The Women's Courtyard

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.