ABSTRACT
The reformers concentrated on female education as a means of both improving the lot of Muslim women and of the community in general. The masochism of ghazal poetry, in which the lover willingly provokes and desires the cruelty of his beloved, is transformed into a sort of reformist sado-masochism in which men are unjust to women only to feel remorseful subsequently. Once the woman has become a Muslim the urge to spoil her, to seduce her from herself, becomes almost unbearable, and literary villains from Rashid ulKhayri onwards take a curious pleasure in deflowering or corrupting masum women. The chapter examines in terms of a larger sharif struggle over and shift in notions of Muslim space. There occurs in the nineteenth century a fundamental shift in the politics of space. Late nineteenth century Muslim India witnessed the emergence of a powerful new movement concerned with the reform of women's conditions.
