Seeking Sisterhood: Travel Writing, Asia, and the Search for Muslim Women’s Solidarity in Colonial India
Muslim women in India began to compose and publish travel accounts from the early twentieth century. Largely written in Urdu, their travelogues reveal a burst of fascination with the lives and practices of Muslim women from other regions of the world. The advent of this literature coincided with the emergence of new forms of Indian Muslim aspiration that sought to create affective links with their coreligionists abroad. As Muslim philosophers and politicians in India began to see themselves as part of something they were beginning to call the “Muslim world,” India’s women travelers produced their own imaginations of that world, not only by theorizing the nature of pan-regional Islamic links, but also by making them tangible through first-person narrative. And yet, their aspirational Muslim unity was ultimately fractured by class- and race-based discrimination. This talk considers how Indian Muslim women’s travel writing eagerly sought out sisterhood with Muslim women from across Asia, while simultaneously declining to extend to those women a full membership in their aspirational “Muslim World.”
Assistant Professor of South Asian Literature and Culture, Northwestern University
Date: 2 April 2024 (Tue)
Daniel Majchrowicz is a scholar of modern South Asian literature and history with a special interest in Islam, mobility, and gender. His work broadly examines how South Asian literary traditions, particularly popular traditions, inhabit the world, with a focus on links between India, Asia, and Africa. He teaches at Northwestern University and is the author of The World in Words: Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia (2023) and A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909-1910 (2024), and co-editor of Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (2022).
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