Gender and the Nation in the Limits of the Bazgasht-i adabi: Two Women Poets and Their Practice of Literary Return in 18th- and 19th-century Iran and Afghanistan

The so-called Bazgasht-i adabi (Literary Return movement) is believed by many to have begun in post-Safavid 18th-century Isfahan, and to have come to fruition in the context of early Qajar Tehran. To date, this neo-classical literary movement has been presented by most scholars of Persian literature as: a) an exclusively Iranian phenomenon (one that consciously saw itself in opposition to the wayward “Indian” style it sought to replace); and b) as a movement among male poets in which women played no significant (or insignificant) part. This paper challenges both these tropes in the established narrative on the geographical and gender scope of the Bazgasht-i adabi through a close reading of the divans of two women poets who wrote in Persian in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of these literary figures, the Afghan poet ‘A’isha Durrani (d.1819), was active in Kabul at the same time the grassroots poetic movement that had taken shaped in the literary societies (sing. anjuman) of Isfahan was being co-opted by the Qajars for their cultural project. The other, the Kurdish poet Mastura Kurdistani (d.1848), composed poetry of a neoclassical character and of considerable sophistication in a provincial environment, while her male counterparts at the courts of Fath-‘Ali Shah and Muhammad Shah vied with one another to demonstrate their prowess in imitating the poets of the pre-Timurid Iranian world.