Tracing Lutf un-Nisa Imtiyāz in the archive

This study examines the late eighteenth-century kulliyāt (complete works of an author) by Lutf un-Nisa ‘Imtiyāz’ (1733?–?),Footnote ¹ the first female şāḩib-e dīvān (published poet) in Urdu.Footnote ² Yet, she is excluded from nearly all taz̄kirahs (literary anthologies) of her time, from the little we know, she was a contemporary of the renowned courtesan poet Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañdā’ from Hyderabad and compiled her kulliyat in the year AH 1212/AD 1797, one year prior to Chañda.Footnote ³ While Chañda enjoys well-documented historical recognition for her multifaceted contributions, Imtiyāz and her husband Mīr Asad ʿAlī Ḳhān ‘Tamannā’ (?–1789), also a poet of the same era, remain relatively obscure in history.Footnote ⁴

Beyond the maṣnavī (a long narrative poem), Imtiyāz’s corpus includes panegyric poems. In a separate study, I translate three qasidas and several qitʿas (a series of couplets) addressed to Nawab Asaf Jah II, which shows a sustained practice of praise and petition.Footnote ⁵ This kind of court-adjacent address aligns with patterns visible in the Deccan, while also distinguishing Imtiyāz from her contemporary Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañdā’, who is securely documented as a courtesan-performer. The comparison helps frame a spectrum: Mah Laqa’s public performance is attested, whereas Imtiyāz’s performerly stance is textually staged on the page. The absence of biographical proof does not diminish the courtly functionality of her poems as communication, reputation building, and requests for favour.

Lutf un-Nisa Imtiyāz appears only briefly in a handful of literary and historical records from the Deccan, with minimal details about her life beyond her association with Tamannā. Naseeruddin Hashmi, a prominent literary scholar specialising in Dakani, the Deccan’s vernacular form of Urdu, wrote about Imtiyāz on two occasions. The first was in a detailed catalogue of the manuscripts housed in the Salar Jung Museum Library. He writes about Imtiyāz using the masculine verb agreement:

The term kanīz marks gender, but its social index is unstable: it can denote a maidservant or enslaved girl, a devotee in elite households, or a conventional mode of self-effacement used by women poets.Footnote ⁷ In some courtly settings, a kanīz could be placed within elite or salon circuits where literary skills circulated; in others it functions as a humble signature with no biographical implications.Footnote ⁸ Given the thin documentary trail for Imtiyāz, I treat kanīz as an unstable self-marker rather than evidence of sale, performance training, or a fixed occupational identity, although it might. Following the ‘self in performance’ approach in Speaking of the Self, I read such terms as rhetorical positions through which women negotiated voice and audience in constrained archives, rather than as firm biographical data.Footnote ⁹

Hashmi later mentions Imtiyāz in the 1985 edition of Dakkan meñ Urdu, where he explicitly mentions her as Lutf un-Nisa Imtiyāz Begum (lady) and includes more biographical details, stating: ‘Her upbringing was carried out in a shāhī, royal, household. She was wed to Mir Asad ʿAli Khan Tamannā, but in her youth she was widowed.’Footnote ¹⁰ Hashmi’s later notice presumes a royal upbringing and early widowhood, but the poem’s internal timeline allows more than one reading. The internal timeline of the maṣnavī is elastic: two couplets refer to ‘36 years’, which can be read either as the span of a conjugal bond or as an age marker. Neither reading, on its own, confirms professional performer status, yet both keep open the possibility of an earlier court-adjacent placement followed by marriage. I return to this point in the reading of the relevant couplets below, where I keep the hypothesis strictly cautious and tied to the poem’s wording.Footnote ¹¹ Hashmi provides few additional biographical details, focusing primarily on the manuscript housed in the Salar Jung Museum Library in Hyderabad. Notably, by the time of this reference, he assumes Imtiyāz is a woman, consistently using feminine verb agreements to describe her poetry.

Elsewhere, Imtiyāz is mentioned by Maulwi ‘Abdul Hai in a history of Aurangabad. He writes about her poetry:

It is not clear how ‘Abdul Hai is able to discern so much information about Imtiyāz’s life, like the nature of her character or where she died. He describes a move from Aurangabad to Hyderabad, where she died. Read together with the maṣnavī’s refrains of musāfir (traveller) and be-vaţan (without country), the record registers both physical and affective displacement. In Hyderabad under the Nizam, women’s artistic labour moved through households, shrines, and salons; Imtiyāz’s poems participate in that courtly ecology even where documentary proof of embodied performance is absent. The be-vaţan couplets, analysed later, allow the reading of loss of homeland as both a spiritual state and a material relocation.

She is last mentioned in the Taz̄kirah Riyāẕ Ḩusainī (The garden of Husain anthology) (1994) by Agha Mirza Beg. He writes: ‘The wife of Asad ʿAli Khan Tamannā, whose name was Lutf un-Nisa Begum and takhalluş, penname, was Imtiyāz. She was the first khātūn (or lady) şāḩib-e dīvān in the Deccan and of Hind. She has a relationship to the city of Aurangabad.’Footnote ¹³ The entry is brief and only mentions her Persian couplets and Urdu couplets that date the kulliyat as examples of her poetry.

Lutf un-Nisa Imtiyāz is absent from contemporary taz̄kirahs, both general and those dedicated to women poets, leaving little biographical record beyond her own verses. The few sources that do mention her rely heavily on inferences drawn from her poetry itself. This scarcity of historical documentation invites an exercise in reading her maṣnavī as a form of autobiography, offering insights into her life and subjectivity. However, I acknowledge the limitations of this approach, as poetic conventions, literary tropes, and artistic embellishments complicate attempts to reconstruct a definitive personal narrative.

While the archive of premodern women’s writing is small relative to men’s, it is not accurate to say that courtesan writing scarcely exists. Much of what survives is by courtesans or royal women. For instance, Fasih al-Din Rañj’s Bahāristān-e Nāz (The garden of coquetry) gathers biographies of poet-courtesans, even if many are represented only by a few poems or couplets.Footnote ¹⁴ This makes Imtiyāz unusual, since her kulliyat is comparatively full and internally organised. In the Hyderabad state of the Nizams, both Imtiyāz and Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañda’ wrote within a Shi’i, courtly milieu and addressed the same sovereign; in Imtiyāz’s case, this includes panegyrics to Asaf Jah II in the form of qasidas and qit’as.Footnote ¹⁵ The commonalities are striking, yet the divergence of preferred forms matters: Mah Laqa’s extant collection is a divan of ghazals, optimised for salon performance and circulation, whereas Imtiyāz turns to the maṣnavī to stage an extended first-person arc that braids devotion, memory, and petition.Footnote ¹⁶ The maṣnavī thus enables modes of self-narration that the couplet-based ghazal typically disperses. Read this way, the difference does not measure agency so much as it marks distinct strategies of subject formation and patronage within a shared courtly world—one embodied and public, the other performerly and textual.

Given the paucity of women’s literature from this historical epoch, this article seeks to demonstrate how Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī can serve as a unique avenue to explore her mobile and agentive self. This maṣnavī serves three primary functions: firstly, as an autobiography facilitating the construction of a counter-archive for early women’s writing and an earnest attempt to discern a ‘woman’s voice’; secondly, by utilising time as a pathway to comprehend Imtiyāz’s life story across past, present, and future; and thirdly, by employing metaphors of space and place to depict imagined travel, expanding her mobility beyond the physical realm to personify a divine, literary, and historical traveller.

In this article I use courtesanly to describe a mode of voice and posture that the poem performs on the page: self-effacing self-markers such as kanīz in later notices, direct apostrophe to an addressee, oath sequences, and calibrated audience management through requests for lenient reception and correction.Footnote ¹⁷ These are textual cues of a salon or court-adjacent ecology, not a biographical claim. In this sense, performerly names the poem’s choreographed sequencing of address and response: entrance by apostrophe, set-piece vows, changes of scene, and a closing appeal to present and future audiences. I trace these cues where they appear in the maṣnavī: the kaniz notice and its ambiguity, the apostrophe to the cup-bearer and to ʿAli, the extended oath sequence, and an appeal to ‘noble ones’ and the ‘generous’. Before delving into Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī, however, a brief background to the mas̄navī form itself is necessary.

Introducing the mas̄navī form

The mas̄navī is a long narrative poem composed in paired rhyming hemistichs—often summarised as ‘aa bb cc’—that enables sustained storytelling across episodes, arguments, and scenes. Its exact technical prehistory is debated, but for our purposes the key point is functional: by the classical Persian period, the maṣnavī offered poets scale and continuity beyond monorhyme lyric, supporting romance, didactic narrative, and spiritual instruction alongside autobiographical arcs. A concise definition captures this capaciousness as a ‘poem with rhyming hemistiches (aa bb cc), which can be of any length and treat any topic’, a flexibility that underwrites the genre’s range.Footnote ¹⁸

While scholars differ on early metrics and origins, they converge on the genre’s affordance to expand poetic scope.Footnote ¹⁹ As one formulation puts it, the maṣnavī answered a ‘wish to enlarge the scope of their poems’, which helps explain its rise as Persian matured as a literary language.Footnote ²⁰ Canonical exemplars—Firdawsi’s Shāhnāma (The book of kings, circa 1010), Rumi’s Mas̄navī-i-maʿnavī (The maṣnavī, circa 1267), and ʿAţţār’s Manţiq-al-ţayr (Attar’s conference of the birds, circa 1177)—illustrate how the form came to index epic, instruction, and spiritual journey without fixing a single template.Footnote ²¹

Two features of this narrative technology matter for the analysis that follows. First, the maṣnavī commonly deploys compact paratexts (often called dībācha) that shape reception: brief praise of God and the Prophet, invocations, a statement of occasion, and address to a patron, sometimes with moral or programmatic remarks; these elements are mobile and may resurface as a closing appeal.Footnote ²² Second, the genre shares a narrative toolkit with dāstān storytelling—recurring images, exemplary tales, and clear transitions that mark scene changes—so that shifts of voice or location read as deliberate staging rather than digression.Footnote ²³

This minimal schematic clarifies why the maṣnavī is so well-suited to Imtiyāz’s project. The form’s scale permits an explicit sequencing of life events and reflections; its flexible paratexts sanction direct apostrophe and petition; and its episodic movement makes heavenly ascent, oath-taking, and return legible as organised ‘set pieces’ rather than incidental ornament. In later sections, I show how Imtiyāz uses an extended oath sequence (saugandh) to assemble audience and authority, how apostrophes to the cup-bearer and to ʿAli function as entrances, and how a closing appeal to ‘noble ones’ and the ‘generous’ manages readers’ reception—each a performerly cue that the page inherits from salon and court-adjacent practice.

The genre’s narrative elasticity also supports the article’s key analytic moves. Because a maṣnavī can braid timelines, Imtiyāz can calibrate past loss, present petition, and future address without abandoning coherence—an ability that undergirds my readings of time as journey and the strategic placement of autobiographical markers. And because the form normalises scene change, metaphors of space and place—tavern, city, sky—operate not only as imagery but as stage directions that cue mood and tempo, setting up the mobility readings pursued later.

With this focused frame in place, the next section turns to Urdu practice, especially in the Deccan. There I outline how poets adapted the Persian maṣnavī’s paratexts and episode structure to local idioms and audiences, and how Imtiyāz situates her own poem within that tradition before retooling it towards self-narration and court-adjacent address.

Historicising form: early Urdu maṣnavī

Scholars argue that Urdu’s earliest literary works emerged in poetry rather than prose. Jamil Jalibi, for instance, asserts that the first work in Urdu is not prose but poetry; this is Fakhr-e Din Niz̦āmī’s mas̄navī, Kadam Rāo Padam Rāo (Kadam Rao Padam Rao), written between 1421 and 1434.Footnote ²⁴ This suggests that the maṣnavī was central to Urdu’s literary beginnings, shaping the language’s poetic evolution from its very inception. The maṣnavī holds a foundational place in the development of Urdu poetry, distinguished by its vivid regional imagery, indigenous expressions, and broad appeal to everyday audiences. As a genre, it not only set literary standards but also laid the groundwork for the evolution of other genres. As one scholar observes,

The early maṣnavī thus functioned not only as a narrative form but also as a literary space where vernacular expression and classical influences converged.

From the start, the maṣnavī demonstrated remarkable adaptability, drawing upon Persian models while embracing distinctly Indian themes. Early poets like Rustami, who composed Khāwar Nāmah (1649), engaged in translation and adaptation. This long maṣnavī is a translation from the Persian maṣnavī of the same name, and ‘it tells the story of adventure and romance, based entirely on unhistorical and imaginary events’.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, others in the Deccan like Malik Khushnud and ‘Abdul captured regional cultures in their poetic narratives—Malik Khushnud was the poet laureate for the seventeenth-century sultan of Bijapur, Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, and is known for his maṣnavī, Hasht Behistht (Eight paradises, circa 1646), penned in the style of Khusrau.Footnote ²⁷ The Ibrahīm Nāmah (circa 1604), written as an extended qasida by ‘Abdul to celebrate Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II is also notable for its vivid portraiture of Bijapur’s culture during the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁸

Further, the maṣnavī functioned as a repository of folklore and local storytelling traditions. Muqīmī’s Chandrabadan-wa-Mahiyār (Chandrabadan and Mahiyar, circa 1686), for instance, retells a love story drawn from South Indian oral traditions.Footnote ²⁹ Muqīmī was so captivated by the tale of Mahiyar and Chandrabadan that he felt compelled to render it in verse, believing it could surpass the legendary love story of Laila and Majnun. Mahiyar first encountered Chandrabadan during a pilgrimage and confessed his love, but they were separated for a year. When they reunited at the next pilgrimage, he collapsed at her feet, only for her biting remark—‘So, you are still alive!’—to strike him dead. As his funeral procession passed her home, it mysteriously came to a stop. Draped in white, Chandrabadan emerged, lay beside his lifeless body, and took her final breath.

Similarly, Nuşratī’s Gulshan-e-‘Ishq (The rose garden of love, circa 1657) reflects the maṣnavī’s fluidity, blending Persian, Hindi, and Dakhani influences in an artistic retelling of the love story of Manohar and Madhumati. Manohar and Madhumati are the star-crossed lovers of a North Indian Hindavi Sufi romance (prem-akhyān) first attributed to Shaykh Manjhan and later Persianised, a tale whose allegorical journey between lovers made it ideal for adaptation. He was perhaps the most outstanding poet of this age, and as Ali Javad Zaidi recounts, ‘although from a Brahmin background, he talks respectfully of the Gulbarga Sufi, Gesu Daraz, and other mystics. This popular story was first told in Hindi by Sheikh Manjhan (1649) and retold in Persian by ‘Aqil Khan ‘Raẕī’ in his Mehr-o Māh (1654–1655).’Footnote ³⁰ Nuşratī enriched the narrative with the additional love story of Champawati and Chandrasen, reshaping the original with his unique portrayal of physical nature.

A distinct feature of the Urdu maṣnavī is its interplay between historical reality and literary imagination. Waj’hī’s Quţb-i-Mushtarī (Qutb and Mushtari, circa 1609) is a skillful example of this, and according to Zaidi, possibly recounts a king’s own love affair while embedding personal experience within a broad geographical and cultural canvas, from Bengal in the north-east to the Deccan in the south.Footnote ³¹ The poet laureate at the seventeenth-century court of Abdullah Qutb Shah of Golconda, Ghawwasi, on the other hand, seamlessly integrated Indian and Iranian motifs, using allegory and fables to convey philosophical and moral themes: his Ţūţi Nāmah (Tales of a parrot, 1631), for instance, contains fables that convey deeper truths, such as the story of a bulbul (nightingale) whose greed led to its downfall:

Meanwhile, the tradition of gendered representation in Dakani poetry, as seen in Hashmi’s Yūsuf Zulekhā (Yusuf and Zulekha, 1687), reflects an engagement with Hindi poetic conventions, portraying women as active lovers rather than passive beloveds. As Zaidi notes, while discussing Hashmi,

Thus, the Urdu maṣnavī emerged as a dynamic and evolving genre, simultaneously preserving cultural memory, experimenting with narrative structure, and influencing later poetic forms. Its ability to weave together elements of history, mythology, folklore, and personal reflection not only defined the genre but also ensured its enduring relevance in Urdu literary tradition.

Reading Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī as autobiography

Following Dwight Reynolds’ scholarship on the Arabic autobiography, this article attempts to broaden the characterisation of which genres constitute an autobiography in early modern and, more importantly, non-Western literature.Footnote ³⁴ Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī meets the two criteria that Reynolds outlines: it qualifies as a ‘text that present[s] themselves as a description or summation of the author’s life, or a major portion thereof, as viewed retrospectively from a particular point in time’, and the personal and inner lives of the authors ‘is made manifest only through careful, close reading of the texts and a thorough awareness of their social milieus and literary strategies’.Footnote ³⁵ Through a thorough close reading of the maṣnavī, it is evident that it behaves as a form of life story for an otherwise unknown woman.

Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī is unique in its particularly autobiographical nature; it consists of approximately 219 verses and follows a distinct timeline. It begins with a romantic stage, moves to a period of longing, a metaphysical journey to the heavens, then a flashback to describe the life events of Imtiyāz from birth, and finally concludes with remarks to the future readers of her maṣnavī. Imtiyāz masterfully deploys the maṣnavī genre as a means of crafting a memoir, particularly during a period of personal melancholy in her life. Through this perspective, we are afforded the opportunity to hear a genuine woman’s voice, not solely as a stylised piece of poetry but as a profound testament to her life’s purpose and journey. The journey Imtiyāz undertakes in her maṣnavī is not physical but metaphorical: it moves through inner time, emotional landscapes, and spiritual reflection rather than across real geographies.

The beginning of the maṣnavī occurs at the throne of Hazrat ʿAlī, the fourth Shi’i imam, where she bares her soul and narrates the poignant tale of her own life, revealing detailed examples of various life stages and circumstances that ultimately left her in a state of profound loneliness following her husband’s passing. She states:

Here Imtiyāz embarks on a temporal journey through the crucial moments of her life story, commencing with her parents. She narrates how she was parted from her birth parents at the tender age of merely one year and three-quarters. It becomes apparent that, despite coming from a sizable family, she was raised by what she refers to as ‘outsiders’. Imtiyāz goes on to provide intricate details of those formative years, shedding light not only on her own intricate character but also on the social status and dynamics of her adoptive family. She writes:

She proceeds to paint a vivid picture of her adoptive family, revealing that they were childless and consequently doted on her lavishly. Imtiyāz reminisces about her infancy when she cried vehemently and the entire household would go to great lengths to soothe her. They would cradle her in their arms and remain awake throughout the night, contributing to the development of a rather skittish disposition, which left everyone around her without any grounds for complaint. Her narrative then transitions to a pivotal moment in a Muslim child’s life: the bismillah ceremony, which marks the formal initiation of Islamic education.

As we delve into the subsequent section focusing on her upbringing and education, it becomes evident that Imtiyāz enjoyed a social life and status that were highly formalised. Her exemplary ethics and refined demeanour suggest that she was nurtured within a jagirdari (landed gentry) class. She writes:

She continues to chronicle the inner conflict she grappled with as she grew closer to her adoptive family, expressing deep gratitude for their exceptional care. Imtiyāz reveals the joy of being surrounded by the love of many, yet she could not escape the frustration of not having her own biological parents. Then, at the age of nine, a pivotal moment unfolds as her birth father re-enters her life. Initially, it feels like an encounter with a stranger, but in a remarkable twist, he too showers her with love and affection, filling her life with newfound warmth and care.

She says:

Following this, Imtiyāz delves into her early inclination towards poetry, which emerged at a tender age. She laments the absence of an ustad, or mentor, to guide and correct her poetic endeavours. It becomes apparent that her husband played a pivotal role in providing islah (corrections) for her poetry, a role that continued until his passing.

In a subsequent part of this section, Imtiyāz humbly implores for the mercy of those who peruse this divan. She goes on to explain that her husband has regrettably passed away and the divan was assembled in haste. This is when the autobiographical section of the maṣnavī transitions from a past tense recollection to a present tense composition. The very specific details indicate that Imtiyāz uses the maṣnavī to tell her own life story, not too dissimilar from an autobiography.

The close reading of Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī as an autobiography is important for two reasons. The first is that it approaches genres in a counter-hegemonic manner, incorporating diverse poetic forms to explore individual subjectivities in the early modern period. The transformation of certain, ‘traditional’ genres is also fascinating to trace with the growing influence of colonialism and English genre systems. As articulated by Pasha Khan, genres like the qissah were intersectional, intertextual, and multigeneric, which raises important questions about the hierarchical matrix of the genre system, especially after colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁴

In their introduction to Speaking of the Self, editors Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley state, ‘if we look at autobiographical practice as a “self in performance”, we begin to appreciate the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the self was imbricated, and what enabled gendered subjectivity and speech’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Given the dearth of early modern women’s writing, it is necessary to read the writing that survives carefully and creatively, to recreate an authentic narrative from the words that were judiciously chosen by these women to describe their own life stories.

The second and related reason to read this maṣnavī as autobiography is to imagine a form of selfhood for this woman that is distinct from the male gaze, one that is both anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial. Here, scholarship by Erica Wald, Katherine Butler Schofield, Veena Talwar Oldenburg,Footnote ⁴⁶ and Radha Kapuria provide an excellent socio-cultural framework to understand courtesan lives in early modern India.Footnote ⁴⁷ This method traces female subaltern consciousness by paying attention to the text’s embeddedness in a history of colonialism and patriarchy. The female subconscious is, therefore, read through ‘strategic essentialisms’, which involve encounters between elite narrators and gendered subaltern subjects.Footnote ⁴⁸ The pitfall of this kind of historical analysis is that it reifies fixed essences of male–female, Hindu–Muslim, elite–subaltern, western–eastern, etc. However, this method does allow one to analyse dominant discourse to understand the constructs of women when source material is limited or non-existent.

Other scholars engage with an internal perspective from the courtesan herself or from those in direct contact with her. These studies often explore themes of subjectivity, selfhood, and autobiography through a close reading of source material. In the second category, Scott Kugle and Shweta Sachdeva JhaFootnote ⁴⁹ analyse the poetic works of Chañda, Imtiyāz’s contemporary poet, as a representation of her selfhood by constellating poetic works authored by the subject with other biographical information, such as biographies, taz̄kirahs, and epistolary works. Kugle and Sachdeva Jha take the perspective that Chañda imitates masculine modes of imperial self-fashioning. Kugle characterises this craft explicitly as strategic persona-shifting calibrated to a male audience:

However, I would question whether this kind of power must be conceived of as imperial, whether imperial power must necessarily be masculine and whether women’s participation in self-fashioning in these contexts can only be understood as an imitative masculinity. I use this as a foil for Imtiyāz: her poem adopts male-coded protocols of authority yet stages them performerly on the page rather than in embodied salon performance. A close reading of the maṣnavī as a form of autobiography helps us go beyond such understandings to allow Imtiyāz’s words to speak for themselves. In particular, the next section focuses on her use of time to frame the larger narrative of the maṣnavī.

Temporality as travel

Imtiyāz employs time as a narrative device in three major ways. First, she uses temporal symbols and motifs within the narrative to affirm her religious and historical knowledge. Relatedly, the narrative engages with and reflects on a cultural and historical context that better allows the reader to situate her past and present. Lastly, she manipulates temporal shifts and flashbacks to provide insight into her personal character development and builds nuance for a thematic resonance that carries into the future.

While multiple motifs of time appear in the maṣnavī, the most prominent are the following three. First, the arrangement of major religious figures in a chronological order beginning with the Prophet Muhammad, the Ahl al-Bayt, and then all twelve Shi’i imams. Next, a historical nod to three Persian literary couples that reaffirm Imtiyāz’s formal education and experience in the genre of maṣnavī. Finally, a sequence of Imtiyāz’s life, marking the important features, from a past childhood to a dismal present, and culminating in a message for a future reader. Imtiyāz adheres to conventional tropes by structuring her maṣnavī around established religious and literary frameworks, yet she innovates by weaving in her personal timeline, infusing the narrative with her own lived experiences and unique voice.

After beseeching the cup-bearer to hear the story of her sorrow and share her burden of grief, Imtiyāz transitions to a saugandh, or qasam-nama, which is an extended sequence of solemn oaths.Footnote ⁵¹ Notably, she employs each couplet to solemnly swear by the name of the Prophet Muhammad, Ahl-ul Bayt, and subsequently, each of the Shi’i imams, almost in sequential order, using their respective Arabic epithets. She states:

The first couplet uses the epiteth nabī-ul-hudā, which corresponds literally to the prophet who guides towards the right path, for the Prophet Muhammad. The metaphorical path or journey in the quest for knowledge is a recurring theme that we see elsewhere in the maṣnavī. After that, she uses the term mājrā to describe a present condition but can also be understood as a narration, series of events, or past occurrences. Through this word choice, Imtiyāz is again tuned to a temporal aspect of her autobiography and relaying a story from the past into the present. Murtaza and Khair ul-Nissa refer to ʿAlī bin Abu Talib, the cousin of the Prophet, and his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, respectively. Interestingly, they are mentioned in two hemistichs of the same couplet, just like the literary lovers mentioned in the following section. The following couplet uses the term Ḩasnain, which includes both Imam Hasan and Imam Hussain, the two grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, followed by an admission of a jān be chain, or restless soul. One can interpret this as the anxiety around the historically important Battle of Karbala in which Hussain was martyred. Following this, she swears by Zain-ul-Abidin and connects her own displacement with the displacement that occurred in the lifetime of the Fourth Imam when he was taken prisoner to Damascus. Again, we have the juxtaposition of religious history with the narrative of Imtiyāz’s own life story to render an emotional response from the reader. After this, she swears by the epithets of the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth imams, al-Baqir, al-Jafar, Musa al-Kazim, al-Riza, al-Hadi, and al-Taqiy in near perfect order. She then repeats the mentioning of the tenth Shi’i imam with another epithet, al-Naqi, and then moves on to swear directly to Hasan al-Askari—the Eleventh Imam—and the Imam of the Age—Muhammad al-Mahdi or the twelfth Shi’i imam in occultation. The last two couplets of this section implore on the strength of intercession by the chārdah, or Fourteen Infallibles mentioned on the Day of Judgement. The progress of time as traced in these oaths, from the early leaders of Islam to the Day of Judgement, acts as a vehicle for the personal struggles Imtiyāz describes elsewhere in the maṣnavī. She is using time to connect with the past, placing her promises alongside the revered figures of the Prophet and imams. Then, she looks ahead to the Day of Judgement, to win favour from the arbiters of justice. Time is therefore a mechanism of agentive expression for Imtiyāz that links her present to the past and future. Read as performance, the saugandh functions like a set-piece in recitation: a measured sequence that assembles audience, authority, and testimony, moving from prophetic and imamate invocations towards a judgement-day horizon. The arrangement of oaths thus marks tempo and scene changes as much as belief.

She proceeds by invoking a further series of oaths, extending her commitment to the lives of renowned lovers and beloveds from Persian maṣnavīs, such as Yusuf and Zulekha, Layla and Majnun, and Shirin and Farhad. She begins:

It is interesting to note that Zulekha is perceived in two ways, positively and negatively. Her love is pure and consummated in Jami’s popular Persian maṣnavī, deserving of an oath in the first couplet. This indicates that Imtiyāz was familiar with the poem and perhaps even understood the metaphysical dimensions of Jami’s version, where Zulekha’s love is a mere metaphor for the pursuit of God.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the second couplet, however, Imtiyāz follows the Qur’anic narrative more closely, whereby Zulekha is accused of a deadly gaze against the innocent Yusuf. The inclusion of both gives the impression that Imtiyāz is savvy in both literary and doctrinal anecdotes.

Next she turns to the love duo of Layla and Majnun where a ẕila’ jugat, or stretched metaphor, provides multiple meanings of the term musalsal, which can be defined as consecutive, continuous, or to be linked, chained, or connected. With the first meaning, a continuous or unending pledge is imagined, in which Imtiyāz continues her litany of oaths beyond the family of the Prophet, beyond the imams, beyond the cup-bearer, and all others to again profess an oath by the lovers Layla and Majnun. Alternatively, the term musalsal might play on the imagery of Layla’s concatenated curls through the word zulf (tresses). Finally, and perhaps most amusingly, the term musalsal might be playing on the chains that bound Majnun in some renditions of the maṣnavī.Footnote ⁵⁵ In all three interpretations, there is a remarkable emotive element that plays through the verse due to a combination of vivid imagery and aural components.

Following the precedent of Layla and Majnun, Imtiyāz next moves to Nizami’s other tragic romance, Khusrow va Shīrīn (Khusrow and Shirin), focusing on the secondary love story that takes precedence in South Asia between Farhad and Shirin. In some accounts, Farhad bangs his head on the very rocks that he is excavating to win over Shirin; therefore, the use of sar chaṛhnā, literally ‘sticking one’s neck out to save another’, has a double meaning here. Shirin’s restlessness can also be understood as impatience and in this regard harkens back to the original idea of time being used as a narrative device to connect the historical tale to Imtiyāz’s present condition. From the original story, one knows that Shirin is relayed the message of Farhad’s death, implying that she was waiting to hear news about him, furthering nuancing time’s presence in both narratives. The inclusion of these three sets of lovers also relocates the narrative of Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī beyond the South Asian context to the broader Persianate and Arabic settings of the three romantic love duos.

As indicated earlier, Imtiyāz most obviously uses the maṣnavī to sequence her life journey in her own terms, with her own words. She explicitly mentions various ages alongside major life events. For instance, she describes the moment when her mother died and her father left, ‘Without a doubt, this life was only one and three quarters old.’Footnote ⁵⁶ She adds the celebration of her bismillah ceremony, ‘When the beginning of my fifth year began/I was given a teacher of good character.’Footnote ⁵⁷ It is later followed by a reunion with her father, ‘At the age of nine, I learned he was my father.’Footnote ⁵⁸ When she includes the compilation date of the divan explicitly, one can put Imtiyāz’s life story in actual historical terms. She states:

In two other couplets, she recalls that her love story spans 36 years, alluding, perhaps, to the duration of her marriage, which abruptly came to an end with her husband’s death.

The number ‘36’ admits two readings: It is worth noting that we have the recorded date of her husband Tamannā’s demise in Aurangabad, which occurred due to an illness in AH 1204/AD 1789.Footnote ⁶² If this moment marks the duration of a marriage ended by Tamannā’s death in 1204/1789, then given the common practice of marrying girls upon reaching puberty, a marriage around 1754–1755 is plausible, which would place Imtiyāz’s birth earlier in the 1740s. If alternatively, these couplets mark her age at bereavement, then a birth in the early 1750s is more likely. Neither reading by itself secures biographical facts beyond a reasonable window of life events. At most, the longer-span reading allows a hypothesis that an earlier phase of court-adjacent placement preceded marriage, especially given her kulliyat’s courtly address elsewhere; this remains a scenario, not evidence.Footnote ⁶³ By contrast, Nasir al-Din Hashmi reads ‘36’ as her age at marriage to Tamannā; my evaluation stays anchored to the couplets’ wording and avoids treating an interpretive number as a documentary claim.Footnote ⁶⁴

The end of the maṣnavī takes on the form of a supplication in which she requests the future readers to look on her divan kindly, without too much scrutiny. She states:

These closing verses script reception as prayer and protocol. Imtiyāz petitions ‘the noble ones’ for āfarīn (Well done!) and asks future readers for merciful judgement; she marks the absence of a khalīfa (successor) or jānashīn (heir) while deliberately installing the poem itself as yādgār, a lasting memorial. The image of ‘few words stand like the engraving on a signet-stone’ frames the text as a seal that carries her name forward in time; it is courtly in posture and performerly in effect, yet achieved on the page. Read beside earlier motifs of musāfir and be-waţan, this ending converts displacement into textual permanence; where home and heirs are uncertain, the authored book becomes the vessel that travels through time.

The temporal aspect of Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī contributes to the understanding of her experiences and agency as a woman. A deferential nod to the Ahl-ul Bayt and the infallible imams in order of succession, preserves her religious reputation in the face of those who would malign her character. The chronological order, which additionally incorporates the titles of the imams, cleverly indicates Imtiyāz’s religious education and a strategic inclusion of herself within the broader Shi’i Muslim community. This inclusion of the imamate allows for an even deeper spiritual intercession on behalf of Imtiyāz whereby she beseeches and swears on the qualities of each of the imams to elevate herself from the lonely and destitute state at which she has arrived. While placed later in the maṣnavī, the inclusion of a canonical na’t (encomium for the Prophet Muhammad), also positions Imtiyāz among other male literati who understand the conventions of writing proper poetry. Similarly, the inclusion of past literary lovers reaffirms Imtiyāz’s understanding of the maṣnavī genre and exemplifies her literary sophistication. This persuasive positioning also correlates her own suffering and grief within a cultural and historical context thereby elevating her personal love story to the status of epic love stories. Most importantly, in the maṣnavī, time functions as a journey for life and gives Imtiyāz control over her own life story and how it transforms. In the final section of the maṣnavī, we see great emphasis placed on the pen and paper used to dictate this narrative. Might we conceive of the pen as a vehicle of travel through the major eras of Imtiyāz’s life? Time in the maṣnavī is not only remembered past; it is projected reception. Through subjunctive wishes and address to later readers, Imtiyāz moves from past loss to a hoped-for future of recognition and forgiveness, with the pen as her vehicle across those eras.

Imagined travel through space and place metaphors

Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī is replete with metaphors related to space and place. Beyond the customary tropes evoking locales like the tavern and the rose garden, two pre-eminent motifs emerge—the recurrent journeying towards the celestial heavens and the profound abstraction of homeland loss intertwined with a poignant solitude. In tandem, these thematic elements coalesce to unveil a narrative wherein Imtiyāz not only traverses the conventional boundaries of her domicile but transcends the corporeal realms of mobility, embracing a profound and spiritual expedition.

From the beginning, the maṣnavī reads as a deeply spiritual and personal journey through various spaces and places, beginning with the season of love in the place of the tavern. Imtiyāz implores the sāqī (cup-bearer) to take notice of this spring-like season in which she is united in youth with her beloved. She quickly transitions to a grief-stricken state at the discovery that she has lost her beloved and is alone in a strange land. She says:

Repeatedly, the loneliness Imtiyāz describes is directly related to a loss of homeland and feeling out of place. This homeland could refer to Aurangabad, where she was originally from, according to ‘Abdul Hai, located at a considerable distance from Hyderabad, where she moved to and died.Footnote ⁶⁷ The apostrophe to the cup-bearer and the self-naming as musāfir work like entrance cues. They summon an audience, set the scene, and license the speaker’s petition, much as a salon performance would frame mood before the central piece. The recurring mehfil (gathering or party) and shehr (city) imagery further simulates a venue where voice and response are expected. She uses the term musāfir (traveller) to describe herself, which at the same time can be translated as ‘stranger’. Along these lines, one can see a self-reflexivity of how she might perceive her present condition. Perhaps Imtiyāz views her own self as a stranger; she is uncomfortable or distant within herself due to the loss of her beloved and the absence of other companions. There is also a possibility that she views this as a temporary condition that might ameliorate once she is in her homeland.

The choice of the term be vaţan, or ‘without country’, is also curious because it implies a sense of permanency whereby one has been exiled or stripped of a right to country or home. Taken with Abdul Hai’s notice of her move from Aurangabad to Hyderabad, musāfir and be-vaţan carry both spiritual and material weight. The poem stages estrangement, but it also allows us to register relocation and the courtly world that relocation implies. Her displacement from Aurangabad to Hyderabad, read alongside the mehfil and shehr imagery, suggests a court-adjacent ecology in which women’s artistic labour circulated through households, salons, and shrines. Her contemporary Mah Laqa Bai ‘Chañda’ offers a useful foil, especially since her own family of courtesans moved from Aurangabad to Hyderabad.Footnote ⁶⁸ Mah Laqa’s mobility is documented in embodied performance and biography, while Imtiyāz’s mobility is performerly and textual, simulated on the page through address, petition, and praise. On this reading, be vaţan marks an inward state and a lived itinerary, since at least one notice places her end in Hyderabad after leaving Aurangabad; the poem’s courtly venues (meḩfil, shehr) let that migration read as court adjacency rather than only metaphor.

A motif of desolation and a related physiological condition continue elsewhere. Imtiyāz writes:

The first couplet marvellously incorporates the busy and boisterous imagery of a mehfil and a shehr, which are normally filled with people and things. She juxtaposes this lively imagery with terms like vīrān (desolate or deserted) and its synonym ujāṛ. There is also a desperate agitation and movement that transfers from the speaker to the listener with the repeated imperative phrase, ‘quickly come’. Despite her physical loneliness, perhaps an embodied agitation compels Imtiyāz to solicit respite from the listener. Therefore, the bustling gathering or city can metonymically stand in for the internal agitation and commotion of the heart. Alternatively, one can read these two lines from a metaphysical perspective, for in Sufism the quest for self-discovery and knowledge is often described in terms of solitude and desolation, specifically with terminology used to describe the desert. This interpretation ties nicely with the journey mentioned in the following couplet. Her physical condition is described like an illness, while the reader possesses a heart of stone. The stone of this couplet plays on the term yār-e-ghār (intimate friend or companion of the cave) of the next couplet.Footnote ⁷⁰

The motif of journeying/the journey seamlessly intertwines with the motif of loneliness, casting a spotlight on the poignant isolation and despondency born from this alliance. As previously indicated, the initial instance underscores this theme, and subsequently, she commences and concludes a lamentation of solitude, each encapsulated within the evocative framework of the journey motif. Imtiyāz writes:

This segment of the maṣnavī evokes the emotional separation or distance often depicted in Sufi poetry, where the ardent lover grapples with earthly tribulations, yearning to reunite with the divine in the celestial realm. The nuanced interplay between ‘ishq-e ḩaqīqī (love of the ultimate truth) and ‘ishq-e majāzī (earthly love) renders the beloved a dual metaphor, symbolising both Allah and Tamannā, her worldly spouse. The metaphorical journey, encapsulated by the term safar, serves as a frame for her expression of loneliness. While the exact nature of this journey remains undefined, it seems an allegory for the voyage of life. Imtiyāz’s odyssey unfolds as a quest for profound knowledge, evident in her affinity for poetry, her lament over the absence of a corrective influence, and her plea for grace amid inevitable errors. This expedition emerges as a journey of self-discovery, where she meticulously recalls the tapestry of her past to refine her future. It may also represent a pilgrimage towards divine connection, signified by her invocation of ʿAlī at the narrative’s inception and her concluding entreaty for intercession from the Fourteen Infallibles. Despite the inherent anguish embedded in this journey, Imtiyāz assumes authorship of her narrative, crafting it as a trajectory towards a more enriching destination. Once again, the pen becomes her conduit not merely for corporeal mobility but for an ethereal transcendence.

Imtiyāz employs various other space and place metaphors in the maṣnavī, but none are more important than her travels and descriptions of the sky and heavens. The first instance of this occurs early in the maṣnavī when Imtiyāz travels to the sky in search of her beloved and encounters the angels. She writes:

Imtiyāz carefully personifies the sky by giving it features like a back and eyes while anthropomorphising the stars who cry. The starlit sky is seen anew as it seems dishevelled like an unkempt mournful lover who wept all night long. The angels even participate in this scene by conversing back to the sky, as if it can tell the story of how it came to be so. In her profound desperation, she reveals a sarāpā (comprehensive head-to-toe description) of her husband and his distinctive attributes to the celestial angels in the sky. After this, she arrives at the abode of ʿAlī to beseech him for help. She states:

The charkh-e kaj-rau (adversarial sky) is made up of the charkh (sphere of the heavens), which moves in a kaj-rau (crooked) manner. One can think of this as poor luck, but the fact that she travels to the heavens to make this complaint directly to ʿAlī, makes the metaphor of the sky much more profound. She has travelled all this way to seek the assistance of the exalted ʿAlī, despite the zig-zag path she had to endure from the adversarial sky.

Later she addresses this very adversarial sky when describing the difficult start to her life. She says:

And again, later:

Once again, she anthropomorphises the sky by giving it hands through which it does evil deeds and a heart in which it should find compassion. She speaks to the sky perhaps to speak back to destiny to demand answers. In such a manner, her movement to the sky and her conversations with the sky are a form of agency and an intervention within her life.

In a final section, Imtiyāz recounts her descent into a state of profound helplessness following her husband’s demise, where each entreaty, prayer, and lament ascended skyward in fervent supplication. She describes:

Yet, at this juncture, the maṣnavī undergoes a transformative shift towards optimism. Imtiyāz narrates how, amidst an extended period of mourning with none to offer solace, she seized the khāma (pen) to compose her divan. She delineates the urgency with which she penned her verses, acknowledging the absence of a revising hand and extending a plea for leniency to potential critics. Despite this, she articulates her achievements with an undercurrent of pride, meticulously enumerating the myriad ghazals, lyric poems, and diverse poetic genres enshrined within her literary opus.

To summarise, Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī exemplifies innovation filtered through convention, intertwining established poetic forms with a deeply personal and spiritual narrative. Imtiyāz employs vivid tropes through space and place metaphors to navigate through her personal and spiritual journey. The two most significant motifs are the profound sense of loss and loneliness associated with the homeland and the repeated theme of travelling to and conversing with the sky. Together, these metaphors symbolise Imtiyāz’s transcendence beyond physical space into a spiritual realm, reflecting both continuity with existing poetic traditions and her unique intervention within them. Framed this way, loss of homeland is not only a devotional trope. It is keyed to a historical shift towards Hyderabad under the Nizam, which provides the courtly horizon against which her performerly voice petitions, praises, and seeks reception. The comparison with Mah Laqa clarifies the spectrum between embodied circulation and textual staging.

The maṣnavī unfolds as a deeply spiritual odyssey, starting with the season of love, evolving into a grief-stricken state, solitude in a foreign land, moving to the heavens, and back down to a grounded state of acceptance. During her sojourn in isolation, Imtiyāz skillfully uses the metaphor of a journey; the term musāfir conveys not only physical transience but also a sense of being a stranger or temporary in one’s own existence. A motif of desolation permeates Imtiyāz’s verses, depicting her plea for companionship and solace. The juxtaposition of vivid imagery like the busy city with the desolate heart reveal the irony of Imtiyāz’s internal condition. The anxiety caused by such loneliness is palpable to the reader, and the despair that arises from the combination of the two motifs magnify one another.

At the same time, Imtiyāz’s celestial travels and dialogue with the sky reflect agency and intervention within her own life, as she confronts a humanised destiny to demand answers. Whereas she initially seeks intervention and intercession from ʿAlī and the other chahārdah (Fourteen Infallibles), by denouement, Imtiyāz describes her transition from a state of helplessness to empowerment after her husband’s death. She picks up the pen, a symbol of agency, to compile her anthology. This positive turn highlights Imtiyāz’s resilience and pride in her accomplishments, symbolising a journey from despair to creative self-expression.

Ultimately, Imtiyāz’s maṣnavī is both an innovation and a continuation of literary tradition. Her use of space and place metaphors forms a rich tapestry that weaves together spiritual, emotional, and artistic dimensions. These metaphors contribute to her mobility and agency, enabling her to transcend physical and emotional constraints, confront adversity, and assert her voice through the transformative power of poetry.