Women, Islam and Familial Intimacy in Colonial South Asia highlights the rich tradition of protest and defiance among the Muslim women of colonial India. Bringing together a range of archival material including novels, pamphlets, commentaries and journalistic essays, it narrates a history of Muslim feminism conversing with, and confronting the dominant and influential narratives of didactic social reform. The book reveals how discussion about marriage and family evoked claims of women’s freedom and rights in a highly charged literary and cultural landscape where lesser-known female intellectuals jostled for public space alongside well-known male social reformers. Definitions of Islamic ethics remained central to these debates, and the book illustrates how claims of social obligation, religious duty and freedom balanced and negotiated each other in a period of nationalism and reform. By doing so, it also illuminates a story of Muslim politics that goes beyond the well-established accounts of Muslim separatism and the Pakistan movement.
Author(s): Asiya Alam
Series: (Perspectives on Islamicate South Asia)
Edition: 1
Publisher: BRILL
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 370
Tags: Feminism, Gender Studies, Literary Theory, Postcolonialism
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures
A Note on Transliteration
Introduction
1 Women, Islam and Social Reform
2 Ethics and the Question of Family
3 Urdū Public Sphere
4 Gender and Nationalism
5 Structure of the Book
Chapter 1 Familial Ethics and the Critique of Social Reform
1 Nineteenth Century Debates on Akhlāq: Ethics as Relationships
2 Reformist Censorship and the Battle for Women’s Voice
3 Fatherhood and Contentious Advice
4 Disruption of Social Reform: ‘Respectability’ as Oppression
5 Parent-child Relations, Rights and Social Authority
6 Conclusion
Chapter 2 Marital Consent and the Discourse of ‘Women’s Freedom’
1 Coercive Marriage and the Vision of Compatibility
2 Marital Compatibility as Social Practice
3 Marital Consent in Urdū Magazines
4 Pardah: Seclusion and/or Participation
5 ‘Women’s Freedom’
6 Conclusion
Chapter 3 Conjugal Sexuality and the Politics of Reproduction
1 Bodily Health and Conjugality
2 Masculinity and Global “Anti-Vice” Campaigns
3 Sexual Pleasure, Female Sexual Desire and Reproduction
4 Eugenics and Family
5 Niyāz Fatehpūrī: Colonial Knowledge and History of Sexuality
6 Conclusion
Chapter 4 Polygyny
1 Sexuality and ‘Legitimate Polygyny’
2 Social Reform and Its Advocacy of ‘Legitimate Polygyny’
3 Critiques of Polygyny
4 Muslim Women’s Conference, 1918, Lahore
5 Polygynous Marriage of Saiyid ʿĀbid Husain and Sāliha ʿĀbid Husain
6 Conclusion
Chapter 5 Marital Annulment and Separation of Family
1 Talāq (Divorce)
2 Divorce and Male Authority
3 Respectability, Equality and Marital Annulment
4 Debating Strategies for Change
5 Women’s Freedom, Female Apostasy and Marriage
6 Two Men on Divorce: Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939
7 Mahr and the Economy of Marriage
8 Ethical Dilemmas: Non-Legal Familial Conflict
9 Conclusion
Postscript: A ‘Rebel’ Life
1 Saiyida Bāno Ahmad: Intimacy outside Marriage
Bibliography
Urdū Works
English Works
Index
