South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. ix, 281 pp. US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0651-7.
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley’s Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia is a deeply researched, sophisticated, and beautifully written study of South Asian Muslim women’s autobiographical life writing from the earliest known examples to the late twentieth century. Lambert-Hurley brings rich perspective to her study. She has studied the voluminous life writing of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum in her monograph on this important princely ruler, edited a travel account by Sultan Jahan’s grandmother, and introduced a memoir written by Sultan Jahan’s granddaughter. She also co-edited an account written by the iconoclastic Atiya Fyzee (who reappears in the book at hand). Lambert-Hurley has also been deeply involved in collaborative work on life narratives, participating in a project on “Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies” (2010–2011) and co-editing a volume (Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia, Duke University Press, 2015) stemming from a multi-year project focused on women’s life writing. In contrast to these and similar projects, this book ambitiously sets out to move beyond studies of discrete texts and rather to generalize about her sources.
Each of the book’s five chapters takes on an elegantly simple dimension of these generalizations: “what, who, where, how, and why,” topics that are informed, Lambert-Hurley adds, by the historian’s when throughout (21). Lambert-Hurley’s first contribution is to demonstrate to skeptics that a considerable body of Muslim women’s autobiographical writing exists. In chapter 1, she explores the variety of forms that are encompassed by “autobiographical writing,” her preferred term, pondering her own intellectual journey as she dismisses, for example, documents such as letters or diaries in contrast to items constructed into a single narrative, or weighs the appropriateness to her project of novels that hew to the author’s life. Her criterion is “the constructed life” (55) and extends to texts like travelogues, reformist literature, edited letters and diaries, interviews, and speeches, as well as to what are explicitly presented as memoirs and autobiographies. In the end, her archive was some 200 texts in multiple languages, including English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, and Malayalam—with language choice often shaped by the imagined audience. The sociological material presented in chapter 2, not surprisingly, identifies the authors as elite and educated, a point reinforced in chapter 3 with the survey of the geographical provenance of the texts. Authors are, typically, “courtly women, educationalists, writers, politicians, or performers” (91), who write to record their accomplishments. Lambert-Hurley’s quest in assembling these texts, often following a chain from one relative or other connection to another, yields unusual insight into the creation of a project’s archive.
A second important contribution of the study is Lambert-Hurley’s analysis of the texts from the perspective of “self-presentation” or performance, which puts to rest a second theme of skepticism she encountered as she began her project: that the texts would not be very useful factual documents “as if Ranke and his notions of objectivity had never died” (29). The issue, as she shows, is not a matter of facts but an author’s self-presentation through her experiences and aspirations in a particular socio-cultural milieu. Chapter 4 stands out as a particularly successful demonstration of this approach with an analysis of four versions of an English-language account by the well-known actor, Begum Khurshid Mirza. This example also serves to illustrate the importance of attentiveness to a text’s production, a third important contribution of the study. Design and format (including here a manuscript original, journal serialization, and books published in India and Pakistan respectively) provide meaning to a text. In this case, a range of participants—family members, editors, publishers, and designers—edited and added to the text, are still presented in the voice of the putative author. Successive editions variously emphasized such topics as Begum’s early life in India or later in Pakistan, her enmeshment in an elite family, and her different professional achievements in ways relevant to feminist, Pakistani, and Indian audiences among others.
What about the book’s purview? Why women and why Muslims? In chapter 5, Lambert-Hurley astutely tests the differences between men’s and women’s writing in examining the abundant texts of the illustrious Tyabji family, finding far more overlaps in content than European models positing marked gender difference might suggest. What about the Muslim demarcation? One justification for a focus on Muslim women, Lambert-Hurley suggests, is the heritage of Perso-Arabic traditions of life writing, such as inclusion of family genealogy, emphasis on luck or other contingencies, modesty, and the centrality of relationships. A further justification is author writing that shows their achievements by new standards of women’s respectability (sharāfat) stemming from reform movements. However I am unconvinced that these earlier literary traditions are relevant, or that these characteristics are specific to Muslim writings. Most importantly, Lambert-Hurley justifies the Muslim demarcation on the experiences of parda and emergence from seclusion, often drawing comparisons with Middle Eastern Muslim women’s life writing about these experiences.
What would a comparison with non-Muslim South Asian women’s texts demonstrate were one to control as many variables as possible? So many generalizations about South Asian Muslim women, as other studies have shown, are dependent on such characteristics as poverty or location, not Islam. Lambert-Hurley in fact often cites authors working on non-Muslim South Asian texts that show similar patterns. Why, then, reinforce the South Asian view—so pernicious in India today—that Muslims are properly understood only in relation to Muslims elsewhere? How different are these texts from those of non-Muslim South Asian women? What new questions, generalizations, and differences, would these comparisons yield? Who do writers compare themselves to (if they do)?
Parda in these texts is typically presented in terms of early restrictions that are then overcome, a trope represented, for example, by one writer whose words begin and end the book. Parda often serves to structure a heroic narrative characteristic of much life writing and, in this case, also plays to audience expectations. But is this particular version of restrictions on women enough to justify a separate Muslim category? As for parda/seclusion of feelings, are Muslim women more “elusive” than anyone else in what they reveal and conceal as they write? The “unveiling” of intimacy, personal feelings, and so forth characteristic of Muslim writers is surely true of more recent writing generally.
Given that Muslim women are in fact the subject of this stimulating book, and that what defines them above all is a story of achievement, would it not have been better to drop the implicit stereotype of the title and replace “Elusive” with something like Accomplished Lives?
Barbara Metcalf
University of California, Davis