Writing in Kinship
Whom do you think of as your closest fellow traveler in your academic journey? The person who has seen you at your performative peak, say at a conference, and equally at your most vulnerable, perhaps in the aftermath of a crushingly negative peer-review? Who are the members of your tribe that prompt you to apply for the fellowship that you thought was out of your league? The generous reader who diagnoses, correctly, that what is missing in the first draft of your book’s introduction, is you and your story? While academia has long valorized the striving individual paving a solitary path of production, refreshing change is afoot with more women, non-binary, BIPOC, immigrant, and differently abled persons modeling new practices of what it means to inhabit the academy in whole and authentic ways.
In the dialogue that follows, we speak as two close friends, fellow architectural historians, professors in the US academy, mothers of daughters, South Asian immigrants, and feminist allies who have developed a practice of writing in solidarity and kinship. Our thinking is informed and inspired by those who have come before us: the feminist geographers who launched the Slow Scholarship movement; architectural historians who have written eloquently about mindful parenting in the academy and caregiving as method; and the call to arms from Black intellectuals on dismantling the regulatory and colonizing impulses of the university. We hope that this piece will inspire new imaginations of research worlds and practices. While scholars have long been attentive to what and where they will write about (field and subdiscipline) and how they will assemble their research (method), very few ask themselves: Who am I writing alongside? What writing spaces do I conjure up? How will the people I love and provide for thrive in my intellectual universe?
What we Write
Mrinalini: I have just completed the manuscript for Marks She Made: The Art and Architecture of Begum Samru, 1803-1836. It is a creative biography of Begum Samru, a wealthy dowager who rose from humble beginnings to become the independent ruler of a prosperous territory in north India. Through paintings (of herself and others) and architecture she commissioned, Begum Samru was able to author and present different versions of herself to various audiences. I am interested in her will, indeed her capacity, to write herself into history by crafting images and choreographing or manipulating space. Her ability to deploy art and architecture to navigate patriarchal society and leverage them as she enhanced her social and personal autonomy, security, and respectability is stunning (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Muhammad Azam, Begum Samru and her army, c. 1815 Chester Beatty Library.
Early in my research, I was motivated by the false assumption/ presumption that Begum Samru was an outlier in the history of architecture—a maverick who disrupted nineteenth-century gendered expectations of a ruler, builder, military commander, or a diplomat with global connections. I have since learnt that Begum Samru was only one of several prolific women patrons of art and architecture, whose histories are yet to be told.
Shundana: I have been working on my book, Resonant Tombs: A Feminist History of Sufi Shrines in Pakistan, for almost as long as you. My objective was to write women into the history of Islamic architecture, as builders, laborers, architects, preservationists, and conservationists. Several generations of named and unnamed women have patronized tombs of Muslim mystics who were considered saints. Spanning from the thirteenth century to the present, the book describes feminist ways of placemaking and placekeeping through auditory practices of weeping, sweeping, singing, chanting, whispering and more. I theorize sound as a building material, as architectural labor, and a strategy of marking territory or public space for women.
Built by kings and governors to memorialize spiritual leaders, today Sufi spaces are mainly stewarded by poor women. On average, for every three men, there are seven women visitors at Sufi shrines in the Punjab and Sindh regions of Pakistan. This book reframes their physical spaces and soundscapes as sites of feminism from below for over 800 years. This history has been in clear view for centuries, but patriarchal framings of Islamic women’s access to the public sphere and western conceptions of feminism have blinded us to its enduring valence (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Dhammal (devotional dance to drumming) at Shah Jamal Shrine in Lahore, 2023. Photo Credit: Shundana Yusaf and Fatema Udaipurwala.
Where We Write From
Shundana: It is impossible, and arguably unethical, to disentangle the world we live in from what we write. Writing is not the work of a disembodied intellect. It is an embodied practice that unfolds alongside cooking (for yourself and others), sleeping, exercising, showering, socializing and clarifying a messy jumble of ideas through conversations with friends and confidants. Writing is somatic, intuitive, and emotional. My current book has been an overt exercise in self-discovery as well as self-reconstruction. It grew from my intersectional identities as a feminist, a Muslim, and a scholar of the built environment and brought me to the realization that I am neither willing to accept, nor fully reject the religious beliefs, architectural theories, and everyday practices that shape me. The tradition in which I was raised, casts the women I study as hapless illiterates, mindless followers of degenerate customs, or heretics. I now recognize them as my role models. They exert agency in making and occupying space for themselves in public arenas. Co-inhabiting their soundscapes has shown me that I need not disinherit every aspect of Islam or architectural history as a discipline. Feminist strategies of placemaking and placekeeping in Sufi shrines productively disrupt traditional definitions of knowledge, architecture, material, labor, manufacture, and conservation. In this unraveling, we might regard the vibrational energy of sound as construction material. Here, the rituals of sobbing, singing, and speaking to the living-dead are the labor of historic preservation.
I see this research as a reparative project. It is a countermapping of Islamic space and place that has traditionally marginalized women as bit part actors in its history. It also remaps Western feminism, where women’s freedoms and rights are premised on a detachment from their desire and corporeal selves. Resonant Tombs is a project of reconstructing myself both within and outside the grains of these twinned traditions. It is from here that I know and write.
Mrinalini: I started incubating this book around 2012-2013 when violence against women, that has unfortunately always been a clear and present danger in Indian society, gained visibility in the national and international media. There was news of repeated gang rapes of girls and women, many of whom were targeted either due to their religious identity (Muslim) or caste status (Dalit). Some were as young as eight years old, and several were murdered by their rapists so that they would be unable to speak their dehumanization into existence. In 2018, I adopted my daughter and began to think in very real ways about bodily autonomy, women’s safety and rights (especially in the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade), and what it meant to raise a woman capable of claiming space and using her voice. Meanwhile, I was writing a history of a nineteenth-century Indian woman who had invested considerable energy in creating spaces and images that made her hyper-visible, both in her own immediate milieu and abroad. Begum Samru was often the only Indian at a banquet table that hosted European men and women. She was often the only woman on a battlefield. Her unveiled face was seen by Pope Gregory the XVI and King Louis Philippe of France through the portraits she sent them. These deliberate strategies of women taking up room in the public sphere and choreographing their images on their own terms were a part of Indian history. I realized that my identity as an Indian woman, as a mother to a female child, and my intellectual preoccupations could not, should not, be neatly compartmentalized. Marks She Made is written from that place; marked by the anger felt in the wake of relentless anti-female violence, of the joys and anxieties of parenting, and the energizing power that comes from archival discoveries.
“Who am I writing alongside? What writing spaces do I conjure up? How will the people I love and provide for thrive in my intellectual universe? ”
How We Write
Mrinalini: My biggest challenge in terms of method was authentically reconstructing the history of female creativity from an archive that was almost entirely authored by men. Records of Begum Samru, whether they are paintings, military and political correspondences, architectural drawings, or eyewitness accounts, were the products of her male counterparts. Contemporaries of Begum Samru saw her as a cultural and gendered anomaly, and what survives today as information about her is refracted through their male, and often European, gaze. To puncture these masculinist underpinnings of the archive, I deployed a citation practice where the secondary sources in my book are exclusively authored by women scholars. In doing so, I was able to create a parallel arena of women’s voices and scholarly thought that exists in a productive frisson with the male voice of the archive.
Begum Samru was not a feminist, and my book does not present her as such. I wanted, however, for my own feminism to step out of the shadows and find a meaningful place, to be a concrete organizing force, in Marks She Made. I took seriously Sara Ahmed’s provocation that citations function as a form of feminist politics, as a lived feminist practice. Inspired by Ahmed, I went from citing a few feminist intellectuals here and there to imagining and composing the book around a gyno-centric counter archive.
Shundana: I conceptualized my book from the very beginning, around the triad of sound, space, and women. Sufi Islam provided the richest and most cacophonous sites for the purpose. I looked for existing models that synthesized these three modalities but came up short. In the past two decades, especially since the rise of measuring sound behavior in natural and built environments by archeoacousticians, architectural historians have begun to investigate sound in space. Important work has been done in this field, but it pays little attention to gender. Equally, social and humanistic studies that focus on women in Islamic space have little to say about sound. As soon as I began this project, my instincts based on what I knew growing up in Pakistan, told me that non-elite women were important to the soundscapes and built histories of Sufi shrines. But where would I find historic records of such women? The archival cache leans towards hagiographies of male patrons who built khanqahs and tombs for these men. They center the saints and their male companions, rendering women, especially those who were poor and differently literate, homeless in history. So, a new form of archaeology was needed. One that resisted the linear constructs of temporality and causality. Sound suggested a direction.
Feminist scholar Adriana Cavarero has made a case for thinking with sound. Voice, an indicator of individual existence and agency, both connects and differentiates us from others. It connects our interior, the throat, saliva, lungs, to the listener's interior—their ears, auditory cortex, the heart, abdomen and so on—in real space. Sound as vibration with special frequency, amplitude, tone, melody, infuses the physical environs with all sorts of emotional and intellectual information. Depending on the material qualities of architecture and landscape, sound can multiply itself through space by way of echo, sound can subvert the assumed logic of space through piercing wails and fugitive whispers. For this project, I located new feminist sources through sound, such as the pilgrims who sweep the courtyard of Bibi Raasti (d. 1291CE) in Multan to keep her memory alive. Afghan mothers and daughter walk hundreds of miles with earthen pots filled with water to a sanctuary in the salt range of Kalar Kahar. Thousands gather daily at Sehwan to experience trance and to transcend the prison house of their bodies while dancing to medieval war drums played there. Pastoral Hindu, Sunni, and Shia followers have offered songs composed from Shah Abdul Latif’s feminist poetry at the tomb in Bhit Shah for more than 270 years. Devotees walk across the Thar desert synchronizing the rhythm of their anklets and bangles with the water sloshing in the pots over their heads. Women singers shake hands with strangers and record themselves in decades old registers while singing at the sixteenth-century grave of Bibi Khichri. With these sources, I have been able to piece together a new archive of sound, space, and female presence at Sufi shrines over 800 years.
Our Infrastructures of Solidarity
Shundana: Our privileges—the security of tenure, the financial means to travel, the freedom to meet, access to technology, and our almost synchronous academic calendars, have allowed us to write together. Sometimes this happens in person, where we spend several days at one person’s house for writing blitzes. We break these days into 2–3-hour intense writing sessions interspersed with breaks for cooking, eating, and exercising. Other times, we meet virtually and write together with whatever time we have at hand. We have been doing this since 2015, so there is a familiar rhythm and comfort to our writing sessions now.
Mrinalini: This essay, for example, was mapped out over four days during Thanksgiving week of 2023 when you came to Pittsburgh. The abstract was distilled on a train ride from Vicenza to Rome, that summer, when we were traveling with our daughters. I needed assistance with field research in Italy and your daughter, Cherie and you came to help take care of my daughter, Ameya while I was off working in archives and private collections. Of course, this kind of mobility is neither accessible nor affordable for everyone. We have been able to instrumentalize our privileges to create these bonds of solidarity and structures of intellectual and emotional support (Figure 3).
Figure 3 Mapping this essay, November 2023.
“This kind of reciprocity and generosity of thought and attention challenges the scarcity model of academia which tells us to hoard individual research time and attention.”
Shundana: I believe that anyone who holds us accountable to our stated goals (life, intellectual, or otherwise) or anyone who helps you untangle problems in your writing is doing something monumental, albeit with humble means. When friends recommend readings, assist in mind-mapping, or read each other’s manuscripts, they become each other’s thought partners. Such quotidian praxes of generosity and exchange successfully bypass the toxic model of competition at the heart of capitalist production and replace it with an ethics of care, solidarity, and collaboration—tools that are germane to feminist practice. Knowing that I can workshop every chapter of my book with you dissipates the anxiety of having to problem-solve in isolation. There is an excitement that comes with this form of intellectual banter, where it feels almost playful and turns writing into a treasure hunt for the best ideas, words, or formats.
Mrinalini: So much of the good energy of our rapport comes from having worked side by side for nine years now. I cannot separate my own intellectual growth over the past decade from the development of Resonant Tombs and Marks She Made. Long-term investments in each other's intellectual projects and well-being have made it possible for us to see each other’s work with both clarity and familiarity. When we find ourselves stuck in the weeds of a chapter, when we lose the big picture, when our ideas begin to feel stale or overworked, we ask the other for a few hours to workshop ideas together. This kind of reciprocity and generosity of thought and attention challenges the scarcity model of academia which tells us to hoard individual research time and attention. For us these investments of time and labor do not feel cumbersome or even extraneous to our own individual development. Personally, I always find myself nourished after a writing session with you.
In Conclusion: Writing as Carework
We have found much joy and pleasure from recognizing each other’s wholeness as human beings even as we advance our intellectual projects. For example, as Urdu/ Hindi speakers with fluency in English we share linguistic worlds that allow us to code-switch in private and public. As South Asians who spend the early decades of our lives in India and Pakistan and immigrated to the US as adults, we understand our cultural eccentricities with a shared sense of humor. Writing books and advancing on the academic ladder is hard intellectual and emotional labor. It can become all-consuming. Creating these life worlds where our intellectual identities syncopate with other human needs and aspirations has turned writing into a space of nourishment and pleasure for us.
We invite our colleagues and students to explore all that is to be gained from changing the way in which writing is imagined and enacted on a quotidian basis as well as over the longue durée career of an academic. Give yourself permission to dream an answer to this question: How will I rethink writing and rethink kinship? Gayle Rubin, the queer theorist, notes that “True feminism must call for a revolution in kinship.” Early in our friendship, we recognized the importance of forging a sororal bond as vital to our academic lives and minds. We have since cooked for each other, cleaned up together, cared for our daughters, grieved one another’s losses, edited each other’s fellowship and grant applications, and celebrated wins both big and small, academic and personal. Our infrastructures of care have moved the needle of writing and the metrics of academic success from the end product (the finished book or the published article) to the process of writing which as challenging as it is, is also marked by delight, discovery, growth, and friendship.
Citation
Shundana Yusaf and Mrinalini Rajagopalan, "Writing in Kinship,” PLATFORM, June 17, 2024.
