SOUTHASIA Online

The autobiography was published in Urdu under the title ‘Buri Aurat ki Katha' in 1994. Now the Oxford University Press has brought out an English translation of the volume titled ‘A Bad Woman's Story', done by Durdana Soomro, an avid golfer who lives in Karachi and has already won admiration for her translations of Pakistani writers, some included in the anthology Fault Lines (2008).

Kishwar Naheed gives many reasons for her being a different type of woman. Her love marriage at the age of 19 was perhaps the first step. She writes that her romance was still at the embryonic stage when her brother got wind of it. The result was "a hasty engagement and wedding was arranged. It all happened in such a hurry that neither the family nor the friends of the bridegroom knew about it."

Secular and Nationalist Jinnah questions many of the myths that have grown round Jinnah's role in the freedom movement and reveals his true character to readers around the world. Dr. Ajeet Jawed is a reader in the Political Science Department of Satyawati College, University of Delhi.

Concerted Hindu propaganda, especially after partition, has painted Mohammad Ali Jinnah, variously, as "a diehard communalist, a Muslim fanatic, a separatist, an egoist, arrogant, an ally of the British imperialists, an opponent of the freedom, an enemy of the Congress and, particularly, of its leaders like Gandhi, Pundit Nehru and Sardar Patel." But truth, at last, seems to have raised its head out of the accumulated detritus of falsehood and a new, clearer, picture of Jinnah has emerged that rubbishes all those negative notions about him.