Kishwar Naheed: Pakistan’s Eminent Feminist Poet

Ali Shehzad Zaidi

BORN IN in 1940, Kishwar Naheed had a transformative experience at age eight when she witnessed the return of several girls to her hometown of Bulandshahr, Pakistan.

As she beheld the bruised and bleeding girls who had been kidnapped months earlier during the partition riots, Naheed ceased to be a child and became a woman (“Interview”). Feminine solidarity came to define her life as in this excerpt from “I Feel In My Bones:”

My mother cut
like water through
rocks of grief,
drop after drop after drop.
My mother endured
like the moon
every phase of pain
unfrowning, dauntless.
My mother melted away
like a cloud leaving everything unsaid.
(“I Feel,” 30)

Forsaking this tradition of demure silence, Naheed spoke forcefully for women in Pakistan. She came of age during the late fifties, influenced by the ideals of socialism and by the Progressive Writer’s Movement that, from its inception in the mid-1930s, inspired the struggle for social justice in the Indian subcontinent.

At age 15, Naheed published her first ghazal, the traditional Urdu verse form that consists of interlocking yet self-contained rhyming couplets. The creative tension between the traditional and the contemporary gave rise to some of her best poems.

While still in college, Naheed married Yousaf Kamran, a classmate and fellow poet, under pressure from her family who were dismayed by their budding romance. By age 22, Naheed had two sons and was tasked with domestic chores and work responsibilities.

Nonetheless, her tribulations were less daunting than those of most Pakistani women, as she notes her autobiography:

“What kind of hell is this that the woman who works in ten houses every day should also have to warm the bed at night and should give over her day’s earning for the bottle that fuels the man’s lust? I was shaken when my maid servant returned to work the day after giving birth. Her story was that giving birth was no big deal.” (Bad Woman’s Story, 92)

Marriage threw her own values and those of her husband into sharp relief. As a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, Naheed is heir to an ancestral memory that heightens one’s sense of responsibility towards others. She did not adhere to the custom of forbearance typically expected of Pakistani women should their husbands enjoy carousing lifestyles.

In “The Maid,” Naheed conveys how the sheer weight of tradition habituates Pakistani women into reflexive submission. As in other poems, Naheed foregrounds the female body as a site of oppression:

Like the sunflower
I turn my head
At the command of the master.
Turning my head
Has cracked my spinal cord.
(Salt, 34)

Military Rule Nightmare

During the period of military rule under General Zia ul Haq, Naheed was placed under surveillance and her husband jailed. In 1979, the regime imposed the Hudood Ordinance, which made no distinction between rape and adultery while silencing women by excluding their testimony in those matters.

Adultery, once a personal matter between husband and wife, became a crime against the state. A year later, the regime ordered female government employees to cover their heads.

Naheed took part in the protests that the newly formed Women’s Action Forum organized in response to these developments. Despite their brave efforts, Pakistan’s regressive cultural shift would prove lasting.

Between 1979, the year that Zia had Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto hanged in secret in the middle of the night, and 1988, the year that Zia died in a plane crash, the number of women imprisoned in Pakistan rose from just 70 to 6,000 (Ashfaq).

The title of Naheed’s poem “Anticlockwise” conveys the reversal of human rights and gender equality. In 1983, the military regime banned Naheed’s Urdu translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, but not its English translation, fearing more the spread of ideas to the masses than to the educated elite of Pakistan.

As Naheed tells us, it was during those years that many women overcame their fear of takfiri mullahs:

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns
who don’t sell our lives
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

Naheed’s husband died in 1984 at age 46. That year, Naheed wrote “Bird-Mating Tree,” presented here in an unpublished translation by Daud Kamal, who was my teacher at the University of Peshawar:

Bird-mating tree —
boisterous, pagan —
planks of its timber
for your coffin
(what you wanted).

Hard as desire —
heavy as loss.
How long
will you stave off
the blind worm’s hunger?

Silence
of granite mountains —
the sea’s oblivion.
Lover, poet, husband —
talk to me.

Kamal’s English language poem “Night” also expresses this quest to communicate in the beyond and likewise appears for the first time in these pages:

On separate rafts
in a sea
of black ink
and
all the time
I thought
we were talking.

Spiritual Geography

The year 1984 also witnessed the death of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistan’s most renowned Urdu poet whom Naheed admired immensely. Faiz’s poetry, like that of Naheed, delineates Pakistan’s desolate and entropic spiritual geography as in Kamal’s hitherto unpublished translation, titled “Spiral:”

Spiral of dust
whirled away
by the wind
that made it.
The traveler returns
to his burnt-out home —
the fisherman to his plundered river.

In old age, having achieved renown, Naheed travelled widely to conferences and literary festivals, the stage in life that most approached happiness, to which she alludes in “Decline:”

Every nail of these hands
Looks like a jagged shore,
A mirror of ugliness.
This is the beginning
the picture of my better days. (Salt, 14)

Into Her Own

In 1998, when she became director general of the Pakistan National Council for the Arts, Naheed created a cooperative where women artisans were paid fair rates for their handicrafts, strengthening, in her own small way, the economic foundations of social justice, which are a precondition to emancipate women:

“In my country along with women, men are also oppressed: 87 percent of the country’s entire land is under the control of only 13 percent of the population in the shape of the feudal. The peasants of my country, the earners of all the foreign exchange, are rotting in a 400-year-old environment. And those that barter away their interests make merry in the assemblies and in air-conditioned houses. In my country woman has no identity, she is identified by her relationships with others — She is a sister, wife, mother, daughter — but is she anything on her own?” (Bad Woman’s Story, 123)

Naheed is among the few Pakistani women to have come into her own. One of her legacies is to have filled children with sense of wonder in nursery rhymes and poems that restore them, at the dawn of their literary sensibilities and social consciousness, to the primordial images of a living universe, as might be inferred from the title of her poem “Daughter of the Moon.”

The outlook for Pakistan remains grim. In its 2023 Global Gender Gap Report, the World Economic Forum ranked Pakistan dead last among 148 countries in women’s health, education, economic participation, and political initiative (“Pakistan”). However, Naheed’s courage has inspired many others to speak up for social and economic justice in Pakistan.

Works Cited

Ashfaq, Abira. “Voices from Prison.” New Politics 10.4 (Winter 2006). https://newpol.org/issue_post/voices-prison-and-call-repeal-hudood-laws-pakistan/

Naheed, Kishwar. A Bad Woman’s Story. Tr. Dudana Soomro. Karachi: Oxford UP, 2009.

Naheed, Kishwar. “Decline.” Tr. Baidar Bakht and Leslie Levigne. Salt in Wounds. Ed. Ali Kamran. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2020: 14-15.

Naheed, Kishwar. “I Feel In My Bones.” Tr. C. M. Naim and Salman Tarik Kureshi. The Distance of a Shout. Ed. Asif Farruki. Karachi: Oxford UP, 2005: 30-33.

Naheed, Kishwar. Interview with Harris Khalique. Herald. 8 March 2017.

Naheed, Kishwar. “The Maid.” Tr. Baidar Bakht and Leslie Levigne. Salt in Wounds. Ed. Ali Kamran. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2020: 34.

Naheed, Kishwar. “We Sinful Women.” Poetry International.

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-23748_WE-SINFUL-WOMEN. https://herald.dawn.com/news/1153170/an-interview-with-feminist-poet-kishwar-naheed

“Pakistan hits rock bottom in WEF’s global gender gap report out of 148 countries” Dawn (12 June 2025) https://www.dawn.com/news/1916743

March-April 2026, ATC 241