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ABSTRACT
The dominant image of Indian Muslim women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of being uneducated, silent, and secluded. This trope has crossed temporal and spatial borders, making its appearance even today in representations of Muslim girls in international development policy literature and media. Often Islam is blamed for women’s conditions, and limited attention is paid to their contextual specificity. One way to decolonize this imaginary is by excavating female Muslim subjects who defied these logics, with careful attention to how within the right circumstances Muslim women have been able to experience empowerment, however tentative. In this paper, I do so by re-purposing elite Muslim women’s auto/biographical writings from the turn of the twentieth century to intervene in dominant knowledges about their silence. I center an under-studied auto/biographical text Hayat-e-Ashraf (The Life of Ashraf) compiled by Muhammadi Begum (1878–1908), a pioneer female Muslim writer and editor from the turn of the twentieth century. Hayat-e-Ashraf includes not only Muhammadi Begum’s account of Ashraf-un-Nissa’s (d. 1903) life, but also articles written by Ashraf herself and her daughter. I therefore theorize the text as a palimpsest, layered with multiple performances of educated selves.
Acknowledgements
I thank the University of California Press for giving me permission to reproduce some sections from my book Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (2018).
Notes
1. Elsewhere I have explained how the over the course of the twentieth century the composite figure of the Muslim woman/girl has disaggregated into Muslim woman and girl (see Khoja-Moolji, 2018). In this paper, I use ‘Muslim girl’ to refer to girls’ education discourses in the contemporary development regime, and ‘Muslim woman’ to point to discourses from the turn of the twentieth century, keeping in mind that today’s gender distinctions cannot neatly be applied onto the past. For more see Khoja-Moolji, 2018.
2. See Cobbett, 2014; Koffman & Gill, 2013; Khoja-Moolji, 2017, 2018.
3. See Ahmad, 2014; Baron, 1994; Booth, 2001; Lal, 2013; Minault, 1998a, 1998b; Sarkar, 2001 & 2010.
4. Lambert-Hurley, 2013.
5. Gilmore and Marshall, 2010, 667.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 668.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. See note 4 above, 2013.
13. See Khoja-Moolji, 2018; Minault, 1998; C.M. Naim, 2004; Ahmad, 2014; Karlekar, 1993; Basu & Karlekar, 2008.
14. See Sarkar, 2008; Minault 1998a.
15. Padma Anagol (2008; 2010).
16. Anagol, 2010.
17. Anagol 2008, 619; original emphasis.
18. Ibid., 603.
19. Ibid.
20. See note 16 above, 2008.
21. Ray-Chaudhuri and Forbes, 2000.
22. Sarkar, 1999.
23. Sarkar, 2001 and 2008.
24. Sarkar, 2001, 227.
25. Gail Minault, 1998.
26. Minault, 1998a, 2.
27. Khoja-Moolji, 2018.
28. Ahmad, 2014.
29. Alam, 2015.
30. See C. M. Naim, 2004 and Ruby Lal, 2013.
31. Cherryholmes, 1993, 3.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 5.
34. Malhotra and Lambert-Hurley, 2015.
35. Ochs and Capps, 1996, 21/.
36. Vatuk, 2004.
37. Vatuk, 2004, 149.
38. Goulding, Walter, and Friedrich, 2013.
39. C. M. Nain (2004) provides a translation of these articles, hence, instead of reproducing the text, I hone in on particular scenes and situate them within my project of highlighting creative Muslim female subjects.
40. Sharif literally means ‘respectable’ but also signals social class and ethnic backgrounds. According to C. M. Naim (2004) Bibi Ashraf’s ancestors were from Bukhara in Central Asia and had served under various Mughal kings.
41. see Batsha, 2010.
42. Begum, 1899, 5.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. As cited in Shaheen, 2009, 20.
46. Shaheen, 2009.
47. Ibid.
48. Khatun, Vol. 3, Issue 1, as cited in Khoja-Moolji, 2018.
49. See note 42 above, 7.
50. Ibid., 8.
51. see ibid, 12.
52. Ibid., 14.
53. Ibid., 16.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 18.
56. Ibid., 19–20.
57. See Khoja-Moolji, 2015a.
58. Begum, 27.
59. Ibid., 28.
60. Ibid., 28.
61. Ibid., 29.
62. Ibid., 11.
63. Ramusack, 2004.
64. See Metcalf, 1992; Zaman, 2008; Khoja-Moolji, 2018.
65. See note 34 above, 2015.
66. Ahmad 2014, 63.
67. See note 28 above, 2014.
68. Ibid., 2014.
69. See Khoja-Moolji, 2018 for a detailed analysis of these texts.
70. See note 42 above, 45.
71. Ibid., 22, 25.
72. Ibid., 51.
73. Ibid., 37.
74. Ibid., 35.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 48.
77. McDonagh, 2005, (as cited in Goulding et al, 162).
78. See Khoja-Moolji, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2018.
79. Portelli, 1991.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Shenila Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018; Winner of the Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award by the Comparative and International Education Society). The book combines historical and cultural studies analyses with ethnographic work to examine the figure of the ‘educated girl’ in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. Her work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Theory, Feminist Media Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Gender and Education, Comparative Education Review, Girlhood Studies, and Feminist Teacher, among others.