Shameless Women

Abstract

Maulana Naqshbandi, one of Pakistan's religious leaders, accounted for Pakistan's defeat by India at the World Cup Cricket quarter-finals in March 1996 by saying Any nation which made a woman its ruler has never prospered (cited in The Times of Pakistan, 11 March 1996, 27). This comment encodes the dominant attitude towards women in a rigorously Islamic society, and is germane to the central argument of this essay, which situates gender oppression and devices of female resistance in a specific temporal and spatial context. Taking the case of a literary text, We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry (1991) I will explore the ways in which cultural production becomes a tool of resistance in a climate of social repression. In this anthology a group of women poets from Pakistan, who refuse to conform to both sociocultural and literary traditions, react to oppression by calling attention to the way in which female experiences are policed and controlled by the state. I aim to demonstrate that though poetry is often regarded as a private, emotional genre it can, and does, become an enabling vehicle during political and social upheaval. One of the problems of critically examining Urdu women's poetry is the dearth of scholarship on the subject. Although this anthology was published over ten years ago, there has been little material in English to aid in developing a critical perspective on We Sinful Women. Thus I have had to rely on secondary sources that are