Abstract

Ostensibly, Muslim women in colonial India only rarely wrote travel narratives, particularly in Urdu. In truth, women’s travel writing in Urdu is anything but chimerical, but persistent archival and methodological limitations have led to the neglect and even irrevocable loss of this writing. A recalibrated approach to travel writing and archival practices divulges a vast corpus—but only if we attend to the specific ways in which women’s narratives were produced and circulated. This article offers a primary typology of the formats and fora most often employed by women writing in Urdu, including semi-private (but orally consumed) letters, family newspapers and women’s journals. Using extensive quotations from previously unknown sources, it reintroduces a forgotten corpus to the study of Indian history, literature, and gender studies alike.

摘要

从表面上看，印度殖民地的穆斯林妇女很少写旅行故事，尤其是在乌尔都语中。实际上，乌尔都语中的女性旅行写作绝非是嵌合的，但是档案和方法的持续限制导致该写作的忽视甚至是不可挽回的损失。经过重新调整的旅行写作和档案实践方法透露出庞大的语料库，但前提是我们要关注女性叙事的产生和传播的特定方式。本文提供了乌尔都语女性写作最常用的格式和形式的主要类型，包括半私人（但经口头消费）信件，家庭报纸和女性期刊。它使用以前未知来源的大量引文，将被遗忘的语料库重新引入印度历史，文学和性别研究领域。