Patriarchal Silences
It was while guiding my daughter through her 10th Board examinations last year that the pervasive gender asymmetries within the Urdu curriculum first dawned upon me with an unsettling force. As an English Literature teacher, long accustomed to scrutinising the ideological underpinnings of literary canons, I had anticipated certain asymmetries - yet the discovery proved more profound than anticipated. The Baharistan Urdu textbook for Class 10, with its pages dominated almost exclusively by male authorship—Allama Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Mir Aman, Prem Chand, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Hali, Zafar Gorakhpuri, Shoq Lakhnawi and their contemporaries—presented a literary landscape framed unequivocally through a masculine prism. Female authorship was conspicuous through its absence. No female writer appeared among the prescribed texts, no feminine voice was permitted to interrupt the seamless succession of male perspectives. Women appeared, if at all, as remote objects of poetic desire, symbols of cultural virtue, or passive recipients of narrative action—never as subjects endowed with intellectual or creative agency. Intrigued and troubled by this pattern, I proceeded to examine the syllabi and textbooks for Classes 8 and 9, only to find the same structural exclusion replicated with little variation: a canon constructed entirely by male voices.
This personal encounter was rendered all the more striking by the contrasting trajectory I had witnessed in the English literary canon over the course of my academic life. When I was a student, the English curriculum was overwhelmingly constituted by the works of white European men, with Jane Austen standing virtually alone as the solitary female exception permitted entry into an otherwise unassailable masculine edifice: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Keats constituted the normative core, their perspectives advanced as the quintessence of human experience. In the intervening decades, however, sustained feminist intervention, curricular revision, and institutional commitment to representational equity have significantly reshaped the field. The English canon is now being actively recreated and pluralised; within the JKBOSE syllabus itself, female writers are accorded substantial and meaningful presence—Jane Austen, Mary Dobson, Anne Frank, Emily Dickenson, Kamala Das, Arundhati Roy, and others whose writings interrogate gender, power, and subjectivity are integrated as essential components rather than supplementary additions. While this process remains incomplete and further incorporation of female writing is still imperative, the shift nonetheless represents a deliberate movement toward inclusivity and representational justice. By contrast, the Urdu curriculum in JK BOSE’s Baharistaan series, continues to inherit a markedly more exclusionary paradigm.
Feminist literary theory provides a robust lens for this critique. Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism urges us to recover and reinterpret women’s texts, revealing how patriarchal structures have historically suppressed female authorship. Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze illuminates how literature, when dominated by male perspectives, objectifies women, reducing them to passive spectacles rather than autonomous subjects. Extending these, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work, The Second Sex, posits women as the “Other” in patriarchal societies, a framework that explains the curricular marginalization as an extension of existential subjugation.
In the context of JKBOSE’s Urdu curriculum, this lens reveals how the erasure of women writers perpetuates a silence, where female experiences are overwritten by patriarchal binaries, preventing women from “speaking” through educational canons. These theories underscore that the JKBOSE curriculum is not ideologically neutral but a site of power that reproduces patriarchal ideologies, denying students,particularly young girls,the models of agency and resistance embodied in women’s writings.
Urdu literature’s trajectory is inextricably linked to historical power dynamics, where gender intersected with colonial and linguistic politics. Emerging in the medieval Deccan and North India as a syncretic language blending Persian, Arabic, and Prakrit elements, Urdu thrived under Mughal patronage. However, British colonialism disrupted this equilibrium. Post-1857 Revolt, the imposition of English as the lingua franca of governance and education relegated Urdu to the margins, associating it with a “decadent”. This linguistic demotion was gendered: colonial reforms influenced by Victorian morality confined women to domesticity, entrenching purdah and limited female roles, as seen in the codification of personal laws that entrenched patriarchal biases.
Reformers like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan exemplified this patriarchal vision. While founding Aligarh Muslim University and advocating Urdu as a vehicle for Muslim upliftment, Khan prioritized male agency. In works like Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (1858), he framed women as bearers of cultural honor, not intellectual equals. Post-independence, this legacy persisted in regions like Jammu and Kashmir, where Urdu curricula inherited colonial binaries, prioritizing canonical figures like Mirza Ghalib ,Prem Chand, Allama Iqbal, Mir Aman while excluding women.
This omission is particularly appalling given the rich corpus of Urdu women writers who challenge such tropes. Qurratulain Hyder, often hailed as the “grande dame” of Urdu literature, subverts patriarchal narratives in novels like Aag Ka Darya (1959), which weaves a feminist historiography of the Indian subcontinent, exploring women’s identities amid partition and migration. Her work embodies female experiences of loss and resilience, offering a counter-narrative to male-dominated historical epics.
Similarly, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, a progressive writer affiliated with the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, infused her short stories and novels, such as Sar-e-Sham with critique of feudal patriarchy, portraying women as agents of social change rather than victims.
Saliha Abid Hussain’s contributions further illuminate this erasure. In works like Azadi Ki Neend , she interrogates gender roles in postcolonial conservative India, drawing on personal experiences to depict women’s struggles for autonomy in conservative societies. Rakshbanda Jalil, a contemporary scholar and translator, bridges generations through anthologies like Urdu Stories (2008), which recover women’s voices, emphasizing themes of resistance and identity. Parveen Shakir’s poetry blends romanticism with feminist assertion, challenging the ghazal’s traditional male-centric eroticism by voicing women’s desires and frustrations. Other figures like Ismat Chughtai, Kishwar Naheed, and Fahmida Riaz similarly dismantle patriarchal structures but Urdu canon has historically silenced their authentic voices in favour of hegemonic discourses that align with patriarchal ideologies.
Tragically, students in Jammu and Kashmir’s classrooms might not have even heard of these great women writers. This ignorance is no accident but a mechanism of silencing: by omitting their works, the curriculum ensures that young minds internalize a monolithic, male-dominated literary heritage, perpetuating the notion that women’s stories are peripheral, nonexistent, or invisible.It denies the students the access to multifaceted human experiences, reinforcing hierarchies that stifle critical thinking. By excluding women, the curriculum silences voices that model resistance, potentially perpetuating cycles of gender-based violence and inequality
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides a national framework to guide such changes, urging states and boards to prioritise gender equity in curriculum design. It emphasises “Equitable and Inclusive Education” as a core principle, aiming to ensure that no child is left behind due to background, socio-cultural identities, or gender (Ministry of Education, Government of India, 2020). It identifies Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Groups (SEDGs), which explicitly include females and transgender individuals, and advocates for targeted interventions to address disparities in access, participation, retention, and learning outcomes.These directives challenge patriarchal biases in existing curricula and call for depatriarchalization, aligning directly with the need to include women writers in Urdu textbooks for diversification and agentic representations of gender.
The persistent exclusion in JKBOSE’s Baharistan series violates NEP 2020’s vision, as it fails to eliminate gender stereotypes or provide equitable exposure to female literary voices. Implementing NEP-aligned reforms—such as revising curricula to incorporate women writers and promote gender equality would advance inclusive pedagogy and address subaltern silencing in regional contexts like Jammu and Kashmir.
Bhat Rehana Bashir, Associate Professor, Islamia College of Science and Commerce, Srinagar
