@inproceedings{bib_“�_2025, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {“‘As If I Am in My Homeland’: The Social and Intellectual Engagements of Ṣuġhrá Humāyūñ Mirzā in Berlin, 1924"}, BOOKTITLE = {Journal of Urdu Studies}. YEAR = {2025}}

Most research on the presence and activities of Muslim intellectuals in interwar Europe deals with men, with Muslim women strikingly underrepresented in such scholarship. This article addresses this gap by dwelling on the activities of Haidarābādī reformer and writer Ṣuġhrā Humāyūñ Mirzā (1884–1958) in Berlin in 1924 and, in the process, offering a glimpse into the role and work of women activists, educators, social workers, and intellectuals working in Germany at the time. Her own thought in this regard makes for an important and fascinating study. Furthermore, the speeches she was invited to deliver by different associations contain striking historical commentary and communicate her thoughts and experiences as a social reformer and educator in Europe. In examining this account, this paper also demonstrates how Ṣuġhrā Begam’s insatiable personal curiosity and relentless sense of duty critically challenge and undermine the enforced, unhistorical invisibility of Muslim women travellers in the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse of travel writing.

@inproceedings{bib_“B_2024, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {“Between Sadhu and Darvesh: Storytelling and Social Reform in Sughra Humayun Mirza’s Mohini (1929),” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 47.4 (2024), 774-790.}, BOOKTITLE = {Between Sadhu and Darvesh}. YEAR = {2024}}

Ṣuġhrā Humāyūñ Mirzā (1884–1958) was a reformer, journalist, writer and traveller from the erstwhile princely state of Haidarābād, Dakkan. She wrote prolifically and used her fiction and non-fiction as a vehicle for her reformist ideas and objectives. However, scholarly focus on Ṣuġhrā Begum’s reformist work alone risks dismissal of her literary creativity and innovation. This paper aims to address this gap through an analysis of the narrative and stylistic features of Ṣuġhrā Begum’s Urdū novel, Mohinī (1929). I suggest a reading of this text on its own terms, i.e. one that emerges from the text and the motivations of its author, rather than through measurements with standard—usually Western—yardsticks or other assumptions about Ṣuġhrā Begum’s ostensibly singular priorities. Instead, I argue that Mohinī should be read in the context of the development of the Urdū novel, which was taking shape through the encounter between Western modes of representation made prominent through colonialism and existing Indian storytelling traditions, such as the qiṣṣāh. In the process, this paper expands the scholarship on this writer by offering a study of the creative features of her fiction and calls for the imagination of South Asian and wider Persianate print realisms that are not bound by rationalist epistemologies and encapsulate broader systems of knowledge.

@inproceedings{bib_Work_2024, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar, Radheshyam Thiyagarajan}, TITLE = {Working Backwards: Mixed-Methods Approaches and the Challenge of a Fragmentary Migration Archive}, BOOKTITLE = {Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability}. YEAR = {2024}}

Given the challenge of fragmentary or scattered archives, how can we construct a historical and socio-cultural profile of urban micro-minorities that are acutely affected by the “global flows” (Arjun Appadurai 1990) of people, commodities, and capital? Secunderabad, once a town in princely Hyderabad state in colonial South Asia, was shaped critically by the arrival of migrant communities from different parts of the subcontinent. One such group was that of educated, professional, Tamil-speaking migrants from Madras Presidency. Testament to this migration today are multiple localities with a dominance of Tamil-speaking people, cultural events, and related institutions and associations. Using this community as a case study, this paper demonstrates that the biggest challenge in studying the history of a micro-minority is their marginal presence in archives. We find that the keepers of such history are individuals and communities. Hence, we examine private archives, oral histories, and community records in conjunction and contestation with literary texts and official sources, such as census data, civil lists, and gazettes. This paper offers an account of how we addressed methodological challenges by building community networks, and adopting and adapting a mixed-methods, interdisciplinary approach to creatively trace migration, settlement, linguistic, and socio-cultural patterns. Our findings suggest that such approaches have positive implications for city and urban studies and research methods in this area.

@inproceedings{bib_A_St_2023, AUTHOR = {Dhruvee Birla, Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {A Study of Pandemic Experiences of LGBTQ+ Community Through Social Media Data}, BOOKTITLE = {Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI)}. YEAR = {2023}}

Social media was one of the most popular forms of communication among young people of a certain class demographic during the pandemic. Consequently, crucial debates and discussions about the pandemic crisis itself have also developed on social media platforms, making them a great primary source to study the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community during the pandemic. We conducted research using LDA topic modelling on a sub-reddit from the Reddit platform to understand the nature of this discourse. LDA Topic modelling is useful in identifying patterns and themes in large volumes of unstructured data and is an appropriate tool for analyzing social media posts. The results from our preliminary research in this area suggest that institutions such as the health care system, justice system, and legislative system perpetuated systematic inequalities against LGBTQ+ communities during the pandemic, thereby adding to the pre-existing stigma against them during a global crisis. Data from subreddits such as ‘lgbt’ have also suggested a shift in tone in these discussions from the period during the pandemic to the period after the pandemic. We intend to now expand our analysis to other platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook to verify and qualify our approach and understanding of this problem. Researchers, such as Ahmed & Sifat (2021), Pandya & Redcay (2021) and Bhalla & Agarwal (2021), working on qualitative studies have given us enough evidence that proves that inequalities and violence against these communities had intensified during the pandemic. Although research has been done showing that COVID-19 pandemic correlates to an increased amount of discrimination towards the LGBTQ+ community, no research prior to this study has examined content available on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit using LDA topic modelling to understand this correlation. By conducting this research, we will also be able to offer an informed analysis of the effectiveness of computational tools in the study of gender and look at this population from a new perspective.

@inproceedings{bib_BRIC_2023, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {BRICK, VERSE, ECHO: Partition and the Decline of Urdu Poetry in Jeelani Bano’s Aiwan-e-Ghazal (1976)}, BOOKTITLE = {Regional perspectives on Indias Partition}. YEAR = {2023}}

The crisis in shared literary cultures and language communities during the transfer of power has been an important theme in Partition Studies. But while Urdu has been researched in the northern context, its place in southern India at this critical time remains neglected. This is an especially glaring gap because it was in the Deccan that Dakhni/Urdu literature flourished and developed before it came to be properly patronized by the courts of northern India. This chapter examines Jeelani Bano’s Urdu novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal (The Palace of Ghazal; 1976), which contemplates the changing place of Urdu and Urdu literary culture against the events and aftermath of Partition in the context of Hyderabad. Operating on the generic tensions between literature and historiography, Bano’s novel challenges hegemonic narratives of a monolithic, communal Hyderabadi Muslim community and charts the stagnation, transformation, and decline of Urdu poetry in twentieth-century Hyderabad. Through its analysis of this novel, this essay argues that the upheavals of Partition laid the groundwork for the homogenisation and marginalisation of both Hyderabadi Muslims and Urdu—contrary to the historical reality and diversity of these categories—and shows how their fate became inextricably intertwined, leading to the minoritisation of this singularly defined community and language in post-Partition India.

@inproceedings{bib_“�_2022, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {“‘Bepardahgi’ amid Social Taboo: Radical Acts of Narration in Bilquis Jehan Khan’s Autobiography A Song of Hyderabad (2010),” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 45.3 (Autumn 2022), 81-91.}, BOOKTITLE = {Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics}. YEAR = {2022}}

@inproceedings{bib_Bibi_2022, AUTHOR = {Nazia Akhtar}, TITLE = {Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose}, BOOKTITLE = {Orient BlackSwan}. YEAR = {2022}}

In addition to the general neglect of women writers, Urdu literary historiography in both English and Urdu has historically privileged north Indian and Pakistani writers while overlooking the many Urdus south of Bombay and Bhopal. Next to no work exists in English on the Urdu writers of Hyderabad, and only a handful of texts have been translated into English —an astonishing neglect, considering their contribution to the study of gender, political cultures, and regional histories. Bibi’s Room studies the lives and work of three women writers from Hyderabad who wrote in Urdu: Zeenath Sajida, Najma Nikhat and Jeelani Bano. It addresses the absence of scholarship on Hyderabadi women writers in three ways: representative translations; short, nuanced biographies; and critical analyses of their oeuvres—all framed against twentieth-century Hyderabadi history, politics, culture, and society. The three writers showcased here offer rich portrayals of Hyderabadi urban culture as well as critiques of gender and patriarchy. Zeenath Sajida’s insights into Islam dramatically alter what we know of Muslim women’s engagements with fundamental theological questions. Sajida is also a skilled proponent of Urdu humour and satire, a genre notorious for its exclusion of women writers. Jeelani Bano’s oeuvre, spanning three schools of Urdu literature, makes vital contributions to our understanding of gender, class, communalism, and national identity. Najma Nikhat’s deodi stories powerfully narrate women’s lives across class in feudal aristocratic homes, and their participation in revolutionary struggles like the Telangana movement. The picture of Hyderabadi women’s lives that emerges generates new knowledge about the conditions in which women live, write, and resist, and expands our understanding of their public participation in South Asia. Bibi’s Room is also a welcome and valuable addition to studies of Urdu literature, South Asian feminism, translation, and the history and culture of Hyderabad.