Bøger i Anthem Studies in South Asian Literature, Aesthetics and Culture serien

As the first study of its kind, this book offers a new understanding of progressive women's poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu's linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women's diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies. In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women's movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women's voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing?Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women's movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy.

Lahore's Mayo School of Arts, as the National College of Arts (NCA) was called then, was Pakistan's equivalent of London's South Kensington School of Design (presently Royal College of Art, UK). One of the last of the four colonial art schools established in India, the others being in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, the Mayo School of Arts was founded in 1875 to perpetuate the memory of the Lord Earl of Mayo, the only Indian Viceroy to be murdered while in office. Established by Rudyard Kipling's father Lockwood Kipling, the school had on its staff some of the most renowned names in the Indian art world, such as Ram Singh, Percy Brown, Lionel Heath, S. N. Gupta, B. C. Sanyal and A. R. Chughtai. The Mayo School gave birth to the most celebrated Indian art historical publication in the world, the Journal of Indian Art and Industry. The journal ran 30 illustrated volumes published by London's Imperial Publishers using the most advanced techniques of chromolithography. The pioneers of colonial anthropology in Punjab, the fabled "e;men on the spot,"e; such as Richard Temple, Denzil Ibbetson and Baden Powell, were associated with the establishment and administration of the Mayo School of Arts. They played a foundational role in the ethnographic reconstruction of artisan castes as suitable boys of "e;primitive"e; tribal Punjabi society through administrative reports, exhibition catalogues and gazetteer literature. Constituting the colonial cultural subtext to art education, the colonial discourses provided necessary anthropological foundations for the education of the "e;primitive"e; artisans in the industrial art schools of Punjab. Through its pedagogy, the Mayo School also framed the emergence of the Indo-Saracenic school of architecture and patronized the traditional styles of paintings in Punjab.Despite its strong industrial art agenda, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Mayo School of Arts was able to give the Indian art world a Punjab School of modern painting. Officially acknowledged in the British Indian Empire Exhibition of 1924, the Punjab School stood apart from the Calcutta School of Indian paintings and comprised largely of drawing masters of the Mayo School. Lionel Heath, a European miniaturist, whose career as the Principal of the Mayo School is overshadowed by his equally illustrious predecessors, was responsible for Mayo School's drift into modern art. Printmaking, graphic design and sculpture made their beginning in the 1930s at the Mayo School under B. C. Sanyal and M. M. Hussain. A. R. Chughtai, one of the most illustrious painters and printmakers of the Punjab School, learnt his skills as a printmaker from the Mayo School. The Mayo School of Art's printing press designed, lithographed and printed hundreds of posters, invitation and greeting cards, calendars, illustrated educational texts, including war publicity posters, by drawing on all the major Western art movements from Arts Nova to Art Deco and Bauhaus.In the founding decades of Pakistan, to mark the cultural transition from a colonized to an independent national identity, the "e;old"e; Mayo School was reorganized and raised as the National College of Arts in 1958. To reflect its role in developing national culture and imparting professional visual art education, the NCA was established on the model of Bauhaus with three main departments in fine art, design and architecture. Some of the most important men in Pakistan's cultural history, such as poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, painter Shakir Ali, art patron Ghulam Mueenuddin and American sculptor Mark Sponenburgh h,ave been associated with the development of the NCA as the aesthetic center of fine art and design in Pakistan.