Urban Emotions Behind the Veil: An Early-Twentieth Century Muslim Wedding in Shahjahanabad

Abstract

While scholarship on pardah nashīn or veiled women in South Asia has emphasized the links between women's ritual and urban landscape, what has received less attention is the ways that domestic spaces, affective work performed in those spaces, and material culture of the home were instrumental in mapping the South Asian city during the late colonial period. Aesthetic decisions, gift-giving, and performative critiques of the public rituals of marriage acted as loci for the self-fashioning of both the colonial-era city and women's modern selves. Through close reading of an account of the customs of Delhi by a pardah nashīn woman S. Begum Dehlavi, this article shows that veiled women mapped the city through their consumption and exchange of goods, as well as through the construction and affirmation of a complex web of families in the city.