“Who owns a language?” we are asked on a panel at the Islamabad Literature Festival last week. Two of the participants insist that no one does, and it’s our right to write in any language we choose. But what about those of us who are constrained by the language of our education to express ourselves exclusively in its idiom? And what of those who, while they live in one country, are only able to write freely in the language of a minority, or an elite?

“What if a language owns us?” I ask. I’m speaking about English, which is the lingua franca shared by the panellists and many members of the audience, who would claim that English is, for all practical purposes, the only language in which they are literate. But we may well be speaking about Urdu too. Many participants in the festival probably speak Punjabi, Pashto or any one of our several languages at home, but for reasons of contingency, convenience or love, they write (or broadcast, or both) in Urdu. I am reminded of a young friend from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who speaks Pashto at home, Siraiki with many of his friends, and English at work; but when it comes to poetry, he believes that Urdu is incomparable, and if he were to write poetry it would be in Urdu.

I’m particularly interested in this question of choice, because I’m reading a book of Urdu short stories by Rahat Ara Begum, a prolific Urdu writer of the 40s, whose work, like that of so many other women (or men, to be fair) was lost, and rediscovered by a critic in Delhi a half-century later. Most of the stories in the book, which was a selection printed in Delhi in 1994, are long; as the editor Fahmida Begum comments, they could, in their reach and span, almost be novels. They inhabit, in their themes, a territory not unfamiliar to us from the work of other writers of her generation, for example Saliha Abid Husain, who wrote about the struggles of middle-class women and men against the strictures of a materialistic society. However, unlike Rashid Jahan or Ismat Chughtai, whose protagonists often reject conventional morality, they rarely advocated radical feminist rebellion or a total rupture with tradition.

One of Rahat Ara’s stories, ‘Dilnawaz,’ is a fable in the manner of Attar or Nizami, set in a fairy tale world of palaces, princes and beautiful harem women; the eponymous heroine, though, is not a princess, but is a slave girl who lives and dies for love. In ‘Ghalati,’ another, longer story, a paterfamilias attempts to annihilate the will of his wife and children; he loses his older son to anomie, poverty and death, and only compromises when the other, too, threatens to follow his older brother into estrangement. Love, in these stories, is the common factor; in the second of them, love is the cause of both exile and reconciliation: romantic love drives the patriarch’s sons away, and paternal affection causes him to relent and ask his errant younger son for forgiveness.

These stories are set in worlds familiar to readers of Urdu fiction; locations are unnamed, but the palace of the first story could be anywhere from Baghdad to Murshidabad, and the second story, with its cinemas, colleges, offices and slums, could unfold in any Indian metropolis. However, in a third story — one of the longest in the book — Rahat Ara is far more specific about location: ‘Naujawan Talib-ilm’ is set in Calcutta and in nearby West Bengali villages. This, too, is a love story — a young man falls in love with his best friend’s sister, leaves her to study in Europe, and risks losing her to another suitor. Retold so baldly, the story resembles many written at the time, or even earlier, by one of Rahat Ara’s contemporaries. Along with its length and setting, the story displays its author’s dexterity with technique, as shifting perspectives and a long span of time are deftly handled and reveal the probable influence of film. But its defining features set it apart from most Urdu stories of the time. The story is set entirely among the Hindu bhadralok (genteel middle classes) of Bengal, with their social mores that seem, at least superficially, to be more open to the discourse of gender and modernity: for example, young women are allowed to mingle quite freely with their brothers’ friends, and though the question of (arranged) marriage always arises at a crucial point, these women have some say in their choice of marital partner.

Another long story, ‘E’teraf,’ restages some of the elements of ‘Naujawan Talib-ilm’. A young woman, out at the cinema with her husband, meets a childhood friend and takes him home to dinner. The friend is impoverished and unlucky. However, he soon becomes a liability, particularly when he threatens to reveal, in a gesture akin to blackmail, that he and the heroine had been childhood sweethearts until his scapegrace behaviour had led her parents to reject him as a potential bridegroom. Here, the heroine displays a degree of agency that is commensurate with the author’s moderate feminism.

In both these stories, Rahat Ara shows another significant influence, that of modern Bengali literature. The scenes of her fictions will be familiar to many of us from countless films we’ve seen that are derived from Bengali short stories. This observation leads us back to our original topic: do we own a language, or does a language own us? Why, unlike several of her contemporaries who chose Bengali for political reasons, did Rahat Ara Begum continue to write in Urdu until her early death? She was born into a privileged and highly educated family in Calcutta in 1910, and died in 1949 in Chittagong, where she had migrated with her husband and children after Partition. Apart from a few years in Lucknow, she seems to have spent most of her life in Bengal. She was conversant with Bengali; she translated Tagore’s play, Dak Ghar, into Urdu. But, in common with her relatives Shaista Ikramullah and Jamila Begum, Urdu was the language in which she wrote with the greatest ease.

To today’s reader, this choice of language gives her fiction a particular distinction: apart from her clear, flowing prose and her dexterity with dialogue, she brings to her fiction a very subtle element of cultural translation. (Most Urdu readers of the time would only have known Bengali fiction in translation; she conveys some of its unique qualities to them in her own idiom, which often captures a Bengali idiom and sensibility.) Later, she moved in other directions: ‘Geoff Bramlow,’ one of the stories in Fahmida Begum’s collection of her work, the longest and toughest, is set in England, and narrated by Queenie, an English woman who marries the Geoff of the title only to bring up his motherless daughter Myrtle. Is this a story she was inspired to write by reading in English? Is it an adaptation of something she read, or even a free, uncredited translation? The modernist style and sensibility of this piece, while different from her other work, still seem to be uniquely her own, as do the preoccupations — love, duty, social opprobrium — of the story. Another story which the editor leaves out, but glosses in her critical introduction, is apparently about the independence movement. She also translated Tolstoy into Urdu and at the apex of her writing life was obviously experimenting with the boundaries of culture and narration, and, had she lived, may have continued to bring something entirely new to contemporary Urdu fiction.

Why, then, has she been forgotten? Shaista Ikramullah, in her landmark study of Urdu fiction, mentions three collections of stories Rahat Ara had written. (She went on to write more; several of these were published in Lahore.)

We may now ask another question. Who owns a writer? The country of her birth, or the language of her choice, or the place where she is buried? Most of Rahat Ara’s books were published in an undivided India, where Urdu was not confined to one region or one nation; she migrated to what was then known as East Pakistan, giving her work a relevance to the literature of a new nation. Had she lived, she may have gone on to write about the land that would become Bangladesh, bringing the landscapes of Chittagong to the Urdu language.

Or she may even, given the political climate of the times, have chosen to write, or translate herself, in Bengali, or translate more Bengali fiction into Urdu — she was only in her late 30s when she died, and young enough to change languages. But today she is lost between linguistic and national borderlines.

Had she written in English, she would no doubt have been reclaimed long ago as one of Bangladesh’s national treasures; had she written in Bengali, she would certainly have been included by Shaheen Akhtar and Moushumi Bhowmik in Women in Concert, their pioneering anthology of Bengali Muslim women’s writing from 1904-1938. I discuss this with Bangladeshi poet and short story writer Sadaf Saaz, who is in Islamabad; she is Rahat Ara Begum’s granddaughter and introduced me to her work, which she, like most of her compatriots, can’t read in the original, though she longs to understand it. (Sadaf, too, like so many of us in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, knows her own language, Bengali, very well, and makes use of its cadences in her poems but, because of her education, writes only in English.)

Until Rahat Ara Begum is translated into Bengali she will remain unknown to the people of the land in which she is buried. In the meanwhile, however, she remains, for those of us who have the pleasure of reading her, a writer who brings together three countries — Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Fahmida Begum is to be praised for rediscovering her stories for Indian readers, and it’s up to Sadaf and her contemporaries to introduce her to Bangladesh. However, it it is now the task of custodians of the Urdu language in Pakistan to find her works that were published here, and bring more of her stories, which chronicle histories that are lost except in the pages of books, to a new generation of readers.