“Captives,” the speaker in Ishrat Afreen’s “Liberation” is told: “rise and chisel the mountains.” In Rukhsana Ahmad’s English translation, the repeated call turns the work of breaking inherited constraints into a collective task. The poem appears in We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry, edited and translated by Ahmad and published by The Women’s Press Ltd, London.
Who is Ishrat Afreen?
Ishrat Afreen writes in Urdu; the poems discussed here are translations, so each English version carries the choices of its translator. Her work brings women’s constrained lives and agency into view alongside poverty, labor and the lives of people with little social power. Those themes emerge in these selections; they should not be mistaken for a complete account of her poetry.
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A profile of Afreen characterizes her as redirecting poetic traditions associated with Muhammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz toward progressive messages. That is a useful way into the tension in these poems: inherited forms and images remain present, but their meanings can be turned toward women’s experience and social critique.
Start with “Liberation” and “Ghazal”
“Liberation”: a collective call
In Ahmad’s translation, “Liberation” addresses its listeners as captives and urges them to dismantle dead traditions, blind beliefs and cruel hatreds. The call to “rise and chisel the mountains” gives the poem its central image: change is difficult work, not a private escape. Its collective voice also links present freedom to responsibility for the generations that follow.
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The translation appears in We Sinful Women (© 1991). Poetry International identifies the anthology as a collection of original Urdu poems with English translations, edited and translated by Rukhsana Ahmad and published by The Women’s Press Ltd, London: read “Liberation” at Poetry International.
“Ghazal”: planting, land and power
Another poem on the same page places agricultural images beside social conflict. Planting is bound to peasant widows’ tears, landlord power, fertile soil and young people’s blood. The image of growth therefore carries a political cost; the land is not simply a pastoral setting. The translation page explains that a haveli is the distinctive affluent home of a feudal landlord.
Reading this ghazal next to “Liberation” shows two different routes into Afreen’s social critique: one speaks directly to captives, while the other lets the relations among land, labor and power surface through its imagery. The English “Ghazal” is available on the same Poetry International page and belongs to the Ahmad anthology translation route.
Read the first-person claim in “I Picked Up My Share of Sunshine”
Scroll’s 30 January 2024 excerpt from Hitesh Gupta Aadil’s Humsafar: The World of Urdu Poetry includes “I Picked Up My Share of Sunshine.” Its repeated claim to “my share” moves through sunshine and food, then sleep, fire, lifespan and a road. The plain first-person voice makes entitlement tangible: the speaker is not asking for an abstract ideal, but a share of the conditions needed to live and choose a path.
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The excerpt identifies the poem and source collection, but the supplied text does not establish a translator for this English version. Treat it as a useful reading selection rather than assuming it is the same translation as the anthology poems: read the Scroll excerpt.
Where to read more in English
We Sinful Women
A strong starting place is We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry, edited and translated by Rukhsana Ahmad. It is an anthology featuring multiple Urdu feminist poets, not a book solely by Afreen. Poetry International’s poem pages provide an accessible way to read Ahmad’s translations of “Liberation” and “Ghazal” and identify the collection and publisher.
Translations from Afreen’s debut collection
Afreen’s official website lists Kunj Peele Phoolon Ka (1985) as her debut collection and presents “Words” and “Roses and cotton” selected and translated by Yasmeen Hameed. In “Words,” language becomes material through images of a home, food, land and a musical instrument. “Roses and cotton” contrasts girls working in fields with idealized ornamental beauty. These selections offer a different translator and a direct route into the collection: read the poems on Afreen’s official website.
Scroll names two later collections as well: Dhoop Apne Hisse Ki (2005) and Zard Patton Ka Ban (2017). The 2024 excerpt also describes Afreen as a teacher at the University of Karachi; that is a time-specific description, not confirmation of her current employment.
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Why translations can sound different
Translator Nuzhat Abbas has discussed translating Afreen’s ghazal “Shattered Mirrors, Broken Bits.” Abbas says she chose poems from Ahmad’s We Sinful Women when she did not have access to an Afreen poetry collection, and wanted to retranslate them partly to recover a kind of sound she felt was missing from the English version she had read. Her account is one translator’s explanation of her approach, not proof that one rendering is definitively more faithful than another: read Abbas on “Shattered Mirrors, Broken Bits”.
That context matters when moving between versions. A translator may make different choices about sound, image or emphasis while carrying a poem into English; for a fuller encounter with Afreen, follow the translator and source collection attached to each text rather than treating any one English version as definitive.
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