More than half a dozen anthologies of Persian and Urdu poetry that was by women were published in India in the second half of the nineteenth century. There had been sporadic interest, for over half a millennium, on the part of Persian male literati in reading and compiling collections of Persian verses that were composed by women—albeit a small group until modern times—but what was behind the new interest? For one thing, by dint of also including writings in Urdu, there were suddenly many more poets who could be included. In his latest book, Farhat Hasan studies two of these works: Hakim Fasihuddin Ranj's Bahāristān-i nāz (1864; revised and expanded edition 1869) and Durga Prashad Nadir's Tazkirat al-nisā-i Nādirī (1878 and 1882, whose bibliographical history is more complicated than can be described here). Written in the established form of the biographical dictionary or tazkirah that was used to memorialise the achievements of poets or saints, these modern anthologies of women's poetry were printed and therefore circulated more widely than earlier manuscript tazkirahs. The anthologists penned essay-like introductions to them that signalled a new way of understanding the place of poetry in society and the rethinking of what constituted classical and contemporaneous poetic canons. These anthologies were yet another textual genre in which authors emphasised the importance of education and literacy in the larger context of women's reform but, as Hasan writes, when it came to collecting the verses that were composed by women—most of whom were from either one of two opposite poles of the social spectrum, namely elites or courtesans—the purpose was to provide models of erudition and self-expression for modern women, contrary to other reformist literature in which respectable women were warned about the dangers of reading love poetry and fiction.

As the biographical details of the poets in tazkirahs were equally of interest to readers as their poetry, each of these works is a ‘who's who’ of accomplished women who were drawn mainly from Persianate South Asia, but also selectively from the Iranian world. The inclusivity of these anthologies comprises a range of women from classical poets, whose verses were read rather than performed, to contemporary courtesans, whose poems in Persian and Urdu circulated orally. In a series of chapters, Hasan discusses different aspects of this textual phenomenon through close readings of the entries about individual or groups of poets and analysis of their verses. Each chapter is supplemented by translations of the entries—both the biography and the verses—for the poets discussed in it, as well as excerpts from the introductions by Ranj and Nadir. In the world of women, there were some shared practices with the male poets, and differences too. The performance of the emotions of sorrow and separation through the love lyric (ghazal) in the public space of the kothā and having a mentor (ustād) whose influence sometimes threatened to overshadow the poet's creativity were at the centre of the lives of many courtesans, as the case study of two sisters from Lucknow, Umrao Jan ‘Zuhra’ and Qamran Jan ‘Mushtari’, brings out. Hasan rightly states: ‘Gender was never quite the primary marker of identity, but emerged as a fluid and tenuous formation, enmeshed with the other markers of social difference in the lives of the poets and their audience’ (p. 75). Ultimately, we keep returning to the basic literary questions: What is the tension between a gendered reading of the voice of the poet-lover and conventional utterances that are modulated by the generic requirements of a strict poetic form? How can the voice in a poem be determined to be feminine, especially in Urdu, which, unlike Persian, has grammatical gender? Hasan discusses these problems in a sensitive manner by showing the role of female poets ‘in shaping the norms of aesthetics and appropriate expression’ (p. 118), especially through the ambiguous ghazal form. In the classical Persian tradition, verses that were written by women such as Mahsati were bawdy and replete with sexual innuendoes that were aimed to provide titillation for male audiences. A case in point is Tuti of Iran, who, in a quatrain, lampoons her husband as he pursues a beloved young male beloved: ‘My Lord! Come and let's resolve this issue between us peacefully, / You embellish his world, while I take care of his dick (kīr)’ (p. 140), but ‘world’ (kaun) should be read as ‘arse’ (kūn) to get the full effect of the witticism. Such verses were humorous, but also ‘reflect their contestations with patriarchal norms and ritual conformism’ (p. 136).

The scope of the two anthologies was truly impressive, as the authors were constantly updating their lists of poets and issued several versions of their works. I have been able to count around 350 women poets who were included in several anthologies that were published during this period. The biographical information is sometimes anecdotal, at other times akin to literary analysis. The inclusion of the contemporary Babi poet from Iran, Qurrat'ul-‘ayn or Tahirih, in Nadir's supplement to the volume on poets writing in Persian, with a single line of her verse in Arabic, is important because her presence is rare in literary sources of the period. One of the most interesting points that comes up is how these anthologies construct cosmopolitan Muslim and Hindu traditions in the Persianate context, and also how seamlessly Persian finds its place within a South Asian Persianate literary culture, without the agonising over the classical past, as was the case in many contemporaneous discussions by male poets. The construction of a female poetic canon necessitated the creation of a partly invented tradition, as it entailed retrospectively attributing verses to powerful women of yesteryear such as the medieval Sultanate Queen Raziya Sultan, Rani Rupmati, and various Mughal women.

The story of how the two men—Ranj, a popular poet in his own right whose mentor was the renowned poet Mirza Asadullah ‘Ghalib’, and Nadir, who was educated at the Delhi College and was a schoolteacher for several years—came to compile these anthologies is a compelling one that illustrates many dimensions of nineteenth-century Urdu and Persian literary cultures. The popularity of lithographic printing during this period clearly spurred on the production of these anthologies with specific markets in mind. This topic, and especially the bibliographic entanglements of the various editions and anthologies by other authors, requires more extensive research that could delve into the role of the presses involved in the production and circulation of these works, as well as the audiences for them. Some, perhaps many, educated women with an interest in poetry would certainly have read these anthologies, but it would seem that they were primarily written for a male audience. It is interesting that no woman has produced such an anthology until recently.

A couple of important bibliographical items are missing in this book: Dick Davis's anthology, The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (Bethesda, MD, 2019; New York, 2021; bilingual edition, Bethesda, MD, 2020), available both in English translation and in a bilingual edition; and Sundas Amer's MA thesis, ‘Recovering an Archive of Women's Voices: Durga Prasad Nadir's Tażkirāt ul-Nissāy-e Nādrī’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2018), which is available online. Hasan declares in the very first sentence of the book that this is ‘an exploratory study’, which holds the promise of a more detailed study in the future. This book constitutes an exciting start to such a research agenda, but there is a great deal more to be said on the subject of poetry that was composed by women in Persianate societies and anthologised by male authors in the nineteenth century.