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Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia. By Siobhan Lambert-Hurley. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. ix, 282 pp. ISBN: 9781503606517 (paper).
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley works across disciplinary and contemporary national boundaries to locate and describe the artifacts that constitute the literary genre of South Asian Muslim women's autobiographies. She presents her book Elusive Lives as a “decoding of a gendered self” (p. 2) and part of a larger effort to recover South Asian women's voices. This instructive study serves scholars in multiple disciplines, providing accounts of the lives and diverse motivations of women autobiographers from across the Indian subcontinent over the twentieth century, while also complicating our understanding of voice, performance, and individualism as these emerge in the texts.
Chapter 1, read together with the introduction and the extensive bibliographies of works in South Asian languages and in English, reveals the process and the result of Lambert-Hurley's search for texts, a process that she describes as a constitution of an archive of South Asian Muslim women's autobiographies. This is “neither a straightforward nor a systematic process,” Lambert-Hurley tells us (p. 26); it is a sampling produced through concentrated “on the ground” effort in Delhi and other “historically important Muslim centers in India and Bangladesh” (p. 25), as well as via contacts and communications technology links to Pakistan. She locates and taps a rich vein of...