Synopsis
Since the medieval period, Persian poets have been anthologized in biographic encyclopedias, which include life stories and verse samplings. In one such encyclopedia, poet Valeh Daghestani (d. 1756) praises woman poet Mahsati (11th/12th centuries): “one quatrain of hers is equal to a thousand divans [collections of poetry].” Discussing one of Mahsati’s poems, Valeh writes: “even the great classical poets could have written it once in a lifetime.” Professor Sunil Sharma began his lecture, “The Episodic Reception of Medieval Persian Women Poets,” with this anecdote. Presenting verses side by side with biographies, medieval poetic encyclopedias fictionalized both male and female poets, and were read primarily for entertainment, not as “reliable” sources. By the fifteenth century, most anthologies featured extensive biographies, the chief draw for readers, and popular tropes and templates emerged.
A scribe, secretary, and singer at a sultan’s court, Mahsati was known for her quatrains and spontaneous compositions. She was fictionalized according to a popular trope in which a (male) court poet renounced his libertine ways and became a Sufi, or ascetic mystic. A short didactic tale by Attar of Nishapur (c. 1145 – c. 1221) describes Mahsati’s love affair with the sultan’s cupbearer. When questioned about these intimate relations, Mahsati reminds the sultan that the true beloved is always divine, and never earthly as the cupbearer is. Attar, himself a mystic, thus gives Mahsati’s carnal love a loftier, allegoric purpose. A fifteenth-century prose romance likewise shows Mahsati abandoning her wanton ways and bringing up Muslim children with the preacher who fell in love with her. During the romance, Mahsati’s “skill of repartee” is shown through poetic dialogue. In one episode, Mahsati travels to Khorasan, the heartland of classical Persian poetry, and engages in poetic recitation with 300 poets and scholars. When she returns, she verbally spars with the poet Sanai (1080 – 1131/41), reciting: “I have no affections for Lord Sanai […] you can stick your beard where the sun don’t shine.” Although this romance exemplifies “the purification of the mystic soul through an apparent fall,” an early sixteenth century anthology of women poets calls it “nothing but fiction.” The anthologizer believes that casting Mahsati as a romance heroine is a rhetorical tool to contextualize the enjoyment of her poems.
Rabia Balkhi (10th century), talented, intelligent, and an authority in both Arabic and Persian rhetoric, was similarly cast into a male trope. One biographer described her as “always playing the game of love.” Professor Sharma says: Rabia “appropriates the role of active lover, a privilege held by men in Persian romances and poetry,” where the lover yearns for an often unreciprocating beloved who is allegorized as the divine. Attar writes Rabia into an extended romantic narrative: Rabia falls in love with her brother’s slave Bektash and composes for him, but when Bektash, equally in love, grabs her skirt, Rabia accuses him of lust. Attar clarifies for the reader that the “poetry she composed was for the divine beloved” and that “Bektash was only helping her along the [mystical] path.” When their love is revealed following a verbal spar with Rudaki, the father of Persian verse (c. 858 – c. 940), Rabia is sealed by her furious brother in a bathhouse, where she slits her wrists and covers the walls with poems written in her own blood. This tragic tale facilitates Rabia’s inclusion into the circle of female Sufis by the poet Jami in the fifteenth century, and causes her to disappear from secular anthologies and encyclopedias. Unlike Mahsati, whose love was earthly and who thus was refashioned into a wife, Rabia’s love poetry is more ambiguous. Although critics write that it “betrays no elements” of mysticism, this ambiguity allows for mystical fictionalization.
Jahan Malik Khatun (d. ca. 1394) was one of the only medieval women poets about whom we know more substantial facts. Prefacing her divan in an example of a woman poet framing her own work, Jahan writes that she took inspiration from Arab women poets and that her poetry was inspired by a pseudo-mystical call to solitude. Writing in the ghazal form, which at the time was recognizable vehicle of mysticism, Jahan walked the line between the mystical and secular binary. An accomplished poet and member of the aristocracy, Jahan was later referred to as a court poet herself. However, she could only have been a court poet in a private space; because court poets panegyrize or write epics for performance, Jahan’s poems would have been circulated, but never performed. Ultimately, Jahan’s fame was overshadowed by contemporaries like Hafez of Shiraz (1325-1390), so she remained obscure until the twentieth century despite the relative wealth of information about her.
Professor Sharma emphasized that “premodern women poets were viewed as ancillary to the [literary] tradition.” Mahsati, valued as a singular and exemplary artist, was one of only half a dozen women in the encyclopedia among thousands of men. Furthermore, premodern poems are often ascribed to multiple writers at once; we know 300 of Mahsati’s verses, but some of them are simultaneously thought to have been written by Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). This is because, as translator Dick Davis writes, as long as the poem lasts, the female poet “assumes a fictive male persona.” Scholar Mia Hammond further writes that in anthologies, the “texts are framed, either by an object or by another text […] in order to attest women as agents of authorship.” Because the anthologizers were men, only “on the inside lies the woman’s word.”
So how do we read a tradition in which women are shown in primarily in anecdotes, rather than their own framing words? Professor Sharma says that we have to “respect the way in which premodern readers read poetry.” Studying how poets were anthologized and the legends built up around specific figures allow us to see how those perceptions changed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, amidst an anxiety over the loss of female voices, an interest in Indo-Islamic heritage, and women’s reform movements, South Asian men of letters attempted to recover lines left by women poets. The desire to recover the “memory of a once-flourishing transregional poetic world” resulted in a muddled catch-all collection method and encyclopedias that included “more names than verses.” This enabled modern scholars to rediscover once-marginalized poets like Jahan. Other poets’ legacies fit into modern narratives of nation and identity. In Azerbaijan, Mahsati is celebrated as part of literary canon, and her verses in Azeri translation are visible in public spaces and museums. In Afghanistan, Rabia’s grave is a site of women’s refuge. “No one questions in the culture whether the poet existed or not,” Professor Sharma says. “They accept her, her poems speak to them about suffering. Persianate poetry has touched the hearts of so many people, even outside the Persianate world. The poet’s voice speaks directly to the people, there’s a university about it, they think they can relate to what the poet is saying.”
-Dina Famin, World Languages & Literatures, March 2024
