Kishwar Naheed (b. 1940): The Fearless Voice of Urdu Feminist Poetry

Voices of Urdu Literature

Kishwar Naheed

Aapa — the “bad woman” who taught a generation of women to speak

Born 1940 · Bulandshahr · Lahore

In a line of Urdu poetry that has survived translation into languages across the world, Kishwar Naheed once wrote of women who would not be awed by the grandeur of men in robes and titles, who would not sell their souls, bow their heads, or fold their hands in submission. “We sinful women,” she called them — and the poem’s title has since become something between a rallying cry and a badge of honour for generations of Pakistani and South Asian feminists. Few single poems have travelled so far, or been claimed by so many women who never met the poet who wrote them.

Naheed has spent more than six decades writing, editing, organising, and refusing to be quiet, becoming one of the most significant feminist voices in the history of Urdu literature. Widely known simply as “Aapa” — elder sister — to the generations of writers who followed her, she remains, well into her eighties, an active and outspoken presence in Pakistani letters.

Kishwar Naheed at a glance

Born	1940, Bulandshahr, United Provinces, British India (exact date disputed across sources)
Migration	To Lahore, Pakistan, in 1949, following Partition
Education	BA (1958) and MA in Economics (1960), Punjab University, Lahore
Public roles	Director General, Pakistan National Council of the Arts; editor, Mahe Naw magazine
Landmark poem	“Hum Gunahgar Aurtein” (“We Sinful Women”)
Major works	Lab-e-Goya (1968, Adamjee Prize); Buri Aurat Ki Katha (memoir, 1995); Taar Taar Pairahan
Organisation founded	Hawwa (Eve) — economic empowerment for women
Honours	Sitara-e-Imtiaz; UNESCO Award for children’s literature

Who Is Kishwar Naheed?

Kishwar Naheed is a Pakistani Urdu poet, essayist, and translator, widely regarded as one of the pioneering feminist voices of South Asian literature. Writing in a field long dominated by traditional male voices, she carved out a distinctively feminine poetic register — innovative, defiant, and unapologetically self-aware — across more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose published over four decades and beyond. Beyond her own writing, she has translated Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex into Urdu, edited a major literary magazine, and built institutions aimed at helping other women achieve economic independence.

She has, at various points, expressed some ambivalence about being labelled simply a “feminist poet,” a complexity scholars have noted reflects her nuanced relationship to a term that carries different histories in Pakistan than it does in the West. What is not in dispute is the scale of her influence: she is widely credited as a forerunner whose courage opened the door for later Urdu feminist poets, including Fahmida Riaz.

Blood on the Feet: A Childhood Marked by Partition

Naheed was born in 1940 into a Syed family in Bulandshahr, in what was then the United Provinces of British India. She was still a young girl — around eight years old — when Partition tore through the subcontinent in 1947, and an experience from those months left a permanent mark on her life and her poetry. Muslim girls from her own hometown, kidnapped during the Partition riots, eventually made their way back to Bulandshahr after escaping or being rescued from their captors. Naheed accompanied her mother and sisters to see them.

The girls lay haggard and exhausted on the floor, their feet badly bruised and soaked in blood. It was in that room, Naheed has said, that she stopped being simply a child and became a girl child — aware, for the first time, of what the world could do to a woman’s body.

She has returned to that image throughout her life: “Women and girls anywhere have their feet soaked in blood,” she has said. “Very little has changed over the decades. This must end.” Her family migrated to Lahore, Pakistan, in 1949, where she would build the rest of her life and career.

A Fight for an Education

Naheed’s family, like many of its background and era, was deeply resistant to the idea of higher education for girls, and literary activity was regarded within the household as something close to taboo. She fought on both fronts. Denied conventional schooling for a period, she studied at home and obtained her high school certificate through correspondence courses — but it was the financial support and encouragement of her brother, Syed Iftikhar Zaidi, that allowed her to continue into formal higher education, where she went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree in 1958 and a Master’s in Economics from Punjab University, Lahore, in 1960.

Her interest in poetry had taken root even earlier, nurtured by attending mushairas with her mother as a young girl, and she began writing Urdu poetry herself as a student — a practice she never abandoned. In 1960, she married her friend and fellow poet Yousuf Kamran; the couple raised two sons together, and Naheed continued working and writing throughout, later supporting her family alone after her husband’s death in 1984.

Suggested image: a torn or mended piece of fabric, evoking the imagery of Taar Taar Pairahan (“Tattered Garment”), or a woman’s silhouette walking forward — public-domain/royalty-free images available on Wikimedia CommonsAdd a symbolic image here, with alt text: “Kishwar Naheed — pioneering feminist voice of Urdu poetry”.

Coming of Age Amid Revolution

Naheed came into her own as a poet during the tumultuous late 1950s and 1960s, shaped by the ideals of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and international socialism, and coming of age against a backdrop of martial law in Pakistan and sweeping political change across the world. She and her literary friends threw themselves into the causes of the era with real enthusiasm — one day marching in support of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Egypt’s claim over the Suez Canal, the next organising rallies for Vietnam, Palestine, or Latin America.

Her first poetry collection, Lab-e-Goya (“The Speaking Lip,” 1968), a work of traditional ghazals, won the prestigious Adamjee Prize for Literature and announced her as a serious new voice in Urdu poetry. She went on to move fluidly between the nazm, translations of foreign poetry, and free verse, eventually finding a particular gift for the prose poem — a form she came to compose, in the words of one critic, “with unusual felicity.”

We Sinful Women: An Anthem Is Born

No single work has defined Naheed’s public reputation more than “Hum Gunahgar Aurtein” (“We Sinful Women”), a poem that names and refuses the labels a patriarchal society uses to control women — obedience, submission, silence — replacing them instead with defiant self-possession.

यह हम गुनहगार औरतें हैं
जो अहल-ए-जुब्बा की तमकनत से न रौब खाएं, न जान बेचें, न सर झुकाएं, न हाथ जोड़ें

“We are these sinful women, who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear the robes of piety, who will not sell their souls, will not bow their heads, will not fold their hands in submission.”

Kishwar Naheed, from “We Sinful Women”

The poem lent its title to a landmark 1991 anthology of contemporary Urdu feminist poetry, translated and edited by Rukhsana Ahmad and published in London — introducing Naheed’s voice, and the wider movement of Urdu feminist writing she represented, to an international readership. Within Pakistan itself, the poem has become something close to a women’s anthem, recited and invoked at protests and gatherings for more than three decades.

Writing Against the Zia Years

Naheed’s activism sharpened considerably during the repressive military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose Islamisation policies fell with particular severity on Pakistani women. Her poetry from this period, and her later reflections on it, describe with unflinching honesty how legal and religious mechanisms — including accusations of Zina, a charge related to adultery or fornication — were routinely weaponised by husbands, brothers, and fathers to control, imprison, or disinherit women. Her memoir recounts these mechanisms in plain, angry, documentary detail, refusing to soften what she witnessed and experienced during those years.

She has spoken candidly, too, about the burden this era placed on writers and artists more broadly: creative people, she has argued, do not live in isolation, and it is entirely natural for them to react to and comment on the political and social circumstances surrounding them — a rebuttal to any suggestion that poets should confine themselves to safely apolitical subjects.

Buri Aurat Ki Katha: The Story of a “Bad Woman”

Naheed’s 1995 autobiography, Buri Aurat Ki Katha (“A Bad Woman’s Story”), remains one of her most significant and revealing works — the first of her publications that was neither poetry, translation, nor essay compilation. Its title deliberately reclaims a label routinely used against women who defy expectation: a woman who wants to work outside the home, who wants to write, who wants to choose her own path, is, in the eyes of a conservative society, simply a “bad woman.” Naheed wears the label as testimony rather than shame.

The book was translated into English by Durdana Soomro and published by Oxford University Press in 2009, giving international readers direct access to a narrative that scholars have since studied as a foundational document of South Asian feminist life-writing — notable, among other things, for its raw honesty about her own mistakes and struggles, refusing the sanitised, “demure” tone that had characterised earlier women’s memoirs in Urdu.

Building Institutions, Not Just Poems

Naheed’s contribution to Pakistani cultural life extended well beyond her own writing desk. She served as Director General of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts before her retirement, edited the respected literary magazine Mahe Naw, and founded an organisation called Hawwa (Eve), dedicated to helping women without independent income achieve financial self-sufficiency through cottage industries and the sale of handicrafts — a practical, on-the-ground complement to the arguments her poetry made on the page.

She has also written eight books for children, winning a UNESCO award for children’s literature, and has played an active role in promoting cross-border peace efforts, including the Pakistan India People’s Forum and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Writers Forum — work that has taken her advocacy for justice and equality well beyond Pakistan’s own borders.

A Voice That Has Only Grown Louder

Commentators tracking Naheed’s work across the decades have observed that her voice has grown, if anything, “louder, more insistent and somehow more intimate” with age rather than softer. Well into her eighties, she has continued to publish new collections — including Taar Taar Pairahan (“Tattered Garment”), launched to critical acclaim in 2023 — and to write a regular weekly column in the newspaper Daily Jang, engaging directly with contemporary events rather than retreating into reflection on the past.

Critics have noted that her individual poems function almost as fragments of one single, ongoing composition — a lifelong poem, in effect, titled simply “life,” in which poetry and lived experience have never been separable. Her sharp critiques of religious extremism, and her continued attention to the suffering of women and girls under radicalisation, have made waves both within Pakistan and internationally, ensuring that a poet who began writing in the 1950s remains urgently relevant to readers in 2026.

Legacy: The Elder Sister of a Movement

Kishwar Naheed’s honorific “Aapa” is telling: it marks her not merely as an admired poet but as something closer to a matriarch of an entire literary and political tradition — the patron figure of the modern Urdu feminist movement across South Asia. Her willingness to be Urdu poetry’s first openly “sinful woman” gave later writers like Fahmida Riaz and Sara Shagufta room to follow, widening a path that had previously been almost entirely closed.

Her poetry is now read and translated from Delhi to Buenos Aires, and she is regularly discussed alongside international counterparts such as Simone de Beauvoir, whose landmark work she herself brought into Urdu. More than seventy years after she watched a room of bloodied, rescued girls lying on a floor in Bulandshahr, Kishwar Naheed remains exactly what that moment made her: a woman who refuses to look away, and who has spent a lifetime making sure that readers cannot look away either.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Kishwar Naheed’s poem “We Sinful Women” so significant?

The poem defiantly reclaims the label used against women who defy patriarchal expectations, and has become a widely recited feminist anthem in Pakistan. It also gave its title to a landmark 1991 anthology that introduced Urdu feminist poetry to international readers. What is Kishwar Naheed’s autobiography about?

Buri Aurat Ki Katha (“A Bad Woman’s Story,” 1995) is her candid autobiography, reclaiming the label “bad woman” used against women who defy societal expectations, and documenting her personal struggles for education, independence, and creative freedom. What organisations has Kishwar Naheed built or led?

She served as Director General of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, edited the literary magazine Mahe Naw, and founded Hawwa (Eve), an organisation helping women achieve financial independence through cottage industries. Why is Kishwar Naheed called “Aapa”?

“Aapa,” meaning elder sister, is an honorific used across South Asia’s Urdu-speaking community. It reflects her status as a foundational, respected figure for both women writers and the broader feminist movement in Pakistan. Is Kishwar Naheed still writing?

Yes. Well into her eighties, she continues to publish new poetry collections, including Taar Taar Pairahan (2023), and writes a regular weekly column in the newspaper Daily Jang.

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