Perspectives on Islamicate South Asia – serie

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.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.Al-Bīrūnī (ca. 973-1050) was an innovative encyclopaedist thinker. He is particularly known to have investigated into India of his time. Yet, his life and the circumstances of his encounter with Indian languages, culture and sciences are still shrouded in mystery and legends.This research brings to light elements of his intellectual journey based on well-grounded analysis so as to contextualise al-Bīrūnī’s work of transmission of Indian philosophies into Arabic. Thanks to a theoretical framework rooted in a multidisciplinary approach, including Translation Studies, it enables to comprehend the full scope of his work and to analyse deeply his motives and choices of interpretation.

In a career spanning seven decades, Qurratulain Hyder (1927–2007) achieved distinction as a novelist, journalist, translator, and innovator in Urdu literature. To shed new light on this multilingual itinerant woman with a curatorial eye, the present study turns to Hyder’s genre-bending reportage writing, which has not yet garnered the same scholarly attention as her majestic novels and short stories. At once autobiographical, admonitory, journalistic, and lyrical, these reportages offer glimpses of Hyder’s multigenerational erudition, artistry, and mastery of Perso-Urdu poetic aesthetics, as well as the challenges she faced when breaking from histories freighted by patriarchal, colonial, and nationalist enterprises.