The Mughal Aviary: Women’s Writings in Pre-Modern India

“Sabiha Huq’s 'Mughal Aviary' will go a long way in filling a gap in recent scholarship in women’s writings in the pre-modern and pre-colonial India in bringing to light four forgotten women writers of the Mughal period, engaged in a struggle to find a place alongside the more prominent male writers of their time. With painstaking research, compassion, and refreshing insights into their personal and social lives, Huq investigates the reasons why each should be studied in their own right for their powerful work in hagiography, biography or poetry. The book shows quality scholarship in four particular areas: in its analysis of how the women writers appropriated the male language and undercut its dominance and power by bringing into play female sensibility and the subtle use of female language; its emphasis on the need to place these writers against the complex political, social and gender issues of their time for an understanding of how they fought for their creative autonomy; its rejection of the western stereotyping of Asian women as historically muted and as inferior sexed subjects by showing the strength of the women in rising above their limitations, and its success in presenting a more rounded portrait of these women as trailblazers, achievers, fighters and creators of a countercanon which influenced many later writers and scholars.”

Syed Manzoorul Islam

University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh

“The book should appeal to anyone interested in the Mughal period of Indian history, aristocratic Muslim women’s lives in the period, and Indian women’s writing and feminism in general. It will undoubtedly attract readers interested in reading about women who transcend the limitations imposed on them by the age in which they live and write. While the work is original in conception, individual chapters reveal Huq’s conscientious dependence on pertinent scholarship.”

Fakrul Alam

UGC Professor, Department of English, University of Dhaka

The publication of Sabiha Huq’s “The Mughal Aviary: Women’s Writings in Pre-Modern India” (henceforth, The Aviary) coincides with the deletion of important chapters on early Islamic history from school syllabi in India. Huq’s monograph stands between the interstices of parochial ramifications of such deletions and the general problem of mainstream history as a politicised field.

[…] as a literary study that challenges mainstream history, the monograph has potential to redefine South Asian feminism by foregrounding the perseverance and autonomy that these authors exhibit. Their writings signal an unfaltering path to authentic representation of their characters.

Srideep Mukherjee

NetajiSubhas Open University, India

[Book review appearing at 'ASIATIC: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature'. Vol. 16 No. 1 (2022): June.]

[…] it examines Muslim women’s writings from early modern India, a subject that has often been ignored by male (often Indian) historiographers. […]

Huq’s depiction of the complex self-fashioning—both poetic and literary—of these four women produces a richly engaging and original study of aristocratic women writers in the early modern Islamic world.

[Extract from book review at the 'Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal', Vol. 19 No. 2 • Spring 2025. Reviewer: Jyotsna G. Singh (Michigan State University). doi: 10.1086/734208]