Parde Ke Peeche (پردے کے پیچھے) by Rashid Jahan: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: Parde Ke Peeche (Behind the Veil) by Rashid Jahan: summary with the ending, Muhammadi Begum on childbirth, surgery and her husband, the Angarey context, themes and craft.
Two women sit talking behind the curtain of a respectable Muslim household. One of them, Muhammadi Begum, is thirty-two and looks fifty, has borne child after child, has been cut and stitched by doctors at her husband's request, and is now being told he may take a second wife. The other listens. Nothing happens except the telling.
Rashid Jahan (1905 to 1952) published the piece in Angarey in 1932, written as a one-act dialogue rather than narrated prose, which is why some anthologies file it as a play. Read alongside Dilli Ki Sair, it is the more painful of her two contributions and the one that drew the sharpest anger, because it put a gynaecologist's knowledge into a wife's mouth.
The story in brief
Aftab Begum visits Muhammadi Begum and remarks on how worn she looks. Muhammadi Begum answers with the history of her marriage: pregnancies almost every year, several children dead, her body wrecked, and a husband who insists on his rights regardless of her health. She has undergone operations, arranged on his instructions through a lady doctor, meant to restore what childbearing has changed, so that he will not lose interest.
The husband is nonetheless losing interest, and has spoken of a younger second wife. Muhammadi Begum reports all this without rebellion, half accepting it as a wife's lot, half aware of the cruelty. The conversation is cut off by the sound of the husband arriving, and the women compose themselves. The curtain of the title falls back into place, and the piece ends with nothing changed.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exam readings cover the reproductive burden placed on women, marital rape before the phrase existed, and the medical trade that served husbands rather than wives. Rashid Jahan was a practising doctor in Lucknow and knew each of these from her clinic.
The sharper observation is the form. By writing dialogue only, she keeps the reader in the position of the visiting woman: behind the veil, hearing what men never hear. The husband's offstage arrival is the piece's only event, and it shows how the whole conversation exists in the small space before he walks in.
The craft
The turn is the interruption. There is no climax within the confession itself; the arrival of the husband is what gives the talk its shape, because it reveals that everything said had to be said quickly and in secret.
The technique worth stealing is the confession cut short by the return of its subject. Let a character speak at length about someone, and end the scene the moment that person enters, before anything can be resolved. The silence that follows is the story.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Note the form: a one-act dialogue, sometimes filed as a play.
- Connect the medical detail to Rashid Jahan's work as a gynaecologist.
- Treat the husband's arrival as the structural event.
- For your own fiction, try a scene made only of dialogue between two people about an absent third.
- End the moment the absent person appears.
- Let acceptance in a character's speech carry more accusation than protest would.
Try it yourself
Write a scene in dialogue alone in which one character describes, calmly and in detail, what a marriage has done to her body, and cut the scene at the instant the spouse's footsteps are heard.
Questions
What is Parde Ke Peeche about?
A worn-out wife, Muhammadi Begum, tells a visitor about her endless pregnancies, the operations her husband demanded, and his talk of a second wife. The conversation ends when he arrives home.
Is Parde Ke Peeche a story or a play?
Rashid Jahan wrote it as a one-act dialogue for the 1932 Angarey anthology. It is read as short fiction in most courses but staged as drama too.
What is the theme of Parde Ke Peeche?
The physical and sexual cost of marriage to women in purdah, and the way medicine and custom served the husband's demands.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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