Adultery Behind Purdah and the Politics of Indian Muslim Nationalism in Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, historicist, and formalist methodologies, this article reexamines an almost unknown novel Zohra (1951), among the first to be written and published in English by an Indian Muslim woman writer (Zeenuth Futehally). This article argues that Zohra works on two fronts, combining the private/personal and public/political: it critiques the systems of purdah and arranged marriage that shackle women in a secular nation desirous of modernity and insists on the rightful claims of Indian Muslims to belonging and citizenship in modern India (after Partition) on the basis of their anticolonial, anticommunalist struggles for social reform and national independence.