This collection of Qurratulain Hyder’s works offers a detailed portrait of the writer and her times

Common to several of the short stories, pen-portraits, and memoir pieces collected in At Home in India, is the delightful figure of the modern Indian woman. Inhabiting small towns and urban spaces in colonial and independent India, she speaks her mind, stands her ground, chooses and excels at professions hitherto closed to her, navigates new social realities, and fashions a self-conscious subjectivity often denied to her older sisters. Much of the same might be said about the author herself.

Born in a family with a decided literary predilection (and literary pedigree), tracing their ancestry to the 18th-century Islamic scholar, Shah Waliullah Dehlavi, and Nawab Muhammad Amir Khan, a distinguished military general of the Maratha Empire in the early-19th century, Qurratulain Hyder grew up immersed in the world of literature and culture. Her first published pieces were for children’s magazines in colonial India. Her long writing career saw her (somewhat tangential) involvement in the Progressive movement of the 1930s-50s, as well as the more experimental, “modernist” naya afsana of the 1960s and 70s. The current volume of her work, edited and translated from the Urdu by Fatima Rizvi and Sufia Kidwai, brings together stories, selections from her biographical “non-fiction novel” Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai, pen portraits/khake of women writers and...

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