The Raging Women We Need: Review of ‘Kallo and Other Stories’

Patriarchy survives by making inequality appear natural. From childhood, women are taught purity, modesty, sacrifice and perfection, shaping their bodies, desires, ambitions and identities around roles that have been created for them. Patriarchy is sustained not only by institutions but also by language, customs, stories and everyday habits that turn privilege into merit and obedience into virtue. Challenging it means questioning these inherited ideas and recognising freedom, dignity, desire and selfhood as rights, not privileges.

Sameena Nazir’s Kallo and Other Stories (Hachette India), translated from Urdu by Saira Mujtaba, brings together women shaped by the quiet violence of patriarchy. Living under the demands of obedience, silence and sacrifice, they struggle to find themselves. Nazir does not present them as idealised rebels but as ordinary women carrying neglect, humiliation, violence and emotional exhaustion. Their resistance is intimate through a small choice, a reclaimed desire or a refusal to obey becomes an act of defiance. They do not overturn the world through grand gestures; they simply step beyond the invisible boundaries imposed on them. In doing so, they reclaim dignity, selfhood, desire and the right to lives they were taught did not belong to them.

In George R.R. Martin’s world, adapted by Ryan Condal in House of the Dragon, Mysaria, played by Sonoya Mizuno, is one of its most compelling women. Born without privilege or protection, she survives King’s Landing and rises through intelligence, instinct and an acute understanding of power. As Daemon’s confidante and Rhaenyra’s adviser, she moves beyond the boundaries imposed on women. She seeks neither spectacle nor approval, but influence on her own terms, becoming a woman desired by many yet controlled by none. A similar resistance runs through Sameena Nazir’s Kallo.

Kallo is mocked, abused and dismissed for failing to fit conventional ideas of femininity, yet, beneath years of humiliation lies a woman who refuses to surrender her sense of self. Mushtari Bano offers a darker contrast. Having internalised patriarchy so deeply, she sees her husband’s betrayal as fate and begins to believe that death is her only escape. When Kallo and Bano come together, however, they discover companionship, desire and bodily autonomy beyond the rules imposed upon them. Nazir suggests that freedom does not always begin with revolution. Sometimes it begins with recognising one’s own desires and choosing a life beyond the limits written by others.

In a patriarchal society, women are judged by rules they never created. When they cross these boundaries, they face ridicule, exclusion, intimidation or violence, especially through the policing of their bodies. Plus-size women are mocked, female sexuality condemned and those who reject conventional beauty labelled immoral or arrogant. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac exposes this through Joe, whose body is consumed by men who rarely understand her desires. Sameena Nazir’s Impotent offers a similar critique: when Zebu’s dupatta slips, the same body celebrated in films and advertisements becomes a source of gossip and objectification. Both works reveal how patriarchy turns women’s bodies into measures of morality and desire into possession. Nazir’s title further exposes the insecurity beneath masculine authority: the fear is not merely of impotence, but of losing control over women.

Stephanie Rothman’s The Working Girls and Sameena Nazir’s Chouha, despite their differences in geography and mediums, examine how patriarchy forces women to live by moral codes they never created. Honey, played by Sarah Kennedy, struggles to survive in New York, while Nazir’s women confront expectations of purity and respectability. In both works, ambition, desire and independence carry a moral price, yet, resistance begins with refusing to internalise these imposed values. Both also expose the contradictions of masculinity like men consuming women’s labour, bodies and emotions while judging the women who sustain them. Rothman and Nazir reject the categories of pure and impure, respectable and fallen, presenting women instead as complex individuals. The radical act is simply refusing to let patriarchy define them.

When Onir released Kuch Bheege Alfaz, its quiet sensuality found few willing to surrender to its rhythm. The film remains overlooked because it treats desire as more than the body. Through Alfaaz, played by Zain Khan Durrani, desire moves via language, silence and longing, while his late-night radio broadcasts become intimate confessions. Nazir’s Miss Razia similarly explores desire through restraint. Beneath Razia’s stern exterior lies a woman shaped by loneliness and unspoken longing, slowly rediscovering her body, emotions and the right to desire. Onir and Nazir meet in their understanding of sensuality as tenderness, anticipation, memory and self-discovery rather than mere physicality. In both works, desire becomes an act of reclaiming the self, suggesting that true eroticism lies not in possession but in the freedom to feel, want and become oneself.

Mujtaba’s translation is effective in its simplicity, preserving the literary beauty, sensuality, silences and emotional depth of Nazir’s writing. She carries the stories’ pauses, layered emotions and subtle shifts in tone into English, making their women’s fears, desires, and struggles immediate to the reader. Mujtaba allows Nazir’s work to cross languages without losing its cultural specificity or radical imagination.

Kallo and Other Stories is therefore more than a collection about women resisting patriarchy; it is an intimate portrait of a society that disciplines their bodies, desires and voices. Nazir’s quiet anger gives her women the courage to reject shame, reclaim their bodies and dare to want lives of their own.

(Kabir Deb is a writer, reviewer and translator based in Karimganj, Assam)