Gender, Class and Religion: A Study of Sajjad Zaheer’s “Dulārī” and “Heaven Assured!”
Almee Raza
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16526680
Abstract. A distinguished Urdu writer, Syed Sajjad Zaheer, was a major contributor to the revolutionary text, Angarey that laid the foundation of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in colonial India. He emerged as one of the strongest pillars of the movement that ushered in an era where literature became a medium to bring about social reform. The present paper attempts to study two short stories, “Dulārī” and “Heaven Assured!” by Sajjad Zaheer that have, like the other stories in the collection ignited much furore and controversy. The paper shall discuss the themes of vulnerability, domestic servitude and exploitation of women in a patriarchal and feudal society as well as religious duplicity and hypocrisy practiced in the society. The paper shall also trace the publication of Angarey as a path- breaking text and the rise of the Progressive Writers’ Movement which aimed at demolishing the existing conservatism and orthodoxy deeply embedded into the socio-cultural milieu.
Keywords. Patriarchy, Gender, Class, Religious duplicity.
Works Cited
Alvi, Khalid, and Vibha S. Chauhan, translator. Angarey. By Sajjad Zaheer, et al., Rupa Publications, 2014.
Jalil, Rakhshanda. Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Satchidanandan, K. “Syed Sajjad Zaheer”. Indian Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, 2006, pp. 8-12, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23346324.
Almee Raza is Assistant Professor, Department of English in Avadh Girls’s Degree College, Lucknow. Previously, she has taught in Isabella Thoburn College and Lucknow Christian Degree College. Her area of interest is gender studies, women’s literature, literature from SAARC countries, Indian writing in English. Theatre and music specially appeals to her. She has published papers in various journals and writes poetry and short fiction.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5731-1190
Email: almeeraza508@gmail.com
Gender, Class and Religion: A Study of Sajjad Zaheer’s “Dulārī” and “Heaven Assured!” © 2025 by Almee Raza is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
