The Women's Courtyard - by Khadija Mastur (Paperback)

About the Book

"A feminist classic of Partition literature in a newly revised translation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell. A Penguin Classic Set in the turbulent decade of the 1940s, The Women's Courtyard provides an inverted perspective on the Partition. Mastur's novel is conspicuously empty of the political pondering and large national questions that played out, typically, in the arenas of men. Instead, it gives expression to the preoccupations of the women in the courtyard, fighting different battles with loud voices. The novel follows a Muslim girl, Aliya, and her family, about and around the climax of the Independence struggle. While the national struggle rages on the street, Aliya and the other women in the courtyard are tethered hopelessly to their own problems of life and death. The Women's Courtyard is an experience in suffocation. Within the strict religious and social framework of a rigid Muslim family, there is a purdah between Aliya and the rest of the world. While the men in Aliya's family wage politics, get beaten up, and go to jail in the unseen outside, their families back home are forced to wait in deteriorating conditions, trying desperately to hold up the social structure that confines them"--

Book Synopsis

A feminist classic of Partition literature in a newly revised translation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell.

A Penguin Classic

Set in the turbulent decade of 1940s India, The Women's Courtyard illuminates a unique perspective on the Partition. The novel follows the struggles of a Muslim family from the perspective of the youngest daughter, Aliya, during the years that lead to Independence. Mastur's novel is conspicuously empty of the politicking and large national questions that played out, typically, in the arenas of men. Instead, it gives expression to the preoccupations of the women, whose lives are mostly circumscribed by the secluded courtyard of their home. As they deal with the poverty that engulfs the family as a direct result of the men's all-consuming passion for the Independence Movement, the women in the courtyard are left to run the household on shrinking means, and Aliya attempts to gain an education against all odds. Set within the strict religious and social framework of a once-prominent family, The Women's Courtyard invites us into Aliya's suffocating world, where women are forced to contend with deteriorating conditions, as they try desperately to hold up the social structure that confines them.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review Quotes

"Together, Sahni's and Mastur's complementary portraits of Partition illustrate how, when political tensions are weaponized, ordinary lives are crushed by the machinery of power. Those who survive must contend with the devastation that remains, long after the noise abates." --Vikas Turakhia, Minneapolis Star Tribune

About the Author

Khadija Mastur was an award-winning Pakistani short story writer and novelist who was highly regarded in Urdu literature. Her novel Aangan (The Women's Courtyard) is widely considered a literary masterpiece in Urdu literature and has also been made into a television drama. Mastur was born in 1927 in Bareilly, India. She migrated to Lahore with her family after the independence of Pakistan in 1947 and settled there. Mastur wrote with conviction on patriarchy, classism, chauvinism, and misogyny. She saw them as "systemic poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically." Daisy Rockwell (translator) is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator. She has translated numerous classic literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English, including Bhisham Sahni's Tamas and Khadija Mastur's The Women's Courtyard. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti's A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. In 2023 she was awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award. Kamila Shamsie (foreword) is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her novels include Home Fire (2018), which won the Women's Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Burnt Shadows, which won the Premio Boccaccio in Italy, and A God in Every Stone, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. Four of her novels have also won awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. A vice president and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was one of Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2013. She grew up in Karachi, has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and now lives in London.