Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (review)

In Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley aptly poses questions central to the exploration of South Asian women life writers: "who writes when?" and "why?" (58–59; italics in original). These critical questions get to the heart of Lambert-Hurley's historical approach to surveying over 200 examples of South Asian women's life writing: her inquiry shifts the traditional and historical definition of the archive from a colonial library to the interior world of zenana women's spaces. Cutting along socioeconomic lines, Lambert-Hurley's exploration of the private lives and writings of South Asian Muslim women, particularly from marginalized backgrounds, offers a refreshing take on women writers who had previously been silenced in national discourses. Ever mindful of Gayatri Spivak's famous methodology of "measuring the silences," Lambert-Hurley expertly uncovers layers of women's writing previously not discussed. This is not to say that silence exists in an existential vacuum, but rather, if we were to expand our definition of the archive, we would find a rich tapestry of narratives previously ignored, missed, or denied value. Indeed, what is intriguing about this work is that Lambert-Hurley paints a vivid picture that moves the archive from the familiarly cold contours of the British Library to the lesser known warm terrain of "the home, the market, the street" (39). Borrowing from Antoinette Burton's methodology, Lambert-Hurley also views her subjects as "dwelling in the archive" (qtd. in Lambert-Hurley 39).¹ In so doing, she strives to create a feminist project that focuses on autobiographical writings belonging to South Asian Muslim women, and she succeeds in drawing attention to voices that refuse to be stigmatized for speaking out.

The impetus for writing such a narrative stems from Lambert-Hurley's desire to spotlight the power of South Asian Muslim women's writings. For her, the uncovering of such examples "offers a means of restoring agency and subjectivity—even if the historical conditions under which that agency and subjectivity were constituted need to be identified, understood, and problematized" (2). In her first chapter, Lambert-Hurley surveys the definition and production of autobiographical material by South Asian women, spanning from the Mughal Period to the contemporary era, to disprove the colonial notion that autobiography is the "exclusive creation of the modern West" (Malhotra and Lambert-Hurley qtd. in Lambert-Hurley 13). Rather cleverly, Lambert-Hurley autobiographically introduces her own meditations on South Asian women's autobiographies while detailing her methodology in determining what constitutes the personal writings of South Asian Muslim women (31). At the outset, the author wants to pursue "personal narratives," but ultimately settles on "autobiographical writing" to show the "instability of genre while still evoking . . . a focus on the written life" (55). In doing so, she sets out to disrupt the Western canon of autobiographical writing by presenting South Asian Muslim women writers in a "new, globalized history of the field" (55). Throughout this process, she delivers an important point with her applied methodology: autobiographical writing was not limited to white, European men, particularly when looking beyond traditional definitions of both life writing and the archive.

The archive, therefore, becomes a liminal space between public and private, which Lambert-Hurley points out has been demarcated by gender in India. The author employs Burton's expanded definition of the archive as a methodology to show how South Asian Muslim women have been writing long before and more prolifically than previously considered. Thus, she upends the notion that autobiographies are "essentially European" (14). Her reference to Islamic life writing, or sira, as evidenced in the early compilations recording the life of the Prophet Muhammad during the seventh century, is useful here. This historical example, she argues, establishes a mode of narration that predates European notions of autobiography, since siras recorded the "exemplary life, whether of one of the Prophet's Companions...