From Abarodh to Mehfil: On Reading Colonial Bengal's Muslim Women Writers

This thesis examines women writers indexed as 'Bengali' and 'Muslim' in the late colonial era and locates their exclusion (abarodh) from the hegemonic canon of Bengali literature. Reading against the grain of a literary modernity built around male Hindu writers' work, it introduces mehfii as a heuristic device that makes these women writers more accessible to present-day readers through their shared literary-cultural genealogies. Mehfii enables the discovery of wider networks of circulation and exchange in Asia and Africa, which these writers participate in and where their shared experiences, concerns, and politics emerge as the bases for interpersonal and empathetic dialogue.