Lusting After Sun and Moon
Rakhshanda Jalil
WHEN MEN SPEAK AS WOMEN: VOCAL MASQUERADE IN INDO-MUSLIM POETRY by Carla Petievich Oxford University Press, 2008, 365 pp., 695
February 2008, volume 32, No 2

In Urdu poetry, the beloved has always been a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. While the voice may be that of a lovelorn woman suffering from pangs of separation, a discontented concubine, or a young woman on the verge of marriage, the object of these passionate outpourings of both requited and unrequited love could just as well be man, woman or child! Since Urdu poetry has largely been a male preserve and there has been only a sprinkling of women poets, that too in recent times, men have produced the bulk of Urdu poetry. And it has been regarded as perfectly acceptable for men to write in women’s voices on so-called women’s issues expressing womanly concerns. This vocal masquerade has been taking place for centuries and has been taken quite for granted. Carla Petievich lifts the veil on this impersonation in When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-Muslim Poetry. Instead of the conventional ghazal, Petievich has chosen from three different bodies of what she calls ‘marginalized’ love lyrics.

These are the Punjabi kafis, the predecessor of the Urdu ghazal in its Dakani avatar and the rekhti ghazals from nineteenth-century Lucknow. Each is written in a distinct dialect—different not just from the other two but from modern standard Urdu. Similarly, those who have indulged in this vocal make-believe come from vastly different milieus—from ‘the royal courts of sixteenth-seventeenth century Deccan plateau in south-central India;

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