Zehra Nigah sahibah reciting her poetry in CBEC to a rapt audience of faculty, physicians and invited guests on November 5, 2022.
A Woman’s World Through Zehra Nigah’s Poetry
Farid Bin Masood*
We are very fortunate that Zehra Nigah, a renowned, soft-spoken, octogenarian poet always dressed in a simple Saree, visits CBEC for conversations and to recite her captivating poetry to us. Hailing from an intellectual, literary migrant family of Hyderabad Deccan (India), Zehra Nigah is one of the only two early female poets of the Subcontinent, the other being Ada Jafarey, to have achieved fame in the mostly male-dominated world of Urdu poetry. She began writing poetry as a child and since then has published three collections of poetry and an anthology.
What I admire most about Zehra Nigah’s poetry is her ability to present difficult social and political issues in the traditional poetic language. The word Nigah in her name means a gaze or a particular perspective. Through her subtle, multi layered poetry, she can describe the agony of a rape victim without resorting to graphic descriptions, and convey the horrendous aftermath of a drone strike on a community without mentioning the drone by name. In doing so, she relies on candid vocabulary but without losing civility and charm. Zehra Nigah is also known for her beautiful, evocative writing which explores the experiences of women in Asian cultures. She not only writes of the love and warmth of a mother for her children and her home, but also of wives who must make compromises, and of daughters compelled to conform to traditional norms against their wishes.
Zehra Nigah’s poem Samjhota (Compromise), reproduced here from her impressive collections, is among my favourites. Using vivid imagery, she captures the living experiences of a woman through the symbolic use of the Urdu word chadar. Chadar is a large, all enveloping garment Asian women wear to conceal their body from the world beyond their homes. She uses chadar metaphorically to capture aspects of a woman’s life – tenderness, love, warmth, but also personal compromises she makes for the sake of her family.
In January 2023, Zehra Nigah will conduct a session on Humanities and Bioethics during CBEC’s Foundation Module for incoming PGD and MBE students. She will engage in a conversation with Dr. Arfa Sayeda Zehra, Professor of History and Literature, Forman Christian College, Lahore on the historical connections of Urdu literary traditions with Akhlaq (Ethics), Tehzeeb (Culture).
Compromise
(Translation by Farhat Moazam)
My chadar of compromises, soft and warm,
Woven over many years,
Embellished truths like blooms adorn it not
Threads of untruths weave through it not,
I shall conceal myself within it
And you will remain content, at ease!
Neither happy nor sad,
Stretched taut it shall make our home,
When spread our courtyard will blossom,
If raised the curtains will plummet