and published them in magazines such as Khatun of Aligarh, Ismat of Delhi and Sharif Bibi of Lahore. She was also responsible for establishing the Young Sherwanis' League comprising young members of the Sherwani clan, which promoted schools for the children of Bhikampur and Datauli and generated funds to run a boarding house for the Aligarh Girls' School. She wrote about the conditions of Muslims in other places and also scripted nazms (Urdu poetry in rhymed verse) on the Tripolitan wars, the Balkan War (1911–13) and the Kanpur Mosque Tragedy (1913), and when a Red Crescent was also set up in Aligarh. A nazm Sherwani wrote in 1913 titled ‘Id ki Khushi men Ghamzadegan-i-Kanpur (Festival of ‘Id in Memory of the Victims of Kanpur) was published under her pen name Nuzhat in Zamindar, a newspaper of Lahore. Her father, who saw this article, was unhappy with the tenor of the article which criticized the government and covered Muslim political causes, warned his daughter to be careful in her writings, though he was appreciative of her poetry. Another poem she published in Zamindar, titled Mosul ka tail, which dealt with the importance of oil in the international economy and the West's move to control oil deposits around the world, also alarmed her father. Upset with her father's warnings, she discontinued writing for some time. She resumed writing poetry without telling her father. In the meanwhile, her brother Ahmadullah died in 1916 which anguished her as he was a constant support and source of information to her. After this tragedy her tenor of writing took a serious turn and in 1918 she published Sipas Nama-i-Urdu (In Praise of Urdu) which was narrated on the occasion of the inauguration of Osmania University, Hyderabad, then the only institution of higher education in India where Urdu was the medium of instruction; she had published the poem under her pseudonym and people did not know then that it was written by a woman. Shan-ul-Haq Haqqee wrote a critique on this poem noting "its powerful imagery and the parallels the poet draws between the status of Urdu—marginalized, ignored, hidden from view—and the status of women in her society". She had also evinced interest in the Gandhian swadeshi movement and had started changing her wardrobe with clothes made of khadi in support of Indian nationalism. Sherwani did not get married, as a cousin whom she was to marry