Zahida Khatun Sherwani

Bhikampur's caged nightingale — the young poet who wrote women's freedom into Urdu verse. Zahida Khatun Sherwani (1894–1922), who wrote as Zay Khay Sheen — the letters Z-Kh-S — was an Urdu poet and a pioneering voice for women's rights, who died at twenty-seven. Born on 18 December 1894 at Bhikampur in the Aligarh district, the younger daughter of Nawab Sir Muzammilullah Khan Sherwani, a leading figure of the Aligarh movement, she began writing verse at ten and sending poems and articles to women's magazines. Because her society did not permit women to write poetry, she published first as Nuzhat and then, from 1912, as Zay Khay Sheen. Her ghazals and nazms carried a woman's feeling and a reformer's anger together: a nazm on the Kanpur mosque tragedy in 1913, verses on the Tripoli and Balkan wars, a Sipas-Nama-e-Urdu presented at the opening of Osmania University in 1918, and her celebrated masnavi Aaina-e-Haram (1921), a plea for women's rights. Her two collections are Aaina-e-Haram and Firdaus-e-Takhayyul. She died at Bhikampur on 2 February 1922, aged twenty-seven, and her verse was gathered and published by her cousin Aneesa Khatoon Sherwani.