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Medieval South Asian women rarely survive in literary history as authors in their own right, usually appearing as subjects of court chronicles or devotional archetypes. This paper examines three sixteenth-century figures—the Kashmiri lyric poet Habba Khatoon, the Deccan regent Chand Bibi, and the Rajasthani devotional poet Mirabai—to ask what a literary reading can recover. While Habba Khatoon and Mirabai left behind vernacular verse that challenged Persianate and Sanskritic hierarchies, Chand Bibi left no written works. Treating this absence as evidence, the paper reads her afterlife in powada ballads and Deccan miniatures as a literature of representation. Integrating close reading with Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory alongside Spivak’s and Mohanty’s subaltern critiques, the paper argues that these women’s political agency is legible in choices of vernacular form, refrain, and genre.
Ms. Ziniya Al Baha. “Herstories of Habba Khatoon, Chand Bibi, and Mirabai: Voice, Genre, and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century South Asian Women’s Writing.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 813-827. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.50.
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