Gender, Sex and the City explores the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the city of Lucknow, which was the centre of a flourishing Indo-Persian culture. Through its ground-breaking analysis, it demonstrates how re??ti (a type of Urdu poetry whose distinguishing features are a female speaker and a focus on women’s lives) and to some degree, non-mystical re??ta (mainstream Urdu poetry with a male speaker), for the first time in Urdu represent women (both of conventional families and courtesan households) as important shapers of urban culture, especially urban speech.
Vanita analyses how re??ti becomes a catalyst for the transformation of the g_?azal, first, by focusing it not on love alone but on the practices, spaces and rituals of everyday life; second, by bringing subordinated figures, such as women as well as servants centre-stage; and, third, by challenging the g_?azal’s ideal of perfect love as framed by separation and suffering.
Women characters in re??ti fall in love, but they also work, shop, dress, sing, dance, eat, fast, chat, quarrel, pray, invoke spirits, and voice opinions on many matters. The author explores the way re??ti reconfigures the city from women’s perspective, depicting a parallel world of urban women’s meeting places, networks and rituals.
The first book-length study in English of re??ti and also of non-mystical re??ta, it demonstrates the interplay between the twoin language, form and content. Including many first-time translations and also analyses of neglected poems, such as Rangin’s Mas?nawi Dilpazir and Jur’ at’s ???aja ?asan-o Ba??shi T?wa’ if, (a romance with a courtesan heroine), it also studies in detail the works of Insha and Nisbat, among others.
With several more transcribed poems than in its US edition, this book is a must-read for students and scholars of literature, history, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies and culture studies.