Stéphane Pradines

Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz

Type
journal article
Year
2021

This essay focuses on a corpus of eight mid- to late eleventh-/seventeenth-century illustrated manuscripts of the poem Sūz u Gudāz by the poet Nawʿī (d. c. 1019/1610). The text describes the struggle of a Hindu maiden, whose fiancé has died, to commit satī on his funeral pyre despite the interventions of various figures in her life. The essay discusses how later Safavid painters adapted and transformed established pictorial compositions associated with mas̱navīs from the Khamseh (“Quintet”) of Neẓāmī to illustrate Nawʿī’s poem, reflecting its status as a javāb (pointed response) to Neẓāmīan romances. The illustrators often altered the compositional models to draw attention to the gendered dimensions of Nawʿī’s subversive poetics.

Citation

Chagnon, Michael. (2021). Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz.





Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, Volume 2 (Issue 1-2), 55-96. https://doi.org/10.1163/26666286-12340018

Parent Publications

Authorities

Copyright

Brill

Dimensions

41 pages

Keywords