This is a guest post by Amina Yaqin, author of Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing

The award-winning British Pakistani film, Rahm ([Mercy] (2016), an Urdu adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, reflects misogyny in Pakistani society translating a dark tale of power, sex and injustice. Sin and virtue are played out between those who hold political power in society and citizens who are caught between making moral choices and a search for justice. The mood of the film relies on the devotional form of the musical qawwali infusing it with a Sufi aesthetic. Shot in Lahore, it explores how women become pawns in political power games. The script was written by Mahmood Jamal, a writer who made a niche for himself with his pioneering multicultural productions on the British screen. An accomplished writer and poet, he inflected his love of Urdu into his Anglophone writings, including poetry in translation. Jamal was the nephew of Fatima Sughra Haya of Lucknow’s Firangi Mahal who wrote poetry in the 1930s. However, as a woman from a respectable family that upheld the inner sanctity of the zenana, her publication in the public sphere drew censure from the family and thereafter she wrote as Haya.[i] Some of Haya’s poetry is introspective focusing on family and devotion to the Prophet while other poems reflect her views on contemporary themes. It has been noted that she was unable to reach a wider community initially due to familial constraints and latterly because of her deteriorating mental health.[ii] Gender inequalities in Urdu publishing date back to nineteenth-century India when Urdu literary culture was at the heart of moral and social improvement of Muslim women’s lives. The zenana was identified by the colonial state as a problem in need of enlightenment while Victorian feminists and Western women saw it as a space that highlighted civilisational differences confirming the necessity of the imperial mission. Another reason the zenana came under scrutiny was because it was seen as a place of protest and revolutionary activity that threatened the colonial state (Burton 2003:25).[iii] In my book, Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing, I explore the tensions between the secular and the religious in gendered writings from reform to resistance, decolonisation to independence and post Partition Pakistan. The book offers an insight into the lesser known story of Progressive women poets and the legacy of twentieth century feminism in Urdu literary culture. I suggest that the heritage of Progressivism can be found in the voices of women poets from Ada Jafarey in the 1940s onwards to Zehra Nigah, Fahmida Riaz, Kishwar Naheed, Sara Shagufta and regional writers such as the Punjabi poet Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, and the Sindhi poet Amar Sindhu charting the journey from Partition to post-independence Pakistan.[iv] These poets express transnational and global feminist aspirations with a view to transforming narratives of women’s subservience in the national project. [v] Their work is intertwined with the activism and aesthetics of the women’s movement in Pakistan.[vi] Feminism is a contested term in Pakistan and often represented in the media as a liberal undertaking by elite women. My book explores both written and lived realities of women poets in an attempt to unravel this myth.

One of the early pioneers, Ada Jafarey, came from a conventional family in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, India. In her memoir, titled Jo rahi so bekhabri rahi [An Innocence that Remained], she speaks of a constricted culture for girls’ education in which she grew up and the exceptional experience of home-schooling that she and her sisters received thanks to her mother’s progressive attitude. Jafarey’s inspiration was ‘silenced lips that dared to write in verse’ such as Haya Lakhnavi, Safiya Shamim Malihabadi and Najma Tassaduque Hussain.[vii] Supported by her mother, she completed her first manuscript, ‘Main saz dhundhti rahi’ [I Kept Looking for Harmony], in 1947. It was published in 1950 after she got married. Her second collection was published seventeen years later as she navigated motherhood, family life and travel. The India–Pakistan war of 1965 was a turning point in bringing her back to writing. In an interview, she shared how important it was for her to be published as it connected her to readers who would send her letters. For her, this was validation that along with her mother’s belief gave her the motivation to continue writing given her family didn’t think much of her verse. She says she can’t be considered a poet of rebellion because she had her mother’s consent to publish.[viii]

If there is a philosophy that we can attach to her verse, it is that of insaniyat, humanism, something she is proud of having passed on to her children. This is reflected in the moral duty of sadaqat honesty, jasarat ambition and ibadat prayer in her poem Shajr-e nazan dedicated to her son Aamir:

Mere bache!

Mujhe jab dekhna jab sochna chaho

To bas apni taraf dekho

Tumhare lab pe jo harf-e sadaqat hai

Yehi main hun

Tumhare dil men jo naz-e jasarat hai

Yehi main hun

Nigahon men jo tarz-e ibadat hai

Yehi main hun

My child!

Whenever you think of me and you want to see me

Then just look at yourself

The honesty on your lips

That’s me

The ambition in your heart

That’s me

The prayer in your eyes

That’s me

Actions and emotions define her poetry. She uses language sparingly to create a mood of devotion reflecting her moral values through her son. Her affinity to the lyric form captures the essence of her pursuit of divine love and the pain of separation in the wilderness of love. Recently, her autobiography has been translated into English by her son Aamir and his daughter Asra Jafarey titled A World of Her Own: Ada Jafarey. The cover of the book in pastel shades of sky blue, soft pinks and light and dark greens captures the nature/nurture mood of the poet complementing the careful translation.

In stark contrast to Jafarey’s quiet feminism was the rebellious writing of Kishwar Naheed who wrote the iconic poem ‘Hum gunahgar auraten’ [We Sinful Women] in 1983. Written during General Zia’s martial law, it articulated the protest of women’s marches. It was translated into English by the writer Rukhsana Ahmad (1994) and published by The Women’s Press as part of an anthology. Naheed refers to ‘Hum Gunahgar auraten’ as her alternative national anthem for Pakistan. The poem has been put to music by the Norwich-based British Pakistani musician and artist Samia Malik in 1990.[ix] In the United States, it has been choreographed by Janaki Patrik of the contemporary Indian dance collective The Kathak Ensemble and Friends as a contemporary interpretation of modern ‘messy reality’ deploying Indo-Pakistani influences.[x] In Pakistan, the poem has become part of activist-led International Women’s Day celebrations, translated into dance by Indu Mitha and performed by Amna Mawaz Khan.[xi] In 2025, We Sinful Women was curated as a library art exhibition in London by Salima Hashmi and Manmeet K. Walia showcasing private works from Taimur Hasan’s private collection. These global and local contexts connect Pakistani and South Asian diaspora audiences bringing them together over the shared project of social justice for women. The poem itself underwrites Naheed’s commitment to resistance and the project of women’s empowerment as an urgent response to the legal and religio-cultural backlash against women’s rights in 1980s Pakistan. With its mocking refrain of ‘we sinful women’, the poem challenged the military state’s adoption of Shariah laws that policed sexuality to protect the spiritual purity of the nation. The poem’s imagery of protesting women raising the banner of truth is a tribute to the women’s movement in Pakistan and indicative of Naheed’s grass roots activism and membership of the Women’s Action Forum. The poem encapsulates her secular agenda of forcefully rewriting sinful women, who are deemed as such by religious discourse but are in actuality speaking, thinking and self-aware women: