Zohra

Set in Hyderabad in the first half of the twentieth century, this is the story of an upper-class Muslim woman, Zohra, who is forced to marry at the age of eighteen and thus suppress her natural inclination to paint and write and lead an independent life of the mind. Zohra’s husband is a brilliant scientist, but he shares none of her creative passion. Into this cultural desert enters her brother-in-law, Hamid. Very much the face of modern India, Hamid is committed to Gandhian values of non-violence and the cause of social justice and equality. Zohra is driven by her inviolable sense of duty to subjugate her own desires to the demands of the two men in her life between whom she finds herself trapped. Zohra’s personal struggle for self-expression is mirrored in the development of a national consciousness. As the movement for independence gains momentum in the country, Zohra also goes through a process of emotional growth and development. But she is so deeply ensnared in a cage of social conventions that the escape, when it comes, is unbearably painful–the tragedy, overwhelming. A comprehensive introduction by Rummana Futehally Denby, the author’s daughter, to this fully revised edition highlights the novel as an intensely nostalgic historical record of a city and is a social commentary on a unique way of life. It will attract general readers of fiction and all those interested in Indian women’s writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.