Kishwar Naheed

Kishwar Naheed (born 18 June 1940) is a feminist Urdu poet and writer from Pakistan.

She has written several poetry books.

She has also received awards including Sitara-e-Imtiaz for her literary contribution to Urdu literature.

Kishwar Naheed was born in 1940 to a Syed family in Bulandshahr, India.

She migrated to Lahore, Pakistan after the partition in 1949 with her family.

Kishwar was a witness to the violence (including rape and abduction of women) associated with the partition of India.

The bloodshed at that time left a lasting impression on her at a tender age.

As a young girl, Kishwar was inspired by the girls who had started going to Aligarh Muslim University in those times.

The white kurta and white gharara under a black burqa that they wore looked so elegant to her and she wanted to go to college, to educate herself.

She finished Adeeb Fazil degree in Urdu and learned Persian language also.

She had become a voracious reader in her teenage years and read everything that she chanced upon — ranging from the works of Dostoyevsky to the English dictionary published by Neval Kishore Press.

She struggled and fought to receive an education, when women were not allowed to go to school.

She studied at home and received a high school diploma through correspondence courses.

After matriculation, there was a lot of family resistance to her taking admission in college but her brother, Syed Iftikhar Zaidi, paid for her tuition and helped her continue her formal education.

In Pakistan, she went on to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in 1959 and a Master's in Economics in 1961 from Punjab University, Lahore.

Kishwar married her friend and a poet Yousuf Kamran and the couple have two sons.

After her husband's death, she worked to raise her children and support the family.

Kishwar Naheed has 12 volumes of her poetry published in both Pakistan and India.

Her Urdu poetry has also been published in foreign languages all over the world.

Her famous poem 'We Sinful Women', affectionately referred to as a women's anthem among Pakistani feminists, gave its title to a groundbreaking anthology of contemporary Urdu feminist poetry, translated and edited by Rukhsana Ahmad and published in London by The Women's Press in 1991.

Kishwar Naheed has also written eight books for children and has won the prestigious UNESCO award for children's literature.

Her love for children is as much as her concern for women.

She expresses this concern in her poem, Asin Burian We Loko, which is a touching focus on the plight of women in the present male-dominated society.

Naheed has served in major positions in various national institutions.

She was Director General of Pakistan National Council of the Arts before her retirement.

She also edited a prestigious literary magazine Mahe Naw and founded an organisation Hawwa (Eve) whose goal is to help women without an independent income become financially independent through cottage industries and selling handicrafts.

Kishwar Naheed has been witness to the struggles and aspirations that Pakistan has gone through as a nation.

Her written work, spanning more than four decades, chronicles her experiences as a woman writer engaged in the creative and civic arenas, even as she has dealt with personal, social, and official backlashes.

Months after the Partition of India – a little before her family moved to Lahore from Bulandshahr – Kishwar saw something which left a lasting impression on her mind and her heart.

The pain and sadness she felt in those moments have stayed with her forever.

Some Muslim girls who belonged to Bulandshahr were kidnapped during the Partition riots.

Either they succeeded in running away from their captors or were rescued, they arrived back in Bulandshahr.

Some were known to her family and she accompanied her mother and sisters to go see them.

They looked haggard, exhausted and broken.

Surrounded by other women who were trying to console them, they were all lying down on the floor or reclining against the walls in a large room.

The feet of these women were badly bruised and soaked in blood.

That was the moment when Kishwar Naheed says she stopped being just a child and became a girl child.

She became a woman.

She still remembers those blood-soaked feet and says ''"Women and girls anywhere have their feet soaked in blood. Very little has changed over the decades. This must end".

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