"Married among their companions": Female homoerotic relations in nineteenth-century Urdu Rekhti poetry in India

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2004, Pages

  Vanita, Ruth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 37749043548     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2004.0038     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgrave-St Martin's, 2000), 191-94, 220-28.
2. and Khalil Ahmed Siddiqui, Rekhti ka Tanqidi Mutalia (Lucknow: Nasim Book Depot, 1974). Most histories of Urdu literature briefly mention and dismiss Rekhti.
3. For critical commentary in English, see Carla Petievich, "Doganas and Zanakhis: The Invention and Subsequent Erasure of Urdu Poetry's 'Lesbian' Voice," in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47-60;
4. Naim, "Transvestic Words?"; and Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India.
5. For a detailed account of this campaign with respect to Urdu literature, see Frances Pritchett, Nefs of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1995);
6. and Carla Petievich, Assembly of Rivals: Delhi, Lucknow, and the Urdu Ghazal (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), chap.12.
7. Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 191-94, 220-21.
8. For the history of Urdu, see Mohammed Sadiq, A History of Urdu Literature, 2d ed. (1964; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995);
9. Annemarie Schimmel, Classical Urdu Literature from the Beginning to Iqbal (Weisbaden: Otto Harrossowitz, 1975);
10. D.J. Matthews, C. Shackle, and Shahrukh Husain, Urdu Literature (London: Urdu Markaz, 1985).
11. C.M. Naim, "The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry," in Studies in the Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction, ed. Muhammad Umar Memon (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1979), 120-42;
12. Veena Talwar Oldenberg, "Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow," in Lucknow: Memories of a City, ed. Violette Graff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 136-54, quotation on 149.
13. Platts, Dictionary, 530.
14. Khan, Sa'adat Yar Khan Rangin, 416.
15. Petievich, "Doganas and Zanakhis," 54.
16. Husain, Kulliyat-e Jur'at, 294-97. For a full translation, see Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 223-25.
17. Naim, "Transvestic Words,18.
18. Alain Danielou, trans., The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classic Indian Text (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1994), 194.
19. Yashodhara, Jayamangala, excerpted in Danielou, trans., Complete Kamasutra, 192.
20. Oldenberg, "Lifestyle as Resistance," 142-45.
21. Ismat Chughtai, Pratinidhi Kahaniyan (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1994).
22. Naqvi, ed., Intikhab-e Rekhti, 82.
23. Gail Minault, "Other Voices, Other Rooms: The View from the Zenana," in Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, ed. Nita Kumar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 108-24.
24. Holland, The Satsai, 15.
25. See Ram Awadh Dwivedi, A Critical Survey of Hindi Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), 102;
26. See Ruth Vanita, "'At All Times Near': Love Between Women in Two Medieval Indian Devotional Texts," in Same-Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Francesca Canade Sautman and Pamela Shiengorn (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
27. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness.
28. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988);
29. and Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
30. Azad, Ab-e-Hayat, 232-33.
31. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi's Bihishti Zewar, A Partial Translation with Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 75.
32. Carla Petievich, "Gender Politics and the Urdu Ghazal: Exploratory Observations on Rekhta versus Rekhti," The Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 3 (2001): 241-42. In this article Petievich repeats more strongly the arguments presented in "Doganas and Zanakhis."
33. Danielou, The Complete Kama Sutra, 196. Extracts from Shastri's Hindi commentary, translated into English, appear with Danielou's translation of the text.