Tahireh Qurratu’l-‘Ayn, a nineteenth-century Persian Bahai poet, holds a unique and prominent position among the canonical writers of narrative literature in Persian and Urdu on the Indian subcontinent. Her life and passionate poetry have played a significant role in various expressions of women’s emancipation in twentieth-century Urdu and Persian literature, ranging from Mohammad Iqbal’s monumental work Javidnamah (Book of Eternity) to Jamila Hashmi’s fictionalized biography of the poet, entitled Chehreh ba Chehreh (Face to Face). 

This article illuminates this understudied reception of the renowned Iranian poet, and examines how her life and poetry have provided a foundation for dissenting voices on the Indian subcontinent during the tumultuous twentieth century. The primary focus of the article is on the comparison between Iqbal’s “Song of Tahireh” in his Javidnamah and Hashmi’s masterful exploration of the poet’s life and ideas in her Persianized novella, Chehreh ba Chehreh. Through this in depth study, the article suggests that Tahireh’s ideas have significantly influneced the works of two major literary writers of the subcontinent and must be studied as a site to document how women’s voices have shaped the discourses of freedom in the canons that are exclusively celebrated for their male writers.