ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that romantic fiction is crucial to understand the history of women and literature in the subcontinent. Popular fiction such as romances can be feminist in different ways and by historicizing romantic fiction, we can trace the way women authors use the formulaic structure of a romance to re-think feminine subjectivity, ideas of desire, and masculinity. As a genre, romance was not new to readers of Urdu in the 20th century. However, a historical analysis of the works of Hijab Imtiaz Ali (1908–1999) reveals the complexity of her narrative, including her choice to depart from some traditions of writing romance. Through a close reading of her key texts, I show how her narrative style was modern in her use of self-reflexivity. Her forays into the fractured world of the subconscious in the form of dreams, alter ego, and fantasy offered women a means to challenge and interrogate patriarchal ideas of marriage and love in a genre that is by and large seen as ideologically weak for women. Hijab’s narratives offered her readers the possibility of subversion. Taking Merja Maniken’s formulation of ‘readerly position,’ I argue how Hijab Imtiaz Ali’s stories offer us more than one possible way of reading romance, thus making it possible for us to see the significance of revisiting Ali’s writings.
