Portrait of an Artist

An Urdu writer, a Pakistani feminist intellectual, a woman activist, a rebel poet, or a committed Marxist: The many faces of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ, or are they? The poetry collection Tum Kabīr presents an image of Riyāẓ that transcends the individual facets of her identity and work. Describing the many aspects of Riyāẓ’s persona in the introduction to Tum Kabīr, the renowned writer Masood Ashar asks, “Does Fahmīdah Riyāẓ need an introduction? Is it necessary to describe her as a renowned poet, an accomplished short story writer, a trustworthy and impeccable translator or a passionate human rights activist? Is it not enough to say that Fahmīdah Riyāẓ is Fahmīdah Riyāẓ? There is no one like her.”Footnote ⁵ In fact, Riyāẓ’s poetry and poetics can only be fully understood by mapping out “the intersection of multiple migrations, postcolonial feminism, and environmental justice struggles”Footnote ⁶ on the grid of her life. However, it must be mentioned at the outset that such an exhaustive task is beyond the scope of this paper. The discussion is therefore limited to a brief reconnaissance of the complex linkages between Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s life and writings.

Born on 28th of July 1945 in Meerut, a north Indian town in British India, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ was taken to Pakistan by her parents as an infant. She authored many books of Urdu prose, poetry, and criticism. Her writings have often been misconstrued because critics have failed to fully appreciate the complex relationship between her life and works, which echo the intricate nuances of watan (home/country), saqāfat (culture), and the conflict between maqāmī (vernacular) and qaumī zabāñ (national language). Even though Riyāẓ is widely recognized as a leading voice in Pakistan’s feminist politico-literary transformations, her liberal views, atheism, and Marxist feminist identity deeply unsettled the country’s obscurantists and religious fundamentalists. Riyāẓ’s Marxist and feminist approach to poetry, imbued with the cultural consciousness of postcolonial South Asia, emerged in response to her own historical moment. As a mohajir (migrant from India), her identity was further complicated, often positioning her as not fully Pakistani. Regardless of these challenges, Riyāẓ used her writing to counter state hegemony and articulate feminist critiques of nationalism, developing a poetics of resistance by rejecting the stability of a singular identity and voice. At the same time, serving as editor of the progressive magazine Āvaz (Voice) during General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law in Pakistan (1977–1988), Riyāẓ faced government scrutiny for her outspoken opposition to the Hudud Ordinances. These laws, introduced under the guise of aligning Pakistan’s legal system with Islamic principles, in reality curtailed women’s rights. Despite being a lifelong Marxist, Riyāẓ was profoundly influenced by Rumi (1207–1273), whose poetry she translated. Drawing on his Sufi thought, she fashioned an ethical and progressive mode of resistance to the Islamization of the state and the military dictatorship that sought to impose it through coercion. Her political activism and literary candor resulted in more than fourteen sedition cases filed against her and the magazine. In 1982, while out on bail, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ went into exile in India with her husband and two children, where she lived for seven years. During this time, she served as poet-in-residence at Jamia Millia Islamia University (1982–1983). She traveled extensively across India, lecturing against communal violence and reciting poetry at both private and public events. However, with the rise of Hindu right-wing movements in December 1987, she chose to return to Pakistan following the regime change after Zia-ul-Haq’s death. In 2017, she published Tum Kabīr, her last volume of poetry, and after a prolonged battle with an autoimmune disorder, Riyāẓ passed away on November 21, 2018, at the age of seventy-two. As her last poetic collection, Tum Kabīr highlights not only the writer’s role and responsibility as a witness but also the importance of poetry as a dialogic and affective mnemonic archive.

Dialogism, Poetry, and Feminism

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s life offers “a roadmap, an ethical guide to the art of dissidence,”Footnote ⁷ and her work Tum Kabīr may be read as embedded in a poetics of dialogism that “may not centre primarily on voice, allusion, or citation, but rather on a deep engagement with or response to otherness, as … reflected in elements like rhythm, intonation, form, or other poetic techniques that express or signal such interaction.”Footnote ⁸ According to Bakhtinian theorists, Michael Holquist, Michael F. Bernard-Donals, and Jurgen Pieters, dialogism may be understood broadly in two senses. First, dialogism is conceived, in Pieters’s words, “as a cultural phenomenon that occurs in the social relationships between different individuals towards each other and towards the socio-historical reality in which they find themselves.”Footnote ⁹ The second understanding is a linguistic one, which acknowledges different voices in a particular linguistic situation, what Bakhtin himself calls polyphony. Although Bakhtin excluded verse from the dialogic realm of literature, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s Tum Kabīr exemplifies dialogic imagination in both senses. It is situated in a complex sociopolitical and linguistic milieu, wherein Urdu, Hindi, and regional vernaculars interact, and religious, class, and gendered discourses both contest and engage one another. Her poetic voice, grounded in both South Asian syncretic traditions and a Marxist-feminist consciousness, remains in a continuous dialogue with its historical moment, marked by state authoritarianism, religious obscurantism, patriarchal structures, and cultural amnesia. Dialogism itself may be understood as “the capacity of the human mind to conceive, create and communicate about social realities in terms of the ‘alter,’” or otherness, that is, in terms of another individual(s), groups, communities and cultures.Footnote ¹⁰ In Tum Kabīr, the dialogical approach entails an openness to plural perspectives, embracing the tension that arises from encountering different, often opposing, ideas. The poems in this collection employ four modes of dialogical responsiveness: feminist dialogism, critical dialogism, dialogics of the oppressed, and polyphony. Also, dialogicality implies that every enunciation involves three interlocutors: the speaker, the listener, and the previous texts firmly embedded within historicized sociocultural contexts and complex intersubjective and other relational webs.Footnote ¹¹ Although dialogism, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, does not explicitly address gender, later Bakhtinian theorists and feminists have included gender as a category structured by society through language in a dialogical process (Bauer 1989; Hitchcock 1993; Malcuzynski 1992; Pearce 1994; Thomson 1989; Yaguello 1979).Footnote ¹² While Clive Thomson (1989, 158)Footnote ¹³ and Patricia Yaeger (1991, 240)Footnote ¹⁴ have argued that a feminist dialogics is that which explores the relation of three fundamental categories of gender, race, and class, it must be pointed out that neither Bakhtin nor his feminist appropriators have managed to discuss these multiple issues simultaneously. It is precisely within this critical gap that Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s enunciation of the “dialogics of the oppressed” ^{Footnote 15} acquires particular significance, as she foregrounds the intersecting discourses of power, resistance, and multiple identities. Using a gendered dialogical approach to writing poetry, Riyāẓ maps the discursive terrain of gender and class difference, elucidating the exchange of dialogue between distinct and competing voices. Her representation of dialogic multivocality and inclusion is transgressive as it enforces “a new relation between itself and the reader,” hence, “forc[ing] the reader to ‘take up a position’….”Footnote ¹⁶ This implies assuming responsibility toward what one reads, for instance, not remaining heedless to the issues of class and gender and their implications for the genre.

Poetry as a Dialogic and Affective Mnemonic Archive: Frames of Tum Kabīr

Literature serves as a repository of memories, preserving traces of “a social and historical repertoire of words and ideas” that define the notion of a text as archive.Footnote ¹⁷ Within this framework, Tum Kabīr emerges as a dialogic and affective mnemonic archive that foregrounds the poet’s role as a witness. Fahmīdah Riyāẓ engages with dialogism as a counterhegemonic aesthetico-political practice of transformation, delving into the relationship between the self and the socioreligious community, while simultaneously presenting feminist critiques of nationalism. In Tum Kabīr, poetry emerges as a rich site where diverse identities and voices interact and negotiate, underscoring the ongoing struggle between dialogic and monologic forces in the discursive realm. Indeed, if literature is comprehended as “a multi-layered (meta-)archive” that offers “an aesthetic means to (critically) reflect, comment on and inscribe itself into archival practices,”Footnote ¹⁸ one sees how Riyāẓ’s poems construct affective-semiotic and mnemonic archives that are multivoiced and heteroglossic in nature. Moreover, understanding affective memory as an archival source allows a deeper appreciation of how these poems “reveal the material conditions and subject positions that shape intellectual production.”Footnote ¹⁹ The collection thus illuminates the complex overlapping contours of Riyāẓ’s personal, political, identitarian, and aesthetic landscapes. Through her nazms (free-verse poems), Riyāẓ addresses a range of issues, including memory, history, politics, freedom of speech, nationalism, culture, religion, gender, war, class struggles, and the construction of self and other, with a particular focus on women’s experiences. The volume comprises nazms that Riyāẓ had penned between 2001 and 2015. It also includes some nazms that were written earlier but could not be published.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s articulation in Tum Kabīr is based on an ethico-political consciousness that is “situated, relational, and response-able.”Footnote ²⁰ and that manages to hold together a heterogeneous, seemingly diverse mix of poems on the following themes/subjects: faithfully transcribed dreams and desires (“Naʼī Ḍikshnarī” [“The New Lexicon”], and “Nayā Faiṣlah (Taḥrīk-e Nisvāṉ ke Liye)” [“The New Verdict (For the Women’s Movement”]); memories of other poets or dedications (“Josh Malīḥābādī” and “Bhāʼī Jon Eliyā ke Liye” [“For Brother Jon Eliyā”]); reminiscences (“Raḥmān Bābā”); musings on family members (“Tum Kabīr” [“You, Kabīr”], “Ammī [“Mother”],” and “Suno Sulemān!” [“Listen, Sulemān!”]); political figures (“Salām Benaz̤īr” [“Salute to Benazīr”], “Bhagat Singh kī Mūrat” [“The Statue of Bhagat Singh”], and “Āng Sān Sūcī ke Nām: Burmā kī Rahnumā kī Rahāʼī par” [“To Āng Sān Sūcī: On the Release of Burmā’s Leader”]); destructive impact of materialism and capitalism (“Cho So-īng Hūʼī: Ek Mukālimah” [“Cho So-īng Hūʼī: A Dialogue”], “Qiṣṣah Raimanḍ Ḍaivis” [“The Story of Raimanḍ Daivis”], and “Muskurāʼo Palvashe” [“Smile, Palvashe”]); and sociopolitical meditations (“Nayā Bhārat” [“New India”], “Pokhran aur Cāghai” [“Pokhran and Cāghai”], “Karācī,” “Aman kī Āshā,” [“Hope for Peace”], “Baghdād par Pahlī Bambārī” [“The First Bombing of Baghdād”], and “Saddām aur Aḥmad ʻAlī” [“Saddām and Ahmad ʻAlī”]), among others. This heterodox way of constructing a book is in itself a tactic to transcend the hackneyed themes and romantic styles of women’s writings, while also critiquing pernicious conventions in Pakistani society and culture. Mapping out the themes of poems in Tum Kabīr, Réka Máté says, “Out of 59 poems, 40 are feminist in nature, with six overlapping political, seven social and four on religious issues,” and “6 poems are mainly political and 20 overlap with other topics, whereas seven poems contain religious and eleven stress on social issues overlapping with other categories.”Footnote ²¹ Thus, in Tum Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ unsettles and dismantles patriarchal positions, or even political ones, because they maliciously compromise the paratactic series of duties that characterize the social and personal life of a woman.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ dedicated the opening poem of Tum Kabīr to the memory of her son’s loss. In De amicitia, Cicero asserts that no loss is more challenging to endure than that of a child, especially if it is an adult child. In this context, the poem “Tum Kabīr” can be compared to Allama Iqbal’s Javed Nama [Book of Javed] (1932), a book of Persian poetry addressed to his son Javed. Additionally, the poem resonates with Maulānā Jalāl ud-Dīn Rūmī’s Dīvān-e Shams Tabrīzī [Collection of Poems of Shams-e Tabrīzī], dedicated to Rūmī’s most famous alter ego, Shams-ad-Din. Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s engagement with this tradition is further underscored by her translation of fifty ghazals from Rūmī’s 35,000-verse collection of Persian ghazals and other short lyric genres into Urdu, which were published as Yah khānā-e āb-o-gil [This Abode of Water and Earth], 2006. The book expresses Rūmī’s love for, and his bereavement at the death of Shams. Akin to Rūmī’s Dīvān, Riyāẓ’s Tum Kabīr showcases her extraordinary genius for describing intimate relationships and experiences through countless striking metaphors. Significantly, Riyāẓ had initially planned to title this anthology of poems Mausamoṉ ke Dāʼire Meiñ [In the Midst of Seasons]; however, after the tragic loss of her son, Kabīr, who drowned while swimming with friends on a picnic in October 2007, she chose instead to name her book Tum Kabīr to preserve his memory within the structure of the book. In the preface, Riyāẓ says,

The poem “Tum Kabīr” shows how the poet confronts personal loss and tragedy. It showcases Riyāẓ’s capacity to mourn and memorialize, exploring the tension between retraumatization and healing. Writing intimately about loss and grief, she draws from deep within her consciousness to bring these emotions vividly to life on the page as an enlivened emotional experience, transforming “a forced and shattering belief in death into a different sort of belief, one in the value of, as Freud would have it, ongoing work and ongoing love – ongoing life.”Footnote ²³

As the longest poem in the collection, spanning over thirteen pages, “Tum Kabīr” delves into Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s memories, trauma, fears, anxieties, and hopes. Trying to make sense of her loss and bereavement, Riyāẓ says,

In this elegy for her son Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ reimagines Jalāl ud-Dīn Rūmī’s lament for his departed friend and master, Shams-ad-Din, better known as Shams Tabrīzī, into a contemporary idiom, transforming personal grief into a creative reflection on life, death, spiritual longing, and the ethical connections that bind human beings. Although Riyāẓ remained a Marxist throughout her life, the influence of Rūmī’s love for humanity and his quest to understand the mysteries of the cosmos and the individual’s position within it permeates her poetry. Consequently, “Tum Kabīr” allows personal loss to mediate between material experience and metaphysical contemplation. In this sense, memory is not merely retrospective; rather, it forms the ethical foundation of Riyāẓ’s humanist poetics, through which personal loss is transformed into a broader reflection on relationality and shared human experience. Where Rūmī’s sorrow ascends toward divine union, Riyāẓ’s remains a humanist reflection on memory, perseverance, and the moral burden of suffering. Her vision of “mukammal tīragī se banne vālī roshnī” [divine light created from complete darkness]Footnote ²⁵ is not mystical reconciliation but a metaphor for endurance. However, by the end of the poem, she eventually openly calls out: “ae mire Allāh mujh par raḥm kar!” [oh(,) my Allāh have mercy on me!].Footnote ²⁶ By writing the poem, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ creatively attempts to make sense of the traumatic loss of her son Kabīr, and subsequently finds renewed faith in religion. In doing so, she reformulates Sufi transcendence as an ethically significant, relational, dialogic process grounded in lived experience and recollection, through which her humanist ethics are conveyed, thereby transforming personal suffering into contemplation of the enduring dimensions of human bonds.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s meditation on loss and remembrance extends into the poem “Ammī,” which evocatively shows how memory sustains an ongoing dialogue between the living and the dead. In “Ammī,” the poet reflects on her relationship with her mother, who had been an important influence in her life. Mourning her loss, Riyāẓ says,

Unable to fully comprehend her mother’s absence, the poet experiences the fading of memories and the sound of her voice. Summoning images of death and grief, the poem becomes a creative endeavor to grasp the trauma of her mother’s death and to find solace. In the poems “Tum Kabīr” and “Ammī,” Riyāẓ invites readers on a reflective journey of love, loss, and the resilience of the self in the face of grief. This act of remembrance also opens a dialogic space in Tum Kabīr through which Riyāẓ extends her meditation on loss into a broader feminist critique of violence and injustice in Pakistan.

Poetry as a Dialogic Form of Feminist Resistance

In Tum Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ employs poetry as a mode of feminist and epistemic resistance against violence in Pakistan. Being a writer and a feminist activist, she is acknowledged “as one who proposes or demands a politico-ethical stance toward understanding the ways in which all forms of culture are conditioned by gender or sexual difference – as well as other modes of subjectivity (such as sexuality, racial and ethnic identifications, nationality, class and so on)” and “as one who engages (or wills to engage) in trans/national and/or local dialogues, coalitions and networks around issues of gender freedom”Footnote ²⁸ that are essential for both epistemic and hermeneutical justice. Delineating the dialogic relationships among language, religion, culture, and community, Riyāẓ’s poetry “unleashes a ‘chora,’ mediated by the traditions of classical and modern Urdu poetry,” even as it is shaped by both “the formation of gender codes according to Shariah (Islamic) law in post-partition Pakistan” and the gradual emergence of “modernity and Progressive attitudes toward women.”Footnote ²⁹ As a writer with a “secular comprehension of ‘feminism,’”Footnote ³⁰ Fahmīdah Riyāẓ appropriated “a long tradition of political poetry in South Asia to articulate a unique vision of self and society, which functioned as a sharp critique of the Pakistani state and its version of Islam.”Footnote ³¹ Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s position “as a Pakistani woman, subject to a system of sign production and interpretation in an Islamic discourse of nationhood implemented by General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s,” finds expression in her writings as “a feminist evaluation of the implementation of Shariat laws,” particularly the “‘Hudood Ordinance’ passed in 1979,” followed up by “the law of evidence in 1984, which firmly halved women’s legal status,” and together these measures “formed the backbone of Zia’s Islamic renaissance.”Footnote ³² It is important to note that within this broader intellectual and political trajectory, Tum Kabīr continues Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s long-standing engagement with feminist and sociopolitical activism. This commitment finds particularly unflinching illustration in the poem “Nayā Faiṣlah (Taḥrīk-e Nisvāṉ ke Liye)” [“New Verdict (For the Women’s Movement)”] which is exceptional for its bold dialogic expressions and its overt critique of both religious injunctions and Pakistani society.

In “Nayā Faiṣlah (Taḥrīk-e Nisvāṉ ke Liye),” Riyāẓ transforms poetry into a dialogic space where contending religious, nationalist, feminist, and political discourses confront one another, revealing the fractures of contemporary history while also enacting the methodology of the oppressed. As Andrea Witzke Slot argues, dialogic poetry is the “process through which the practices and procedures of the methodology of the oppressed are enacted,” as it recreates “a variety of ventriloquized sign systems and assumes the masks and mouthpieces of both the oppressor and the oppressed and everything in between.”Footnote ³³ This poem is rich in dialogic overtones, employing multiple points of view—those of the girl, her rapists, her father, a ward officer, the society, and even a well—where competing positions vie for ascendancy. In doing so, the poet pieces together a rape survivor’s experience and shows the “prevalence of rape myths and sexual double standards”Footnote ³⁴ in Pakistan that continue to foster victim-blaming and shaming. While Riyāẓ’s second volume of poems, Badan Darīdah [Body Lacerated] (1967–1976), confronts victim blaming through bold bodily rebellion, her final anthology, Tum Kabīr, examines the same phenomenon through a dialogic and layered critique of the discursive and social structures that produce shame in the first place. In this sense, Riyāẓ evokes Kobena Mercer’s appropriation of Bakhtin’s theory to foreground “critical dialogism” as a practice that overturns ideological monologism and binary relations “by multiplying critical dialogues within particular communities and between the various constituencies that make up the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.”Footnote ³⁵ Seen through this analytical lens, Riyāẓ foregrounds critical dialogism to foster reflexivity, contest hegemonic or monologic interpretations by amplifying marginalized voices, and thereby stimulate the emancipatory potential of dialogic engagement.

The poem “Nayā Faiṣlah (Taḥrīk-e Nisvāṉ ke Liye)” begins with the description of a disoriented girl following sexual assault, an incident which turns her ordinary world upside down. In many South Asian cultures, including Pakistan, a family’s honor and reputation are closely tied to the perceived virtue of its women, making sexual violation or accusations of rape a significant source of dishonor. In the poem, too, the perpetrators sexually violate her to seek revenge against the victim’s brother, dehumanizing her and reducing her body to an object through which vengeance is enacted. Unfortunately, after the assault, the girl’s father accuses her of bringing disgrace upon the family, declaring:

Similarly, the neighbors reinforce the victim-blaming, saying:

Riyāẓ shows how the female survivors of sexual violence endure intense shame through traumatic gaslighting. Since gaslighting relies on shaming its target, it constitutes both epistemic and affective injustice, which are premised on prejudices that the perpetrator exploits to discredit the victim’s sense of self, not just as a knower or moral agent, but as an individual.Footnote ³⁸ Beside the girl’s family and neighbors, a ward officer, referencing religious texts, suggests that women’s higher sexual lust makes them culpable, thus exonerating the rapists. He says:

Riyāẓ highlights how the rape survivor is made to feel ashamed and even responsible for her own victimization. She is blamed for her supposedly irreligious behavior and provocative clothing. She is interrogated by the police official as if she were the criminal herself. The men, as members of a privileged group, consider the victimizer’s word more credible than her testimony, which is emblematic of paradigmatic testimonial injustice. Although definitions of rape vary across jurisdictions, under the widely referenced Hudood Ordinances, it was nearly impossible for women to accuse their rapists, as they were required to provide four male witnesses to the crime. While men normally qualify as members of the dominant epistemic group, women’s need for recognition as victims of rape situates them as vulnerable to those positioned to provide or deny that recognition.

In the final section of the poem, Riyāẓ personifies a well that invites the girl to immerse herself in its water so that she can drown her shame. The girl, however, powerfully declares her intent to live and expose the injustices upheld by society. Determined to speak out against the systemic epistemic and testimonial injustices, she proclaims:

By upbraiding the coercive monologism of the self-appointed moral guardians and patriarchal interpreters of Islam who undermine women’s rights and dignity, Riyāẓ constructs a dialogic counter space where the survivor exercises agency and reclaims her dignity. The poem’s structure and voice enact what Stevan Weine (2006) calls a dialogic model of testimony.Footnote ⁴¹ By foregrounding rape not as an isolated atrocity but as a symptom of systemic oppression, Riyāẓ’s poetic witnessing becomes both a political and an ethical act. Echoing Carolyn Forché’s (2012) “poetry of witness,”Footnote ⁴² Riyāẓ extends the ethical scope of feminist witness poetry beyond empathy toward intervention. Her work epitomizes what Helle Abelvik-Lawson et al. (2013) describe as a mode of “poetry activism”Footnote ⁴³ wherein the dialogic structure of the poem itself resists silencing and transforms personal pain into collective consciousness. Exposing the intersections of religion, patriarchy, and state power, Riyāẓ’s dialogic feminism remains profoundly materialist as it recognizes that gender oppression is rooted in socioeconomic and cultural structures, transforming verse into a site of dialogic and Marxist feminist inquiry, resistance, and critique of the systemic violence and injustices that continue to shape Pakistani society.

Transversal Dialogue, Diffracted Feminism, and Poetry

Tum Kabīr embodies a profoundly dialogic impulse that confronts “censorship” and interrogates patriarchal silencing, “both in the formal legal sense, and in terms of the erasure and silencing of women’s voices from the Urdu literary canon,”Footnote ⁴⁴ through a continuous engagement with multiple, often conflicting, voices and epistemologies. Contrary to the “‘nativism’ and parochialism often associated with Muslim women,” Riyāẓ enunciated “a nuanced feminist consciousness quite outside of liberal notions of women’s agency and sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This dialogic feminism moves beyond binaries of tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, and instead proffers a feminist ethics that materializes through contestations, negotiations, and dialogues. In her writings, Riyāẓ engages with feminism and ethics as “a form of politics and repeatedly turns to the Islamic and Indo-Persian topoi (traditional themes) to articulate the universalist significance of ‘raising one’s voice’ or the ‘cry of dissent.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ In doing so, she embraces a diffractive approach that fosters new entanglements and brings them into dialogue with one another. It must be acknowledged at the outset that feminism in Pakistan is not a monolithic construct, and the process of Islamization “as a historically situated policy” was “implemented within specific socio-political conditions in Pakistan.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Fahmīdah Riyāẓ “actively resisted the weaponization of religion as a tool to silence women’s voices and suppress their self-expression.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The poems in Tum Kabīr, in fact, exemplify not only this dialogic feminism in action but also her critical engagement with the process of Islamization.

In Tum Kabīr, Riyāẓ fosters a creative dialogue between intersectional feminisms and Islamic feminism, positioning the subject, as Anna Stetsenko (2007) says, within an ethical bond to “alterity” that reaffirms responsibility, while concurrently envisioning an affirmative politics grounded in empathy, interconnections, and coalitional solidarities across difference.Footnote ⁴⁹ Her poetic method, grounded in “transversal feminism,” involves imagining conflicting perspectives and discourses, oscillating between “rooting”—situating her own stance within feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge—and “shifting”—employing situated imaginative empathy to inhabit the perspectives of her poetic personae and others.Footnote ⁵⁰ This dialogic movement allows Riyāẓ to sustain multiplicity without collapsing differing positionalities or erasing “power differentials.”Footnote ⁵¹ Drawing on Karen Barad’s (2007) Theory of Diffraction,Footnote ⁵² which foregrounds how material entanglements produce differences, Riyāẓ constructs an ethico-aesthetic paradigm that extends the dialogic into the material realm. Within Tum Kabīr, this emphasis takes the form of a sustained practice of dialogic reflexivity as a mode of diffractive inquiry through which Riyāẓ represents and examines the broad manifestations of differences in perspectives and orientations across varied contexts and discourses. As both an analytic and ethical practice for creative dialogue, diffraction enables a rethinking of difference(s) by foregrounding how the world comes into being through the entanglement of matter and meaning, the material and the discursive, within material-discursive practices. In enunciating this interplay, diffraction foregrounds the contingent of epistemological, ontological, and ethical aspects of material realities, especially in feminist and cultural studies. Accordingly, the poet’s diffractive approach reflects the desire to reframe the very processes of meaning-making; rather than focusing merely on the challenges of negotiating differences, it attends to how differences are made and how they continually engage with other differences, diffracting into new patterns of differentiation, grounded in agentic realism and its ethical consequences. In this sense, dialogism itself becomes diffractive, as the voices in her poetry embedded in material realities such as gender, class, history, religion, and lived experience not only generate dialogue at the level of language but also, through their interaction, produce new configurations of meaning and subjectivity. Diffraction thus deepens dialogism by engaging with material-discursive structures and lived experiences, enabling Riyāẓ to diffract and reconfigure the social registers of feminist critique. In “Ḥaẓrat Zainab (raẓ) kā Khutb̤ah Shām ke Darbār Meṉ” [“The Address of Ḥaẓrat Zainab (AS) in the Court of Syria”], Riyāẓ writes diffractively to create a responsible and conscientious engagement with the world, articulating what might be termed a “critical dialogic consciousness,” a mode of ethical witnessing that interrogates the workings of power, history, and faith.

The poem “Ḥaẓrat Zainab (raẓ) kā Khutb̤ah Shām ke Darbār Meṉ” describes the rousing sermon that Ḥaẓrat Zainab, the daughter of the slain Caliph Ḥaẓrat Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad, delivered in the court of Yazīd following the martyrdom of her brother Imām Hussein. The battle of Karbalā (680 A.D.), fought between Imām Hussein and the Umayyad Caliph Yazīd’s armed forces near al-Kufah, constitutes the poem’s ethico-political and affective backdrop. It evokes the image of the decapitated head of Imām Hussein; his surviving family members and thirsty children covered with wounds; the bareheaded women, including his sister Ḥaẓrat Zainab, paraded through the streets of al-Kufah. Against this backdrop of suffering and injustice, the poem foregrounds the bravery and moral resoluteness of the strong-willed Ḥaẓrat Zainab when she addressed Yazīd in his royal court, as reflected in the following lines:

In these lines, Riyāẓ’s dialogic feminism becomes especially apparent as Ḥaẓrat Zainab’s voice resonates with her own feminist critique of injustice. Denouncing not only the despot’s cruelty but also the misogynistic social structures and regressive interpretations of Islam, Riyāẓ transforms mourning into critique and martyrdom into moral agency. Documenting Ḥaẓrat Zainab’s fearless rebuke of Yazīd in his court, the poem outlines “the ethical and political factors that led to her brother’s death, which continue to inspire and sustain the Shia” community in their pursuit of justice and a true expression of Islam.Footnote ⁵⁴ Transforming grief into an enduring discourse of resistance, Ḥaẓrat Zainab’s sermon resonates wherever people resist corruption, embrace sacrifice for a greater cause, or remain steadfast in righteousness against overwhelming odds. Drawing upon the imagery and spirit of the marsiya, an elegiac form of poetry of particular significance to the Shi’ite community in the Indian subcontinent, the poem enacts a dialogue between religious remembrance and feminist reimagination. Since “gender [in Pakistan] cannot be understood apart from struggles over the state,”Footnote ⁵⁵ the recurring marsiya motifs, as part of a shared religious memory, do more than commemorate the moral struggle between good and evil in the battle of Karbalā; they also echo contemporary contests over political authority, religious legitimacy, and gendered citizenship in Pakistan, while simultaneously carrying a message of hope for recognition and survival. Significantly, the poem ends with Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s tribute to Ḥaẓrat Zainab (AS):

In these closing lines, defiance combines with feminist affirmation, rendering Ḥaẓrat Zainab a transhistorical figure of resistance whose voice resonates across spatio-temporal frames and spiritual boundaries.

Riyāẓ’s dialogic mode in poetry is further accentuated in “Rauẓah-e Ḥaẓrat Zainab” [“The Tomb of Ḥaẓrat Zainab”], where the poet juxtaposes the tragedy of Karbalā with the trauma of contemporary violence. Referring to Yazīd as the “prehistoric savage beast,” Riyāẓ concludes the poem with haunting imagery:

While the poem evokes the burial place of the indisputable heroine of Karbalā, its references to “the fire they are raining upon its beams,” the “sky is reddening,” and “people have begun weeping” may also allude to the two gruesome bombings near Ḥaẓrat Zainab’s mosque in Damascus in January and February of 2016, in which more than two hundred people were killed.Footnote ⁵⁸ This creative interweaving of the grief-stricken past and a tumultuous present constructs a dialogic temporality through which the past and the present converse in the language of memory, mourning, and resistance. Situated within a dialogic and feminist framework, Riyāẓ’s reenvisioning of Ḥaẓrat Zainab unfolds through a dialogism that generates an array of meanings as diverse as the historical contexts, material realities, and subjectivities through which it is read. In doing so, it embodies a dialectical consciousness that keeps the poem historically alive, socially engaged, and perpetually open to reinterpretation.

While much Muslim feminist scholarship relies on mainstream Western feminist thought to address questions of gender justice issues, often through a critique of religion, Riyāẓ decolonizes Western feminism through a sustained engagement with Islamic ethics, approaching ethics itself as a form of politics. She foregrounds the contributions of premodern Muslim women as inspirational feminist pioneers, thereby constructing Islamic genealogies of resistance to violence and tyranny. In doing so, she “directly confronted and wrestled against religion being weaponized to stifle women’s voices and self-expression.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Drawing upon religious idioms to challenge patriarchal stereotypes about women, Riyāẓ’s writings enunciate a more nuanced, culturally positioned feminism entrenched in dialogism. Her poetry embodies what Yaeger (1991) describes as feminist dialogics that enable women “from a variety of temporalities, ethnicities, races, and classes [to] initiate dialogues with their oppressions.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Although “leading contemporary secular feminists,” including “Shahnaz Rouse, Fouzia Saeed, Farida Shaheed, Khawar Mumtaz and Nighat Said Khan,” argue for a feminist social critique outside of Islamic discourse,Footnote ⁶¹ Riyāẓ’s dialogic feminism strategically reclaims religious metaphors to communicate her political vision to a broad spectrum of Pakistani readers and beyond. This strategy is most powerfully realized in Riyāẓ’s poetic reworking of Ḥaẓrat Zainab’s sermon in Yazīd’s court into a broader political discourse, turning it into “a resource and repository of meaning”Footnote ⁶² to inspire her readers to fight against despotism and authoritarian rulers. In this entanglement of the past and the present, dialogism acts through patterns of diffraction, generating new linkages among remembering, resistance, and activism. From these diffractive intersections emerges a constellation of Islamic, feminist, and postcolonial ideas and claims that create new possibilities for reimagining Islamic history and feminist solidarity. If creative writing is a form of responsiveness or “response-ability,” then Riyāẓ’s poetry may be seen as exemplifying dialogism as praxis, enabling not only responsiveness to the other but also aesthetic, political, and ethical forms of resistance to normative closure in everyday life.

Dialogic and Marxist Feminism in Tum Kabīr

In Tum Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ mobilizes inherited poetic forms to articulate a living Marxist humanism, reclaiming a voice of resistance and reinscribing it within the canon of South Asian modernity. Her poetry directs its rage against patriarchal morality, religious orthodoxy, and the middle-class respectability that sustains them. Yet this anger is never solitary; it assumes a dialogic form, capturing the interaction of multiple social voices that engage with, challenge, and potentially reshape the epistemic, ideological, and sociocultural contexts they inhabit. As Caryl Emerson (1985) observes of Bakhtin’s Theory of Dialogism, its goal is to make “a unified truth compatible with multiple consciousnesses.”Footnote ⁶³ Likewise, Bakhtin’s belief that the author must “define and shape others in a way in which they cannot define and shape themselves”Footnote ⁶⁴ finds renewed expression in Riyāẓ’s dialogic art, where she revoices inherited traditions, retranslates spiritual idioms, and reclaims the radical possibilities of mystic-humanist discourse for a materialist politics of liberation. Drawing upon Marxist and feminist vocabularies, Tum Kabīr fulfills the Marxist imperative of locating history within language and of transforming poetry into a site of social critique and collective awakening. Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry demonstrates the power of literature to confront epistemic injustices while fostering empathy, moral growth, and ethical recognition. As the poems in Tum Kabīr demonstrate, epistemic justice entails the “liberation of reason from class-based ignorance and prejudice, and from gender-based ignorance.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In poems like “Cho So-īng Hūʼī: Ek Mukālimah” [“Cho So-īng Hūʼī: A Dialogue”], “Qiṣṣah-e-Raimanḍ Davis” [“The Story of Raimand ̣ Daivis”], “Muskurāʼo Palvashe (Mazdūr Kisan Pārṭī ke Kārkan Marḥoom Afẓal Bangash kī Beṭī Palvashe ke Liye)” [“Smile, Palvashe (For Palvashe, the Daughter of the late Afzal Bangash, A Worker of the Mazdoor Kisan Party)”], (“Nayā Bhārat” [“The New India”], “Pokhran aur Cāghai” [“Pokhran and Cāghai”] “Karācī,” “Aman kī Āshā” [“Hope for Peace”], “Baghdād par Pahlī Bambārī” [“The First Bombing of Baghdād”], and “Saddām aur Aḥmad ʻAlī” [“Saddām and ʻAlī”], A Riyāẓ exposes the devastating effects of class hierarchy, capitalism, vulgar materialism, and prescriptive notions of femininity. Riyāẓ’s poetry thus becomes a site of resistance and social transformation, exposing power imbalances, misogyny, and oppression rooted in epistemic and material violence. While exploration of “the female predicament in modern Islamic society emerges as a dominant thematic rubric” in Riyāẓ’s work,Footnote ⁶⁶ her poetry also resonates with the voices of workers, political dissidents, and the destitute, often through a conversational tone and unpretentious idiom. Many poems in Tum Kabīr reinforce the argument that the harmful epistemic injustices and resistances “stemming from privilege are not purely cognitive” but are “intimately related to social injustices”Footnote ⁶⁷ such as gender biases, ethnic exploitation, and economic disparities, etc. In this respect, Riyāẓ assumes an epistemic responsibility to alert her readers to the existing diversity of epistemic cultures and the power asymmetries embedded within them.

In Urdu poetry, Riyāẓ’s Tum Kabīr stands as an exemplar of radical epistemic responsibility inspired by a distinctly feminist, Marxist, and political vision. In poems such as “Salām Benazīr,” “Āng Sān Sūcī ke Nām” [“To Āng Sān Sūcī”], and “Muskurāʼo Palvashe” [“Smile, Palvashe”], Riyāẓ constructs images of women who are simultaneously strong and yet compassionate, capable of nurturing and loving even as they fight against unjust practices and oppressive social, political, and economic structures. “Muskurāʼo Palvashe” [Smile, Palvashe] is a moving poem addressed to Palvashe on the death of her father Muhammad Afzal Bangash, a leading activist of Pakistan’s Mazdoor Kisan Party, the largest party with a Marxist orientation in the country. After the declaration of martial law in 1958, Bangash—along with the left-leaning political workers, trade unionists, journalists, writers, artists, teachers, and students—was arrested and jailed. Having devoted his entire life to the struggle against oppression and exploitation, Bangash becomes, in the poem, an icon of political commitment and ethical resoluteness. Addressing the grieving Palvashe, the poet offers solace while reiterating the enduring significance of collective struggle and resistance:

Here, Riyāẓ infuses poetic language with emotion in a manner that is neither forced nor formulaic. By simply juxtaposing images of past sacrifice with present grief, the poet enacts an ethical and dialectical encounter that, in turn, becomes a crucial source of her revolutionary poetics. In “Muskurāʼo Palvashe,” Fahmīdah Riyāẓ combines a materialist criticism of power with a profoundly humanist ethics. The poet’s directive to “smile” (“muskurāʼo”) becomes a dialectical gesture: an act of resistance against despondency and a repudiation of the alienation inflicted by structural violence. At the same time, the poem’s tender address to a young girl is underpinned by a deep ideological consciousness that challenges embedded social hierarchies, the classed inheritance of ideology, and the complacency of the bourgeois intelligentsia. This ethical and dialectical impulse is further extended in “Saddām aur Aḥmad Alī” [“Saddām and Aḥmad ʻAlī”] where Riyāẓ’s Marxist humanism finds compelling expression. By juxtaposing the slain Iraqi dictator, Saddām Hussein, with Aḥmad Alī, a poor Pakistani cable television fee collector, Riyāẓ stages a profound ethical dialectic encounter between power and empathy, the ruler and the plebian, and the global and the local. While Saddām appears as a “mashkūk sūrmā” [a dubious hero] responsible for the genocide of Kurds with impunity (“qatl-e-ām kartā thā Kurdoñ ka barmalā”),Footnote ⁶⁹ Aḥmad ʻAlī, whose “heels were cracked” (“phatī iskī eḌiyāñ),Footnote ⁷⁰ embodies the quiet persistence of labor and life. By shifting emphasis from the dictator’s televized spectacle to Aḥmad ʻAlī’s humble presence—one that moved the poet to tears (“kar gayā yuñ mujh ko ashk-e-bār”)Footnote ⁷¹ —the poem redirects the attention of the readers from spectacle to the realm of lived human struggle. To apply the crucial Bakhtinian concept of the “dialogic” to Riyāẓ is also to reiterate that Bakhtin’s own most important dialogue was with Marxism. While the dialogism emphasizes plurality, it remains grounded in class conflicts and material relations. In Tum Kabīr, Riyāẓ’s poetry epitomizes this intersection, constructing a dialogic framework that communicates across borders of class, culture, and nation.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s commitment to the working class and to transformative action aligns with a Marxist framework that renders visible the social divisions shaping Pakistani life. Her writing exemplifies “dissident poetry,” which “does not respect boundaries between private and public, self and other” and “talks back” to “act as part of the world, not simply as a mirror of it.”Footnote ⁷² The poems “Aman kī Āshā” [“Hope for Peace”] and “Pokhran aur Cāghai” [“Pokhran and Cāghai”] embody this dissident spirit while exposing the ecological violence of nuclearism. “Pokhran aur Cāghai” describes the ramifications of five simultaneous underground nuclear tests on May 28, 1998, at Ras Koh Hills in the Cāghai District of Balochistan Province, in response to India’s Pokhran-II tests. Deploring the effects of the residual radiation resulting from the blasts over Cāghai on the destitute villagers, Riyāẓ says,

Through her humanist poetics and dissident politics, Riyāẓ critiques nuclearism and urges readers to confront the full implications of nuclear testing, especially for the historically fraught communities in India and Pakistan. Her poetry collapses the borders between private anguish and public protest, “talking back” to the world not as a passive reflection but as an active critique.Footnote ⁷⁴

Overflowing with sparkling wit and humor, “Aman kī Āshā” [“Hope for Peace”] exposes the political and economic stakes of both India and Pakistan in militarizing the border and stoking war cries. Riyāẓ draws the two nations into a “dialogic memory” in which they confront their “shared history of mutual violence by mutually acknowledging their own guilt and empathy with the suffering they have inflicted on others.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Whereas the dominant narratives of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and its violent legacies veer toward monologism, the poet offers a dialogic remembrance by “integrating two or more perspectives on a common legacy of traumatic violence.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The poet sarcastically asks,

Behind the seemingly comic banter in “Aman kī Āshā” lies a sustained ideological critique that dismantles the totalizing voice of nationalism by envisioning a dialogic encounter in which each nation confronts its own complicity and responds to the other through ethical recognition as a precondition for imagining coexistence. One of the nazms titled “Nayā Bhārat” [“New India”], written during Riyāẓ’s stay in India, extends this critique. Disappointed by the environment of religious intolerance that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, she satirically draws a comparison between the rise of Hindutva in India and the ascent of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan:

Through this sharp, dialogic satire, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ implies that both nations mirror each other in their embrace of right-wing religious fundamentalism. Her “critical dialogism” challenges “the monologic exclusivity on which the dominant versions of national identity and community belonging are based,”Footnote ⁷⁹ offering a more plural and reflexive understanding of belonging. By bringing the personal into dialogue with the political, and the poetic with the revolutionary, Tum Kabīr depicts the complexities of postcolonial identity and unveils the sociohistorical and political forces that shape the nation’s sociomaterial realities. In doing so, poetry emerges as a locus of ideological critique, ethical meditation, and political transformation.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s Dialogic Selves: Reflexivity and Intertextual Feminism

Tum Kabīr exemplifies Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s dialogic imagination steeped in reflexivity, as it maps out the complex interactions among the writer’s multiple selves (creative, ideological, and feminine). The poems portray a dynamic process in which the poet’s inner and outer worlds continually shape and contest one another. As Mary DeShazer (1986) notes, often women writers turn first “inward for sustenance to the multiple selves of their own psyches, then outward to the doubles and shadows reflected in other powerful women: mothers, sisters, lovers, muses—alternate selves interwoven by the common thread of female imagination and experience.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This intersubjective and dialogic mode of interaction is a hallmark of Riyāẓ’s collection Tum Kabīr, where poems like “Īmān” [“Faith”] and “Fahmīdah Riyāẓ” reveal the nuanced dialogic dynamics of the poet’s faith, identity, selfhood, and the feminist imagination. In “Īmān,” the poet foregrounds faith as an ongoing dialogic process, negotiating between its ambivalent and mystical dimensions. The poet says:

Thus, through this dialectical tension between sorrow and joy, the speaker underscores the complex, esoteric, mysterious, and ambivalent nature of faith, which, even though it resists a reassuring certainty, reshapes the speaker’s inner worlds and reflexive processes through which the self is constituted.

While reflection may be an individual act, reflexivity entails “a particular kind of engagement with an ‘other,’ whether another person or oneself as ‘other.’”Footnote ⁸² Such reflexivity becomes central to the poet’s identity. In “Fahmīdah Riyāẓ,” self-examination becomes inseparable from social critique, revealing an intersubjective, dialogic mode of interaction between the poet’s multiple selves and the interpenetrating axes of her multifaceted identity. For Riyāẓ, the poet’s creative process takes place in “the ‘intermediate area of experience’ between inner and outer reality.”Footnote ⁸³ Reflexivity, therefore, involves “creating an internal space” that entails “not getting rid of the self, but doubling the self: distancing ourselves from ourselves to a greater or lesser extent, so that we have a sense of standing outside ourselves and observing what we are doing and thinking.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In this regard, Riyāẓ’s poetry becomes both a mirror and a weapon that spares no one, not even its own author. In “Fahmīdah Riyāẓ,” the readers are introduced to both the figurative and the literal selves of the feminist poet. As Riyāẓ says, “I do not write to shock or startle. I do not seek fame. This is simply not true. In reality, a poet narrates the self [khud-kalami] while breaking his [sic] head up against a wall.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Her “khud-kalami” or self-conversation, performs a dialogic feminism that perceives the female self not as unitary but as relational and fragmented. Writing “her” self becomes a “scriptive act,” whereby a shift in consciousness comes before “the emergence of the writing-self.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The poem’s juxtaposition of her real and poetic selves highlights the semiotics of a divided self, evoking various personae, masks, internal fragmentation, and a shifting identity. Looking at her own fame with ironic detachment, the poet observes the following:

In these lines, where Riyāẓ reflects on her apparent fame and professed disinterest in meeting “famous” people, she presents a kind of self-estrangement, as if observing her public persona from the outside. Through dialogic reflexivity, Riyāẓ examines the conversations between her split selves, namely, the public poet and the private personal identity, using poetic creation as a means to negotiate between her divided selves and reconstitute herself as a whole again. The poem not only presents the poet’s dialogic selves as intimately bound to the literary genre, but also shows authorship as a performative act.

Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetic vision, shaped by her experience as a woman, is characterized by multiplicity and dynamism, continually negotiating among her many selves. Exemplifying the internally dialogic and self-reflexive movement of subjectivity, the poem represents Riyāẓ’s poetic self as an “other,” an objectified or decentralized being in dialogic relation to the reader and to other voices in the poem. Through poetry’s self-reflexive and critical potential, Riyāẓ writes herself into the text by using the second-person singular pronoun, inviting the reader to perceive her through her reflected image. This symbolic act of self-address becomes a performance of dialogic feminism and identity formation, underscoring the fragmentary, relational, and contested nature of female subjectivity. As both addresser and the addressee in the poem, Riyāẓ reveals the fissures between the poetic-self and the ordinary-self, while exposing the intricate power dynamics in the dialogic relationships among the self, the poet, and the readers.

Intertextuality, Dialogism, and the Poetics of Taẓmīn

In Tum Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāz extends the poetics of dialogic reflexivity through “a heavy use of intertextuality,”Footnote ⁸⁸ a defining feature of dialogism in which the poet’s voice coexists with multiple other voices across diverse spatio-temporal frames. According to the scholars of rhetoric, some of the major dialogic techniques in Urdu poetry that “allow intertextuality as a legitimate literary device,”Footnote ⁸⁹ include taẓmīn (borrowing lines directly from an earlier poem by another poet and inserting it in a new poem; grafting verse); javāb-goyī (writing response-poems); istiqbāl (the tradition of composing a new poem modeled on the form and structure of a well-known earlier poem written by someone else); and tasarruf (appropriating or changing a word or two of a text). Understanding taẓmīn as a dialogic framework is crucial to appreciating Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s evolving sociopolitical and cultural ideas. Indeed, she draws upon the earlier poets for “sanad,” a term that translates as “warrant” and signifies a transactional process of seeking and receiving approval from one’s superiors.Footnote ⁹⁰ Eschewing detailed analysis of the complex subject of the types and features of such dialogism, suffice it to mention that the whole poetics of “mazmūn āfrīnī” [theme-creation] and “ma’ni āfrīnī” [meaning-creation] are deeply rooted in convention and intertextuality.Footnote ⁹¹ Within this framework, intertextuality emerges as a creative practice where “the old text is not imitated (as in nazira), but preserved intact inside a new, larger text.”Footnote ⁹² In this regard, taẓmīn, as an intertextual poetic device, is often set at the opening of the new text and is usually used as a catalyst to facilitate the development and accentuation of the poet’s theme. At the same time, taẓmīn may become the poet’s own poetic conceit, by which s/he summons a familiar line, employing it to perform a new objective, which is entirely his/her own. As a paradigm for analysis, the creative act of intertextuality as “a form of haunting”Footnote ⁹³ draws our attention to how the textual cross-fertilization in taẓmīn can accommodate the three-fold aim of “providing exegetical information for complex ideas; impressing the audience with literary acrobatic feats by interfusing genres and languages; and drawing a genealogy from particular types of authoritative literature of the past,” to proffer the poet “the legitimacy of cherished traditions.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In the poems “Dikhaʼī diyā yūṉ” [“With Just a Glimpse”], “Iẓta̤rāb meṉ” [“In Anguish”], and “Āg” [“Fire”], Fahmīdah Riyāẓ employs taẓmīn, as a dialogic engagement with the canonical Urdu poets Mir Taqī Mīr (1722–1810), Sheikh Muhammad Ibrāhim Zauq (1789–1854), and Nawāb Mustafā Khān “Sheftā” (1809–1869), respectively. Through tazmīn, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ pays tribute to the previous acclaimed poetry while reaffirming her confidence in her own ability to equal or complement the work of the great Urdu masters. For example, in the following maqtā (signature verse) of the poem, titled “Dikhaʼī diyā yūṉn,” Riyāẓ accentuates Mīr’s lines by using it as taẓmīn:

Here, Riyāẓ recontextualizes Mīr’s romantic despondency to express her own experiential and political anguish, transmuting love into a metaphor for estrangement, both gendered and ideological. Similarly, in the poem “Āg,” it is only in the maqta that Riyāẓ uses the first hemistich “ik āg sī hai sīne ke andar lagī huī” [A kind of fire burns inside my bosom] of Sheftā’s verse “shāyad isī kā nām mohabbat hai ‘Sheftā’ / ik āg sī hai sīne ke andar lagī huī” [Perhaps this is the very name of love “Sheftā”/ A kind of fire burns inside my bosom]Footnote ⁹⁶ as taẓmīn. What Riyāẓ “transcribes” or writes in this “exchange” is not merely literary homage but a “consciousness” and awareness as a postcolonial writer in a continuous dialogue with the previous poets and herself. This whole process of “reaccentuation,” which means using and reemphasizing the texts of canonical authors for new ideological and affective purposes, reveals the writer’s own views, interests, and aspirations.Footnote ⁹⁷ By unravelling the fluid and flexible relationship between the multiple faces of the poet’s self, the poem becomes “polyphonic,” giving “all the different voices of the self an equal space; or what Kristeva calls a ‘subject-in-process,’ whose identity isn’t fixed but constantly developed and developing through experience.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Through this intertextual and intervoiced engagement, Riyāẓ constructs a polyphonic field that reflects both the multiplicity of her cultural inheritance and the radical openness of her poetic vision sustained by an ongoing conversation with history, ideology, and language itself.

Dialogism, Poetry, and the Power/Politics of Language

The performative politics of poetic language is deeply intertwined with the processes through which identities are constructed and the meanings of materially lived experiences are imagined, negotiated, and reconfigured. In Tum Kabīr, the language of poetry assumes a dialogic form that emerges from the interplay of multiple voices, and its performative power underpins the discursive mechanisms through which power flows and is contested. Within this framework, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ embodies what Antonio Gramsci referred to as an “organic intellectual,”Footnote ⁹⁹ that is, an individual who acts as the link between the masses and civil society, expressing the concerns of those who are opposed to the state and cultural apparatuses in a language that is used by the masses. As a progressive, Marxist feminist writer, Riyāẓ’s subjects and poetic genres are intimately intertwined with her choice of language. In Tum Kabīr, Riyāẓ constructs a poetic realm where language, marked by dialogism, becomes both the medium and the site of contest and resistance, foregrounding what may be termed the power/politics of language to shape meaning, identity, and social relations. Her poem “Naʼī ḍikshnarī” [“The New Lexicon”] reveals how language is encrypted with asymmetries of power and embedded in hierarchies of class, faith, ideology, gender, etc. Drawing from her experience as Chief Director of the Urdu Dictionary Board (2009–2011), she shows how social differences in society and gendered subjectivity are constituted through language, and how reconfiguring the lexicon itself becomes an act of resistance. Decrying the use of language to usurp personal/political power to appropriate reality and to control signification, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ exhorts the readers:

Here, Riyāẓ underscores that the language of power can only be dismantled by confronting the power of language. The poem thus invokes a dialogic feminism that challenges the exclusionary structures of patriarchal, religious, and class-based discourse. The poem underscores that, as the asymmetries of power and multiple hegemonies or power structures are indexed and encoded in language, if we desire a society in which each one of us is at par with one another, regardless of class, caste, gender, religion, or nationality, then we need to transform the language and linguistic practice in nonessentialist ways. In this context, when Riyāẓ calls for the creation of a new lexicon, she is effectively proposing a transformation of the discursive conditions through which subjects become intelligible. Indeed, Tum Kabīr repeatedly stages such acts of renaming, redefining, and resignifying as feminist performative practice through which alternative forms of subjectivities can emerge. Therefore, the call to create a “new lexicon” itself becomes a performative act of reconstituting identity.

In Tum Kabīr, Riyāẓ further shows how language becomes a means of forging alliances, creating solidarities, and nurturing collective agency in the Indian subcontinent, where the linguistic politics surrounding Hindi and Urdu, the official state languages in India and Pakistan, respectively, have long been fraught with tensions. After the Partition of the Indian subcontinent based on religion, the Urdu language became identified with Muslims, and Hindi with Hindus on both sides of the border, and any endeavor at linguistic synthesis was considered a betrayal of cultural and national purity. Opposed to the state’s imposition of “a unique and homogenous Pakistani self that was predicated upon both its putative difference from the Indian Other and the minimization of ethnic and regional differences among the nation’s citizens,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Fahmīdah Riyāẓ not only subverts the language barriers, regional margins, and religious borders, but also mobilizes vernacular idioms to recover indigenous modes of resistance. She disrupts the religio-linguistic divisions by employing “eloquent and thoughtful play of Urdu and Hindi diction, metaphors, and images”Footnote ¹⁰² in her poetry, thereby making a strong rebellious statement against the hegemonic linguistic nationalism premised upon exclusionary politics. In imagining herself as “belonging to a community beyond state and city, language and politics,”Footnote ¹⁰³ Fahmīdah Riyāẓ brings to light the complex and dynamic relationship between poetic subjects/personae and language.

In Tum Kabīr, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ employs an unusual choice of diction from Hindi, Urdu, Hindūstānī (a kind of bridge between Hindi and Urdu), and even Braj Bhāshā (a north Indian regional dialect) as a “deliberate” way to foster “transnational dialogue between India and Pakistan” and “celebrate the commonality of experience irrespective of the interests of the state.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Riāẓ deliberately chooses “a vocabulary of purely vernacular and Indic origin instead of the high-flown Persian terms usually preferred by male poets, which are less easily understood by an audience belonging to the lower strata of society and lacking proper education….”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Tum Kabīr, the language of the poem “Īmān” [“Faith”] leans more into Hindi, for instance the use of Hindi words like “saugandh” [an oath], “agnī” [fire], “vardāṉ” [blessing], “dukh” [grief], “sukh” [joy], “nīr” [tears], “mohit” [enamored], and “saṅg” [go together with]. There are many Hindi words in the poem “Sāṅvlā Bāṅkā Pūrab kā” [“Swarthy Dandy of the East”] like “sāṅvlā” [swarthy], “bāṅkā” [dandy], “pūrab” [the east], “ang” [parts of the body], and “kajrī” [a type of song sung in some regions of northern India during the rainy season. Riyāẓ integrates “language and imagery of traditional Hindi gits (songs, village songs, folk songs) into her Urdu poetry,” which expands the scope and range of her poetic voice significantly.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Representing Riyāẓ’s experiences of traveling from Delhi to Bihar on a train, the vernacular cosmos framed in the poetic expression of “sāṅvlā bāṅkā pūrab kā” blurs the borders between the physical, geographical, linguistic, and dialectal realms. Through the use of Hindi and regional vernacular words in her verse, Riyāẓ decolonizes Urdu poetics from within the tradition, producing a polyphonic texture that destabilizes singular readings of nation and gender. In this sense, Riyāẓ’s poem exemplifies Bakhtinian dialogism not only as an aesthetic mode but as a cultural praxis. Through her use of linguistic dynamism, Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry unsettles the seamless flow of ideological discourse that upholds patriarchy, conservatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, and class hierarchy. As Tony Bennett observes in Formalism and Marxism, literature may not in itself engender revolutionary consciousness, yet “it does induce a temporary suspension of ideology, a temporary release from its operations, which may give rise to a new form of attentiveness to and thoughtfulness about reality.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Situated within a Marxist-feminist and dialogic framework, Riyāẓ’s transformative use of language enacts precisely this “critical” effect—“temporarily prising apart the chains of ideology” to create “a kind of open, disengaged mental space within which a new attitude to reality might be produced.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Besides the mixing of classical and colloquial registers, her intertextual dialogue with Bhakti movement, a medieval religious and social reform tradition in India, and Sufism further destabilizes obscurantist and patriarchal ideologies and linguistic norms. Her poetry thus performs its critical function through dialogic and linguistic practices, continually challenging the ideological structures that sustain social and political hierarchies. As an act of ideological revision, Riyāẓ’s poetry does not provide an escape from ideology but rather illustrates the possibilities that exist for experiencing and revising relations to others and to the world.