We Sinful Women: Column by Janaki Patrik

I was initially inspired by the Urdu words of Pakistani feminist poets in 1993, when I read a few of their poems from the collection edited and translated by Rukhsana Ahmad and titled WE SINFUL WOMEN. Those poems had been included in the readings for Professor Gauri Viswanathan's Columbia University course, Nationalism and Modernity, in which I enrolled as part of my MA program in Indic languages and cultures.

Simultaneously, I met Naseem Khan, whose May 1976 Report to the Arts Council of Great Britain, titled "THE ARTS BRITAIN IGNORES, The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain", had revealed the inherent racism and myopia of arts policy in this leading nation of the western world. Dropped like a bomb on complacency, Ms. Khan's report started a process of examination of Britain's debts to its former colonies - in this case to its citizens whose ancestral roots were in former colonies of the British Empire, and whose cultural lives in their transposed British homeland were not being supported. 

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