Khadija Mastoorਖਦੀਜਾ ਮਸਤੂਰ

Early life

Khadija Mastoor was born on 11 December 1927 in Bareilly, in the United Provinces of British India. Her father, Tahawwur Ahmad Khan, was a doctor in government service, and his frequent transfers meant the family moved often, which broke up her schooling. Her mother, Anwar Jahan Begum, was an educated woman who wrote articles for women's magazines, so the house she grew up in was a literary one.

She was one of seven siblings, and writing ran through the family. Her younger sister Hajra Masroor became a noted writer, and her step-brother Khalid Ahmad became a well known poet. The two sisters began writing stories as children, and their work appeared in children's magazines of the time. In 1944, when Khadija was sixteen, stories by both sisters were published together in the same issue of the literary magazine Saqi.

Her father died while the sisters were still young, and the household fell into hardship. Her mother married again, to Mohammad Mustafa Khan, with whom she had a son, Khalid Ahmad. Khadija spent some time in Bombay, and after the creation of Pakistan in 1947 she moved to Lahore, arriving in what Rekhta describes as a state of extreme helplessness. The poet and editor Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi gave the family help and encouragement, and in 1950 she married his nephew, the journalist Zaheer Babar Awan. They had two children, Kiran Fayyaz and Pervez Alam Awan, and the marriage lasted for the rest of her life.

First stories

Khadija began writing short stories in 1942, at fifteen, and she kept writing until her death forty years later. Her early stories were published in the leading Urdu literary magazines of the day, Saqi, Adabi Duniya and Aam-Gir, and they gave her a distinct identity of her own. She wrote about middle class life, and her themes were social and moral as well as political, drawn from experience and observation rather than from any literary movement.

Five collections of her short stories were published in her lifetime: Khel in 1944, Bochaar in 1946, Chand Roz Aur in 1951, Thake Haare in 1962, and Thanda Mitha Pani in 1981, which won the Hijra Award. Rekhta notes that she had no formal training and no model before her, only an instinct for presenting an aspect of life in an artistic way, in frank and everyday language.

Aangan (1962)

Her first novel, Aangan, was published in 1962 by Kitab Numa, and it became her defining work. The title means courtyard, and the novel stays close to the courtyards and houses of its women while the great events of the age press in from outside. It is set in British India and Pakistan in the 1930s and 1940s, following a girl, Aliya, from childhood into young womanhood as the freedom struggle, the Second World War and Partition reshape her world.

The novel won the Adamjee Literary Award for Urdu prose in 1963. It has been translated into thirteen languages. Neelam Hussain translated it into English as The Inner Courtyard in 2001, and Daisy Rockwell's translation, The Women's Courtyard, appeared in 2018 and was recognised as a Penguin classic. The critic Nazir Siddiqi wrote that with her first novel she had possibly surpassed all the male and female novelists of Urdu, with the exception of Qurratulain Hyder, and that in her perfection of art she came close to Jane Austen.

A Pakistani television series based on the novel, starring Sajal Aly, Mawra Hocane, Ahad Raza Mir and Ahsan Khan, aired on Hum TV from 2018 to 2019. The renewed interest made Aangan the bestselling book in Pakistan in 2019, fifty seven years after it was first published. A version was also made in India by DD Urdu.

Why does Aangan still matter?

Aangan endures because it tells the story of Partition and independence from inside the home, through women who live with the consequences of decisions made by men in public life. Aliya's father is jailed for striking a British officer, her uncle backs the Congress while his son Jameel backs the Muslim League, and the family finally leaves for Pakistan almost overnight, yet the novel never leaves the courtyard for long. Reviewers of the English translation have called it a feminist classic, one that questions love, marriage and the need for happy endings, and it is now taught in the syllabus of the Allama Iqbal Open University and in Pakistan's Central Superior Services examinations.

The critic Uslub Ahmad Ansari counts Aangan among the fifteen best novels in Urdu, and Shamsur Rahman Farooqi has said that it deserves more attention than it has received.

Later life and Zameen

Khadija kept writing through the 1960s and 1970s, publishing stories and her second novel, Zameen, which appeared in 1983, after her death. She wrote for forty years without joining any literary movement, and her characters, as Rekhta puts it, appear with their own intellectual complexities, psychological tensions and passions, not as ideals. She died of a heart attack in London in July 1982, aged fifty four, and was buried in Lahore.

Legacy

In 2005, an event at the Karachi Arts Council remembered Khadija and her sister Hajra together, with Hajra as chief guest and the scholar Sahar Ansari presiding. He noted that Khadija wrote from her own personal experience, and that the two sisters had developed quite different styles. Aangan remains her best known work, a novel that is read as both a story of one family and a record of how Partition felt to the women who lived through it in their own homes.