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Negotiating Female Authorship in Eighteenth-Century India: Gender and Multilingualism in a Persian Text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 June 2019
Abstract
In the last years of the eighteenth century, an Indian woman authored a work in Persian intended for the entertainment and guidance of students of that language. Entitled Miftāḥ-i Qulūb-i Mubtadiyān (‘The Key of the Hearts of Beginners’), the work comprised of stories from vernacular oral traditions as well as extracts from well-known Persian poetic, historical and ethical works. Although the work was translated into English in 1908 by Annette Beveridge, it has received no serious scholarly attention. Drawing upon recent scholarship offering new ways of thinking about India's multilingual literary past, this article examines the intersection of multiple vernacular and generic traditions as translated and manifested in Miftāḥ-i Qulūb al-Mubtadīyān. While vernacular languages followed different, and in relative terms, more limited routes of circulation and exchange in comparison with cosmopolitan languages such as Persian, their paths of movement were no less significant. Through a close reading of this work and its context, this article seeks to understand how Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula crafted a distinct, cosmopolitan voice for herself through her deployment of both Persianate and regional Indian traditions.
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References
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28 Beveridge relies on the Annals of Rural Bengal for her information, but this source is not entirely clear: it could also refer to Thomas Brooke, another judge at Benares. See Beveridge, A. S., The Key of the Hearts of Beginners (London, 1908), pp. ix–xGoogle Scholar.
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36 Papers Relating to East-India Affairs: viz. Hindoo Widows and Voluntary Immolations (London, 1821), p. 22. It should be noted that this source, and Mani below, both transcribe W. A. Brooke as M. H. Brooke. However, it is clear that William Augustus Brooke is the individual referred to, as his designation as Collector of Shahabad district is also mentioned.
37 Lata Mani notes that between 1789 and 1829 four circulars regarding sati were published by the government, as the practice gradually became a matter of concern for the colonial state. See, Mani, L., Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998), p. 17Google Scholar.
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48 Such biographical segments were also similarly structured in taẕkiras. See, Shah, ‘Between Cosmopolitan and Classical’, pp.139-165.
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59 Names of gods and goddesses, such as Rām, Indar and Sītā, have been excluded due to their ubiquity.
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64 For instance, Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula's version lacks the miraculous gifts that the brothers possess in some of the versions listed by Pritchett, in which pearls and precious jewels fall when the brothers laugh or cry; similarly, the younger brother, Basant, in Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula's story, causes a ship to sail by uttering the Arabic ‘Bismillāh’. This said, the stories follow the same basic plots, and ‘Gul-ruḵẖ’, the name of the merchant's daughter (and Basant's future bride) in Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula's version even echoes her Indic counterpart, ‘Phūlwantī’, both names suggesting flower-like beauty and delicateness.
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66 Indar, rather than Indra, is the spelling preferred by in Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula.
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