In India and Pakistan, Urdu poetry connects a multiplicity of voices in the public domain, appealing to an elite class, and extends beyond that ‘ashrafization’ in its formulation as an everyday lived experience offering different trajectories across a variety of spaces. It is a signifier of national, local and gendered cultures, forming a cross-cultural mosaic across multiple identities and identification. You will find examples of phrases and poems cited and quoted in a variety of places: television channels will devote hours of primetime viewing to cultural discussion programmes and performances of poetry and song; politicians will quote well-known poems in the certainty that their significance will be broadly understood; and even the drivers of rickshaws and trucks will have adapted poetic phrases painted on their vehicles. Other cultural forms, including devotional music such as the qawwali, folk art and street theatre, engage a cross-section of society, offering a cultural aesthetic that draws from everyday life. Poetry thus advances an activist medium of self-expression in which authority and ownership of symbols, metaphors and personifications can be overturned and class politics questioned. In this landscape, it is necessary to think about the place of women and their intersectional relations to class, nation and culture. Nosheen Ali has written about the plural diversities of poetic knowledges in South Asia and a decolonized approach to poetry through a region-led cross-cultural knowledge of poetic traditions in order to understand the culture of emotions and affect that are part of everyday life. Poetry as both an oral and a written medium in the subcontinent was utilized by reformists, anticolonialists, progressives and nationalists. How do we make sense of the different types of narrative that are embedded in this politics of conformity and resistance? In her book Self and Sovereignty Ayesha Jalal has emphasized the role of poetry in the ‘construction of narratives of identity’ in late nineteenth-century India and its notable presence in the vernacular press of the period. The spirit of Urdu poetry was inflected with influences from bhakti and Sufi traditions underlining Indic and Islamicate aesthetic qualities. Jalal uses the political poetry of protest to illustrate the politics of changing Muslim subjectivities.