Qurratulain Hyder on the Move: Crossing the Frontiers of Gender, Language, and Nation - Hardcover

by Syed Akbar Hyder (Author)

In a career spanning seven decades, Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) achieved distinction as a novelist, journalist, translator, and innovator in Urdu literature. To shed new light on this multilingual itinerant woman with a curatorial eye, the present study turns to Hyder's genre-bending reportage writing, which has not yet garnered the same scholarly attention as her majestic novels and short stories. At once autobiographical, admonitory, journalistic, and lyrical, these reportages offer glimpses of Hyder's multigenerational erudition, artistry, and mastery of Perso-Urdu poetic aesthetics, as well as the challenges she faced when breaking from histories freighted by patriarchal, colonial, and nationalist enterprises.

Author Biography

Syed Akbar Hyder, Ph.D. (2000), Harvard University, is Director of the South Asia Institute and Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).