This talk traces an understudied genealogy of Karbala — that of the women who fashioned, promoted and preserved the traditions of mourning associated with the story and its retelling as it spread from Arabia to South Asia. From the chorus of cries that shook Yazid’s prison when the women of his household joined the Prophet’s captive family in their grief, to the audience wails that underscore modern-day public performances of the Karbala story in India, collective acts of embodied mourning for the martyrs have evolved into a powerful institution of cultural reproduction, aesthetic innovation and communal expansion.
This institution, as Syed Akbar Hyder will demonstrate, is rooted not only in the cultural contributions of women but also a memory of interfaith devotion that empowered mourners to imagine themselves as part of a larger righteous community that was not necessarily constrained by literalist allegiances to scripture or any national identity. By highlighting women’s observances of Muharram in the public and private spheres, as well as their critical influence on the commemoration of Karbala in art forms such as classical Indian music and lyrical poetry, Hyder will illuminate how this institution of mourning blossomed in defiance of sectarian, colonial and nationalist agendas and endures to this day.
Syed Akbar Hyder is the Director of the South Asia Institute and a Fellow on the Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Chair. His research centers on aesthetics, comparative literary traditions, religious reform, mysticism, and gender. He particularly draws from the intersectional archives of Urdu and Persian worlds.
His scholarly work includes Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and a monograph set to be published this year, Qurratulain Hyder on the Move (Leiden: Brill, 2024). This monograph looks at the little-known reportage of the legendary Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder, mapping the creative archives of memory, movement, and polyvocality that allowed her storytelling to transcend boundaries of genre, gender, religion, language, and nation-state. Hyder’s next monograph is Lives of Passion and Paradox, which centers on the life and legacy of Josh Malihabadi, often hailed in South Asia as the “poet of revolution and youth,” and which also takes into account the lives and works of Malihabadi’s contemporaries Yaganah Changezi, Abulkalam Azad, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sadat Hasan Manto, and Firaq Gorakhpuri. A significant part of this study is dedicated to debates about what constitutes beauty in the overlapping autobiographical and lyrical traditions of Persian and Urdu.
Hyder received his bachelor's degree in Political Science from Texas A&M University and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin for the past quarter century; before that, he taught at Harvard. He has received awards for teaching at both institutions, most notably in 2023, when he received the Outstanding Graduate Teacher award.
His primary appointment is in the Department of Asian Studies, and he is affiliated with the university’s program in Comparative Literature and with the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Religious Studies. The classes he teaches include Shia Islam: History and Resistance, Sufism and Mystical Traditions of Islam, Literary Theory from the Global South, Gender and Sexuality in Urdu and Hindi, Partition in Literature and Film, Literary Rivalries, Urdu Marsiyah, Aesthetics of Ghalib and Mir, and Philosophy and Poetry of Iqbal.
Hyder has cowritten two books of Urdu-Hindi pedagogy: Ā’īye Urdu Paṛheñ: An Introductory Urdu Textbook with Harvard University’s Ali Asani (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) and Urdūnāmah: An Intermediate and Advanced Reader with Columbia University’s Timsal Masud (Delhi: Arshiya, 2020).