Book review: Ruby Lal,In Pursuit of Playfulness: The Girl-Child/Woman in Nineteenth-Century India

The reader should not go by the book’s title. There is practically nothing about playfulness in the rest of the book, the dictum (p. 144) that Shakuntala and Ketki were ‘playful characters’, being unsupported by any argument, and, indeed, having no real justification. No argument for this word is offered (even on p. 53), where the title is proclaimed. Moreover, the work is confined to 19th-century writings in UP (then Northwestern Provinces) and Punjab in Urdu and Hindi, all by men, and the claim should not therefore have been made that the work covers the whole of India. And even for this region, Lal has nothing on some 90 per cent of women, for as she herself proclaims (p. 33), she trains her ‘focus on aristocratic, respectable families’, which she claims ‘have remained central to the debate on the woman question’—surely, an unintended censure of the nature of that debate.

The substantial part of the work begins from page 59. Until then, we are offered a long ‘Prelude’ dealing with the life and views of an estimable lady, born in Lucknow, but now living in Delhi, which is hardly of any relevance to what was thought and taught about women 150 years ago.

From page 59 onwards, the author introduces us to relevant Hindi/Urdu literature of the 19th century beginning with ‘Inshā’. This is without doubt of much interest, although it is only what men said relating to women that is available to us. Very little of what women wrote in letters or later memoirs survives; so one can hardly blame the author for essentially describing to us what men thought of, and prescribed for, women.

There are some misprints but not many. Salīqa means ‘good taste, good disposition’ rather than ‘proficiency’ (pp. 145, 146). It should be ghaur not gaur (p. 163, l. 3 from bottom). For a historian of Mughal women, one is surprised that Lal should fail to recognise that Raushanara (rect. Raushanrāi) in the quotation she gives (p. 160) is the wrong princess: It was not she, but Jahānārā, her elder sister, who continued to look after Shahjahan during his later years.