In the dying days of the British Raj, over a family meal in Lucknow, a young Indian man, greatly influenced by communist and Marxist thought while at Oxford in the 1930s, launched forth with his political ideas. The subject at hand: Lenin and the Soviets. His mother, at the other end of the table, leaned forward. “If there’s something wrong with the linen and serviettes,” she said, “let me know. I’ll attend to it.”

The young man was my maternal grandfather, and the story is the stuff of family legend. As a child I loved the humour of that tale – now I am startled by the picture it forms of my great-grandmother as a traditional figure of 1940s Indian womanhood, unable to step outside the domestic, even when faced with a communist dictator.

You certainly wouldn’t guess from that story, or necessarily from photographs of my great-grandmother (which show a tiny woman, her head covered with a dupatta), that she was a politician and the first of four generations of women writers in my family.

I grew up among my mother’s remarkable collection of books – made more remarkable by how difficult it could be in the 1980s to get hold of Anglophone literature in Karachi. She was generally quite happy to let me work my way through her bookshelf, but every so often in my teenage years she would direct me towards particular writers – Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Anita Desai, Kazuo Ishiguro. When my best friend and I co-wrote a “novel” at the age of 11 my mother showed me how to use the word-processing program on her recently acquired computer. Some years later, after I had co-written another book, she suggested that I needed to develop my own voice. This was one of her rare pieces of advice – largely she left me to find my own way, not wanting to exert any pressure or expectation. Although she certainly read my fiction, she always responded as a proud mother rather than an analytical critic and that dynamic remains the same today.

Now, when I’m in Karachi, I write at a desk separated from my mother’s office by an enclosed patio. We can look up from our computers to see each other at work and sometimes, I think, we also catch a glimpse of the other women writers of our famil

I grew up with a curious mix of awareness and ignorance about this literary line. I certainly knew that my great-aunt, Attia Hosain (or “B”, as everyone knew her), was a writer who had two books published in the 1960s by Chatto. As someone who wanted to be a fiction writer from a very early age, and whose first and default language was English, I remember pulling B’s novels off my mother’s bookshelf and marvelling that a relation should have achieved my great dream – publication by a house at the centre of English literature.

But all those great-aunts and great-grandmothers and great-great-uncles (yes, the men wrote too) who were writing non-fiction on travelling through Europe (my great-grandmother), women’s rights in Pakistan (my great-aunt Tazeen) and the history of plagues in Asia (my great-great-grandfather, despite having no medical training whatsoever) barely registered with me. In large part this was precisely because so many family members wrote that it didn’t seem a matter of distinction.

More than that, my lack of interest was because I saw myself as an English-language fiction writer. All those relatives writing in Urdu, or writing non-fiction in any language, seemed to have very little to do with my own aspirations. It was much later that I realised how important it was for me to grow up in a family where the written word mattered so deeply. Even later that I saw how the various women writers of my family were involved in dismantling stereotypes and breaking free of the traditional roles expected of wome

The line started with my great-grandmother, Inam Habibullah. She was one of a number of Indian women of her generation with a keen spirit of reform, who believed it vital to write for other women – many of whom lived profoundly restricted lives.

In 1924 she travelled with her husband and young daughter from India to England (where her three sons were at boarding school) and parts of Europe, and soon after wrote a memoir in Urdu about her travels.

She had grown up observing the veiled and segregated life of purdah, but discarded it at some point during her marriage. In 1938, the year after she entered the provincial assembly as a member of the All-India Muslim League, she helped found – and became the first president of – the women’s subcommittee of that organisation. A great many of the men within the Muslim League were outraged by her insistence on drawing Muslim women out of the world of purdah into politics. (For the record, her daughter Tazeen insists she knew exactly who Lenin and the Soviets were, but had cleverly calculated the only response that could stop my grandfather mid-monologue.

Tazeen, along with Attia Hosain and my third great-aunt, Hamida, were all fiery women – writers, politicians, activists. I used to regard my grandmother Jahanara as the exception – the one who took the wholly traditional route of wife and mother without combining it with intellectual pursuits. She was certainly well read, but I never suspected she wanted to participate in the world of letters.

After my grandfather died, one of my great-aunts in India encouraged my grandmother to write down her recollections of her childhood in pre-Partition India, in the princely state of Rampur. The world she remembered was gone by then and, though she was quick to tell me that it had been “terrible, terrible” in its intrigues and imbalance of power, she had affectionate memories of the cultural life of the Rampur court – the great meals, the monsoon and mango parties, the songs that accompanied weddings. She also had a wonderful turn of phrase in a courtly Urdu that belonged to a bygone era and so the act of writing was also an act of preserving that fading language.

When Oxford University Press (OUP) translated the memoir into English and had it published she was pleased, yet also felt that something had been lost in translation. Then, in 2004, OUP started publishing Urdu books and her memoir was among the first on its list. Her delight was enormous. She told her sister-in-law, Tazeen: “I wasted my life being a housewife! I should have been a writer all along.” She was not a woman to wallow, so I like to imagine that this was said, not with deep regret, but triumph at having worked out something wonderful about her own potential in her mid-80s. In May 2004, OUP asked her to write a speech for her book launch, on which she was working on the last day of her life. She died peacefully in her sleep and the launch went ahead as a memorial and celebration. In one of our last conversations she said gleefully, “We are both writers now!”

I’m often told that there must be a writing gene passed on in my family. I’m as inclined to think that I grew up in a writing atmosphere. Certainly it’s impossible to underestimate the value of growing up the daughter of Muneeza Shamsie. My mother has always loved books, but for a long time thought her lack of university education meant she didn’t have the qualifications to write or talk publicly about them. It was my father who first bought her a typewriter and encouraged her to write for the newspapers – often editing her articles in the early days. She was a feature writer, then a book reviewer, and is now a short-story writer and – I’m pretty sure I can say this without nepotism – the leading critic and expert on Pakistani Anglophone writing.

When I think of all these women, I finally understand what was hidden from me in my “take-everything-for-granted” childhood, when I chose not to dwell on my personal heritage. Because, while I grew up in the harsh world of a misogynist military government in 1980s Pakistan – where women’s freedom was severely threatened – my familial legacy enabled me to imagine, without pressure or expectation, a life centred around writing.

Kamila Shamsie | 1 May 2009 | The Guardian