Projecting Pakistan in Washington DC (1949)

The Urdu writer Ruhafza Hyder introducing American audiences to Pakistan on NBC Radio in a photograph taken in Washington DC 1949. Beside her is her young son, future ambassador Tariq Osman Hyder. She likewise organised cultural programmes visualizing Pakistan in DC, New York, and as per her husband Sajjad Hyder's diplomatic and ambassadorial postings, around the world.

Ruhafza's early interest in writing was fostered by her father, a civil servant, teaching her Farsi and her mother, herself a writer, Urdu: she won a writing prize from Phool Magazine aged six. Educated at Lady Maclagan School and Lahore College, she was amongst the earliest Muslim women in Punjab to attain both a BA and a Munshi Fazil degree in Persian in the late 1930s. She then taught Persian at Islamia College until marriage took her abroad.

– Rehana Hyder