It was while guiding my daughter through her 10th Board examinations last year that the pervasive gender asymmetries within the Urdu curriculum first dawned upon me with an unsettling force. As an English Literature teacher, long accustomed to scrutinising the ideological underpinnings of literary canons, I had anticipated certain asymmetries – yet the discovery proved more profound than anticipated. The Baharistan Urdu textbook for Class 10, with its pages dominated almost exclusively by male authorship—Allama Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, Mir Aman, Prem Chand, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Hali, Zafar Gorakhpuri, Shoq Lakhnawi and their contemporaries—presented a literary landscape framed unequivocally through a masculine prism. Female authorship was conspicuous through its absence. No female writer appeared among the prescribed texts, no feminine voice was permitted to interrupt the seamless succession of male perspectives. Women appeared, if at all, as remote objects of poetic desire, symbols of cultural virtue, or passive recipients of narrative action—never as subjects endowed with intellectual or creative agency. Intrigued and troubled by this pattern, I proceeded to examine the syllabi and textbooks for Classes 8 and 9, only to find the same structural exclusion replicated with little variation: a canon constructed entirely by male voices.

This personal encounter was rendered all the more striking by the contrasting trajectory I had witnessed in the English literary canon over the course of my academic life. When I was a student, the English curriculum was overwhelmingly constituted by the works of white European men, with Jane Austen standing virtually alone as the solitary female exception permitted entry into an otherwise unassailable masculine edifice: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and Keats constituted the normative core, their perspectives advanced as the quintessence of human experience. In the intervening decades, however, sustained feminist intervention, curricular revision, and institutional commitment to representational equity have significantly reshaped the field. The English canon is now being actively recreated and pluralised; within the JKBOSE syllabus itself, female writers are accorded substantial and........

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