This volume intends to cast hitherto unfocused light on the emergent literary sensibilities shown by four Muslim women in pre-modern India. Gulbadan, Jahanara and Zeb-un-Nessa belonged to the Mughal zenana, which was an enigmatic liminal space of qualified autonomy and complex equations of gender politics. Conversely, Habba Khatoon, famously known as ‘the Nightingale of Kashmir’, was a common woman who married into royalty, but her happiness was short-lived with her husband being treacherously exiled by Emperor Akbar. While the subjective selves of these women never much surfaced under extant rigid conventions, their indomitable understanding of ‘home-world’ antinomies determinedly emerge from their works. This monograph explores the literary-political imagination of these women that was constructed through statist interactions of their royal fathers, brothers or husbands, and how such knowledge percolated through the relatively cloistered communal life of the zenana. Contents : Acknowledgments Introduction Sonia Nishat Amin Chapter 1: The Mughal Aviary and Women In/Out Chapter 2: Humayun’s Biographer Gulbadan Begam: A Quiet Observer of the Aviary Chapter 3: Jahanara’s Hagiographies: The Mind of a Matriarch Chapter 4: Dissenting Songbird in the Aviary: The Poetry of Zeb-un-Nissa Chapter 5: The Plaintive Songbird beyond the Aviary: Habba Khatoon’s Lol Chapter 6: Where to Conclude? Bibliography
