I first visited Hyderabad Deccan with my father just before I turned 13. I had a first cousin there whose children were about my age; I’d also heard about the city from several relatives in Karachi.
The city, with its palaces, museums, and nearby monuments and ruins, lived up to every expectation I’d had. I’d not yet visited Lahore or Delhi; Hyderabad was my third experience of a South Asian city — the first was Gwalior, from where I’d travelled, and the second Agra — with a historical legacy that predated colonial impositions. Hyderabad was a metropolis of the sort I was used to, but modernity and tradition coexisted there. I returned about 21 months later; at nearly 15, I was familiar with its particular dialect, food, and many other pleasures.
A year or so later — now relocated to London — I read Aziz Ahmed’s Neither the Shore Nor the Wave, a translation of his novel Aisi Bulandi, Aisi Pasti, set in Hyderabad. It was so vividly depicted that I felt I was revisiting the city. My cousin, who’d lived in Hyderabad since she was 18, was able to unlock the secrets of the novel — in fact, one of its characters lived in London and was a regular visitor to my parents’ home.
Over the years, writings from Hyderabad came my way. I studied the poems of Quli Qutb Shah, one of which I heard in Malika Pukhraj’s inimitable rendition. Closer to my own era, the delicate verses of the radical poet Makhdoom Mohiuddin. Later, I read the novels of Tyaba Bilgrami and Sughra Humayun Mirza.
This weekend, I read an essay about Makhdoom by his younger contemporary, the Hyderabadi writer Zeenath Sajida, in The Deccan Sun. A volume of her stories and essays was exquisitely translated from Urdu by Nazia Akhtar, who holds that Zeenath — who published her first book of short stories, Jaltarang, at the age of 23 — actually excelled in the essayistic form.
As a lover and amateur scholar of the Urdu short story, I began by reading Zeenath’s fiction, a form it seems she soon abandoned in favour of the non-fictional ‘inshaiyay’ [essays] and ‘khakay’[sketches] that Akhtar praises. The early stories were beautifully written and often touching, if not particularly original. Of the two later stories that Akhtar includes, ‘What Time Is It?’ is exceptional: it observes, from a distance, the habits of a seemingly isolated ageing couple. The husband probably suffers from dementia, as he keeps asking his wife what the time is; she patiently responds. It also gives us a sense of the city which they ignore and is oblivious of them: children playing, street vendors, traffic.
Her other stories — written in standard Urdu, with no Dakhani accent — don’t immerse themselves in a specific Hyderabadi milieu. For the general reader, the setting could be anywhere in the Urdu-speaking cities of the Subcontinent.
Keen to read Zeenath in Urdu, I found a novella, Arshi. Published in 1947, it expands on the themes of some of her short fictions. Two young friends are emotionally and physically separated by the fact that they’ve been fed at the same breast — not a subject that I’ve seen in any other Urdu story. Among other stories I read in the original, ‘Bibi’ — which Zeenath describes as a favourite — is about a woman suffering through a difficult pregnancy.
Zeenath’s prose style is pure and lucid; Akhtar is to be praised for her ability to convey, in English, the lush symbolism the author deploys. Moths, which I read in both languages, is my favourite among her fictions: the allusive richness of its language innovatively reworks the trope of lovers separated by WW2, and the subsequent arranged marriage of the female protagonist, by transforming the cliched imagery of moths and flames into something fresh and new.
An interesting feature of Akhtar’s introduction is her contention that Zeenath’s chosen forms of ‘inshaiya’ and ‘khaka’ are not influenced by Western norms, unlike the Urdu short story. And it is in these genres that we can see Zeenath’s Hyderabad.
She writes about the minutiae of daily life: raising chickens, the passing seasons, the travails of wives whose husbands pay no attention to their needs, the vicissitudes of life for working women. Her satirical vein is at its best in a piece where she speaks of a woman who decides to sell ephemera, pretending she’s dealing in regal antiquities. At the end, she designates the superannuated personalities of those who peddle culture to the West to museums; they are the real relics.
Perhaps because of my lack of familiarity with the genre, I’m puzzled about the motivation behind the portrait of Makhdoom. The title in English is ‘I Scratch Your Back’; in Urdu, ‘Man Tora Haji Beguyam.’ English fails Urdu in this instance: not a charge I would otherwise lay at Akhtar’s door. However, I fail to understand why this rather snide sketch of a much-admired poet as a manipulative, exhibitionistic opportunist has been used as an introduction to a volume of Makhdoom’s poetry.
I was unable to find essays by Zeenath on Rekhta or any other website. But these translations highlight Zeenath’s construction of a first person narrative persona. While the narrators of her fictions are often male, we are led to assume that the narrator of her essays is Zeenath herself. But is that so? Akhtar and other admirers tell us that, as an academic, mentor, wife and mother, Zeenath had a fulfilling life. Perhaps, in her prose pieces, she crafted a narrative ‘I’ that reached beyond her own circumstances, to chronicle the dilemmas of women around her.
Much is said about autofiction — to simplify the label, novels and stories we read as slightly altered versions of the author’s own life. Zeenath, who began her career as a writer of fiction, adapts her fictional technique to an essayistic persona. Instead of exulting in her own achievements, she creates a rather disgruntled persona who moans about her circumstances, reaching out to women in parallel situations.
Akhtar deserves accolades for bringing her back to our attention.
The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist
Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 30th, 2025
