A Feminist Understanding of Jameela Nishat’s Play “Purdah”

Abstract

Jameela Nishat is a published feminist poet and playwright who has had a formal training in English Literature and theatre arts and also hails from an artistic background - her father was an acclaimed portrait artist and an acquaintance of the renowned painter, M.F. Hussain; thus, her initiation with the arts began at an early age. Nishat’s literature degree introduced her to many poets, of which she chiefly quotes Plath and Dickinson as having a major impact on her thinking and writing process. It is often said that you cannot separate the aesthetic consciousness of a poet (the word ‘poet’ here is used in a generic sense to refer to litterateurs as a whole, rather than just poets in the strict sense of the term) from his/her moral values; that is, his/her own personal volitions, views and response to their immediate political surroundings ultimately finds a place in their works. The same could be said of Nishat. One of the causes which is close to Nishat’s heart has got to do with her personal identity as a woman hailing from a rather puritanical Muslim background. The predominant theme in most of her poems and plays is to shed light and throw light on the experience of Muslim, especially those belonging to the more orthodox sects. She observes that there is negligible writing both in her mother tongue Urdu, as well as English about the authentic experience of Muslim women. Hence she makes it a point to showcase it in her plays. Her plays are a carefully balanced critique of the oppression that women from the Muslim community