Gendered spatiality: twentieth century Muslim women's writing from the Indian subcontinent
dc.contributor.advisor
Keown, Michelle
dc.contributor.advisor
Crosthwaite, Paul
dc.contributor.author
Sahana, Sheelalipi
dc.contributor.sponsor
School’s Go Abroad (for Virtual Experiences) Fund
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dc.date.accessioned
2025-08-08T12:22:36Z
dc.date.available
2025-08-08T12:22:36Z
dc.date.issued
2025-08-08
dc.description.abstract
This dissertation undertakes the first sustained examination of material space in the literary works of Anglophone and Urdu-phone Muslim women writers from India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. Reading the short stories, novels and memoirs of Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Attia Hosain and Khadija Mastur, I develop a socio-spatial framework of agency that women employ to assert their identities as modern women. The various spaces in colonial and postcolonial India and Pakistan consecrate a spatial bildungsroman through which women’s complex identities are moulded and re-moulded, along architectural axes of power relations in the modernising nation(s). To illustrate this, I study private and public spaces, domestic and institutional spaces, and in-between spaces occupied by Muslim women in the 1930s-1960s, in north India. The tumultuous geographical dislocations of Indian Muslims before, during and post-Partition, shape their actions, and vice versa; their agential activities transform regimented spaces into transgressive spaces through the phenomenological-material frameworks of spatial agency. I approach the texts analysed through the lens of gendered spatiality to argue that progressive writing by South Asian Muslim women during the twentieth century mapped a material relationship between women’s thought and action, that produced an archive of gendered and sexual expression.
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dc.identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1842/43786
dc.identifier.uri
http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/6317
dc.language.iso
en
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dc.publisher
The University of Edinburgh
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dc.relation.hasversion
Naveed, Fatima, Sheelalipi Sahana, and Zehra Kazmi. “Introduction: Writing Muslim Women in South Asia”. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2024, pp. 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2024.2372995.
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dc.relation.hasversion
Sahana, Sheelalipi. “The Architecture of Laila’s World in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column”. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2024, pp. 1-18, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2024.2365101.
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dc.relation.hasversion
Sahana, Sheelalipi. “Object as Subject: Material Agency in Ismat Chughtai’s ‘The Quilt’ and ‘Chhoti Apa’”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 58, no. 3, 2022, pp. 336-48, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.2014348
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dc.rights.embargodate
2026-08-08
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dc.subject
women's writings
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dc.subject
Partition
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dc.subject
Muslim women
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dc.subject
space
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dc.subject
gender
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dc.subject
Progressive
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dc.subject
PWA
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dc.subject
sexuality
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dc.subject
modernity
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dc.subject
Twentieth Century
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dc.subject
India
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dc.subject
Indian Women
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dc.subject
gendered space
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dc.subject
Urdu
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dc.subject
literary history
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dc.title
Gendered spatiality: twentieth century Muslim women's writing from the Indian subcontinent
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dc.type
Thesis or Dissertation
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dc.type.qualificationlevel
Doctoral
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dc.type.qualificationname
PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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dcterms.accessRights
RESTRICTED ACCESS
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