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Abstract
Ostensibly, Muslim women in colonial India only rarely wrote travel narratives, particularly in Urdu. In truth, women’s travel writing in Urdu is anything but chimerical, but persistent archival and methodological limitations have led to the neglect and even irrevocable loss of this writing. A recalibrated approach to travel writing and archival practices divulges a vast corpus—but only if we attend to the specific ways in which women’s narratives were produced and circulated. This article offers a primary typology of the formats and fora most often employed by women writing in Urdu, including semi-private (but orally consumed) letters, family newspapers and women’s journals. Using extensive quotations from previously unknown sources, it reintroduces a forgotten corpus to the study of Indian history, literature, and gender studies alike.
Acknowledgements
I thank the anonymous South Asia readers for their insightful feedback and suggestions. I am also indebted to Zehra Masrur Ahmad, Asif Farrukhi, Ameem Lutfi and Mavra Azeemi, without whose assistance the translation below would not have been possible. I also thank Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, who spurred and guided my interest in this topic. Further translated passages from this text will appear in a forthcoming anthology, A Tent of One’s Own, published by Indiana University Press (2021), edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Khalid ‘Alavi (ed.), Angare (Delhi: Ejukeshanal Publishing Ha’us, 2013), p. 163. All translations are my own, except where indicated.
2. Ibid., p. 164.
3. Carlo Coppola and Sajida Zubair, ‘Rashid Jahan: Urdu Literature’s First “Angry Young Woman”’, in Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 22, no. 1 (1987), p. 170.
4. Sayyid Maqbul Husain Zarif Lakhnavi, Intikhab-i Kalam-i Zarif (Lakhna’u: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi, 2nd ed., 1998), p. 98.
5. Even those works which do focus exclusively on contributions by women do not fully capture the scale and variability of this category of writing: for example, see Sadaf Fatimah, Khavatin ke Urdu Safarnamon ka Tahqiqi Mutala’ah (Karachi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-yi Urdu Pakistan, 2011). This literature is more reliable when it turns to travel writing from the 1970s onward.
6. One might object that Sultan Jehan Begum, the ruler of Bhopal, wrote an account of her 1864 Hajj journey in Urdu ‘in compliance with a request’ from the foreign secretary of the Government of India, Col. H.M. Durand, and his wife, Lady Durand. However, it does not appear that there was ever any intention to write a travel account for an Urdu readership. Rather, ‘Sikandar’s published work was very clearly directed at a British…audience’. Sikandar Begum and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. xxviii–xxxiii. A copy of the original manuscript was only rediscovered in 2020.
7. This question was widely debated by feminist scholars of travel writing in the 1980s and 1990s who wished to reclaim Victorian history for women. For an influential treatment, see Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).
8. Relevant references are given throughout this article. For a review of sources that engage with women’s travel writing in South Asia more generally, see the introduction in Atiya Begum Fyzee-Rahamin, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).
9. Ibid. An edition of travel writing that contains the works in Urdu of many women writers is Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz and Sunil Sharma (eds), A Tent of One’s Own: Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021).
10. Mills, Discourses of Difference, p. 201.
11. The best general overview available today remains Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Hajj’, in Dale F. Eickelman and James P. Piscatori (eds), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 85–107. In terms of women’s travel writing in Urdu, by far the best existing work is the review included in Sikandar Begum and Lambert-Hurley, A Princess’s Pilgrimage.
12. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Elusive Lives: Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), p. 3.
13. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 24.
14. For the case of Bengali, see Hans Harder, ‘Female Mobility and Bengali Women’s Travelogues in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), doi:10.1080/00856401.2020.1791500.
15. One might also add to this list the cultivation of a new sense of self. For more on this, see Lambert-Hurley, Elusive Lives.
16. See, for instance, M. Booth, ‘Locating Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Colonial Egypt’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25, no. 2 (2009), p. 36.
17. See Aruna Asif Ali, ‘Dihli se Landan’, in Jahan-numa, Vol. 1, no. 5 (Nov. 1947), pp. 51–4. I thank Dr. Abdur Rashid for drawing my attention to this rare exception.
18. For an influential and full treatment of how women were taught to adhere to ‘their’ cultures even as men joined the public sphere, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, ‘Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
19. While the readership of these magazines was not restricted to women or Muslims, the content often presumed a Muslim readership, speaking directly to religious concerns, for example the accessibility of halal food.
20. Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 24. On this point, see also C.M. Naim, Urdu Texts and Contexts: The Selected Essays of C.M. Naim (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 202.
21. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially Chap. 3; and Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, ‘Wheels of Change?: Impact of Railways on Colonial North Indian Society, 1855–1920’, unpublished PhD dissertation, SOAS, London, 2013, Chap. 3.
22. Garam Hava, M.S. Sathyu (dir.), Abu Siwani, Ishan Arya and M.S. Sathyu (prod.), 1973.
23. Nafis Ahmad Siddiqi, Begam Hasrat Mohani aur un ke Khutut o Safarnamah (Delhi: Maulana Hasrat Mohani Foundation, 2015). For a study and translation of the complete travel account, see Daniel Majchrowicz, ‘Begum Hasrat Mohani’s Journey to Iraq’, unpublished paper, 2020.
24. Majchrowicz, ‘Begum Hasrat Mohani’s Journey to Iraq’, pp 14–5.
25. The transformative role of the mail service and letter-writing has been most widely discussed in the study of reformist religious movements like Deoband, though not in this context. See Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
26. Muhammadi Begum, private diary (1934), n.p.g. I thank Zehra Masrur Ahmad for allowing me access to her mother’s private writing and introducing me to the writings of her grandmother, Qaisari Begum, and also Dr. Asif Farrukhi for facilitating our correspondence.
27. Qaisari Begam, Kitab-i Zindagi, Zehra Masrur Ahmad (ed.) (Karachi: Fazli Sons, 2003), p. 450.
28. See, for instance, Muhammadi Begum, ‘Aksfard se Khat’, in ‘Ismat (Sept. 1935), pp. 256–9; and Muhammadi Begum, ‘Haidarabad se Inglistan’, in ‘Ismat (1936 salana nambar).
29. This letter was included in Nur Begum’s full travel account, which was reprinted several times, but of which only two copies are now extant. See Nur Begum, Mazahir al-Nur, al-Ma’ruf bih, Safarnamah-yi Nur Bara’e Hajj o Ziyarat-i Huzur (Lahore: Rahmani Press, 3rd ed., 1933 [1952]), p. 9. The second letter concludes: ‘Call everyone from my community and have this letter read aloud to them’.
30. David Boyk, ‘Collaborative Wit: Provincial Publics in Colonial North India’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 38, no. 1 (2018), pp. 95–6.
31. Ummat al-Ghani Nur al-Nisa, Safarnamah-Yi Hijaz, Sham O Misr, Husn-i Jahan (ed.) (Hyderabad: Word Master Computer Publications Centre, 1996), p. 6. For an annotated partial English translation, see Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz and Sharma, A Tent of One’s Own. For the full Urdu text and a larger translated excerpt by the present author, see [https://accessingmuslimlives.org/travel/ummat/, accessed 23 July 2020].
32. Sylvia Vatuk, ‘Family Biographies as Sources for an Historical Anthropology of Muslim Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century South India’, in J. Assayag (ed.), The Resources of History: Tradition, Narration and Nation in South Asia, (Paris/Pondicherry: Écôle française d’Extrême Orient and Institut Français de Pondichery, 1999), p. 162.
33. Muhammadi Begum, private diary (1934), n.p.g.
34. Translation published in Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz and Sharma, A Tent of One’s Own.
35. Fyzee-Rahamin, Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys.
36. A translation by Sunil Sharma is forthcoming.
37. Rahil Shervaniya, Zad al-Sabil, ya, Rahlat al-Rahil (Aligarh: Matba’-i Muslim Univarsiti, 1929).
38. Fatima Begam, Hajj-i Baitullah o Safar-i Diyar-i Habib (Lahore: Kitabkhana-i Paisa Akhbar, 1959).
39. Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz and Sharma, A Tent of One’s Own.
40. For an instructive example from Bengali, see Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win! The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999), Chap. 9.
41. Minault, Secluded Scholars, p. 119. Historical information on women’s magazines in Urdu in this section is taken from Minault.
42. Fyzee-Rahamin, Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys.
43. One indication of this explicit foregrounding of a female audience is found in the regular reference to readers as one’s ‘sisters’. It is further reflected in the careful attention paid to logistical information specific to women travellers.
44. See, inter alia, S. Ansari, ‘Polygamy, Purdah and Political Representation: Engendering Citizenship in 1950s Pakistan’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1421–61.
45. A noteworthy and encouraging exception to this is the article in this issue by Harder, ‘Female Mobility and Bengali Women’s Travelogues in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’.
46. Booth, ‘Locating Women’s Autobiographical Writing in Colonial Egypt’, p. 36.