fazā ye amn-o-amāñ kī sadā rakheñ qaa.em
suno ye farz tumhārā bhī hai hamārā bhī —Nusrat Mehdi1
To protect the peace around us forever,
Listen, this is our duty, both yours and mine.
This year, India completes 75 years of independence as a nation-state, while our perception of our nation-scape/nationhood becomes increasingly fractured and polarised. Women are in positions of power as well as agents of protest2 but where do they figure in our recollections of our past? And can that past be audible? This essay is a woman educator’s self-conscious response as she listens to a contemporary poetess and her she’r.
The Urdu word sadā can be written in two different ways although, when spoken, they sound the same;
سدا (Sadā) means ‘always’
صدا (Ṣadā) is ‘echo or call’
Moving from the first interpretation used by Mehdi to the second one, in this essay, let us listen to the echoes/calls of or by women in the past. I teach in Miranda House, a women’s college in the University of Delhi and I have spent the past few years pondering over college-going women’s archives and histories.3 Starting as a personal project and then growing into a collective, we have been documenting experiences of college-going women through their writings, photographs, and oral histories (via recordings) since 2019. A microcosm within the soundscape of the nation, Miranda House was founded in 1948.