This essay focuses on a corpus of eight mid- to late eleventh-/seventeenth-century illustrated manuscripts of the poem Sūz u Gudāz by the poet Nawʿī (d. c. 1019/1610). The text describes the struggle of a Hindu maiden, whose fiancé has died, to commit satī on his funeral pyre despite the interventions of various figures in her life. The essay discusses how later Safavid painters adapted and transformed established pictorial compositions associated with mas̱navīs from the Khamseh (“Quintet”) of Neẓāmī to illustrate Nawʿī’s poem, reflecting its status as a javāb (pointed response) to Neẓāmīan romances. The illustrators often altered the compositional models to draw attention to the gendered dimensions of Nawʿī’s subversive poetics.
Chagnon, Michael. (2021). Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz.
Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World, Volume 2 (Issue 1-2), 55-96. https://doi.org/10.1163/26666286-12340018
