Baby Halder’s life was not an ordinary one. Leaving behind a husband and decades of violence, she was thrust into the uncertainty and loneliness of a new city, about which she has spoken of many times over the years.
The development of Urdu prose and journalism and the parallel agenda of social reform in 19th-century Hyderabad played a vital role in setting the ground for the emergence of the Progressive Writers’ Movement a few decades later.
Hyderabadi women have been writing in Urdu since the second half of the 19th century. This in itself is not unusual; for, women in other places as well, such as Bengal and Bihar, were writing around the same time.
