In this chapter, I explore women's activism and the Progressive Writers’ movement in the first half of the twentieth century to see where the fault lines lie between secular modernity and religious affiliations. Poetry as a medium for change also inspired Progressive women poets, who initially started off in the inner sanctum of the zenana under the watchful gaze of a religious community that placed its visible Islamic representation on the shoulders of women, and subsequently found themselves in the public spaces of the post-Partition nation actively taking part in national and political culture. It is their story that is lesser known and important to contextualize as the community transformed into nation. The poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz played an important role in the nurture of women poets as he imbued the lyric form with a progressive modernity. His linkages to women poets and female music artists, along with an emphasis on a secular Urdu aesthetic, facilitated an opening up of gender borders that had been tightly drawn into sacred spaces in the lead-up to Partition.

In the post-Partition nation, sharif women's performative poetry inhabited the public sphere at a time when iconic women's voices in the associated world of music and song ruled the sound waves – notably, the flamboyant Madam Noor Jehan and the restrained Malika Pukhraj. Both sang Faiz Ahmed Faiz's verse, immortalizing his poems through electronic media. Their presence as musicians in Pakistan highlighted both the enduring popularity of the craft and heritage of a long-standing Indic music tradition, as well as the new urban middle class's historical distancing of itself from the musical gharana family in order to represent respectable values. The modernizers sought to spiritualize, standardize and eventually nurture a new middle-class taste in music. These bifurcating affiliations with the performing arts for women in the postcolonial nation had been ideologically framed in reformist texts. For instance, Mirza Rusva avoids any reference to the mujra dance in Umrao Jan Ada, although it features heavily in film adaptations of the novel. The mujra is used as a reminder of a decadent past and one of the causes of the downfall of Muslim rule in India, while in Hindi films it serves as a nostalgic reference to the Muslim other.