-
ject to change, and rasa theory remains susceptible to similar changeable
concepts of auchitya. I propose that in converging on rasa’s nectar – that
is, its aesthetic and ethical implications – transnational feminist aesthetic
approaches can engage with rasa’s constituent notions without necessarily

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being bound by their prescriptive time-bound imperatives. Instead of an

outright rejection of traditional aesthetic theories that evolved within
moral and ethical frameworks antagonistic to women’s experiences, a
focus on stable notions of justice measured against transient and relative
notions of propriety may enable innovative feminist interventions in trans-
national and cross-cultural contexts.
Such a relativist deployment of classical theories and literary traditions
may not, of course, be acceptable to feminist scholars who favour more
unqualified perspectives. For instance, Josephine Donovan believes that
because of a difference in values, feminists are faced with the problem of
reading established criticism selectively (1977: 607). She finds that for a
feminist reader, whereas a ‘selective’ reading of philosophical works such as
Aristotle’s Poetics is possible albeit problematic, such a reading of a literary
work is impossible (Donovan 1977: 606–608) because ‘where one cannot
accept the ethics of the text, one cannot accept the aesthetics’ (Donovan
1977: 608). Since Aristotle does not perceive the association of valour with
women as proper in an aesthetic work, a feminist reader, according to
Donovan, must tread around notions of male propriety while appreciating
formal elements of the work (608). Donovan’s example from Aristotle’s
work offers an interesting parallel to feminist applications of rasa theory’s
notions of auchitya, dhvani and abhasa in attempting readings of Sanskrit
literature. Here, too, as for Donovan, feminist ethics must take up the chal-
lenge of class and gender hierarchies and tip-toe around these in search of
hidden subtexts more amenable to feminist perspectives, as I have already
attempted to illustrate. One of the challenges for the feminist reader engaged
with traditional aesthetic theories is to locate, in their interstices, gaps from
which alternate readings more hospitable to feminine ways of seeing
become conceivable. The degree to which this is achievable would depend
undoubtedly on the pliability of theoretical frameworks within which a
particular aesthetic tradition operates. I have tried to argue that rasa’s
inherently flexible conceptual basis makes it possible for feminist theory to
eschew the either/or options that feminists like Donovan confront in their
turn to certain Western classical texts, queering the pitch of ‘tradition’ in
this process.
I close with a couple of contemporary illustrations of such ‘queering’ pos-
sibilities. In their project of re-imagining rasa theory from a contemporary
queer perspective, Chatterjee and Lee (2012) explore rasa’s frames of refer-
ence of spiritual transcendence from the perspective of performing queer-
ness. This strategy enables them to posit the spectator as political ally in
emancipation: ‘If the politically re-appropriated rasika becomes an ally, then
the spiritual transcendence of classical rasa can be translated to – or tacti-
cally misrecognized as – political emancipation’ (Chatterjee and Lee 2012:
140). In another instance of exploring the relevance of rasa aesthetics for
rediscovering feminist agency through contemporary performative arts,

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particularly kathak dance, Pallabi Chakravorty dwells on the sense of ‘deep

self-enjoyment’ enabled by riaz. Chakravorty discovers that riaz creates the
space for an exploration of agential improvisations of performance, so that
‘women become subjects of their own experience even when the dominant
narrative remains tradition-bound and patriarchal’ (Chakravorty 2004: 11).
These contemporary projects reflect feminist and queer impulses that attempt
to re-imagine classical aesthetic theory as an ally of political transformation.
As pithily observed by Kapila Vatsyayan, ‘The arts are or today can be, as
they have been, the most potent tool of transformation’ (1991: 172). In
bringing to bear innovative readings onto traditional aesthetic theories, the
feminist imagination must also be a political imagination, based on what
Amy Mullin calls ‘an enriched conception of the imagination’ (2003: 196).

Conclusion
Rasa, like its axiomatic principle of dhvani, evokes but escapes its own
stable connotations – it remains a savouring of experience, a nectar impos-
sible to describe in words but available for sensory and even spiritual relish.
Despite these ambiguities, rasa theory offers adequate conceptual ground
for feminist re-visionings of their overlapping boundaries. Rasa theory
reveals, on the one hand, art’s investment in emotion, pleasure and affective
transformation of the individual located in trans-personal relationality with
a community of others. On the other, the dependence of rasa theory on his-
torical, transient notions of cultural and moral propriety may often appear
at odds with feminist values. Taking inspiration from rasa’s centring of the
ethical within the aesthetic, and the live parampara of rasa theory which
invites ongoing retellings of its narrative, feminist aesthetics can re-imagine
with rasa the vital role of affect in effecting ethical transformations through
aesthetic experience. Since what was (in)appropriate for rasa proponents
may be (in)appropriate for contemporary feminist theory, any such initia-
tive would need to take into account revised notions of ethical propriety.

Notes
1 See, for instance, Chatterjee, S. and Lee, C.L. (2012) ‘Solidarity – rasa/autobiog-
raphy – abhinaya: South Asian Tactics for Performing Queerness’, Studies in
South Asian Film & Media, 4 (2): 131–142.
2 For observations on santarasa, see Manmohan Ghosh (1951: 102); Sheldon
Pollock (2016: 50–52).
3 The ‘competent reader’ proposed by structuralism was duly critiqued for its
neglect to acknowledge class and other privileges naturalized in the idealization
of such a capable reader. For instance, see Terry Eagleton’s discussion of struc-
turalism in Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983, Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–126 (especially p. 121).
4 Dates provided here are as per Sheldon Pollock (2016) and refer to the major
known works of these authors.

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5 Bhakti and Sufi poets subsequently offer alternate perceptions of aesthetic expe-
rience, as we will see in Chapter 4 of this book.
6 Cixous, H., et al. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1 (4): 875–893.
7 As evident, for instance, in a classic, Western, mainstream text from the modern
period, Frye’s, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
8 See Stadtner, D.M. (1990) ‘New Approaches to South Asian Art’, Art Journal, 49
(4): 359–362; and Parul Dave-Mukherji (2016) (see in References). See also
discussion in previous chapter of Garimella’s perspective,and Garimella, A.
(1997) ‘Engendering Indian Art’, in Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Representing the Body:
Gender Issues in Indian Art, New Delhi: Kali for Women with Book Review
Literary Trust, pp. 22–41.
9 Anukrti is a term cognate to, but not identical with, mimesis. Parul Dave-Mukherji
suggests that ‘rasa is nothing other than intensified sthayibhava achieved through
mimesis or anukrti’ (2016: 83). Literally translatable as ‘doing after’, anukrti sug-
gests a chronological shift or interval between the cognizance of the subject of
aesthetic representation and the act of representing. Both rasa and the anukrti
through which it is achieved are thus imbued with this temporality.
10 Chandra Talpade Mohanty builds on Benedict Anderson’s previous use of the
concept of ‘imagined communities’ proposed in his work Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and the Spread of Nationalism, 1983, London: Verso,
p. 7.
11 Cited by Sheldon Pollock from Anandavardhana’s Light on Aesthetic Suggestion
or Dhvanyâloka of Ànandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta (1940),
edited by Pattabhirama Shastri. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, p. 52.
Reproduced with permission of Sheldon Pollock.
12 For a discussion of propriety and impropriety in literary works, see Pollock
(2016: 93).
13 See previous chapter for a discussion of the significance of the notion of process
in creativity as explored by feminist artists and theorists like Bracha Ettinger.
14 Rachel Jones deliberates on a related notion of reciprocity through her analysis
of Luce Irigaray’s re-reading of Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. In her
reading of Irigaray’s encounter with the fictional Diotima-as-teacher, Jones
reminds us how the ‘mutually transformative’ potential of such an ‘erotic
encounter’ may be extended for a rethinking of pedagogical contexts (see Rachel
Jones, 2007, ‘Lessons of Love: Between Diotima and Irigaray’, p. 7. Accessed on
February 7, 2021, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6
23.6404&rep=rep1&type=pdf.)
15 See Kathleen M. Higgins (2007: 49–50).

References
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Journal of Indian Philosophy, 39 (1): 1–13.
Aneja, Anu. 2019. ‘Feminist theory and the Aesthetic Re-Turn’, in Anu Aneja (ed.),
Women and Gender Studies in India: Crossings, pp. 93–109. London: Routledge.
Chakravorty, Pallabi. 2004. ‘Dance, Pleasure and Indian Women as Multisensorial
Subjects’, Visual Anthropology, 17: 1–17.
Chatterjee, Sandra and Cynthia Ling Lee. 2012. ‘Solidarity – rasa/autobiography –
abhinaya: South Asian Tactics for Performing Queerness’, Studies in South Asian
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Dave-Mukherji, Parul. 2016. ‘Who Is Afraid of Mimesis? Contesting the Common

Sense of Indian Aesthetics through the Theory of “Mimesis” or Anukarana Vada’,
in Arindam Chakrabarti (ed.), Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
(Bloomsbury Research Handbook), pp. 71–92. London: Bloomsbury.
De, S.K. 1963. Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetic. Bombay: Oxford University
Press and University of California Press.
Donovan, Josephine. 1977. ‘Feminism and Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (3): 605–
608. Accessed on July 31, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342943.
Ettinger, Bracha L. 2005. ‘Copoiesis’, in ephemera, 5 (X): 703–713. Accessed on
April 13, 2019. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/5-Xettinger.
pdf.
Ettinger, Bracha L. 2006. ‘Matrixial Trans-Subjectivity’, Theory, Culture and Society,
23 (2–3): 218–222.
Frazier, Jessica. 2010. ‘Arts and Aesthetics in Hindu Studies’, The Journal of Hindu
Studies, 3: 1–11.
Gerow, Edwin. 1994. ‘Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics as a Speculative Paradigm’,
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Dramaturgy and Histrionics Ascribed to Bharata-Muni. Bibliotheca India. Work
No. 272 (1559). Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal.
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Breakthroughs’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (1): 43–54, Special
Issue: Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics.
Jones, Rachel. 2007. ‘Lessons of Love: Between Diotima and Irigaray’, p. 7. Accessed
on February 7, 2021, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download? doi=10.1.1
.623.6404&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
Lath, Mukund. 2016. ‘Thoughts on Svara and Rasa: Music as Thinking/Thinking as
Music’, in Arindam Chakrabarti (ed.), Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of
Art, pp. 93–106. Bloomsbury Research Handbook, London: Bloomsbury.
Mohanty, Chandra. 2004. Feminism without Borders, London: Duke University
Press.
Mullin, Amy. 2003. ‘Feminist Art and the Political Imagination’, Hypatia, 18 (4):
189–213.
Naik, Ashay. 2016. ‘The Peculiarity of the Pollock Challenge’, March 30, 2016,
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the-pollock-challenge.
Patnaik, Priyadarshi. 2016. ‘Rasa Aesthetics Goes Global: Relevance and Legitimacy’,
in Arindam Chakrabarti (ed.), Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp.
43–69. Bloomsbury Research Handbook, London: Bloomsbury.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2001. ‘The Social Aesthetic and Sanskrit Literary Theory’, Journal
of Indian Philosophy, 29 (1/2): 197–229.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2016. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Ram, Kalpana. 2011. ‘Being ‘rasa’: The Affective Pleasures of Music and Dance
Spectatorship and Nationhood in Indian Middle-class Modernity’, Journal of the
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Roth, Amanda, and Pieranna Garavaso. 2018. ‘Introduction to Feminist Value

Theory’, in Pieranna Garavaso (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic
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2019. doi:10.5040/9781474297806.0027.
Simonsson, Nils. 1970. ‘The Aesthetic and the Mystic Experience in Indian Theory’,
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June 30, 2018. doi:10.30674/scripta.67626.
Thapalyal, Ranjana. 2007/2014. ‘Sringara Rasa’, in Griselda Pollock and Victoria T.
Sauron (eds.), The Sacred and the Feminine, pp. 135–149. London: I. B. Tauris &
Co.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalitha. 1991. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present.
New York: Feminist Press.
Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1991. ‘The Role of the Arts in Social Transformation’. India
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Vatsyayan, Kapila, 1996. Bharata: The Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

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 4
THE ERRANT FEMININE OF
BHAKTI AND SUFI AESTHETICS

Bhakti and Sufism represent analogous discourses that, despite their religio-
cultural variations, illuminate the space of a shared conceptual ethic emerg-
ing from cultural milieus within which they evolved in the medieval and
early modern period. In both, aesthetic experiences are central to spiritual
pursuit so that poetry, song, dance and music describe the repertoires of
their epistemic vocabularies. The commingling of the spiritual and the aes-
thetic is so complete in these traditions that it becomes impossible to isolate
one from the other, as has been noted elsewhere.1 The articulation of Bhakti
and Sufi thought through various art forms facilitates the tracing of at least
part of the long aesthetic arc that spans the centuries in the northern regions
of South Asia.
In approaching a set of aesthetic codes and ethics that undergird both
traditions, I am guided by the proposition made by several scholars (see
Behl 2007; Burchett 2019; Murphy 2018) regarding their combined con-
ceptual fields, literary tropes and cultural histories. A timely argument
against sectarian approaches that tend to straitjacket Bhakti and Sufism
within distinct Hindu and Islamic religious traditions was tendered by
Aditya Behl (2007), who observed that as far as the Bhakti movement is
concerned, ‘the greatest gap or silence is the role of Islam and Islamic religi-
osity’ (Behl 2007: 319). Behl’s prescient forewarning about impending nar-
row cultural nationalisms seems particularly urgent in the South Asian
context today as well as perhaps globally. Similar sentiments regarding non-
Islamic cultural influences on the evolution of Sufism have been echoed
across the subcontinent. Nosheen Ali notes the inextricability of Sufi poetry
and culture from a larger South Asian context and remarks that the former
‘cannot be solely subsumed simplistically under the category of the “anthro-
pology of Islam”, given the religio-cultural lifeworld of premodern and
modern times in which “Hinduism” and “Islam” were not taken to be
mutually exclusive categories’ (Ali 2016: 4).
Taking into account some of this previous scholarship, I attempt in this
discussion to approach the common ideological bases of Bhakti and Sufi
aesthetics from a gendered perspective. The impetus for doing so is driven
by the nature of some of their commonalities. These include interlinkages

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-5 91
 BHAKTI AND SUFI AESTHETICS

between corporeality and the experience of love (in its romantic, erotic and
spiritual manifestations) and the deployment of gender-fluid identities and
peripatetic lifestyles in pursuit of transcendental experiences. Frequently, in
both Bhakti and Sufi traditions, the ‘feminine’ comes to function as a guise
for the enactment of a gendered relationship between the human and the
divine. At the same time, in yearning for spiritual union, the mystic exhibits
a disinterestedness in socio-cultural identities of gender, caste and religion.
The paradox arising from these contradictory impulses raises intriguing
implications for a feminist and post-feminist understanding of South Asian
aesthetics of mysticism. In the remainder of this discussion, I pursue some
of these propositions as afforded by the stories and corpus of works attrib-
uted to Bhakti and Sufi mystics such as Meera and Bulle Shah and the alle-
gorical legend of Heer–Ranjha.

The mystic body in love

In striking contrast to the disembodied, abstract religiosity associated with
orthodox Islam and the detachment from corporeal life promoted by
Brahmanical Hinduism, the body occupies a central place in South Asian
devotional mysticism and functions as a prominent marker of difference
between orthodox and ‘progressive’ religious traditions. Both Bhakti and
Sufism embrace corporeality as a way of achieving proximity with the
divine. The body becomes the medium for the articulation of ardour through
jap/zikr (recitation of God’s name), oral poetry and singing (devotional
songs such as bhajans and qawwalis), trance experiences and dance. As the
seat of the yearning soul, the body in love drives the mystic to seek union
with divinity and this love is equally experienced at sensory, erotic and
numinous levels. The significance of a body ‘liberated’ from cultural con-
straints as enshrined in orthodox religious practices has been widely under-
scored in both Bhakti and Sufi contexts. According to Sumati Yadav, in the
Brahmanical tradition the ‘body as a dynamic factor in facilitating salvation
was not paid much attention to’ (2020: 75), whereas Bhakti poets ‘drew the
idea of body, soul and salvation from Vedic tradition but democratized and
localized the path to salvation’ (76). Analogously, in the context of Sufism,
Tanvir Anjum observes that

the concept and treatment of body in orthodox Islam is quite con-

trary to its imagination in sufi Islam. While in the former, the whole
emphasis is on regulating the body through control and restric-
tions, the latter imagines body in quite contrary terms. It considers
body as a means of expressing its proximity with God through its
performative role.
(Anjum 2015: 95)

Reacting against a Brahmanical culture whose caste, gender and faith seg-
regations were founded upon binaries of purity and pollution, the Bhakti

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tradition offered a contrasting egalitarian ethic by underscoring the arbi-

trariness of social hierarchies and by promoting a radical overhauling of
systemic divisions. Its threat was all the more effective because it came from
within – that is, through religious discourses and practices that deployed
familiar Shaivite and Vaishnav iconography and imagery and therefore pre-
cluded interrogations of their Hindu cultural legitimacy. Like the practitio-
ners of tantrism, Bhakti saints rejected the Brahmanical metaphysics of
disengagement and the self/body and purusha/prakriti dualisms that had
dominated Hindu philosophy (see Bilimoria and Wenta 2015; Yadav 2020).
Against a ‘Brahmanical ideal of emotionlessness’ that evolved out of
Upanishadic and Sankhya metaphysics (Bilimoria and Wenta 2015: 11),
Bhakti discarded the adverse associations of embodiment and centred emo-
tion in spiritual practice. Setting aside the Brahmanical apprehension of
corporeality’s attendant sorrows and its preoccupation with renunciation,
Bhakti saints revelled in ecstatic physical and affective otherworldly experi-
ences, while Bhakti poetry and song often wended their way through a field
of sexual and bodily metaphors.
Yet such divergences do not completely obliterate continuities between
Brahmanism and Bhakti, which found in the Sanskrit aesthetic tradition of
rasa an opportune mode for conveying its central impulse, that of divine
love, a contiguity that equally informs Indic forms of Sufism (see Burchett
2019: 152). As we have seen in the previous chapter, affect lies at the very
heart of rasa epistemology, which grounds its aesthetic in a meticulous
scrutiny of emotions. The dialogue between rasa’s aesthetic epistemology
and Brahmanical thought had managed to result in an expansion of the
latter’s boundaries without a full turn away from the conceptual underpin-
nings of Vedic metaphysics. This was facilitated by the fact that rasa theory
embraced embodiment without an outright rejection of the dualism of
material body and spiritual self that undergirds many centuries of Hindu
metaphysics and may be traced as far back as the Upanishads. According
to such a world view, emotions belong to the life of the impure body and
restraint over these within a dualistic framework of purification and con-
trol was essential to ‘the Brāhmaṇ ical model of emotionless spirituality’
(Bilimoria and Wenta 2015: 13).
A comparable distinction between orthodox Islam and Sufi mysticism
has been underscored by Ananya Kabir, who notes that Islam ‘appears mini-
malist in the channels of emotive self-expression that it permits. In contrast,
Sufism seems the space par excellence of emotion and unrestraint’ (2007:
80). With the fruition of the mystic traditions, a veering away from the
ontology of emotive disengagement occurs somewhere between the eighth
to twelfth centuries when love, particularly divine love, becomes a defining
cultural ethic influencing religion as well as literature in South Asia, what
has been referred to by some as the ‘age of love’ (Ali 2016: 10) and others
as the ‘school of love’ (Lumbard 2007: 346). Joseph Lumbard traces the
beginnings of love in Sufi thought to as far back as the second century

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(2007: 345), noting that the duality between the human and divine is recon-
ciled when ‘in the early sixth/twelfth century love comes to be discussed as
the Divine Essence beyond all duality’ (Lumbard 2007: 346).
With this overarching privileging of love, Bhakti and Sufism propose an
immersion into the very heart of feeling and sensory experience, a perspec-
tive drawing upon and yet distinct from rasa’s epistemological emphasis on
emotion and its abstract cognitive analysis of the typology of feelings.
Reacting against rigid absolutist precepts, liberatory mystic traditions such
as tantrism, Bhakti and Sufism came to deploy the body as a medium of
spiritual pursuit and repudiated binaries of purusha/prakriti, upper/lower
castes and male/female bodies to advance confrontations with entrenched
religious and cultural hegemonies. At the same time, their intricate linkages
with the epistemic frameworks of foregoing philosophic traditions such as
that of rasa sustained their inside/outside location and their perpetuity at
the margins of dominant religious belief systems. Thus, rather than offering
distinct, alternate pathways to spiritual knowledge, these traditions offered
an internal critique of and continuity with established religious ideologies
(see also Ali 2016).2
Unsurprisingly, within the conceptual frameworks of both Bhakti and
Sufi discourses, sringara rasa or the rasa of love occupies pride of place and
comes to be articulated in their respective vocabularies as prem and ishq. In
the Sufi tradition, the mystical and philosophical depths of ishq were
plumbed by various saintly figures across the Near East and South Asia,
from Rabiya al-Basri in the eighth century (Iraq) to the Persian Jalāl ad-Dīn
Muhammad Rūmī (thirteenth century), just as in India, Bhakti saints like
the fifteenth-century mystic Kabeer made the elaboration of prem rasa a
dominant theme of his dohas3 (two-line verses in Prakrit or Hindi poetry).
Some of Kabeer’s dohas were so popular that even today they remain house-
hold adages, such as the ubiquitous verse ‘dhai akshar prem ka’ that distin-
guishes between bookish knowledge and love as true knowing and declares
the latter as the only wisdom worth acquiring in this world. The resonances
between Sanskrit and Persianate literary traditions stemming from concepts
such as sringara, viraha (or separation), firāq, sama4 and ishq have invited
considerable attention. Katherine Butler and Schofield asserts that it is the
affinity between shringara rasa and ‘ishq that most obviously connects the
Mughal connoisseur of music to the Indic rasika’ (2015: 412). Expressing a
similar viewpoint, Patton Burchett observes that

both bhaktas and Sufis sang of and theorized about the kind of love
that overflows all bounds and draws the self outside of itself (‘ishq
for the Sufis, prema for the bhaktas), and both placed special
emphasis upon intense longing for an absent beloved (firāq for the
Sufis; viraha for the bhaktas) as a metaphor for (and a vehicle to
the experience of) pure love for the Divine.
(2019: 150)

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Given the centrality of emotion in Indian metaphysics5, the privileged posi-

tion occupied by love’s varied manifestations in Bhakti and Sufi practices
accrues particular significance for a feminist turn towards Indic aesthetics.
However, before this becomes the basis of any enthusiastic endorsement, it
needs to be tempered by feminist theory’s encounter with the hyper-mascu-
linized contexts within which these traditions evolved. Such contradictory
strains are most evident in the literary corpus of women bhaktins, where
love for a male god conceptualized as divine spouse takes on fascinating
and composite shapes.

Meera’s story
To explore the figure of the mystic body in love, I first turn to the Bhakti
movement, particularly to the renowned saint Meera, whose life story
exemplifies a form of Vaishnav Bhakti. Meera’s bhajans are today part of a
500-year-old folk tradition of Bhakti in North India. Notably, in another
instance of the interspersing of Bhakti and Sufism, Meera’s figure equally
marks a remarkable intersectionality between these traditions. As told by
Shemeem Abbas, narratives about her devotion to the Sufi saint Hazrat
Khwaja Chisti of Ajmer form an integral part of Sufi tradition6 (see Abbas
2002: 97–100).
Starting in the seventh century, the Bhakti movement is said to have
spread from Southern India to the northern belt where, in its encounter
with Vaishnavism, it adopted particular Vaishnav aspects such as the bhak-
ta’s single-minded devotion to Vishnu’s avatar, Krishna. Substantial scholar-
ship exists on the early evolution of the Bhakti tradition in the South (see
Chakravarti 1989; Doniger 2009). Owing to its specific and limited intent,
the focus of my discussion is restricted to the northern regions of India
where the Bhakti tradition commingled with Persianate Sufi ideology that
had gained momentum during the Mughal era. The period between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries has been referred to as a ‘great religious
and spiritual renaissance’ (Abbas 2002: 18) and reached its peak under the
reign of the emperor Akbar (1556–1605 CE).
Operating within the idiom of Hindu religiosity, the imagined relation-
ship between bhaktin and divine spouse manages to eschew social censure
even while opening up a space for revolt against the bondage of marital life.
Nowhere is this more evident perhaps than in the body of work attributed
to Meera, a Rajput princess and mystic saint who lived in the feudalistic
medieval society of Mewar in Rajasthan in the early sixteenth century.
Rejecting Rajput notions of honour attached to high-caste women of her
times, Meera, according to legend, abandons the comforts of a royal alli-
ance and consecrates her entire life to the quest for Krishna, whom she
recognizes as her sole and eternal spouse. Meera’s rebellion remains, in a
sense, invisibilized because the object of her romantic and spiritual quest
not only is intangible but wields the authority of a revered Hindu deity.

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Although it is deeply erotic, Meera’s literary production closes off any inter-
rogation of its sexual elements since the earthly husband is replaced with a
godhead whose divinity is established and recognized by the very Vaishnav
culture she undermines through her dissent. Despite its radical undercur-
rent, Meera’s erotic articulation of divine love is tolerated since it operates
with customary religious vocabularies and can be assimilated within domi-
nant religious discourse resulting in at least a partial blunting of its libera-
tory potential.
Wandering the countryside in love and longing for her beloved Krishna,
Meera is said to have composed7 a considerable number of songs/poems
that became an integral part of Indian folk literature and lore. Ubiquitous
allusions to Meera dancing in wild abandon, her hair falling loose over her
shoulders, singing her desire for her divine ‘lord’, are now part of an Indic
cultural discourse that epitomizes the Bhakti tradition in the north.
A stirring translation of some of Meera’s songs is offered by Shama
Futehally (1994). In many of these, Meera expresses her defiance against
conjugal life and a yearning for freedom. In one, she sings of her lost ‘wom-
anly shame’, declaring: ‘I’ve left/my mother’s house/ and the taste of dance
is on my tongue’; she dares her spouse to ‘take/the wedding necklace’ and
break ‘the golden bracelet’ that keeps her chained in the matrimonial bond,
adding in a final assertion of her freedom to choose: ‘I don’t want a fort or
a palace/and my hair is loose’ (Futehally 1994: 47).
Meera’s love for the blue god who often manifests at twilight is expressed
in sensual and sexual metaphors that mirror her longing for surreptitious
unions in the inky darkness of the night. It is with Krishna that she experi-
ences ‘a husband’s/touch’ (Futehally 1994: 43). Meera as poet and lover
gives herself up entirely to the vivid dreams of desire that she weaves in her
songs:

At nightfall
I’ll skip
to his door,
be lit by
his face.

At dawn I’ll
return
to my yard,
walk lightly
in grace.
Tease
like a breeze,
wear what will please,
wait as he says;
eat what he tells me,

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 BHAKTI AND SUFI AESTHETICS

be
sold should he sell me’
(Futehally 1994: 67).

In another song,

she comes, squeezing

berries for Him;
those which ooze
are chewed, then spewed
at him, so
eager is this lowly one
to please.

And He,
he does not see
her stained, defiling teeth
he but imbibes
the purple juice
of love.
(Futehally 1994: 125).

Those who love Krishna in sheer abandon are rewarded with close physical
embrace and climactic erotic pleasure: ‘thus, he holds them/ tight,/ he swings
them high/ above’ (Futehally 1994: 125).
Corporeal metaphors recur equally in the articulation of the state of viraha
or separation, whose pain is experienced like a thorn piercing the body, as
well as of erotic union during which the beloved’s blue-black hues colour
Meera’s body like ‘the cloth/ that someone dyed’ (Futehally 1994: 79).
In a deliberate move characteristic of mystic symbolism, romantic love
stands in for the sublime equivalent of spiritual yearning for a divine
beloved, and erotic earthly union becomes a metaphor for its transcenden-
tal counterpart. Thirstily, Meera sings, ‘Life after life/ I stand by the road/
and look for a home/ with my lord’ (Futehally 1994: 61/63). When he
comes, she is filled with the hope that he will finally ‘quench/ the thirst/ of
births’ (Futehally 1994: 105).
Associated with an unabashed protest against established norms of femi-
ninity, domesticity and marital life, Meera has often been touted as a revo-
lutionary figure far ahead of her times. However, since Meera’s life history
and literary output remain circumscribed within the religious framework of
a time-honoured Vaishnav vocabulary, the degree of its insurgent effects has
remained open to scepticism. A productive debate about Meera as a figure
of emancipation was initiated by Kumkum Sangari (1990), who argues that
Meera remains contained within the patriarchal codes against which she
rebels. Sangari proposes that although Meera’s abstract divine marriage to

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Krishna allows her to defy societal codes, she continues to operate within
conventional patterns of austerity from which she draws her moral
authority:

It is religious belief which empowers Mira; both her sense of self-

hood and her violation of man-made custom emerge from her con-
viction of her subjection to god and her dedication to a ‘higher’
cause. The series of oppositions offered to hierarchy are both made
possible and undone by the fact that as a female subject Mira takes
recourse to the highest point – god - within the same patriarchal
structure.
(Sangari 1990: 1468)

Sangari maintains that Meera’s discourse remains tied to metaphors of ‘ser-

vice, servitude, bondage and domination’ (1990: 1470) and to an idealiza-
tion of subalternity deeply rooted in Vaishnavism (see Sangari 1990:
1470–1472). Sangari’s view is in accord with the identification of bondage
as a ‘recurrent theme of bhakti poetry’, which in turn is attributed to the
idealization of feudalistic society during that time (see Bilimoria and Wenta
2015: 34–35).
In contrast, Rashmi Bhatnagar et al. (2004) deploy a dialect-centred
approach to proffer a contrary view that locates Meera’s corpus of work as
a form of subaltern co-authorship representing a ‘noninstitutionalized form
of dissent’ (2004: 4). Bhatnagar et al. claim that the dialect-based collective
subaltern voice of women that the narrative voice of ‘Meera’ represents
counters the hegemony of individual authorship in the tradition of high
Sanskrit literature: ‘Meera’s writing in dialect is a political act of subalter-
nity, because the politics of dialect languages and literatures is determined
by its conflictual relation to the elite domain’ (2004: 12).
The uncertainty regarding authorship complicates the debate about the
emancipatory effects of the hundreds of folksongs ascribed to ‘Meera’.
Popularized in folk idiom and music, Meera’s songs have been part of a
long oral tradition that traverses various generations as well as languages,
making it virtually impossible to ascertain their authorship, authenticity,
chronological origins, and history of translations and disseminations, as
discussed by Bhatnagar et al. (2004).8 Even if faith in Meera’s individual
authorship is sustained in a willing suspension of disbelief, her nomadic
lifestyle and her participation in the fellowship of a community of women
who sing and dance alongside her and who carry forward the Meera tradi-
tion indicate the likelihood of many ‘Meeras’ interlinked through a folk
tradition in which the individual and community are co-constitutive.
Although the debate about authorship, origins and historicity raises note-
worthy questions for a sociological analysis of Meera’s life narrative, it does
not exhaust an imaginative, analeptic investigation of the emancipatory
effects of Meera’s literary corpus that emerge from an analysis of its telling

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symbolic structures. Overtly, of course, Meera’s songs abound in masculist

expressions that couch female love as bondage to a divine lord and master.
While locating the thematic of bondage as a romanticization of feudal rela-
tionships, feminist readings would concurrently acknowledge Meera’s
elected servitude to a divine, absent lover over a present, male spouse as a
subversion of medieval women’s inescapable domestic captivity. As jogan,
rambling free across the country and dancing literally to her own tunes,
Meera wanders both literally and figuratively away from the Brahmanical
puritanism that seeks to prevail over the emotive, material and feminine
aspects of prakriti that she embodies and embraces. Krishna’s elusive figure
‘moves’ Meera to rapture and his presence is made manifest in her poetry
just as much as in the whirling movements of her dance, invoking the ety-
mological as well as corporeal links between ‘emotion’ and its roots in
‘motion’. Thus, it is that a transported ‘Meera’ moves Meera to madness,
earning for her the moniker of ‘baavri’ in her obstinate pursuit of an impos-
sible, insatiable desire.
If medieval upper-caste patriarchy threatened to deprive women of self-
actualization, Meera is able to overcome this by adopting the nomadic life
of the mystic-as-artist – a calling that upsets various social codes associated
with her gender and caste. Bhakti’s mystic path, with its legitimization of
rootless travel and rapture, enables a transgression of gender and caste
restrictions, particularly the preclusion of higher-caste women from experi-
ences of trance. Conventionally associated with the lower castes, who para-
doxically may have access to certain freedoms denied to secluded upper-caste
women, trance has been viewed as out of bounds for women of high station
(see Clément and Kristeva 1998/2001).9 Given that she adopts the destiny
of an itinerant saint known for her deewangi (‘madness’) and creative
genius, one may conclude that it is Meera as artist who triumphs over
Meera as domesticated wife or over Meera as high-caste princess. Her
exceptional life story, including her rejection of rigorous Rajput marital
codes, thus suggests a conflicted multi-layered contestation of patriarchy.
Many of these tensions find their way into her poetry. Despite her com-
plete surrender to a divine male spouse, Meera’s beloved contrasts sharply
with the stereotypical patriarch doomed to fall short in the fulfilment of
womanly desire. Presented as a foil to the inadequate husband, Krishna is
neither dispassionate nor oppressive and never loses his erotic attraction as
her clandestine, supernatural lover. Her advice to other women is unam-
biguous: no ‘earthly man’ will measure up to him: ‘Delightful/ though he be,
he doesn’t/ belong to you’ (Futehally 1994: 75).
More significantly, it is Meera as artist and lover who etches the silhou-
ette of her perfect idol on the canvas of her imagination. Mesmerized by the
aesthetic effects of sringara rasa, Meera discursively fashions the product of
her desire to her liking in the songs she composes. Lyrically inspired,
Krishna’s mysterious figure is sculpted in words and resides completely
within, intimating both a spiritual yearning and a desire for a beloved,

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secret part of the self: ‘From him/ who lives inner/ than in,/ what can/ you
hope/ to hide?’ she asks (Futehally 1994: 129). The identification of Krishna
with an inner self is so complete that Meera insists ‘He is here/ Inside/ He
does not leave/ he doesn’t/ need to arrive’ (Futehally 1994: 79/81).
In Meera’s enthralled state of jouissance, the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secret’ col-
lapse to become indistinguishable. In referring to these terms, Pollock and
Tauron state that ‘both are forms of interiority which it is the specificity of
the poet to be able to unveil’ (2007: 7). An attention to Meera as poet
(besides Meera as saint) and the exploration of the literary structures of her
verse can enable us to interpret Krishna’s sovereignty in terms of the power
of her own poetic prowess, and her grievances about Krishna’s elusiveness
as the pursuit of a forbidden feminine subjectivity, rather than as a surrender
of the female self to a male other as may be inferred through extra-literary,
empirical or sociological approaches to Meera’s narrative.
Meera’s ultimate sublime union with Krishna at the end of her life
makes such symbolic interpretations all the more plausible. According
to legend, following many years of her absence from her native land in
Mewar, a delegation of priests is dispatched to look for Meera and to
plead for her return in a bid to save the region from the ill fortune asso-
ciated with her departure. As Shama Futehally narrates the story, ‘in her
dilemma, Meera turned to the temple’s idol of Krishna’ fervently appeal-
ing to him to rescue her from this conundrum (1994: 19). ‘The god
responded by physically enclosing her within himself. She disappeared
into the idol, so when the brahmins entered the temple all they saw was
her sari wrapped around the idol’ (Futehally 1994: 19). In this final
‘move’, not only does Meera enter Krishna, Krishna too, wrapped in her
feminine attire, literally embodies himself as ‘Meera’ so that they become
a composite whole. With this penultimate metaphor of conjoined trans-
gendered bodies of lover and beloved, Meera’s permanent disappearance
into the sculpted shape of her own desires erases all difference between
lived and imagined realities as well as between female and male corpo-
reality. A feminist consideration of the literariness of Meera’s poetic cor-
pus thus facilitates a reading of ‘Meera’ as an errant but powerful
feminine imaginary that perseveres within the rigid borders of medieval
Rajput patriarchy.

‘Ishq’ and its ‘deewangi’

Ishq or love, the defining concept of Sufi poetry, draws upon earlier
Persianate literary traditions that explored the multifarious forms of roman-
tic and spiritual love as part of the ‘tasawwuf’ or spiritual journey of the
Sufi disciple towards truth (see Unher and Bano 2010: 4). Ishq is closely tied
to the impassioned madness or deewangi it arouses. The latter may include
connotations of inebriation (induced by a ‘spiritual high’), craziness, trance
and transcendence. It may be stirred up as often by the name of the beloved

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as by the crescendo of music and dance in which a mehfil of singer(s) and

audience become united in kaifiyat or ‘mystical delight’ (Abbas 2002: 69).
Ishq and deewangi appear as recurring aesthetic tropes in Sufi poetry and
music of the northern regions of the subcontinent. Amir Khusrau’s compo-
sitions, dedicated to Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia, speak of the highest form of
ishq in the pir–muridi10 tradition. Under the guidance of the pir (spiritual
master), the murid (disciple) abandons himself/herself completely to a pur-
suit of the divine and is set on the fevered path of ishq that leads to an
ultimate annihilation of the self (fana) and merging (visaal) of the lover
with the divine beloved.
As emphasized by Ananya Kabir, divine love ‘can be interpreted as a
model for all human dialogical interaction’ and is ‘central to and universal
within the Sufi episteme’ (Kabir 2007: 78). Sufism, as Kabir notes, is also

the space of liminality and wildernesses, the space of nomadism

and vagrancy—of a gamut of divinely inspired madnesses as
embodied in the figures of the dervesh, the malang, the qalandar,
the majzoob, the mastan—all categories of ‘sufi madmen’ local to
the deserts straddling Pakistan and Western India.
(2007: 80)

The notion of the merging of the human and the divine in ishq leads to
desire being articulated at multiple levels in an esoteric layering replete with
textured symbolism and double entendre. Poetry, which makes singular use
of devices such as image, symbol, wordplay and disguise, offers an apt her-
metic medium for the oblique expression of ishq in its romantic, erotic and
numinous forms. It is no wonder then that mystical traditions that have
evolved in cultures and time periods dominated by stringent religious doc-
trine show an affinity for, and deep reliance on, veiled lyrical articulations.
These expressions defy the narrow definition of the word ‘poetry’ in English
that fails to capture its wider socio-cultural and political functions in the
cultural and historical contexts of South Asia.
Particularly in the Punjab provinces across northern India and Pakistan,
poetry and literature have been a vital part of everyday life, a way of locat-
ing oneself in and making sense of the world. Even in urban metropolises
like Delhi, it was commonplace until just a generation ago to indulge in
social soirées centred on the reciting of shero-shayerie, whether borrowed
from luminaries like Mir, Zauq and Ghalib or composed by guests in the
inspiration of the moment. Shero-shayerie functions not only as creative
expression but as a manner of communicating and shaping perceptions
about lived reality, about one’s relationship to others and to events, and as
a way of constructing and deepening community values and debates. Similar
observations from Pakistan have been offered; Nosheen Ali, for instance,
proposes the term ‘mannkahat’ for this form of ‘poetic knowledge’ (Ali
2016: 5). According to Ali,

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it is a multidimensional sea of knowledge that permeates our geog-

raphies and histories, defining individual sensibility as well as col-
lective sentiment. Through everyday life environments as well as
mushairas, melas, and rat jagas — verse festivals that take place
across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — poetic consciousness con-
tinues to form the moral imagination in South Asia. More gener-
ally, in the non-West, poetic engagement plays a strong role in
social interaction and political life. Especially in Muslim Central
and South Asia, poetic thought has been intimately connected with
notions of the intellect, spirituality, music, and art.
(Ali 2016: 4–5)

Within this engaged poetic tradition, ishq and its deewangi are not mere
literary tropes but function as cultural nodes for the articulation of famil-
iar experiences, emotions and ways of being. When expressed through
aesthetic formulations such as spiritually uplifting music or dance, they
may perform cathartic functions as well. For instance, Shemeem Abbas
identifies a form of dance called the dhammal performed by the qalandars
during healing ceremonies at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at
Sehwan in Pakistan:

Both men and women participate in the dhammal. Women perform

the dance in a certain section of the courtyard. Many times, fami-
lies will bring women who are emotionally disturbed to participate
in the dhammal, which devotees claim has healing powers.
(Abbas 2002: 35)

A major resource for the investigation of ishq within Sufism is the Persian
qissa literary tradition composed of romantic love legends. Qissas became
popular in the northwestern provinces of Punjab where they were nar-
rated in the form of love narratives or prem-akhiyan (see Murphy 2018).
A rich literary history ranging from Baba Farid in the late twelfth century
to Punjabi poet Bulle Shah (1680–1757) comprises a wealth of qawwalis,
qissas and kafis11 (a form of mystical poetry) woven around allegorical
tales of love. One of these, the love story of Heer–Ranjha, has been passed
down in various versions across the ages and forms part of this prolific
inter-textual literary tradition. Among the most well known and influen-
tial of these from the mid-eighteenth century12 are Waris Shah’s composi-
tion and Bulle Shah’s references to extant versions of the epic poem in his
kafis, incorporated in the popular cultural discourse of Punjab. The oral
legend of Heer–Ranjha tells of two young lovers divided by family and
clan disputes, much like Romeo and Juliet. Forcibly married off against
her wishes, Heer elopes with Ranjha (also known as Dhido) after he fol-
lows her to her marital home. However, owing to the subterfuge of her
relatives, the lovers meet a tragic end leading to her poisoning and Ranjha’s
death in shock.13

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Bulle Shah’s narration of the star-crossed love of Heer and Ranjha came
to exert a deep cultural influence that is still very palpable in today’s Punjab,
where snatches of the heart-rending kafis may be sung at the time of a
bride’s departure from her parental home. In one of his most celebrated
kafis, the Sufi poet deploys the symbolic landscape of this tragic romance to
speak about the sublime love in which Heer becomes indistinct from her
beloved Ranjha, who mirrors the face of the divine:

‘rāṅjha Ranjha kardī, huṇ a maiṅ āpe rāṅjhā hoī

saddo mainūṅ dhīdo rāṅjhā, hīra nā ākho koī’

‘Saying “Raṅjhā, Raṅjhā,” I myself have become Rāṅjhā.

Call me Dhīdo Raṅjhā; no one should call me “Hīr.’
(As translated by Anne Murphy 2018: 248)14

Reminiscent of other eponymous legendary tales of love from the near east,
such as that of Nizami’s Laila and Majnun, Heer–Ranjha’s conjoined nomen-
clature represents a Sufi vision of ishq that refuses all other institutionalized
ties, including marriage, and views class and clan divisions as artificially
imposed strictures that have no relevance in the spiritual realm. The ‘mad-
ness’ of Heer is presented by the Sufi poet as the affirmative assertion of a
female subjectivity as well as a metaphor for spiritual euphoria. Responding
to the oral narrative’s demands within the context of a shared folk history, the
audience willingly participates in this ‘inside knowledge’, one that is cultur-
ally inscribed as an ethical struggle of moral passion against hollow religious
and social constraints that stifle and inhibit the yielding of the soul, or ruh, in
its journey to the divine. Heer’s character, through her authors, speaks in
defense of an ecstatic spiritual love upheld by Sufism and is positioned in
direct confrontation with the dogma of clerics who represent orthodox Islam.
The Heer–Ranjha tradition has inspired retellings in the work of twentieth-
century poets, including the Punjabi poet and writer Amrita Pritam (see Kazmi
2019). Although these modern feminist revisionings have opened up the space
for a contemporary critique of patriarchy in the history of Punjab, Waris
Shah’s eighteenth-century version of Heer is equally recognized as enabling a
‘tussle for female voice’ that is ‘embedded in the originary text itself’ (Kazmi
2019: 6). Shemeem Burney Abbas, though reluctant to use the term ‘feminist’
because of its contemporaneity, recognizes that ‘female myths in Sufi poetry
certainly represent the voices of marginalized groups and continue to be used
as representative frames even today’ and asserts that these stories function as
‘metaphors for the polarities of gender, religious, sociopolitical, and economic
hegemony’ (Abbas 2002: 85). Sufi qissas such as that of Heer–Ranjha thus
carve out a space for women’s agency and unconventional life-choices through
an interrogation of hegemonic orthopraxy. Though doomed to tragic conse-
quences determined by their historical contexts, the allegorical narrations of
passion-driven exceptional destinies initiate conversations about women’s
freedom that continue to be relevant in contemporary times.

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Whether it is Meera or Heer, we can see how the rapturous deewangi of

ishq manages to whittle out spaces for women’s confrontational dialogue
with patriarchal forces. In contrast to the Western pairing of delirium with
illness, trance experiences catalysed through aesthetic modes such as ecstatic
singing and dancing have accrued affirmative cultural associations of healing
and wellness. Thus, an understanding of love and its deewangi in Sufi poetry
must remain distinct from Western feminist theory’s analysis of hysteria and
madness in terms of a retreat from the social (especially as famously embod-
ied in the metaphor of ‘the madwoman in the attic’). Rather than a form of
withdrawal, deewangi as legitimized conduct within a mystic aesthetic mani-
fests as a mode of exit from familial constraints and an entry into wider
public and political conversations, whether in the form of revolt or catharsis.
Embedded in a community’s shared folk narratives, it has evolved into an
established poetic trope that intercedes in public and political discourse by
defying the idea of a social order based on structural hierarchies, particularly
one that has been achieved on the strength of religious dogma and the ‘ratio-
nal’ regulation of individual subjectivities and desires. With its rich folk lega-
cies that emphasize participatory authorship and widespread social debate,
the world of Sufi love poetry thus offers an intriguing domain for exploring
the intersections between aesthetics and politics.

Between dwelling and nomadism

Allied with notions of love and madness, homelessness appears as a recur-
ring leitmotif in Bhakti and Sufi verse. Antecedent to and evocative of con-
temporary feminist explorations of nomadism,15 the meandering itinerary
of the saint’s wanderings through unchartered territories epitomizes the
search for divine refuge even as it enables a literal distancing from the banal
demands of routine life. The enraptured mystic belongs to no country and
to no religion, is at home in perpetual homelessness and rejects bounded
notions of habitat in the pursuit of otherworldly experiences and tasawwuf.
The deliberate enactment of non-belonging is thus a characteristic feature
of much Sufi and Bhakti poetry, which favours direct access to the divine
outside of religious edifices like the masjid (mosque) or mandir (temple).
Bulle Shah’s condemnations of the walled boundaries of institutionalized
religious spaces comprise some of the most reiterated kafis popularized by
Sufi singers across the subcontinent16:

‘bullha kī jāṇ āṅ maiṅ kauṇ

nā maiṅ momana vicca masītāṅ, nā maiṅ vicca kufara dīāṅ rītāṅ.’

‘Bullha [says], what do I know about who I am?

I am neither a believer in mosques, nor do I believe in the rites of the
non-believers.’
(As translated by Anne Murphy 2018: 246)17

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Shattering all religious structures, Bulle Shah recognizes the human heart
overflowing with divine love as the only abode worth preserving:

‘Masjid dhaade, mandir dhaade

Dhaade jo kuchh dhainda
Ik kisi da dil na dhaanvin
Rab dilaan vich rehnda.

Break the mosque and break the temple,

Break what can be broken.
But do not break the human heart,
Within which God abides.’
(Narayanan 2003/2004: 39)18

Iconoclastic and delirious, the mystic’s trajectory appears random, with no

fixed point of origin or destination, spurred only by desire for spiritual
union. Wedded to a divine spouse through an eternal bond of love, the wan-
dering mystic dwells ephemerally in a rapturous body as s/he imprints foot-
prints between home and homelessness, between an esoteric aesthetic and
the known reality of the social order. As it is for Bulle Shah, who recognizes
the human heart as the sole dwelling of the divine, so it was for Meera – her
body conceived as an abode for the self only when Krishna enters it to
‘make all things well’ (Futehally 1994: 55).
In the mystic aesthetic, the notion of home is thus intimately linked to the
mortal body, seen as a transient habitat for the soul in a state of viraha.
Aesthetic rapture catalyses an osmotic exchange between flesh and spirit,
temporarily erasing their distinction and enabling a foretaste of visaal. Such
a psychic porosity shared by mystics and artists has been variously remarked
upon in work that draws upon psychoanalytic and feminist theoretical
frameworks. In their co-authored work La folle et le Saint, Sudhir Kakar and
Catherine Clément propose that the mystic is someone who lives at the bor-
ders of porous realities between body and spirit: ‘Chez eux, la frontière entre
corps et esprit est d’une rare minceur, comme si elle était poreuse’ (1993:
164). (‘For them, the boundary between body and spirit is of an unusual
thinness, as if it was porous’ – Trans. mine.) According to the authors, mys-
tics exhibit a fragility between interior and exterior worlds indicative of a
delicate, porous membrane between the real and the psychic (1993: 166–
167). Analogously, Rosi Braidotti describes ‘a fluid sensibility that is porous
to the outside’ (2014: 171) as the marker of a feminine creative process, a
receptivity that permits access to the ‘other within’ (2014: 166). Braidotti
visualizes the nomadic writer as someone for whom these ‘zig-zagging’ paths
between inner and outer worlds are interlinked through the practice of
nomadic writing (2014: 168).
In Freudian terms, of course, the porousness between inner and outer
liminalities articulated through aesthetic explorations may be interpreted as

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a testimony to the impulse to recapture pre-Oedipal plenitude. Brought into

even greater relief in stratified societies with rigid hierarchies of gender, caste
and class, the mystic path of ‘belonging’ (to the divine) and ‘estrangement’
(from the social order) may be particularly alluring for those who subsist on
the outer circumferences of communities and apprehend threats of ostra-
cism. Marked as estranged and ‘foreign’ in such contexts, those at the mar-
gins may come to espouse foreignness at the cost of permanent exclusion.
The figure of the ‘foreigner’ – someone who has a deep, internalized sense of
non-belonging – thus bears distinct significance with respect to women who
are conceived in perpetual estrangement in patriarchy and obligated to man-
ifest their otherness through sequential rites and practices marking female
birth, feticide, veiling, son preference, dowry, exogamy and widowhood.
As we approach the notion of the woman-as-foreigner wounded and
ousted by society or spurred into voluntary exile by her sense of non-
belonging, it may be helpful to turn to Julia Kristeva’s work. Kristeva sug-
gests that it is ‘a secret wound’ that ‘drives the foreigner to wandering’
(1991: 5). Furthermore, her perception of the foreigner is that of someone
who has experienced maternal loss and is in search of ‘an invisible and
promised territory, that country that does not exist but that he bears in his
dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond’ (1991: 5). Kristeva’s
deliberation on the foreigner’s rupture with the symbiotic maternal calls
forth the psychic loss experienced in cultural contexts where the figure of
the patriarch engulfs the maternal reduced to its reproductive function. It
also evokes interesting analogies with cross-cultural mystic narratives, such
as Meera’s life story. According to legend, Meera devotes herself at a very
young age to an idol of Krishna gifted to her by a wandering ascetic and is
told by her mother, in jest, that the idol may well be her future husband.
Soon after this she loses her mother (see Futehally 1994: 16). In light of this
visceral grieving, her subsequent rejection of all patriarchal bondages,
including that of a marriage of convenience, may be read as a lifelong pro-
test against the absence of the maternal and the pursuit of divine love in
‘transference’. As a motherless child in upper-caste Rajput patriarchy and
endowed with creative prowess and a fierce imagination, Meera was per-
haps the perfect candidate for her own future destiny as a roving poet-saint
in quest of a lost maternal feminine.
The elliptical thematic structure of the exile’s destiny of departure and
nostos, assiduously plotted over the ages in classical literatures across the
world (with some of the earliest examples being the Hindu Ramayana and
the Greek Odyssey) and recharted in medieval mystic traditions of the sub-
continent, continues to shape contemporary epistemological perspectives in
literature and philosophy. In Braidotti’s earlier work, the nomadic subject
displays a non-linear way of thinking (1993: 1–2) and nomadism offers
‘points of exit’ from ‘phallo-logocentric premises’ (1993: 10). Subsequently,
in revisiting a concept explored by Deleuze and Guattari, she employs the
term ‘lines of flight’ (see also Zeina Al Azmeh; 2014: 179), which brings to

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mind French feminist inventive expositions of ‘voler’ (‘to fly’/‘to steal’) as

explored by Hélène Cixous in some of her early work (Cixous 1975).
Analogously, Braidotti emphasizes the significant role of the imagination and
nomadic subjectivity (see 2014: 181–182) as a channel of ‘ethical empower-
ment’ (2014: 172) for women, a kind of écriture feminine. In Braidotti’s
feminist turn, nomadism as style of writing offers an alternative to the des-
tiny of ‘the dutiful daughter’ (1993: 2). In contrast to the devoted daughter,
the ‘writing woman’ embraces vagrancy as aesthetic practice, a wilful choice
that Braidotti reads in terms of a ‘political will to change’ and a ‘desire for
change’ (1993: 3). Equally for women, it is the ‘desire to become’ revealing
the ‘political importance’ of ‘ontological desire’ (Braidotti 1993: 6).
It is intriguing to read Braidotti’s discussion of nomadic subjectivity and
its association with political change from the perspective of South Asian
mystic traditions and in the context of specific narratives. We have already
remarked upon Meera’s wanderings in the desert landscape of Rajasthan
and beyond in terms of women’s revolt against gender and caste restrictions
in medieval feudal society. Other interesting parallels abound in both Bhakti
and Sufi folklore. As noted by Abbas, certain itinerant Sufi sects from parts
of Northern India and Pakistan bear cultural and historical affiliations with
the banjaras or gypsy tribes of Rajasthan (Abbas 2002: 16–17). Mystics
with ‘restless souls’ who are part of these ‘roving-minstrel’ traditions roam
from one place to another ‘in search of divine wisdom’ (Abbas 2002: 17).
‘Mobility’ as a concept in Sufi mysticism thus is experienced at both physical
and spiritual levels. Mystics ‘move’ from one place to another not just liter-
ally but equally in terms of their spiritual progress or tasawwuf, and the spiri-
tual journey continues until the final revelation. As declared by the famous
Sufi singer, Abida Parveen, ‘you don’t get anything by just staying in one
place – it is only when you leave the home – that you achieve something – the
wisdom – you have to wander like the dervish or the faquir – you have to fill
your cloak with the wisdom – the pearls of wisdom – that you gather from
mobility’ (Abbas 2002: 21).
Viewed in this light, mystic aesthetics, characterized by peripatetic life-
styles, artistic ingenuity and the pursuit of oneness, may present an alterna-
tive epistemological pathway for liberating constrained subjectivities. In
such a political reading of the mystic’s transgressive aesthetic imaginary, the
refusal of all kinds of dwellings, including mosques and temples (the masjid
and mandir of Bulle Shah’s Sufi Weltanschauung), constitutes a confronta-
tional dialogue with centres of power. Here, revolt is carried out at the lit-
eral margins of society – for instance, in the desert as well as at its inner
discursive borders – in a community’s shared vocabulary of poetry, song
and music. Braidotti’s assertion that nomadic writing can be a ‘visceral ges-
ture’ (2014: 163) that resists and has an ‘ethical relationality to power’
(2014: 165) may well describe the life stories of wandering mystic poets
and, through these, a significant aspect of mystic aesthetics within and
beyond South Asia.

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That mysterious fluidity of gender …

In Sufi poetry, a gendered reconceptualization of the human–divine rela-
tionship is achieved by engendering the feminine at the heart of sublime
union. This is accomplished through various modes that include gender
inversion, gender transgression, and non-specific eroticism. In the pir–
muridi tradition, the male disciple often adopts a feminine posture towards
his pir, who stands in for the radiant face of the sublime and may exude
some of divinity’s brilliance. Examples of the male saint’s trans-gendering
and female impersonation abound in the spiritual-aesthetic practices of
diverse Sufi orders (tariqas), each claiming descent from its own spiritual
lineage or silsila. One of the more well known of these in Northern India is
the Chisti order with dargahs at Ajmer in Rajasthan, dedicated to the saint
Moinuddin Chishti (also known as Khwājā Ghareeb Nawaz), and another
at Nizamuddin in Delhi, dedicated to Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple
Amir Khusrau. Both of these draw scores of believers from all faiths, par-
ticularly during the urs or death anniversary of the saint.
Androgynous representations in South Asian literature and culture
have met with a range of reactions from condescension to enthusiastic
awe in the West. At times, the acceptance of, or indifference to, bisexual-
ity and fluid sexual identities in Indic culture may dovetail with Western
nostalgic hankering for a lost exotic world. For Catherine Clément
(1998/2001), the tolerance for bisexuality is ‘part of the elementary sym-
bolic tool kit’ of Indic culture, so integral that ‘no one pays any attention
to it. The intellectual who knows Levi-Strauss is unsettled by it, which is
not a bad thing’ (1998/2001: 31). Clément views various ubiquitous
androgynous/trans-gendered representations such as the androgynous
Shiva,19 the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna’s cross-dressing, the sharing of
feminine energy or shakti by men and women all as examples of a deeply
embedded bisexuality in Indian culture (1998/2001: 31). In fact, in her
view, bisexuality is so deeply ingrained that ‘on this continent, the tran-
sitional zone occupies almost the entire terrain: one slips fluidly from
one god to another, from one sex to the other’ (1998/2001: 54). Indeed,
Clément seems to express consternation at the loss of a progressive
matricentric past in which shakti was shared by everyone and with
which, according to her, the wealthy in India are losing touch.20 In her
view, it is only the Sufis who ‘truly let identification with the feminine,
bisexuality, and “the whole lot” get by. They reach ecstasy by panting,
shaking, spinning, screaming if necessary. ... The Sufis, victors of the
transitional zone, grab hold of any human being whatever to practice
divine love. As it happens, the Sufis, as if by chance, champion tolerance
in the matter of religion: everything that is divine is equivalent, man and
woman, temple, church, mosque, fetish’ (1998/2001: 55). Clément
regards this indiscriminate practice of love as evidence of ‘the freedom
proper to the sacred transitional zone’ (1998/2001: 55).

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Regardless of their wide-sweeping endorsement, such indulgent readings

of bisexuality run the risk of overlooking the subtle nuancing of androgyny
in Sufi mystic literature and its complex interlinkages with metaphysical
ontology. Particularly in poetry, the male Sufi saint, represented as the bride-
of-god through a process of trans-gendering, positions himself as an abject
feminine lover willing to surrender all in the rapture of divine ishq (see
Kabir 2007; Malamud 1996). Where the feminine is deployed as the locus
for human devotion, regardless of the gender of the devotee, it appears to
disengage from the sexed female body even while retaining overtly gen-
dered overtones. It thus comes to function as an attitude of humility, desire
and surrender accessible by men and women alike, cloaking the one who
wears it like a temporary apparel to be worn or shed at will.
At the same time, the question of female and male sexual identities is
approached with a palpable indifference by adherents of Sufism. An inter-
view with Abida Parveen, the famous contemporary singer from Pakistan
who is also one of the few women practitioners of sufiana kalam (corpus
of Sufi poetry), is revealing. To a question by the interviewer – ‘And do
you have a special bond with female Sufis like Rabia?’, Abida Parveen
responds:

All saints reached a great level. It’s not up to me to say who is

higher and who is lower. I have no status to distinguish between
superior and inferior. And within the higher spirituality of the Sufi
saints, male or female also loses its meaning. They own the spiritual
world and the spiritual world is there because of them. They’re all
imams who lead the whole humanity. And I follow them.
(2013)21

In another interview, she asserts:

Male and female does not even come into it – what you call Allah
is one – God is the mehver [center] of everything – you make a
roundabout and whatever way it goes – it is in that direction… it
really does not matter whether it is male or female – in fact we can
really say that in Sufi’s terminology – if someone is not a male – he
is called a female.
(Abbas 2002: 22)

Abida Parveen thus foregrounds the Sufi approach to truth through inver-
sion – something is through what it is not. It is not surprising then that, for
her, gender, like caste and class, signifies a matter of mere artifice. Appositely,
in Abida Parveen’s Punjabi rendition of one of Bulle Shah’s songs, the refrain
‘O Bulle – let’s go where everyone is blind’ emphasizes a wilful disregard
towards caste and gender; the place the poet wants to go to is one ‘Where no
one knows our caste and where no one acknowledges us’ (Abbas 2002: 73).

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Another legendary anecdote from Bulle Shah’s life tells of a period of time
when his spiritual mentor, Shah Inayat, grew displeased with his disciple
because of Bulle Shah’s ridiculing of social hierarchies of gender, caste, class
and religion. In order to win back his favour, Bulle Shah left to apprentice for
several years with musicians and dancers. Upon his return, he dressed as a
dancing girl and performed before his mentor to appease him, an effort that
resulted in a successful reconciliation. The famous Punjabi kafi, ‘Mainu nach
ke yaar manaavan de…’ (‘let me dance to win back my beloved’), articulates
the plea of the lover, Bulle Shah, who snubs all restraints of gender, caste and
class in an expression of mystical love (see Abbas 2002: 73–74, 77–78):

Let me put the mark on the forehead

To become the dancing girl affects not my caste
Dance I shall to win my beloved, my mentor
(Abbas 2002: 78)22

Markedly, the English term ‘dancing girl’ does not quite capture the con-
notations of the original Punjabi term ‘kanjri’, a pejorative used to describe
prostitutes and performers alike. The mystic’s espousal of the tainted figure
of the kanjri for an expression of pure love is thus all the more startling in
its iconoclasm.
Bulle Shah’s poetry contains several instances of similar gender fluctua-
tions. In another kafi, the male poet represents himself as a veiled bride
whose female friends/lovers entreat her/him to lift the veil that conceals
their beloved’s face:

‘Ghungat cuk le Baba Bulle Shah

Sakhia vekhan aia sajna—
O ghunghat khol a-sajna’

‘Lift they veil, O Baba Bulle Shah

Thy female friends come to see thee,
O Beloved
Lift thy veil, O Beloved’
(Abbas 2002: 80)23

In Sufi poetry, the lifting of the beloved’s veil, or kasf, is a central metaphor
representing the revelation of the divine to the lover. Here, the metaphorical
wordplay on ‘veiling’ that circulates between male poet as female beloved/
mentor, female friends as lovers/disciples, and the shrouded beloved as the
veiled face of divinity leads to a deliberate confusion and esoteric submerg-
ing of meanings typical of Sufi verse. Since Sufi poetry employs ishq as a
central catalyst, the fluctuating gender roles enable the poet to express love
at dual interlinked levels concurrently – that of ishq for an earthly beloved
(who may be either female or male) and for the divine beloved.24 At other

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times, by impersonating a woman desirous of erotic union with her male

lover, the mystic is able to employ physical yearning as a metaphor for the
highest form of ishq.
In an interview with Shemeem Abbas, the illustrious maestro of ghazal
and qawwali Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan averred that it is possible to read
the entire discourse of the sufiana-kalam in the female voice, citing exam-
ples of some of the greatest poets, including Amir Khusrau, Baba Farid and
Bulle Shah. In this regard, Khan remarks that

there is an elegance – a humility in the female voice – which is lack-

ing in the male voice – all these aesthetics – it is altogether something
very different – all these aesthetics - … they found their spirit – their
soul – the essence of what they wanted to say in the female voice.
(Abbas 2002: 67)

The gender play at work in Sufi poetry has attracted considerable feminist
attention, not least because despite the apparent fluidity of gender roles, the
‘feminized’ saint consistently appears as a supplicant and as an abject lover
torn by love’s longing. These contradictory pulls have generated debates
which, while widely nuanced in their expositions, could broadly be classi-
fied under two general categories. On the one hand, the trans-gendering of
the male poet is perceived as an opening up of a space of fluid identities that
serve as a counter-discourse to rigid heteronormative gender divides. These
perspectives tend to highlight representations of the feminine as a fluid
realm of possibilities accessible across genders. On the other hand, the
ongoing equation of the feminine with unchanging, formulaic aspects of
powerlessness, longing, abjection and supplication provokes an interroga-
tion of the problematic nature of the deployment of trans-gendering as a
temporary male access to ‘womanliness’.
In adopting the former, sympathetic approach, Ananya Kabir elucidates
how the sacred as feminine becomes the mark of a ‘shifting signifier’ (2007:
83) beyond the sexed body: ‘The saint is feminized as bride of God; but he
is masculinized as king of Ajmer (shah, raja) vis-à-vis the feminized devotee
as jogan/deewani’ (2007: 83). Although Kabir argues persuasively for a gen-
erous interpretation of gender fluidity, it remains tricky to disassociate the
‘feminine’ in her discussion from the essentialist binaries within which it
remains caught. Appearing as a combination of ‘abjection, self-surrender,
and irrational longing’ (Kabir 2007: 83), the feminine brings with it a ‘poten-
tial annihilation of the ego’ (Kabir 2007: 84). Apprehending that the ‘adop-
tion of feminine postures’ may be viewed as ‘an appropriation of the feminine
by men’, Kabir suggests an alternative reading of such a feminization in
terms of ‘longing and inaccessibility’ (2007: 84). Tellingly, it is a longing that
‘stands outside of narrative in a space of the irrational, anti-teleological and
emotional excess’ (2007: 85). Thus, when the ‘sacred and the feminine’ is
substituted by Kabir with the ‘sacred and the androgynous’ (2007: 86)

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based on the premise that the feminine ‘is available to both men and women,
to both saint and pilgrim, and to anyone, of any religion, who may be so
predisposed towards the sacred’ (2007: 86), the untangling of the feminine
from its formulaic traits still appears unfinished.
For others, like Margaret Malamud and Tanvir Anjum, gendered attri-
butes of power and powerlessness in Sufi thought replicate established gen-
der relations in society. ‘Gendered imagery’, Malamud (1996) argues, ‘was
used in part to signify relationships of power and subordination’ (101) and
‘sufi rituals consecrated hierarchy and inequality in this world by linking its
social forms to the divine will and order’ (113). In a similar vein, according
to Tanvir Anjum (2015), ‘In South Asian society, the relationship of a
woman to the society in general, and more particularly, the relationship of
a wife to her husband is that of extreme submission, surrender and dedica-
tion. Therefore, the husband-wife or bridal metaphors can well explain the
relationship of a sufi seeker with God’ (Anjum 2015: 107). Notwithstanding
the primary dominance–submission structure of Sufi master–disciple rela-
tionships, both authors do signal inherent complexities manifested in their
representations. Malamud proposes that ‘when feminine imagery was
applied to disciples, the dependence and subordination of the disciple were
stressed, but when it was used to describe the master, it enhanced the mas-
ter’s power and authority, through the rhetorical appropriation of female
procreative and nurturing powers. The use of feminine imagery thus could
signify both authority and dependence’ (1996: 101–102). Anjum’s discus-
sion highlights a re-conceptualization of masculinity effected by gender flu-
idity: ‘Keeping in view the patriarchal social set up in South Asia, and the
fact that masculinity as a social and cultural construct is seen as a source of
honour and pride for men, the identification of the male Sufis with the femi-
nine is quite meaningful. By purposely acquiring a female persona, these
Sufis try to transcend normative gender categories, and thus, redefine the
concept of manliness or masculinity. They not only deliberately abandon
the patriarchal prerogatives of maleness but also give up their actual male-
ness. Their androgynous behavior represents a temporary or permanent
transgression of gender norms and boundaries’ (Anjum 2015:105).
Malamud’s deliberation on the Sufi murshid’s role as both father and
mother possessing ‘two bodily fluids upon which life depends: semen and
milk’ (1996: 97) emphasizes a comparable intermingling of sexualities.
In a different take, Anne Murphy (2018) forefronts the problematical
nature of engendering which ‘provides another intersection point between
the two, Sufism and bhakti: the exploration of female voices and positions
– as well as their appropriation’ (249). Murphy calls attention particularly
to the latter aspect: ‘That is to say, the female as object within a spiritual
journey is still yet an object: to speak as a woman is not to give women a
voice’ (2018: 249–250). ‘Thus, to appropriate the emotional register of
women is not to empower them, and to speak as a woman is in a sense to
accept and appropriate the position of abjection, not to challenge it’ (2018:

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250). At the same time, Murphy acknowledges the complex modes in which
gender is represented and the ‘alternative models for gender formation’
made possible by Bhakti and Sufi poetic conventions (2018: 251).
In brief, regardless of these divergent opinions, there seems to be a con-
currence around the acknowledgement of fluctuating gender roles and the
slipperiness of gender in Sufi poetry, even when such representations repli-
cate existing social hierarchies. I suggest that this recurrent wavering
between gender identities succeeds, even if inadvertently, in centring gender
posturing as a deliberate aesthetic stratagem for the expression of ishq.
Performative elaborations of the feminine present the denial of stable male
and female positionalities not as a mere contestation of gender categories
but as a tacit recognition that gender may be construed as an ephemeral
stylistic performance.
Although this may resonate with Western feminist theory’s engagement
with notions of performativity, particularly as explored by Judith Butler25
since the last decades of the twentieth century, such perspectives may not
prove completely adequate for an assessment of the feminine in the context
of South Asian mystic literary traditions. Principally, and dissimilar to
Western feminism’s deep interest in questions of performativity, the perfor-
mance of the feminine is dealt with in Sufi poetry with a contrasting disin-
terestedness that has its origins in mystic epistemes specific to the
historico-cultural environments of the Indian subcontinent. The mystic aes-
thetic proposes in its free-play with sexualities an indifference towards the
significance of gender in the life of the apprentice. Whether in the disciple’s
abject positioning before the male saint, the male saint’s posturing as bride-
of-god, or the twisting grammatical whorls of rekhta and rekhti26 ghazal
poetry, gender enactment is grounded in symbolic structures of disguise and
transience, and gender inversions are a matter of adornment or sringara.
The utility of gender-as-adornment seems to be more closely tied to its func-
tion as a mode of experiencing ishq beyond corporeality, than as a form of
social structuration. For the Sufi mystic kneeling before the divine, it is
almost as if gender does not matter or rather matters only in its performa-
tive role in enabling the experience of mystic love. Quite like the attire the
saint is clothed in and the mortal body that awaits obliteration in fana,
gender becomes a theatrical costume to be worn and eventually discarded.
The espousal of embodiment as a medium for experiencing desire and the
long-awaited renunciation of the body through ultimate union, or visaal,
result in a central paradox in Sufi thought. In this paradox, human life
marks a period of postponement and longing and the body becomes the
temporal locus of separation (viraha) and desire (ishq) until the mystic
achieves visaal beyond the realm of linear time. Towards the end of the spiri-
tual journey, the ‘pause’ of life, all the physical attributes of embodiment,
including gender, caste, class and religion, are cast aside in numinous bliss.
Undoubtedly, as we have seen, in the gendered performances of Sufi
poetry, the feminine remains problematically entangled with essentialist

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traits such as surrender, frailty and impotence. But the ephemeral staging of
feminine and masculine, whether in the mystic’s literal cross-dressing or in
rhetorical flourishes of gender play, effects a loosening of femininity from
the female body. If men can perform the feminine-as-abjection, one may
well ask whether women are not already ‘performing’ it (as suggested by the
persona of both ‘Meera’ and Waris Shah’s ‘Heer’). The political potential of
Sufi poetry may lie not only in its iconoclasm but in the methodological
tools it employs (that is, its inattention to and dismissal of gender, caste and
class identities). Paradoxical as it may appear, such a discounting of social
constructions of identity may facilitate resonances between South Asian
aesthetics, feminist and post-feminist perspectives.

Mystic aesthetics and the politics of reception

So far, we have looked at the emancipatory potential of mystic oeuvre in
South Asia from the perspective of the mystic-as-artist. A comprehensive
understanding of the political ramifications of Bhakti and Sufi aesthetic
production, however, would remain incomplete without a consideration of
the latter’s reception and social impact. In this effort, it may be helpful to
consider Andrew Benjamin’s analogy between art and the refugee (2003). In
his discussion of the relationship between art and its assimilation, Benjamin
finds that the inclusion of both art and the outsider ‘may have a transforma-
tive effect on the site that absorbs them’ (2003: 211). From Benjamin’s
perspective, art, like the refugee, may be conceived as a threat, but a nego-
tiation with the difference embodied in individual works of art can locate
them as ‘sites of contestation and therefore as sites of potential transforma-
tion’ (2003: 212).
Such contemporary perspectives on reception theory offer surprising res-
onances with conceptual frameworks of rasa epistemology that were woven
into subsequent mystic thought in South Asia. As discussed in the previous
chapter, rasa theory evolved to increasingly emphasize the role of the spec-
tator as a meaning-making agent, particularly in the work of early-tenth-
century scholars like Bhatta Nayaka, who emphasized the importance of
the ‘commonization’ of aesthetic experience. The reciprocity between aes-
thetic objects and spectators in rasa theory has been remarked upon by
feminist scholars (see Jessica Frazier 2010), while the potential of rasa the-
ory to function as political ally for re-conceptualizing gendered representa-
tions continues to be explored.27 If the abiding relevance of the classical
aesthetic philosophy of rasa establishes its currency in our times, it equally
points to the prevailing effects of extant Bhakti and Sufi mystic aesthetics
that borrow from rasa’s conceptual vocabulary and endure in the shape of
long-surviving folk traditions across South Asia.
As previously noted, oral performances of Sufi poetry and music empha-
size the importance of establishing sama – a harmonious synchronization of
mood or ‘mahaul’ in which the entire mehfil of performers and audience

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can be at one with each other, an environment that may lead to the mystic
delight of kaifiyat. ‘Reception’ is therefore an integral aspect of Sufi perfor-
mances since the reciprocity between artist and audience determines the
quality of the performance as well as its dispersed spiritual effects: ‘The
qawwali or sufiana-kalam concert is characterized by the intimate commu-
nication between performers and audience… The performers know their
patrons closely and respond to verbal and nonverbal cues from them that
condition the structure of the performance’ (Abbas 2002: 55). In inspired
renderings of poetry, music and dance, it is not only the performer who may
experience transcendence but equally the audience members who ‘perform’
through appreciative gestures, clapping, acclamations of awe and encour-
agement (wahwahi), offering cash gifts (nazrana) or joining the performers
in music and dance.
An additional intricacy in the meaning of ‘audience’ is accrued through
the intertextual reciprocity that contemporary poets exhibit towards their
predecessors, many of them seeing themselves in an ongoing dialogue with
mystic pirs of the past whom they follow or admire. The poetry of Rumi,
Kabeer, Meera, Waris Shah, Bulle Shah and others is very much part of a
living tradition whose oral and literary influence continues to shape con-
temporary culture and sustains a cyclical, non-linear view of time character-
istic of Bhakti and Sufi ontology. As Nosheen Ali observes, ‘“contemporary”
poets conceive of themselves in conversation with the living word of poets,
deceased or alive. A poet goes back and forth, back and forth, not across
vast swathes of time — as we often hear — but within eternal time, in a
manner as freeing and constrained as a child on a swing’ (Ali 2016: 8).
The contemporaneousness of Sufi music can also be attributed to an
active cultural revivalism in recent years by talented and influential classical
artists like Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, the Sabri brothers
and the Wadali brothers, to name only a few. Alongside this more ‘serious’
music, trendy adaptations in rock and pop genres have been popularized
particularly in the Punjab provinces across the northern part of the subcon-
tinent by singers like Rabbi Shergill (see Manuel 2008). This recent phe-
nomenon has helped institutionalize a genre of contemporary Sufi music
whose relationship with ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ Sufi kalam is sometimes called
into question. Kelly Pemberton’s description of established hierarchies
‘between “true”, or sahih, and “marketplace”, or bazaari, Sufism’ (2006:
65) may be particularly relevant in this regard. Contemporary artists with
tenuous ties to Sufism and looking for commercial gains thus may be per-
ceived as exhibiting the ‘ongoing bourgeois appropriation of performing
arts in modern India’ (Manuel 2008: 395). Despite questions of authentic-
ity, it is evident that the vulgarization (and one might even say the democ-
ratization) of Sufi pop continues unabated, as evidence of the continued
germaneness of the Sufi world view within today’s hyper-nationalistic and
sectarian societies. Rabbi Shergill’s chart-topping popular sufiana28 rendi-
tion of ‘Bullah ki Jaana’ in his 2005 album ‘Rabbi’29 is but one instance of

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this wide-ranging influence of a sufiana attitude. Rejuvenated by a culture

of ‘remixing’, Bulle Shah’s songs continue to reverberate in the new desert
landscapes of urban metropolises in South Asia and in diasporic locations
torn by forces of strife and division. The messages of love in his songs con-
jure up a world quickly disappearing behind us.

Conclusion: the paradox of the sacred and the feminine

Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron, in their 2007 publication
entitled The Sacred and the Feminine, a collection of essays that engages
with and reverses the title of Clément and Kristeva’s earlier study
(1998/2001), propose an understanding of the sacred as an ‘imaginary
space, borderline, cleavage, alterity’ (2007: 3). In their introduction, they
remark that ‘the sacred is not synonymous with the divine, even if the ways
in which religions conceptualize the divine render it sacred. Nor is the
feminine synonymous with women or social constructions of gender’
(2007: 2). Their assertions of what the sacred and the feminine are not
resonate with an analysis of these terms in the context of South Asian mys-
tic traditions.
Bhakti and Sufi mystic poets bring us face to face with the sacred, the
feminine, interiority, love and the divine not so much through what these
are but through what they are not. Reminiscent of the ancient Upanishadic
way of recognizing truth by way of negation (neti, neti30 – ‘it is neither this,
nor that’), mystic poetry intersperses the shadowy outlines of feminine/
masculine, interior/exterior and erotic/sacred only to reveal, counter-intui-
tively to deconstructive thought, the futility of looking for meanings in
binary differences. Perhaps, as Nosheen Ali puts it, ‘for the inhabitants
seeped in these traditions — non-binary thinking is a way of being, and the
coexistence of what-to-us-moderns-seems-paradoxical simply a philo-
sophical and playful way of comprehending truth’ (Ali 2016: 8). As we
have seen in this discussion, Bhakti and Sufi poetic imaginaries posit an
errant, impassioned and nomadic ‘feminine’ that escapes beyond norma-
tive semantic delineations and also breaks free of conventional geo-spatial
constraints.
As I hope to have shown, the apparent contradictions between some of
the prominent aspects of South Asian mystic poetry – corporeality and fana,
erotic and spiritual passions, the feminine as desiring agent as well as locus
of abject desire – are undone through the foregrounding of ephemerality
and disguise. By dismantling distinctions between erotic/spiritual, mascu-
line/feminine and mortal/divine, the mystic aesthetic explores the merging
of contradictions at the liminal borders of human transcendental experi-
ence. In this process, gender remains, as we have seen, not an end in itself
but an apparatus. The paradoxical centring of the affective, trans/gendered
body and the concurrent decentring of sexual identity remains intriguing
from a feminist perspective.

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Notes
1 For instance, Patton Burchett observes that ‘we cannot entirely separate the aes-
thetic, emotional, and ethical dimensions of the devotional religious sensibility
that early modern north Indian Sufis and bhaktas seem to have shared—they
were inextricably intertwined’ (Burchett 2019: 152).
2 Nosheen Ali offers a perceptive critique of binaries of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alter-
nate’ modes of viewing religious and literary cultural traditions in the context of
South Asia. Finding such classifications lacking, she argues that ‘the sphere of
poetic knowledge in South Asia has predominantly embodied a resisting and
progressive spirit’ which calls into question ‘the divide between literature and
politics’ (Ali 2016: 16).
3 See description of the doha as poetic form in Shemeem B. Abbas (2002: 110).
4 Sama refers to an ambience in which poets/singers/musicians and their audience
experience a state of complete aesthetic accord and is seen as essential for reach-
ing a stage of maqam for deepening the mystical aspect of the performance for
all participants. According to Abbas (2002: 12), ‘to create the sama also means
to create the context’.
5 See, for instance, Hilde Hein’s 1998 essay ‘Why not feminist aesthetic theory?’,
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 12 (1): 20–34 (see p. 31) and Bilimoria, P.
and Wenta, A. (2015) ‘Emotions in Indian Thought-Systems: An Introduction’.
6 According to Shemeem Abbas (2002), the Meera Bai story was performed in a
concert in the UK by the Sabri Brothers in the form of a qawwali in 1981. Abbas
tells us that the performance was dedicated to the Chisti saint Hazrat Khwaja of
Ajmer with whom Meera has been associated as devotee.
7 See Rashmi D. Bhatnagar, Reena Dube and Renu Dube (2004) for an informa-
tive discussion about co-authorship in the context of the Meera corpus.
8 See Bhatnagar, Rashmi Dube, Reena Dube and Renu Dube (2004: 9–10):

The problem of deprivileging nonnationalist women’s writing is com-

pounded by scholarly debates about the historical accuracy concerning
the details of Meera’s life, speculations that this sixteenth-century poet-
ess of Rajasthan may never have existed, and questions about the
authenticity of her poetry: how much of Meera’s poetry is her own and
how much has been added to by Meera followers? In Meera’s case, we
move away from the Western notion of author as an individual “I” who
carries the power of authorship, personality, creativity, and opinions.
Instead, we choose the more complex idea of Meera as the name of a
social text of patriarchal critique.

9 In a co-authored dialogue with Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clément asserts the

caste-specific nature of trance which, according to her, is more easily associated
with women of lower castes: ‘In the high castes of the Hindu social system, in
fact, the body’s porousness is not part of the code of good manners. Letting
oneself go is out of the question. But, having seen the mass pilgrimages of Indian
peasant women, who also break loose, I suspect that the trance and its porous-
ness probably have something to do with the caste of origin’ … ‘That’s why, in
India, the high castes, bound by the strict manners of Hinduism, are capable of
resisting the trance’ (1998/2001: 7–8).
10 See Kelly Pemberton (2006) for a detailed discussion of the pir–muridi relation-
ship in Sufism.
11 Kafis are a genre of Punjabi and Sindhi Sufi music derived from Arabic qasidahs.
See Kazmi (2019: 17, endnote 9). According to Shemeem Abbas, they are ‘short
verses for expressing mystical thoughts’ (2002: 117).

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12 For a discussion of Sufi literature from the Punjab provinces, see Anne Murphy
(2018).
13 For a gendered analysis of the story of Heer–Ranjha, see Sara Kazmi (2019).
14 Reproduced with permission of Anne Murphy.
15 See especially Kristeva (1991) and Braidotti (1993, 2014).
16 Bulle Shah’s songs have been popularized across India and Pakistan by famous
singers, including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Reshma, Hansraj
Hans, and the Waddali brothers.
17 Reproduced with permission of Anne Murphy.
18 Reproduced with permission of Renuka Narayanan.
19 ‘Shiva, the great god of life and death, is sometimes represented in a strange
form: half woman, half man. Divided from the top of his chignon to his cute
little toes, flat chest on one side, a pretty round breast bulging on the other, the
god of ascetic virility is endowed with a pinup’s left hip. That is because sacred
bisexuality is not something one can move beyond, it is the movement itself’
(Catherine Clément, in Clément and Kristeva, 1998/2001: 31).
20 Clément laments:

The increasingly rich middle class is becoming computerized and is

returning to its Hindu identity. And it takes its pick of deities. Shiva, the
great bisexual of the old pantheon, is being set aside in favor of cute gods
shaped like big babies or like apes, faithful servants of their masters.
Wealth, air conditioners, televisions, computers, obedience, and kids.
The sacred is losing ground in favor of family life. All of a sudden, the
move into bisexuality is becoming rarer.
(Clément and Kristeva 1998/2001: 50)

21 https://www.halalmonk.com/abida-parveen-sufi-qalam
22 Cited with the permission of Shemeem Burney Abbas.
23 Cited with the permission of Shemeem Burney Abbas.
24 For an excellent discussion of the evolution of ishq in Sufism, see Joseph E. B.
Lumbard’s (2007) essay ‘From Hubb to Ishq: The development of love in early
Sufism’.
25 See, for instance, Butler (1988) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An
Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40 (4): 519–
531; Butler (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge.
26 In rekhta verse, the beloved may be male or female but is always represented by
the masculine gender. In rekhti verse, the narratorial voice is female; the male poet
also employs a feminine narratorial voice and position to address the male/female
beloved. See also Scott Kugle’s distinction between rekhti and rekhta verse, (2016:
211) and Abbas (2002: 118–119). For a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 5.
27 See previous chapter.
28 In Sufi style.
29 Rabbi Shergill’s debut album released in (2004), Phat Phish Records.
30 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6.

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Practices of Pakistan and India. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
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2020. https://www.halalmonk.com/abida-parveen-sufi-qalam.

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Al Azmeh, Zeina. (2014). ‘Nomadic Feminism: Four Lines of Flight’, European

Scientific Journal, 2, (Special edition June): 98–107.
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Lyric in Postcolonial India: The Rhetorics of Women’s Writing in Dialect as a
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1–46.
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 5
‘SPEAKING WITH WOMEN’
The promise of the pre-modern Urdu ghazal

‘ghazal’:
Etymology: ‘to speak with women’;
And: ‘talking to a woman about love’
(Mukhia 1999: 864, emphasis added)

The term ‘ghazal’, it appears fortuitously, finds its etymological moorings in

connotations of flirting or conversing with women about love. We may well
wonder, then, about the positions occupied by women and by the gendered
categories of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in the ghazal universe,
located as they may be as an object of fantasy or as the speaking voice of
the lover. With the archetypal male lover’s ready embrace of melancholy,
surrender and defeat as permanent conditions, and the relative ‘power’ of
the unattainable beloved, the genre of the ghazal draws our attention to its
gendered persona imagined through the trope of unrequited love. Since the
ghazal inherits from its Persian Sufi tradition a non-conformist legacy that
bristles against socio-religious constraints, its gendered analysis occasions a
contextualization within the genre’s literary history and defining aesthetic
axioms. In this discussion, I locate the non-conformist undercurrent of the
ghazal at the heart of its aesthetic, discernible in its impulse towards dissent
and iconoclasm and its reconceptualization of gender through a stylized
obliqueness. In this process, I attempt to decode the links between the
ghazal as a poetic genre and its gendered dynamics to construe what these
might suggest for potential reconfigurations.
In the previous chapter, we got a glimpse of the numinous body in its
particular rapports with the sacred and the feminine as manifested in medi-
eval mystic aesthetics. Within the Sufi tradition, as we have seen, poetry,
music and aesthetic ambience have been central to the pursuit of transcen-
dental oneness (for instance, the deployment of qawwali and of sama to
achieve kaifiyat)1 and to the concurrent unravelling of a cultivated indiffer-
ence towards gender as a socially constructed identity. Running alongside
these otherworldly inclinations, deep-seated socio-cultural power hierar-
chies are revealed in the strictly regulated pir–muridi tradition of medieval
Sufism. Status differentials between disciples and guides/masters are equally

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-6 121

 ‘SPEAKING WITH WOMEN’

discernible in coterminous Bhakti devotional practices that draw upon the

hierarchical bearings of the guru–shishya (teacher–student) customary tra-
dition with a long history rooted in Vedic culture. In the late medieval liter-
ary conventions of the northern provinces of South Asia, these composite
cultural practices emerged in the form of the ustadi custom according to
which a teacher took on one or more disciples and consented to train them
in the poetic arts. Frances Pritchett points to the occasional blurring of the
South Asian literary tradition of ustadi with the pir–muridi relationship
conceived in the realm of religious pursuit (1994: 57). Strictly coded rules
of humility and dedication governed the conduct of shagirds or disciples
towards their ustads (teachers/guides), particularly visible in the practice of
the fine art of composing ghazals, a poetic genre originating in Persian lit-
erature. Ustads rewarded their disciples through islah – a practice of literary
correction traditionally performed by master poets on request of their fol-
lowers. Although apprentice poets desirous of perfecting their literary skills
were expected to surrender almost completely to their teacher’s wisdom,
this attitude of acquiescence was invoked – as in the pir–muridi tradition –
in its positive connotations of spiritual renunciation. This affirmative view
of absolute devotion is transposed onto the ghazal where it is reflected in
the attitude of the male lover (aashiq) towards the (female/male) beloved
(ma’shuq) (see also Narang 1989; Malamud 1996).
The genre of the ghazal blossomed in Urdu in the South Asian literary
landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and retained a deep
connection with mystic pursuits because of its Persianate genealogy. Peter
Manuel traces the Urdu ghazal’s roots to its preceding Persian avatar in the
thirteenth century and its geneses further back in seventh-century Arabic
literature (Manuel 1988/89: 94). The Sufi mirroring of divine love through
human relationships provided a double thematic scaffolding for the Urdu
ghazal which, while continuing to turn on the pursuit of supreme love as a
driving impetus for creativity, evolved to provide a much fuller elaboration
of the human aspect of desire through the devoted bearing of the aashiq
towards the ma’shuq.
Of course, a meaningful engagement with the unique gendered dynamics
of the lover–beloved relationship in the ghazal is inextricable from an
understanding of the ghazal as a poetic genre and its various literary grati-
fications. I credit my own enduring pleasures in the ghazal’s aesthetic
charms to early childhood memories of leisurely evenings of sh‘ir-o-shayerie
when I bore witness, despite little knowledge of the genre, to adults per-
forming their favourite parts of ghazals through recitation or accompanied
by music with inspiring interludes provided by musical recordings of some
of the most well-known ghazal singers of the time, including Begum Akhtar,
Ghulam Ali, Talat Mehmood and Mehdi Hassan. Much later, a very illumi-
nating course on Urdu literature taught by Aditya Behl at UC Berkeley
before his unfortunate passing helped me consolidate these pleasures on a
more scholarly terrain. At the risk of overly rehearsing the ghazal’s distinctive

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features, I offer a bird’s-eye view of a few that are critical to this discussion
with the caveat that readers interested in the ghazal’s prosodic aspects may
find the work of some eminent scholars2 in the field much more useful for
this purpose.

Form and meaning-making in the ghazal

The ghazal’s structure comprises a number of sh‘irs (sometimes referred to
as ‘couplets’3) consisting of a pair of lines (mishras) in a rhyme scheme of
aa, ba, ca, da and so on. Its principal prosodic features include the use of
rhyming tools: the radif and qafiyah; radif refers to repeated word/s or syl-
lables at the end of each rhyming line; the indispensable4 qafiyah precedes
the radif and its final syllables rhyme with all other qafiyahs that occur in
the ghazal (see Faruqi and Pritchett 1984). The opening sh‘ir of a ghazal
with two rhyming lines (aa) is its matla, and the final one its maqta, which
may also contain the nom de plume or takhallus of the poet. Quantitative
meters or bahr are used in ghazals to establish its melodic rhythms. These
are seen as essential to the melodiousness of the ghazal form and make it
particularly amenable to musical rendering. Stock images such as those of
the rose (gul), the nightingale (bulbul), the cypress tree (sarv) and the idyllic
perfumed garden (chaman/gulistan) deriving from a Persian heritage make
up the verdant landscape of the ghazal universe. In this sh‘ir from Hatim’s
ghazal, the qafiyah is provided by the syllable ‘āna’ while the word ‘hai’ acts
as the radif. The garden imagery invokes the enigma of the beloved whose
shadowy silhouette is intimated by the rose, the candle/flame and the cypress
in a chain of embedded metaphors (‘isti‘arah):

gul kī aur bulbul kī sohbat ko chaman kā shāna hai

sarv hai juuñ sham.a tis par fāḳhta parvāna hai
Hatim, Shaikh Zahuruddin (1699–1783, Delhi)

In the garden’s nook nestles the love of rose and nightingale

The dove orbits the flaming cypress as though a fevered moth5

The ghazal’s architecture juxtaposes contrasting forces energized through a

point–counterpoint scheme. The first mishra of a sh‘ir makes a claim or
proposition (dava) and the second responds to it through a counter (javab-
e-dava), an illustration (tamsil) or a supporting argument (dalil) (see
Pritchett 88–89). In this balancing act, the tension between correspondences
and polarities induces rhetorical delight and becomes a particular achieve-
ment of the ghazal, what has been termed by Shadab Hashmi as a cosmo-
politanism that lies at the root of its form (Hashmi 2017). For instance, in
this shi‘r by Mirza Mazhar, the two mishras turn on the tension between
‘waking’ and ‘dreaming’ even while these antithetical terms together evoke
the youthful splendour of the (female/male) beloved. The latter is

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incarnated in the blooming buds whose beauty is stirred by awakening

youth while their dreams are disturbed by the spring breeze:

nargis o gul kī khilī jaatī haiñ kaliyāñ dekho sab

phir bhī unhī ḳhvābīda fitnoñ ko jagātī hai bahār6

Look how the narcissus and rose buds blossom and stretch
And still the spring breeze stirs those dreaming scamps

Alongside this pattern of semantic polarities runs the particular euphony of

sounds made possible by the long vowels, izafahs (connecting particles)
and rhythmic bahr of Persianate Urdu that lends to each sh‘ir an aspect of
smooth agility or ravani, translated by Pritchett as a sh‘ir’s ‘flowingness’ –
‘a kind of euphonious, harmonious sound that makes people want to recite
the verse aloud and savor it’ (1994: 87). Shamsur Faruqi suggests that the
term ‘ravani’ can denote multiple aspects: ‘flowing, felicitous, smooth in
reading aloud, easy to remember’ (Faruqi 1999: 13). Ravani bathes the
ghazal in a sonorous undulation making it particularly amenable to musi-
cal renditions. Set to music, its supple rhythms take the form of tarannum
(see Manuel 1988/89: 95). In regard to its musicality, Regula Qureshi
observes that the ghazal was a ‘favoured genre’ for musical performance by
women musicians (2001: 99) and even led one of its most famous propo-
nents in the twentieth century, Begum Akhtar, to declare it ‘as a part of
classical music’ (Qureshi 2001: 120).
The various prosodic obligations of the ghazal are rigorously enforced
through islah. The tight embrace of structural parallelism, contiguous meta-
phors, and paradoxical surprises can lend to a ghazal the quality of internal
tautness or rabt even as its undulating rhythms enhance its ravani (see
Pritchett 1994: 84, 87). Poets adept at intertwining rabt and ravani are able
to create a mood of kaifiyat during performances, one that mounts at times
to a heightened level of passion perceived as the shorish of the ghazal (see
Pritchett 1994: 116).
Meaning in the ghazal is built along two important axes: mazmun afirini
or a process of theme/metaphor making and ma‘ni afirini or a process of
meaning-making. Mazmuns refer to a bouquet of themes – a majority focus-
ing on variations on the experience of unrequited love – from which the
poet may pick any one for elaboration in a particular sh‘ir or ghazal.
Mazmun afirini involves a conflation of the ma’shuq with various symbolic
elements so that the beloved’s ‘reality’ is lifted onto a sacred, magical realm.
As a consequence of this process, ‘ishq-i mijazi or love in the material world
coalesces with divine love or ‘ishq-i haqiqi, which literally stands for ‘real
love’ (or ‘true love’) and emphasizes the ‘reality’ of the sacred over the illu-
sion of the profane. Apart from the bounds of the idyllic garden
(chaman/gulistan), mazmuns may be derived from other familiar environ-
ments such as the tavern or maikhana. Illumined by the flickering flames of

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candles (shama), the tavern provides a fitting locale for the bereft lover,
overcome by deewangi, who staggers about like the lovelorn moth (par-
vana) and hangs on the generosity of the saqi (often a beautiful young man
or woman who may function as both wine-bearer and beloved) to replenish
his cup of ‘poison’. Metaphors or mazmuns thus constitute the varied
colourful threads available to poets for weaving the ghazal’s lyrical designs
in their signature styles.
Meaning-making, or ma‘ni afirini, is a much more complex affair since
the excellence of a sh‘ir is often evaluated by its lexical and phonetic art-
istry, polyvalence and its generation of semantic ambiguities. Poets rely on
their imaginative prowess to multiply the associative values of metaphors
through a virtuoso play on words and situations, which Pritchett terms a
‘game of words’ (1994: 75). In this rhetorical game, words-as-signs acquire
multiple connotations and each sh‘ir can evoke diverse interpretations. The
processes of metaphor-making and (ambiguous) meaning-making operate
together to construct a lush aesthetic garden within whose leafy bounds lov-
ers leisurely amble, pausing to admire the delicacy of its blossoms, the fra-
grance of its cypress trees, the cool sensation of soft breezes, and the
melodious call of its songbirds. A defining measure of the excellence of a
ghazal thus becomes its multivalence and its indirectness; interpretive singu-
larity is deliberately eschewed and multiple concurrent readings are evoked.
The audience may identify with preferred interpretations even while luxuri-
ating in the pleasure of witnessing several layers of meaning gradually unfurl
in the manner of the falling petals of a rosebud. The delights of the meta-
phorical garden are summoned by the opulent lyricism of the ghazal that
accentuates the sensuous beauty of language through melody, creativity and
play. However, these sensual pleasures offer a sharp contrast to the pain
born of unreciprocated love that is the lover’s perpetual destiny. This may at
least partially explain why, despite the overwhelming focus of ghazal poetry
on the mazmun of the bereft lover’s pain or gham, what Sara Suleri calls an
‘erotics of asceticism’ (2008: 113), the audience finds its performative expe-
rience so delightful. Ghazal poetry thus elicits concurrent responses of won-
derment and commiseration, or as Pritchett succinctly puts it, ‘an exclamatory
Vah!’ alongside ‘an Ah, a sigh’ (1994: 122).
According to Faruqi, the separation between theme/metaphor (mazmun)
and meaning (ma‘ni) in the literary tradition of the ghazal resulted in ‘the
dual nature of meaning’ (Faruqi 1999: 6) and created an important distinc-
tion between what the poem was about and what it meant. This splitting of
meaning had significant consequences for the beloved whose identity or
‘meaning’ was not fixed in any gender and brought about a change in the
‘ontological status of the lover and the beloved’, neither of whom needed to
coincide with the poet or with any real individual (Faruqi 1999: 6). This
semantic duality is replicated in the mirroring of profane and divine love so
that the individual beloved transcends the real world to function as an epit-
ome of the sacred. As Safdar Ahmed points out, this distinction between

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mazmun and ma‘ni allowed a nuancing of love within the liminal space
afforded between ‘ishq-i mijazi and ‘ishq-i haqiqi, thereby opening up the
possibility of ‘variant and overlapping readings’ (440). Because it is never
certain whether the love being spoken about is directed to a real person or
an abstract ideal, the ghazal’s meanings continue to scatter and escape
beyond its discursive boundaries.
We have to remember, of course, that the ghazal was and has remained a
primarily performative art and is often recited or sung at mushairas. During
performances, the break between the two lines of a sh‘ir, its haltingness,
makes room for a moment of suspense that enhances the appreciation of
unfolding meanings and rhythmic patterns established through prosodic
features such as bahr, radif and qafiyah. It is thus commonplace to repeat
the first mishra a couple of times before launching into the second.
Correspondingly, breaks between the various sh‘irs of a ghazal create tem-
poral intervals that enhance this performative suspense. As observed by
Islam and Russell, these interludes can be manipulated in enunciation but
are impossible to replicate on the printed page (1991: 273).
Since sh‘irs can function autonomously, each one has its own culminating
second mishra, resulting in the dispersal of the climactic pleasures of the
ghazal along multiple axes of sound and meaning. It also enables the ghazal
to be performed or read in pieces, with different effects, endowing it with a
non-teleological structure of dispersed culminations and multiple co-exist-
ing readings resonant of the attributes of ‘feminine writing’ proposed
through French feminism’s interventions in the late twentieth century, as in
the work of Hélène Cixous, for example.7 Performative interludes are
intended to stir reactions, defer meaning and extend pleasure through a lin-
gering on sounds and double meanings, and the ghazal revels in these poetic
effects by holding back and manipulating its measured breaks. A tangible
example of the ghazal’s confluence of halting and flowing patterns may be
heard in the melodic interludes of ghazals sung by Begum Akhtar in her rich
gravelly voice. By improvising with the ghazal’s breaks and flows through a
‘slow rhythmic pace’ and ‘extended durations of salient notes, of phrases,
and even of entire pieces’, Begum Akhtar managed to capture the ravani of
the ghazal in all its kaleidoscopic manifestations8 (Qureshi 2001: 121).
A ghazal’s excellence thus is tied at once to how it means and how it
sounds. If there is a ‘ghazalness’ or taghazzul that ultimately defines a ghazal,
it is the coming together of a number of these features. Faruqi and Pritchett
identify the ‘fundamental, least-common-denominator definition of taghaz-
zul’ as a combination of the ‘harmony of sound and indirectness of expres-
sion’ (Faruqi and Pritchett 1984: 125). By balancing on the fulcrum of these
seesawing forces, the ghazal maintains a carefully calibrated equilibrium
between overlapping grids of meaning and sound – an aesthetic, so to speak,
of counterpoise and fluid elegance that knits together delicate two-line sh‘irs
to generate moving waves of beauty and pleasure. In an expanded reading
of the ghazal’s ravani, I propose that it equally becomes possible to picture

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this agility bathing the ghazal’s conceptual contours through the gentle
motion that carries the listener from rhythmic sound to sound and from one
set of meanings to another. I use these dual guiding posts of supple sounds
and sinuous meanings comprised by the taghazzul of the ghazal to explore
how the ghazal’s aesthetic of counterpoise intersects with its gendered un-
decidability within the larger context of a legacy of dissent.

A legacy of dissent
As discussed in the previous chapter, Sufi thought proposed a dissenting
view on institutionalized religion by underscoring the oneness of the human
and the divine and casting as dubious the mediating powers of a hegemonic
clergy. The notion of ‘oneness of being’ or Wahdat-ul-wujood9 brought into
question the concentration of power in the hands of the orthodoxy and
prompted a protest against religion, caste and class divisions. These dissent-
ing impulses, first reflected in Persian poetry, continued to manifest them-
selves in the Urdu ghazal that arrived at the culmination of a long cultural
history during which the literary representation of Islamic mystic thought
had evolved. In this context, Gopichand Narang (1989) traces Mansur al
Hallaj’s travels in the tenth century to map the spread of Islamic mysticism
from Arabia to India, where it found a hospitable environment given the
parallel emergence of the Bhakti movement, with which it converged on
various ideological fronts. In the Indian subcontinent, the syncretism of the
composite ideals of Islamic and Hindu mysticism achieved a literary apo-
theosis in ghazal compositions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The poetry of Mir and Ghalib, among other luminaries, has been variously
cited for an exemplification of this ethos of syncretism as well as of irrever-
ence (see Narang 1989; Narang and Zaidi 2005; Hashmi 2017). Mir’s
verses, revivified in music by Begum Akhtar in the twentieth century, retain
their power to startle even in contemporary times:

‘mīr’ ke dīn-o-maz.hab ko ab pūchhte kyā ho un ne to

qashqa khīñchā dair meñ baiThā kab kā tark islām kiyā10

‘Why probe Mir for his faith and creed, his temple
Ash marked, Islam forsaken, he’s parked in his temple’

Urdu poets sustained an intimate connection with the Sufi legacy of dissent
through literary devices such as lampooning and parody to expose the
hypocrisy of self-proclaimed religious authorities. Concurrently, through
transposed modes of love-as-surrender and love-as-failure founded on mys-
tic epistemology, the ghazal poet remonstrates against common materialist
notions of love-as-possession and love-as-consummation. Gopichand
Narang (1989) and Harbans Mukhia (1999) have substantively addressed
this literary lineage. Both foreground how recurring concepts of surrender

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and failure, conventionally viewed in an adverse light, undergo an inversion

when associated with the lover in the ghazal. Narang demonstrates how
‘complete surrender’ accrued a ‘positive connotation’ (1989: 168) since it
indicated a willing submission to a unifying higher being. Mukhia (1999)
examines the deployment of the ‘predominant idiom’ (863) of failure as a
‘form of resistance’ (874) to argue that the ghazal privileges protest against
all forms of bigotry. According to Mukhia, ‘it is dissent, above all, that the
ghazal- poets upheld and celebrated’ (876) and that permeates all of the
ghazal’s central categories (1999: 864). Not all critics agree with such ‘politi-
cal’ readings of the ghazal. Safdar Ahmed holds that language games were
the principal concern of ghazal poets and that they were ‘less concerned with
depicting (or critiquing) contemporaneous social realities than with the vir-
tuosic manipulation of language itself’ (2012: 442). Faruqi, too, insists that
poetry ‘was not expected to reflect social reality … but deal with mazmuns’
(1999: 21). These variant perspectives, as I hope to illustrate, do not prevent
us from looking beyond what the ghazal did or did not intend to do, to what
the ghazal’s particular aesthetic can promise for feminist theorizing.
Although religious irreverence and a stand against dogma are major recur-
ring tropes, other seeds of dissent are found widely scattered across the liter-
ary landscape of Urdu ghazal poetry. For instance, a disregard for normative
(male) sexuality, drinking wine and openly declaring desire for an unattain-
able love object such as another man’s wife were practices that may have been
tolerated beyond the universe of the ghazal, but definitely neither sanctioned
nor approved by the self-proclaimed keepers of social morality. Narang and
Zaidi observe that ‘sacred as well as profane desires for love, wine and
ecstasy’… ‘are part of the basic metaphorical repertoire of the Ghazal’ (2005:
173). These themes and their corollary imagery continued to form an integral
part of the ghazal backdrop through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
until, under colonial influence, they became associated with a decadent cul-
tural past as elaborated by Frances Pritchett (1994) and others.
How then do we reconcile ‘political’ and ‘literary’ understandings of the
ghazal? One possibility is to view the ghazal as operating in the interstices
of these terms and carrying out a dismantling of their distinctions. In this
context, it would be worthwhile to remember that, despite their overt radi-
cal bent, non-conformist themes represented, as in foregoing Sufi poetry, an
epistemological confrontation with hegemonic forces as a means of spiri-
tual growth rather than an activist call to arms and, for this reason, were
most likely not perceived as serious social threats. Because the ghazal allows
a cloaking of dissent in heavily textured poetic devices such as polyvalence,
image, symbol and metaphor, the poetic universe remains relatively removed
from any direct consequences of insurgence. Particularly when it comes to
reconceptualised gender norms, the ghazal has remained largely secured
from adverse reactionary critique by its high literariness. Radical implica-
tions of certain mazmuns thus can be attributed to the innovative lyrical
prowess of poets or to the double meanings invoked by mystic leanings

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rather than to an enhanced social awareness or activist impulses, what

today we may view as a measure of the poet’s political consciousness.
Admittedly, by insisting on its own artifice and exaggerated stylization, the
ghazal tradition tends to reinforce the notion that it is the product of a liter-
ary imagination with little connection to social reality. But such a one-
dimensional understanding of the genre is belied by the plethora of ghazals
by various poets, including Sauda, Mir and Ghalib11, that resist such exclu-
sivist readings and make dubious an absolute elimination of the ‘political’
from their ambit. Moreover, the long-term effects of interrogative and
adversarial sentiments expressed through literary discourse cannot be sum-
marily discounted given the latter’s central role in shaping the cultural
imagination of the northern provinces in South Asia.12 It is, in fact, by min-
ing its rich aesthetic of evocation, ambiguity and indeterminacy that ghazal
poetry was able to carry forth the radical tradition of Sufi protest. This has,
I suggest, significant implications for a gendered reading and writing of the
ghazal’s past as well as its future since it spotlights the inextricability of art
and politics in the genre. Although it may be true that the ‘political’ remains
discursively mapped within an entirely fictional universe, the ghazal’s pro-
clivity for non-conformity casts doubt on restrictive understandings of
either the ‘political’ or the ‘literary’ and makes its protest-oriented mimesis
worthy of attention in contemporary contexts.

A covenant of indeterminacy and a grammar of (homo)

eroticism
Given the Sufi impulses of the ghazal and the practice of amradparasti (love
of boys) associated with the Persian court, the discourse of homoeroticism
came to converge with that of mystic union through the highest forms of
ishq. Amradparasti, of course, has pederastic connotations outside the poetic
universe, and as Pritchett observes, pederasty along with other illicit vices
such as adultery, prostitution, drunkenness and gambling may have been
prevalent in the ‘old culture’ but these were ‘officially viewed as reprehensi-
ble’ (1994: 175). Pritchett adds that ‘certainly classical poetry did not legiti-
mize the physical expression of pederastic desires, any more than it legitimized
actual adulterous affairs with respectable ladies, or actual public drunken-
ness, or actual apostasy from Islam. But people of the old culture felt able to
invoke attraction to beautiful boys as a powerful, multivalent poetic image,
just as they invoked illicit heterosexual love, intoxication, apostasy, and
other images of forbidden behaviour’ (1994: 175). Following from this
‘poetic’ function, amradparasti appears in the form of a literary convention
in the ghazal as a part of its taghazzul (see also Pritchett 1994: 177).
Amradparasti can be traced back to Sufi mysticism within which the
practice of witnessing divine glory through the human form took the form
of nazar or the contemplation of the beauty of a male youth (amrad).
Margaret Malamud observes that ‘love lyrics in which a male lover

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seemingly addresses another male (the ghazal) were sung at certain Sufi
gatherings (the sama’) and some Sufis would experience ecstasy listening to
them’ (1996: 98). Scott Kugle similarly discusses the prevalence of homo-
erotic bonding in sama’ in terms of the therapeutic effects of poetry and
music (2016: 90) achieved through a sublimation of ‘homoerotic devo-
tional practice’ (2016: 88). The coalescing of these spiritual and cultural
practices thus made this kind of ‘double love’ a central mazmun in ghazal
poetry, and the ecstatic union of lovers acted as a metaphor for ultimate
absorption or fana. That the ghazal poet was almost always male, and that
the lover’s speaking voice as well as the figure of the beloved are also gen-
dered as masculine, resulted in embedding male homoerotic love as a path-
way to numinous union. This was aided, of course, by the grammatical
structures of the languages in which the ghazal was written – first Farsi and
then rekhta or Urdu.
In the Persian ghazal, a sustained veiling of the beloved’s identity (often
the object of male homoerotic desire) was made possible by the un-gen-
dered grammatical structure of Farsi that enabled a seamless merging
between the figure of the beloved and the face of the divine. The fact that ‘in
the overwhelming majority of verses, no clue at all is given about the gender
of the beloved’ (Pritchett 1994: 178) helped rationalize the prevalence of
multiple forms of desire, including homoerotic love, in ghazal poetry.
Furthermore, Pritchett’s observation that the ‘Perso-Arabic tradition of lit-
erary theory, which has so much to say about language and rhetoric in the
ghazal, has virtually no interest in the question of the beloved’s gender’
(1994: 178) bolsters the assessment regarding a cultivated disinterestedness
towards gendered identities. Consequently, as she points out, ‘if the beloved
indeed had a well-established gender’, ‘no one has been able to prove it’
(Pritchett 1994: 178).
Urdu combined the Persianate vocabulary of Farsi with the grammatical
structures of Hindi and flourished as a language for literary expression
from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (see Narang 1989: 157). Owing
to its ‘mixed’ heritage, it came to be known as rekhta (literally, scattered
language). Narang traces the advent of rekhta to Arab–Persian influences
around the tenth century (1989: 156). Amir Khusrau is known to have
composed poetry in Persian as well as rekhta in the fourteenth century, at a
time when rekhta or Hindavi was establishing itself as zabaan-e-dilli or the
lingua franca of the Mughal court in Delhi (Narang 1989: 157). According
to Faruqi, the terms rekhta/Hindi were used until well into the eighteenth
century whereas ‘the term Urdu as a language name came into use much
later’ (1999: 4). Faruqi credits the literary status of the Urdu ghazal to the
poet Vali Deccani, who arrived in Delhi in 1700 and began composing
ghazals in rekhta (1999: 4).
Maturing in South Asia in the eighteenth century, the Urdu ghazal contin-
ued to employ Persian imagery and metaphors while elaborating on themes of
love in a changed cultural scenario. As the ghazal re-located from its Persian

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linguistic environment to that of the gendered terrain of Urdu in South Asia,

an intriguing shift occurred in terms of gendered subjectivities that could no
longer be invisibilized. Scott Kugle summarizes the shift as follows:

‘Although rekhta adopted its poetic genres and imagery from

Persian poetry, its Indic grammar base was structured with a
dichotomy between male and female gender (to describe things as
well as persons). Persian has no such dichotomy. Those who wrote
ghazals in Urdu were forced to depict gendered roles for the lover
and beloved in ways that poets in Persian did not’ and as a result,
‘Urdu poetry itself became a gendered genre’.
(Kugle 2016: 211)

Notwithstanding this re-gendering, the adherence to the principle of gen-

dered ambiguity appears to have been so integral to the genre that the Urdu
ghazal makes every attempt to retain un-decidability as a predominant fea-
ture in continuity with its preceding Persian avatar. The gender-biased con-
structions of Urdu and Braj, like many other languages, employ the
masculine as a universal category. As a result, in the Urdu ghazal, the speak-
ing voice becomes distinctly that of the male lover and the beloved is also
marked as grammatically masculine. However, s/he could stand in for a
female love object, a young man or an abstract divine beloved. Through a
series of linked metaphors, the beloved comes to be perceived as an abstract
idea floating about variously gendered human/divine love objects while
continuing to occupy a masculine location in Urdu syntax. The overlapping
of the masculine with the universal as it appears in the form of a ‘deliberate
universality’ (Russell 1969: 123) made it impossible to discern gendered
identities and worked opportunely for an abiding masked representation of
male homoerotic love since no distinction was made between the male/
female, hetero/homoerotic beloved.
Furthermore, the semantic indirectness of the ghazal, identified as an
elemental aspect of its taghazzul, fortified its cherished gender ambiguity.
Carla Petievich has demonstrated how layers of grammatical and interpre-
tive indirection are enabled in the Urdu ghazal by a manipulation of its
linguistic features (2001a: 228). Despite the gendered grammar of Urdu, a
concerted effort to retain indeterminacy is palpable in the deployment of
evasive subject positions afforded by oblique syntactic structures that result
in a much-valued copiousness of elusive speaking voices. Verbal clauses that
can meaningfully exist without corollary subjects, such as ‘kehte hain’ (‘it is
said’) and indistinct pronouns such as ‘un’ and ‘voh’, often stand in for
either a female or a male beloved to underscore this uncertainty, as in this
oft-quoted sh‘ir by Ghalib:

un ke dekhe se jo aa jaatī hai muñh par raunaq

vo samajhte haiñ ki bīmār kā haal achchhā hai13

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This visage aglow on their14 arrival

A mirage alas of my revival

Faruqi attributes the convention of gendered indeterminacy to Vali

Deccani, who emphasized the importance of the lover and beloved as
notions and thus liberated the beloved from the constraints of any real gen-
der identity (Faruqi 1999: 7). For instance, in Vali Deccani’s ghazal describ-
ing the celestial glory of the beloved, the poet ambles leisurely from one
genderless metaphor to another as he dwells on the beloved’s beauty:

adā o naaz suuñ aatā hai vo raushan-jabīñ ghar suuñ

ki jyuuñ mashriq suuñ nikle āftāb āhista arista15

My bright faced love appears at the threshold in elegant grace

So the haloed sun brightens the horizon, in leisurely pace

The literary representation of homoerotic love posed less of a problem in

early Mughal society than after the advent of British colonialism, during
which time it appears to have turned into a matter of increasing concern.
Prior to the imposition of Victorian moral codes, as Faruqi (1999) con-
tends, the (masculine) gender of the beloved had not much bothered the
ghazal audience given the privileging of the idea of an abstract beloved.
According to Faruqi, the obsession with the gender of the lover and beloved
owes its origins to a need for establishing the absence of homosexual rela-
tions, whereas earlier the gender of the lovers did not matter since it was
seen as part of a fluid discourse on love. Faruqi even goes so far as to claim
that the beloved’s gender is an ‘embarrassment’ that ‘most bothers western
readers’ (1999: 16). On the other hand, in the ghazal, ‘the beloved’s anthro-
pomorphic character was often left vague, especially by poets inclined
toward Sufism. … Once the beloved was no longer anchored in any given
entity, it became possible to play with all kinds of possibilities. Man,
woman, boy, God himself, all, or none of them but a general sense of
“belovedness” became possible. The “you” of the ghazal assumed a life of
its own’ (1999: 17). Faruqi, while acknowledging that ‘some of the poems
are clearly homoerotic or even pederastic’, observes that this sense of
‘belovedness’ supersedes any real gendered and corporeal identity (1999:
17). Others have proposed analogous arguments. Scott Kugle points to a
leniency towards male homosocial and homosexual bonds in early Mughal
society (Kugle 2016: 76) as long as these did not ‘threaten the patriarchal
social order’ (2016: 77). Kugle argues that, under these circumstances,
questions of ‘decorum’ and ‘status maintenance’ assumed far greater impor-
tance and that ‘life orientation’ mattered more than ‘sexual orientation’
(2016, 82). There was thus an emphasis on a path of spiritual growth
whereas sexual acts were viewed as hindrances to the former because they
encouraged attitudes such as possessiveness and selfishness (see Kugle

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2016: 86). Clearly, then, sexuality was perceived as a fluid force with
abstract manifestations, and sublimated homoerotic desire was just one of
its many strands. This, of course, problematizes the use of the term ‘homo-
sexuality’ for describing same-sex adoration in Urdu poetry; however,
Kugle defends its usage on the basis of its standardization in the aftermath
of a Foucauldian revisioning of the modern, Western categorization of
homosexuality (Kugle 2016: 74–76).
In colonial India, categories of sexuality began to crystallize during the
wave of reforms that overwhelmed Urdu poetry in the nineteenth century.
The realization, among Urdu poets and litterateurs, that the ghazal’s elliptic
narrations of homosexual desire ran counter to Victorian moral codes led
to an unease with the ghazal’s mazmuns and to the need to reform the genre
which was seen as too closely linked to a foregoing profligate culture. In her
book Nets of Awareness (1994), Frances Pritchett provides a brilliant dis-
cussion of this initiative led by two Aligarh intellectuals: Muhammad
Husain ‘Azad’ (1830–1910) and Altaf Husain ‘Hali’ (1837–1914). Insightful
commentaries on the reformist effects of Victorian moral codes on Urdu
poetry have also been proffered by Nile Green (2010), Safdar Ahmed (2012)
and Tariq Rahman (2012). Many of these discussions reflect on the influ-
ence of English ‘realism’ and moral codes and the resultant conflation of
poetry’s social function with the literary representation of values perceived
as beneficial for living a better day-to-day life. Safdar Ahmed highlights the
important role assumed by language and literature in the context of the
promotion of an Anglicist vision, so much so that ‘language is not simply
the by-product of a civilisation, but may actively mould and shape that
civilisation for better or worse’ (Ahmed 2012: 438). Given the significant
role of literary discourse within this larger cultural programme of reform,
the perceived effeminacy of the Urdu ghazal as manifested in its sensuous
Persian imagery, metaphors, devices of exaggeration and homoerotic maz-
muns became the cause for much aggravation, calling forth a rigorous prun-
ing of its effects through islah.
One consequence of the reformist zeal brought forth by modernity was
the disappearance of the amrad, the beautiful adolescent/young boy who
earlier had occupied the image of the beloved in much of Persian poetry (see
Rahman 2012: 196), and the replacement of boy love by the imported cat-
egory of homosexuality as ‘ham-jinsparasti’ (Rahman 2012: 200). In his
analysis of the eroticisation of power relations in patriarchy as manifested
in the ownership of tangible goods such as women and boys (2012: 197–
198), Tariq Rahman proposes an interesting argument. Rahman suggests
that the condemnation of eroticism in Urdu literature is tied to its percep-
tion as the ‘product of a militarily defeated culture’ (Rahman 2012: 199).
He thus views the reformist crusade as resulting in the ‘defeat of eros’
(Rahman 2012: 215). For others, the reformist agenda does not imply an
unqualified setback although the impoverishment of the ghazal’s ambiguity
and un-decidability resulting from reformist islah is a shared concern. For

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instance, Nile Green observes that the scrutiny of moral codes upheld by the
Sufis in the nineteenth century resulted in a loss of metaphoricity in poetry
(Green 2010: 308–309). Safdar Ahmed too emphasizes the loss of ‘a liminal
ambiguity or tension (between the phenomenal and mystical worlds) relat-
ing to the figure of an absent beloved’ in the ghazal but qualifies this with
the assertion that the ‘power of its tropes could not be erased’ (2012: 453).
Frances Pritchett’s enthusiasm, even in the face of such major efforts at
‘reform’, is far more unequivocal: ‘Despite the lack of a useful critical tradi-
tion, despite an almost universal ignorance of theory, despite the wide-
spread, continuing, pervasive influence of Azad and Hali, the modern Urdu
ghazal continues to be vigorously alive. What a supreme tribute to its pow-
ers!’ (Pritchett 1994: 189).
We may infer from the above that a covenant of indeterminacy helped
sustain the mazmun of homoeroticism alongside that of heteronormative
desire despite the gendered nature of the Urdu language, the misogynistic
times that the ghazal’s evolution witnessed, and the efforts at literary and
cultural ‘reform’ encouraged by imperialist forces. This is primarily due to
the fact that the ghazal evokes rather than narrates and that it holds dear its
central focus on nurturing semantic ambiguity through wordplay, indirec-
tions and layered symbolism, so that the horizons of its interpretive realm
seem forever veiled and elusive. The indeterminate gender of the beloved
was very much a part of this non-specificity since gender particularity would
‘limit the “meaning” aspect of the poem’ (Faruqi 1999: 6). Indeed, limiting
meaning is an impulse so contrary to the ghazal aesthetic that polysemy
becomes the pivot on which it turns and from which centripetal meanings
waft outwards. The seductive power of the ghazal lies in these ever-escaping
meanings, the ones that appear at the thresholds of language, in the manner
of the slowly brightening skylines of Vali’s poems. In this landscape, the
indecipherable beloved appears almost magical, resembling in Pritchett’s
words ‘the anqa, the bird defined by its elusiveness. All that can be said with
real certainty is that the classical ghazal includes along with its great pre-
ponderance of sexually unspecific verses, some verses in which the beloved
is clearly a beautiful woman, and some verses in which the beloved is clearly
a beautiful boy’ (1994: 178–179).
Evidently, the ghazal’s radical impulses and non-conformist mazmuns
may have been submerged but were not permanently interred despite an era
of reform. A revivification of the ghazal’s socio-political aesthetics is subse-
quently manifested in the corpus of work of early twentieth-century poets
like Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938) and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911–1984).
The tribute to the powers of the ghazal is thus equally an homage to its
aesthetic axioms which were so highly valued that they withstood the purg-
ing tendencies of an almost missionary zeal. It is not a matter of surprise
then that despite their misgivings about the ghazal’s ‘effeminacy’, reformers
like Hali insisted on the preservation of a ‘radical ambiguity’ of gender
(Pritchett 1994: 180).

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An inversion of gender and power

The privileging of symbolism in a self-avowed fabricated world liberates
the ghazal from compulsions to replicate conventional gender power
dynamics informed by patriarchal outlooks. Thus, in the make-believe
world of the ghazal, the ideal male lover is one who capitulates completely
at the slightest gesture of his beloved and repeatedly makes a show of laying
down his life at her feet if she so commands. It is his Orphic destiny, of
course, that he remain forever separated from the love object who becomes
a muse for his poetic imagination and whose callousness drags him deeper
into the undercurrents of gham. That he wallows in his melancholy and
embraces the tragic destiny of unrequited love as the defining trope of his
life only adds to his enigma as the eternal lover, as in Vali Deccani’s verse:

jise ishq kā tiir kaarī lage

use zindagī kyuuñ na bhārī lage16

Those slain by love’s lethal spur

They bear the burden of living

The submission of the enthralled, disempowered lover takes the form of

extreme posturings such as his willingness to kill himself, consume poison
or inscribe love letters in the crimson ink of his blood.

Likha hun dilbar-e-rangin ko arzi-e-ahwal

Kiya hun khun-e-jigar se tamaam afshaan surkh
Source: Kulliyat-e-Siraj (1998)

“to my colorful love I write my petition

and sprinkle it with heartsblood red”
(Translation: Courtesy of Aditya Behl, ‘Ghazal in Red’)17

Needless to say, the ghazal audience does not take such bloody threats liter-
ally; a kind of literary pact is established whereby the poet, the lover and the
audience are all ‘in’ on the rules of the game, one of which is emotive ampli-
fication, in tune with the ghazal’s general obligation towards exaggeration
(see also Russell 1969: 123; Faruqi 1999: 18). Amplification results in the
construction of an imaginary landscape, where the ghazal’s hyperbolic per-
sonas represent alter-egos for the playing-out of transformed gendered sub-
jectivities, much like a virtual reality game.
As noted in the previous chapter, despite the re-inscription of status-ori-
ented pir–muridi dynamics, Sufism does not distinguish between male and
female disciples18, both of whom merit regard earned through spiritual
progress regardless of gender identity. Kugle observes that ‘Sufis often speak
of female mystics as “men” because they partake in these moral acts and

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spiritual aspirations on a par with male mystics, without being prevented by

their reproductive anatomy, their female gender, or their feminine socializa-
tion’ (Kugle 2016: 87). Furthermore, the co-occurrence of bi-gendered attri-
butes within the same persona defies simplistic, unidimensional formulations
of male and female identities. Malamud foregrounds this complexity
through the figure of the pir who is endowed with paternal as well as mater-
nal qualities (Malamud 1996: 95–97) while his disciple undergoes a process
of ‘feminization’. Thus, in Sufi thought, the masculine and the feminine
appear as shifting attributes rather than as frozen corporeal essences and
both female and male mystics appear to embody/rise above these attributes.
Aligned with such a bi-gendered mystic episteme, the ghazal universe reflects
an analogous overlapping – the (male) lover surrenders power, adopts a
supine position before the beloved, but retains (masculine) subjective agency
as the speaking voice of the ghazal. In the process of his ‘feminization’, gen-
der identity matters less than the spiritual attitude of abdication in keeping
with the Sufi convention of ‘the annihilation of the disciple’s own will and
desires and their replacement by the will of the guide’ (Malamud 1996: 92).
On the other hand, the beloved’s exaggerated coquetry and elusive beauty
belie her/his absolute power over the lover. S/he owns the lover but remains
congealed as the object of his fantasy, much like the figurations of beauty on
Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’.
Two important inferences may be drawn from the above for unravelling
the gender dynamics of the love relationship in the ghazal. First, it is the
face of the female/homoerotic male beloved that is superimposed upon the
erstwhile site occupied by the authoritative (male) Sufi pir while the male
lover of the ghazal is positioned as the ardent ‘feminized’ disciple, thereby
re-gendering relations of acquiescence and empowerment. Second, the co-
existence of bi-gendered attributes in the personage of the Sufi pir offers a
clue to the conceptualization of the masculine and the feminine as co-habit-
ing attributes rather than as exclusive identity markers in the mimetic pro-
cess operationalized in the ghazal. We may infer from this that neither the
lover nor the beloved conforms uniformly to predictable gendered attri-
butes in the ghazal universe; rather, the dynamic power play of feminine
and masculine unwittingly encourages an interrogation of their divides.
A reconfiguration of masculinity derived from mystic ontology thus suf-
fuses the ghazal, one that romanticises submission, defeat, separation and
accession through the figure of the gentle, sensitive, melancholic anti-hero
as lover or ashiq (see also Petievich 2001a: 224). Faruqi sums it up as fol-
lows: ‘The world of the ghazal is one world where the Outsider is the Hero,
where non-conformism is the creed, and where prosperity is poverty’ (1999:
13). This inverted universe stands in direct contravention to the palpable
material world of pre-modern Mughal society that idealized aggressive
hyper-masculinity. Submission is the central trope for this reimagined mas-
culinity, and the lover displays all the traits stereotypically associated with
women, including weeping, wasting and patience (see Faruqi 1999: 23). In

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describing the figure of the lover, Scott Kugle observes that he is ‘sensitive,
vulnerable, defined by relationships with others’ and finds ‘completion in
sacrificing for the sake of others’, values that ‘many modern readers will
identify as “feminine”’ (Kugle 2016: 92). Kugle further contends that
against feminist scholarship’s claim about patriarchy’s construction of a
common masculinity, the ghazal discourse is evidence that patriarchal val-
ues may be differently expressed in diverse cultures and that Mughal cul-
ture may have equally valued ‘personal intimacy and interconnection
between males’ alongside more conventional aspects of domination and
aggression (2016: 92). Notably, the feminization of the trope of surrender
does not imply a mere relinquishing of power; rather, it is a path to attain-
ing otherworldly rapture. Indeed, as observed by Narang and Zaidi, ‘Mir
and some other poets often compare total surrender and submission to an
intense ecstasy, stillness and silence’ (2005: 182). Thus, co-existing with
the combative masculinity of the Mughal warrior-male, an alternate emo-
tive masculinity is inscribed through ‘poetry and literary sensibilities’, attri-
butes viewed as essential for the ‘real men’ of the ghazal (Kugle 2016: 93).
Since spiritual advancement is posited here as the true marker of manhood,
failure is recuperated, inverted and re-shaped as an affirmative, counter-
intuitive idiom of protest against established norms, one facet of which
appears as a critique of and remonstration against patriarchal conceptions
of hyper-masculinity.
What then of the woman-as-beloved? At the same time as the lover is
reconfigured, the grammatically masculine love object (previously male and
overwhelmingly female subsequently) is the repository of exaggerated
embellishments originating in Persian metaphoric conventions that find
parallels in the sringara and alankara19 concepts of rasa theory. The figure
of the beloved combines formulaic notions of femininity such as fragility,
fickleness and seductive charm with Sufi mystical conceptions of celestial
sovereignty. Variously epitomized as the rose, the narcissus and the candle
flickering in drunken spring breezes, ‘she’ exists in an augmented reality
that renders her perfect in her youthful beauty. The gentle, sorrowful lover
is perpetually threatened by her ‘killing’ looks so that even a dismissive
glance can render him defenceless. The beloved’s unavailability is signified
through an exaggerated performance of ‘femininity’ in a literary pantomime
that secures her elusiveness in an aesthetic world that pivots around the
lover’s failed desires. Although the beloved’s lack of participation in an
interchange primarily constituted of the male lover’s plaintive soliloquies
may indicate an absolute passivity, Faruqi insists that the beloved’s indiffer-
ence ‘makes a point’ (1999: 11). In defending the genre of the ghazal against
accusations of sexist bias, Pritchett too strongly asserts that ‘the power dis-
tribution in the ghazal is radically unequal, and the overwhelmingly power-
ful one is the beloved, not the lover. The lover suffers and dies; the beloved
lives and thrives’ (2003: 32). Although we may remain sceptical about the
value of this immobilized perpetuity in the face of the (spiritually

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advancing) male’s agentic desire, this in no way negates the disruption

effected by the unique inverted gender power dynamics of the ghazal uni-
verse. The classical ghazal may offer no validating female role models, but
it does succeed in re-calibrating the representation of established gender
power conventions. Just as it draws attention to an amplified ‘feminine’ that
approaches excessive and unrealistic proportions, it equally foregrounds
the de-privileging of a bellicose hypermasculinity that is remarkable by its
absence. Instead, masculine and feminine attributes flow as cross-currents
between the aashiq and ma’shuq lending to the ghazal a ‘protean flexibility’
(Manuel 1988/89: 93). This gendered fluidity, I propose, is very much at
harmony with the ghazal’s taghazzul of semantic and sonic agilities and its
underlying impulse towards flux and indirection.

Ada or performing the feminine as artifice

Tools such as metaphor and amplification lend to the ghazal a self-reflex-
ivity that fixes the audience’s attention on its stylization, its pleasure-in-
making. In this respect, the ghazal’s literary pleasure is very much one of
the Barthesian ‘writerly’ text20 seducing the reader into playing fields of
pluri-modal signs. Multiple pathways for interpreting meaning are gener-
ated by the encounter of the creative consciousness of the poet and the
audience, both of whom are immersed in the joy of creative play even as
they remain acutely aware of the game’s artifice. Ultimately, the ghazal
universe is one made up of metaphors (‘isti‘arah’), of signs as truths, and
not of any one unitary meaning as truth. In this world-as-text, ‘there is an
essential “itself-ness” in each thing’ (Faruqi 1999: 14). We have already
seen how the lover and the beloved, projected as hyper-stylized figures,
function as discursive symbols liberated from quotidian expectations.
While they run the risk of becoming cardboard caricatures, they retain a
mysterious enigma made possible by the ghazal’s aesthetic of ‘doubleness’
– the splitting up of realms of meaning between ma‘ni afirini and mazmun
afirini. This artful process supports the embedding of the masculine and
the feminine as signs within what is clearly intended to be a discursive
universe that carries us ‘from art to art’ (Pritchett 163). In this privileging
of artifice, gender too becomes a matter of performance, a play of exagger-
ated postures.
One palpable manifestation of the ghazal’s artifice is achieved through
the concept of ada, a term translatable as coquettishness and associated by
extension with ‘coquetry, dress and manners, speech and body language’
(Faruqi 1999: 21). Ada is often expressed by means of a sensual delicacy of
manner or nakhra which in musical renditions of the ghazal may take the
form of ‘histrionic, sensual vocal mannerisms’ (Manuel 1988/89: 100). Ada
bandi, or seductive mannerisms, are a defining aspect of the beloved’s liter-
ary persona. Although this may create the impression of a shy and fragile
creature who seduces the lover from a cold distance, Faruqi clarifies that

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such a view is not supported by the context of eighteenth-century poetry. In

this context, he notes that in Mir’s ghazals, ada bandi was not a mere staged
coquettishness but a way of describing ‘the rare meetings and closeness, the
all too frequent partings, and the distressing distances between lover and
beloved’ (Faruqi 1999: 22). Consequently, Faruqi contends that ada bandi
presents the beloved as assertive seductress rather than ‘the passive, hiding-
behind-the-purdah, slightly tubercular, recoiling from the slightest physical
contact, shrinking-violet type of little girl much touted by modern critics as
the optimal beloved in the ghazal’ (Faruqi 1999: 22).
More interestingly, from our perspective, ada bandi exceeds the mere cel-
ebration of the beloved’s seductive charms and is an integral attribute of the
style that defines the ghazal as a lyrical genre. For instance, it encompasses
the affectations adopted by the mazmun of love whose complex layers are
manipulated by each poet to achieve kaifiyat, a delight in the beauty of the
aesthetic experience. It is an experience in which the poet and the audience
privilege the erotic charm of lyricism over any other emotive effect. As a
genre that favours exaggerated stylization, the ghazal thus may be viewed
as an epitome of ada bandi, of writing-as-ada, where ‘writing’ takes on con-
notations of generating fantastic chimeras for living out substitute realities,
particularly noticeable in Urdu poetry’s proclivity for anthropomorphized
metaphors. Although ada often may appear in mannerisms such as a playful
fingering of forelocks, a graceful movement of the body, a sensual way of
walking away from the lover, or a seductive raising/lowering of eyes, it
transgresses these confines and functions as a set of autonomous floating
attributes that attach themselves to women and men just as much as to
symbols such as the narcissus, the crescent moon and the spring breeze. For
instance, in a ghazal by Vali Deccani, ada appears as a ‘calamity’ indepen-
dent of gendered associations and is a measure of the effect of coquetry on
the lover enthralled by ‘style’ itself.

Na voh bala na voh bali bala hai

Bala-e-aashiquan naz-o-ada hai

“Neither that boy nor that girl is the calamity;

For lovers’ calamity is blandishment and coquetry.”
(Cited and translated by Haywood 1964: 165)

In this famous matla by Ghalib, ‘style’ is an attribute of all forms of writ-

ing/painting/creative activity:

naqsh fariyādī hai kis kī shoḳhi-e-tahrīr kā

kāġhzī hai pairahan har paikar-e-tasvīr kā21

What claim to writing mischief does this printed sign press

Each painted figure’s clothed in a papery dress22

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Parallels between the ink of writing and the inky beauty of the beloved’s
tresses are found elsewhere, as in these lines by Siraj Aurangabadi:

musta.id huuñ tire zulfoñ kī siyāhī le kar

safha-e-nāma-e-āmāl kuuñ kaalā karne23

Willing I stand to take the ink of your curls

and darken the document of my deeds

In embracing ada bandi, the ghazal reveals how both love and writing
respond to the creative impulse through seductive inventiveness. As Pritchett
sums it up, ‘the ghazal glories in its own creative powers’ and ‘flaunts its
artifice’ (1994: 168). It is evident that such a closed literary world may
evoke apparent associations with the Western school of New Criticism (see
also Pritchett 1994: 168). But the ghazal’s mannered universe transcends
the notion of a temporary, self-sufficient literary refuge; it flourishes its arti-
fice in a much more deliberate manner, foreshadowing a postmodern world
view. It thus becomes possible to trace intriguing correspondences between
the inscribing of ada in eighteenth-century Urdu poetry and late-twentieth-
century poststructuralist meditations on style. One of the most notable of
the latter is Jacques Derrida’s elaboration on the ‘feminine’ as ‘style’ in
Spurs (1978), inspired by his reading of Nietzsche’s work. In Derrida’s
reading of Nietzsche, the sign of ‘woman’ appears as a question of style and
simulacrum, a veiling, as it were, of truth. Derrida attempts to show how
in such a process of discursive veiling, woman, like truth, ‘will not be
pinned down’ and ‘that which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth
– feminine’ (1978: 55). The ‘feminine’ here, as Derrida clarifies, is not to be
confused with ‘a woman’s femininity, for female sexuality, or for any other
of those essentializing fetishes’ (1978: 55). Rather, the feminine appears as
‘feminized’ through a pervasive essentializing discursive process that
attaches the ‘feminine’ to women. Once an awareness of the construction-
ism of the process sets in, the ‘untruth’ of the feminine and of women
becomes subject to deconstruction. In positing ‘woman’ as a matter of
‘style’, Derrida proceeds to show how the question of sexual difference
lacks any stable ontological truth and conceals its own ‘undecidability’
(1978: 103–105). A parallel working through of the feminine-as-artifice
through devices such as amplification and coquetry is perceptible in the
ghazal universe, as we have seen. The one conspicuous difference that
squarely locates the ghazal in its pre-modern mystic context is, of course,
the insistence on the overarching ‘truth’ of the divine beloved experienced
through ‘real love’ – ishq-i haqiqi. Despite this distinctiveness, the ghazal’s
Sufi milieu, in a precursor to poststructuralist epistemology, reveals a cor-
responding impulse towards dismantling taken-for-granted illusions – the
world of the ‘ahl-e zahir’24 – by positing an imagined universe that may be

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as ‘real’ or as ‘illusory’ as the world as we know it. A reflexive lyrical styliza-

tion thus becomes a way of interrogating the constructedness of lived reali-
ties, including those of gendered subjectivities.
The emphasis on artfulness was so pronounced in the eighteenth-century
ghazal that it resulted in a strong aversion towards this aspect of the genre
among reformists aligned with the imperialist programme of moulding the
ghazal to the realist tendencies of Western naturalism. Pritchett discusses
how Azad recoils from the use of metaphors which he sees as consisting of
false imagery and fabricated refinements (Pritchett 1994: 157), a tendency
completely opposed to the ‘natural poetry’ that the reformists attempted to
dredge up from what they viewed as the stale dregs of ghazal verse.
Paradoxically, it is this parallel world of stylization and metaphorization
that ensures the perpetuity of the ghazal beyond its reformist phase. The
particular associative uses to which metaphors are deployed in ghazals are
not inadvertent, for the metaphor must point to similitudes not only
between two comparable things but to a process of comparisons along a
chain of similitudes that reveals the constructionism of the apparent uni-
verse. Faruqi provides an excellent analysis of the ‘epistemology of meta-
phor’ that emphasizes the ‘literalness’ of metaphors, one implication of
which is that ‘metaphors do not represent facts; they are facts. Thus a meta-
phor could be treated as a fact, and another metaphor drawn from it. From
that metaphor again, another one could be derived, and so on’ (1999: 23).
Faruqi shows how the ghazal’s metaphors in the Perso-Indian tradition,
unlike the syntagmatic attributes of metaphors in Western poetics, con-
tained associative capacities and operated along both paradigmatic and
syntagmatic axes (1999: 25–26). This unique attribute renders them as facts
in their own right so that metaphors and facts become interchangeable
(Faruqi 1999: 23–24).
We may deduce from the above, then, that metaphors in the ghazal tradi-
tion are endowed with surprising metonymic qualities that enable quick
flights from doves to moths to flaming cypress trees to the ever-elusive
beloved. In acquiring the associative values of metonymy and assuming the
function of a ‘fact’, the metaphor of Urdu poetics fuses with the former so
that the divide between truth and non-truth/style becomes hazy. Such a
Derridean overlapping of un-truth/style with the ‘truth’ of the beloved-as-
metaphor in the ghazal universe may have intriguing implications for femi-
nist theorizations. Constructed as a ‘metonymic metaphor’ and displaying
the flair of ada, the beloved becomes the face of an artfully fabricated femi-
nine that unveils gender as a matter of style in an ultimate signal to the
simulacrum of gender. In such a Derridean turn, the artfulness of the beloved
draws feminism’s attention to the unfettering of the ‘feminine’ from biologi-
cal women. It is perhaps why, according to Pritchett,

the ghazal is open to everybody, of all ages and classes and genders
and conditions, and its very stylization and complexity are what

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make it so. … Women can, in short, enter the ghazal world just as
intimately and accessibly and identifying as men, without being
put off by sexism. For it contains no real men and women, but only
the lovers and beloveds and rivals and advisors and other stylized
characters who are needed for the great “passion play” of the
ghazal world.
(2003: 34)

As we have seen above, the formulation of a stylized feminine is facilitated

by a manipulation of rekhta’s grammatical and semantic indirections. And
yet, rekhta’s universalizing masculinity, the relative paucity of women poets
and of women’s experiential realities must lead to its inevitable gendered
interrogation and an exploration of alternative possibilities beyond rekhta.

Rekhta, rekhti and the question of woman’s voice

In view of the gendered hierarchies of pre-modern societies, the Urdu literary
canon is unsurprisingly dominated by men, and extant tazkirahs25 of classi-
cal Urdu ghazals reveal a preponderance of male poets.26 The few women
who wrote poetry in Urdu were largely privileged royals or accomplished
courtesans trained in literary and artistic pursuits and in some ways less
constrained by the gendered norms governing the lives of ordinary women.
The question of Urdu women poets impels us to look both within and
beyond the northern regions of the subcontinent, as there was an ongoing
literary exchange between the north and the Deccan during these times.
Among Deccani poets writing in Urdu, one particular name that stands out
is that of Mah Laqa Bai (1768–1824), a wealthy tawa’if (courtesan) from
Hyderabad. In conformity with prevalent literary conventions of the north,
Mah Laqa Bai wrote most of her Urdu ghazals in the masculine speaking
voice of rekhta even while asserting her female identity through her takhal-
lus, ‘Chanda’ (see Kugle 2010: 371). Despite being one of the few women in
a male-dominated literary tradition, Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chanda’ gained acclaim
as a skilled ghazal poet. Scott Kugle explains her choice of rekhta and its
‘standard normative gendered voice’ on the basis of Mah Laqa Bai’s par-
ticular circumstances, prime among which, unsurprisingly, was that ‘women
poets had to prove their worth among male poets’ (Kugle 2010: 372).
Furthermore, for the poet-courtesan adept at enacting her role as an object
of male sexual desire, the masculine voice of the lover in rekhta served as an
apt foil enabling her to identify as both assertive lover and seductive love
object (see Kugle 2010: 370–371). Emphasizing this performative aspect,
Kugle proposes that it is ‘only by highlighting her role as a courtesan per-
former that we can understand her poems’ complex interplay between a
male persona gazing upon, pursuing, or being subdued by a female beloved’
(2010: 383). Thus, for this poet who spent many years of her life perfecting
her stylized dance performances for a male audience, gender becomes ‘a

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play of positions, of watcher and watched, of audience and performer, of

desirer and desired’, an awareness she transposes onto her poetry (Kugle
2010: 384).
The ensuing (excerpted) ghazal foregrounds the courtesan-poet’s con-
certed attempt to reverse the effects of the objectifying male gaze with direct
consequences for questions of gendered agency. ‘Spoiled’ by the lover’s las-
civious gaze, the poet-as-performer reclaims the right to rebuff his advances
in favour of a higher, pious love based on the Sufi distinction between ishq-
e-majizi and ishq-e-haqiqi. As in Sufi thought, so for Mah Laqa Bai ishq-e-
haqiqi is the defining measure of true love and informs the notion of ideal
manhood so that, from her perspective, ‘the only way to be a real man is to
be a lover’ (Kugle 2010: 384). Consequently, an interrogation of conven-
tional understandings of both love and masculinity is operative in her
ghazals that offer contrasting alternatives for each. In the first sh‘ir cited
below, the poet locates herself as the object of the voyeuristic gaze of the
(false) lover who literally turns her into the ‘spoils’ of love; however, by the
end of the ghazal, she has become the one who ‘sees’ him and through him.
In the maqta, the male lover who had previously appraised her for his plea-
sure serves as nothing more than a channel for her union with Ali; almost
‘seeing’ past him, she visualizes the divine face of the true beloved of ishq-
e-haqiqi. Thus, by the end of the poem, the poet usurps the lover’s subjective
location and, in an ultimate subversion, reverses the metaphor of seeing and
being seen as she turns the dust of the holy city of Najaf into kohl for her
eyes, a black powder that equips her to ‘visualize’ divinity’s brightness.

gardish se terī chashm ke muddat se huuñ ḳharāb

tis par kare hai mujh se ye iqrār dekhnā

Misfortune that through aeons his gaze spoils me

And yet I am pursued by his pledges, as you see

nāseh abas kare hai man.a mujh ko ishq se

aa jaa.e vo nazar to phir inkār dekhnā

In vain do they counsel me against the guiles of love

But a glance and how I spurn him, this too you will see

'chandā' ko tum se chashm ye hai yā alī ki ho

ḳhāk-e-najaf ko surma-e-absār dekhnā27

‘Chanda’ looks to you so she may merge in Ali

Of Najaf’s dust she’ll make eye-kohl, and so you will see.

As is evident here, Mah Laqa Bai is able to skilfully manoeuvre rekhta’s

linguistic indirections to appropriate agency and perform the switch from

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being the sexual object of male scopophilia to the impassioned lover with a
higher ‘vision’. If the only way to be a ‘real man’ was to be a true lover, then
the courtesan performing before the objectifying male gaze stages a scrutiny
of ‘manliness’ to supplant and become the ‘real lover’ of the poem (see also
Kugle 2016: 216, 227). One of the significant contributions that rekhta thus
offers is its foregrounding of gender as a moving play of positions, open to
interventions.
Notwithstanding the prospects generated by such innovations, the glar-
ing absence of all but a few women’s voices in the Urdu ghazal canon has
invited a feminist critique of rekhta. For the same reason, attention has also
been drawn to a genre considered its polar opposite, that of rekhti. The prin-
cipal persona of rekhti, unlike its antithetical counterpart, are women; the
speaker adopts a distinctly feminine voice, and the themes as well as gram-
matical constructions leave no doubt about the female identity of the lover
and beloved. Whereas rekhta employs high Persianized Urdu and an over-
abundance of stylistic devices, rekhti is composed in the accessible and col-
loquial ‘women’s idiom’ (auraton ki boli) that incorporates Hindi vocabulary
and was commonly used in the domestic sphere and the bazaar. Although the
term ‘rekhti’ came into use much later, C. M. Naim credits Hashimi (d. ca.
1697) with an early invention of the genre (Naim 2001: 5–6). The coining of
the term ‘rekhti’ and its popularization are widely attributed to the poet
Sa’adat Yar Khan ‘Rangin’ (1756–1834/35), who, after migrating to
Lucknow, became known for his raunchy caricatures of women, penned in
suggestive and often obscene verse. Rekhti is said to have evolved in the
Deccan region, from where it was carried to the north, where it was prac-
tised not only by Rangin but by a handful of well-known nineteenth-century
male poets, including Insha Allah Khan ‘Insha’, Qalandar Bakhsh ‘Jur’at’
and Mir Yar ‘Ali Khan 'Jan Sahib’. Although rekhti centres on the experi-
ences of women, there appears to be very little surviving evidence of nine-
teenth-century women poets having practised it, suggesting that
women-authored poems in rekhti were largely neglected by Urdu canon-
makers and have most likely been excised or lost (see Vanita 2004: 13).
Rekhti has traditionally been considered an inferior genre because it
appears to have functioned primarily as a smutty male-invented satire of
female bodies and same-sex relationships, expressed in a less-than-privi-
leged idiom often bordering on the vulgar. Leaving no doubt about the
gendered identity of the lover and beloved, rekhti does away with the trade-
mark ambiguity and mysticism of the classical ghazal. In contrast to rekhta,
it operates on the quotidian human plane, gleefully narrating the escapades
of lustful women trapped in mundane domesticity, and caters to voyeuristic
(male) pleasure in uncovering women’s sexual desires and imagined fanta-
sies. There is evidence that some male poets, including Jan Saheb (see Vanita
2004: 44), dressed up as women while reciting rekhti before a primarily
male audience to exaggerate its bawdiness, leading at least one critic to view
it as a ‘quintessentially transvestic’ genre (Naim 2001: 23; see also Kugle

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2010: 367–368). Citing the example of poets such as Insha donning wom-
en’s clothes for amusement during mushairas, Naim reminds us, however,
that this temporary act of effeminacy by heterosexual males nowhere com-
promises their manliness (Naim 2001: 21–22). Accordingly, Naim con-
cludes that rekhti ‘was not a “feminine”-ization of Rekhta; it was rather a
trivialization of it’ (Naim 2001: 16). Because its primary intent appears to
be the derision of women’s experiential realities through lasciviousness and
parody, rekhti has been critiqued both for its misogyny and for its coarse-
ness (see Petievich 2001b; Rahman 2012).
Rekhti makes two fascinating concurrent moves. On the one hand, it
privileges women’s experiences and the ‘ordinary’ as worthy subjects for
poetry and frames them in the popular ‘women’s idiom’ of the time. Thus,
women’s domestic lives, routine sexual desires and their familiar discourse,
all previously considered unfit for the elevated rekhta world, are now given
admission into the highly guarded and prized ghazal universe. On the other
hand, rekhti’s misogyny is apparent in its outright denigration and objecti-
fication of women and its primary function as voyeuristic male entertain-
ment. Owing to this paradox, its contraposition with rekhta and its potential
value as an independent ‘women’s genre’ have occasioned an intriguing and
unresolved debate. Whereas critics like C. M. Naim (2001) and Carla
Petievich (2001a and 2001b) have offered trenchant critiques of the ghazal
in both rekhta and rekhti, others like Ruth Vanita (2004) and Salim Kidwai
(Kidwai and Vanita 2000) have explored rekhti as an expression of wom-
en’s voices and same-sex relationships. Without an extensive rehearsing of
these positions, I attempt to summarize a few divergences that may aid in
advancing a consideration of the individual potentials of rekhta and rekhti
for the expression of women’s subjectivities.
Drawing attention to the absence of women’s voices in rekhta, Carla
Petievich calls for a gendered critique of Urdu poetry, arguing that hege-
monic readings of the ghazal ‘work to render its gender politics invisible to
huge audiences’ (2001a: 227). Petievich attributes this silencing of women’s
voices to the strict gender segregation prevalent in the patriarchal pre-mod-
ern society in South Asia (see 2001a: 239). As for rekhti, Petievich argues
that the genre should be seen as ‘a bi-product of patriarchy’s cultural con-
structions than as a bi-product of feudalism's gender oppression’ (2001b:
85). Under these circumstances, she remains unconvinced that rekhti can
provide a possible ‘site of resistance’ and an alternate space for a ‘promised
lesbian utopia’ (2001a: 242). Petievich reminds us that rekhti can offer
insights only into ‘what it means for men’ … ‘to invent a parody of their
own idealised love literature, and to perform it for other men while imper-
sonating women, for laughs’ but it cannot provide any similar insights into
‘what it means for women, living together, to develop a literature of same-
sex eroticism’ (2001a: 242). Besides its explicit misogyny, the case against
rekhti as a literary genre is also to a large extent an indictment of its unam-
biguousness and artlessness. Whereas the rekhta ghazal’s abstract mysticism

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and symbolism provided a fertile terrain for embedding sublimated (male)

homoerotic desire, rekhti abandons all pretence at gendered ambivalence
and presents lesbian bodies and relationships in plain sight for prurient
engagement. According to Petievich, its explicit lesbian content is also what
rendered rekhti illegitimate within a conservative tradition of Urdu canon-
making (2001a: 239).
Ruth Vanita defends against such accusations by unfolding the wordplay
in rekhti poems achieved through devices such as double entendre. Vanita
cites examples from poems by Insha and Rangin to contend that the genre
contains various elements of ‘wordplay, allusion, ambivalence, and layered
suggestiveness’ – tools ordinarily associated with rekhta (Vanita 2004: 13).
Based on her reading of social relations in the eighteenth century, Vanita
refutes the attempt to link rekhti’s misogyny with an absolute gender segre-
gation (2004: 13). Rather, she proposes that the reformist excision of rekhti
from the Urdu literary canon was driven by the rejection of its religio-cul-
tural hybridity that had reflected eighteenth-century syncretism of Muslim
and Hindu cultures and dialects (Vanita: 2004: 15). In defence of the genre,
Vanita points out that rekhti poems by Rangin, Insha and Jur’at frequently
use terms (such as chapat, chapti, chapatbazi and dogana)28 that display a
commonplace familiarity with lesbian sexual intimacy. Marshalling this evi-
dence, she argues that it substantiates the prevalence of a ‘slippage’ in vari-
ous forms of ‘same-sex friendship in Indian society’ in the eighteenth century
(Vanita 2004: 19). Additionally, as against the elitist high classicism of
Persianized Urdu used almost exclusively by male poets in the public
domain, Vanita highlights rekhti’s accessibility based on its reliance on
‘women’s speech’, namely the language of ‘villages and small towns’, of the
‘streets and marketplaces’ of Delhi and Lucknow, of ‘private lives, of emo-
tions, and of significant imaginative domains’ (2004: 37).
For a socio-cultural understanding of same-sex relationships between
ordinary Muslim and Hindu women in eighteenth-century South Asia and
for its analysis of the role of Deccani women’s idiom in poetry, Vanita’s
argument is undoubtedly persuasive. Vanita’s analysis may equally suggest
that one way of approaching rekhti’s plucky directness and approachability
may be to read it as an unapologetic expression of women’s sexual experi-
ences. However, any unequivocal endorsement of rekhti invites caveats
emerging from its feminist critique. For one, the gendered and regional
polarization of a relatively ‘feminine’, hybrid Deccani women’s idiom vs.
the masculinized ‘pure’ Urdu of the classical ghazal in the north may be
susceptible to its dismantling, given Urdu’s own origins in a syncretic amal-
gamation of Persian and Hindi. Kugle notes, in fact, that ‘Deccani Urdu is
not a uniquely feminine dialect when compared with northern Urdu. All the
forces of mixing and synthesis that led to the formation of Deccani Urdu
were also at work in the North’ (Kugle 2010: 381). Second, as discussed
already, the rekhta ghazal, its reconceptualized masculinity and its stylistic
adornment all came to be equated with the perception of a repugnant kind

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of effeminacy shunned by reformists (see Pritchett 1994; Vanita 2004;

Ahmed 2012). It is evident then that the perceived gendering of any literary
discourse is enmeshed in complex historical, cultural and linguistic circum-
stances, further complicating the privileging of any one idiom as an apt
medium for the expression of gendered subjectivities.
More centrally, any attempt to unravel the prevalence of subversive sub-
texts in extant rekhti verse authored by male poets cannot afford to side-
step either the explicit sexism and misogyny of the time or the loss of the
characteristic indeterminacy of rekhta that sets forth an interrogation of
gender performativity. Obtainable verse written in rekhti does contain mul-
tiple instances of polyvalence but these tend to function primarily at lexical
surfaces and stop short of the ‘tahdari (depth-possession) and pechdari
(complexity)’ of the classical ghazal (Pritchett 1994: 106). Does this make
rekhti less ‘literary’ than its counterpart? Although any response to such a
question might be shaped by a reader’s individual literary proclivities and
therefore one is not attempted here, it leads to a more intriguing and related
issue – that of the interlinkage between literary pleasure and the audience’s
participation in the process of meaning-making. This question may be par-
ticularly significant for gendered readings of ambivalence-laden Urdu
ghazals. As we have seen, the polysemous ‘writerly’ terrain of rekhta verse
facilitates the interrogation of conventional gender power dynamics and the
projection of alternate positionalities. It is safe to assume, however, that
most eighteenth-century rekhti verse seeks to amuse, entertain and ridicule,
rather than to create dispersed multiple pathways for interpretive delight,
and remains far removed from the jouissance that subsequently came to
mark formulations of feminine writing.29 Significantly, the loss of indirection
in rekhti – the metaphoricity, stylization and ada bandi that lend rekhta its
layered textuality – diminishes its potential as a locus of subversive dissent.
As previously noted, in the hands of virtuoso eighteenth-century rekhta
poets like Siraj, Mir and Ghalib, metaphors of transcendence achieved much
more than an abstract aura of high spiritualism. Rather, they were deployed
as malleable tools for resisting and critiquing dominant sexual and religious
codes and foregrounded the place of literariness in non-conformist dis-
courses of protest. Rekhti, though apparently unconventional in its maz-
muns, abandons its revolutionary potential at the point where it embraces
mere parody over textuality and mockery over radical subversion.
This is not to imply, however, that such possibilities are out of reach of
the genre. In fact, if we locate rekhta and rekhti within an encompassing
ghazal landscape, it may not be too far-fetched to imagine a reconceptual-
ization of the feminine and of non-normative gendered identities in the
Urdu ghazal, one whose contours begin to take shape in the twentieth cen-
tury. Whereas rekhta’s intricacies offer a space for imagining an alternative
masculinity, for foregrounding the shifting artifice of gender and for camou-
flaged dissent, rekhti promises a direct access to women’s discursive agency
through powerful feminine tropes and through an appropriation of

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expressly female voices articulated in an accessible language. Rekhti also

holds the potential to shift attention away from a puerile male gaze towards
women’s own experiences and pleasures. A refiguring of the ghazal thus can
draw inspiration from rekhta’s indirections as well as from rekhti’s agentic
appropriations even while asserting that certitude about gendered identities
need not spell the loss of the cherished radical ambiguity enabled by the
ghazal’s unique aesthetic. Rather than surrendering either rekhta or rekhti
to a hegemonic masculist canon pursuant to a gendered critique, it may be
more fruitful, and assuredly more pleasurable, to explore the ghazal’s prom-
ise as a space for fashioning reconceptualised subjectivities.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the ghazal has been variously approached as a literary
world in its own right and/or as a living sociological document that may
shed light on the manner in which gendered and cultural identities and
relationships were shaped in pre-modern South Asia. Since it is nearly
impossible to undertake one kind of endeavour without a nod in the other
direction, neither of these positions is exclusive, although critics may privi-
lege one over the other. The enigma of the ghazal seems to lie somewhere
in the interstices of these positions since its stylized aesthetic makes it pos-
sible to avail pleasure in its artful devices even while decoding its bold
resistive ideas of social dissent. The radical impulses of the ghazal are
found embedded in its unique aesthetic spaces – its polarities and non-
teleological climaxes and its indirections, artifices, multivalences and meta-
phors – and remain inseparable from its escaping meanings. The mazmuns
of the ghazal operate in the liminal space between double worlds and
reveal the genre’s infinite capacity for inventiveness. Ultimately, no matter
how we approach the ghazal, its slippery terrain hints at unforeseen future
re-imaginings. In at least some if not all of these, the ghazal continues ‘to
speak to women’. In the end, in the ghazal and beyond, there is always
more left to tell:

ba-qadr-e-shauq nahīñ zarf-e-tangnā-e-ġhazal

kuchh aur chāhiye vus.at mire bayāñ ke liye30

Too narrow for my desires are the margins of the ghazal

Some other horizons I desire for this telling

Notes
1 For a discussion of qawwali and sama, see previous chapter, especially endnote
4; kaifiyat refers to the mood or emotional state created during performances
that strive towards mystic delight (see also: Pritchett 1994: 119).
2 Readers looking for a grounded understanding of the ghazal as poetic genre
may find it useful to refer to work of various scholars cited in this chapter as

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well as to a handbook on Urdu Meter by Frances Pritchett: http://www.colum-

bia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/meterbk/00_index.html
3 Faruqi and Pritchett disagree with the use of the term ‘couplet’ to describe the
two-line sh‘ir because the rhyme scheme of the sh‘ir does not adhere to the tra-
ditional rhyming pattern associated with the couplet in the Western literary tra-
dition (see Faruqi and Pritchett 1984: 117).
4 See Faruqi and Pritchett (1984: 117).
5 Hatim, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/gul-kii-aur-bulbul-kii-
sohbat-ko-chaman-kaa-shaana-hai-shaikh-zahuruddin-hatim-ghazals/?lang=ur
All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise specified.
6 Mirza Mazhar, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/ham-ne-kii-hai-
tauba-aur-dhuumen-machaatii-hai-bahaar-mazhar-mirza-jaan-e-janaan-ghazals
7 See Aneja, A. (1989) ‘The Mystic Aspect of L'Écriture féminine: Hélène Cixous’s
Vivre l'Orange’, Qui Parle, 3 (1): 189–201; and Aneja, A. (1992) ‘The Medusa’s
Slip: Hélène Cixous and the Underpinnings of Écriture Féminine’, LIT: Literature
Interpretation Theory, 4 (1): 17–27.
8 The voice of Begum Akhtar, one of the most well-known ghazal singers of the
twentieth century, is said to have contained a natural break that she turned to
her advantage in her slow, soulful singing (Qureshi 2001: 121).
9 See Narang and Zaidi (2005) for a discussion of this concept in the context of
Islamic and Hindu mysticism. See also Nile Green (303).
10 Mir Taqi Mir, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/ultii-ho-gaiin-sab-
tadbiiren-kuchh-na-davaa-ne-kaam-kiyaa-meer-taqi-meer-ghazals
11 See various examples, including those of Sauda, Mir and Ghalib, cited by
Harbans Mukhia (1999).
12 See also Ali, N. (2016) ‘From Hallaj to Heer: Poetic Knowledge and the Muslim
Tradition’, Journal of Narrative Politics, 3 (1): 2–26. Cited in previous chapter.
13 Mirza Ghalib, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/husn-e-mah-garche-
ba-hangaam-e-kamaal-achchhaa-hai-mirza-ghalib-ghazals
14 I use the plural ‘their’ instead of the gendered “her/his” to suggest the non-
specificity of the pronoun ‘un’. Moreover, ‘un’ can be employed in the plural in
Urdu, although here its connotation is singular.
15 Vali Deccani, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/kiyaa-mujh-ishq-ne-
zaalim-kuun-aab-aahista-aahista-wali-mohammad-wali-ghazals
16 Vali Deccani, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/jise-ishq-kaa-tiir-kaarii-
lage-wali-mohammad-wali-ghazals
17 Translation personally circulated by Prof. Aditya Behl in a class on ‘Urdu
Literature: The Ghazal’ (Hindi-Urdu 225), University of California Berkeley,
Spring 1996.
18 See discussion related to women Sufi mystics in previous chapter.
19 See previous discussion of these concepts in Chapter 3.
20 Roland Barthes develops the notions of the ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts across
a corpus of works; see especially S/Z, 1970, Hill & Wang.
21 Mirza Ghalib, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/naqsh-fariyaadii-hai-
kis-kii-shokhi-e-tahriir-kaa-mirza-ghalib-ghazals
22 ‘In Iran there is the custom that the seeker of justice [daad-;xvaah], putting on
paper garments, goes before the ruler-- as in the case of lighting a torch in the
day, or carrying a blood-soaked cloth on a bamboo pole [to protest an injus-
tice]. Thus the poet reflects, of whose mischievousness of writing is the image
a plaintiff? --since the aspect of a picture is that its garment is of paper. That
is to say, although existence may be like that of pictures, merely notional
[i((tibaar-e ma;ha.z], it is a cause of grief and sorrow and suffering.’ (Frances
Pritchett: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/001/1_01.
html)

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23 Siraj Aurangabadi, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/couplets/mustaid-huun-

tire-zulfon-kii-siyaahii-le-kar-siraj-aurangabadi-couplets
24 See Faruqi (1999, 3). An equivalent notion of the belief in the world as illusion
is found in the Hindu philosophical tradition of maya.
25 Tazkirah – a selection of poems by a poet or group of poets.
26 Frances Pritchett mentions some that did concern themselves with women poets.
For details, see Pritchett (1994: 66).
27 Mah Laqa Bai, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/aalam-tirii-nigah-
se-hai-sarshaar-dekhnaa-mah-laqa-chanda-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&
lang=ur
28 See Vanita (2004: 17–19); chapat, chapti and chapatbazi are variant forms of
the term ‘pressed flat’ and suggest female homosexual acts; dogana refers to one
part of a pair or a double and is used to indicate a lesbian lover.
29 See endnote 5 above.
30 Mirza Ghalib, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/naved-e-amn-hai-
bedaad-e-dost-jaan-ke-liye-mirza-ghalib-ghazals (accessed July 7, 2021).

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Delhi: Director Qaumi Council Bara-e-farogh-e-Urdu Zaban, p. 382. https://
www.rekhta.org/ebooks/kulliyat-e-siraj-siraj-aurangabadi-ebooks-2
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/ Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche.
Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. 1999. ‘Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu
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Journal of South Asian Literature, 19 (2): 111–127.
Green, Nile. 2010. ‘The Propriety of Poetry: Morality and Mysticism in the
Nineteenth Century Urdu Religious Lyric’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 13 (3):
299–314.
Hashmi, Shadab Zeest. 2017. ‘Ghazal Cosmopolitan’, World Literature Today, 91
(3–4): 22–26.
Haywood, John A. 1964. ‘Wali Dakhani and the Development of Dakhani-Urdu sufi
Poetry’, Acta Orientalia, 28: 153–174.
Islam, Khurshid and Ralph Russell. 1991. Three Mughal Poets: Mir Sauda Mir
Hasan. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kidwai S. and R. Vanita. 2000. ‘Rekhti Poetry: Love between Women (Urdu)’, in
Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex Love in India. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-05480-7_28
Kugle, Scott. 2010. ‘Mah Laqa Bai and Gender: The Language, Poetry, and
Performance of a Courtesan in Hyderabad’, Comparative Studies of South Asia,
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Kugle, Scott. 2016. When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros, and Ecstasy in Urdu
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Malamud, Margaret. 1996. ‘Gender and Spiritual Self-Fashioning: The Master-

Disciple Relationship in Classical Sufism’, Journal of the American Academy of
Religion, 64 (1): 89–117.
Manuel, Peter. 1988/89. ‘A Historical Survey of the Urdu gazal-song in India’, Asian
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Mukhia, Harbans. 1999. ‘The Celebration of Failure as Dissent in Urdu Ghazal’,
Modern Asian Studies, 33 (4): 861–881.
Naim, C.M. 2001. ‘Transvestic Words?: The Rekhti in Urdu’, Annual of Urdu
Studies, 16, Part I: 3–26.
Narang, Gopi Chand. 1989. ‘A Critical Perspective: The Impact of Islamic Mysticism
on Urdu Poetry’, Indian Literature, 32, (2 (130)): 155–170.
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Petievich, Carla. 2001a. ‘Gender Politics and the Urdu Ghazal: Exploratory
Observations on Rekhta versus Rekhti’, Indian Economic Social History Review,
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CA: University of California Press.
Pritchett, Frances W. 2003. ‘“The Straw that I Took in My Teeth”: Of Lovers,
Beloveds, and Charges of Sexism in the Urdu Ghazal’, Manushi, 136: 31–34.
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 6
TRAVELING WITH THE GHAZAL
A transnational feminist aesthetic

In Perso-Indic elaborations of the ghazal, the genre’s etymological origins in

‘speaking to women’ emerged largely in the form of a monologue directed by
a male lover towards an inaccessible hyper-feminized beloved, a relationship
that brought into question the gendered power dynamics at play in the ghazal’s
love discourse. These representations prompted inquiry into the nature of the
gendered positions occupied by the central figures of the ghazal even as they
unveiled the genre’s infinite capacity for inventiveness. Despite its inscription
of fluid and ambiguous gender identities, the rekhta ghazal primarily func-
tioned as the domain of male poets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
barring some noteworthy exceptions, such as Mah Laqa Bai. Turning this
trend in the twentieth century, a number of Urdu poets have explored the
ghazal as a lyrical mode for the representation of expressly woman-centric
positions. Pursuing the trajectory of this literary history to its gendered conse-
quences in the modern era brings us to the question of what happens when it
is not just the ghazal that speaks to women but when women decide to speak
with, and through, the ghazal.
Following the decline of British imperialism that left behind a fragmented,
increasingly sectarian postcolonial map, the ghazal’s capacity to function as
a discursive space for inscribing resistant voices from the margins acquired
a particular appeal in the twentieth century. Among postcolonial and femi-
nist poets, the allure of the ghazal, apart from its popularity as an oral
performative genre, may be ascribed to its capacity to facilitate an engage-
ment with non-conformist, interrogatory sentiment. As we have already
seen, owing to medieval mystic influences, the ghazal exhibits an affinity for
anti-hegemonic iconoclasm alongside a persistent commitment to the un-
decidability of gender as social construct. However, throughout the pre-
modern period, the predominantly patriarchal nature of South Asian
societies ensured that the ghazal’s field of representations continued to
reflect a dominant masculine gaze, the objectification of women’s bodies,
and the marginalization of women’s voices in a largely male-populated lit-
erary universe. Among modern women poets concerned with articulating a
growing gendered self-awareness, these conflicting propensities resulted in
ambivalence towards the genre. While the hesitation led some to favour free

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 T R AV E L I N G W I T H T H E G H A Z A L

forms such as the aazad nazm, others attempted rousing re-inventions to

articulate gendered expressions of dissent as well as of agentic pleasure and
gratification. Further on in this discussion, I examine how the ghazal’s
taghazzul of fluid semantic metaphoricities and ravani offers a fertile realm
for such explorations, presaging alliances with a feminist aesthetic within
the Indian subcontinent and transnationally.
The ghazal’s proclivity to resist any kind of cultural straitjacketing, its
pleasure in discursive playfulness, its fragmented dialogic structure, and its
mazmuns ranging from elaborations of mystical ishq to those of political
dissent offer an uninterrupted literary landscape for contemporary feminist
interventions. These aspects of the ghazal’s aesthetic respond in visceral
ways to feminist aesthetics’ core impulses, as evident in Urdu poetic oeuvre
from South Asia and internationally. Prominent among these impulses is a
resistance against the subjugation of feminine experience1 in art forms, the
articulation of agentic gendered subjectivities from locations of alterity, and
an investigation of the interlinkages between gender and aesthetic expres-
sion. Although not every work of art deemed ‘feminist’ may manifest all of
these aspects, they do continue to inform broad understandings of the term
‘feminist aesthetics’.2
In view of the confrontational positionalities that women are pressed into
within inequitable societies, the exigency to register opposition to systemic
gender inequities and misogynist social norms as well as to wrest gratifica-
tions through the unleashing of suppressed desires has continued to fuel the
pursuit of artistic forms that accommodate these twin needs in contempo-
rary South Asia. The ghazal’s twofold adaptability for engaging with social
discourse through resistance to cultural norms even while generating sen-
sory and sensual literary pleasures – its characteristic lutf – makes it par-
ticularly responsive to these dual needs. The ghazal, as Anisur Rahman
comments in a recent interview, has been ‘a site for romantic-cum mystical
engagements, as also for socio-political discoursing. It has thrived in the
literary domain, as well as in cultural spaces’ (Rahman, March 31, 2019,
interview with Maaz Bin Bilal). That these twin concerns are not confined
to contemporary South Asia is made evident by the attention the genre has
attracted both within the subcontinent, particularly in Pakistan, and in the
post-globalized environs of the US and other Western nations. So as to trace
these aspects of the ghazal’s sojourns within and beyond South Asia, I first
locate the evolution of the Urdu ghazal against the backdrop of the linguis-
tic and literary landscape of the new millennial in the subcontinent before
turning to its transcontinental re-imaginings.

Urdu language and literature in the twentieth century

As discussed previously, Urdu evolved out of osmotic linguistic interchanges
between Farsi (Persian) and Hindi that occurred during the pre-modern his-
tory of the subcontinent. Urdu’s evolution maps a curious plot that

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progresses from its hybrid Indo-Islamic natality to its maturity in an increas-

ingly separatist religio-cultural environment. In the aftermath of anti-impe-
rialist independence movements, the isolationist religious and nationalist
ideologies leading to the subcontinent’s partition effected a mapping of lan-
guages and religions onto national cartographies whose political borders
were demarcated in light of the two-nation theory but whose internal cul-
tural boundaries remained fuzzy and intertwined in multiple ways. One
ramification of the division of India and Pakistan and rising nationalistic
sentiments on both sides of the border was that Urdu, increasingly con-
strued as the ‘language of Muslims’, earned the status of national language
in Pakistan although it continues to be spoken there by only a small minor-
ity relative to other regional languages such as Punjabi and Sindhi (see
Hasan 1988: 107). On the other hand, there are currently many more Urdu
speakers in India than in Pakistan, as noted by C. M. Naim and others.3 As
Christina Oesterheld points out, although Urdu is a second or third lan-
guage for the majority, it is the mother tongue for less than 10 percent of the
population in Pakistan (Oesterheld 2004: 229).
Despite its widespread usage across India, C. M. Naim, one of the fore-
most scholars of Urdu literature, laments that ‘in the states where millions
of Urdu speakers have lived and died for centuries, Urdu has no status, not
even that of a full-fledged second language’ (Naim 1993/1994: 245). It is in
this light that Naim observes, somewhat ruefully, that previous claims about
Urdu as a language of ‘synthesis and harmony’ are no longer tenable (Naim
1993/1994: 245). The peculiar irony of the current status of Urdu in the
subcontinent thus derives from this unique developmental trajectory: its
birth and infancy occurred in the syncretic amalgamation of peoples, their
shared languages and customs, while its adulthood has been spent, at least
to date, in a conflict-ridden history of national and religious separatism that
poses a serious threat to its longevity, particularly in India. The ‘Hindi-Hindu
and Urdu-Muslim analogy’ (Zaidi 2015: 169) has been widely critiqued
given that, notwithstanding the artificially imposed crystallization of Hindi
and Urdu as separate languages and scripts, Hindustani continues to be the
language of the masses (see also Zaidi 2015: 159). Moreover, any attempt to
divide Hindu and Urdu on the basis of religious identities is easily demol-
ished by the plethora of syncretic early modern Urdu and Hindi literary
works produced across the northern provinces. Clearly, religion-based lan-
guage separatism displays a disregard for the diversity that informs South
Asia’s local cultures, as also observed by Sukrita Paul Kumar (see Kumar
1997: 84). A contextualized consideration of Urdu literature thus mandates
attention to the language politics of the postcolonial subcontinent, one that
is undergirded by calculated national, religious and gendered ideologies but
that may be susceptible to deconstruction through an unravelling of deep-
rooted commonalities. Within these circumstances, Urdu came to function,
over a period of time, as both an identifier of separatism and a locus of
counter-interventions and ruptures. As Naim observes, writing in Urdu in

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India is ‘now definitely a political act. It may not empower you much, but it
still lets you assert the fact of your existence. You authorize yourself. In a
time of plagues, that is enough’ (Naim 1993/1994: 246).
Urdu literature of the early twentieth century reflected many of these
changing circumstances. The Progressive Writers of the 1930s and 1940s
marked a turning-away from the primary concerns of the classical ghazal
that had expounded, in highly stylized lyrical detail, the enigmatic charms
of the absent beloved. During the pre-modern period, writers such as
Mohammad Iqbal introduced the notion of khudi (selfhood) to indicate a
growing assertion of self-assured post-imperialist cultural identities, mark-
ing a shift towards an altered political consciousness often informed by
Marxist and socialist perspectives (see also Kumar 1997; Rahman 1998).
With the onset of modernism, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Miraji and others broke
new ground in socially responsive poetry without abandoning aesthetic
exactitudes. Faiz, as Rahman observes, ‘believed in Progressive ideology but
he was also quite aware of the exacting demands of art’ and brought a ‘rare
sensitivity towards social responsibility’ (1998: 167). In an increasingly
fractured world divided by Islamic and Hindu ideologies that called for
canonical boundaries between Urdu and Hindi literatures, Faiz became the
uniting voice of ‘authentic human experience salvaging humanity from
offensive and inhuman practices perpetuated in the name of religion, poli-
tics’ (Kumar 1997: 90).
Politics and art began to come together in modernist literature in novel
ways as writers and artists confronted increasing threats to what had per-
haps always been a gingerly sustained pre-modern cultural syncretism. In
the politically transformed context of post-independence years, themes of
‘survival and poverty in the subcontinent, the struggle for expression of the
marginalized, the exploited and the deprived, the stresses of modern life and
the question of the rehabilitation of a whole generation of Partition refu-
gees’ became major concerns in modern Urdu literature (Kumar 1997: 87).
A literature of commitment as envisioned by the Progressive Writers thus
evolved to accommodate postcolonial political and economic realities even
as it expanded its sphere to incorporate Western influences of modernist
schools of thought such as French symbolism, and poets like Miraji drew at
once upon ‘Oriental, American and French sources’ (Rahman 1998: 167).
Mohammad Hasan delineates two distinct ideological processes and lit-
erary idioms that marked progressive and modernist writings in the early
twentieth century: ‘The progressive idiom was represented by poems of pro-
test and writings of wider social perspective while the Modernist idiom
created a literature of symbolism, tortured fragmentation of self and a new
suggestive diction’ (1988: 111). In light of these contrary pulls exerted on
the Urdu writer – that of social commitment on the one hand and aesthetic
autonomy on the other, what Hasan identifies as ‘the non-commitment of
literature to ideology’ (1988: 111) – the ghazal can be seen as playing a
unique and significant role as it exerts no such exclusive demands on the

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modern poet. Rather, the ghazal presented an aesthetic field that welcomed a
concurrent commitment to matters of aesthetic form and to mazmuns that
abjured or interrogated narrow ideological constructs as made evident in its
prior trajectory. Because of its progressive legacy, the ghazal’s thematic rubric
could accommodate idioms of protest ranging from anti-imperialist national-
ist aspirations to an impatience with narrow identitarianism. At the same
time, it was the quintessential genre for elaborating upon the pleasures of
artful speech – of metaphoricity and its extended semantic and lexical delights
achieved through a rich nexus of imagery, wordplay and polyvalence. Because
the ghazal expresses both discontentment with dogma of any kind and delight
in creativity and invention, its re-purposing to modern postcolonial and femi-
nist concerns could evolve as a matter of organic progression.

Women and Urdu language and literature: a fraught

relationship
It is against this background of an already-fraught relationship between
language and postcolonial identity that the relationship between women
and Urdu language and literature acquires a specific dynamic in the Indian
subcontinent, a situation made more thorny given women’s unequal access
to Urdu.4 Many women were deprived of formal education in Urdu, tradi-
tionally considered the language of urban educated elites. As noted in the
previous chapter, during the evolution of Urdu in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, ‘women’s dialect’ or auraton ki boli commonly employed
in the domestic sphere and in local contexts was considered far less presti-
gious than the literary rekhta of intellectuals and writers most of whom
were male. This hierarchical gendering of Urdu linguistic registers led to
the denigration of auraton ki boli and its mockery by some male poets,
especially through rekhti verse. As Oesterheld argues, women’s dialect,
also referred to as begumati zuban, was associated primarily with lower-
class women and ‘deemed unfit for men’ (2004: 219). Thus, the Urdu reg-
ister commonly employed by educated, upper-class men in the public
sphere came to represent a source of empowerment for women (see also
Oesterheld 2004: 221). Diverging from the suggestion made by Ruth
Vanita5 and others for a reconsideration of rekhti as a suppressed register
of women’s authentic expression, Oesterheld proposes that any ‘negative
evaluation of the suppression of women’s language’ needs to be nuanced in
light of its limited sphere of use. Access to standardized Urdu implied
admittance to its associated socio-cultural privileges as well as to its rich
literary treasures. Understandably, for many women, Urdu came to present
an avenue of liberation from a constricted private sphere and the opportu-
nity to intervene in the prestigious wide-reaching literary discourse hith-
erto dominated by men. Thus, it is not surprising that many women writers
in the early part of the twentieth century, including well-known figures like
Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Haider, turned to Urdu as a primary mode

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of literary expression, given the language’s ability to surpass the confines of

the domestic chardivari.
Paradoxically, where rekhta verse had historically marginalized women’s
voices, it came to be deployed, in modern times, for accessing emancipatory
opportunities to overcome gendered oppression and for reconstituting gen-
dered positions and perspectives. However, the complicated nature of post-
colonial language politics made this task arduous. Where on the one hand,
women found themselves disenfranchised in terms of access to formal edu-
cation in Urdu, on the other, in the aftermath of British colonialism in South
Asia, Urdu (like Hindi and other indigenous languages) was marginalized
by the privileging of English as the language of the rulers. In many instances,
therefore, the practice of writing in Urdu, Hindi or other regional languages
became a political choice for registering opposition to a colonizing dis-
course and for self-empowerment through ‘one’s own language’. Ironically,
in this case, Urdu or ‘one’s own language’ was still one that women were
trying to make their own as they confronted dual imperialist and gendered
oppressions. Taking into account these historical and cultural contexts from
the perspective of Pakistani women writers, Asma Mansoor and Najeeba
Arif encourage a reconsideration of Urdu language ‘as an empowering
space pushed to the periphery by the British colonial master whose lan-
guage of power was English’ and assert that it needs to be ‘re-thought as an
agentive space’ (2016: 131). Any consideration of the ghazal’s emancipa-
tory feminist possibilities must consequently take into account the postco-
lonial trajectory of Urdu’s cultural and gendered intricacies.

Indigeneity and syncretic cosmopolitanism

The notion of ‘language ownership’ extended to literary and cultural dis-
courses, a phenomenon that signalled one inward-turned effect of newly
constructed postcolonial nationalities. In this scenario, literary genres such
as the qawwali and ghazal, viewed as ‘belonging’ to South Asian nations
and cultures, came to function as effective means for assertive cultural
expression through indigeneity. The qawwali and ghazal play an intriguing
role in discourses of cultural representation within South Asia since they at
once represent a composite subcontinental literary rubric that defies narrow
boundaries of nation, religion and language even as they manifest a ‘differ-
ence’ from Western literary traditions.
As a popular form of poetry recited or sung during mushairas, the ghazal
is embedded in a deep-rooted performative South Asian tradition that, over
the centuries, has finessed collective oratory and participatory capabilities
across the northern regions of Pakistan and India, a geo-politically divided
area that shares an ancient cultural and literary history. Based on the signifi-
cance of the qawwali and ghazal as genres that constitute a common emo-
tive cultural discourse across the subcontinent, Narang and Matthews
argue that ‘it is necessary to take into account aspects of the

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composite nature of Indo-Islamic society, of the shared culture of the sub-

continent and of all that the Indian Muslims and non-Muslims have in
common’ and to consider their ‘shared aesthetic taste’ in poetry and music
(2014: 161). One significant aspect of this shared aesthetic is the centrality
accorded to reception, in particular to the rapturous effects of performative
art on the audience, whose emotive comportment Narang and Matthews
characterize as a unique feature of the ‘Indian temperament’ (Narang and
Matthews 2014: 162). Unlike the Kantian ‘disinterestedness’ essential to the
valuation of art in classical Western aesthetics, the rousing of emotion in the
performative traditions of South Asia is deeply imbricated in judgments of
literary and artistic excellence publicly communicated through the lauding
of the artist by a vocal and ‘moved’ audience. In public performances of the
ghazal and the qawwali, one of the primary tools for stimulating aesthetic
pleasure through the stirring of emotion is the initiation of an ideal ambi-
ence, that of sama’. In more intimate surroundings, sama’ may be promoted
not only through a brilliant performance but also through a relaxing envi-
ronment of soothing fragrances, floral decor, wine, comfortable seating,
like-minded participants and accomplished musicians. In such circum-
stances, the inextricability of the ghazal from its musical renderings cannot
be underestimated since music is used in public performances to enhance
the melodic ravani of the ghazal and to transport the audience to an ‘other’
plane.
Besides music’s influence in shaping affect, its significance is augmented
through its role in transcending national and religious divides and fore-
grounding shared cultural contiguities. In this context, Ananya Kabir pro-
poses that music’s affect stems from ‘“structures of feeling” that transmit
the somatics of memory and belonging across generations’ (2004: 183). In
the specific context of the Punjab region where the qawwali and the ghazal
have been popular genres, often set to musical renditions, Kabir proffers
Punjabi music as a ‘transnational postmemory’ that allows Punjabis on
both sides of the border divided by the ‘mutual illegibility’ of their scripts
(Gurmukhi in Indian Punjab and Shahmukhi or Persian script in Pakistani
Punjab) to recognize their common culture through the music they share
(2004: 183). Music thus offers, according to Kabir, a ‘non-violent cosmo-
politan alternative to radical separatist politics’ (2004: 180). That this non-
sectarian tradition is still very much alive in the Punjab region may be
evidenced by the revival of Faiz’s ghazals6 in public demonstrations in India
and in the singing of women’s boliyan and various other forms of Punjabi
music deployed to express anti-establishment sentiments during the 2020–
2021 farmers’ protests.7 The unique effects to which music from the Punjab
has been recently deployed in this movement offers what B. Venkat Mani
aptly terms ‘a blazing alphabet of hope’8 (Mani 2021).
As genres that have evolved into a long-standing composite repository of
Islamic and Hindu literary symbolism, the ghazal and the qawwali manifest
a syncretic cultural ethos that reflects the conjoining of Sufi and Bhakti

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mysticism. Zaidi observes that the ghazal ‘exposes the illegitimacy of

appropriation of literary traditions by territorially defined, identity-cen-
tric, essentialist political discourses’ (2015: 170). Rejecting narrow ideo-
logical confines, the ghazal exhibits an inherent cosmopolitanism that
speaks to interrogations of the relationship between power and identity in
its varied forms, including those steeped in gendered, religious and cultural
identifications.
One manifestation of this cosmopolitanism may be evidenced through
the social role of the mushaira. Based on his study of mushairas in Varanasi,
Christopher Lee foregrounds the contemporary mushaira as an inclusive
public space that eschews communalism and that brings together poets
across religion, community, class or gender (Lee 2013: 217). Thus, the mus-
haira creates an ideal ambience for creating a sense of shared ‘real and
imagined communities’ to which the audience ‘wants to belong—or sees
itself as already belonging’ (2013: 216). Lee’s argument that the ghazal uni-
verse enables a shift from the individual to the social self, an expansion of
‘the idea of poet-lover (I) to one of community (we)’ (2013: 221), forefronts
the ghazal’s ability to encompass larger political concerns beyond the per-
sonal/mystical concerns of unrequited love. In keeping with this adaptabil-
ity, the concept of the beloved may shift from the figure of the absent,
unavailable wo/man to an ethically informed ideological position such as
‘an abstract theory or belief’, ‘socialist revolution or economic justice’, ‘an
ideology or even God’ (Lee 2013: 224).
The re-figuring of the beloved in the shape of a passion-infused anti-
hegemonic ideological position can be seen as a significant development
from the perspective of women poets searching for resistive and assertive
modes of gendered expressions in twentieth-century South Asia. The
ghazal’s popularity as an oral genre made it an effective tool for the collec-
tive articulation of common concerns just as its symbolic fields expanded to
encompass mazmuns dealing with issues of postcolonial national, cultural
and gendered freedoms. The ghazal’s capacity to combine the literary with
the political through its emphasis on the conjoining of metaphor and fact
makes it virtually impossible to extricate one from the other. This, coupled
with the widespread popularity of publicly performed mushairas, lends to
the ghazal aesthetic a powerful, transformative revolutionary energy.
Although mushairas tend to be male-dominated public forums, women
have gradually made inroads into these events. As Rukhsana Ahmad opines
in the context of Pakistani women’s poetry,

poetry in Urdu is not the exclusive property of the cultural élite.

Poetry readings, or mushai’ras, are an established and popular
convention for Urdu speakers and attract many people who may
not otherwise view themselves as “literary” or who may not be in
the habit of buying books. As some of this poetry is also set to
music and sung, its use for political influence cannot be

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underestimated. … Pakistani women are now using this conven-

tion too, consciously and effectively.
(Ahmad 1990: 18)

It is thus not difficult to see how Pakistani feminist poets, in their attempts
to reconfigure lived realities through aesthetic expression, came to discover
particular resonances in the ghazal form which responds in multifaceted
ways to anti-oppressive aspirations without abandoning its pursuit of liter-
ary pleasures. As an interventionary mode, the ghazal combined a non-
conformist social and political consciousness with an unflinching pursuit of
literary delight – a lutf in the highly stylized art of meaning-making and
metaphor-making.

Transgressing the hudd: feminist Urdu poetry in Pakistan

The deployment of Urdu poetry as a mode of feminist resistance in Pakistan
acquires particular significance in the circumstances created by the Hudood
ordinances passed in 1979 under the military regime of General Zia-ul-
Haque. Deriving from the root ‘hadd’ or ‘limit’, the term Hudood refers to
the prescription of maximum limits and penalties for specific offenses fixed
under Sharia law. One of the four Hudood ordinances pertaining to zina
included laws regarding rape and adultery and was particularly biased
against women. Lines between adultery (zina) and rape (zina bil Jabr)
remained fuzzy; rape victims were doubly victimized as they were required
to produce four credible male witnesses in their defence. Punishment for
adultery included death by stoning and was occasionally used against
defenceless women arbitrarily accused of adultery. According to Arshad
Hashmi, this period of extreme oppression and victimization of women
‘heralded the beginning of a nationwide awakening among women’ (Hashmi
2014: 7). The Women’s Action Forum and other organizations took up legal
cudgels and activist rebellions against the Hudood laws, leading to a new
version of the Shariat bill in 1991. The new bill, aimed at the Islamization
of Pakistani society, promised women’s rights under the constitution, but
various aspects of the bill, especially those relating to education and defini-
tions of ‘obscene’ behaviour, continue to be biased against women. In 2006,
under President Musharraf, an amendment to the Hudood Ordinance was
passed that offered women additional protection without repealing the
original ordinance and without addressing the structural ‘gender apartheid’
that had become endemic in Pakistani society (Hashmi 2014: 8).
In these circumstances, Urdu poetry written by women in the latter part
of the twentieth century came to operate as a discourse that spanned
boundaries of the literary and the political and refused the hadd between
the two. Pakistani women poets, according to Oesterheld, were able to
‘profit from the popularity of Urdu poetry recitals and from the rich tradi-
tion of Urdu poetry as a means of agitprop’ (2004: 229) and deploy it as

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an emancipatory tool. Notably, a number of Pakistani women poets, includ-

ing Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riaz, were also active participants in the
women’s movement and in advocacy for women’s rights, so that the female
predicament in modern Islamic society appears as a dominant thematic
rubric in their poetry. Themes relating to an interrogation of notions of
shame (sharm) and honour (izzat), stoning of women under the Hudood
law, veiling (chadur/purdah), gender segregation through the chadur aur
chardivari9 campaign, and the interrogation of the conflation of women’s
bodies with those of the nation recur in their poems. In 1994, Rukhsana
Ahmad’s watershed collection We Sinful Women brought together many of
these feminist voices, including Kishwar Naheed, Fahmida Riaz, Ishrat
Aafreen, Sara Shagufta and Zehra Nigah. According to Anisur Rahman,
they appeared on the international stage with a large community of women
poets (including Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich) ‘who believed
in confession, negation, protest and confident individualism’ (1998: 168).
The advent of a feminist aesthetic in Urdu poetry witnessed, alongside this
resistive discourse, a consecutive process of the re-invention of the female
psyche and a recuperation of feminist creative expression through women’s
agency over their lives, their bodies and their erotic pleasures. Adapting to
these parallel impulses, the ghazal’s dialogic architecture and its plastic
semanticity offered a fitting terrain for the elaboration of gendered insur-
gency and for the re-invention of altered feminine subjectivities.

Re-purposing the ghazal towards a feminist aesthetic of

protest and reclamation
One of the aspects that renders the ghazal amenable to a modern re-purpos-
ing is its semantic porousness generated by a rapprochement between meta-
phor and reality. This permeability may be detected in the pre-modern Sufi
conjoining of earthly and otherworldly love – ‘ishq-i mijazi and ‘ishq-i haq-
iqi – just as much as in the gendered ambiguity and the mortal/divine confu-
sion shrouding the figure of the beloved that also blankets various other
associated images and symbols through operations of double entendre. The
ghazal’s porousness lends to it a liquescent quality manifested not merely
through the ravani of its melodic flowing patterns but equally through its
metonymic imagery. Even though its stock images operate within rigorously
upheld formal strictures, they display a tendency to exceed these bounds by
encouraging and accruing multiple interpretations. Since the ghazal’s meta-
phors (“isti‘arah) are amenable to nuancing and re-contouring, the ghazal’s
suppleness of meaning enables the expression of women’s diverse, altered
subjective locations. Consequently, postcolonial feminist poets were able to
expand the ghazal’s elastic semantic fields for re-imagining gendered rela-
tionalities in a modern context.
Comparable aspects of non-teleological fluidity and openness, empha-
sized in elaborations of French feminine discourse in the late twentieth

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century, have found reverberations in South Asian literary and critical dis-
course. For instance, Mansoor and Arif draw upon Luce Irigaray’s work to
locate Pakistani women’s writing in Urdu on the side of a fluidity and
‘liquidity’ that unsettles the stringency of dominant masculist culture,
describing it in terms of the woman writer’s rapturous entry into the domain
of ‘male’ Urdu language (see Mansoor and Arif 2016: 140–141). According
to Mansoor and Arif, a woman writing in Urdu ‘proclaims the fluidity of
her constitution, in a manner that segues from Irigaray’s who argues that in
the social syntax, solidity is equated with masculinity while a woman and
her exiled, sinuous desires are fluid’ (2016: 140–141). They further argue
that ‘through the articulation of their mutability, Pakistani women writers
undermine the solidity of the masculine discourse, be it in Urdu or in
English. In speaking the supposed language of the male, they make it preg-
nable’ (Mansoor and Arif 2016: 141). Notwithstanding the essentialist
overtones of such gendered binaries, the transcontinental cross-pollination
of feminist theoretical perspectives on women’s writing does foreground
certain attributes of lyrical language, such as discursive porousness, that
may be hospitable for disturbing established gendered conventions in writ-
ing and literature. I propose that the genre of the ghazal, with its inherent
porosity and liquescent fields of meaning, facilitates the exploration of
transgressive conceptualizations of gender beyond rigid culturally received
models. Since the ghazal’s aesthetic emphasizes the instability of identity
with the help of literary devices such as indirection, multivalence and
semantic contingency, it shores up efforts to interrogate the ‘solid’ impreg-
nability of regulatory norms and to rupture the speciousness of immobi-
lized gendered identities configured by such norms.
The figure of the beloved in the classical ghazal offers one such locus for
the deconstruction of its ‘con-figuration’. Largely preserved through the
genre’s literary history as a pivotal site of hyperbolic femininity, the beloved
appeared on the ghazal landscape as an unattainable creature whose semi-
divine brilliance served as the guiding post for the lover’s lamentations of
gham. Often objectified through the fragmentation of her anatomy, an
exaggerated form of which may be identified in sarapa10 verse, the beloved
was kept interred under layers of symbolic imagery in the ghazal tradition
that sustained her/his association with divinity. Corporeal imagery employed
to idealize physical features, such as the comparison of eyes to the moon
and of lips to rosebuds, succeeded in rendering the beloved into a fe/male
figure of rare beauty and an object of male homo/erotic adoration. Gendered
indeterminacy enveloped the love object, who alternated as homoerotic
young man and female beloved in the literary canon of the ghazal, just as
much as it worked to destabilize the nature of ‘masculinity’ through the
notion of the failed lover.
A process of re-gendering through the foregrounding of contingency is
thus a crucial element of the ghazal’s epistemological stance towards ques-
tions of identity. This process resulted in exaggerating the illusoriness of the

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hyperbolic figures of the ghazal, including that of the male lover whose
feminized persona laid bare the absence of conventional ‘manhood’ in the
ghazal universe. As observed by Nuzhat Abbas, ‘real men’, ‘alarmingly, seem
nowhere to be found’ in this world within which the notion of gender
appears susceptible to ‘contamination’ (Abbas 1999: 145). An excess of
‘femininity’ anchored in the beloved and the figure of the hypersensitive
lover, the interrogation of ‘manliness’ through the inverted positing of fail-
ure in affirmative modes, and the problematization of gender through
hyperbole and artifice all added to a dubiousness towards the immutability
of gender and form the bedrock of the ghazal’s aesthetic.
The epistemic contingency that enabled an interrogation of ‘ideal man-
hood’ in the cultural environs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
came to provide, in the new millennium, a well-appointed space for inter-
rogating norms of femininity imposed upon women. Thus, in Urdu ghazals
penned by some Pakistani feminist poets, a re-imagined subjectivity emerges
in diverse shapes – as a concealed inside girl at the edge of a feminist con-
sciousness, a latent empowered self who discovers her own sensuality, a
community of women, a woman who finds her ‘beloved’ within herself, or
a poet who finds pleasure in a new ‘feminine’ ghazal.
Notwithstanding this capaciousness, the ghazal’s evolution over two pre-
ceding centuries within a male-dominated literary canon offers a caveat
against the assumption of an unproblematic affinity with feminist perspec-
tives. While gender remained a slippery concept throughout the ghazal’s
pre-modern history, the conformist design of gendered relationality rein-
forced a traditional prototype that immobilised ‘women’ within over-
wrought representations effected by male erotic/spiritual desire. Interrupting
this trend, twentieth-century women’s poetry in Urdu re-purposes the
ghazal form by detouring its insurgent legacy towards an altered gendered
relationality. Mansoor and Arif summarize this shift as follows:

In the Urdu poetry of contemporary Pakistani women writers, man

is made to reconsider his masculinity and a woman’s femininity at
the same time, without privileging either. This further induces a
deflection in the system of relationality through which both gen-
ders constitute themselves and each other.
(2016: 140)

Settling on an unequivocal feminine positionality, Ishrat Aafreen, Fahmida

Riaz, Kishwar Naheed and others posit a defiant and agentic female narrative
voice to reclaim the pleasures of a transformed gendered consciousness.

Ishrat Aafreen
Ishrat Aafreen is known both for her stylistic conformity to the traditional
ghazal form (occasionally viewed as ‘archaic’) and for her rebellious spirit

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stemming from identification with a legacy of progressive poets, including

Iqbal and Faiz (see Ahmad 26). Defending the selection of poets included in
her edited collection We Sinful Women, Rukhsana Ahmad describes Ishrat
Aafreen as the ‘most literary of the poets in this collection’ (1990: 26).
Aafreen deploys to maximum advantage the ghazal’s dialogic form of
contrasting positions across two mishras, what David Caplan calls its ‘argu-
mentative structure’ (Caplan 2004: 119), to counter past (masculist) with
present (feminist) ways of seeing, to undermine images of feminine depen-
dency and to initiate long-overdue reparations. In these efforts, the tensions
generated by the polarities of the ghazal form are modulated to accommo-
date articulations of dissention as well as of pleasure.
Aafreen excels in re-deploying the hyperbolic feminine of the classical
ghazal to locate for herself a new selfhood, or khudi, in the tradition of her
predecessor, Iqbal, with whom she shares a special affinity. During the anti-
imperialist struggle across the Indian subcontinent, Iqbal had once famously
exhorted11 his compatriots to stand brave and tall in their khudi, so much
so that even God would be compelled to invite his slave to decide his own
fate. In Aafreen’s verse, the khudi that characterized Iqbal’s early modern
progressive poetry is transmuted into a sense of female selfhood through
the term ‘ana’. Aafreen re-invents khudi into a different political entity that
resonates with women shackled by patriarchy; her ana – a term that exceeds
the ‘ego’ suggested by khudi – conjures up an affirmative sense of self-
esteem. For instance, the word ‘kabile’ (wandering tribe) juxtaposed with
‘ana’ and ‘saffaq’ (ruthless/ harsh) in the phrase ‘ana ke kabile ke saffaq
ladki’ suggests an uncompromising aspect cultivated by the self-reliant, itin-
erant girl who has daringly transgressed patriarchal bounds and surmounted
the emotional distance that allows her to champion a cherished inaccessibil-
ity – ‘teri dastaras se bahut dur hai’ (Aafreen cited in Ahmad 1991: 142).

This ruthless girl

from the tribe of Ego
roams far from the bounds
of your lands.12

If it was unseemly for God’s slave to have a mind of his own, it is much
more unsettling when his female population decides to have one too.
Writing from within the tradition established by someone of as grand a
stature as Iqbal, Aafreen strategically locates feminist awareness at the heart
of revolutionary thought and at the core of the ghazal of dissent. In this
way, her ghazals both extend and contest the literary tradition of Urdu
shaayerie to which she explicitly owes her poetic allegiances.
In Aafreen’s ghazal translated below, the word ‘girl’ repeated at the end
of every couplet draws the reader’s attention to both the vulnerability and
the pent-up strength of an ‘inside girl’, a veiled internal ego nurtured and
tended to by the spirit but still hesitant to reveal herself in full view:

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‘Inside me is this delicate girl

of strange feeling and stranger passion, this girl

Not for nothing these bloodied hands

From hard stone I chiselled a girl

Thoughtful she stands in Aazar’s home

With wounded hands, that’s Aazar’s girl

When Self was lost, she cringed, then died

So tender was this inside girl

You name me guilty artist though

This art mine, nor I Aazar’s girl

Scattered she lies and broken, broken

Curls up her petals and cowers, this girl

The mansion owners of course wanted

that the girl of the house remain a family girl’13

The Aazar of Ishrat Aafreen’s poems is also to be found in Muhammad

Iqbal’s poetry but with very different repercussions however. Aazar, the
father of Abraham or Ibrahim, was a sculptor and a trader in idols and was
hounded by the keepers of the Islamic faith for the crime of idolatry. In a
famous poem ‘Jawab-i-Shikvah’, Iqbal complains that we are left with only
the likes of Aazar and his idolatrous progeny instead of Ibrahim, the god-
fearing one.14 Aafreen, however, moulds her secret self in the image of
Aazar’s daughter, the gifted girl who sculpts her words/poems into citadels,
to pay homage to a heretical ancestor. The poet or shaayar has an edge over
the sculptor for, unlike Aazar, she can make and unmake realities and claim
and deny accountability within the architectural framework of the ghazal.
These contradictions are concretized and reconciled through the image of
the narrator’s bleeding hands (from the work of chiselling her selfhood) and
her denial of any relationship to her sculptor forefather.
Forced to submerge her innermost desires, the female psyche in Aafreen’s
poetry becomes a house surrounded by a series of walls, each veiling a
younger and carefully defended identity. Like Chinese dolls, the girl who
lives inside the girl keeps her selfhood intact, biding her time. The scaffold-
ing provided by the ghazal’s prosodic conventions offers a perfect architec-
tural form for such entombments. Within ‘archaic’ structural designs,
however, a swift re-vitalizing of worn-out imagery and mazmuns is at work.
Prosodic rules are put to service in the subversion of overused interpreta-
tions, resulting in acute effects. Quintessential images of the Persian garden
landscape, including those of flowers, birds, candles and veils, are furnished

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with novel metonymic associations in a rewoven literary tapestry where

they come to suggest the blossoming of a feminine consciousness, flights of
freedom, scorching passions and veiled inner selves. Mirror images of a Perso-
Indic paradise are invoked by the poet who deliberately retains literary asso-
ciations with a bygone tradition but centres the feminine subject as the agentic
speaking-voice. As expressed by Neluka Silva, ‘Within the ornate style of con-
ceits and hyperbole of the conventional ghazal, Aafreen underlines the pathos
of the female predicament’ (Silva 2003: 33). Aafreen’s inventive explorations
of the ghazal form serve to reinforce the notion, as previously signposted by
Francis Pritchett, that the ghazal can prove as welcoming to women as it has
been to men in bygone eras (see Pritchett 2003: 34).
The rekhta voice is abandoned in favour of an explicitly female speaker
made evident in the gendered verb endings. It is apparent that the feminist
poetic consciousness at work here has traversed a great distance from rekh-
ta’s focus on the male lover’s exaggerated sagas of ishq and gham, just as
much as it has from rekhti’s infamous deriding of female bodies. In lieu of
the crazed lover’s dogged pursuit of his evanescent ‘rose’ and ‘nightingale’,
both of whom had remained trapped in a charmed masculist paradise, the
mazmun of ishq is now turned on its head – the woman-narrator pursues
her own hidden self, an ‘inside girl’ whose shadow continues to haunt many
of Aafreen’s poems.
Elsewhere, Aafreen employs the disjointed form of the ghazal, with
loosely linked autonomous she‘rs, to express the schism between a literary
and cultural history that trapped women in a false idealization and a pres-
ent in which a revolutionary feminist idiom is forged.

maiñ phuul pull safar kar rahī thī ḳhvāboñ kā

phuvār laa.ī thī tohfa na.e gulāboñ kā

I wandered through dreams full of flowers

And brought an offering of rose-petal showers

mile to qurb kā vo e'timād hī na rahā

bhalā thā us se to mausam vahī hijāboñ kā

In encounter friendship’s faith was gone

Sweeter that season of veils now gone

vo zaḳhm chun ke mire ḳhaar mujh meñ chhoḌ gayā

ki us ko shauq thā be-intihā gulāboñ kā

My wounds he measured, then pierced with thorns

So immeasurable was his passion for roses

vo jañgaloñ se nikāle hue g̣harīb parind

jahāñ ga.e unheñ maskan milā uqāboñ kā

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Those hapless birds exiled from their forests

At every flight, they found hawks in their nests

har ek pūchhtā phirtā hai phir na kuchh ta.abīr

ki jaise shahr meñ melā thā raat ḳhvāboñ kā

Each one wanders in search of veiled meanings

As though the city last night was a festival of dreams

maiñ jo bhī kuchh huuñ ye sachchā.ī merī apnī hai

tamām jhuuT thā likkhā huā kitāboñ kā

Whatever I am now this truth is mine

All else was a lie imprinted in reams.15

Above, for instance, the opening she‘r or matla announces a stark rever-
sal of the ghazal tradition: the Persian beloved-as-rose has arrogated the
right to explore the meanings of her own dream-abounding pleasure-gar-
den. The female narrator appears as a harbinger of ‘gifts’ who bequeaths to
her audience the ghazal’s bouquet of she‘rs, a ‘shower’ of exquisite roses
that sets the frame of reference for the ensuing she‘rs. The conventional
terms of romantic ishq are ineradicably transformed. The sexual/mystical
union with the beloved – that much-sought-after visaal of a bygone era –
has lost its promise of a trustworthy companionship leaving only a regret
for a past ‘season of veils’ and memories of a time when credible love stories
induced imagined pleasures. In a subsequent she‘r, the bruised and mauled
female body undoes the frailty of the classic metaphor of the beloved-as-
rose whose beauty formerly pierced the lover like thorns and who is here
transmuted into the recipient of piercing wounds. The revivified metaphor
of the exiled bird searching for shelter in a threatening universe of vultures
appears in striking contrast to the ubiquitous seductive and mesmerizing
nightingale of the erstwhile ghazal universe. Finally, the maqta inverts the
dream–reality polarity through a reference to the fiction (kitabon/‘books’)
of a male literary canon. It is evident that this ‘treasury’ of knowledge has
failed to offer women anything other than a self-destructive past and a pres-
ent full of un-interpreted dreams. In such a scenario, the woman poet’s
creative agency is the only truth worth sustaining. Through each of its suc-
cessive she‘rs, Aafreen’s ghazal lays bare an illusory past to arrive at a plea-
sure in re-writing women’s own narratives.
Echoes of regret for a lost past and the recognition that women’s ideal-
ization occurred at the expense of their freedom may also be traced in
Urdu poetry by other twentieth-century Pakistani feminist poets. In the
ghazals of Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed, as in the case of Aafreen, a
lamenting narratorial voice turns inwards to re-emerge as a revolutionary
call for agency.

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Fahmida Riaz
According to Rukhsana Ahmad, Fahmida Riaz is known for forging a
poetry in the ‘living language’ of ‘peasants and workers’ and her poems
‘resonate with music’ (Ahmad 1990: 23–24). Although her later poems are
written in free verse, this musical resonance is particularly evident in some
of her early ghazals. Riaz employs an undecorated, conversational idiom to
re-write the ghazal’s antiquated but familiar images of love, romance and
separation. Here, the female subject is no longer overwhelmed by the
demand to quench male lust, his ‘thirst’ for her body. As we see in the exam-
ples below, the narratorial voice searches for life-affirming love in the
‘wreckage’ of modern patriarchy and confronts mortality in a ‘fistful’ of
dust. In place of idealized ishq, a gendered awareness emerges. Although
dejection and disillusionment form a familiar thematic bedrock, Riaz’s
ghazals do not always end on a note of utter despair. Ultimately, the oppres-
sive shadow that subjugated women in the past is throttled by someone
who lives within, a familiar sister to Aafreen’s ‘inside girl’ – a ‘devil’ or per-
haps a ‘god’.

kis se ab ārzū-e-vasl kareñ

is ḳharābe meñ koī mard kahāñ16

Who now will satisfy that desire for union

This wreckage has left no sign of men

sarāb huuñ maiñ tirī pyaas kyā bujhā.ūñgī

is ishtiyāq se tishna zabāñ qarīb na lā17

A mirage am I, I will not quench your thirst

Stay that craving tongue, don’t bring your lust so close
….

jise maiñ toḌ chukī huuñ vo raushnī kā tilism

shuā-e-nūr-e-azal ke sivā kuchh aur na thā18

That bright spell I shattered of radiance

Was nothing more than an eternal brilliance

patthar se visāl māñgtī huuñ

maiñ ādamiyoñ se kaT ga.ī huuñ

To stones I turn for passion

So severed I am from men

̣
shāyad pā.ūñ surāgh-e-ulfat
muTThī meñ ḳhāk-bhar rahī huuñ19

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In search of a clue to love’s enigma

I gather a fistful of dust
…

jo mujh meñ chhupā merā galā ghoñT rahā hai

yā vo koī iblīs hai yā merā ḳhudā hai20

The one who hides within and strangles me

The devil or my own god he may be

Protest is articulated through a blunt interrogation of the conventional

augmentation of male stature, formerly invisibilized by time-honoured
codes of gender hierarchy.

kyā merā ziyāñ hai jo muqābil tire aa jā.ūñ

ye amr to ma.alūm ki tū mujh se baḌā hai21

What harm if I should stand before you now

Well aware I am of the familiar order of your greatness

Kishwar Naheed
Kishwar Naheed is known for her intrepid critique of regressive mores and
valiant public protestations. ‘If there is a Pakistani feminist who poses a
serious threat to men through her work, her lifestyle, her manner and
through ceaseless verbal challenge’, according to Rukhsana Ahmad, ‘it is
Kishwar Naheed’ (1990: 20–21). Although Ahmad notes that Naheed’s free
verse has been criticized for its ‘lack of polish’, she at once acknowledges
that this is more than compensated by the poet’s ‘boundless energy and
uninhibited, honest exploration of themes’ (Ahmad 1990: 22). As in
Aafreen’s and Riaz’s verse, regret followed by denouncement is a dominant
mode of lyrical progression in Naheed’s ghazals which often dwell on unre-
warding past relationships to come to terms with a present feminist vision.
The dialectical structure of the ghazal once more proves apposite for such a
negotiation. The semantic tensions that undergird the double-lined arma-
ture of the sh‘er provide a scaffolding for performing oscillations between
former, inadequate lovers and a consummate relationship with a burgeon-
ing self. ‘Loneliness’ here incrementally takes up the space of the lover–
beloved twin ideal and this sense of aloneness is embraced, in an inverted
irony typical of the ghazal, like a welcome ‘guest’.

tujh se va.ada azīz-tar rakkhā

vahshatoñ ko bhī apne ghar rakkhā22

To keep up the pledge of lovers, dearest

Loneliness in my home was the guest

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The mirror, a recurrent image in Urdu poetry, offers a fitting symbol for
reversing the damaging effects of the objectifying male gaze; in Naheed’s
ghazals, it serves to identify chimeras, abandon deceptions and re-focus
poetic consciousness on a refracted self. Similarly, the all-pervasive gham in
whose gloomy shadows the maudlin lover drowned his tears is re-imaged as
the ‘āb-e-ravāñ’ – the flowing waters of a feminine lyricism. Sharing etymo-
logical roots with ravani, ‘āb-e-ravāñ’ invokes the sinuousness of the ghazal’s
mellifluous currents but ‘turns tide’ to flow towards the woman-as-subject.
The mourned-for spring seasons of past male fantasies have also aroused
her at the edges of her dreams. Re-deploying the metaphor of tears-as-ink,
the narrative voice arrives at the shores of writing to traverse the gap
between mourning and agency, between a fatalist ontology of being to an
epistemological act of becoming.

apnī be-chehragī chhupāne ko

ā.īne ko idhar udhar rakkhā

To hide my invisible face

I misplaced the mirror
…
is qadar thā udaas mausam-e-gul
ham ne āb-e-ravāñ pe sar rakkhā

So sorrowful was the season of roses

I lay my head on its flowing waters
…
kalma-e-shukr ki mohabbat ne
ham ko tamhīd-e-ḳhvāb par rakkhā

This indebted I am to love

On the edges of dreams I slept

un ko samjhāne apnā harf-e-suḳhan

āñsuoñ ko payām par rakkhā23

To convey the meanings of my verse

My tears were engaged as messengers

Elsewhere in Naheed’s verse, images of bodily fluids such as tears, blood

and saliva accrue sensual and sexual connotations. These ‘liquid’ symbols
operate concurrently at structural and semantic levels to intermesh with the
ghazal’s lexical and sonic ravani as well as to establish a sexualized relation-
ship with the female body. In her reading of the recurrent images of ‘dew’ and
‘tears’ in Naheed’s verse, Hufaiza Pandit proposes that Naheed establishes a
link with the feminine act of writing the body that transgresses entrenched
South Asian taboos of shame (sharm) whose association with feminine sexual

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desire is ‘a cornerstone of hetero-patriarchal cultures like Pakistan’ (Pandit

2016: 8). Pandit argues that Naheed’s verse resists the clichéd association of
dew with tears and ‘circumvents the image to focus on the essence of the phe-
nomenon – wetness’, an image that may be ‘read in terms of sensuousness as
an orgasmic phenomenon thus inscribing the sexual as natural with the femi-
nine body – an internalization of “ecriture feminine”’ (Pandit 2016: 8). Pandit
thus locates Kishwar Naheed within a ‘literary canon of resistance poetry
dominated by male poets’ of the progressive literary tradition (Pandit 2017).
However, resistance and dissent, as previously discussed,24 are not new to
Urdu progressive poetry. These constitute a deep-seated impulse at the core of
the ghazal with origins in the mystic’s confrontation with religious ortho-
doxy, leading Narang and Matthews to observe that, over the centuries,
ghazals and Sufi poetry have ‘acted as a kind of safety valve’ (2014: 166). The
authors view the spirit of rebellion characteristic of the ghazal as a reflection
of a particularly sensitive ‘subcontinental mind and temperament’ which,

because of its peculiar sensibility and profound emotion, hardly

paid any attention to the fetters of imposed moral behaviour, how-
ever harsh they might be. Therefore in sufism, under the influence
of the subcontinental psyche, the desire to rebel against formal
morality became more apparent.
(Narang and Matthews 2014: 166)

Rebellion emerges quite unfettered in Naheed’s verse, both in terms of

women’s defiance against regressive constraints and in keeping with the
ghazal’s legacy of syncretism as upheld by early-twentieth-century progres-
sive writers. Like Mir and some of his contemporaries, Naheed deliberately
juxtaposes Islamic–Hindu religious symbolism to defy puritanism in favour
of a hybrid, ‘contaminated’ vocabulary in verse that may verge on the idol-
atrous. For example, the image of the dancing Radha appears as the epit-
ome of the desirous female body; however, as the poet makes evident, even
Radha, whose sole object of desire was a male god embodied in Mohan
(Krishna), appears to have lost her relevance in modern times. In contrast
to the pirouetting Radha, the female figures of her ghazals are unable to
dance, walled in as they are by an oppressive, window-less ‘chardivari’. The
poet’s clarion call is evident – the only choice left open before the shackled
woman is to break through her chains. Consequently, her poetic persona
will brazenly shed her ‘veil of tolerance’ or bound over ‘the limits of night’,
discarding distorted illusions of former lovers’ unions. Transgressive imag-
ery is threaded through her ghazals which often arrive at a resolute self-
awareness – the knowledge imprinted in books authored by patriarchs
must be relegated to ‘visitors’ rooms’ (parlours) since it is ‘knowledge in
name after all’.

chaltī gaaḌī naam kā rishta kyā mohan kyā rādhā aaj

ban ke sañvar ke raas rachā ke mohan aaj manā.e kaun25

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Fast paced lives, friends in name, but where are Mohan and Radha
Decked up for the dance of love, who shall play those seductive tunes

jab maiñ na huuñ to shahr meñ mujh sā koī to ho

dīvār-e-zindagī meñ darīcha koī to ho

From this city when I go might my familiar stay

In this life-of-walls just a window might there stay
……

‘nāhīd’ bandishoñ meñ muqayyad hai zindagī

jaa.eñ hazār baar bulāvā koī to ho26

“Naheed” this life is shackled in chains

I’d leave a thousand times were there a call

aksar naqāb-e-zabt hameñ thāmnā paḌā

jab bhī fasīl-e-shab ko hameñ phāñdnā paḌā27

Often clutching the tolerance-cloak

Have we bounded the limits of night

chhupā ke rakh diyā phir āgahī ke shīshe ko

is ā.īne meñ to chehre bigaḌte jaate the28

I have hidden away the mirror of awareness

Only distorted faces were reflected in that glass

tere milne ke Dhañg bhī taslīm magar

zā.iqa is tarah badlā ki mazā kuchh na rahā

Your encounters are still salutary but

The taste has changed, the pleasure’s gone
…

kyuuñ na mehmānoñ ke kamre meñ sajā.eñ in ko

ilm kā naam kitāboñ ke sivā kuchh na rahā

Why not place these books in the parlours now

They are knowledge in name after all

ḳhushbū-e-vasl tavajjoh kā vo aalam vo ḳhulūs

Dūbte chāñd kī āg̣hosh meñ kyā kuchh na rahā29

The scents of our bodies, that longing, that ardour

Were lost in the embrace of a vanished moon

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̣
kāghaz pe thā likhā huā har harf-e-lab-kushā
tahrīr jism-e-saut-o-sadā kī thī kuchh dinoñ30

Every murmuring voice that was recorded on paper

Was a fleeting composition of sound and style

kahāniyāñ bhī ga.iiñ qissa-ḳhvāniyāñ bhī ga.iiñ

vafā ke baab kī sab be-zabāniyāñ bhī ga.iiñ31

Those tales are no more, the days of storytelling no more

Those chapters of fidelity, those tongue-tied days are no more

muhīt-e-jāñ na koī zā.iqa na sabza-e-shab

talāsh kartī hai ḳhushbū kisī garebāñ ko32

No more those boundaries, that savouring, those spirited nights

A sweet fragrance lost and hunted in intimacies

Aligning the ghazal with a feminist aesthetics of pleasure

The term ‘sama’ bandhna’ (‘to bind together in an ambience of pleasure’)
aptly communicates the interlinking of audience members in a mood of
shared pleasure. Occasionally reaching a crescendo of mystical delight,
sama’ results in a rare and prized kaifiyat, a state of rapture akin to cross-
cultural correlatives suggested by the terms ananda and jouissance. Over
the centuries, the notion of rapture has endured in one form or another at
the core of Indic aesthetic traditions, as evident in the significant place it has
occupied in ancient treatises on rasa theory and in medieval Indo-Islamic
mystic poetry. In the ghazal, rapture manifests in the shape of an intense
aesthetic delight triggered by semantic play, language games and mellifluous
renderings of ravani whose effects may be enhanced through music and
ambience. In all of these, delight appears in its transformative and ethereal
form – an affective mode that carries the audience, even if momentarily, into
an otherworldly, elevated state of awareness. The privileging of ecstatic
states in Urdu poetry thus may be considered within a common trans-his-
torical framework of South Asian aesthetic traditions which, despite their
variations, emphasize transformational awareness through heightened
experiences of pleasure. Narang and Matthews, for instance, highlight the
interlinks between the ghazal’s otherworldly pleasures and a broader South
Asian inter-religious tradition that equates aesthetic and spiritual ecstasy:

The Indian yogis have stated that aesthetic consciousness is the

name of that most agreeable ecstatic state in which all one’s fac-
ulties are encompassed by the sub-conscious, and in which the
soul (atman) experiences the ultimate joy and exhilaration

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(paramananda). In the same way Urdu poets see the ghazal (mystic,
philosophical or amorous) as a journey for the emotions at the end
of which the superficial distinctions of our feelings are erased, and
our sight passes beyond the limits of worldly constraints.
(Narang and Matthews 2014: 167)

In large public mushairas just as much as during intimate ghazal soirées, the
attainment of kaifiyat marks the artist’s success in generating aesthetic plea-
sure. Kaifiyat is progressively stimulated through the enjoyment generated
by a combination of aesthetic and performative elements, including ada,
stylistic sensuality and the euphony of the ghazal form. Along the way, vari-
ous kindred terms – such as lutf, suroor and raahat – may be employed to
describe different types and degrees of pleasure experienced by a gradually
transformed audience. A ghazal that eases the soul with raahat does so by
offering respite from the commonplace burdens of a quotidian existence
through the elevating experience of art. On the other hand, suroor conveys
sensory and sensual pleasures such as those associated with music, rhythm
and melody, while lutf suggests an indescribable soul-satisfying, uplifting
form of joy (‘lutf utthana’ literally translates as ‘lifting/carrying joy’). It is
evident, then, that despite the ghazal’s embrace of an existential melancho-
lia or gham as a primary mazmun, its thematic frame is well clad in a fabric
of stirring aesthetic pleasures.
If the ghazal’s archetypal anguished lover finds himself buried under the
afflictions of gham, unable to find passage from a state of being to one of
becoming, that existential crisis appears aggravated when the narratorial
voice of the poem is that of a woman trapped in oppressive heteropatriarchy.
As we have seen through some examples, it is the loss of an access to an agen-
tic self rather than the gham of the absent lover that defines the nature of the
existential quandary for the female persona of twentieth-century feminist
Urdu poetry. The articulation of gendered experiences through lyrical modes
becomes a way of transgressing this ontological crisis by initiating a shift
from a locus of objectification to one of self-actuation. Such an ontological
shift realized through ‘poetic speech’ transports the female subject beyond the
circumference of pain to the possibility of reclamation and of pleasures prom-
ised in the process of self-actualization, undoing in this process the distinction
between speaking and doing and between discursive shifts and their material
effects. The movement from gham to lutf in Urdu feminist poetry thus spot-
lights the altered conditions of gendered identity achieved in the process of
transitioning to women’s ‘subjectification’ or ‘becoming subject’ through lit-
erary discourse. Here, it also invites feminist aesthetics, that incorporates
ethical valuations of gendered representations in art, to function as a prism
for musing upon the specific nature of the relationship between women, plea-
sure and the political brought to the fore in aesthetic expression.
In feminist Urdu poetry, the contours of women’s relationship to pleasure
are shaped by particular cultural effects so that terminologies of pleasure

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take on specific gendered nuances. Where women in South Asian societies

may have an acute appreciation of raahat, a term that suggests relief from
oppressive environments, their experience of lutf may at times be inscribed
in the form of a transgressive discourse, particularly in as much as it refers
to a trespassing of the limits set upon women’s access to pleasure. Gham, or
sorrow, too gets transformed in its re-gendered inscriptions. The ghazal’s
melancholic mazmuns deriving from gham’s existential sadness present a
suitable terrain for etching the design of an eternal mourning – in this case,
a grieving for a lost romanticized past that venerated the ethereal, hyper-
feminised beloved but also perpetually arrested her in fetishized imagery.
Moving beyond the romantic mazmun of unrequited love and melancholy,
feminist poetry draws upon the ghazal’s alternate thematic of dissent for an
articulation of idioms of remonstration. These in turn fuel other pleasures:
the raahat of creativity and the lutf of a re-styled agentic self.
It may be useful, at this juncture, to distinguish the aesthetic lutf of liter-
ary/musical experience as conveyed by genres such as the ghazal and qaw-
wali from the ‘mazaa’ that connotes a kind of transient, sensory experience
of ‘fun’ in everyday language. Ananya Kabir describes what she terms the
‘alegropolitics of mazaa’ in relation to an ‘embodied philology’ (2020:
244). Mazaa suggests a sensory pleasure, something to be ‘relished through
the tongue’s capacity to taste’, often experienced in participatory shared
contexts with others, and an experience that occurs within an ‘optimum
time frame’ (Kabir 2020: 244). These features of mazaa distinguish it in
qualitative ways from other forms of pleasure, such as lutf. Although
mazaa may be generated at lexical levels such as that of wordplay and
punning, it varies both in kind and in degree from lutf which suggests
more deeply nourishing and lasting transformative effects. What mazaa
achieves through the ‘fun’ of small, everyday occurrences, lutf intensifies
and expands through its uplifting ecstatic effects. Although this facilitates
the interchangeability of the terms mazaa and lutf in specific contexts such
as that of culinary enjoyment (an exceptionally well-prepared meal has
lazzat or savour, offers mazaa in its relishing, but can also satiate its con-
sumer with the experience of lutf), lutf more often connotes a deeper,
transformative joy.
Notwithstanding these nuances, when located within the framework of
feminist aesthetics, the metonymic associations between mazaa and lutf can
suggest one way of thinking about the interrelationship between art and
politics. Both draw upon a common continuum of sensual and sensory plea-
sures whose analysis can foreground the differential gendered access to
various forms of pleasure admissible in specific socio-cultural contexts.
Such conjunctions may lead to unforeseen effects. Anjaria and Anjaria
extend the notion of mazaa to suggest

being open to a politics whose direction is neither inevitable nor

foreseeable. It means being open to the ways in which the sensuous

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and the pleasurable appear in our lives, not just to reflect or chal-
lenge the status quo, but to generate worlds as well.
(Anjaria and Anjaria 2020: 234)

Following Ananya Kabir’s elaboration of mazaa as ‘fun’, the authors argue

that ‘for decades, scholars of South Asia have also been taking the mazaa
out of the story’ (Anjaria and Anjaria 2020: 233). Given that established
approaches towards the investigation of women’s issues in the Global
South tend to be dominated by concerns with gendered oppression and
violence, more pleasure-full readings may get pushed to the margins.33
‘Dwelling in mazaa thus goes against the grain of scholarly trends in South
Asian studies, which, since the 1980s, have been inclined toward revealing
the workings of power’… and where ‘ordinary joys are understood for
their relation to power rather than in the language we use to relish them’
(Anjaria and Anjaria 2020: 235). Countering these dominant trends,
Anjaria and Anjaria remind us that ‘dwelling in the details’ and ‘spending
time describing the sensory and mazaa-inducing aspects of cultural forms’
do not constitute ‘a refusal of the political’ (239). Such readings underscore
that theorizing about women’s relationship to pleasure is far from an apo-
litical act. On the contrary, the privileging of certain customary approaches
to women’s questions in the Global South that result in the suppression of
this relationship may be implicated in prevailing, restricted ways of inter-
preting the ‘political’.
If the ghazal has retained its allure over the centuries, it is not merely due
to its melancholic elaborations of ishq, but equally because it is deeply con-
cerned with matters of aesthetic delight and with the ecstatic effects of art
as achieved through modes of raahat, suroor and kaifiyat. The ghazal’s form
insists on a mazaa in every choice of word, every clever pun, and each care-
fully crafted she‘r imbued with rabt. Beyond this, wherever it deepens the
mazaa of ambiguities, double entendres and semantically loaded mishras
into the powerful lutf of combined aesthetic effects, it elevates the articula-
tion of that experience to an epistemology of pleasure.
As performative genres, the ghazal and the qawwali communicate lutf at
several levels – through concurrent appeals to the intellect achieved in
semantic play, to affect through emotive response, and to sensory responses
through mellifluousness. Feminist poetry that muses upon the nature of
these pleasures in relationship to emancipatory feminine subjectivities
unravels the gendered dimensions of the partaking of lutf. In re-deploying
the ghazal’s customary affinities for pleasure to write a new gendered idiom
of gratification availed from discursive acts of resistance, transgression and
re-invention, it thus succeeds in forging a South Asian feminist aesthetic in
modern Urdu poetry.
The radical space of the ghazal tradition and the sinuous body of the
ghazal’s form provide generous ground for carving out expressions of wom-
en’s corporeal relationship to pleasure, striking examples of which may be

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found in the poetry of Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Riaz’s ghazals
reveal a deliberate overwriting of jaded passions and a reclamation of sen-
sual and sexual gratifications. An inward gaze leads to the realization of an
auto-erotic sensuality that posits woman’s own body as beloved. Instead of
yearning for an unworthy lover’s kisses, Riaz’s narrator ‘bites her own lips’
to establish a ‘playful’ relationship with her body.

vo ḳhvāhish-e-bosa bhī nahīñ ab

hairat se hoñT kāTtī huuñ

No more that desire for kisses

In wonderment I bite my lips

ik tiflak-e-justujū huuñ shāyad

maiñ apne badan se kheltī huuñ34

Perhaps my desires are still young

Enough to play with my body.

Rejecting the notion of the female body as the receptacle for male lust, a
new gendered idiom is inscribed through sensual and sexual pleasures that
resonate with the practice of ‘writing the body’. In this effort, the ghazal’s
semantic polarities constructed on the basis of contrasting imagery such as
that of brilliance and darkness, ink and paper are adeptly re-formulated by
poets like Aafreen, Riaz and Naheed. In what may be read as a concurrent
affiliation and contrast with Cixous’s invocation to women to write using
the ‘white ink’ of their breasts (see Cixous 1976), Riaz burnishes fiery words
on paper in the ‘black ink’ or ‘siyahi’ of a feminine corporeal script, upsetting
both the metaphor of phallus-as-pen and the association of whiteness with
mother’s milk. Familiar hyperbolic images such as that of the inky darkness
of the beloved’s tresses and the moonlike kohl-lined eyes of the beloved re-
appear as inverted metaphors. Conventional ghazal prosody such as the
proposition/response structure of the mishras of the she‘r and customary
imagery of breast and heart that constituted the classical discourse of ishq
are retained as defining underpinnings but re-deployed for introducing ele-
ments of surprise and pleasure, a new lutf of writing the female body.

kyuuñ nūr-e-abad dil meñ guzar kar nahīñ paatā

siine kī siyāhī se nayā harf likhā hai35

Why does this heart not contain that immortal radiance

A new alphabet have I emblazoned with my inky breasts

Writing the body, as Neluka Silva suggests, ‘has a clear political imperative
within a landscape of religio-social repression and patriarchal authority,

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since the body is simultaneously a surface on which social law, morality, val-
ues, and lived experience are inscribed’ (Silva 2003: 34). The political aspect
of writing the body for laying claim to an assertive female identity is equally
evident in Kishwar Naheed’s shayerie. Here, the political emerges in the shape
of an alterity, that of the wild, unfettered female body whose figure challenges
established interpretations of the ghazal’s mazmuns. In a re-visitation of the
trope of deewangi, the ‘maddened woman’ unabashedly displays her tempes-
tuous desires to displace the archetypal crazed deewana of the classical ghazal,
who was driven to madness by the beloved’s inaccessible beauty. In an upset-
ting of the ghazal’s customary gendered relationality of ‘mad lover’ and
‘beautiful beloved’, inaccessibility becomes the mark of the unfathomable
inner woman rather than that of a static flawless object of beauty.
In the excerpt from Naheed’s ghazal cited below, a she‘r that initiates the
daunting task of looking within the ‘mirror of the heart’ leads to one where
the mirrored self emerges in wanderlust. The conventional takhallus that
previously identified the ‘authority’ of the poet is ‘overwritten’ by a naming
that identifies the woman poet as the ‘mad one’ or the ‘deewani’ of the
ghazal to bring about a complete collapsing of, and identification between,
the wild feminine figure of the ghazal and the feminist poet. The figure of
the madwoman thus intrudes upon the ghazal’s pristine universe and inter-
rupts its trope of love-as-deewangi, drawing the ghazal into what Mansoor
and Arif call a ‘subterranean feminine realm of madness’ (2016: 136).
Drawing upon Lacanian theory that locates madness outside the symbolic
order, Mansoor and Arif observe that ‘madness and femininity remain
inscrutable within the masculine signification system’ (2016: 136). In
Naheed’s ghazal, the twin narrator-poet figure defies the ‘inscrutability’ of
madness and femininity by introducing a different ‘sense’ to the deewangi
of the masculist canon of Urdu poetry. Markedly, it is the ghazal’s legacy of
the interrogation of identity, including that of masculinity as embodied in
the figure of the mad lover, that provides the springboard for such re-inven-
tions. The genre of the ghazal thus enables a re-alignment between its aes-
thetic and that of a modern feminist consciousness.

dil kī dīvār meñ ā.īna rakhā thā kis ne

mujh ko pahchānte rahne ko kahā thā kis ne

Who placed a mirror in the walls of my heart

Who asked for my name to be told apart
…

ab bahut duur nikal jaane ko jī chāhtā hai

mujh ko jaate hue dīvāna kahā thā kis ne36

Now I yearn to wander in the wilderness afar

Who said to name me ‘deewana’ in departing

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The wanderings in wild environs are not free of dangers, of course, and
the fierce passions of the poet must be tempered with forewarnings about
the journey she sets out on. It is a warning not just to herself but to her audi-
ence as well:

mauja-e-reg-e-ravāñ hai zer-e-āb

apnī hastī dekh kar baḌhnā bahut

These ripples of sand, these fierce currents below

Consider your selfhood before you proceed
…

ḳhastagī 'nāhīd' ban jaa.e na jurm

apnī hastī dekh kar baḌhnā bahut37

Lest frailty, “Naheed”, should become a misdeed

Consider your selfhood before you proceed

Ultimately, the narrative voice, having transgressed all prior curtailments

on her ‘becoming-woman’, confronts a revivified self as ‘healer’ to access
the lutf of her renaissance. In the process of this epiphany, the ‘true mirror’
within her heart becomes the revelatory instrument just as the poet’s con-
versation with her male predecessors, the master poets of the classical
ghazal, makes way for a dialogue turned inwards that calls for all veils of
modesty to be shed. The lutf of the ghazal and the kaifiyat it initiates – that
much-sought-after ecstasy that the rekhta poet attempted to communicate
to his appreciative but largely male audience – make way for a rapture
attained through feminist self-knowledge:

āñkhoñ meñ ḳhvāb chubhte raheñge tamām umr

ye dard-e-lā-davā thā masīhā bhī the hamīñ

Those thorn-like dreams that we shall pick lifelong

We were ourselves healers of that terminal pain

ai sub.h-e-nau-bahār kabhī tū idhar bhī aa

ahbāb jānte haiñ ki tujh sā bhī the hamīñ38

O new spring morning why shy away from us

Our friends know we are just like you

pahchān apnī ho to mile manzil-e-murād

'nāhīd' gaahe gaahe sahī aa.ina bhī dekh39

Recognition shall bring a longed for destination

“Naheed”, on occasion look in the true mirror

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kaifiyat-e-nashāt thī ḳhud hī se guftugū

'nāhīd' ye ridā bhī hayā kī thī kuchh dinoñ40

That ecstasy-in-union was a dialogue with my self

“Naheed”, short-lived was the cloak of modesty.

Forging a postmodern transnational feminist aesthetic

By the mid-twentieth century, the ghazal’s cosmopolitan allure had acquired
a transcontinental reach, spreading beyond South Asia and the Middle East
to Germany, France and the US. From Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals in exile to
Adrienne Rich’s blue ghazals, postmodern poets turned to its elegant form
for articulating a range of contemporary concerns (see also Zaidi 2015:
173).41 In anticipation of the centennial death anniversary of Mirza Ghalib,
the ghazal was introduced in the US in 1968, a year that marked the genre’s
entry into the continent ‘as an idea if not a poetic form’ (Caplan 2004: 117).
David Caplan makes a case for the inherent transnationalism of the ghazal
by setting aside reservations based on the alleged anachronism of tradi-
tional poetic forms which he views as ‘an antagonistic, unnuanced under-
standing of literary history’ (2004: 116). For American poets, he argues, the
ghazal can provide ‘an equivalent’ form that speaks to ‘contemporary
American history and to the verse techniques that American poets favoured’
(Caplan 2004: 119). In support of this claim, Caplan proposes that the
ghazal’s ‘argumentative structure’ adapts with ease to the contemporary
poet’s sense of ‘fragmentation’ (Caplan 2004: 119), as exemplified in
Adrienne Rich’s poetry, just as much as it responds to ‘the age’s skittish
anxieties’ (Caplan 2004: 123).
Beyond its avowed cosmopolitanism, a contemplation of the ghazal from
the perspective of a transcontinental feminist aesthetics must consider the
latter’s concerns with forging ethically informed cross-cultural solidarities
through gendered approaches to art and literature. To buttress such alli-
ances, feminist perspectives unmask the conflation of hegemonic national
and gendered identities in patricentric cultural discourses across the world.
The ghazal’s history as a radical discursive space for unsettling straitened
authoritarian dogmata can dovetail with such a transnational feminist
world view. The ghazal’s syncretic thematic concerns, its mockery of the
power-lust of pretentious ideology, and its aesthetic of indirection and mul-
tivalence are all aspects that offer an ‘equivalent’ vocabulary for advancing
the concerns of a cosmopolitan feminist aesthetic.
Earlier in this discussion, we considered the tensions generated in the
aftermath of imperialism between postcolonial discourses of ‘ownership’
and the ghazal’s proclivities towards a syncretic oneness of being or Wahdat-
ul-wujood. Although the anti-hegemonic slant of such a mystic bent towards
oneness may have ideological appeal within a postmodern world view, post-
modernism’s epistemological concerns with difference are not impervious to

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the slippage that makes affirmative assertions of identity vulnerable to a

crystallization of rigid appropriations of ‘culture’. Consequently, it is not
uncommon to find in postmodern discourse a cautious balancing of differ-
ence-based identity claims and shared ideological platforms. Owing to the
late-twentieth-century dialogue between postmodernism and feminism, this
equilibrium appears in transcontinental feminist theory in the form of a
contextualized nuancing of gendered identity that speaks to essentialism/
social constructionism debates and takes into consideration local, cultural
specificities as well as strategic cross-cultural solidarities. These efforts have
generated a rich body of feminist scholarship as elaborated over a period of
time, such as Gayatri Spivak’s assiduous nuancing of the gendered subaltern
(1988), Alison Stone’s work on reconciling anti-essentialism with feminist
politics (2004) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s scholarship on building
transnational solidarities (2019), among various others.
Concurrently, such work brings to the fore a difficulty at the heart of
postmodern thought created by tensions between claims of belonging and
non-belonging and between impulses towards difference and towards pro-
visional notions of universalism.42 This problematic manifests in a variety
of forms across cultures. In the context of the US, David Caplan argues that
a postmodern ‘rhetoric of possession’ based on race (as, for instance, in the
association of the blues with a Black aesthetic) stems from ‘American criti-
cism’s long tradition of framing questions of poetic form in nationalistic
terms’ (Caplan 125). Caplan’s discussion suggests that for American poets
searching for literary forms that allow the articulation of alterity without
risking accusations of indigenous cultural appropriation, the South Asian
ghazal offers a more remote and consequently less perilous alternative (see
Caplan 2004: 125–126). Moreover, a gravitation towards the ghazal form
seems all the more validated by the ease with which it journeys across cul-
tural boundaries. Similar observations are offered by Nishat Zaidi, who
argues that ‘the Ghazal form best exemplifies the flows and counter-flows of
literary and cultural exchanges across languages and exposes the illegiti-
macy of appropriation of literary traditions by territorially defined, iden-
tity- centric, essentialist political discourses’ (Zaidi 2015: 170).
What makes the ghazal both ‘postmodern’ as well as ‘transcontinental’
in its bearing is that its dialogic structure and its insistence on multivalence
and ambiguity can accommodate concurrent contrasting appeals to cul-
tural authenticity as well as to transnationalism. The ghazal’s lyrical form
thus makes room for the difficult and complex work that transcontinental
postmodern thought demands in efforts to move beyond difference-induced
impasses.
Attempts at sustaining equilibrium between such contrary claims are
prominent in the poetry of exile authored by Agha Shahid Ali, whose verse
poignantly brings together fragments of memories from Kashmir, from
New Delhi and from the academic environments and metropolises of the
late-twentieth-century US. Ali insists on a strict adherence to the ghazal’s

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traditional form as a mark of authenticity; at the same time, his poems of

exile traverse vast affective cross-cultural distances through trans-conti-
nental journeys. They often map the experiences of a queer South Asian
man caught between memories of ‘home’ and belonging, on one hand,
and the seductive appeal of rootlessness exerted by the Western metropo-
lis that destines the refugee to homelessness, on the other (see also Caplan
2004: 127–128). According to Caplan, ‘This “strange fate” overrides geo-
political differences, allowing Ali to place “Kashmir” “[b]y the Hudson,”
“brought from Palestine”’ (Caplan 2004: 131). Ali’s insistence on a for-
mal fidelity to the classical ghazal and his ability to discover in that form
a terrain for inscribing an alterity that has all the features of an uprooted
contemporary global consciousness reveal how the ghazal can respond at
once to the instinct for rootedness and to a postmodern cosmopolitanism
of non-belonging. It is perhaps this ability to span bridges poised on deli-
cate lyrical equilibriums that defines the ghazal’s agile, anti-conformist
difference, what Nighat Gandhi terms the ‘queerness’ at the basis of the
genre (Gandhi 2019, Sep 6). Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals offer some of the
finest instances of such a ‘queerness’. In his ‘Ghazal’, the poet’s visceral
sense of unbelonging is carved out in fragments across the body of the
ghazal’s sh‘ers: ‘I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time./ A refugee, I’ll
be paroled in real time’ even as the ‘plot’ unfolds ‘in real time’43 (Ali
2009: 293). In the hands of poets like Rich and Ali, the ghazal becomes
‘a transnational poetry of witness’ (Caplan 2004: 131) that seeks to
record and imprint in a common literary memory, the violence of racism,
bigotry and misogyny of an apparently globalized world: ‘Will you,
Beloved Stranger, ever witness Shahid- / Two destinies at last reconciled
by exiles?’44 (Ali 2009: 298).
Perhaps there is no other genre more befitting for this role since the act of
‘witnessing’ lies at the core of the ghazal’s raison d’être. As noted in the
previous chapter, the ghazal’s romantic and mystical mazmuns evolved
from the Sufi notion of ‘nazar’ and the practice of witnessing beauty with
the aim of achieving union with the divine. Originally associated with
homoerotic forms of love, the witnessing of the beauty of the human form
merged with spiritual belief and subsequently was adapted in lyric modes.
The spiritually transformative act of ‘witnessing’ endows the individual
with a discriminatory ability for ‘seeing’ the truth (of the divine) beyond the
deceptions of institutionalized religious constructs. During the pre-modern
evolution of the ghazal, a growing dissent against the powers arrogated by
a hegemonic clergy had functioned as a measure of the political impact of
poetry within the larger cultural discourse to which it belonged. Although
contemporary connotations of ‘witnessing’ have undergone substantial
shifts contextualized by current forms of violence, ghazals by Agha Shahid
Ali, Adrienne Rich and others demonstrate the genre’s continued relevance
and resilience for serving as a mode for bearing witness in our changing
times. This undisturbed literary continuity embedded in the ghazal form

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speaks a ‘poetic justice’ of its own, one that seeks to give voice to those
invisibilized in deeply stratified post-global societies.
In Adrienne Rich’s poems, the ghazal evidences another kind of invisibil-
ity confronted by a narrative voice probing her own imprint in a ‘dark-
room’. Here, too, as in the feminist poetry from Pakistan, self-recognition
occurs only in abiding aloneness: ‘In the red wash of the darkroom, I see
myself clearly’, but ‘when the print is developed and handed about, the face
is nothing to me’ (Rich 1969: 62). Meanwhile, the herculean work of wit-
nessing ‘undoes itself over and over’ even as ‘the grass grows back, the dust
collects, the scar breaks open’ (Rich 1969: 62).
Carole Stone’s ‘Ghazal of Remembrance’ bears another kind of witness
– to the memory of the violent images of the dead in the ‘twin towers’, so
many that obituaries cannot keep up with the records. At the end of Stone’s
ghazal, the convention of the takhallus becomes the signatory proof of an
impossible documentation as the poet declares to herself: ‘Carole, I remind
myself, the poet’s golden verses/ will outlast civilization’s towers’ (Stone
2005). Stone’s verse reminds us that where words fail, poetry can sometimes
do the work that memory demands.
In Patricia Smith’s ‘Hip-Hop Ghazal’, the ghazal’s playfulness enables the
poet to dress her ‘difference’ in light-hearted poetic garb that becomes a
manner of establishing solidarities with ‘brown girls’ and with kindred
poets across continents and eras:

Patricia Smith: Hip-Hop Ghazal

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,

wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin’, gotta pull back some.

Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin’ down Manhattan streets

killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying ‘bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off

what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.
(Smith July/August 2007)45

Smith’s ghazal has a mocking tone, one that cocks a snook at the famed
ethereal beauty of the love object of the classical ghazal, even as a

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purposeful literary identification is invoked through the radif (‘hips’) and

the qafiyah (the rhyme pattern set at the outset by ‘blue’ and ‘woo’). With
its emphasis on the ‘stinging view’ of ‘fat, swinging blue hips’ of her ‘sistas’,
her ghazal changes the terms by which ‘feminine’ beauty is conventionally
defined and takes charge of a glorious physicality embraced in its alterity.
Carole Stone, Heather Hugh and other contemporary American poets
invent a new feminist idiom by re-deploying the ghazal’s literary devices,
including its familiar imagery of the moon and the mirror. Their poems
reveal surprising associative similarities with the ghazals of Ishtar Aafreen
and Fahmida Riaz in whose work, as we have seen, the reflective surfaces
of the moon and the mirror enable the narratorial voice to turn inwards in
a deliberate mis-recognition of ‘woman’ as ‘beloved’. Similarly, the use of
the takhallus – the classical masculine ‘signature’ of authority – becomes
now a manner of imprinting the name of an assertive, female self. In Carole
Stone’s ghazal ‘Summer’s End’, the word ‘moon’ appears as the radif at the
end of each couplet. But the moon-faced beloved has been replaced by a
narratorial first-person poetic voice that bears witness to the end of a sea-
son, with the light of the full moon helping her to ‘see’. The ghazal here
becomes a contemporary tool of another kind of watching, one that securely
places the woman poet as chronicler of history rather than a persona in
someone else’s memoirs.

Carole Stone: Summer’s End

(Ghazal)

In the East Hampton sky, a full August moon

signals summer’s almost over under the full moon.

In this house I’ve grown old in, I listen

to the ocean, tides pulled under the full moon.

Wild turkeys amble through my yard.

Box turtles inch across the road under the full moon.

On Indian Wells Beach, each night’s like a retirement party.

Beer cans rattle, fires burn under the full moon.

As if to a departed relative, I wave to the full moon.

Carole, still here, singing Au clair de la lune.
(Stone 2017)46

In Heather McHugh’s ‘Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun’, the metaphor of

the mirror offers surprising cross-cultural correspondences. ‘Too voluble a
person’, the woman poet is also much like her roused South Asian counter-
parts we have encountered, a ‘primordially stirred person’, whose ‘howling’

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remains ‘un-heard’ and whose words slip beyond the sense-making universe
in which she resides. Here, too, the reflection in the ‘blurred’ Lacanian mir-
ror is not whole and ‘not convincing’ because, like ‘I-car-us’, the narrator’s
first person selves are scattered, even transported, across pronouns by a
‘vehicle’ that renders them ‘absurd’. At best, the mirror replicates broken
shards of a fragmented self in words split wide open across hyphens and
enjambed lines – an ‘in-/ ferred’ figure thus leads the poet to ask whether it
is not preferable to be ‘an unoc-/ cured person’. McHugh skilfully recon-
structs the confrontational structure of the two-line sh‘ir by balancing end-
stopped first (matla) and enjambed second (maqta) lines that propose a
claim (dava) only to counter it (javab-e-dava). In a departure from the clas-
sical ghazal form, however, the enjambment at the end of each sh‘ir stretches
the maqta across a third fragmented line in a deferred pattern that empha-
sizes the poet’s particular predicament.
Furthermore, McHugh employs the convention of semantic polarities –
in this case, those of birth and death – to achieve an equilibrium ‘halfway
to the third person’. The undoing of the birth/death polarity is invoked by
the term ‘suicide’ in the prelude that sets the thematic and symbolic frame-
work for the ghazal. At the end of the ghazal, the Shakespearean existen-
tial quandary of being/not being is finally resolved with the takhallus,
‘McHugh’ – a final assertion of agency – a woman poet’s right ‘to be’ –
within a literary canon populated by men. The final sh‘ir collapses the
poet’s identities across first, second and third persons as she addresses her
various selves and confronts the finish line in the word ‘death’. Yet, in the
process of making a signatory ‘mark’ that pivots the poet’s identity from a
familiar self to an insinuated posthumous third person, McHugh’s signa-
ture seems to dodge the very extinction that is the central theme of this
ghazal. Just as the nomenclature prompts an acknowledgement of autho-
rial identity, it also by extension impels the reader to recognize the place of
the contemporary woman poet within the literary legacy of the ghazal’s
male-populated genealogy. And for this, poetry, like the ‘book’ that post-
pones suicide in the prelude, makes its timely appearance as an escape
route that defers mortality.

Heather McHugh: Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun

A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran

Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?

I blame the soup: I’m a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.

The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

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The sound I make is sympathy’s: sad dogs are tied afar.

But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.

The mirror’s not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time’s revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.

Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person.

The only cure for birth one doesn’t love to contemplate.

Better to be an unsung song, an unoc-
curred person.

McHugh, you’ll be the death of me -- each self and second studied!

Addressing you like this, I’m halfway to the
third person.
(McHugh 1999/2001: 39)47

Conclusion
The ghazal has traversed a long trajectory across historical eras and conti-
nents. Poets across South Asia and the West have been drawn to its unique
aesthetic that speaks to anti-conformist political impulses just as much as
to the pursuit of aesthetic delights. With origins in an iconoclastic mystic
legacy rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it functions in
Urdu feminist poetry of the twentieth century as an inscription of emanci-
pated feminine subjectivities of resistance and pleasure. In recent times, the
ghazal has been adopted and adapted as a poetry of witness that chronicles
postmodern existential concerns of marginalized identities – those of
women, queer persons, racialized others, and exiles. Within the South
Asian subcontinent, along the verdant landscapes of the Kashmir valley,
and alongside the changed skyline of New York City, the ghazal’s aesthetic
continues to resonate and respond to experimentations in what is now a
cross-cultural postmodern feminist aesthetic. As a lyric genre both elegant
in its strict prosodic conventions and radical in its ability to embrace a
diversity of anti-conformist sentiment, the ghazal has come to offer a con-
temporary aesthetic that knots together the past and present across conti-
nents. In contemporary times, its form and thematic align gracefully with
feminist concerns.
This book began with a discussion of the remarkable gender fluidity of an
ancient Indus aesthetic, one that revealed a litheness of art forms and sup-
pleness of meanings whose subsequent glimmerings I have attempted to
pursue across time periods in South Asia and beyond. Perhaps, then, there

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is no better way to close this chapter than with a poem by Ali that summons
up the Harappan girl from the Indus valley, whom we previously encoun-
tered as the ‘bronze dancing girl’, and whom we may now encounter again
as our contemporary familiar.

Agha Shahid Ali: At the Museum

But in 2500 B.C. Harappa,

who cast in bronze a servant girl?

No one keeps records

of soldiers and slaves.

The sculptor knew this,

polishing the ache

off her fingers stiff

from washing the walls

and scrubbing the floors,

from stirring the meat

and the crushed asafoetida

in the bitter gourd.

But I’m grateful she smiled

at the sculptor,

as she smiles at me
in bronze,

a child who had to play woman

to her lord

when the warm June rains

came to Harappa.
(Ali 2009: 217, Copyright© 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali) 48

Notes
1 For a discussion of the centrality of experience in feminist aesthetics, see discus-
sion in Chapter 1.
2 See discussion regarding the term ‘feminist aesthetics’ in the Introduction and in
Chapter 1.
3 C. M. Naim noted that there were at least 35 million speakers of Urdu in India
as per the census of 1981. These figures continued to grow until the beginning
of the twenty-first century. (The 2001 census recorded 5.15 crore Urdu speakers

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followed by a decline particularly in northern Indian states such as Uttar

Pradesh. According to the 2011 census, the figure was 5.07 crore.) See https://
thewire.in/culture/urdu-census-language-2011-north-india and https://www.
censusindia.gov.in/2011census/C-16_25062018_NEW.pdf
4 For a detailed discussion, see Oesterheld (2004).
5 See discussion of rekhti and auraton ki boli in previous chapter. See also Kidwai,
S. and Vanita, R. (2000) ‘Rekhti Poetry: Love between Women (Urdu)’, in R.
Vanita and S. Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex Love in India. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan; and Vanita, R. (2004) ‘“Married among Their Companions”:
Female Homoerotic Relations in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry in
India’, Journal of Women’s History, 16 (1): 12–53.
6 Faiz’s nazm ‘Hum dekhenge’ has become a popular protest song and heard at
various protest venues in the environs of Delhi and Punjab in recent years.
7 According to a report in the Times of India, during the farmer protests that
spread across various sites at Delhi’s borders initiated by Sikh farmers from
Punjab and neighbouring states in 2020, one of them was questioned about how
he felt about sharing the food offered by Punjabi Muslims who had travelled to
one of the venues from Malerkotla, a Muslim-majority region. In response, he
attested to an age-old amity across the Punjab region on the basis of literature
and music: ‘Enjoying the zarda at the langar was Daljinder Singh, a sarpanch of
a village in Punjab’s Fatehgarh district. “These people are our brothers and there
is no doubt in my mind that they have been true to this special relationship for
centuries in Punjab,” said Singh. “We share the same culture, the same literary
inspirations and the same music… This amity has prevailed for centuries, and
the people of Malerkotla have proved it once again by coming here to support
us”.’ (TOI December 11, 2020)
8 See also two other linked articles in this three-part series of articles published in
Telos, March 2021, by B. Venkat Mani: Reclaiming Postcolonial Nationalism,
Global Indian Diaspora and Digital Media and Writing the Alphabet of
Democratic Hope.
9 Literally, the ‘veil’ and the ‘four walls of the household’; see also, Sukrita Paul
Kumar (1997: 89) for a brief discussion of the implications of the ‘Chadur aur
Chardivari’ campaign carried out under General Zia’s regime.
10 Like the Blazon form of love poetry, sarapa verse elaborates upon different parts
of the female anatomy.
11 Iqbal’s famous lines are ‘Khudi ko kar buland itna/ Ki har taqdeer se pehley/
Khuda bande ko khud poocchey/ Bata, “teri raza kya hai?”’ (‘Stand so tall in
your self/ That at every turn of your fate/ God himself asks his slave/ Speak your
mind, make your fate’) – translation mine.
12 Translation mine.
13 Translation mine; see original in Ahmad (1990: 166).
14 For the text of Iqbal’s poem, see Francis Pritchett, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/
mealac/pritchett/00urdu/iqbal/shikvah_index.html
15 All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise specified. Courtesy of
https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/main-phuul-phuul-safar-kar-rahii-thii-
khvaabon-kaa-ishrat-afreen-ghazals?lang=hi
16 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/chaar-suu-hai-badii-
vahshat-kaa-samaan-fahmida-riaz-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
17 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/ye-pairahan-jo-mirii-
ruuh-kaa-utar-na-sakaa-fahmida-riaz-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
18 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/ye-pairahan-jo-mirii-
ruuh-kaa-utar-na-sakaa-fahmida-riaz-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
19 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/patthar-se-visaal-
maangtii-huun-fahmida-riaz-ghazals

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20 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/jo-mujh-men-

chhupaa-meraa-galaa-ghont-rahaa-hai-fahmida-riaz-ghazals
21 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/jo-mujh-men-
chhupaa-meraa-galaa-ghont-rahaa-hai-fahmida-riaz-ghazals
22 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/tujh-se-vaada-
aziiz-tar-rakkhaa-kishwar-naheed-ghazals
23 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/tujh-se-vaada-
aziiz-tar-rakkhaa-kishwar-naheed-ghazals
24 See discussion in previous chapter.
25 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/bigdii-baat-
b a n a a n a a - m u s h k i l - b a d i i - b a a t - b a n a a e - k a u n - k i s h w a r- n a h e e d - g h a -
zals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
26 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/jab-main-na-huun-
to-shahr-men-mujh-saa-koii-to-ho-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
27 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/har-naqsh-e-paa-
ko-manzil-e-jaan-maannaa-padaa-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
28 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/tire-qariib-
pahunchne-ke-dhang-aate-the-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
29 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/girya-maayuusii-
gam-e-tark-e-vafaa-kuchh-na-rahaa-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
30 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/surkhii-badan-
men-rang-e-vafaa-kii-thii-kuchh-dinon-kishwar-naheed-ghazals
31 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/kahaaniyaan-bhii-
gaiin-qissa-khvaaniyaan-bhii-gaiin-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
32 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/vidaa-kartaa-hai-
dil-satvat-e-rag-e-jaan-ko-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&
lang=hi
33 See Evelyn Accad’s chapter ‘Sexuality and Sexual Politics’, in Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds.), Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism, 1991, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 237–
250; see also Anjaria and Anjaria (2020: 235).
34 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/patthar-se-visaal-
maangtii-huun-fahmida-riaz-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
35 Fahmida Riaz, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/jo-mujh-men-
chhupaa-meraa-galaa-ghont-rahaa-hai-fahmida-riaz-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
36 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/dil-kii-diivaar-
men-aaiina-rakhaa-thaa-kis-ne-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
37 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/tishnagii-achchhii-
nahiin-rakhnaa-bahut-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-desc&lang=hi
38 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/tujh-se-bahut-
qariib-bhii-tanhaa-bhii-the-hamiin-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
39 Kishwar Naheed, courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/apne-lahuu-
se-naam-likhaa-gair-kaa-bhii-dekh-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi
40 Kishwar Naheed,courtesy of https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals/surkhii-badan-men-
rang-e-vafaa-kii-thii-kuchh-dinon-kishwar-naheed-ghazals?sort=popularity-
desc&lang=hi

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41 ‘Practitioners of the form in English include Adrienne Rich, Judith Wright,

Maxine Kumine, Jim Harrison, Phyllis Webb and Agha Shahid Ali who have
experimented with the form in their own unique ways.’ (Zaidi 2015: 173)
42 For instance, see Priyadarshi Patnaik’s discussion of a ‘provisional universality’
in ‘Rasa Aesthetics Goes Global: Relevance and Legitimacy’, The Bloomsbury
Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Arindam
Chakrabarti, 2018, Bloomsbury, pp. 43–69.
43 Excerpt from Agha Shahid Ali’s ‘Ghazal’ cited with permission of W.W. Norton.
44 Excerpt from Agha Shahid Ali’s ‘Ghazal’ cited with permission of W.W. Norton.
45 Smith July/August 2007; ‘Hip-Hop Ghazal’ is published with permission from
the author.
46 Source: Stone 2017; http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/carole_stone1.
html – Reproduced with permission of Carole Stone; Courtesy Muse-Pie Press
and Shot Glass Journal, May 2017, #22.
47 Copyright 1999 Heather McHugh; Reproduced by permission of the author.
48 ‘At the Museum’, Copyright© 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali, from The Veiled Suite:
The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali. Reproduced by permission of W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc.

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 7
TURNING BACK TOWARDS THE
FUTURE
Feminist conversations with South Asian art

Given that this study has undertaken a rather speculative voyage into the
past, spotlighting along the way certain junctions with feminist ways of
thinking about art, any attempt at a conclusion must remain a tentative
stop, awaiting its re-routings in future scholarship. In my effort to travel
into past aesthetic traditions as a way of envisioning a way forward for
feminist theorizing, I therefore return to an image and a notion evoked in
the Introduction to this book: on the one hand, the evocative symbolism of
the Sankofa bird of the Akan people of West Africa and, on the other, Robert
Graves’s suggestion of analepsis and its proleptic effects in the context of
myth, art and literature. Though drawn from two entirely different cultural
traditions, the image and the concept suggest a cross-cultural synchronicity
in their shared faith in turning to past knowledge for reconceptualizing
future directions. Both of these have enthused my attempts to sift through
and ferret out kernels of ideas in former aesthetic epistemologies that reso-
nate with feminist imaginaries. Furthermore, I have tried to seek out how
these resonances may lead to novel ways of re-imagining questions of gen-
der and other intersectional identities through the affective experiences that
art affords, particularly the shared contours of affective experiences fore-
grounded by feminist theory and in South Asian aesthetic traditions.
One of the primary questions that mobilized this particular journey into
the past – that of the possibility of alternate conceptualizations of now-
familiar categories of gender and sexuality in the bygone time-spaces
charted by South Asian aesthetic traditions – has revealed that these tax-
onomies have remained contingent, made susceptible to their reconfigura-
tions by aesthetic imaginaries that have actively resisted the congealing of
identity constructions. It is precisely this contingency that obliges us to
press and reassess the taken-for-granted robustness of notions of identity in
our times. Undoubtedly, a journey into a past interred under so many layers
of time makes it challenging to be surefooted in any such pursuit. Yet, like
Ariadne’s intrepid trail into and out of the heart of meaning, this expedition
into former Indic aesthetic epistemologies has undraped some of the muta-
tions to which terms such as gender and sexuality have remained predis-
posed. Like other socially constructed typologies, these categories have

DOI: 10.4324/9780429286995-8 193

 T U R N I N G B A C K T OWA R D S T H E F U T U R E

recurrently yielded, as we have seen, to shifting cultural and epistemic for-

mulations in aesthetic traditions that evolved across the north and north-
western provinces of South Asia. In this process, they have also revealed their
plasticity. If there is a continuum to be traced through this trans-historical
trajectory, it thus makes itself visible in the permeability and porosity of
notions such as ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, ‘caste’ and ‘religion’, wrought upon by
the varying understandings that have informed former aesthetic theoriza-
tions, stances and representations. Many of these conceptualizations provide
ingresses for new conversations with feminist theorizing, as has been my
attempt to demonstrate along the way. Without overly rehearsing these pos-
sibilities, I offer here a brief recapitulation of some salient issues as a way of
mapping a way forward for what may promise to be a rich and productive
dialogue between feminist theory and South Asian aesthetics.
The taxonomic suppleness to which contours of identity have been sub-
ject over time made itself apparent at the very onset of this journey into a
South Asian past. As we saw, prehistoric Indus clay figurines foreground a
moveable, plastic aesthetic that sculpts identity across a nexus of axes1 that
include gender, sexuality, and age among other ways of imagining human
subjecthood. The hundreds of unfinished, discarded figurines in terracotta
from Harappa are suggestive of a playful celebration of sexual and gen-
dered multiplicities temporarily projected onto the human body, one that
becomes deified through its androgynous configurations. The Indus aes-
thetic challenges the statism of gender and sexuality, as it moulds porous,
diversely gendered bodies with the help of mixed sexual attributes, and
privileges severality over the bi-polarity of strictly female and male forms.
Its emphasis on a shareable non-teleological aesthetic that draws pleasure
from the creative act of making, rather than from individual ownership of
a definitive ‘finished’2 art object, and its refusal of binarity in conceiving
identity speak in clear, chiming tones to feminist re-imaginings of intersec-
tional identities through art.
Feminist theory may equally discover some common conceptual ground
in rasa theory’s emphasis on the conjoining of a transformative affective
experience with the begetting of pleasure. Rasa’s construction of pleasure as
a psychosomatic, communal experience stemming from a trans-personal
shareability of affect generated in an encounter with art resounds with femi-
nist elaborations of the trans-subjectivities afforded by art-making and art-
witnessing, as explored in recent years by Bracha Ettinger, for instance.3 Rasa
theory expounds on these through elaborations of the related notions of
‘commonization’4 (sadharanikarana), evocation (dhvani) and the appear-
ance/impression of pleasure (abhasa), all of which may resonate with a femi-
nist aesthetic that imagines interfaces between aesthetic pleasure and its
transformative gendered effects. Rasa’s equilibrium rests on notions that
themselves are never at rest – dhvani ‘moves’ the reader/spectator from mean-
ing to suggested meaning through a nexus sketched between the lines as well
as underneath their subversive abhasa. Correspondingly, the privileging of

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srngara rasa and its corollary alankara, which together serve to close the
distinction between love, beauty and ornamentation and between metaphor
and empirical reality, augurs revised understandings of the aesthetic process
with implications for gendered approaches to art. It is likely that feminist
theory will equally discover intriguing affinities in rasa’s interfacing of psy-
chic and empirical notions of experience. In particular, such an interface is
furnished by the transformative, miracle-bearing concept of chamatkar,
which heralds the possibility of aesthetic breakthroughs and transmogri-
fied, expanded selves commingled in aesthetic communion.
Undoubtedly, rasa theory’s evolution during historical periods that were
marked by explicitly masculist elaborations of propriety would often have
been at cross-purposes with women’s emancipatory agencies. But defini-
tions of propriety, as we have seen, remained transitory and in flux even as
they evolved alongside an uninterrupted emphasis in aesthetic theory on the
stable, central role of affect in engendering pleasure. Together, these hinted
at the vulnerability of moral–ethical orders that were prone to change and
susceptible to their future subversions through rasa’s persistent centring of
the affective and the ethical at the heart of aesthetic experience. Rasa’s faith
in art’s transformative capabilities located in its emotive effects brings it in
close proximity to the conversations between notions of art, experience and
politics that energize feminist aesthetics.
As we traversed our way forward beyond the delight availed through
sensory and even transcendental aesthetic experiences5, we encountered a
different conceptualization of pleasure elevated to the level of meta-reality
in medieval mystic traditions. As iconoclastic epistemological thought-sys-
tems, both Bhakti and Sufism articulate a refutation of culturally con-
strained notions of identity particularly where these pose as obstacles to the
mystic path of oneness, conceived in Sufi thought as a oneness of being or
Wahdat-ul-wujood.6 In this transcendental pursuit of oneness through
immersion in creative activity, gender and other identity markers such as
class, caste and religion become vulnerable to their dismantling. Mystic
poetry, song and dance are conceived as a ‘moving’ of the human spirit,
transporting it to the realm of the divine. In wild abandon, the corporeal
body shakes free of the trappings of identity, as seen in the deewangi7 of the
bhakt and the pir (particularly evident in the poetry and songs composed by
Meera and Amir Khusrau), the ‘mad’ dance of the whirling dervishes, and
the wild drumbeats of the malang. Although, in the male mystic’s efforts to
shed the garb of ‘masculinity’ and in his adoption of ‘womanly’ devoutness,
the ‘feminine’ acquires risk-bearing associations with abjection and surren-
der, gender itself remains construed as a robe to be worn and discarded at
will. This practised mystical awareness of the feminine-as-artifice and of
gender-as-attire offers discernible parallels with feminist perceptions of gen-
der performativity; these in turn draw attention to art’s central function in
foregrounding performance as a political event. Additionally, Sufi poetry’s
anti-hegemonic and anti-establishment impulses demonstrated that it is not

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inconceivable to bring together the political with the transcendental, the

worldly with the otherworldly, in the realm of the aesthetic.
Moreover, by positioning the feminized (male) body as both desiring
agent and locus of abject desire, the mystic aesthetic prevents the solidifica-
tion of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ as immovable, impermeable categories.
Deploying notions such as kaifiyat and fana (see Chapter 5) that effect the
merging of the corporeal body with divinity, identity constructions of gen-
der, caste and class are projected as ephemeral abodes for the metaphysical
self that emerges in jouissance at the liminal borders of otherworldly plea-
sures. Although the essentialist undertones of such an aesthetic may por-
tend feminist theory’s wariness towards mystic transcendentalism and
anti-empiricism, this does not limit the revolutionary implications of mystic
impulses that we see re-emerge in the pre-modern Urdu ghazal.
As we saw in medieval Persian poetry and subsequently in pre-modern
Urdu verse, the effortless coupling of empirical and metaphysical experi-
ence was encapsulated in the mazmun of unrequited love – the ishq and
gham of the sorrow-bearing lover towards the composite figure of the
human/divine beloved. This twinning of ontological mortal/immortal con-
trasts was intertwined by virtuoso poets in the polarities of the ghazal form
through the semantic and stylistic tensions and flourishes generated in the
dialogic two-line she‘r. At the same time, the ghazal’s ravani, its ‘flowing-
ness’, suggestive of sonic and semantic fluidities, ensured that the genre
secured its enigma by withholding meaning just beyond its margins, as
though to foreshadow prospective postmodern ruminations on the subver-
sive tensions between the margin and the centre. Prefiguring the deconstruc-
tion of essences through Derridean elaborations of gender’s artifice that
came to characterize late-twentieth-century poststructuralism, the early
ghazal pivots on the notion of gender as stylization, particularly of the femi-
nine as ada, as ‘style’. The ghazal’s highly stylized aesthetic worked in tan-
dem with the legacy of dissent that it inherited from Sufi literary affiliations.
This parallelism brought to the fore the double-ness that is art’s unique
bequest – the concurrent generation of affective pleasure and the articula-
tion of political dissention without locating these in antagonism. By com-
bining its radical impulses with an aesthetic of indirection, ambiguity,
multivalence and metaphoricity, the ghazal’s mazmuns of ishq acquire a
textured and slippery semanticity that transgresses notions of singular
meaning and unitary interpretations. It is owing to this forever-expanding
universe of subtle inventiveness that feminist theory may find in the ghazal
a form suited to the unfurling of nuanced understandings of gender, sexual-
ity and other intersectional identities.
Particularly in the hands of women poets, as becomes evident from a
study of twentieth-century transnational Urdu verse, the ghazal’s subtleties
provide fertile ground for a reconfiguration of gender identities. On the one
hand, the ghazal’s non-conformist legacy proves amenable to feminist artic-
ulations of insurgence, as made evident by several Pakistani poets who

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wrote radical poetry in the aftermath of the hudood ordinances. On the

other, the ghazal’s taghazzul, its ‘ghazal-ness’, enabled poets like Kishwar
Naheed, Fahmida Riaz and Ishrat Aafreen to explore the genre’s pleasure-
bearing aesthetic to formulate and assert erotic and political gratifications
that women could claim as a lutf of their own.
In more recent times, a fitting scaffolding for contemporary concerns has
been afforded by the ghazal’s fragmented dialogic structure, its resistance
to the straitjacketing of meaning, and its playful gambolling through fields
of love and revolution, ensuring the genre’s ‘trans-lations’ across conti-
nents, where it has found surprising new homes in the notebooks of poets
like Agha Shahid Ali, Adrienne Rich, Carole Stone, Patricia Smith and
Heather McHugh, among others. These contemporary traversals showcase
the ghazal’s ability to function as a poetry of witness and to chronicle the
experiences of those pushed to the margins. Here, again, we may trace the
ghazal’s revolutionary energy to its Sufi legacy of anti-institutional dissent
and to its capacity to birth stylistic pleasure even while drowned in maz-
muns of sorrow and unfulfilled desire. The genre speaks viscerally, there-
fore, to the unrequited lives of all those ‘othered’ at the margins of
hegemonic societies: women and queer persons, dissidents, persons of
colour, immigrants and refugees stranded on the outer banks of a conflict-
ridden, post-globalized universe that increasingly is witness to waves of
racial and gendered violence. In such despairing scenarios, the ghazal con-
tinues to sparkle with delicate rays of light at the brightening horizons of
meaning it generates.
Because this study has been selective in its focus on a particular geo-
political region of South Asia and on certain time periods, this tentative
closure must end with a disclaimer. This book was intended as a circum-
scribed appraisal of a few South Asian aesthetic traditions that promise an
imminent dialogue with feminist aesthetics. Needless to say, by no means
has it been my attempt to proffer an overview of the vast and diverse array
of aesthetic traditions that have been homed in or continue to be nurtured
within the region we presently refer to as South Asia.8 What has emerged
through this selective investigation are a few interwoven threads that resur-
face from time to time and hint at continuities nurtured over the centuries
in the aesthetic epistemologies of the northern regions of the subcontinent.
These formulations illuminate certain leitmotifs that can have bearing on
gendered perceptions of art in contemporary times – those of the elasticity
and contingency of identity, of the central role of affect in producing aes-
thetic pleasure, of the embodied perception of joy as lutf, of the feminine as
stylized artifice, and of the possibility of knotting together articulations of
resistance and gratification to collapse the distance between the political
and the aesthetic. Just as the ghazal continues to ‘speak to women’, South
Asian aesthetic traditions hold palpable promise for ongoing and future
conversations with transnational feminist theory. As I have tried to intimate
through the title of this book, the aesthetic traditions within South Asia

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readily invite alliances with the aesthetic impulse that lies within the heart
of feminist theory.

Notes
1 See Sharri Clark (2003) and discussion in Chapter 2.
2 See discussion in Chapter 2.
3 See discussion of Bracha Ettinger’s artwork in Chapter 2.
4 See Sheldon Pollock’s use of this term as discussed in Chapter 3, and see Sheldon
Pollock (2016).
5 See, for instance, Chapter 3 for a discussion of Abhinavagupta’s elaboration of
santarasa as a transcendental pleasure of peace and tranquillity.
6 See discussion in Chapter 5.
7 See Chapter 4.
8 See the Introduction for an elaboration of the term ‘South Asia’ in the context of
this book.

References
Clark, Sharri. 2003. ‘Representing the Indus Body: Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the
Anthropomorphic Terracotta Figurines from Harappa’, Asian Perspectives, 42 2:
304–328.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2016. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York:
Columbia University Press.

198
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures; page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer
to notes numbers.

Aafreen, Ishrat 163–167, 177, 184 Anandavardhana 78–79

aashiq 122, 138 Ananya Kabir 93
Abbas, Nuzhat 163 androgyny 34, 40–41
Abbas, Shemeem Burney 102–103, 107, anekanta 83
111, 117n4, 117n6 Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro 175–176
‘āb-­e-­ravāñ’ 170 Anjaria, Ulka 175–176
abhasa 81–82 Anjum, Tanvir 92, 112
abhidha 83 anubhavas 65
Abhijnana-­sakuntalam (Kalidasa) 73 anukriti 77
Abhinavagupta 72, 75, 77–79, 84 Anukrti 88n9
Abhinava’s theory 85 anuvyavasaya 75–76
ada 138–142 Appadurai, Arjun 58
ada bandi 138–140 archaeology, feminist perspectives in
adbhuta 83 28
aesthetics 1; breakthrough 84–85; Arif, Najeeba 157, 162–163, 178
epistemologies 193; feminist, see Aristotle 86
feminist aesthetic; feminist art 8, 24–25, 65–66, 70–71; feminist
approaches in 2; in India 17–21; conversations with 193–198
international perspectives 14–17; of artefactual/archaeological approach
pleasure-­in-­process 54–55, 56; 60n1
traditions, South Asia 1, 3–4, 6–7, artha 74
10, 12, 21–22, 34, 193, 197 artist/artisan, aesthetic experience of
Agarwal, Bina 51 53–54
Ahmad, Rukhsana 159, 161, 168–169 Aryan invasion theory 32
Ahmed, Safdar 125–126, 128, Atre, Shubhangana 3–4, 28, 33, 61n7
133–134 auchitya 67–68, 81–82, 85–86
alankara 72–73, 195 Aurangabadi, Siraj 140, 147
alapa 83 auraton ki boli 156
Ali, Agha Shahid 180–182
Ali, Nosheen 91, 101–102, 115–116, baavri 99
117n2 Barreda Monge, Frederick H. 58
amrad 129, 133 bazaar 115, 144
amradparasti 129 begumati zuban 156
analepsis 5, 28, 37 Behl, Aditya 91, 122
ananda 72 Benjamin, Andrew 114

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Bhakti and Sufism 23–24, 91–93, Coomaraswamy, Ananda 6, 25, 70

121–122, 129, 195; dwelling vs. corporeal imagery 162
nomadism 104–107; Ishq and cosmopolitanism: indigeneity and
deewangi 100–104; Meera’s story syncretic 157–160; postmodern 182
95–100; mysterious fluidity of gender ‘cow-­boat’ artefact 42
108–114; mystic aesthetics 114–116; cross-­cultural linkages 33
mystic body in love 92–96 culture 7–8, 22, 157
Bhakti movement 127 curatorial approach 33
bhaktin 95
Bhatnagar, Rashmi Dube 98 darshan 84
Bhatta Nayaka 75, 114 Dave-­Mukherji, Parul 69
bhavas 65–67, 71–72, 74, 76, 85 deewana 178
Bhoja 69, 72–73, 78, 82 deewangi 100–104, 109
bi-­gendered mystic episteme 136 deewani 111, 178
bindi 49 De, S. K. 65, 72
body-­in-­pleasure, rasa theory 70–74 Dehejia, Vidya 54
Bolger, Diane 3, 28, 35 DeKoven, Marianne 15
boliyan 158 Derrida, Jacques 140
Brahmanical Hinduism 92–93 dhammal 102
brahmanical patriarchy 18 dharma 74
Braidotti, Rosi 105, 107 dhun 83
Brand, Peg 1–2 dhvani 74, 78–79, 81–83, 86, 194
British imperialism 152 dimorphic representational tool 6
Bulle Shah 102–105, 109–110, 116, discourse 18–20, 59, 67, 82, 157
118n16 disinterestedness 113
Burchett, Patton 117n1 dogana 143, 150n28
Bussagli, Mario 55 dohas 94
Butler, Judith 113 Doniger, Wendy 23, 33
Donovan, Josephine 86
Caplan, David 164, 180–182 dristi 84
chadur aur chardivari campaign 161
Chakrabarti, Dilip 57 Early Harappan/Kot Dijan transitional
Chakravorty, Pallabi 87 phase 42
chaman 123–124 eclectic approach 3
chamatkar 83–84, 195 ecriture feminine 171
chapat 143, 150n28 ekanta 83
chapatbazi 143, 150n28 elitism 19–20
chapti 143, 150n28 Elliott, Jane 17, 22
chardivari 157, 171 emotional anatomy 68
Chatterjee, Sandra 86 enthroned queen/goddess figure 42, 44,
chittavistara 84 45, 46
Cixous, Hélène 61n5, 68 epistemic contingency 163
Clark, Sharri 35, 39–42, 52, 54 epistemology 93, 114
clay figurines 30, 32, 34–36, 41, 53–54, eroticism, covenant of indeterminacy
194 and grammar of 129–134
Clément, Catherine 105, 108, 116, ‘erotics of asceticism,’ 125
117n9, 118n20 Ettinger, Bracha L. 28, 36–37, 54–55,
commonization 74–77, 83 61n8
competent reader 87n3
conceptual liminalities 22 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 134, 158, 164,
conceptual plenitude 63 188n6
contextual interdisciplinary approaches fana 196
3 Faruqi, Shamsur 124–126, 130, 132,
conventional ghazal prosody 177 136–139, 141, 149n3

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female figurine 48; decorated belt and ‘Ghazal of the Better-­Unbegun’

‘skirt,’ 39; fan-­shaped headdress 32 (McHugh) 184
feminine-­as-­artifice 138–142 Ghosh, Manmohan 65, 85
feminism 2, 7, 16, 18, 22–25 Global South 176
feminist aesthetic 1, 28, 153; aligning goddess–bull imagery 51
ghazal with 173–180; definition of goddess-­centred aesthetic, in Indus
15; postmodern transnational civilization 30–34
180–186; rasa theory, see rasa theory; ‘Goddess Feminism,’ 31
re-­purposing ghazal towards Gordon, D. H. 30
161–163 Gordon, M. E. 30
feminist discourse 18 Graves, Robert 4, 28, 60n2, 193
feminist ethics 86 Green, Nile 134
feminist theory 1, 194; in India 17–21; gulistan 123–124
international perspectives 14–17 guru–shishya 122
feminization process 136–137
folk tradition 98 hadd 160
Foucault, Michel 21 Harappan culture, goddess figure in 33,
Frazier, Jessica 60n1, 83–84 35, 38–39, 40, 41, 52, 54, 58, 194
French post-­structuralist feminism 34 Harappan sculpture 23
Futehally, Shama 96, 100 Hashmi, Arshad 160
Hashmi, Shadab 123
Gandhi, Nighat 182 Heer–Ranjha tradition 102–103
Ganesh, Kamala 33 Hein, Hilde 15, 21, 55
Garavaso, Pieranna 64, 85 Higgins, Kathleen M. 68, 71, 78, 84
Garimella, Annapurna 5–7, 34 high theory 17, 20
gender: apartheid 160; dualism 78; Hindu art 84
mysterious fluidity of 108–114; Hindu metaphysics/philosophy 23, 93
polarity 35; roles 52–53 Hindu mysticism 127
geo-­spatial locales 10 The Hindus: An Alternative History
Ghalib, Mirza 131–132, 139, 147 (Doniger) 23
gham 174, 196 ‘Hip-­Hop Ghazal’ (Smith) 183
ghazal 10, 121, 196–197; Aafreen, homoerotic devotional practice 130
Ishrat 163–167; ada 138–142; homosexuality 133
aligning with feminist aesthetics hudd 160
173–180; dissent, legacy of 127–129; hudood 160–161, 197
eroticism, covenant of indeterminacy
and grammar of 129–134; feminine-­ imagination-­based interdisciplinary
as-­artifice 138–142; form and approach 3
meaning-­making in 123–127; India: aesthetic in 17–21; political role
fragmented dialogic structure 197; 12; Western archaeological
gender and power, inversion of approaches to 33
135–138; indigeneity and syncretic Indian feminism 20–21
cosmopolitanism 157–160; Naheed, Indian metaphysics 95
Kishwar 169–173; Perso-­Indic Indian sculpture 54–55
elaborations of 152; political and Indic aesthetics 22–25; theory 63, 69
literary understandings of 128–129; Indic art 3
postmodern transnational feminist Indo-­Islamic society 158
aesthetic 180–186; proclivity 153; Indus art objects 55, 57–58
rekhta and rekhti 142–148; re-­ Indus civilization, sculpting gender and
purposing towards feminist aesthetic sexuality by: geographical spread of
161–163; Riaz, Fahmida 168; 29; goddess-­centred aesthetic in
universe 138; woman’s voice 30–34; periodization of 29;
142–148 reconstructing through artifacts
‘Ghazal of Remembrance’ (Stone) 183 53–59, 56; re-­figuring composite

201
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sexualities in 37–42, 38, 39, 41; La folle et le Saint (Kakar and Clément)
sexual ambiguity and gender roles 105
52–53; trans-­disciplinary approaches Lalitha, K. 19, 67
34–37 Lee, Christopher 159
Indus clay figurines 194 Lee, C. L. 86
Indus ecology 51 Light on Implicature 78
Indus iconography 30 Light on Passion 72
Indus valley 3, 29, 57–59 literary and cultural theory 20
Iqbal, Muhammad 134, 164–165, Lumbard, Joseph 93
188n11 lutf 153, 174–176, 179
Iran, seeker of justice in 149n22 lyrical language, attributes of 162
Irigaray, Luce 162
Irigarayin, Luce 61n5 madness 68, 100, 103–104, 178
ishq 100–104, 109, 153, 166, 176, 196 ‘magico-­religious significance,’ 30
ishq-­e ehaqiqi 143 mahaul 114
ishq-­i haqiqi 124, 161 mahavakyartha 82
ishq-­i mijazi 161 Mahimabhatta 79
islah 122, 124 Mah Laqa Bai 142
Islamic mysticism 127 Malamud, Margaret 112, 129–130,
isti‘arah 123, 138, 161 136
izzat 67, 161 malang 101, 195
male figurines 48; from Harappa 38
Jain, Jasbir 22 Mani, B. Venkat 158
jogan 99, 111 ma‘ni afirini 124–125, 138
John, Mary E. 7 mannkahat 101
Jones, Rachel 88n14 Mansoor, Asma 157, 162–163, 178
jouissance 147 Manuel, Peter 122
Jungian model, of female archetypes maqta 123, 167
33 Marshall, John 30, 36
maryada 67
Kabir, Ananya 101, 111, 158, 175–176 ma’shuq 122, 124, 138
kafi/s 102–104, 110, 117n11 matla 123, 139, 167, 185
kaifiyat 139, 173–174, 176, 196 Matthews, David 157–158, 171
Kakar, Sudhir 105 Mature Harappan phase 29
kama 74 mazaa 175–176
Kama Sutra 73 mazmun afirini 124–125, 138
kanjri 110 mazmuns 128, 133–134, 148, 153, 159,
Kapur, Ratna 22 174, 178, 196
kasf 110 McHugh, Heather 184–186
Kashmiri Shaivism 84 Medusa (Cixous) 68
kavya 80 Meera’s story 95–100, 106, 117n6
Kenoyer, Jonathan 29, 51, 58–59 metonymic metaphor 141
khudi 164 mimansa 78
Kidwai, Salim 145 Mir, Mir Taqi 127, 139, 147, 149n10
kitabon 167, 172 mishra 126
Kramrisch, Stella 55, 70 mobility 107
Kristeva, Julia 106, 116, 117n9 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 77, 88n10,
Kugle, Scott 130–132, 135–137, 142, 181
146 moksha 72, 84
Kumar, Sukrita Paul 9–10 mother goddess: iconography 36;
standing figure of 31, 31
Lacanian theory 178 movement-­based politics 16
‘The Lady of the Spiked Throne’ Mughal society 132, 136–137
(Vidale) 42–52, 43–48, 50 Mukhia, Harbans 127–128

202
 I ndex

Mullin, Amy 15–17, 19 politics 15–16, 155

murid 101 Pollock, Griselda 14, 22, 24, 37, 100,
Murphy, Anne 112–113 116
mushairas 102, 126, 145, 157, 159, Pollock, Sheldon 63, 66, 72, 75–76,
174 79–80, 82–85
mystic aesthetics 105, 107, 113–116 Possehl, Gregory 30, 33, 36–37, 52, 55,
mystic body in love 92–96; Ishq and 57–59
deewangi 100–104; Meera’s story postmodern transnational feminist
95–100 aesthetic 180–186
mystics 107; ontology 136 post-­theory moment 17
Prakriti–Shakti interrelationship 51
Naheed, Kishwar 161, 167, 169–173, Pratap, Ajay 57
177–178 prem 94
Naik, Ashay 80–81 prem-­akhiyan 102
Naim, C. M. 144–145, 187n3 pre-­Vedic ideology 42, 51
nakhra 138 Pritchett, Frances 122, 124–126,
Narang, Gopichand 127–128, 130, 128–130, 133–134, 137, 140–142,
137, 157–158, 171 149n3, 150n26, 166
Natyashastra (NS) 63–68 provisional universality 76
Natyaveda 69 provocative theory 72
nazar 129, 143, 182 purusha–prakriti 73
nazrana 115 purusharthas 69
Nets of Awareness (Pritchett) 133
nomadic lifestyle 98–99, 105, 116 qafiyah 123
nomadism 104–107 qawwali 157
qissa 102
Oesterheld, Christina 156 Qureshi, Regula 124
O’Flaherty, Wendy 3
‘oneness of being,’ 127 raahat 174–176
‘originary feminine difference,’ 36 rabt 124, 176
radif 123
Pakistan: Urdu poetry in 160–161; Rahman, Anisur 161
women’s poetry 159–160, 162–163, Rahman, Tariq 133
169 Rajan, Sunder Rajeswari 18
Pandit, Hufaiza 170 Ram, Kalpana 19, 71, 73
parampara, of rasa theory 64, 66 Rancière, Jacques 15
Paranjape, Makarand 5, 7–8 rapture 72, 99, 173
parvana 123, 125 Rasa, rasas 65–67, 71–72, 84
Patnaik, Priyadarshi 76 rasa theory 23–24, 63–64, 93–94, 114,
performative interludes 126 194–195; aesthetic experience 70;
Persianized Urdu 146 art 65–66; body-­in-­pleasure 70–74,
Persian poetry 127 75; commonization 74–77, 83;
Perso-­Arabic tradition, of literary empathetic response 78; feminist
theory 130 critical perspectives on 66–70;
Perso-­Indic elaborations, of ghazal 152 gender dualism 78; miraculous
Petievich, Carla 131, 145–146 effects of 83–87; Natyashastra
Piggott, Stuart 30 64–65; primary/generative 65;
pir 101 reception theory in 82; sringara and
pir–muridi dynamics/tradition 101, alankara of 137; stratified status-­
108, 121–122, 135 based impulses 77
pleasure-­in-­process, aesthetic of 54–55, rasika 76–77, 79
56 ravani 124, 126, 153, 161, 170, 173,
Poetics (Aristotle) 86 196
poetry 101; of witness 10, 186, 197 reception politics 114–116

203
 I ndex

rekhta and rekhti 113, 118n26, 130, Smith, Monica 53, 58–59
142–148, 152, 156–157, 166, 179 Smith, Patricia 183–184
replication, concept of 58–59 The Social Life of Things (1986)
Riaz, Fahmida 161, 167–168, 177, 184 (Appadurai) 58
Rich, Adrienne 180, 182–183 social-­literary competence 82
Rockwell, Peter 54 solar imagery 45–46, 47
Roth, Amanda 64, 85 South Asia 2; aesthetic traditions 1,
3–7, 10, 12, 21–22, 34, 193, 197; art
The Sacred and the Feminine (Pollock 4, 193–198; geo-­political and
and Sauron) 116 geographic boundaries 1; inter-­
sadharanikarana 74–76 religious tradition 173; mystic
sahrdaya 76 aesthetics in 114; nations and
sama 117n4, 158, 173 cultures 157; paradoxical category of
sama’ bandhna 173 8; performative traditions of 158;
samanya 74 positionality 3; transnational context
samkhya philosophy 72–73, 83 3
Sangari, Kumkum 97–98 South Asian Literature 9
sankocha 84 Spivak, Gayatri C. 181
Sankofa bird 5, 12n2, 28, 193 Spurs 140
Sanskrit poetry 82 sringara 72
santarasa 65, 83–84, 87n2, 198n5 sringararasa 67, 72–74
saptasindhu 46 Stanford Encyclopedia 15
saqi 125 sthayibhava 65, 67, 88n9
sarapa 162 Stone, Alison 181
saundarya 73 Stone, Carole 183–184
Sauron, Victoria Turvey 116 sufiana 115–116
Schofield, Katherine Butler 94 sufiana-­kalam 109, 111, 115
Scialpi, Fabio 31 Sufi/Sufism, Bhakti and , see Bhakti and
scientia sexualis 21 Sufism
seated figurines 40, 41 Sumerian civilization, cross-­cultural
seductive mannerisms 138 linkages with 30
sexuality 133; attributes, in Indus art suroor 174, 176
37–42, 38–39, 41; feminine powers
and composite 42–52, 43–48, 50; taghazzul 126–127, 131, 153, 197
interdisciplinary theorizations of 28; takhallus 123, 142, 178, 183–185
sexual ambiguity and gender roles tarannum 124
52–53 tasawwuf 100, 104, 107
shaayar 165 tawa’if 142
shaayerie 164 tazkirahs25 142
shagird/s 122 terracotta artefact 42, 43, 44, 53, 55,
Sharia law 160 57–58
sharm 161, 170 Thapalyal, Ranjana 73
shayerie 178 Tharu, Susie 19, 67
she‘r 166, 169, 182, 196 theatrical scene 49, 50
Shero-­shayerie functions 101 theoretical sophistication 19
sh‘ir 123–126, 143 toolbox approach 4
sh‘ir-­o-­shayerie 122 trans-­disciplinary approaches 34–37
Shiva, Vandana 51 transgender 41–42
shorish 124 transnational feminist aesthetic
Silsila 108 approaches 85, 180–186
Silva, Neluka 166, 177–178 ‘transnational postmemory,’ 158
siyahi 177 trans-­temporality 22

204
 I ndex

trivarga philosophy 70 vyabhicarin 68

Trivedi, Harish 8–12 vyabhicharibhavas 65, 77
vyanjana 82–83
universalism 181
Urdu language 10; ghazal, see ghazal; Wahdat-­ul-­wujood 127, 195
poetry, in Pakistan 160–161; wahwahi 115
twentieth century, language and We Sinful Women (Ahmad) 161, 164
literature in 153–156; women and, Western archaeological approach 33
fraught relationship 156–157 Western psychoanalysis 36
ustad 122 Western school of New Criticism 140
ustadi 122 WGS, see Women’s & Gender Studies
utthana 174 Wheeler, Mortimer 30
Wiegman, Robyn 16–17
vahanas 46 Williams, Joanna 54
Vali Deccani 130, 132, 135, 139 Women’s Action Forum 160
Vanita, Ruth 20–21, 145–146, 156 women’s experience 25n2
Vatsyayan, Kapila 64, 66, 76, 87 Women’s & Gender Studies (WGS)
Veda 69 14–15, 17–18, 20
Vedic binarism 29 Women Writing in India (Tharu and
Vedic metaphysics 93 Lalitha) 19, 67
vibhava 68 Woolf, Virginia 41
Victorian moral codes 132–133 Wright, Rita P. 3, 28, 35
Vidale, Massimo 42, 46–47, 49
viraha 94, 97, 105, 113 Yadav, Sumati 92
Virgin goddess 33
visaal 101, 105, 113, 167, 188n19, Zaidi, Nishat 128, 137, 159, 181
189n34 Ziarek, Ewa P. 15, 21
visceral gesture 107 zina bil Jabr 160

205