Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry, 1780-1870

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 reḵẖti (a type of Urdu poetry whose distinguishing features are a female speaker and a focus on womens lives) and to some degree, non-mystical reḵẖta(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 reḵẖtī becomes a catalyst for the transformation of the g̱ẖazal, 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 g̱ẖazals ideal of perfect love as framed by separation and suffering.Women characters in reḵẖtī 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 reḵẖtī reconfigures the city from womens perspective, depicting a parallel world of urban womens meeting places, networks and rituals. The first book-length study in English of reḵẖtī and also of non-mystical reḵẖta, it demonstrates the interplay between the twoin language, form and content. Including many first-time translations and also analyses of neglected poems, such as Rangins Mas̤nawi Dilpazir and Jurats Ḵẖẉāja Ḥasan-ǒ Baḵẖshī T̤wāif, (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.