Siobhan Lambert-Hurley works across disciplinary and contemporary national boundaries to locate and describe the artifacts that constitute the literary genre of South Asian Muslim women's autobiographies. She presents her book Elusive Lives as a “decoding of a gendered self” (p. 2) and part of a larger effort to recover South Asian women's voices. This instructive study serves scholars in multiple disciplines, providing accounts of the lives and diverse motivations of women autobiographers from across the Indian subcontinent over the twentieth century, while also complicating our understanding of voice, performance, and individualism as these emerge in the texts.
Chapter 1, read together with the introduction and the extensive bibliographies of works in South Asian languages and in English, reveals the process and the result of Lambert-Hurley's search for texts, a process that she describes as a constitution of an archive of South Asian Muslim women's autobiographies. This is “neither a straightforward nor a systematic process,” Lambert-Hurley tells us (p. 26); it is a sampling produced through concentrated “on the ground” effort in Delhi and other “historically important Muslim centers in India and Bangladesh” (p. 25), as well as via contacts and communications technology links to Pakistan. She locates and taps a rich vein of literature made available in the market by publishers and booksellers and unites this with lesser-known works that she locates in libraries and private collections. After sifting and discarding writings that are more fiction than autobiography, as well as uncrafted compilations of diaries and letters, Lambert-Hurley is left with a sampling of approximately two hundred texts composed in English, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and Malayalam; a rough comparison of sections of her bibliography suggests that autobiographies composed in or translated into English comprise at least roughly half of her archive. A detailed concluding comment on the specific places visited, the number of sources discovered in each location, and the number in each language should have been provided to establish the contingencies of the constituted archive and the analysis that results. Nevertheless, Lambert-Hurley convincingly argues that her texts should be seen to represent a genre across a region. The resulting study goes on to classify Muslim women autobiographers of the Indian subcontinent occupationally, socially, and locationally, to propose general motivations and influences on women's autobiographical writings, and to offer a few rich case studies.
In chapters 2 and 3, Lambert-Hurley provides memorable and colorful descriptions of the educators, politicians, actors, and writers who composed their life stories, drawing most substantially on texts written in or translated into English followed by those composed in Urdu and Bengali. Their occupations, experiences, and ambitions denote exceptional lives that motivate them in their writing. Lambert-Hurley's classification of women autobiographers as “pretty elite” (p. 57) and “elite and often highly so” (p. 66) is not particularly useful when she refers at once to aristocratic nawabs of Bhopal, to women of the new sharīf middle class of the early twentieth century, and to salaried actors and educationalists of the late twentieth century and explicitly excludes two prostitutes’ autobiographies that were otherwise part of the sampling. These life stories come together most powerfully to demonstrate the diversity of this group and to subtly convey that while Muslim women are often grouped and inscribed with shared attributes, their life stories should be engaged with care to disrupt those very accounts of mutuality.
Chapters 4 and 5 work together to describe the literary milieus and agents and the families that shaped women's stories. Women wrote their life stories with specific audiences in mind in some cases and rewrote them in response to the expectations of their editors in others. They were often serialized for publication, cowritten, and translated. South Asian Muslim women autobiographers did not compose in solitude but in a dynamic engagement with interlocutors and production processes. The unusual and colorful life story of the actor Begum Khurshid Mirza (1918–89) draws on multiple versions and forms of her autobiography to uncover her professional ambitions and her disenchantment with the conventions of marriage. The life stories of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century women of the Tyabji family who lived in Bombay and Burma and traveled in Europe are contrasted with those of male autobiographers in the family. Lambert-Hurley demonstrates the rich variety of experiences of place, and ideas about sexuality and politics, that can be attributed to this family. These vignettes exemplify the features of women's writing to which Lambert-Hurley has asked the reader to attend.
Much of the discussion in this book is structured as productive engagement with existing scholarly work on South Asian women's histories and autobiography, including, but by no means restricted to, that by Barbara Metcalf, Antoinette Burton, David Arnold, and Stuart Blackburn. Interweaving accounts of women's lives captured in other published works with the life stories she herself located, Lambert-Hurley maps the critical terrain, existing limits, and possibilities for working with South Asian Muslim women's autobiographies. She offers powerful critiques of methodology and textual interpretation, arguing in one instance that the autobiography of the celebrated short-story writer Ismat Chughtai has been continually portrayed as lacking narrative coherence, but her “episodic approach” was in fact a result of both editorial intervention and the serialization required for the stories’ original publication in a journal (pp. 130–31). Lambert-Hurley's own voice, compelling and authoritative, resonates throughout Elusive Lives. She tells the life stories of her autobiographers in an account that is equally one of discovery, recovery, and compilation.
