South Asian cultural mythology has maintained a strict zoning law for female desire, with ambition receiving approval so long as it serves a family, selflessness held up as a woman's finest virtue, and her own wants subject to the condition that they never inconvenience anybody else. A woman who decides that those wants deserve precedence is introduced to a word that has followed generations of women around: khudgarz, selfish. The accusation carries the suggestion of a fundamental social theft, as though wanting something for herself was an unreasonable demand on everybody else's behalf.

A man who prioritises his ambitions can be celebrated for his drive; a woman who does the same is liable to be reminded of her obligations. Her choices are measured against the people they inconvenience, the relationships they disrupt, and the expectations she has failed to fulfil. Selfishness becomes a convenient charge to level at women who decline to make themselves endlessly available to others, and the word carries enough moral disapproval to make even an ordinary act of self-preservation look suspicious. Apparently, a woman can want quite a lot, provided she remembers to consider everybody else's feelings first.

On her debut full-length, 'Khudgarzi', American-Indian composer and theatre artist Sheherazaad uses this accusation as the starting point for a cast of women whose stories fall outside the terms of respectable femininity. Across ten tracks, courtesans, sex workers, shunned lovers, songstresses, and other femme figures appear as storytellers, survivors, and witnesses. Some are described as dangerous, some carry the stigma of being undesirable, others occupy roles through which women have historically been judged, consumed or dismissed. The work takes an interest in the women who seldom receive the suspension of judgement, and in what their stories might sound like when they are allowed to speak for themselves.

Society prefers its victims graceful. Suffering only earns sympathy when the person enduring it remains forgiving, quiet, and careful not to make a mess of anyone else’s afternoon. The moment a woman retaliates, manipulates, or puts her own survival ahead of the social contract, the conversation instantly pivots from what was done to her to how she chose to handle it. The cultural demand that a female protagonist prove her moral purity before earning our empathy is exhausting. The villain gets a grand monologue and the woman in the neighbourhood gets a character assessment.

Sheherazaad began constructing these fictional narrators in the aftermath of a broken engagement, an experience that provided an emotional point of departure for the collection. Her background in theatre informs the way she approaches the roles women inherit and the histories attached to them. The narrators occupy positions of public authority and private ruin, with each perspective carrying its own relationship to power, memory and authorship. A woman who tells her own story claims a different territory from one whose history has been curated by somebody else; a woman remembered as a villain leaves a different trace from one remembered as a martyr. The boundaries between storyteller, witness and subject remain in constant conversation, giving the collection a theatrical structure without requiring its characters to arrive at a shared moral conclusion.

The theatrical framing also leaves room for women who resist easy sympathy, which is where the project finds its teeth. Female defiance has acquired its own set of prescriptive rules: be independent, be fearless, know your worth, and make sure your rebellion remains sufficiently inspiring to the spectators. The women in Khudgarzi resist the categorisation that turns female characters into interchangeable illustrations of oppression, with their appetites and grievances extending across different moral and emotional registers. A woman can be ambitious and inconsiderate, tender and cruel, or entirely unresolved in her motivations. She deserves the same moral latitude that narrative tradition has long afforded male characters.

Musically, Sheherazaad describes the collection as an extension of her dystopic folk-noir and dark-pop vocabulary, drawing on Hindustani, Turkish, Arabic and Carnatic traditions. The tanbur, santoor, veena, rabab, ghatam and gungaroo sit within arrangements that also incorporate weather recordings, breath, echoes, moans and animal sounds. Her want to preserve room noise and stillness in the production, leaving space around the vocal performances, results in a collection whose musical references are as wide-ranging as its cast of narrators, with each composition given its own setting and atmosphere.

The characters also find expression through the songs themselves. Pakeezah takes on the expectation of feminine purity, addressing the impossible image of the unblemished woman and the social scrutiny attached to it. Gulukara, featuring Irfana, centres a songstress whose performance is also her livelihood; its lyrics bring the labour of women entertainers, the demands placed on their bodies and the economics of their work into the same conversation. On Andhera, Sheherazaad draws on what she describes as a Bolly-goth pop sensibility to write about a vilified lover who turns towards darkness, giving romantic grief a mythic scale. Registaan, featuring Daatri Dadhich on vocals, follows a woman alone in a desert landscape, determined to find her own way towards freedom. These songs give the album's fictional women different circumstances and vocabularies, allowing the writing to carry the argument beyond its central premise.

Her relationship with language adds another dimension to this construction. Raised in California in a second-generation immigrant household, Sheherazaad writes across Hindi-Urdu, English and Tamil, drawing on the tensions of growing up between linguistic worlds. Her songwriting displays an exploration of broken tongues, a phrase that carries particular significance in a collection concerned with women whose histories have been interpreted, preserved or distorted by others. Language carries its own associations of geography, class, inheritance and belonging, and the movement between tongues gives the narrators different ways of occupying the stories they inhabit. Sheherazaad's diasporic experience enters this conversation without requiring the women she writes to represent one unified cultural experience.

The collaborative process also deserves attention. Alongside Irfana and Daatri Dadhich, more than thirty musicians contributed to the record, including Ria Modak, Sarathy Korwar, Jay Chakravorty, Shunya and Qasim Naqvi. Having grown up with the idea that there could be only one woman at the table, Sheherazaad places considerable importance on creating room for other women in the making of this record. Female ambition has long been framed through competition, with recognition treated as a limited resource and solidarity as an afterthought. Bringing multiple creators into the same project offers a different account of authorship, one in which creative authority can be shared without diminishing the contributions of individual artists.

There is a risk, with any work centred on female defiance, of turning women into sanitised symbols of resistance. The supposedly selfish woman can become another idealised figure: independent, self-assured and perpetually vindicated by history. Khudgarzi is at its most interesting when its characters remain inconsistent, unwise and difficult to reconcile with the expectations placed upon them. Their freedom cannot depend on performing an especially attractive version of rebellion, or on emerging from every experience with a lesson that makes their choices easier to accept.

Sheherazaad's debut makes room for women to occupy the roles of villains, witnesses and protagonists without requiring a verdict on their lives. The woman who wants something for herself has spent long enough defending the request.

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