| This dissertation, "One Day the Girl Will Return: Feminism, Nation, and Poetry in South Asia," seeks to embed the poems of four women writers, two from India and two from Pakistan, within the nationalist movements of their respective countries. One crucial question with which this dissertation engages is: How do genres of poetry enable these four women, from vastly different periods of social history, and from different geographical places, to write feminist conscious, anti-state poetry? In answering this question, this project raises important theoretical issues about the relationship between gender, voice, nation, and sexuality. By crossing boundaries, both geographic as well as linguistic, this project provides a more nuanced and complicated understanding of nationalism in India and Pakistan, and how women's resistance to it has taken on a multiplicity of forms and voices. In theoretical terms, this study connects Hindi and Urdu literature, which have remained two distinct areas of study since India's independence from British colonial power in 1947 and the subsequent partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and points to the places and moments in which they speak to each other. To date, no scholarly work has successfully accomplished this goal of reading women's voices in both Hindi and Urdu, embedded in the literary public sphere.; In nationalist debates about the role that women would play in the development of the nation and a national identity, women's bodies, and not their voices, was of primary concern. But women's voices did exist and women did articulate resistance to the ways in which they were being imagined by the state. As my dissertation shows, these periods of nationalism in pre-partition India and later on in an independent India and Pakistan, coincide with women's resistance movements. This dissertation reveals that while working within masculine constructs of femininity, women used the poetic genre in these critical historical moments to discuss intimate issues of self, emotionality, and sexuality that could not, in their socio-historical contexts, be otherwise expressed. Poetry uniquely facilitates such expression, as it allows an author to explore these sensitive issues under the protective blankets of metaphor, symbolism, and literary convention. This project challenges the idea that only men are active participants in the public sphere, by showing that precisely when their identities are most vulnerable, and their sexualities publicly contested, women writing the self, sexuality, and the body came out into the public sphere. This dissertation suggests that sexuality, as a category of analysis, is crucial to unraveling the mechanism of nationalism in South Asia. It also serves as a powerful conceptual metaphor of resistance. |
