Urdu literature has been renowned for its lyrical beauty, philosophical depth, and emotional appeal. And, behind this rich tradition, however, is another group of women writers whose voices were sometimes sidelined, toned down, or even denied. The works of these women were written not through the luxury of literary privilege, but through the limitations of oppressive social worlds that raised doubts about their right to speak in the first place. Bringing their voices back is not a charity or even nostalgia; it is a literary justice.
Male critics, male editors and male expectations dominated the Urdu literary canon in much of the literary history. Female writers usually received no more than flattery on the condition that their work adhered to the standards of modesty, domesticity or romantic restraint. They were controversial, immoral or even too western when they wrote about desire, anger, autonomy or injustice. This meant that a large number of women writers either lost their place in the canon of modern literature or became footnotes to their male counterparts.
One of the most vivid examples of such tension is Ismat Chughtai. She was bold, unapologetic, and largely blunt in her writing on female sexuality, hypocrisy amongst classes, and emotional repression when it was a taboo subject. It was the outrage and legal proceedings that followed her renowned short story Lihaaf, not due to its ineffective literary qualities, but due to the fact that she gave no apology for focusing on the inner world of women. Chughtai’s work reminds us that discomfort is often the initial reaction to the truth.
Equally, Qurratulain Hyder was a monumental writer of novels who transformed Urdu fiction. The way her stories slid through time, space and even political revolution came easily, but over the years her talent was still interpreted as an exception, an anomaly as opposed to evidence that women had gained a rightful place in the heart of intellectual life. Her writing breaks down the artificial separation between women’s writing and serious literature, revealing that the difference is a highly gendered category.
There are tens of other less-known names: Hijab Imtiaz Ali, who made romanticism meet with feminist awareness; Fehmida Razi, whose poems openly refuted patriarchy and authoritarianism; and Kishwar Naheed, who turned poetry into protest. Most of these authors were censored, exiled or even socially oppressed, but they still managed to write with a tremendous degree of courage. They were marginalised not because they were untalented but because they did not receive institutional support and the willingness of the culture to listen.
The process of rediscovering forgotten women writers of Urdu does not necessarily mean including them in the curriculum or rereading lost works. It needs to refine the definition of literary value, who defines it, and whose experience is entitled to be preserved. This writing was written out of the silences imposed upon them: the silences of home, of body, and of history, and so they did; they opened up the emotional and political vocabulary of Urdu itself.
It takes only a modern reader to hear voices that were never really silent but rather simply left undisturbed. And when heard, they do not go away so easily. They challenge us to face uncomfortable reality, challenge inherited narratives, and realise that Urdu literature in its totality would never have existed without them.