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Preface

India’s Muslims have always been an integral part of Indian democracy —

socially, culturally as well as politically. They have written extensively and have been

written extensively about. Although India’s Muslims have been a substantial subject

in academia, there are certain aspects which one needs to inspect, such as that of the

social stratification that exists among them. Recent scholarship, particularly

sociological research by eminent sociologists suggests a pluralism among Muslims as

opposed to the rudimentary idea of the supposed egalitarianism among them. This

dissertation seeks to study the problematics of social stratification, gender and aspects

of the Muslim society in India through its fictional representations in select short

stories and novels by Ismat Chughtai and the novel, Chandni Begum (1989) by

Qurratulain Hyder. Apart from the issues of class, gender and society, a significant

part of this dissertation is also devoted to the process of identity-formation of

Muslims in India which has been the consequence of the socio-political and religious

movements that came into play before India itself became a nation-state.

The methodology of this dissertation is sociological through which the texts

have been analysed. The “Introduction” opens with a general overview of Muslim

society and the question of stratification, moving on to the relationship between the

disciplines of literature and ethnography. Within the theoretical framework of

sociologists such as Clifford Geertz and theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, an attempt

has been made to understand ‘the strange romance’ as Geertz addresses it, between

fiction and ethnography in terms of not only how fiction is mostly understood as a

discipline which reflects society but also how society is constructed and experienced

through fiction and also in terms of how fiction, like ethnography, aims at bringing

the private into the public and to make the unknown, known. It further places the
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Indian Muslim society against the historical context of colonization and the national

movement wherein a distinctive Muslim identity was shaped owing to such historical

forces. It moves on to an overview of Indian Muslim writers and their works, right

from Dastan-e-Amir Hamza (1855) to the more radical philosophy and oeuvre of the

Progressive Writers’ Movement of the early 20th century helmed by Sajjad Zaheer

and later, Shama Fatehully in recent years. It finally focuses on the life and works of

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder, followed by a literature review on the said

concerns and the relative scope of this work.

The first chapter is centred on the social category of class and its ramifications

within Indian Muslim society. Beginning with the hierarchies of class and caste

within Indian society in general and Muslim society in particular, it moves on to read

these structures along the lines of Marxist thought. Drawing on the cultural and

theoretical insights of sociologists such as Imtiaz Ahmad, Ghaus Ansari and Zarina

Bhatty, this chapter delineates the problematics of social stratification rampant among

India’s Muslims, particularly among the Pasmanda or lower strata of Muslim society.

It finally gives an outline of the life and works of Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain

Hyder and ends with an exploration of the dichotomies of class and other sorts of

stratification in short stories such as “Gainda” and “Gharwali” by Chughtai and the

novel, Chandni Begum by Hyder. It analyses these works through a comprehensive

framework of Marxist thought and sharif (noble) culture within Muslim gentility.

The second chapter peruses the notion of gender in select works of the authors,

reading it mainly along the lines of Judith Butler’s idea that gender is a construct

developed on pre-decided roles for men and women which they perform. It begins

with a discussion of the Muslim reform movements which entailed an insistence on

women’s education. It further develops on the acknowledgment and uninhibited

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discussion of sexuality by the women characters in the fiction of Ismat Chughtai and

how such proclamations are a way of asserting their individuality, agency and power.

It analyses her story “Lihaaf” and the novel Dil Ki Duniya (1966) wherein the first

deals with the unhappy marriage of a Begum and a Nawab with undercurrents of

homosexuality and the other deals with a broken marriage where the wife has been

abandoned by her husband. It further discusses the role of women in the novel

Chandni Begum (1989) by Qurratulain Hyder and how they transcend social

constructions of gender and class to become agents of change. The main focus of this

chapter is gender relations and the challenges which spring from being a woman in a

largely patriarchal society in the works of the two writers chosen for study.

The third chapter, which is centred on the socio-cultural milieu of the Indian

Muslim community, builds on the nationalist project of Muslim reformers in India

who propagated familial honour and domestic harmony as essential for carving out a

communal minority identity in the face of Hindu majority and colonial power. The

central figure of the Muslim home was the housewife, often considered the propagator

and preserver of socio-cultural mores. This chapter shows how narratives of the

authors are blatant contestations of this ‘proper’ image of women in the public sphere

through depiction of non-conforming and rebellious women characters as well as non-

normative marriages. This chapter thus focuses on the family structure within the

Indian Muslim society, focusing largely on interpersonal relations, domestic helpers,

challenges faced by the individuals and also on their relationship with the outside

world. This is followed by a conclusion wherein the major issues this dissertation

focuses on have been summarised.

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Introduction

This dissertation titled “Class, Gender and Society: A Study of Select Writings of

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder” seeks to examine the issues within the Indian

Muslim community, particularly of social stratification in terms of lineage and

intersectionality of class and gender. Given the professed egalitarian philosophy of

Islam, the customary understanding of the Muslim community in India is that it is a

homogeneous society, bereft of any divisions. However, recent scholarship,

particularly sociological research ensues a pluralism among India’s Muslims which is

as rampant as in any other society. They are an elaborately stratified lot which is

manifested through their customs, traditions, occupations and living conditions. Also,

this stratification is significantly present in literature.

The present research focuses on reading, through interdisciplinary frames of

ethnography and sociology, select works of two of the most prolific and widely-read

Indian writers, Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) and Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007), who

wrote in Urdu and whose works hold up a mirror to the issues within the Indian

Muslim community. The primary texts undertaken for analysis are Ismat Chughtai’s

collection of short stories, Lifting the Veil (2009) from which a few selected stories

have been analysed, aspects of her novels Tehri Lakeer (1940) and Dil Ki Duniya

(1966) as well as Qurratulain Hyder’s novel Chandni Begum (1989) and aspects of

The Housing Society (1963). Originally in Urdu, the English translations of these texts

have been taken for reference. These two writers have rightly been read and analyzed

mostly through a feminist perspective; this project, however, is invested into

promulgating issues such as class, stratification and society in these works which have

hitherto been neglected in academia.

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This chapter aims to place the work in perspective by first establishing a relation

between fiction and society through an ethnographic point of view in terms of how,

mainly, fiction can reflect society and not just how society inspires writers to delve on

it. Another sub-section gives an overview of the socio-political conditions which led

to the carving out of a unique identity for India’s Muslims, mainly India’s

colonization by the British and the subsequent national movement for independence.

The next subsection dwells on significant Indian Muslim writers who were active

during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a especial emphasis on the

progressive writers’ movement. The last subsection is about the life and works of

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder which also puts their writings in the context of

the socio-political milieu of their time. This is followed by literature review and scope

as well as the objective of the present work.

Fiction and Society: An Ethnographic Perspective

Literature’s preoccupation with human life and society links it closely to the

discipline of Ethnography. It is in their rather shared endeavour to make sense of

human society and also, their emphasis on writing that the two often cross borders.

This makes the fields more trans-disciplinary than interdisciplinary, whereby the two

disciplines transcend each other and give rise to a new holistic approach. Within

academia, there has been a steady burgeoning of the analysis of ethnographic leanings

in Literature and how fiction can actually take up the task of ethnographic readings in

order to accentuate the study of humanity itself. Fiction has been one of the primary

areas for such research as it builds on different cultures, often progressing from words

to gestures and underlying codes of conduct. At its center, the various constructions of

meanings pertaining to a particular culture can be discerned through the work taken

for analysis. While defining ethnography, British Anthropologist Meyer Fortes states:
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Writing an anthropological monograph is itself an instrument of research, and

perhaps the most significant instrument of research in the anthropologist’s

armoury. It involves breaking up the vivid, kaleidoscopic reality of human

action, thought, and emotion which lives in the anthropologist’s note-books

and memory, and creating out of the pieces a coherent representation of a

society. (vii)

Fiction, for which the backdrop is civilization and humankind, can patently be

specified in similar terms as Fortes’ rendition of ethnography. Fiction writers too,

break up the “reality of human action, thought, and emotion” (Fortes viii) on paper to

demonstrate their conceptualization of society. Literary anthropology as a field of

study analyses literary texts for ethnographic source material, for instance, how the

inception of printed dailies in Hungary led to the rise of nationalistic sentiment in

Hungary in the 19th century. Conversely, concepts and theories in ethnography are

resorted to, for the analysis of literature, such as the employment of the concept of

‘thick description’ as given by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, to the New-Historicism

approach to analyse literature, wherein the social context with all the symbols and

meanings of a particular culture are taken into account in order to understand its

inhabitants.

The sheer immensity of scholarship over the polemics of an interdisciplinary

relationship between literature and anthropology is alone enough to fathom the

magnitude of just how indispensable the two disciplines are for each other: John

Leavitt’s book Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration (1997) draws

the relationships and links among brought categories such as literature, folk poetry,

philosophy and prophesy; Novel Approaches to Anthropology: Contributions to

Literary Anthropology (2013) edited by Marilyn Cohen, probes into how

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ethnographers analyse fiction and travel writing through pedagogical approaches,

concepts and perceptions from their own discipline whereas the book Blurring the

Boundaries between Literature and Anthropology: A British Perspective (2014) by

Ullrich Kockel and Máiréad Nic Craith also traverses between the two disciplines;

Helena Wulff’s Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (2017) by

takes as its central premise the anthropological inquiry into writers, writing and

contemporary literary culture. Such studies open spaces into observing, interpreting

and analyzing human behaviour, communities as well as standpoints more inclusively.

This predilection for traversing from one discipline to another by scholars of both

and the recurring preoccupation with interpreting and analyzing literature as a cultural

and social artifact continue to fortify the relative merits of interdisciplinary

approaches by academicians of both fields as well as the popular consensus to

understand literature along the lines of being a social and cultural artefact.. One can

contend that literature’s alliance with ethnography is interminable owing to their

natural interconnectedness and that there is going to be more significant scholarship

that would posit and explore literature against its cultural and social milieu.

Clifford Geertz was one of the foremost theorists of literary anthropology, vying

for ‘a strange romance’ between literature and anthropology. Geertz interestingly

claims that the strength of an anthropologist lies in his ‘in-wrought perceptions’ which

bring his discipline closer to literature than science. If one thinks of Geetrz as one of

the leading patrons of literary anthropology, one must also bring to mind his

contemporary, Wolfgang Iser who works along similar lines. Iser recognizes literature

as a kind of anthropology, one which gives way to cultural formulations in order to

interpret and understand society in a particular era or within specific societal

communities. The literary discipline is most often understood in terms of an

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interpretive tool for understanding the world in general and humans in particular and

its intentions have always been to divulge secrets that have otherwise been abstruse.

Iser draws on this privileged position of literature, claiming that it traverses into the

contours of transgressing boundaries of disciplines and cultures from that vantage

point which has not been secured by other disciplines. In his book How to do Theory

(2005), Wolfgang Iser opines:

We still have ethnography, which is basically what the practitioners of

anthropology are concerned with, but we also have philosophical, cultural,

historical, even literary anthropology, distinguished by their respective

objectives and their methodological presuppositions. (131)

In his other book, Iser writes: “Since literature as a medium has been with us

more or less since the beginning of recorded time, its presence must presumably meet

certain anthropological needs” (“Towards a Literary Anthropology” 264). Fiction is

mostly understood as a discipline which reflects society; however, society is also

constructed and experienced through fiction. Narratives divulge truths about spaces

and communities and one can’t help but think about the writer’s responsibility to

represent truth. Jhumpa Lahiri, for instance, in her celebrated work, The Namesake

(2003) records the several experiences of immigrants specifically of the first and

second generation Indian diaspora in America. Likewise, as ethnographers make

sense of social practices and customs, mainly through observation, they not only

unravel cultural metaphors, but also simultaneously create literary metaphors which

would convey cultural forms to the reader. In James Clifford’s words,

“Literary processes — metaphor, figuration, narrative — affect the ways

cultural phenomena are registered, from the first jotted ‘observations’, to the
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completed book, to the ways these configurations ‘make sense’ in determined

acts of reading.” (“Introduction” 4).

Even Levi Strauss, one of the founders of cultural anthropology wrote about the

value of the story in his Mythologiques (1964). Furthermore, as a result of trans-

nationalism, migration and globalization, cultures have undergone massive

alterations. These cultural and social changes have not only affected anthropology,

but literature as well, making the writer think more in terms of adapting his writing

according to the larger realities of contemporary society. Therefore, it’s not just

through figurative language, passages which are suggestive of certain places,

dialogues, themes and character, but also through what goes as part of the readers’

interpretation of the texts according to his or her own background and understanding

that close connections are found between fiction and ethnography.

Another spectrum where a confluence of fiction and ethnography can be

imagined is that like ethnography, fiction too aims at bringing the private into the

public, to make the unknown, known and, to give the voiceless, a voice, as new

possibilities of representation open up. Fiction not only ‘tells’ a story but also ‘makes’

it just as much as ethnography makes the reader or observer experience the social and

cultural practices of another group. It is within this framework that the present work

places select works of Indian writers, Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder.

Colonisation, National Movement and India’s Muslims

The larger project of British rule in India implied a bringing together of the

subjects in order to rule. However, as the empire drew the people together, drawing

strategies to combat the many challenges of imperialism, certain divisions were

exacerbated. The most notable was the change amidst the Muslim community of India
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who went from a previously unified group to claiming themselves as having a

separate identity of their own. The Revolt of 1857 or the Mutiny has largely been

considered a starting point for this. The Revolt has been considered not just as a mere

uprising but also the seed from which the Indian struggle for Independence began.

One strand tracing the reasons behind the uprising was put forward by Sir Syed

Ahmad Khan, the influential leader and one of the foremost Muslim thinkers of India.

He extended his loyalty towards the colonial rulers all through the uprising,

concerning himself truly with reconciling the British with their Muslim subjects.

Sir Syed penned three works on the uprising: The History of the Mutiny

(1858), The Causes of the Mutiny (1858), and The Loyal Mohammadans of India

(1860). The second work is a vehement critique of how the East India Company was

ruling and it was believed that Mutiny was just the result of past experience that had

piled up. Sir Syed’s argument was that the most dissatisfactory act of the British was

that of their forced conversion to Christianity. It was feared by the Muslims that every

one of them would be proselytised by the missionaries. Grants we conferred upon

missionary schools and they thrived. Several measures were adopted such as the

syllabus which was heavily influenced by Christian teachings along with luring

students with awards who displayed considerable knowledge of the Bible. Most

parents began to believe that it was the government’s interest to take children away

from their own religious teachings and instead focus on Christianity. The

missionaries’ efforts to focus on women’s education and uplift was taken as an act

against purdah and was thus perceived as corrupting for them.

The East India company formed by the had no qualms about Muslim and

Hindu religious learning. However, post 1835, new education policies brought about

by the British approved of instruction solely in areas such as Western philosophy,

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European history and such with only English as medium of instruction. These

knowledge systems were deemed suspicious by the Muslims. The Hindus, on the

other hand, embraced the changes brought about by the British while for the Muslims

it was fairly disadvantageous. It was Sir Syed also further made people realise that

their rulers were indifferent to the needs of their subjects by noting the fact that the

import of machinery resulted in large scale unemployment in India.

The British dismissed the uprising merely as ‘sepoy mutiny’ and were

unaffected by it. The cause of the mutiny cited by the British was that since the

Muslim and Hindu soldiers had bite off the end of the cartridges which had pork fat,

they were enraged. They considered the Hindus and Muslims’ reaction as a result of

their guilt and misconduct towards their own religion and community. It does not

matter what was the motivation behind the mutiny but it is significant that the

dissatisfaction which the soldiers felt reached both the elite and the working classes in

India. As Aziz Ahmad opines in his book Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan

1857-1964 (1967), “this unrest and discontent had features which make it necessary to

redefine the uprising as a confused, abortive revolution, if not quite the 'First War of

Independence’” (27).

It did not take long for the uprising to spread like fire in North India which

started on May 10, 1857 when the soldiers had first mutinied in Meerut. It was

particularly in places such as Bihar, Oudh and North-West Provinces that whole of the

people began to oppose British rule. The unrest spread quickly to other social groups

such as religious leaders, chiefs who had been dispossessed, zamindars and others. It

was helmed by significant Muslim leaders such as Nana Sahib in Kanpur, Bahadur

Shah Zafar in Delhi, Begum Hazrat Mahal in Oudh and Khan Bahadur Khan in

Rohilkhand. The mutiny moved beyond creed, caste and linguistic demarcations. The
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uprising led to a closer bond between Hindus and Muslims who rose together against

the injustices of British rule in India. The mutiny may have failed but it certainly

paved the way for an increasing demand for an independent Muslim state which

ultimately culminated in the formation of Pakistan later.

After the uprising, Muslim aspirations turned towards the idea of a separate

Muslim homeland, realising the impossibility of ever recovering India for Islam. Post

1857, a general consensus among majority of Muslims was that the British rule can be

challenged and defeated. Consequently, they began to aspire for an Islamic state

where they could be socially and politically independent. It is hard to accept that the

Mutiny was perceived only as one of the many instances of the struggle towards

independence. Many of them were also probably motivated by a desire towards

Muslim rule such as the one during the Mughal era. The uprising cannot be termed

and seen just as mutiny. In fact, the roots of the demand towards the separate Muslim

state of Pakistan can be traced back to this uprising. By 1947, when the Indian

subcontinent separated into India and Pakistan, many Indian Muslims harboured the

realisation of being a distinct community in itself, quite apart from the Hindu

majority. The preceding reform and political movements made both Muslims and

Hindus conscious of their religious identities which binded them to their own

respective communities.

India thus underwent a social transformation under British rule, particularly

from the Mutiny of 1857 until independence was gained in 1947, largely because of

the tendency of separatism among India’s Muslims. What followed was that as the

19th century drew to a close, such viewpoints began to take a strong hold in politics.

Eminent British historian, Francis Robinson gives a clear view of this while tracing

the history of separatism among India’s Muslims:

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In 1906, they secured public recognition from government of their

special status, and for their particular need for a reserved share of the

power which was being devolved upon Indians. In 1916, they gained

acceptance of this same point from the leading organisation of

nationalist politics, the Congress. Moreover, from 1909, this principle

of Muslim separateness was implemented in every constitutional

change. (Separatism 1)

As the power and rule of the British began to crumble in India, the urge for a distinct

Muslim state by and for the Muslims grew strong enough to not be ignored, leading to

the eventual division of the nation into India and Pakistan.

Several interpretations and reasons have resurfaced time and again regarding

the separatism. The first is a theory put forward by the historian W.W. Hunter in 1870

which was based on the fact that the British discriminated against the Muslims and

had lacked in terms of embracing western education with the result that they fell

behind when it came to securing employment and economic opportunities. Lord

Ellenborough, the then governor-general of India had also stated in 1843, even before

the Mutiny, “I cannot close my eyes to the belief that the race (Mahomedans) is

fundamentally hostile to us and our true policy is to reconciliate the Hindus” (qtd in

Desai 370). The second theory is that it was by design that the British created a divide

between the two major communities in India to realise their own ends. The statement

of Lord Elphinstone, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bombay during the early 19 th

century, following soon post the suppression of the uprising, “‘Divide et impera’ was

the old Roman motto, and it should be ours” (qtd in Desai 370) is generally quoted to

support the stance of British iniquity in India.

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The third reason, although not very common and yet significant is that Muslim

communalism gained momentum because of a rising Hindu nationalism with the

result that Indian nationalism was no longer secular:

Nationalism was associated with a frequently aggressive Hindu

revivalism, and its symbols, its idiom and its inspiration were all Hindu

[…] Muslim separatism was no Pavlovian reaction to Hindu

organisation, but the natural expression of the realisation that Indian

Muslims were a separate community. (Robinson 2)

Along with tracing the possible reasons behind separatism among India’s Muslims,

Francis Robinson also bases his study on not the Indian subcontinent as a whole but

on a particular province: Uttar Pradesh or United Provinces, as it was known under

British rule. This has been the case, despite the fact that the population of Muslims

was more concentrated in states such as Bengal and Punjab, as compared with UP.

The reason behind this is, in Robinson’s words, “UP Muslims, on the other hand,

were at the heart of Muslim separatism […] (they) mainly led the organisations which

represented the Muslim interests in Indian politics” (4).

The Census of India which was first worked upon by the British in 1872

impacted ethnic and religious identities significantly, as much as it gave rise to new

ones. This has been due to the fact that whenever censuses are made, they not only

restrict the communities’ boundaries, but also lay bare the actual number and growth

of each community in the country. This in turn adds a new dimension to religious

identities which play out strongly in democratic politics. The idea of religion was

introduced into the census right from the beginning as people were divided on the

basis of being Hindu, Muslim, Christian and so on. Thus, the religious divisions in

which the British categorised Indians in the census, proved to be the most significant
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factor behind the realisation of religious consciousness among both Muslims and

Hindus which ultimate became the driving force behind separatist ideologies of

India’s Muslims. It has continued to shape the dynamics between Hindus and

Muslims during both colonial as well as postcolonial India.

The period between 1857 and 1870 also saw another anti-British movement,

that of the Wahabis which was a Muslim group whose followers had previously been

a part of the 1857 Mutiny and after its curbing, continued their activities for a few

years. Inlfuenced by the teachings of Shah Walliullah who is considered to be the

foremost Indian Muslim leader, it is also known as the ‘Walliullah Movement’ which

initially came up as an opposition towards British cultural influence. The movement

was centred around the legacy of Islam, focusing on teachings of the Quran and

Hadees. It was towards 1871 that the government was successful in curbing the

Wahabi movement, following several armed conflicts.

Apart from the above stated reasons, another important aspect has been the

efforts of certain leaders who have been the agents of motivation behind the

minoritisation of Muslims within the Indian subcontinent, perhaps the most influential

among them was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Aligarh Muslim University, originally

known as Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College which Sir Syed founded in

1875 was home to many who later on became politicians in the Muslim league as the

college was from where Muslim politics largely emerged. The All-India Muslim

Educational Conference of 1886 followed this where he made a significant impression

on Muslims with his modern and liberal ideas of education for the Muslim youth. This

was the main platform where Muslims put forward their views and ideas about the

education system until the Muslim League was later founded.

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Sir Syed’s advice to the Muslims was to refrain from being active participants

in politics and rather focus on educating themselves. However, as certain Muslims

later became associated with the Indian National Congress, Sir Syed unabashedly

criticized the Congress’ beliefs and objectives, a major focus of which was the

founding of a parliamentary form of government in India. The argument put forth by

him was that India is a country wherein communalism is paramount and education is

the prerogative of the elite, which is why parliamentary democracy would be unequal.

Most of the Muslims heeded to his advice and kept away from politics for several

years and ultimately went on to form their own political establishment, that is, the

Muslim League.

It was in 1906 that the first political organization by and of Muslims, the

Muslim League was set up where there a demand for separate Muslim representation

in politics. The then Viceroy accepted the insistence and said,

The pitch of your address [...] is a claim that any system of

representation whether it affects a Municipality or a District Board or a

Legislative Council, in which it is proposed to introduce or increase an

electoral organization, the Muslim community should be represented

as a community. You point out that in many cases electoral bodies, as

now constituted, cannot be expected to return a Muslim candidate and

if by any chance they did so, it would only be at the sacrifice of such

candidate's views to those of a majority opposed to his community,

whom he would in no way represent; and you justly claim that your

proposition should be estimated not on your numerical strength, but in

respect to the political importance of the community and the services it

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has rendered to the Empire. I am entirely in accord with you. (Buchan

244)

It was Lord Morley’s belief that the aid and assistance of Lord Minto was the

motivation behind Muslims’ urges for distinct representation.

The establishment of the Muslim League proved to be a threshold in driving

political agency of the Indian Muslims.

Following aims were laid down by the League:

(1) To promote among Indian Moslems feelings of loyalty towards the

British Government [...] (2) to protect the political and other rights of

the Indian Moslems and to place their needs and aspirations before the

Government in temperate language; (3) so far as possible, without

prejudice to objects mentioned under (1) and (2) to promote friendly

feelings between Moslems and other communities of India. (Mehta and

Patwardhan 28)

The Amritsar session held by the Muslim League in 1908 put forth a few communal

ideas. They demanded for representations for Muslims in Privy Councils, local bodies

as well in civil services. Therefore the demands translated mainly for various jobs and

positions for the working classes. After a few years when the government was even

lesser considerate towards Muslims, than it had been when the Muslim League was

formed in 1906, the All-India Muslim League’s secretary at that time, Wazir Hasan

from Lucknow, managed the Muslim campaign in UP to ensure that their voices do

not go unheard. His efforts came to fruition with the when the Lucknow Pact was

formed in 1916 wherein it was agreed by the Congress that it would give Muslims the

same privileges in future constitutional reforms as they had held in 1906.

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Apart from Muslims who were major participants in politics, Muslim

landlords were also very influential which meant a strong hold on land, particularly in

Oudh. They held many large estates. “The Rajas of Mahmudabad were presidents of

the British Indian Association” (20), writes Francis Robinson,

[…] and represented in on the Imperial Legislative Council […] the

best indication of Muslim influence is that, although they numbered

only thirteen per cent of Oudh’s population, and although they held

only twenty per cent of the land, they were able to elect about forty per

cent of the members of the district board. (20)

Thus the influence of Muslim landlords, particularly in Oudh, was significant. These

landlords, along with Muslim government servants formed the elite class and had

stronger connections with Hindus of the same social class than with lower Muslim

communities such as weavers or butchers. This was the class of Muslims who

welcomed the modernising efforts of the British and also set up institutions to deal

with the issues faced by the Muslims, particularly in terms of setting up educational

institutions for Muslim youth and taking active part in politics.

An important characteristic of the religio-reform movements such as the

Aligarh Movement was that they did not confine to reforming religious practices but

also to bring about a change in social and political relations. This has to do with

religious as well as socio-political structures being intermingled in India. The

awakening of nationalism among the Indian Muslims took more time than among the

Hindus. This was mainly because of the Muslim’s accusation towards the British for

usurping them of their power and also because of their seemingly more closed

approach towards the changes implemented by the British while Hindus were much

more welcoming. In turn, the British also turned more hostile towards the Muslims
 Mamnoon 19

post the 1857 Mutiny. It resulted in Muslims not embracing the novel education

system and culture brought by the British. They perceived such an education system

as a threat and consequently became even more orthodox. The Hindus availed

themselves of the new educational opportunities. On the other hand, the Muslims

disorientated from it. The Muslims in India began to embrace modern education only

as the 19th century drew to a close, especially due to Sir Syed’s efforts. Nationalism as

well as the need for a separate nation thus began to spread among the Muslims,

leading ultimately to the formation of Pakistan as India gained independence in 1947.

Indian Muslim Writers of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries:

India is home to many Muslim writers since times immemorial, but the present

study demands a narrowing down of the spectrum of Indian Muslim writers. Hence, I

will be focussing on Indian Muslim writers writing through the late 19 th and early 20th

centuries, who focus largely on certain crucial socio-political as well as cultural

aspects of the Indian Muslim community. Various challenges faced by the Muslim

minority in India have always been the essence and concern of their works, be it the

question of Muslim identity in India, ramifications of the Partition, or the more

intricate issues which emanate from within the Muslim community, such as that of the

feudal system, lack of education, gender and class conflicts.

Urdu writing in India underwent a metamorphosis post the decline of the

romantic genre of the ‘Dastan’. Beginning largely in the thirteenth century, the Dastan

is an ornate, oral style of storytelling. It is believed that the Persian style

of dastan evolved in the sixteenth century and one of the earliest print forms of the

genre is a nineteenth-century text, Dastan e Amir Hamza1 which comprises forty six

volumes. Dastans operated mainly in the realm of the fantastic and the unearthly

along with having an escapist stance to them by way of elements such as magic,
 Mamnoon 20

sorcery and larger than life characters. It soon gave way to an entirely distinct style of

writing which was more real such as the modernist project of Altaf Husain Hali and

the works of Abdul Haleem Sharar as well as the didactic writings of Maulvi Nazir

Ahmed Dehlvi whose works were significantly succeeded by the sociological, bold

and ideological works of the Progressive writers.

Altaf Hussain Hali (1937-1914) can be credited with bringing a transformation

within Urdu Literature, from fantasy and imagination to a more serious and realist

form of writing. A pioneer of literary modernism, Hali infused new ideas into poetry

by introducing fresh themes and styles. Hali’s novel, Majalis-un Nisa, translated into

English as Assemblies of Women (1975), emphasizes on the need for extending

education and knowledge towards women. The protagonist of the novel, Zubaida

Khatun, is given lessons not only pertaining to the Qur'an but also languages such as

Urdu, Persian and Arabic as much as she gains knowledge of modern subjects such as

history, geography and mathematics. What strikes as unusual and also advanced is

that she learns about these subjects at a time when they were deemed unsuitable for

women and were difficult to access for men even. Hali’s Mussadas (1879) was about

the prestige and then eventual downfall of the Muslims. He criticised “the rich for

their selfishness, the aristocracy for their degeneracy, religious leaders for their

bigoted ignorance, poets for their foolish triviality” (qtd in Afzal). It created an

awakening among Indian Muslims. Hali was a pioneer in putting forward “the theory

that literature should be harnessed into the service of the community, and made to

advance the cause of social welfare and betterment” (qtd in Afzal).

The credit of being the first to introduce biographies in Urdu can also be

conferred upon Hali as he authored quite a few of them, such as Hayat-e-Saadi

(1887), covering the life and works of the prolific Persian scholar, Shaikh Saadi,
 Mamnoon 21

Yadgar-e-Ghalib (1897) and also, Hayat-e-Jawed (1901), which comprised the life

and works of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Hali can also be credited to having written one

of the foremost books of literary criticism in Urdu, that is, Muqaddama-i-Shaer-o-

Shaeri (1893), wherein he brings forth how the Ghazal as a classical form is fairly

limited while also underscoring the shallowness of its dated thematic cooncerns while

giving more importance to the ‘nazm’. For Hali, the ghazal was a thing of the past as

it was mainly meant for courtly entertainment while a nazm entailed poetry with a

purpose, primarily social change. Hali’s works and efforts thus anticipated the

socialist realism of the progressive writers as well.

Maulvi Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi (1831-1914) was also a social and religious

reformer as well as an influential orator apart from being one of the foremost Indian

Muslim fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The oeuvre of Indian Muslim writers

has been very progressive ever since its inception, a befitting example of which is

Nazir Ahmad’s novel, Mirat-ul-Uroos (1869) which is largely regarded as the first

novel in Urdu. Possibly the first text espousing the cause of women’s education,

Mirat-ul-Uroos inspired many ensuing writers to take up the cause of women. Nazir

Ahmad was actively writing during the period when India’s Muslims were

undergoing significant changes in terms of a community: it was the demise of the

Mughal rule and India had come under the dominion of the British. In this period of

transition, Ahmad ushered in a consciousness about the paucity of education and the

all-pervasive poverty among Muslims in India. Through his novels he championed the

cause of education and reform of the Ummah2 and thus emerged as perhaps the first

feminist Urdu writer.

While recounting India’s literary history, the monumental significance of the

Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM) and the bearing it has had on Indian writing
 Mamnoon 22

in general and Urdu writing in particular is indubitable by any scholar of considerable

merit. Since its inception, the movement was successful in assembling both already

acclaimed and evolving writers of approximately all notable languages of the Indian

subcontinent. Jan Nisar Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander,

Ismat Chughtai, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Rashid Jahan, Munshi Premchand and Bhisham

Sahni were some of the most eminent proponents and writers associated with the

PWA, which was headed by Sajjad Zaheer. This movement was necessary and

significant not only because of the personalities associated with it and the prolific

body of work which germinated from it, but because of its contribution to expedite a

social and political consciousness among the masses, particularly Muslims and also in

their unabashed enunciation for the need of radical social changes. Their literature

was their modus operandi to propagate their philosophies, aims and anger.

Since literature emanates out of a certain social consciousness which in turn is the

result of certain socio-political events, the Progressive Writers’ Movement had crucial

antecedents. The rebellion of 1857, also interpreted as the first war towards making

India Independent was among the foremost precursors of the movement, particularly

the aftermath it had for the Muslim community, followed by the Movement in Aligarh

helmed by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. An instantaneous antecedent which drove the

movement, however, was the publication of the book Angarey in 1932, which was a

collaboration by four young, revolutionary writers, namely, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed

Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmuduzzafar. Angarey created a furore and was deemed

blasphemous for its scathing attack on religious orthodoxy and hypocrisy the writers

felt within the society, which was construed as a defilement of Islam. The

downtrodden and the marginalized were the subjects of the anthology which also

made a strong case against the abysmal condition of women within the society.
 Mamnoon 23

Angarey was an unapologetic indictment of retrogressive middle-class Muslim mores,

for which its authors had to bear with severe criticism and even death-threats;

religious fundamentalists hurled invectives and issued fatwas3 against them and in the

month of February, 1933, the All India Shia Conference’s Central Standing

Committee demanded an immediate proscription on the book from the British:

The Central Standing Committee ... at this meeting strongly condemns the

heart-rending and filthy pamphlet called ‘Angare’ compiled by Sajjad Zahir,

Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jehan, Mahmuduz Zafar which has wounded the feelings

of the entire Muslim community by ridiculing God and his Prophet and which

is extremely objectionable from the standpoints of both religion and morality.

The committee further strongly urges upon the attention of the U.P. [United

Provinces] Government that the book be at once proscribed. (qtd. in Alvi xvii)

Although English educated and belonging to the upper classes, the ‘Angarey

four’, a name they were popular as, entirely annihilated the conception of a public

sphere where the lone custodians of morality were people, particularly men of the

upper classes. The narratives in Angarey fervently castigated the Muslim middle-

classes’ conservative sexual politics while deriding all religious, social and political

supremacies. For instance, Sajjad Zaheer, in his story, “Heaven Assured!”, reprehends

a respected Maulvi who disregards his wife’s physical advances towards him, citing

excuses of prayers while dreaming of being in the midst of naked houries or

seductresses in heaven which has been given to him by God for having been pious

and devoted towards Him, only waking up to his wife’s laughter who finds herself

amused by his act of fondling the Qur’an.

Another story in the anthology, “Masculinity” by Mahmuduzzafar unfolds

with the appalling image of a new-born’s head between its mother’s thighs as she lies
 Mamnoon 24

in pain and is about to die. A young man who is insensitive towards his wife’s

sufferings and hell-bent on proving against rumours of his sexual failings,

impregnates his wife on the mountains. This story is a vehement critique of men who

are so ignorant and backward that they neglect their wives’ ill-health and think solely

in terms of their own honour. Similar themes form the background of the one-act

play, Parde ke Peeçhe (Behind the Veil), by Rashid Jahan, who takes a stand against

retrograde practices such as the desire for a male heir which tend to put the lives of

women in danger. The literature that followed Angarey was referred to as naya adab

or new literature. Adab, which is an all-inclusive word, simultaneously meaning

literature, ethics and etiquette, and ethical conduct, came across as a shared social and

intellectual universe of people from diverse religions. This new literature, however,

had its foregrounding and roots in the ideals germinating through Angarey.

The fact that Ahmed Ali claims in his article that Angarey has no political

leanings and that “Neither the practice nor the intention of the authors was Marxist”

(“The Progressive Writers’” 97) is hard to accept. Influenced and inspired by the left

political ideologies in Europe in the 1930s, writers associated with the progressive

writers’ movement found it hard to refrain from radical viewpoints while writing for

Angarey. Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmuduzzafar, having received their education in

England, had no real literary interest in writing for Angarey. It becomes even

pronounced with the fact that they did not write much after it. To take the Communist

party to new heights and Their main concern was to work in the Communist Party and

to propagate their socialist concerns were the main agendas behind their works.

Following the societal concerns raised by several European and American

writers at this time, which they expressed through their works, Rashid Jahan and her

contemporaries became increasingly concerned with world issues and came closer
 Mamnoon 25

home in describing the ills faced by Indians. Literature was considered the most

potent tool in expressing their apprehensions. In the words of Sajjad Zahir, ‘writing’,

[…] was probably the only avenue left open to us. Most of the

members of our small group wanted to become writers. What else

could they do? We were incapable of manual labour. We had not learnt

any craft and our minds revolted against serving the imperialist

Government. What other field was left? (Zaheer 51).

Angarey thus stood against worn-out and denigrating social and moral mores. It

moved beyond age-old use of the Urdu language and experimented freely with both

form and content. Drawing heavily on experiments by modernists such as Virginia

Woolf, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and also significantly from Marxist

philosophies, these writers were quite direct in their showcasing of society’s realities

while at the same tme experimenting with form.

Although Angarey itself can be reckoned as a manifesto for writers associated

with the PWA, three manifestoes appeared out of the project between 1935 and 1936.

The first version, which was in English, was drafted by Indian students at Oxford,

Cambridge and London University under the aegis of Sajjad Zaheer at the Nanking

Restaurant in central London. Published in February 1935 in New Left Review, it

strongly held the belief that,

[…] new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our

existence today […] the problems of hunger and poverty, social

backwardness, and political subjection. All that drags us down to

passivity, inaction, and un-reason we reject as reactionary. (qtd. in

Gopal 13-14)
 Mamnoon 26

Angarey’s second manifesto was brought out in Hindi while the third in Urdu.

The latter was rendered as the ‘ailan-namah’ (announcement) and was the most

widely circulated. A well-founded and radical document in its own right, the

manifesto came first into public purview under the aegis of Sajjad Zaheer in April

1936 at the first instalment of the Progressive Writers’ Conference. It must be noted

that Zaheer and many of his supporters in the association had left leanings and were

closely connected to the Communist Party of India. Although their project must not be

perceived as an intellectual and cultural vanguard of and for the Communist Party, the

CPI certainly aided the establishment of the movement. Premchand administered the

first meeting of the PWA and emphatically invoked the need for “the birth of a new

epoch in literature” (Coppola 28). Such literature, according to Premchand should be

“dignified through the breath of freedom, beauty, and clarity of style, and a clear

reflection of the call and bustle of life, the heart of truth. It must give us a goal; it

must make us alive; it must make us think” (Coppola 28). In making such appeals, the

PWA reiterates the modernist literary mission commenced by the movement in

Aligarh by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan during the preceding century.

Apart from the four authors of Angarey, one of the most prolific writers of the

PWA was Saadat Hasan Manto. Although he migrated to Pakistan post Partition,

Manto wrote many of his works while in British India. Manto is more of a

phenomenon than a writer, who was both infamous and controversial. Although

having close links with the PWA, Manto (and also, Ismat Chughtai) began to

disintegrate themselves from it when the other members began demanding unrealistic

ideological fidelity from its members. Manto churned out stories whose subjects were

the outcastes, the working classes and the marginalized. He was charged for obscenity

multiple times as he wrote extensively on prostitutes, sexual slavery of women and

 Mamnoon 27

the dark side of human psyche. His stories, particularly those portraying the horrors of

Partition, such as “Dhuan”, “Khol Do”, and “Thanda Gosht” were criticized as being

pornographic and titillating. In his defense, Manto said that he was only revealing

what was already there in society:

If it is obscene to even mention a prostitute then her existence is

also obscene. If one is forbidden to mention her, then her profession

too should be forbidden. Remove the prostitute; her mention too will

end. (“Prostitution is Allowed”)

While most of Manto’s anthologized stories have been his most controversial, there is

more to his oeuvre than that and he upheld a more truthful mirror to society than

many of his contemporaries.

The struggle for Independence from British dominion and the appeal for a

separate Muslim nation by the radical literati among others led to various forms of

individual Muslim expression in terms of multiple political and intellectual currents

underlying literary traditions, trajectories, and pursuits which shaped an emerging

Muslim consciousness. One of the foremost figures to this end was Sir Muhammad

Iqbal, popularly known as Allama Iqbal who was a politician, philosopher and poet of

the early 20th century. Iqbal reinvigorated long-standing discourses of Muslim

selfhood and the unmediated relationship between the individual and God, but in

relation to the political challenges that confronted colonized Indian Muslims. His

assertion of the idea of khudi (selfhood) — that is, the power that Muslims as

autonomous individuals could wield over their destiny — resonated across a wide

political spectrum of the Urdu—speaking intelligentsia, from Marxists to the religious

Ulama.
 Mamnoon 28

The oeuvre and beliefs of Muhammad Iqbal, most of which were articulated

through his poetry in Urdu, heavily inspired the political endeavours of many leading

Muslim intellectuals for generations and more so, the progressive writers. Apart from

his poetry, a few of Iqbal’s lectures were published in 1934 in a collection termed

as The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, which largely concerned itself

with Islamic teachings as well as its legal and political philosophy. Iqbal denounces

the way certain Muslim politicians carry and conduct themselves in several of his

lectures whom he perceives as having treaded the corrupt path and having only a thirst

for power and position without any regard for the Ummah.

Iqbal also thought about different ways in which Muslims could attain

political autonomy. He, along with the Dalit leader Dr B.R. Ambedkar nurtured the

thought of direct British control of India which would be a free unit in itself. He had

inhibitions about the freedom of Muslims if there happened to be a central

government in India. He felt that in such a situation, Muslims would face an

existential anxiety due to their minority status in India. Therefore, Iqbal not only

called for the political freedom of Muslims in India but also expressed the

impossibility of a peaceful coexistence between Muslims and people of other faiths in

India, particularly the Hindu majority. By expressing such prophetic concerns, Iqbal

can be considered a pioneer in giving a certain shape and direction to the identity of

Muslims in India.

Ahmed Ali, another beacon of Indian writing in English has also been very

influential. Having been proficient in both Urdu as well as English, Ali was an equally

significant critic and translator. His first novel, Twilight in Delhi which was published

in 1940 was written in English and brought him immediate and considerable

international fame. The novel is an evocative chronicle of the crumbling down of the
 Mamnoon 29

Mughal rule which had once seen the heyday of prosperity and power post the

accession of the British rule in India. Ocean of Night (1964), Ali’s second novel,

dwells on the various cultural demarcations in India prior to the its 1947 Partition into

India and Pakistan.

Muslim women writers were also highly instrumental in the advancement of both

the literary as well as socio-cultural sphere of the time. One of the foremost Indian

Muslim women writers was Rashid Jahan. Herself a medical practitioner, she was also

a pioneer in terms of expressing taboo female issues openly. She was pioneer by way

of having made her way into the literary sphere at a time when it was extremely

difficult for women to have done so. She not only spoke for herself but also on behalf

of other women who did not get the chance to raise certain issues and spoke

unreservedly about women’s sexual desires, their bodily functions as well as about

medical and scientific advances which gave way to a new path in Indian writing in

order to discuss taboo subjects particularly about women. Her play Behind the Veil,

which is a part of Angarey is a moving account by a married Muslim woman who has

been left to spend her life alone within oppressive domesticity. The play depicts the

problems which women who are married off at an early age, health concerns,

Infidelity of husbands, unwanted pregnancies, threats of divorce and apprehensions

regarding ageing. The ‘veil’ in the title is a reference to the many physical and

metaphorical barriers which distinguish the public sphere from the private for women.

The short story, “Dilli ki Sair” by Rashid Jahan which is also a part of Angarey is

a first-person account of a woman whose husband has deserted her and left her to wait

indefinitely at a railway station in Delhi as he goes out with one of his male friends.

What motivated Jahan’s writings and also of her contemporaries was neither to create

a scandal nor to shock the readers. Its real purpose, opines Rakhshanda Jalil in her
 Mamnoon 30

books A Rebel And Her Cause (2014), was to “introduce another sort of writing”, a

self-conscious attempt “to shock people out of their inertia, to show how hypocrisy

and sexual oppression had so crept into everyday life” (Jalil 15). Though Rashid

Jahan continued to write with gaps, she didn't pursue a literary career in the same way

as that of someone whom she inspired the most — Ismat Chughtai. Jahan is thus

remembered for the inspiration that she proved to be for a number of upcoming young

writers by making them learn how to unveil harsh realities of life.

Another prominent Indian Muslim woman writer was Attia Hosain. A

prominent author, journalist, actor and broadcaster, Hosain was born in Lucknow in

1913 and later settled in England. Belonging to the feudal aristocratic class, Hosain

grew up to have a liberal worldview and akin to the progressive writers, was affected

and inspired by political environment and left ideology prevailing in the 1930s. Being

receptive to the social and political milieu of her home town Lucknow, she took

inspiration from it for her works which portray both the traditional as well as modern

ways in which her family lived. In her short story “The First Party” for example,

delineates the struggle between strands of tradition and modernity wherein a young

bride has a hard time in keeping pace with husband’s modern ways of leading life.

Although hailing from the aristocratic class, Hossain did not turn a blind eye towards

the pretences of the elite and wrote extensively on them. Her writings draw upon

inequalities in the society, injustices towards the lower classes and peasants along

with the sense of ambiguity which women of her class felt on account of gender

discrimination.

The celebrated poet, Cecil Day-Lewis inspired Attia Hosain to publish her

highly autobiographical magnum opus, Sunlight on a Broken Column in 1961. The

 Mamnoon 31

Indian Partition forms the larger framework of the novel and it portrays an India

where social structure is slowly crumbling down. Spanning twenty years of the

protagonist Laila’s life, the narrative offers deep insights into how the political and

socio-cultural milieu was altering in India at that time. A foray into the ongoings

within the Muslim community in India, it focuses on bringing out the affectations of

the class to which Laila belongs.

Sunlight on a Broken Column is thus a vivid account of the intricacies of

marriage and fact that women have no say in choosing their partners. The bias which

is characteristic of the class to which Laila belongs becomes clear through the

displeasure which her family shows when she chooses a man who is lower than her in

terms of class. In her Foreword to Hossain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, writer

Anita Desai cogently summarises the novel as:

To know what feudalism meant, one has to read Sunlight on a Broken

Column or Phoenix Fled and see how it was made – how the land

belonged to the wealthy taluqdars, how the peasants worked upon it,

what was exacted from them, and what was in return done to or for

them. How women lived in a secluded part of the house, jealously

protected by their menfolk, and what powers were theirs, and not.

(“Introduction”)

Speaking of Indian Muslim women writers, Zeenuth Futehally comes close to

expressing the predicament of the Muslim minority in India. First published in 1951,

her only book, Zohra was lauded by E. M. Forster who wrote the Foreword to this

book, both for its “vivid […] picture of the old Moslem society of Hyderabad […]

before it disappeared” (Forster iv) and for its “convincing and charming” (iv)
 Mamnoon 32

eponymous heroine who makes the book “not only an interesting document but a

creative achievement” (iv). Zohra daringly presents the possibility of a Muslim

married woman's adulterous desire for her husband's brother within the confines of

purdah in a joint-family setup. Apart from this, the novel is not merely a political

effort to represent Indian Muslims as separatists demanding a Muslim nation, but also

as loyal nationalists and active participants in the anticolonial struggle for a free,

unified India.

Published immediately following the gruesome Indian Partition, along with

the struggle over which country Hyderabad would belong to, the narrative focuses

equally on trying to fathom a space for Muslims who stayed back in India and who

recognised themselves as Indian citizens. Their insistence towards holding on to the

Indian nation springs more from their agency, role and sacrifice vis-à-vis the struggle

for attaining freedom rather than merely birth right. Unlike the dominant Indian

narratives that identified separatist or communalist UP Muslim leaders as those who

split India to produce Pakistan, or that cast Muslims not as legitimate Indian citizens,

it offers an alternative narrative that insists on the commitment to the Indian nation of

Muslims who lived in India and blended Hindu and Muslim cultures.

Given the political and cultural climate of new nationhood, Zohra speaks to an

Indian readership of a minority community’s right to belong to the nation, and hence

to reconfigure dominant ideas of nationhood. These two threads of my argument are

related, for the novel’s feminist critique of Muslim culture is connected to its secular,

nationalist, and progressive politics of reform. A modern postcolonial democratic

nation, Futehally suggests, must be based on women’s equality and emancipation —

as Ngugi wa Thiong’o would later declare: “No cultural liberation without women's
 Mamnoon 33

liberation” (Petersen 254). Zohra thus does cultural work on two fronts: within the

Indian Muslim community, it questions the systems of purdah and arranged marriage,

emphasizing the damage they do and argues implicitly for reform in favor of women’s

education, opportunity, and freedom of choice. Within the Indian nation more

broadly, it suggests the progressive potential of Indian Muslims like Hamid (Zohra's

brother-in-law) who devotes himself both to the anticolonial nationalist movement

and social reform with his exemplary, inextricably twofold support of national and

women’s independence.

The Muslim writers of India who have been discussed above, although hailing

from a different socio-cultural and often, economic background, had one thing in

common: the predicament of being a Muslim in India and the domestic, social and

political milieu of the Indian Muslim society. These individuals assumed what is the

absolute role of a writer, that is, to speak the truth. Their indispensable contribution in

shaping an Indian Muslim identity can be summed up in the words of Bhisham Sahni,

another literary legend associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement:

The social orientation in literature was further defined and so was the role of

the writer: that the writer was not merely a detached observer of life’s drama

but also an active participant in it on the side of struggling humanity. Man was

still the center of all writing, yet man is shown, not as a mere individual

struggling with his destiny, but in the context of his social milieu, who has his

individuality and his volition and yet is not independent of the social and

economic forces that largely determine his destiny (Sahni 180-181).

 Mamnoon 34

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder, the two writers chosen for the present study

have not been discussed above although they belong to the same socio-political and

cultural milieu. The next subsection discusses their life and works at length.

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder: Introducing their Life and Works

As established earlier, one of the major tasks of the Progressive writers was to

yoke literature together with social reform. They emphasized on truthful experience

rather than exaggerated romance. One such writer and an eminent member of the

Progressive Writers’ Association was Ismat Chughtai. She was born in

Badayun, Uttar Pradesh on August 21, 1915. Her parents were Nusrat Khanam and

Mirza Qaseem Baig Chughtai and she was the ninth of ten children — four sisters six

brothers. Her father was a civil servant which is why the family often shifted homes.

As a child, she grew up in various cities such as Agra, Aligarh and Jodhpur. Chughtai

has often talked about the influence of her brother, Mirza Azim Beg Chughtai, who

was a writer himself, on her yearning for education in her formative years. Eventually,

the family settled in Agra, post the retirement of her father.

Having received her early education at the Women’s College of Aligarh

Muslim University, Chughtai received her degree of B.A. in English from Isabella

Thoburn College, Lucknow, in 1940. Although facing fierce opposition from her

family, she went on to do her Bachelor of Education degree from Aligarh Muslim

University next year. During this period she drew towards the Progressive Writers’

Association and attended her first meeting in 1936 where she came across Rashid

Jahan, someone who later inspired Chughtai to mould realistic and bold women

characters. She had begun to write privately during this same time, but it was only

later that her work got published. If her brother supported her early quest for

knowledge, Rashid Jahan laid bare before her the harsh realities of life and
 Mamnoon 35

particularly, womanhood, while stripping off the veil of romantic and imaginary

notions of man-woman relationship before her eyes. In her autobiography, A Life in

Words: Memoirs, Chughtai writes:

The handsome heroes and pretty heroines of my stories, the candle-like

fingers, the lime blossoms and crimson outfits all vanished into thin

air. The earthly Rasheed Jahan simply shattered all my ivory idols to

pieces […] Life, stark naked, stood before me (13).

An non-conformist Muslim writer and intellectual in her own right, Ismat

Chughtai has remained one of the most well-known, widely read, revered and at the

same time, controversial writers of Urdu writing in India. Beginning as early as the

1930s, Chughtai’s narratives concerned themes and subjects which were hardly

considered earlier —female sexuality, domesticity and middle-class values. She was

also Marxian in her approach towards the disparity between different social classes.

wrote extensively on themes including female sexuality, femininity, middle-gentility,

and class conflict, often from a Marxist perspective. Her writings portray a sense of

realism which very few authors could touch upon. A Padma Shri Awardee, Chughtai

also wrote screenplays of certain Hindi films. Chughtai’s works fit into no pre-

conceived narrative and she published short stories, novels, sketches, plays, reportage

and radio plays. Her bold protagonists stood out from the ordinary, her outspoken

approach jolted regressive minds and her rebellious themes raised many eyebrows.

She was also an educationist and an icon of women’s empowerment. But above

everything else, she was a woman. She understood the complexities of a woman’s

mind, their inhibitions, and also their secret desires and all of her writings reflected

these complexities at length.

 Mamnoon 36

Although an active member of the Progressive Writers’ Association, Chughtai

scathingly attacked its orthodoxy and stringent ideals. Even after the movement faded

away a few years following Indian Independence, she remained a true beacon of its

ideologies and progressivism. She fought relentlessly to acquire an education,

struggled fiercely to find her own voice and wrote passionately about those ills of

society which are brushed under the carpet for they are considered taboo. Studied and

recognized primarily as a feminist writer, her writings deal with many other

significant issues such as class and existence. Her writings are rich in imagery,

picturesque description and wry humour along with a rare ability to look critically at

herself. Chughtai’s concerns were much wider than just women’s oppression. To

think of her only as a writer taking up the cause of women would be to limit her

unjustly. Anita Desai encapsulates Chughtai’s authorial merits by saying:

One could read her works as an exposure of Indian traditions, of

religious bigotry, of the male hegemony and female literacy and

dependence — but that would be a limited interpretation for beside her

obvious and instinctive iconoclasm — there was also her intimate

involvement with that world, her delight in it — the unruly household

with too many children, the squabbles and rivalries amongst the

women, the displays of affection and indulgence, and the rich and

colourful language, spiced with salty proverbs and aphorisms. Instead

of contradicting each other, these elements came together to form such

an indivisible — and infinitely rich — whole that one can only

exclaim, on reading her work, “Oh, human nature! Ah, the human

race!” (qtd. in A Life 10)

 Mamnoon 37

The larger focus of Chughtai’s oeuvre is the socio-cultural and domestic

mores of the Indian middle-class wherein a girl grows up to be a woman. This was

Chughtai’s world, one which she had seen and experienced all her life and the

manner in which dealt with the conflicts within her class is commendable. Stories

such as “Saas”, “Dayen”, “Uff Ye Bacche”, “Jawaani”, “Gainda”, “Neera” and

“Aik Shohar ki Khaatir” were all written during Chughtai’s initial years as a writer.

Suh stories did not just change the face of Urdu literature through underlying satire

and wit but also brought in new experiments within Urdu writing. Among many of

Chughtai’s stories which followed, “Pesha”, translated as “Profession”, proved to

be a moving story about prostitution which had till then been a taboo topic.

However, it was her novel Tehri Lakeer or The Crooked Line, published in 1940

which established Chughtai among the great names of Urdu writing.

Chughtai’s uninhibited, witty and sarcastic approach towards writing

complemented the genre of both long and short fiction. Through her stories, several

novel metaphors, expressions and symbols came in purview of the reading public.

Chughtai made popular the Begamati Zuban, which was how the women in middle-

class households conversed. In doing so, she brought into public sphere what was

confined to the zenana. Such contributions gave a distinct place to Chughtai within

Urdu literature. Another of Chughtai’s novella, Ziddi dwells on the life of a young

man who loses track of the honourable path on account of being unable to choose

love within a society where class distinctions are paramount. The protagonist,

Pooran, revolts against the society which tries to keep him away from his love

interest who belongs to a class lower than his. The story finds a closure with a

painful death as Asha, the woman Pooran loves, dies by suicide over his dead body.
 Mamnoon 38

Ziddi is a narrative characterised by romantic excess and melodrama which may

have contributed towards its popularity among young people.

Terhi Lakeer can easily be deemed as Chughtai’s magnum opus. The

narrative dwells on how Shaman, an able and sharp middle-class Muslim girl falls

an easy certain psychological fixations and complexities for having been sexually

and morally repressed. It seemed as if the realities which Chughtai had merely

touched upon in her earlier works, culminated in a deeper study or both childhood

and adult consciousness in this novel. It is indeed Chughtai’s most autobiographical

works wherein she removes the layers from over her own childhood experiences,

challenges and introspections.

Although Chughtai’s contemporary, the ideals and writing style of

Qurratulain Hyder were markedly different, as was the society her works focused

on. Having been born to vigorous figures of Urdu writing in India — Sajjad Hyder

Yildirim and Nazar-e Sajjad Hyder — Hyder had an impeccable literary lineage.

She was born on January 20, 1927 in Aligarh. Growing up in an illustrious, educated,

westernised and liberal familial setup, she received her primary formal education in

Aligarh. She cleared her Intermediate examination from Isabella Thoburn College,

Lucknow, and went on to graduate from Indraprastha College, Delhi. She earned her

postgraduate degree in English from the University of Lucknow and trained in art and

music. She also did a short course in modern English literature from Cambridge

University, United Kingdom.

Hyder began writing as early as the age of eleven and Sitaron Se Aage,

which was her pioneer anthology of short stories, got published in 1945. Over the

years, she produced an impressive array of works across genres — novels, plays,
 Mamnoon 39

travelogues, translations, short story collections such as Mere Bhi Sanamkhane,

Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Naa Kijo, Gardish-e-Rang-e-Chaman, Patjhar ki Awaaz,

Kaar-e-Jahan Daraaz Hai, Akhir-e Shab ke Humsafar and others.

Hyder lived in Pakistan for some time but returned to India in 1961. She

worked with magazines such as Imprint and Illustrated Weekly of India and also had

brief spells of being a visiting faculty at Aligarh Muslim University as well as Jamia

Millia Islamia. Hyder was also honoured with several awards such as the Bhartiya

Jnanpith in 1989, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, the Padma Shri followed by

the Padma Bhushan in 2005. Her works can be placed in the trajectory of post-

Independence writing in India. Hyder’s Aag ka Dariya (1959) or River of Fire, a

novel spanning Indian history from the 1950s to way back in the past at the beginning

of Indian civilization, is perhaps her most celebrated work. The novel traces the fates

of four people across time: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril. All in all, the

characters reflect the oneness of human nature amidst the nationalist and religious

upheavals of Indian history whereby Hyder argues for a culture that is inclusive. On

the publication of Aag ka Dariya, Hyder was lauded for her style of writing, critics

often comparing her with some of the best writers in the world. Aamer Hussein, for

instance, wrote that River of Fire is to Urdu fiction what One Hundred Years of

Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is to Hispanic literature4.

Mere Bhi Sanamkhane (1949) or My Temples, Too explores the promise and

disillusionment which accompanied the birth of two new nations — India and

Pakistan — through the lives and deaths of the young citizens of the city of Lucknow.

Set in the 1940s, it tells the story of Rakshanda and her brother Peechu — children of

privileged families — and their friends Kiran, Vimal, Salim and Christabel. They
 Mamnoon 40

form a group which is idealistic, nationalistic, liberal and rational. They meet in

coffee-houses, run a progressive magazine and dream of building a brave new world.

But with the turbulence of Partition and Independence, the quiet rhythm of their lives

is brutally disrupted. New animosities come into play as friendship and loyalty lose

meaning which leads to the group eventually falling apart.

Patjhar Ki Aawaz (1965) or The Sound of Falling Leaves was Hyder’s most

celebrated short story collection for which she won the Sahitya Akademi

Award. Aakhir e Shab kay Hamsafar was on the Naxalite Movement and Bengal

unrest. Her novellas, Sita Haran, Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Na Kijo, Housing

Society and Chai Ke Bagh, like her longer fiction, are centred around politics and

culture. Hyder has also written works of non-fiction; for instance, the three-

volume Kaar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai, chronicling the social, cultural, historical and

political ambiance of multiple generations of her family.

Though she did not actively campaign for it like Ismat Chugtai and others,

Qurratulain Hyder was a strong proponent of women’s rights all her life. Not only did

she lay a foundation and paved the way for future Urdu novelists of South Asia, she

also shunned gender stereotypes through her writings. She did not characterize

women in typical and stereotypical moulds and her female characters were as able as

her male ones; however, they did not have equal opportunities –– a basic

representation of the South Asian society and patriarchy.

Literature Review

There has been substantial sociological research on stratification among

India’s Muslims but not without certain gaps. However, there has been absolutely no

research on how this stratification is evident in literature, particularly in Indian fiction,

 Mamnoon 41

apart from a few references in passing. The edited volume by Imtiaz Ahmad and

Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, titled Dalit Assertion in Society, Literature and History,

comprises essays which impart insights into the lowest rung of the Muslim

community in terms of their history, literature and society, focusing on their agency,

assertion and their challenge against prejudice as well as social exclusion from the

dominant classes.

Imtiaz Ahmad and Yoginder Sikand talk about the existence of discriminatory

caste norms among Muslims despite the doctrinal emphasis on equality among all

believers. According to them, stratification of Muslims falls under the categories of

Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal. Ahmad also talks about how most Islamic scholars have

always abstained from considering caste as a social reality among Muslims and how

the Islamic scriptural text has been hierarchical itself. He concludes with the need for

a more focused social research on this issue. In her influential text, A Struggle for

Identity: Muslim Women in the United Provinces (2014), Firdous Azmat Siddiqui,

delves mainly on the social life of women, the zenana and also on the amalgamation

of British men and women with the Muslims during the period of colonisation.

Siddiqui also dedicates a chapter on stratification among Muslims, giving

concrete examples of strict segregation between higher caste and lower caste Muslims

which are analogous, perhaps to the practice of untouchability among Hindus.

Siddiqui opines that unlike Hindus, status matters more to Muslims than birth

considerations. A pertinent idea which Siddiqui points out is the difference in

nomenclature among various categories of Muslims.

Scope and Objective of this Research Work

 Mamnoon 42

In the past few years, the issue of social stratification among India’s Muslims

has also attracted considerable scholarship and debate in academia, resulting in

somewhat differing views by scholars and theorists, who, however, have a common

consensus: the Muslim community is elaborately stratified. Status differentiation

implicit among Muslims finds expression mainly in restrictions on marriage and to

some extent, inter-dining. Following insights of sociologists such as Ghaus Ansari,

Imtiaz Ahmed and Yoginder Sikand, the present project postulates that the Muslim

community is elaborately stratified and divided. This hypothesis stands in sharp

contrast with the unified perception of the community. Another major objective is to

study the underlying stratification among India’s Muslims mainly based on lineage

which entails, mostly, the status, education, occupation and social standing of

individuals within the community.

In order to achieve the above stated objectives, I would try to bring out the

existence of this social stratification through fiction by critically analysing select texts

by Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder. Approaching a social issue through a

fictional framework would pave a way for understanding social realities more

comprehensively.

Conclusion

In this chapter, thus, I have tried to put the present work into context, namely,

the socio-political as well as cultural milieu of the period when the writers undertaken

for study, Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder were writing. I have also focussed

primarily on the conditions which inspired them to take up writing as a potent tool or

medium to bring about a social change and also the different societies they focus on.

Nevertherless, despite the distinction in their priorities and style, what remains
 Mamnoon 43

constant is a strong voice which always tries to speak up against injustice and ills of

the society, whether it is class or caste conflict, plight of women or struggle for an

individual’s identity. Another major concern that this chapter has tried to raise is that

of social stratification among India’s Muslims, which the subsequent chapters will

focus on. Having discussed all these issues in the introduction, the main initiative of

subsequent chapters of the present work is to delve into them in greater detail,

focusing on the aspects of social stratification or class concerns, gender norms, and

societal mores of the Muslim community in India.

End Notes

1. Dastan-e-Amir Hamza is an enchanting, romantic fairy tale involving a lot of

magical elements such as fairies and charms. It was originally written in

Persian by Amir Khusrau. In its present form, it was written by one of the

great literary figures of Emperor Akbar in order to entertain him.

 Mamnoon 44

2. Ummah is an Arabic word, meaning “community”, one that has a shared

history. The concept of the Ummah is significant in Islam as it pertains to

kinship and a commonwealth of the believers.

3. A fatwa is a legal proclamation or a authorized decree in Islam on a particular

matter, issued by a person who specializes in religious law. One of the most

widely-known fatwas was proclaimed against writer Salman Rushdie in 1989

by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, against his novel The

Satanic Verses (1988) which was accused of blasphemy.

4. See Hussein, Aamer. “Chaos and Upheaval”. The Times Literary Supplement,

1998.

Works Cited

Ahmad, Aziz. Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan 1857-1964. Oxford University Press,

1967.

Ali, Ahmed, and N M Rashed. “The Progressive Writers’ Movement in its Historical

Perspective.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 1977.

 Mamnoon 45

Alvi, Khalid. “Introduction.” Angarey, translated by Vibha S Chauhan and Khalid Alvi, Rupa

Publications, 2014, pp. xv—xlv.

Buchan, J. Lord Minto: A Memoir. Echo Library, 2007.

Chughtai, Ismat. A Life in Words: Memoirs. Translated by M. Asaduddin, 2013.

Clifford, James. “Introduction.” Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, by

James Clifford and George E. Marcus, University of California Press, 1986, p. 4.

Coppola, Carlo. “Ismat Chughtai: A Talk with One of Urdu's Most Outspoken Women

Writers.” An Uncivil Woman: Writings on Ismat Chughtai, edited by Rakhshanda

Jalil, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 95.

Desai, A.R. Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Popular Prakashan, 2000.

Desai, Anita. “Introduction.” Sunlight on a Broken Column, by Attia Hosain, Penguin India,

2009, p. 4.

Forster, E.M. “Introduction.” Zohra: A Novel, by Zeenuth Futehally, Oxford University

Press, 2004, p. iv.

Fortes, Meyer. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi. Oxford University Press,

1945.

Iser, Wolfgang. How to Do Theory. Wiley—Blackwell, 2005.

---.“Towards a Literary Anthropology.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to

Literary Anthropology. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Jalil, Rakhshanda. A Rebel and Her Cause: the Life and Work of Rashid Jahan. Women

Unlimited , 2014.
 Mamnoon 46

Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Prostitution Is Allowed so Why Should Writing about it Be Illegal?:

Manto.” Translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, Scroll.in, 14 Sept. 2014,

scroll.in/article/678733/prostitution-is-allowed-so-why-should-writing-about-it-be-

illegal-manto.

Mehta, Asoka and Achyut Patwardhan. The Communal Triangle in India. Kitabistan, 1942.

Petersen, Kirsten Holst. “First Things First: Problems of a Feminist Approach to African

Literature.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft et al,

Routledge, 1995, pp. 251-54.

Robinson, Francis. Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’

Muslims, 1860-1923. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sahni, Bhisham. “The Progressive Writers’ Movement.” Indian Literature, vol. 29, no.

6,1986, pp. 178-183. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24159089.

Usmani, Afzal. “Maulana Khawaja Altaf Hussain Hali.” Aligarh Movement, 2000,

aligarhmovement.com/karwaan_e_aligarh/maulana_khawaja_altaf_hussain_hali.

Zahir, Sajjad. “Reminiscences”, Indian Literature, 1952. pg. 51

Chapter One

Construction of Class and Social Stratification among India’s Muslims in Select

Narratives of Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder

 Mamnoon 47

Within disciplines of social sciences and political theory, a predominant

concept is that of ‘class’, one that is centred on principles of social stratification

whereby strict hierarchies and demarcations prevail within society. The bases of this

disparity lie in wealth, occupation and social status of people which become

yardsticks for their social position within society and therefore, consequently, of

power and authority. Time and again, the concept of class has been theorized and

defined by anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists. This chapter deals with the

ideas of class within Indian Muslim society and dwells on the various stratification

models by which Indian Muslims are categorised such as Ashraf (upper classes) and

Ajlaf (lower classes). The chapter draws on various Indian sociologists who have

worked mainly on the question of stratification among India’s Muslims. The chapter

finally analyses works of Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder to see how social

stratification among India’s Muslims plays out in their fiction.

Class and Caste in Indian Society

Analogous to any society in the world, India is seeped into diverse forms of

social stratification, particularly owing to the country being home to diverse religious,

cultural and social factions. Class and caste are two of these forms. India as a country,

according to Marx, is “not only divided between Mohamadan and Hindoo, but

between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was

based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a general repulsion and constitutional

exclusiveness between all its members” (“Future Results”). Class system is generally

composed of three classes — Upper class, Middle Class and Lower class as well as

various sub-classes which exist between them. In India, predominantly a Hindu

nation, class exists in the form of the Varna system which basically classifies Hindu
 Mamnoon 48

society into four groups: Brahmins, which includes priests and scholars; Kshatriyas,

which includes warriors, rulers as well as administrators; Vaishyas, which includes

traders and businessmen and Shudras, which includes labourers or the working class.

A separate group whose existence lies outside of the four above mentioned categories

is that of the Dalits or ‘Depressed Classes’ as the Census by the British termed them

prior to Independence.

It must be noted that the above mentioned quadruple means of social

stratification must not be mistaken with that of the more convoluted and at the same

time perspicuous concept of Jati or what is known as caste which is an elaborate

system of stratification based on birth among Hindus. Pragmatically, there might be

some movement and flexibility between classes; castes, however are immutable,

offering no respite for change. Those at the top of these hierarchies hold more

prestige, power and opportunities while those at the bottom languish in lack thereof.

The most deplorable of them all, however, are the Dalits who have been subjected to

untouchability since times immemorial and who are engaged in the most menial of

jobs such as manual scavenging.

Many scholars and social scientists have delineated caste as a manifestation of

the class system for they perceive the Bramanical order as one of privilege over those

who are confined to the lower orders. Scholars such as Narmadeshwar Prasad have

tried to establish this through positing that the Brahmins, by citing certain instances

from the Gita and documents such as Laws of Manu, curb any revolt from the lower

classes quite effectively through myths about their own sanctity and unquestionable

authority. This has been done through theories such as the Law of Karma,

transmigration of the soul etc. The Hindu caste system is not just restricted to

Hinduism alone; it has influenced other communities as well, especially Muslims.

 Mamnoon 49

Since the present study focuses on Indian Muslims, I would now delve into the social

stratification that exists among Indian Muslims, how it developed and what are its

ramifications.

Social Stratification among India’s Muslims

The intent behind drawing on the discourse on Marxism and the Hindu Caste

system was to examine the issue of social stratification among India’s Muslims

against these frameworks amidst others. It is believed that the non-hierarchical,

singular and unifying ideology of Islam got challenged when it spread over the world

and reached a particularly plural and elaborately stratified culture like India.

Although, initially the Arabs were divided into different tribes or ‘Qabile’ as they are

known in Arabic, like Quraysh, Banu Asad or Ajman, there was no gradation or

segmentation among them. However, people began stratifying the community on the

basis of, initially, their lineal or social connections to the Prophet, caliphs and other

prominent Muslim personalities. Later when Islam spread to distant lands, intricate

group identities began to surface. In the past few years, the issue of social

stratification among Muslims has also attracted considerable scholarship and debate

within academia, resulting in somewhat differing views by scholars and theorists,

who, however, have a common consensus: the Muslim community is elaborately

stratified. Status differentiation implicit among Muslims finds expression mainly in

restrictions on marriage and to some extent, inter-dining.

On the basis of decadal censuses of India, Muslims can be divided into four

groups. Group I consists of Ashrafs, who trace their lineage to foreign shores such as

Arabia, Persia or Afghanistan. Saiyyids are considered most significant and highest

among Ashrafs, followed by Sheikh, Mughal and Pathan. Group II comprises

 Mamnoon 50

indigenous Hindu converts to Islam. This includes people across Hindu castes, except

untouchables and are known as Ajlafs. Group III was characterised on the basis of

profession, for instance, Julaha (weaver), Darzi (tailor), Qassab (butcher), Nai

(barber), Kabariya (garbage collector), Dhobi (washerman), Mirasi (musician) and

Tawaif (prostitute). Group IV consists of foreign settlers in India who were known by

the regions they came from, for instance Biloch (born in Bilochistan) or Habshi (born

in Africa).

This stratification, however, excludes another class of people, the Hindu Dalits

or Untouchables, who converted to Islam in order to emancipate themselves from

oppression due to caste practices in their former religion. They are known as

‘Pasmanda’ Muslims, a term which became popular after the formation of the

Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, an Indian Muslim organization dedicated to the

emancipation of the Arzal community. It was founded by Ali Anwar in Patna, Bihar,

Anwar himself being an OBC Muslim. It is a general belief that untouchability does

not exist among Muslims, but the existence of such organisations as the Pasmanda

Muslim Mahaz and other facts reveal something else. For instance, an episode on

Untouchability of the popular television talk show on social issues, Satyamev Jayate,

featured clips of a documentary. It depicts a poor Muslim family, one of whose

members revealed that the Sheikhs and Syeds are from a higher status and thus do not

even let them sit at their homes for they consider these people filthy and therefore

untouchable. He also tells that the mosque is the only place where there is no bias but

no sooner they climb down the stairs of the mosque, than Islam is kept aside and

discrimination thrives and so, apart from offering namaz, they cannot do anything else

together.
 Mamnoon 51

What is more problematic for the Pasmanda Muslims is that they have not

even been recognized as a ‘scheduled category’ by the Indian Constitution, unlike

their Hindu counterparts. In eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, for instance, Muslim

Halalkhors or manual scavengers work alongside Helas, Doms and Valmikis in

sanitation crews and brass bands, and are subjected to the same forms of everyday

contempt on account of their lowly birth, yet the latter three are identified by the state

as Scheduled Castes while Halalkhors, because they profess Islam, are excluded from

this category and its concomitant safeguards and benefits.

Although different from the Hindu untouchables, the Muslim Pasmanda are

subjected to the same kind of exploitation and segregation. In Muslim Caste in Uttar

Pradesh: A Study of Culture Contact (1960), for example, Ghaus Ansari observes that

a Bhangi, either Muslim or non-Muslim, is not permitted to enter a mosque no matter

how clean he may be at the time and that in almost all the households of Ashraf,

Muslim Rajputs, and the clean occupational castes, Bhangis, either Muslim or non-

Muslim, are generally served food in their own utensils and are given water to drink

in such a way that the jar does not touch even their hands (Ansari 60). It is notable

that although they converted being perhaps lured by the Islamic promise of equality

and brotherhood, the Hindu Dalits could never really escape the heavy baggage of

their humble birth and faced an equal, if not more, discrimination in their new-found

community. The scholar, Ghaus Ansari terms this group as ‘Arzal’ which consists of

‘unclean’ groups such as Bhangi (manual scavengers) and Chamar (tanners) and are at

the lowest rung of the social ladder.

It can be said that the flexibility attributed to Islam is confined only to the

mosque and religious pilgrimages where all pray as equals. Firdous Azmat Siddiqui,

in her book, A Struggle for Identity: Muslim Women in the United Provinces, notes
 Mamnoon 52

how no Mehtar Muslim could ever think of sitting with a Saiyyid and also how there

was a separate passage for a Mehtarani to enter a house in order to clean the

washrooms. She was debarred from touching the taps or drinking water and would be

poured water only from a distance. They used to outstretch the loose end of their saris

in order to receive wages from the mistresses of the house, thus avoiding contact with

their superiors. This gesture carries within itself undertones of inferiority, voluntary

submissiveness and internalization of their consciousness of being at the lowest of the

stratification hierarchy among the Arzals or the downtrodden (Siddiqui 7). Owing to

urbanization and developments in every field, this practice may have receded a bit but

there is a long way to go and in villages, the conditions of the Arzals still remain the

same.

Extensive sociological research in this area has not really been done, an

observation also endorsed by the sociologist Imtiaz Ahmad who has been a prominent

researcher in this field. Ahmad observes that Muslim groups, who are commonly

designated by terms such as biradari or zat, are corporate and local entities. Even

biradaris like Saiyyid, Sheikh and Ansaris, who reside in different parts of the

country, restrict marrying within their particular territories and often, their names are

affixed with their respective territories. This is how one hears of Sayyids of Satrikh,

Sheikhs of Allahabad or Pathans of Malihabad.

It is also generally believed that hierarchies like zat or biradari are based not

just on birth but on other factors such as occupation or economic standing, but it can

be argued that these demarcations are based on birth alone. There is really no recourse

through which, say, a Julaha (weaver) can be a Saiyyid except that of birth.

Consequently, if someone from a lower status group becomes economically

prosperous or marries into a higher or another zat, his zat does not change. It becomes
 Mamnoon 53

another biradari or zat and is addressed by a different name, to which membership

continues to depend on birth. Therefore, the belief that the biradari system among

Muslims is less rigid, because Islam permits marriage between distinct classes of

believers is just a common assumption and is not substantiated by solid empirical

evidence.

The social stratification among Muslims is a manifestation of dominant

ideologies. Religion is an ‘identity-marker’, as is class. A common parlance, the term

‘ideology’ is equated with any belief characteristic of a particular group or class.

Ideology is something ruling classes “do” to subordinate groups, what Nicholas

Abercrombie refers to as the “dominant ideology thesis”. Dominant groups such as

the Ashraf exercise control over the Ajlafs and Arzals by means of superior birth

more than economic power. Karl Marx opined that “the ideas of the ruling class are in

every epoch the ruling ideas” (“The Future Results”). The Italian Marxist philosopher,

Antonio Gramsci held the belief that political control requires both coercion and

consent. While the state is the principal agent of coercion, it is not primarily

responsible for the creation of consent. The institutions of civil society, such as

religion or the educational system, create the cultural forces that legitimise the status

quo. Gramsci’s analysis can be extended to the notion of social stratification where

the social position of individuals gets internalised by them. The Mehtarani who used

to outstretch the loose end of her sari to take wages from their employers as noted by

Firdous Azmat Siddiqui is a classic manifestation of the internalization of their

inferior status by the lower classes and the ‘naturalization’ of the status quo.

The ideology of the dominant group in a system of stratification can be further

discerned against the discourse on Marxism. The significance of a theory cannot be

grasped independently of the historical and social practice within which it is

 Mamnoon 54

understood, hence, class struggle in Marxism is considered radically distinct from

social stratification in India by most scholars. However, if one analyses the underlying

reasons for both, one may be able to come to some reconciliation. Karl Marx was one

of the first thinkers to draw sharp attention to the highly deleterious impact of social

stratification on Indian society and its causal link with the relations of production. In

his essay, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, he characterized the Indian

stratification system, which includes stratification among Muslims as “the most

decisive impediment to India’s progress and power”. Marx clearly and causally

connected the archaic social formation of stratification within India with the relations

of production and devised that this was based on the hereditary division of labour,

which was inseparably linked with the unchanging technological base and subsistence

economy of the Indian village community. The struggle between the higher and lower

strata of Muslims in India, that of between feudalism and peasantry as well as the

Ashraf-Ajlaf divide can be envisaged as the divide between the bourgeois and the

proletariat.

A religion becomes an ideology when a particular dominant group within that

religion such as the Ashraf comprehend religious doctrines to suit their own agendas

and refuse to accept any way of understanding the religion other than their own. It

also becomes an ideology when man-made dogma is treated as infallible truth. A

literary manifestation of this is the text, Fatwa-i-Jahandari, written by the fourteenth

century Turkish scholar, Ziauddin Barani, who was a prominent courtier of

Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Sultan of Delhi from 1325 to 1351. Through the Fatwa-i

Jahandari, Barani comes across as a vehement advocate of Ashraf supremacy who is

ruthlessly against Ajlafs. Barani’s translator, Mohammad Habib, writes, “Barani’s

God, as is quite clear from his work, has two aspects — first, he is the tribal deity of
 Mamnoon 55

the Musalmans; secondly, as between the Musalmans themselves, He is the tribal

deity of well-born Muslims” (Habib 134). Barani’s contempt for the Ajlafs is apparent

in his advice to the Sultan against their education, although the Qur’an stresses on the

acquiring of knowledge by everyone alike. Thus, he advises the Sultan:

They (Ajlafs) are not to be taught reading and writing, for plenty of

disorders arise owing to the skill of the low born in knowledge. The

disorder into which all affairs of the religion and the state are thrown is

due to the acts and words of the low born, who have become skilled.

For, on account of their skill, they become governors (wali), revenue-

collectors (amils), auditors (mutassarif), officers (farman deh) and

rulers (farman rawa) (Habib 49).

Barani promotes such ideas in order to keep the Ajlafs under control so that they do

not challenge Ashraf hegemony and for this, he frequently looks for religious

endorsement: “to promote base, mean, low-born and worthless men to be the helpers

and supporters of the government has not been permitted by any religion, creed,

publicly accepted tradition or state-law” (Habib 95). The conflict between the Ashrafs

and the Ajlafs is not simply one between a dominating upper-class and a downtrodden

lower one, but a constant dialectic of hegemony and resistance.

A significant study of class has also been addressed within Marxian thought so

much so that it has been impossible to talk about class without delving into Marxism.

Karl Marx, a German philosopher and socialist revolutionary, discerned class as a

group whose members share common economic interests and are conscious of their

work collectively to promote these interests. A group’s ideological and political

consciousness emanates from a certain sensibility of their own class out of which a
 Mamnoon 56

shared consciousness also germinates regarding how a society should socially,

politically and economically ought to be, rather than what it is.

A significant concept within Marx’s theory of class is that of the means of

production, whereby people belonging to a particular class earn their living in terms

of their ownership of the things which create social goods. A prominent notion of

class struggle within Marxist thought is that of the conflict between the capitalist

class, termed as bourgeoisie by Marx, in whose hands lie the means of production and

the working class or the proletariat, who, in order to earn and in order for the society

to go on, must work and sell their labour power. In The Communist Manifesto (1848),

a political pamphlet which is perhaps the most influential of political documents in

world history, Karl Marx and his contemporary, Friedrich Engels put forward the

following conception of class struggle:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggle […] Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,

guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,

stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an

uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time

ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in

the common ruin of the contending classes [....] The modern bourgeois

society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done

away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new

conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old

ones. (32)
 Mamnoon 57

The rationale and resolution behind the manifesto was an appeal for socialism

by the proletariat to break the shackles of capitalism and develop a communist society

where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

(Marx and Engels 60). The intent was to form a classless society; Marx’s socialist

aspiration, however, remains a distant dream for no society in the world has been able

to emancipate itself from the confines of class struggle. To think of social

stratification among Indian Muslims only in terms of Marxism would not be very

significant because the former is typical of India and has certain characteristics of its

own. However, it gives a new dimension to it if read along similar lines. I would now

place the works of the writers undertaken for study against the context of social

stratification.

Delineation of the Lower Castes and Classes in Ismat Chughtai’s Writings

Published in 1938, “Gainda”, is one of the initially published stories by

Chughtai. Through its introspective telling,published in the year 1938, is among

Chughtai’s earliest published works that in its quality of reflective narration,

disintegrated interchanges, along with strong characters provides the right arena for

serious discourses on ideas such as gender bias, class and caste conflicts as well as

sexuality. It also builds over injustices, bonding between women, domestic violence,

premarital sex and teenage pregnancy. The story also dwells on what repercussions

can occur in case of unfitting romantic relationships. A very distinguished way of

recalling past experiences is displayed by Gainda who has been victim to certain

difficult circumstances but has overcome them through her strength. Gainda, a very

young girl works as a maid in an upper class household. She is a young widow and

has seen the adult world quite early in her life due to her child marriage. As the story
 Mamnoon 58

progresses Gainda is impregnated by the narrator’s brother and when the family

comes to know about this they send the boy to Delhi while tortures Gainda for

months. Gainda faces double discrimination as she not only transcends her class to

love a man but is also a widow and is thereby expected to refrain from sexual and

romantic alliances.

“This is OUR shack” (Lifting the Veil 1) — the story begins with this assertion

by Gainda as she and her friend start to play. Such a proclamation can be read as a

way to take hold of what is one’s personal space which can further be interpreted as a

liberating move towards freeing oneself from the shackles of a society which

represses both female assertion and agency. These meetings between the narrator and

Gainda evocates a friendship that is beyond caste and class structure and in a way,

transcends boundaries created by society. It gives them certain political agency

although they remain oblivious of it. Not much has been described regarding Gainda.

She is only presented through the eyes of the narrator who gives only those details

which she deems as significant. What remains on the surface throughout is the fact

that she is in awe of Gainda and wishes to be like her, being, as she says, “the sole

owner of a set of glittering silver jewellery” (3) and moving “around showing off her

finery” (3). Despite the fragmentary descriptions of the story, the information given in

parts do complete the picture as they unravel the sufferings of a young, innocent girl

who becomes a victim of patriarchy as many others like her.

The character of Gainda cannot be read along the lines of rebellion. On the

contrary, she is a timid but exuberant young widow. As any other adolescent, she also

is on the way to ascertain her desires, hopes and sexuality. Chughtai’s portrayal of

Gainda takes beyond just the category of an ordinary girl and puts her among those
 Mamnoon 59

women in history who have been agents of change. As the literary critic Edward W.

Said, in his Introduction to his book Culture and Imperialism (1993) writes, “The

power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very

important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections

between them” (xiii).

Chughtai asserts her right over the domestic space by conferring only minor

roles to men. However, it is still quite evident that women are still on the periphery

while men rule. Even while being largely absent, the male member of the household

exert influence over everything such as the narrator’s brother in “Gainda” who

impregnates and then leaves her alone. The male characters such as Bhaiyya go out

into the world for better opportunities while leaving the women of the house the task

to clean up the mess they leave behind. The women at home, on the other hand, cover

up their faults so efficiently that men continue to have a privileged existence both

within and outside of home. It comes as no surprise then that ‘lifting the veil’ from

such hypocrisies becomes an unsettling but at the same time, necessary act, which

Chughtai attempts to do through this story and many others. Despite Gainda’s fate,

the young daughter of her employer, the narrator, goes on to establish a strong bond

with her which transcends the strictures of class.

“Gainda” is an evocative social comment on the regressive belief that a

woman’s identity is through a man, be it her father or husband and a woman no longer

has any identity if her husband dies. “When a girl’s husband is dead, who will she

deck herself for?” (3), Gainda stoically asks this rhetorical question. “A wife wears

sindoor or bangles for her husband only” (3) she continues, which according to

Chughtai is a cliché that Gainda expresses “as though she believed in it firmly” (3-4).
 Mamnoon 60

Bhaiya addresses Gainda as a ‘witch’, clasps her hands and pushes her and even

teases her to marry him. Bhabhi refers to her as ‘raand’, a term retained in the English

translation of the story for its effectiveness, meaning prostitute. An early incident in

the story involves Bahu growling and whacking Gainda and asking her, “How dare

you braid your hair and make the parting?” (5). When Gainda becomes pregnant she

is solely blamed for it, with invectives hurled at her. Biwi addresses Gainda and

others of her stature as “low-caste bitches” (11) who trap “the nobles” (11) while

Bhaiya is given a clean chit as “a studious boy” (11) who had been lead on by Gainda.

She is even beaten up for months after she becomes pregnant and is “abandoned

without food” (11).

Ismat Chugtai in “Gainda” highlights the hypocrisy and injustice associated

with sexual morality prevalent in the society in terms of how disrespectfully Gainda

and her child are treated in contrast to Bahu who also had a child few months back:

When Bahu had had that coal-black baby who died a few days after

birth, how they had sung and danced! Tons of ghee and jaggery had

been forced down her gullet. And now when Gainda had had such a

beautiful baby what did they do? Nothing? (13)

In just a few pages of fragmented dialogue and reflection in “Gainda”, with a

minimum of description and exposition, Chughtai manages to evoke issues of gender

and class. It also explores the various facets of sexual awakening in girls from a

tender age. “Gainda” is thus the story of a young widow who is sucked into the adult

world prematurely owing to a child marriage, early widowhood and ultimately a pre-

marital pregnancy due to which she is chastised. “Gainda”, like “Bandi”, an

untranslated story by Chughtai, states the bitter reality of a feudal society, where
 Mamnoon 61

domestic helpers are emotionally and sexually exploited at the whims of upper class

men, only to be discarded later. Gainda is not one of Chughtai’s fiery, outspoken

heroines but in its simplicity and understated power, the story questions the efficacy

of rampant yet retrograde religious and social ideals where women have no

democracy of choice or autonomy for their lives. It is also a story which speaks of the

economy of caste and exploitation, however, not one of grief, mourning, and death,

but a personhood of desires, the ability to ask for and of love, and the unflinching will

to live.

Unlike the quiet, submissive Gainda, the protagonist of “Gharwali” (The

Homemaker), Lajo is an effortless radical feminist and an independent, subversive

woman. Chughtai’s “Gharwali” is a scathing satire on the redundancy of the

institution of marriage, sufferings of low-born women and their sexual liberation. In

Indian society, marriage is considered a threshold, an essential step in a woman’s life,

a notion which Chughtai questions through her story. “Gharwali” is the story of Lajo,

a low-born orphan who comes to realise, as she reaches womanhood that “her body

proved to be her only asset” (79). She solicits her body for money, sometimes for

cash, sometimes on credit and other times on charity. As she grows up, Lajo is not at

all doubtful or uncertain about her desire for physical intimacy and is “a stranger to

bashfulness or the sense of shame” (79). She does not shy away from sexual

pleasure. She has minimal regard for social status and views everyone as an equal.

Perhaps promiscuous, she is desired by many, including Mirza, the owner of the

house in which she lives and works. Mirza tries to tame Lajo on many occasions,

but her care-free soul remains unshackled by any conventional understanding of

love and marriage.

 Mamnoon 62

Lajo, partly because of her birth and partly because of her profession, doesn’t

enjoy a good reputation in the neighbourhood but at the same time she is desirable to

every man. Men see her as an object through which they can fulfil their sexual

yearnings. They do not respect her or accept her as an equal, but do not, even, leave a

single chance to sleep with her. In this sense, through “Gharwali”, Chughtai also

captures the essence of the male gaze. Brought into academic lexicon and eventually

into common parlance by film critic Laura Mulvey, ‘male gaze’ is a concept of the act

of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in Literature from a

masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual

objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. A related concept by Mulvey is that of

scopophilia, a psychological concept referring to an aesthetic pleasure “in using

another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (“Visual Pleasure”

18) which a person derives from looking at something or at someone.

As soon as Lajo enters his house she starts charming the young man with her

coquetry. Mirza yearns for Lajo but is scared of the society which looks at the

relationship between a man and a woman with scorn, unless they are married. Mirza’s

quandary finds a solution when one night Lajo makes a move; she herself grabs and

seduces him. He becomes quite fond of Lajo, making him insecure towards her and

soon proposes her for marriage. “Mirza never treats her like dirt,” (107) writes

Muhammad Sadiq. “Lajo’s former masters, once they became her lovers, took it for

granted that she was not to be paid for sexual favours. They even sent her out to other

men. Mirza alone considers her his own. He considers her worth keeping” (107).

However, he loses interest in her soon after marriage and ultimately leaves her.
 Mamnoon 63

Though Lajo has been defined as a tractable character by Ismat Chugtai, she is

not at all soft spoken as was expected from the women of those times. She is well

aware of her sexual desires she doesn’t hide them and is bold enough to flirt with

men. She is frank about her physical needs and takes them as basic human needs

which need to be fulfilled. She likes to wear a lehnga and cannot bind herself with the

string of a shalwar which Mirza asks her to wear. “Lajo is not a woman who is

confused about her basic need, she gives priority to them without getting into

complicated opinions of modesty and morality laid down by the patriarchal world”

(Kataria, 14).

“Gharwali” unravels the corruption and hypocrisy of middle class gentility. In

many ways, Lajo comes across as a ‘new woman’ 2 in terms of being sexually

liberated and resisting injustice in terms of not being subdued by patriarchal norms.

By questioning the institution of marriage through the principal character, Chughtai

delivers a strong message about how fidelity is possible without marriage. Both Lajo

and Mirza are, in fact, happier after their divorce. The narrative deals with complex

human sentiments like envy, sexual desire and obsessive behaviour cogently. The

wish and several attempts made by Mirza to subdue Lajo and turn her into a ‘proper’

lady who abides by society’s expectations never bear fruit. It is through Mirza’s

character that Chughtai expresses the larger concerns of the society with the purity

and submissiveness of women. “Gharwali” not only flouts the stereotypical image of

women as pious but also calls into question the merits of marriage as an institution.

Through her ideas, Chughtai renders marriage a farce which is bereft of love and

concern and sees it only as a way of suppressing women.

 Mamnoon 64

“Gharwali” can be read parallel to another of Chughtai’s story, “Pesha”

(Vocation) which is told from the viewpoint of a woman for who tawaifs or

courtesans are only deserving of disregard and hate. Expressing immense superiority

over herself practicing the respectable sphere of teaching, she strongly believes that

women must stay chaste until they are married. It is only when a certain group of

courtesans start living in her area and reach out to having a friendly exchange with her

that she begins have an identity crisis. The juxtaposition of the distinct concepts of

perfect femininity with impure and corrupt women and consequently the two different

professions, make the story worth reading. Furthermore, by having the story narrated

by a woman, Chughtai aptly expresses the disdain women feel for other women an din

doing so, carry on upholding the structures of patriarchy.

Through her writings, Chughtai exposed the readers to a particular facet of

Indian Muslim society, which is that of the unjust practices of sharif culture where

people from the lower strata are both humiliated and discriminated against. By turning

sharīf men into subjects in need of reform (instead of ideals of reform) in a language

that brazenly exposed the excesses of patriarchy, both of Chughtai’s stories, “Gainda”

and “Gharwali” bring forth the hidden notions of propriety enshrined in sharif culture.

Both Gainda and Lajo are the ‘other’ and the ‘subaltern’ for whom the privileged have

absolutely no regard. If adab refers to, generally, the outward aesthetic expression of

an internal ethical state of being, then writers such as Chughtai moulded the concept

of adab into an ethical practice by making literature a potent tool of social justice

where the ajlaf have to be liberated from the injustices of sharif hierarchies.

Urdu progressive writers of the period such as Chughtai saw themselves as

auteurs of socially realist literature that depicted the lives and thinking of people who

had up until then appeared at best peripheral, and at worst, held in contempt as the
 Mamnoon 65

inverse of all that was sharīf. What came to be a defining feature of progressive

writing was that, figures like the peasant, the laborer, the lower-class prostitute and

the household servant were transformed into individuals with desires, dreams, and

disappointments. The elite Mughal attitude towards this class of people was one of

contempt, as Sudipta Sen notes:

Most professions attending to the elite were held in disdain and looked

upon as fit only for the mean and the vile […] personal servants,

watering men, elephant keepers, venders, perfumers, sweets sellers,

and bread-makers were considered scoundrels (paji) […] even among

ten rupee officeholders (masabdars), an elephant keeper with a

monthly allowance of five hundred rupees was seen absolutely as a

social unequal. The company of people engaged in mean professions

or the market (bazariyan) was to be carefully avoided. No aristocrat,

Mughal, Shaikh, Sayyad or Afghan, would marry into their ranks, have

them join their table, or entertain them at their social gatherings.

(Empire of Free Trade 29)

Professor M. Asaduddin states in his introduction to a collection of Chughtai’s

short stories, “The characters have been treated not as autonomous individuals but as

products of a certain social environment which shape their psyche […] in other words,

they are culturally rooted, and the local flavor adds significantly to their charm”.

(xix). “Gainda” and “Gharwali” thus lay bare the ruptures, conflicts and hypocrisies

of a society beleaguered by social ills such as caste, class and patriarchy. Stories like

the ones discussed above challenge conventional mores and therefore fulfil

Literature’s responsibility of mirroring society and serving as a powerful tool to

propel change. The extremist wing of the Progressive Writers’ Movement had
 Mamnoon 66

communist undertones which led to their fiction being, in part, parallel to or inspired

by the realist, Soviet Socialist Literature and portraying the plight of the working class

peasants. Some of Chughtai’s works too, such as “Gainda”, centre on the domestic

lives of ordinary women, many of whom belong to lower classes “who suffer multiple

marginalizations, owing to the stereotypes that define their status within patriarchal

familial setups in the private spaces of the household as well as in public, social

spheres” (Rizvi 65).

Both Gainda and Lajo are victims of double marginalization — first, by being

women, and second, by hailing from the lower classes. For them, it is the twin

afflictions of sexism and class-struggle. Akin to the female characters in American

writer Alice Walker’s writings such as in The Colour Purple (1982), who embody this

double consciousness and dichotomy of being women and at the same time, being

Black, both Gainda and Lajo’s predicament displays how a woman’s body becomes

an embodiment of male voyeurism, patriarchy and male hegemony. In doing so,

Chughtai comes across as a writer who is critical of such practices and a champion of

women’s struggle for sexual, political and class equality.

Portrayal of the Muslim Elites and their World in Qurratulain Hyder’s Works

Qurratulain Hyder has been a prolific writer who went on to write several

novels, including Mere Bhi Sanamkhane (My Temples, Too), Aag Ka Darya (River of

Fire); Aahkir-e-Shab ke Humsafar (Fireflies in the Mist) and Chandni Begum. Most of

these are historical novels and are contextualised in the socio-cultural milieu of the

Indo-Muslim bourgeois communities of Awadh. Hyder got the prestigious Jnanpith

Award in 1989 for Aakhir-e-Shab ke Humsafar in the acceptance speech of which she

commented on her own writing:

 Mamnoon 67

My concern for civilizational values about which I continue writing

may sound naive, woolly-headed and simplistic. But then, perhaps, I

am like that little bird which foolishly puts up its claws, hoping that it

will stop the sky from falling. (Naim “Aini Aapa”)

Mere Bhi Sanamkhane, Aag Ka Darya and Aahkir-e-Shab ke Humsafar form a sort of

trilogy, explicating the political scenario of the Indian subcontinent. Among

these, Aag Ka Darya has received the maximum amount of attention on account of its

epic historical sweep and experimental narrative conception.

Spanning the period from the Indian Partition to the time of the Babri Masjid

dispute in the early ninetees, Chandni Begum is Qurratulain Hyder’s most enigmatic

and daring of novels, which, as Hyder’s other works, consistently oscillates between

the past and the present. Centred around two prominent Lucknow families, the

narrative focuses on the life of a young man, Qambar Ali, who is a romantic

revolutionary and the three women whose lives are strewn with his in certain ways —

Bela, the daughter of a mirasi-bhand 3 couple who constantly struggles to move

beyond her tainted past; Safia, daughter of the Raja of Teen Katori House who suffers

from polio and Chandni Begum, once belonging to an affluent landed family but now

turned destitute. Chandni Begum is a sharp socio-political commentary on Partition,

class conflict and the role of women.

The conflict between the Ashrafs and Ajlafs, categories discussed earlier, is

not simply one between a dominating upper-class and a downtrodden lower one, but a

constant dialectic of hegemony and resistance. This division can easily be discerned

through Chandni Begum. As the story unfolds over a period of four decades or so and
 Mamnoon 68

across generations, one finds Hyder holding forth an issue little dealt with during her

time — a society without caste or class divisions. The Partition of India forms the

backdrop of this book as much as the illustrious homes and lives of people in

Lucknow, where the novel is mostly set. It chronicles the rapidly transforming socio-

political milieu through the perspectives of Qambar Ali, his family and other

characters.

The narrative draws us into itself through a detailed and vibrant description of

Red Rose, the sprawling mansion of Qambar Ali, a Leftist young man, the son of the

affluent Shaikh Azhar Ali, a successful barrister always with a Havana cigar in his

mouth. Shaikh Azhar Ali, “the classic picture of a successful and affluent barrister”

(Hyder 1), is an epitome of the dying landed gentry. His son, on the contrary, is

presented as “a young man of modern times who made fiery speeches against private

property in the Students’ Union” (1). In presenting the contrasting picture of these

characters of two different generations, the novel is in effect showcasing a shift in the

socio-political and cultural ethos of the city where the questioning of the status quo

was growing stronger, especially amongst lower classes and women. Qambar Ali’s

mother, Badrunnisa Azhar Ali (also known as Bitto Baji), we are told, was a social

reformer and used to give speeches on women’s rights.

Chandni Begum depicts deep nostalgia about an old-world order, a long-lost

and much loved legacy and culture of the Taluqdars4 or landed gentry:

Suddenly the scene changed. The Taluqdars and their begums along

with their cars, palanquins and carriages disappeared. Soon even tonga

and ekka5 carriages became rare. Instead, there was a flood of bicycles

and rickshaws. (3).

 Mamnoon 69

It also reflects upon farmers and peasants who “had been dispossessed because they

had been cultivating the lands now declared abandoned by their owners” (3) due to

the abolishment of the Taluqdar system. The dynamics of both caste and class are

inherent in this novel. At the very outset, Bitto Baji’s friend, Alima Bano complains

of her sisters in law not considering her family as “social equals” (14) and rhetorically

questions, “Why would they be friends with us poor people?” (4).

Perhaps the most evocative commentary on social stratification in Chandni

Begum is through the mention and portrayal of courtesans and dancers. Early on in the

novel, Qambar is reminded of a stage performance by Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, whom

Bhawani Chacha, an elderly man who works for Qambar, dismisses as one without

respectable character:

On moonlit night, a crazy man would go around writing his name with

chalk on the roads of Lucknow. Next to it, he would add – the besotted

lover of Akhtari Bai […] I have heard he was from a well-to-do family.

What does it take to drive a man crazy? May God save us from bad

times. (21)

These words promulgate the general notion about courtesans or tawaifs –– a term

exhibiting profanity which was not the case earlier — as lowly women trapping

young, affluent men. The courtesans garnered enormous respect and wealth during the

Mughal period and years after that.

Historically, the courtesans were at the centre of art and culture in India,

proficient in both music and dance. Author and historian Pran Nevile, an authoritative

voice on the subject, describes in his book, Nautch Girls of India: Dancers, Singers,
 Mamnoon 70

Playmates (1996), how the tawaifs of North India enjoyed wealth, power, prestige,

political access, and were considered authorities on culture. Noble families would

send their sons to them to learn tehzeeb, or etiquette, and “the art of conversation”

(45). The tawaifs reached their zenith under the Mughal rule. “The best of the

courtesans, called deredar tawaifs, claimed their descent from the royal Mughal

courts” (60). writes Nevile.

They formed part of the retinue of kings and nawabs […] many of

them were outstanding dancers and singers, who lived in comfort and

luxury […] To be associated with a tawaif was considered to be a

symbol of status, wealth, sophistication and culture […] no one

considered her to be a bad woman or an object of pity. (66)

The character of Bela, who is the daughter of a Mirasi-Bhand couple is one of

the most developed of Hyder’s characters, one whose character becomes an

embodiment of the segregation, prejudice and injustice faced by her lot on the basis of

their class and profession. Bela and her mother, Chameli Begum are “domni-singer by

caste” (23). When they come to visit Qambar along with Bela’s father, I.B. Mogra,

Qambar decides to write an article about them and include it in the socialist journal

run by him, Red Rose, under the title, ‘Women Qawwals: India’s new Popular

Artists’, citing the reason, as much to himself as to the readers that, “The terms

‘people’s artists’, ‘popular singers’ are very powerful” (25) and recognising the fact

that “There is a latent contempt in using caste terms like dom, dhari, mirasi, bhand.

Folk singer, folk artiste, changes this image” (25). In deliberately refraining from

addressing Bela and her family as they are and imposing nomenclatures he thinks
 Mamnoon 71

best, Qambar, for all his socialist, Marxist ideals, represents the elitism which comes

from higher birth and wealth and is only an “armchair leftist” (27).

Nevertheless, Hyder asks a pertinent question through Qambar — “Why is an

artist so miserable in our capitalist society?” (25). In asking this, she reiterates the

ideas of Karl Marx, who viewed prostitutes as victims of the capitalist system. In

his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (2007) he describes prostitution

as being “only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer” (115)

and viewed the abolition of prostitution as a necessary part of ending capitalism. Also,

in his political treatise, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx addresses prostitution

as the ‘complement’ of the bourgeois family, and predicted that both institutions

would one day collapse. The courtesan figure in historical narratives is variously

referred to as the dancing girl, nautch girl, tawaif, kothewali. These categories, each

with their own significance, were read within a broad category of ‘prostitute’ with the

advent of the colonial government and administration in India. The ‘artist’ Qambar

refers to is Bela, the daughter of a mirasi-bhand couple and whose mother has had a

‘debauched’ past.

Fredrik Barth, in his seminal study, Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon,

and North-West Pakistan (1971), identifies the origin of stratification among Muslims

from the historical segregation between categories such as pak (pure)

and paleed (impure), defined by an individual or family’s social or religious status

and occupation.

Originally, Paleed/Paleet qaum included people running brothels or

working there, courtesans/dancers (Tawaif) and musicians. Declared to

 Mamnoon 72

be ‘sexually promiscuous’ by upper classes, the onus is firmly on these

women for inciting upper class men (Chowdhry 170).

This question of ‘purity’ is a strong argument posited while discriminating people

from the lower strata as against the ‘sharif’.

Qambar has always been clear about the fact that he wants to marry an

educated girl from the working class, and to make sure that the bride “doesn’t wear a

nose-ring like cattle at the time of the nikah. That is a symbol of the enslavement of

women” (9). His mother chooses the simple, submissive, Chandni Begum. However,

when Bela comes along, Qambar decides to bail her out of her misery by marrying

her. He draws a lot of resentment and negativity for his decision. Even the household

workers don’t approve of Bela to become his wife. Ramzani, the cook, exclaims,

“what a bizarre sight! Bhaiyya has lost his mind” (53). This gesture carries within

itself undertones of inferiority, voluntary submissiveness and internalization of their

consciousness of being at the lowest of the stratification hierarchy among the Arzals

or the downtrodden as Firdous Azmat Siddiqui notes in her book, A Struggle for

Identity: Muslim Women in the United Provinces (2014). Siddiqui describes how a

Mehtarani, or women who clean toilets at home used to outstretch the loose end of

their saris in order to receive wages from the mistresses of the house, thus avoiding

contact with their superiors. This is because she is perceived as ‘defiled’ on account

of her occupation.

Qurratulain Hyder was modern and experimental in terms of exploring

psychological perspectives and cultural mores of her characters. The internalisation

and acceptance of one’s social class and thus acting accordingly is brought out

effectively by Hyder through depicting the psychology of domestic workers and their
 Mamnoon 73

intolerance towards anyone from their class transcending boundaries and attaining a

higher position than themselves. The domestic workers in Qambar’s house resent Bela

for having broken the glass ceiling. Bela understands this and confesses to Qambar:

[…] all of them belong to the lower classes, but if another person from

their class rises in social standing, they resent it. They love their

enslavement. They always want their lord to be their master. You are

unnecessarily killing yourself trying to establish a classless society.

(54)

In marrying Bela in order to bring an end to her miseries, Qambar tries to prove

himself as someone bereft of the ideas of hierarchies and clas; still, he is conscious of

the fact that he has married below his birth and Bela asks him a pertinent question:

“Why haven’t you still introduced me to your friends? You’ve kept me underground

when you should have proudly announced, this is my wife Bela, the daughter of

Mogra the bhaand” (65) and tells him that “no one can be more class conscious than

you” (65).

Bela is also humiliated by the inhabitants of the Teen Katori House, Qambar’s

affluent neighbours — the daughters of the Raja, Zarina Sultan, Parveen and Shehla

and their mother, Rani Sahib. Parveen or Penny as she is called, points “to the low

stool implying that she (Bela) can sit there” (85), when she happens to visit them.

Bela, who has immense self-respect, “kept standing where she was” (85). “With

disgust, Bela looked at these insensitive sisters, who for countless years had been

humiliating unfortunate women” (86), writes Hyder, “If she were to go and join

Chandni on the stool, the ladies would think that the domni has realised her place

(86)”. The sisters are discriminatory, not only towards Bela but also towards Chandni
 Mamnoon 74

Begum, once belonging to landed gentry but now fallen on hard times. Monetary

strength and birth are thus put under the same category here and looked at with

contempt.

Rani Sahib addresses Bela as “a low-caste wretch. A horror!” (88) in her

absence and has no sympathy for Chandni either, asking her to leave their house:

“Listen, Chandni. The truth is that there is no place inside the house” (88). Chandni,

too, is conscious of her affluent past and class. She retorts, in a broken voice, “Don’t

give me any food left on their plates” (89), when she thinks the leftovers for the cat is

instead for her. Due to her altered circumstances, Chandni finds herself spending

more time with the domestic workers of Teen Katori House than its owners who are

her relatives. Waziran draws a contrast between Chandni and Bela:

Bad times have befallen her, therefore she is sitting here with the

maids. If she were to become a lady again, would she come and sit on

a servant’s cot? Bela is a domni by caste. When she came here to sing

for the wedding, food was served to her outside on a tray. She wasn’t

allowed to sit with the guests. Now that she has returned as a lady, they

grumble. (98)

This comparison brings to the fore a certain upward mobility within the social ladder

among Indian Muslims. Syed Ali, in his research on caste among Muslims of

Hyderabad for instance, notes that on the one hand there are Qureshis who want to

preserve their blood purity through strict endogamy, there are others in Hyderabad for

whom the importance of lineage-based status identities such as caste have greatly

declined6. This has been possible with the expansion of economic opportunities,
 Mamnoon 75

education and a modern outlook with time. However, social stratification is still a

grim reality among India’s Muslims.

Chandni Begum is replete with instances of social stratification among India’s

Muslims. There is a mention of there being different mosques for the Bhand

community. Although different from the Hindu untouchables, the Muslim Pasmanda

are subjected to the same kind of exploitation and segregation. In Muslim Caste in

Uttar Pradesh: A Study of Culture Contact (1960), for example, Ghaus Ansari

observes that a Bhangi, either Muslim or non-Muslim, is not permitted to enter a

mosque no matter how clean he may be at the time. An Al-Jazeera documentary

entitled Dalit Muslims of India (2015) shows, among other things, the lives of the Hila

community in Tara village of Madhya Pradesh. They are manual scavengers. They

faced discrimination at the hands of upper caste Hindus so they converted to Islam but

without any respite. The Hilas have a burial ground quite separate from the other

ethnic and religious groups and also different mosques. This reality debunks the belief

that religious places such as mosques do not discriminate people on the basis of the

category to which they belong in the strict social hierarchy.

The politics of nomenclature is also a strong determiner of class. For the

French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, names reveal a person’s “identity and inform him

in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be” (121). This rings true

of Indian Muslims whose names reflect, often without ambiguity, their gender and

class. Muslims belonging to the lowest rungs of society such as peasant and domestic

workers do not generally have names resembling those of Ashrafs. For instance, there

is a common practice of naming a person Jumman if he was born on a Friday. There is

 Mamnoon 76

a washerman named Jumman in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961)

as there is Kallan the carpenter in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940).

In Chandni Begum, an inherent politics ensues through nomenclature. The

domestic workers in the novel have names such as Batashan Bua, Ilaichi Khanum,

Waziran, Ramzani and Phatku among others. The inhabitants of the Teen Katori

House, however, have anglicised nicknames such as Jenny, Penny, Dinky, Pinky and

Vicky. When Dinky expresses disdain over having such names for themselves, Pinky

tells her that

Class becomes apparent […] from names and their aliases. Babbu

Sharbati will obviously be a cotton carder or weaver […] There is so

much inherent snobbery in being called Jacky Singh and Dicky Khan.

In our democratic time, our people have changed names that they

thought were degrading. Cotton carders call themselves Mansuri after

Mansur al Hajjaj. Barbers have become Salmani (195).

Personal names come with considerable “demographic baggage” (Alter 13),

frequently acting as key vehicles for the automatic categorization of their bearers and

the noticing of the category before the person. This demographic baggage of names,

then, plays a key role in everyday discrimination.

Her class, which Pinky speaks about is synonymous with respectability or

‘sharif’ culture. Respectability for the higher class or Ashraf as they are known, has

primarily been understood in terms of two inter-dependent codes of Muslim moral

conduct: adab and akhlaq. Adab refers to manners, etiquette, and proper
 Mamnoon 77

comportment. Barbara Metcalf in her book, Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place

of Adab in South Asian Islam (1984), has defined the term adab as:

[…] a concept, a literary genre, and a quality of personality […] which

reflects a high valuation of the employment of the will in proper

discrimination of correct order, behavior, and taste. It implicitly or

explicitly distinguishes cultivated behavior from that deemed vulgar,

often defined as pre-Islamic custom. Adab means discipline and

training. It denotes as well the good breeding and refinement that

results from such training. (3)

Intimately related to adab, is akhlaq (ethical conduct), but whereas adab has tended to

correspond to that which is practical, such as behavior associated with speaking to

one’s superiors, or the kind of dress worn for specific occasions, akhlaq refers to

one’s innate behavior, character, and moral conduct.

Behaviours such as the manner of greeting and attire also determine class

where bending one’s head to acknowledge greeting “is the manner of the high-born”

(316). In terms of attire, Hyder distinctly points out that clothes like “Chutta pyjama.

Khadapaincha! Less flared. Those were worn only by the maids. The owners wore

gharaswan pyjamas” (179). Sharif culture is also determined by its use of chaste Urdu

language whereas the lowly Muslims speak roughly and also on its insistence on good

taste. The question of manners, attire, language and taste as determiners of class is

what Pierre Bourdieu defines as ‘Cultual Capital’, by analogy with economic capital

which includes wealth, cultural capital refers to assets that ensure social mobility.

Boudieu perceives cultural capital as a ‘habitus’, or an embodied socialized tendency

or disposition to act, think, or feel in a particular way 7. This refers to education and

the kinds of behaviour, clothing and taste the higher class approves as ‘good’.
 Mamnoon 78

Education plays a major role in this as the habitus of a person is composed of the

intellectual dispositions inculcated in a person within the family and eventually the

education system.

Chandni Begum thus has the distinctive cultural context of Lucknow and the

vivid descriptions in the novel exude Hyder’s deep understanding of the society that

has traditionally thrived in the city along with its beliefs, language and behaviour

patterns. Present in the novel are those prominent shadows of the old-world

feudalistic structure of society on the one hand and on the other, one witnesses the

crumbling of the same in the post-Partition era when industrialization and modernity

began to bring India into its fold.

This chapter has thus tried to delve into the intricacies of social stratification

among India’s Muslims, especially the dichotomy between the Ashraf and Ajlaf.

Through a discussion of the writings of Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder, I have

tried to explicate the wide gap between the two classes through the perspectives of

behaviour, occupation, language and way of life. Although the societal concerns of

the two writers are different since one deals with the middle class while the other with

the elite, their main consideration is how the narratives express codes of behaviour

and speculate over what is considered ‘appropriate’ and ‘right’ and what is not,

depending on the classes.

 Mamnoon 79

End Notes

1. For more on such myths, see Prashad, Narmadeshwar. The Myth of the Caste

System, Samjna Prakashan, 1957.

2. ‘New Woman’ is a feminist idea that emerged in the late 19th century and had

a profound influence on feminism well into the 20th century. It was first used

in 1894 by the Irish writer Sarah Grand in an influential article, to refer to

independent women seeking radical change. It was the prolific British-

American author, Henry James who later familiarized readers with the term by

referring to it in terms of recounting the spurt of knowledgeable, independent

and career-driven women in both America and Europe.

3. The Mirasi are the genealogists and traditional singers and dancers belonging

to different communities. In North India, most Mirasi groups have been lower

caste Hindus who reverted to Islam.

Bhands are the traditional folk entertainers of countries like India, Bangladesh

and Nepal who are now an endogamous Muslim community, which is no

longer involved in their traditional occupation of folk entertainment. They

include actors, dancers, minstrels and storytellers.

4. The Talukdars were aristocrats who formed the larger ruling class during

the Mughal and British periods in India. They collected taxes and were owners

of vast amount of lands which followed a hereditary system.

5. An ekka is a carriage driven by a horse, mostly common in northern India

during the 19th and early twentieth centuries. They find frequent mention in

colonial literature of the period for instance in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Three

Musketeers”.
 Mamnoon 80

6. For more on this, see Syed Ali’s study, “Collective and Elective Ethnicity:

Caste among Urban Muslims in India.” In Sociological Forum, vol. 17, no. 4,

Dec. 2002, pp. 593–620. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3070361.

7. For a better understanding of ‘Cultural Capital’, see Distinction: A Social

Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) by Pierre Bourdieu and the chapter

by him, “The Forms of Capital” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the

Sociology of Education (1986), edited by J. Richardson.

 Mamnoon 81

Works Cited

Alter, Adam. Drunk Tank Pink: And other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think,

Fee,l and Behave. Penguin, 2013.

Ansari, Ghaus. Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of Culture Contact. Ethnographic

and Folk Culture Society, 1960.

Bouazzaoui, Mostafa, director. Dalit Muslims of India. Youtube, Al Jazeera English, 2 Sept.

2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7xTSy4P9QI.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Rites of Institution.” Language and Symbolic Power, translated by G

Raymond and M Adamson, Polity Press, 1991, p. 121.

Chowdhry, Prem. “Enforcing Cultural Codes: Gender and Violence in Northern India.” A

Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India, edited by Janaki Nair

and Mary E John, Zed Books Ltd, 2000.

Chughtai, Ismat. Lifting the Veil. Translated by M. Asaduddin, Penguin Books, 2009.

Habib, Mohammad, and Afsar Umar Salim Khan. The Political Theory of the Delhi

Sultanate: (Including a Translation of Fatawa-i Jahandari, circa 1358-9 A.D.). Kitab

Mahal, 1961.

Hyder, Qurratulain. Chandni Begum. Translated by Saleem Kidwai, Women Unlimited,

2017.

Katoria, M. (2011). “Woman and Sexuality: Gender-Class Interface in Selected Short of

Ismat Chugtai”. The Criterion, vol. 2, no. 4, 2011.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Marx, Karl. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” The Future Results of British Rule

in India, marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm.
 Mamnoon 82

Metcalf, Barbara D. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam..

University of California Press, 1984.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures, edited

by Stephen Heath, et al, Palgrave, 1989.

Naim, C M. “Aini Apa (1927-2007).” Outlook, 2007.

Nevile, Pran. Nautch Girls Of India: Dancers, Singers, Playmates. Nevile Books, 1996.

Sen, Sudipta. Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the

Colonial Marketplace. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Siddiqui, Firdous Azmat. A Struggle for Identity: Muslim Women in the United Provinces.

Foundation Books, 2014.

 Mamnoon 83

Chapter Two

Delineating Gender Constructs within Indian Muslim Society through Select Works

by Ismat Chughtai and Qurratuin Hyder

At the time when Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder were writing, the

British as well as the Indian Muslim reformers were conscious of the fact that for a

community to uplift and modernise itself, the education of its womenfolk is vital.

Hence the various reformers began to undertake the task of Muslim women’s

education by setting up various organizations and committees. This chapter tries to

put the need for the education of Muslims, particularly women in the context of the

socio-political milieu of India during the colonial period and the period immediately

after as India achieved Independence. It further delineates how women writers such as

Chughtai and Hyder championed the cause of women by narrating their experiences

vis-a-vis their families and the nation.

Muslim Women’s Reform Movement

Prior to the British invasion of India there was a certain lacuna in terms of a

formal, regular, government-approved and aided education system and as far as

women were concerned, they were mainly educated at home by their fathers or

brothers. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century with the arrival of

certain Christian missionaries in India as British rule attained prominence that things

began to alter. These missionaries aimed at broadening the perception of men towards

the importance of education for themselves as well as for their women which led to

the establishment of a thriving, formal education system in the form of new-age

schools and syllabi. As much as the emancipation of women was a major concern for

both rulers and native intellectuals, Muslim women's absence from these
 Mamnoon 84

developments was conspicuous. One of the main reasons for this was a certain

conservative outlook regarding the education of Muslim women, the practice of

purdah or veiling among other things which led to a certain reluctance of the Muslim

intelligentsia to undertake the cause of modernization and reform at their nascent

stage. Despite that, once the need was understood, there came a certain urgency in

seeking to provide a platform and momentum to women from Muslim families.

providing visibility and impetus to Muslim women. For this, education seemed the

most potent way for women’s empowerment and their presence in public sphere.

Around the 1860s, several British women took keen interest in India and its

natives. Taking inspiration from her friend, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Mary Carpenter

(1807-1877), a British educational reformer, devoted her entire life to the cause of

education of the poor, backward and oppressed sections of the society. After assessing

the situation of women's education in major Indian cities such as Bombay, Surat,

Calicut, Ahmedabad and Madras she urged as well as actively participated in making

the natives understand the absolute need to educate their daughters, wives and

mothers. Carpenter, in her book, Six Months in India (1868), recorded a detailed

account of her visit to India as well as her impression and stance regarding the

shortcomings of educational reform schemes which were biased towards the

education of men. One of the major hurdles to women’s education, according to

Carpenter was the lack of female teachers, an issue she discussed in her book:

My first great subject was of course female education. I met with no

exception in Bombay Presidency in the strong interest felt by native

gentlemen on this subject. There was no need to point out to them the

importance of obtaining female teachers for the schools. They felt it as

 Mamnoon 85

strongly as I could do, or even more so, from having personally

witnessed the evils arising from the want of them. (64)

Thinking ahead of her times, Carpenter was an inspiration for Indian reformers

seeking to elevate the position of their women folk. For them,

[…] she represented the Western woman who was more enlightened

than the British rulers, more radical than the missionaries, and because

of her feminist consciousness, more daring and persistent than her

male compatriots in exposing the evils of the patriarchal social

structures of both Britain and India. (Jayawardena 71)

Most of the reformers and individuals, be it British or Indian had one vision in

common, that adapting to the Western pattern of education was indeed the best and

most swift way towards advancement in every field. By the end of the nineteenth

century, there was an upsurge in the number of women who acquired education and

became increasingly involved in public activities. As times underwent changes,

relatively modern approaches and strategies were also adopted to promote education

inside the zenana (female space). Due to spatial segregation, education was imparted

in the high class Muslim households through British governesses who taught women

to read and write as well as manners and etiquettes in order for them to gain

respectability and acceptance in society1. Education, in this case, became the

prerogative of the affluent class. It took a more utilitarian form following the

establishment of several educational institutions by the government. The success of

the British was therefore twofold, in the sense of promoting education as well as

giving rise to a class of educated Indians who could assist them in their imperial
 Mamnoon 86

objective of successful governance, an idea evocatively expressed by Thomas

Babington Macaulay in his famous Minutes on education2.

It should be noted that until the middle of the nineteenth century, women were

restricted to only a basic knowledge of the Quran which was primarily because it

could be done within the precincts of home. Along with lessons meant at developing

household skills, the newly introduced criterion regarding education lead towards an

urgent need for formal education to Muslim women for their overall progress.

Rachana Chakraborty sheds light over such developments in her article, “Women’s

Education and Empowerment in Colonial Bengal”:

One of the earliest references to girls’ schools in North India, noted in

the government report of 1845, referred to six schools in Delhi with a

total of 46 students. All the students were Muslim, as were the

teachers, and the education consisted of memorizing the Quran. (79)

With the advent of the printing press in the late nineteenth century, a milestone

was achieved in terms of Indian women’s education as a variety of women-centric

literature began to be published. As a means of resistance towards the western system

of education with its insistence on the English language as a medium of learning,

many Indian reformers adopted Urdu for the same purpose with the likes of important

personalities such as Altaf Husain Hali, Nazir Ahmad, Shaikh Abdullah, Rashidul

Khairi etc., contributing to the cause with sincere devotion. One of the principal

religious reformers, Ashraf Ali Thanavi (1863-1943), was a strong proponent of the

belief that for women, religious teachings such as that of the Quran and Hadith, were

paramount and knowledge of any subject beyond that would prove corrupting for

them and therefore, would be an impediment in the society’s progress. Consequently,

 Mamnoon 87

his seminal work, Bahishti Zewar (The Jewels of Paradise), lays out an actual list of

literary books that were considered apt for women to read along with a list of books

which needed to be avoided by them. Among the list of books that he regarded as

corrupting were “Dastan-i-Amir Hamza (Tale of Amir Hamza), AlfLaila (The

Thousand and One Nights), books of poetry [...] and novels of Nazir Ahmad,

including Mirat ul-Uroos and Banat un-Na’ash” (Minault 72). He believed that books

like Bahishti Zewar were the key source of religious and ethical guidance for women

in order for them to embody the roles of daughters, sisters, wives and mothers

perfectly.

As opposed to Thanavi, Mumtaz Ali favoured the establishment of educational

institutions dedicated solely to the cause of Muslim women's education. His wife

Muhamrnadi Begum, who was the first woman editor of the Urdu journal Tahzib un-

Niswan, spent her entire life writing books, articles, novels and essays concerning

women and their problems as well as her efforts towards their liberation. As a writer,

journalist and a social reformer, Muhammadi Begum drew inspiration from her father

and husband to take to writing. According to Aamer Hussein, “Mumtaz Ali’s

encouragement of his wife was of vital significance, but her ultimate vision was to be

resolutely her own: she seems to have had no need of intellectual guidance” (78).

Mumtaz Ali and his wife worked dedicatedly towards issues such as women’s rights,

age of marriage and the need for their education.

Along with the male writers who engaged with the task of reform through

their writings, there were also the Begums of Bhopal who contributed extensively

towards the same. The royal Begums of Bhopal were rulers of the state in late

nineteenth and twentieth century and prominent harbingers of liberation. A bold voice

among them was that of Begum Sultan Jahan of Bhopal (1858-1930) who not only
 Mamnoon 88

supported and patronized women's education, but also worked towards ameliorating

women from their subjugated status. What makes Sultan Jahan Begum different from

other women reformers is that she propagated concerns over women’s emancipation

through speeches and interviews at various gatherings rather than the romantic genre

of the novel. The Begum as a ruler was quite outspoken in her views and social

concerns. She stated that, “A girl's education [...] in addition to book learning, should

provide her a sufficient knowledge of household management and other feminine

occupations” (Begum 323).

The Begum herself practiced purdah and did not see it as an impediment in the

way of attaining education. In fact, she promoted the culture of veiling by observing

purdah at public events and also went ahead to establishing a social club for the

purdanashin (veiled women) in Bhopal in 1909 which provided an open and liberal

platform for purdah observing women as it included modern amenities such as “a

small library, tennis and badminton courts, and wooden stalls for exhibitions and

fancy bazaars” (Lambert-Hurley 113). Another Begum actively involved in reform as

well as the nationalist movements was Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz of Bhopal. She

got involved with the cause of women’s emancipation by starting to write articles at

the tender age of nine. Her first article titled “Talim-e-Dukhtaraan” (A Female

Education) was published in the journal Tehzib-e-Niswan. Her novel Hasanara

Begum (1916) is an effective instance of the altering socio-cultural trends towards

Muslim women. The primary motive behind such literature was to motivate girls and

women alike to attain education and also to encourage men to support them in this

endeavor.

The Begum helmed several revolutionary ideas such as her opposition towards

polygamy and female infanticide. She also supported women’s right to Meher4,
 Mamnoon 89

insisted on keeping in check men's right to triple talaq5 and women’s right to initiate

divorce or khula6 in extreme circumstances. What set her apart and more popular than

her contemporaries was that she substantiated her arguments by constant reference to

verses from the Quran and hadith. Thus, her presence looms large not only because of

her royal background, but also because she worked all her life for the cause of women

and was vocal about them in her writings.

Rebels with a Cause: Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder

The present section delves into the writings of two Muslim women writers

from India, Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder and their negotiation for change in

a patriarchal and class-ridden society by putting them in the context of the reform

movements of the time. Although Chughtai and Hyder differed ideologically as well

as in their depiction of social class and milieu, both were predisposed towards the

project of making literature a realistic representation of the society and both were

proponents of women’s liberation and deemed it as instrumental to the nation’s

progress. The bold and fervent writings of Chughtai such as her acclaimed short story,

“Lihaaf” (The Quilt) and novel Dil Ki Duniya, translated into English as The Heart

Breaks Free and Hyder’s novel, Chandni Begum which assesses even diverse issues

such as class and nationalism are cases in point. The aim of many Muslim women

writers during the twentieth century was to make the society move beyond the

rudimentary understanding of gender roles and also to highlight the multitude of

obstacles faced by women in general and women writers in particular. According to

Susie Tharu,

Embedded in the explicit programs of the reform movement, were

massive ideological reconstructions of patriarchy and gender that

 Mamnoon 90

underwrote the consolidation of imperial power. These reconstructions

often took place at the interface of patriarchy with class and caste. Not

surprisingly, it is these hidden agendas, whose effects were by no

means restricted to upper-caste or middle-class women, that were

being played out in the agitated discussions of the time. And it is these

agendas, their strategic intentions and the interests underlying them,

that the more radical and subversive women’s literature of the period

addresses (Tharu and Lalita 152).

Tharu and Lalita’s aim to create a context in which “women's writings can be

read [...] as documents that display what is at stake in the embattled practices of self

and agency, and in the making of a habitable world, at the margins of patriarchies

constituted by the emerging bourgeoisies of empire and nation” (39) finds evocative

expression in Muslim women writers exhibiting radical feminism such as Rashid

Jahan, Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder who endeavoured to become agents of

change in the treatment of women. Although facing impediments themselves, these

women writers left no stone unturned to accentuate the value and relevance of

education for women. With the likes of rebels such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,

Attia Hosain, Ismat Chughtai and others gaining prominence, it became increasingly

tough to turn a blind eye towards them or suppress their voices and writings whose

sole objective was to uplift the position and role of Muslim women.

Exploration of Gender Constructions in the Works of Ismat Chughtai:

A notable aspect of Ismat Chughtai’s oeuvre is that it deals largely, though

not only, with women. Her fiction expounds the portrayal of women in various roles,

their daily lives and challenges faced by them while her autographical narratives are
 Mamnoon 91

extensions of her own being as a woman and writer. Equally remarkable is the fact

that she is one of the first significant writers in Urdu who recognises and discusses

female sexuality in an unbridled manner, right from sexual urges in children, during

adolescence to adult sexuality. Apart from physical intimacy between men and

women, she also, in part, touches upon homosexuality in both genders. For many of

her women characters. an acknowledgement of their sexual urges is liberating. The

themes and characters of her narratives have been drawn from a world she knew best:

the middle-class Muslim families of north India, at the heart of which are women in

every role.

Chughtai’s autobiography, Kaghazi Hain Pairahan (A Life in Words:

Memoirs) (1988) draws upon her views regarding education for women, an issue she

reiterates in several of her fictional works as well. In her own case, her learning paved

the way for a new style of writing, one that was bold and realistic. She herself fought

against the restrictive norms of her family and attained higher education which was

considered difficult and bold for women of her time. Reform being one of the agendas

of her writings, Chughtai urged women to rebel against injustice and make themselves

self-dependent. Her characters portray an amalgamation of both weakness and

strength. There is a sense of realism in both her characters as well as her narratives

along with there being a strong sense of relatability. Chughtai’s works are a scathing

attack on patriarchy with themes such as women’s subjugation and erasure of the

feminine space. Something which distinguishes Chughtai from her contemporaries is

her exploration of female sexuality with abandon.

Chughtai did not shy away from unreservedly delineating the female sexuality,

a topic which has consistently been curbed and guarded by patriarchy. Most of her

stories have been inspired from phases and incidents in her personal life involving her
 Mamnoon 92

own altercation with patriarchal strictures. While the memories of her childhood were

filled with sorrow at being an unwanted child, cared for by none, her teenage and

youth were reflective of her rebellious nature that had her parents worrying about her

future. As she mentions in Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, “Our family was Progressive but

this attitude was acceptable only for boys. I was after all just a girl. Every Woman in

the family — mother, aunt, sister — was terrorized [...] Too much education was

dangerous” (qtd. in Kumar and Sadique 28). But Chughtai was successful in

transgressing the barriers laid down for her in terms of education and was able to

contrive a secure and successful career for herself. She spoke and wrote extensively

against the social customs of her times such as veiling, the spatial segregation of

women and the prejudiced perception of Muslim society against its women. These

themes and issues find reflection in Chughtai's novels as well as short stories.

Both Chughtai and Hyder’s works are compelling archives of Muslim

experience following Partition. One of the leading historians, Mushirul Hasan’s

estimate of Attia Hossain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column can be extended to the

equally important narratives of her contemporaries, Chughtai and Hyder, which, in

Hasan’s words,

[…] illuminate certain aspects of the liberation struggle which are only

dimly covered in records and private papers. They bring out the

tensions, conflicts and contradictions in movements perceived as

monolithic, autonomous and linear. They introduce nuanced discourse

in an area of research dominated by highly magisterial generalisations.

(62)
 Mamnoon 93

Perhaps the most significant reasons which set Ismat Chughtai apart from other

Muslim writers was her discussion of a rather taboo subject: female sexuality. No

other narrative brought Chughtai so much into the public eye as her story “Lihaf”

which was published in a journal based in Lahore, Adab-i-Latif in 1942.

In an interview with Carlo Coppola, Chughtai recalled that she writes “about

people I know or have known. What should a writer write about anyway?” (qtd in

Coppola 95). Taking as its inspiration, the rumours regarding a much-anatgonised

love affair between a Begum and her maid in the city of Aligarh, the narrative

delineates the sexual desires, otherwise considered taboo, of Begum Jaan who withers

away as a victim of an unhappy alliance with Nawab Sahab. After it was

published, “Lihaaf” was disregarded as immoral and corrupting on account of it

undertones of lesbianism and thus had to face a much-discussed trial in Urdu

literature. Chughtai, along with her contemporary Sadat Hasan Manto, who was

similarly summoned by the Lahore High Court for one of his stories, had to stand her

ground against strong allegations of obscenity. Both Chughtai and Manto were

exonerated post the trial as they defended themselves successfully7.

The way the trial was covered by the media was strongly despised by

Chughtai who believed that it had tarnished both her reputation as a writer and her

works post the “Lihaf” controversy was heavily overshadowed by the incident. She

expresses the experience in her own words: “‘Lihaaf’ brought me so much notoriety

that I got sick of life. It became the proverbial stick to beat me with and whatever I

wrote afterwards got crushed under its weight” (110). Indeed, as Tahira Naqvi

reiterates, Chughtai’s oeuvre is “neither confined to nor exhausted” (40) by the

subject-matter and concerns of “Lihaaf” and that “she had much, much more to offer”

(40-41). Despite being infamous, “Lihaaf” remains a scathing critique of patriarchy

 Mamnoon 94

and an expression of female sexuality. It is a narrative about the sequestered lives of

women within an Ashraf household, narrated from the perspective of a young girl

who describes the intimate and sensual relationship between a mistress and her

maidservant.

Although having faced charges of obscenity, “Lihaaf” refers directly neither to

sexual affairs nor lesbianism per se. Still, it cannot be denied that the narrative does

have homoerotic connotations, something unheard of in Indian writing earlier.

Readers is left to decide what the child sees when she lifts the quilt under which lie

her aunt, Begum Jaan and her maid, Rabbu in the penultimate passage of the story:

There was that particular noise again. In the dark Begum Jaan’s quilt

was once again swaying like an elephant. ‘Allah! Ah! ...’ I moaned in a

feeble voice. The elephant inside the quilt heaved up and then sat

down. I was mute. The elephant started to sway again. I was scared

stiff. (Chughtai 22).

Begum Jaan is a woman who gets no attention from her husband, Nawab

Saheb. It’s only a marriage of convenience where “Having married Begum Jaan he

tucked her away in the house with his other possessions and promptly forgot her. The

frail, beautiful Begum wasted away in anguished loneliness” (14). The story is set at a

time when women’s bodies were traded in the name of marriage and treated as

possessions. The man of the house could misuse his hegemony over the wife and

indulge in ‘veiled’ activities like Nawab Sahab did. He could be seen with a number

of “[…] young, fair, slender-waisted boys” (14), while the patriarch in him didn’t let

Begum Jaan go out of the house or visit her relatives. Begum Jaan’s relationship with
 Mamnoon 95

Rabbu and Nawab Saab’s relationship with the young boys brings out the reality

behind the closed doors of heteronormative marriages.

The Begum subverts the patriarchal norms that she has to adhere to by giving

way to her sexual desires through her relationship with Rabbu. The constant reference

to ‘the elephant’ under the ‘quilt’ which doesn’t let the narrator sleep, also serves as a

metaphor for the sexual desires and relationships that are either not spoken of or only

talked about in terms of metaphors and not addressed directly. There are suggestions

in the story of the Nawab being impotent as a result of which his and the Begum’s

case becomes one of failed marriage. Male impotence as a concept is still a taboo

within Indian society where the blame is conveniently put on the woman because of

the internalised male hegemony. The concept of male impotence in “Lihaaf” and the

subsequent suffering of the Begum can be read along the lines of the analogy between

sexuality and politics by the radical feminist Kate Millett in her seminal text, Sexual

Politics (1970). Millett defines politics as a “power-structured relationship,

arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another” (23). Millett’s

thesis is that sex, like politics, is a status category as much as race and class are,

which determines whether one is powerful or subject to another’s power. This

argument is the backbone of radical feminism and logically captures the idea of

hegemony of the male over the female.

Alongside other of her works, “Lihaaf” signals the emergence of Chughtai’s

unique writing style with its awareness of the details of everyday domestic life. In the

book, My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits (2001), a collection of

Chughtai’s works translated by Tahira Naqvi, Chughtai is quoted as saying, “In reality

no one ever told me that writing on the subject I deal with in Lihaf is a sin, nor did I

ever read anywhere that I shouldn’t write about this […] disease […] or predilection”
 Mamnoon 96

(177). Thus, it must be noted that “Lihaaf” was not a celebration of lesbian

relationships; rather, it is a tale which lends itself easily to homophobic readings of

such relationships as ‘vices.’ Chughtai herself argued that the story was about the

‘sickness’ which occurs in the households of respectable families, where women are

neglected by their husbands and not allowed to forego the seclusion of the women’s

quarters (zenana). The way Rashid Jahan did earlier in Angarey, Chughtai also

strongly claimed for the freedom to talk about women’s bodies and sexuality and she

took it forward by her evocative discussion of how they were a source of pleasure for

women.

Ismat Chugtai’s commitment to the politics of social change was coupled with

an interest in the everyday life of women, and she produced a body of literature that

depicted the spaces between modernity as an all-encompassing historical project (the

subject position of women in India’s movement for independence) and as lived

experience (the private musings of women upon quotidian subjects). In Geeta Patel’s

words, Chughtai was characterized by her demand “to disrupt the civil, to disrupt the

ideas that constituted civility, to upend the notions that gave force to how women

ought to be” (Patel 346).

“Lihaaf” has also been significant in paving the way for emergence of a

section of Muslim women that historian Gail Minault has referred to as ‘the daughters

of reform’— that is, upper and middle class Muslim women of North India, most of

whom had educated and cultured mothers to look up to and themselves, “grew up

going to school, reading women’s magazines, coping with accelerated social change

brought on by the growth of nationalism, the Great War, and Great Depression”

(Minault 270). Explained earlier in this chapter, women of this generation were

increasingly involved in public life, taking an active role in the Indian nationalist
 Mamnoon 97

movement. Women of Chughtai’s social background continued to grow and learn

within the sophisticated literary sphere of Aligarh and Lucknow and where they

openly discussed about predominant conservative as well as progressive assumptions

about what could constitute legitimate subjects of literature and poetry.

While the wave of modernization within ashraf society may have been a

reason behind the advent of such women artists, it is a fact that they were deeply

concerned with adapting modernity in both their lives as well as the society they

belonged to. Given how the discourses around the emergent nation-state was putting

forth a rhetoric of filial allegiances, the gendered and class subject position of ashraf

women progressive writers and their relationship to national modernity was one

fraught with tension. In order to comprehend the way in which these women

approached modernity and their experiences with it, it is crucial to consider the fact

that they had the background of the middle-class which is something Chughtai

explored in her acclaimed novel, Tehri Lakeer (The Crooked Line). The works of

progressive women writers like Rashid Jahan, Khadija Mastur, Fehmida Riaz and

Chughtai herself faced the struggle to understand what it actually meant to embrace

and understand modernity not simply as women but also as writers, Muslims, Indians

as wells as agents of social change.

When it comes to understanding gender dynamics within the works of Ismat

Chughtai, Judith Butler’s conception of gender is important. Butler believes gender to

be a result of many social practices. She makes an important point that gender

performativity is “the act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act

that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Butler 21). The similarity of

repeated acts by the being before the acquisition of a socially accepted identity is the

locus of gendering. Butler says: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set
 Mamnoon 98

of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to

produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (45). Chughtai’s

women characters are also gendered beings in the sense that certain roles have been

set out for them which they follow, but also transcend.

Chughtai’s novel, The Heart Breaks Free (1966) unfolds the tragic lives of

Aunt Qudsia and Bua. Aunt Qudsia lives under strict surveillance after her husband

deserts her. From early childhood, a girl’s behaviour is monitored by her elders in her

parental home and then by her husband and in-laws in her marital home. In her book

Gender and Space: Femininity, Sexualization and the Female Body (2001),

Seemanthini Niranjana posits how a woman, after her marriage “is believed to be in

need of constant supervision” (65) where she is restricted to go very often to her

parental home as well and generally “restraints are imposed on a woman’s movements

and activities” (65) as it is believed that after her marriage “her primary responsibility

lies towards her husband and family” (65).

In many ways, Chughtai articulates how and to what extent, women reject or

accept their subordinate position in the social hierarchy which favors and values the

male. Bua, on the one hand, is the one who rejects the boundaries that restrict her

movement and creates a world of her own where she is in control of her life. Bua’s

narrative runs parallel to that of Aunt Qudsia’s and throughout the novel they have

been compared and contrasted to each other. If Aunt Qudsia is helpless, caged and

submissive, Bua is seen as a free spirit who has the rein of her life in her own hands

and “wanders all over the place without restraint” (12). The more Bua lives her life on

her own terms, the less Aunt Qudsia does.

 Mamnoon 99

Aunt Qudsia was married off when she was fifteen to one of her cousins, who

was supposed to provide her security and protection that a marriage entails for a

woman. However, without consideration for his feelings, he moves to England and

later marries an Englishwoman. Aunt Qudsia is not even allowed to get a divorce

because of the stigma attached to it. Instead of the false promises of stability, security

and warmth of marriage, all that Qudsia is left with is humiliation and harassment.

The young narrator of the story informs:

She had been married for nearly ten years. Her father packed her

husband off to England soon after the wedding – that was one of the

conditions of the marriage. In keeping with custom, he returned from

there with an English wife, a mem. Now he had a clinic in Mainpuri.

This is why Aunt Qudsia endlessly chanted verses from the Quran,

spent long hours in worship and prayer, and when all of this proved

fruitless, suffered from attacks in which her jaws locked and foam

gathered at her mouth. Unfortunate woman, what else could she do?

(The Heart 5).

Even the elders of the family do not object to the actions of a man who takes a second

wife despite being married already. In this way, even they are complicit in it and in

fact, silently approve of it.

Hafiza Nilofar Khan, in her article “South Asian Fiction and Marital Agency

of Muslim Wives” (2013), acknowledges the fact that marriage is not seen as an

“association of equal individuals in the patriarchal societies” (174). Khan also

concedes that Muslim women in Chughtai’s writings have been “turned into

receptacles of their respective traditions and robbed off their courage to bring about
 Mamnoon 100

positive changes in their lives” (174) and they are rendered speechless and mute. As a

result of this, they have been robbed off their courage to exercise any agency – be it

domestic, sexual or mechanisms of power. Commenting on the brutal and

inconsiderate treatment of the family members, especially that of women towards

Aunt Qudsia and to every other woman in general, Naqvi has rightly remarked:

Chughtai has repeatedly brought to our attention the cruel treatment

that women dole out to each other. Together, the women of the

household – steeped in old-fashioned custom and intransigent tradition

that impel them to engage in practices that border on the inhuman and

inflexible – proceed to ruin the life of Bua, a free spirit who “had

created a free world of her own where she ruled” (The Heart, viii).

The Heart Breaks Free is also a study on how a second — or even a third —

marriage does not entail any problem for a man but is considered disrespectful for

women. Qudsia cannot entertain the thought of another man although Uncle Shabir,

her brother-in-law, shows inclination towards her. Uncle Shabir has been seen as a

weak man who cannot muster the courage to defy tradition and express his feelings

for Qudsia. Time and again, Bua and Aunt Qudsia are compared to each other which

bring out more sharply the chasm that lied in their lives. Bua enjoys all the rights that

a man enjoys whereas Aunt Qudsia took breath of servitude, submissiveness and

restrictions. The narrator informs that they were more or less of the same age, but

Aunt Qudsia never protests against the injustices done to her and instead accepts her

role of a deserted woman:

Bua was probably just a few years older than Aunt Qudsia. From the

time she is young, a woman’s heart is filled with a thousand fears, so

 Mamnoon 101

that when she reaches puberty she thinks of herself as a fragile,

unbaked clay pitcher that must encounter stones at every step. Because

she had lost her mind, Bua’s fears had vanished, especially her fear of

losing her honour. She was no longer a hollow clay pitcher, she was

solid rock. In a manly fashion she went where she pleased, regardless

of whether it was night or day. (The Heart 15).

Driven by the dread of going against the customs and rituals, Aunt Qudsia, however,

leads a life dictated by others.

Like many of Chughtai’s strong heroines, Qudsia also assumes a new-found

strength as she questions Nani Biwi on being reprimanded by her for meeting Shabir:

“‘Why, have I committed adultery?’ snarled Aunt Qudsia” (The Heart 49). The

volcano that she had been holding for the last ten years gets erupted. She asks them to

give answers to the injustices which she was subjected to have in the name of

traditions after her husband had deserted her:

Why shouldn’t I be out of my mind? I’m human, I’m not a stone. You

hurled me into hell when I was fifteen, the colour of my wedding

henna hadn’t yet faded when he crossed the seven seas to a faraway

place, and there he was stung by a white snake. But tell me, is this all

my fault? Did I dally with anyone, did I give a thought to another man?

[…] What sin have I committed that I should be punished while that

scoundrel continues to lead a happy life? (The Heart 54-5).

Thus, a submissive young bride becomes a mature woman who recognises the

injustices that have been meted out to her by the family. By ending the novella in this
 Mamnoon 102

way, Chughtai clearly indicates that women can be the architect of their destiny if

they dare.

Chughtai’s women characters thus dissent against the shambles of patriarchy,

all the while defying gender roles laid out for them even before they take birth. The

female characters show the range of possibilities for women rather than conforming

images of passivity and blind acceptance of their fate; the narratives explore women's

positions and functions alongside the socially-constructed power inequalities of their

environments. These minute acts of resistance produce supplementary spaces wherein

women negotiate alternative behaviors, often alongside the traditional narrative of

family life.

Modernity at Large: An Appraisal of Qurratulain Hyder’s Chandni Begum

Qurratulain Hyder’s novel, Chandni Begum is set in Lucknow and is a

remarkable narrative of post-Partition India with the backdrop of Taluqdari culture.

Amidst other thematic concerns, the novel is a significant study of nationalism,

modernity and a new and emerging face of the educated Muslim woman following

long years of repression. Muslim women reformers, such as those discussed earlier in

this chapter, could understand the plight of Muslim women better than their male

counterparts whose efforts they appreciated nonetheless. They could decipher the root

cause of the backwardness of Muslim women which were mainly illiteracy, unjust

religious practices and financial dependence on men. For the women reformers, it was

necessary that Muslim women themselves took up the task of becoming self-sufficient

and self-reliant and consequently, education was thought to be the first step towards

achieving this goal.

 Mamnoon 103

In Chandni Begum, Qambar’s neighbor and resident of the Teen Katori House,

Safia Sultan rejects proposals that come her way after Qambar refuses to marry her.

To take her mind off, she decides to open a convent school and names it St Sophia,

taking a cue from the popular Durga Das Convent and Abraham Lincoln Convent in

the vicinity. This school is a manifestation of the many schools established in India

both before and after Independence. It embodies the desire for advancement by

following the western or, more specifically, the Victorian English model of education

and development, one that was heavily influenced by the western liberal notions of

progress and equality.

One of the most successful and prominent Muslim reformers in India was Sir

Syed Ahmed Khan, whose biggest feat, probably, was the establishment of the

Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in as early as 1875, which later came to be

known as Aligarh Muslim University. Despite having been instrumental in curating a

curriculum for Muslim men, Sir Syed was not in favour of establishing educational

institutions for women, his perception being that whatever knowledge women could

receive at home was better and enough for them. His address before the Indian

Education Commission in 1882 is testimony of his belief regarding women’s

education:

The present state of education among Muhammadan females is, in my

opinion, enough for domestic happiness, considering the present social

and economic condition of the life of the Muhammadans of India [...]

[anything more] will probably produce mischievous results, and may

be a waste of money and energy. (qtd. in S. Ahmed 115)

 Mamnoon 104

Although Sir Syed did not favour formal education for women, the All India Muslim

Educational Conference (AIMEC) was led by him in 1884, the foremost concern of

which was Muslim women’s education. Apart from this, several other committees

were established for women with the realization of the need for their education.

Anjuman-lslamia, for instance, was established in 1876 in Jabalpur by which two

primary schools and a high school for girls were founded later.

Another major step towards the development of education for women was the

establishment of the Aligarh Madarsa by Shaikh Abdullah and his wife Waheed Jahan

Begum in 1906. By procuring funds from the government as well as patronage from

the Begum of Bhopal, Shaikh Abdullah fulfilled his dream of contributing towards the

cause for women’s education when he was given the responsibility of the Aligarh

Zenana Madarasa which was a major milestone towards the mission. A major

challenge was to convince parents to send their daughters to school considering the

strict norms of purdah and Shaikh Abdullah's wife Waheed Jahan herself visited

Muslim households to urge them for the same. Both the Shaikh and his wife paid

special attention to purdah arrangements in the school to ensure the comfort of girls

within the school premises. In addition to their efforts, the Muhammedan Education

Conference passed a resolution that “the spread of education among Muhammedan

girls is a matter of paramount importance” (qtd. in Sankhdher 286) at its annual

meeting in 1912.

Despite difficulties, hostility and threats, Shaikh Abdullah and his wife

initiated an effort which went a long way in ensuring knowledge for those willing to

learn. The curriculum included studies in science, maths and household skills such as

cooking, stitching and techniques in child-rearing. Post 1914, English became a part

of the curriculum and consistent attempts were made towards inculcating knowledge
 Mamnoon 105

which would ensure the nation's development and progress. A crucial establishment

for the same was the “Anjuman-i-Khawateen-i-Islam [...] founded in February, 1914

as a part of the colourful ceremony inaugurating the new residence hall at Aligarh

Girl’s School” (Minault 285). This establishment, which was patronized since its

inception by the Begum of Bhopal aimed towards a bigger level, that is, of creating

awareness within women regarding their rights and manners through which they

could contribute to the development of a fair society. Influential Muslim women

reformers such as Begum Abdullah, Begum Sayyed Mahmood, daughter-in-law of Sir

Syed Ahmed Khan, Abru Begum, sister of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Nafeez

Dulhan, the secretary of the conference were some of its participants.

The basic premise of the Anjuman was to try holding a conference every year

in a different city, to encourage members of the Muslim community to found more

girls’ schools, and to contribute towards the progress of Aligarh Girls’ School. The

primary focus of the conference was “to spread modern education among ordinary

Muslim women” (Zaidi 65). With the help of the funding received through the

conference, the Muslim Anglo-Oriental Girls’ School was founded in Calcutta in

1927. Also, by establishing various branches in other parts of India, the organization

became a landmark in promoting women’s education and was an inspiration for other

upcoming organizations. In the year 1927, for instance, the All-India Women’s

Conference was established in Pune as a joint effort by Muslim and Hindu women.

Many women writers also contributed heavily towards women’s education, the

most important of whom was Rokeya Sakahwat Hossain in the early twentieth century

in Bengal. Being a strong advocate of education, Hossain set up a school for Muslim

girls in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar in 1909 and later she opened the Sakhawat

Memorial Girl’s School in 1911. This school, with Urdu being its medium of
 Mamnoon 106

instruction, was another milestone in being inclusive for Muslim girls who wished to

acquire education within the limits of purdah. Hossain’s school followed a curriculum

which “included physical education, handicrafts, sewing, cooking, nursing, home

economics and gardening, in addition to regular courses such as Bangla, English,

Urdu, Persian and Arabic” (Jahan 42). Its purpose was to bring women out of their

seclusion through learning. In 1916, the Anjurnan-i-Khawateen-i-Islam was also

founded by her to work for the betterment of Muslim women by introduction of

vocational courses that would ensure their financial independence.

Hossain’s another major endeavour was the establishment of the Muslim

Anglo-Oriental Girls’ School in Calcutta in 1927, with financial assistance from the

conference funds (Zaidi 106). While supporting women's education, Hossain

addressed the Bengal Women's Education Conference in 1926 as:

The opponents of female education say that women will become

wanton and unruly. Fie! They call themselves Muslims and yet go

against the basic tenet of Islam which gives women an equal right to

education. If men are not lead astray once educated, why should

women? (qtd. in Ray 121).

Hossain’s belief that women’s education is a pre-requisite for the advancement

of the society led her to work towards the same all her life. Apart from the institutions

established for the education of Muslim women, the All-India Muslim Ladies’

Conference was set up in Lahore in 1907. The aim of this establishment was to cater

to the needs and interest of women and it became a thriving place for hearing about

important matters of and by women.

 Mamnoon 107

Thus, as part of their civilising mission and bringing about reform, the British

and subsequently inspired by them, Indian reformers established schools in India for

they strongly believed that traditional Indian education was redundant and insufficient

for bringing about modernity. As a result, several missionary schools were

established, especially by English women. The convent school established by Safia in

Chandni Begum is an embodiment of women’s transition into the public sphere from

the private sphere of the zenana and their participation in the nationalist struggle to

acquire an indigenous identity.

The Indian Political scientist and anthropologist, Partha Chatterjee delineates a

related constructive idea of women’s roles in terms of nineteenth-century Indian

nationalism. According to him, the figure of the re-formed, re-cast Indian woman was

constructed in response to the contradictory drives of anticolonial nationalism: on the

one hand, the nationalists felt that “to overcome [colonial] domination, the colonized

people must learn [...] superior techniques of organizing material life” (Chatterjee

237), which entailed imitating the West; on the other hand, this ambition was at odds

with forging a distinctive and autonomous ‘Indian’ identity necessary for

overthrowing colonial rule. The solution to this dilemma effected by nationalism was

to construct a dichotomy that acquired tremendous force and which established an

outer, material, public sphere in which men imitated the West to develop “superior

techniques for organizing material life” (237) and inner, spiritual, domestic or private,

female sphere that protected and nourished an essential ‘Indian’ identity.

Chandni Begum is one of those few novels where the eponymous character

plays very little part and one who dies unceremoniously by a fire midway through the

novel. But such unpredictability is not unusual of Qurratulain Hyder. Chandni Begum

is remembered after her death with fondness and with contrition, by characters who
 Mamnoon 108

had treated her with scorn when she was alive. One could have said that these

characters are redeemed when they look back at Chandni and see her for what she

was. But Hyder would not allow of such sentimentality. Chandni’s character is

merged with Bela’s, who has been Chandni’s antithesis in terms of personality. What

they have in common is that both of them have been wronged in different ways.

While Bela is the ‘fallen woman’ because of her past, Chandni is someone who has

fallen on hard times as the socio-political scenario changes in India.

Hyder’s works exhibit the elegance and sophistication enjoyed by the people

of Oudh, primarily in the city of Lucknow. The epoch dealt with in the novels is the

twilight of the British Raj and the period following the Indian Partition and

subsequent Independence. Most of her characters are young men and women from

the upper crust of Lucknow but at the same time there are also characters who belong

to the subordinate groups of society. Both groups of characters, however, cultivate

values of family honour, fellow-feeling, social reform and imbibing the best in India’s

composite culture while dismantling the artificial distinctions of religion, class and

gender.

Muslim writers such as Chughtai and Hyder as well as reformers dealt and

negotiated with patriarchy differently from their male counterparts. Though authority

remained in the hands of the patriarchal power structure, Muslim women were

successful in re-casting the patriarchal power structure of their community. They

emerged not as silent victims but as rebels with the cause of emancipating themselves

by asserting their rights as individuals through acquiring education themselves and

inspiring others for the same. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita also shed light on the

emerging role of women while discussing the same historical moment:

 Mamnoon 109

A new powerful figure emerged in the nationalist imagination and can

be encountered in text after text of the period. She was, in keeping with

the now-naturalized Victorian ideals of domestic virtue, patient and

long suffering. But the new woman was also self-confident and

autonomous, conscious of her power and of the strength she could find

in tradition: a gentle but stern custodian of the nation's moral life. And

this was a figure that dominated the literary imagination for several

decades to come. (172-173)

Despite the establishment of several institutes and the task of reform, Indian

Muslim women have remained backward in comparison to their counterparts from

other religions till the beginning of the twenty-first century. Women writers who

challenged patriarchal norms were able to do so solely because they had access to

education, something which saw a decline in post-Partition India as manifested in the

dearth in Muslim voices in the literary scenario. Nevertheless, two of the strongest

voices in Indian writing, Chughtai and Haider have been discussed in this chapter and

through their works, the effort has been to delineate discourses of Muslim identity in

India, especially that of women.

 Mamnoon 110

End Notes

1. For further information regarding the employment of British governesses in

order to educate Indian women from elite families, refer to Flora Annie Steel,

India. A. and C. Black Ltd., 1929. In this book she discusses the role of British

governesses and nannies who were employed by affluent Indian households

and who in turn employed native Indian women for their household chores.

2. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his famous Minutes on Education (1835),

emphasized on English as the medium of instruction instead of other

languages and also gave a clear understanding of the funds that were generated

for the educational uplift of Indians. Focusing on the issue of educating the

Indian masses, he sums up his Minutes, "We must at present do our best to

form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we

govern — a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes,

in opinions, in morals and in intellect." For further details please refer to:

ittp://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/

Macaulay001.html .

3. In order to understand this better, see Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education

and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India by Gail Minault. Oxford

University Press, 1998, pp. 215—266.

 Mamnoon 111

4. ‘Meher’ is the total sum which the groom has to pay the bride at the time of

marrying her, according to Islam. It is a mutual decision by both the families

before the marriage.

5. Triple talaq is a form of divorce practised in Islam, whereby a Muslim man

can legally divorce his wife by pronouncing ‘talaq’ (the Arabic word for

divorce) three times in any form. Practiced since ages this form of divorce is

considered discriminatory towards women.

6. Khula is a right given to a woman in Quran whereby a woman can walk out of

marriage indicating her intention of divorce from the husband. This process is

beneficial in circumstances where the wife is mistreated by the husband or is

physically abused. For a better understanding of such concepts, refer to Islam:

The Key Concepts by Oliver Leaman and Kecia Ali, Routledge, 2008.

7. For more details into the trial of Ismat Chughtai and Sadat Hasan Manto for

‘obscenity’, see Aqdas Aftab’s paper, “The Sexual Subaltern in Court: The

Queer and Inter—Caste Obscenities of Ismat Chughtai's "Lihaaf" and Saadat

Hasan Manto's ‘Boo’”, published in 2019 in Journal of Commonwealth and

Postcolonial Studies, by University of Florida Press.

 Mamnoon 112

Works Cited

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Muslims: Interpretive Essays. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Ahmed, Safdar. Reform and Modernity in Islam: The Philosophical, Cultural and Political

Discourses among Muslim Reformers. I.B. Tauris And Co Ltd, 2013.

Antoinette, Burton. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial

Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Begum, Nawab Sultan Jahan. An Account of My Life. Translated by C. H. Payne, John

Murray, 1912.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 2007.

Carpenter, Mary. Six Months in India. Longmans, Green and Co, 1868.

Chakraborty, Rachana. “Women’s Education and Empowerment in Colonial Bengal.”

Responding to the West: Essays on Colonial Domination and Asian Agency, edited

by Hans Hägerdal, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009, pp. 87–102.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mt0s.9. Accessed 21 Aug. 2020.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton University Press, 1993.
 Mamnoon 113

Chughtai, Ismat. Lifting the Veil. Translated by M. Asaduddin, Penguin Books, 2009.

Chughtai, Ismat and Tahira Naqvi. The Heart Breaks Free & The Wild One. Translated by

Tahira Naqvi, Kali for Women, 1993.

Coppola, Carlo. “Ismat Chughtai: A Talk with One of Urdu's Most Outspoken Women

Writers.” An Uncivil Woman: Writings on Ismat Chughtai, edited by Rakhshanda

Jalil, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 95.

Hussein, Aamer. “Forcing Silence to Speak: Muhammadi Begum, Mir’atu ‘l-‘Arus and the

Urdu Novel.” The Annual of Urdu Studies, 1996, pp. 71–86.

Jahan, Roushan. “Rokeya: An Introduction to Her Life.” Sultana's Dream: a Feminist Utopia

and Selections from The Secluded Ones, edited by Roushan Jahan, The Feminist

Press, 1988, pp. 37–57.

Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia

during British Colonial Rule. Routledge, 1995.

Khan, Hafiza Nilofar. “South Asian Fiction and Marital Agency of Muslim Wives”. Journal

of International Women's Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 2013, p. 174-193.

Kumar, Sukrita Paul, and Sadique, editors. Ismat: Her Life, Her Times. Katha, 2000.

Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan. “Historicizing Debates over Women's Status in Islam: The Case of

Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum of Bhopal.” India's Princely States: People, Princes and

Colonialism, edited by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, Routledge, 2007, pp. 139–

156.

Madhani, Taslim. “Construction of Muslim Identity: Women and Education Reform

Movement in Colonial IndiaT.” McGill University, Library and Archives Canada,

2005, p. 49.
 Mamnoon 114

Metcalf, Barbara. “ Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi and Urdu Literature”. Urdu and Muslim

South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russel, edited by Christopher Shackle,

Oxford University Press, 1991.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Minault, Gail. Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial

India, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Niranjana, Seemanthini.Gender and Space: Femininity, Sexualization and the Female Body.

Sage, 2001.

Nurullah, S and J.P. Naik. A History of Education in India during the British Period.

Macmillan, 1951.

Patel, Geeta. “An Uncivil Woman: Ismat Chughtai.” Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 16, 2001,

pp. 345-55.

Ray, Bharati. From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women. Oxford University Press,

1995.

Sankhdher, B M. The Development of Women's Education in India. Edited by Sabyasachi

Bhattacharya et al., Kanishka Publishers, 2000.

Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, editors. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present.

Feminist Press, 1993. Y

Zaidi, S.M.H. “Muslim Womanhood in Revolution.” The Emergence of Feminism among

Indian Muslim Women, 1920-1947, by Azra Asghar Ali, Oxford University Press,

2000.
 Mamnoon 115

Chapter Three

Social and Family Dynamics among India’s Muslims as Depicted in Select Works by

Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder

Several sociologists and anthropologists have, time and again, commented on

the dearth of sociological studies on Muslims in India. For instance, Imtiaz Ahmad

opines Social Dynamics and India’s Muslims that,

Indian society comprises not only Hindus, who constitute the dominant

majority, but also Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jews and the adherents

of the three major off-shoots of Hinduism: namely Buddhism, Jainism

and Sikhism. Each of these groups claims inheritance from a

distinctive socio-cultural and religious tradition. (For a Sociology 1)

Hence, it becomes imperative to discuss about important aspects of Muslim society

such as how the civilising effort of the British affected Indian Muslims during

colonisation as well as reform movements within Indian Muslim society, family

structure and kinship, with the effort to examine how these structures play out in the

works of the two writers undertaken for study.

The White Man’s Burden: Civilizing Mission of the British in India

In order to understand the formation of the Indian Muslim identity, it is

necessary to unfold the socio-political and religious factors which led to a resurgence

of Muslims becoming active participants in the nationalist struggle and carving out an
 Mamnoon 116

identity of their own, particularly the emergence of Muslim women into the public

sphere. One of the key components of the civilizing mission of the British in pre-

Partition India was promoting Western education and a fundamental criteria through

which the British analysed the education system of India and justified the need for

reform was that of ‘useful instruction’. Addressing the question of the allocation of

funds by the East India Company for the advancement of education in India, the

influential Utilitarian thinker and historian James Mill wrote in February 1824:

The great end should not have been to teach Hindoo learning, or Mahomedan

learning, but useful learning [...] In professing, on the other hand, to establish

Seminaries for the purpose of teaching mere Hindoo, or mere Mahomedan

literature, you bound yourself to teach a great deal of what was frivolous, not a

little of what was purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which

utility was in any way concerned. (qtd. in Zastoupil 32-33)

With the advent of British rule in India, the social, economic and cultural lives

of Muslims were hugely impacted. Initial discontent within the Muslim community

towards British rule was primarily because of economic reasons as the Zamindari and

Taluqdari systems were abolished. “The peasant cultivators as well as the zamindars

were equally ruined by the new policy adopted by the East India Company for the

administration of the land revenue” (104), R.C. Majumdar writes in his book, History

of the Freedom Movement in India (1962). Also, the states where the British began to

rule first were largely dominated by Hindus; Muslims were lesser in numbers and also

comparatively backward in states such as Bengal 1. Owing to such reasons, Hindus

came earlier in contact with the British and thus began to be benefited and influenced

by their impact earlier as well. Muslims considered British influence as corrupting

 Mamnoon 117

because of their insistence on Western education and ideals as well as the English

language which was thought to be against the leanings of Islam.

Aamir Mufti also discusses the problematics of the minority figure in relation

to the modern nation-state in his work, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish

Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, wherein he draws a parallel between

the modern Hindu-Muslim communitarian conflict in India as a colonial version of

what he calls “the exemplary crisis of minority” (2), that is, the Jews in Europe. He

argues that the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century South Asia

was essentially the re-iteration of the “Jewish question” in a non-Western colonial

society. Also, Mufti asserts that his work is about “the crisis of modern secularism

and of postcolonial secularism in particular, at whose center […] is the terrorized and

terrifying figure of the minority” (2).

As a result of their opposition, even the British began to discriminate against

the Muslims. The 18th century Scottish historian who was also a member of the Indian

Civil Service, Sir William Wilson Hunter has written extensively on the Indian

Muslim community during the British Raj. According to him,

The first of them, the Army, is now completely closed. No

Muhammadan gentleman of birth can enter our Regiments; and even if

a place could be found for him in our military system, that place would

no longer be a source of wealth. (159)

Muslims were also excluded from higher political and judicial posts. Even the law

began to be strictly closed to Muslims. According to Hunter’s statistics of professions

in 1869, “the Law officers of the Crown were six in number — four Englishmen, two

Hindus and no Musalman” (163).

 Mamnoon 118

The progress of Hindus and advent of Christian missionaries who harangued

the Muslims for being backward not despite but because of their lives being divinely

ordained and criticised them for conventional practices such as slavery, polygamy,

purdah and easy divorce for men stirred Muslims to reinterpret Islam and their own

practices in a rational and scientific way. As a result they began to adapt themselves

to the changing norms and subsequently a socialist struggle ensued along with the

nationalist one.

Family Structure among India’s Muslims

Along with factors such as caste and community, the family structure in India

is considered not only one of the most important pillars of the Indian social structure

but also an ideal towards which families aspire. Although nuclear families have

become more common in India, the country is traditionally known to have a joint

family system, something which the members feel proud of and experience a sense of

nostalgia for if they are no longer part of it. The joint or close-knit family system is

common across religions in India. In contrast to the Western social structure which

tends to emphasise the importance of the individual and hence rests on the nuclear

family system, Muslim families in India idealise togetherness and are inherently

patrilineal.

Today, the joint family structure is more characteristic of rural than of urban

families, of the upper caste and wealthier strata of society than of the lower and

poorer strata, of the more orthodox sectors than of those which have taken over

Western traits. However, even among urban and Westernized Muslim families, the

patterns of interpersonal relationships set by the joint family are not wholly ignored,

and the model of the orthodox, scriptural joint family still holds true. The family unit

is regarded as the cornerstone of a healthy and balanced society. The different plane
 Mamnoon 119

of emphasis from that found in individual-centered cultures is for many remarkable.

The traditional Muslim family is extended, often spanning three or more

generations. An extended structure offers many advantages, including stability,

coherence, and physical and psychological support, particularly in times of need.

Richard Lannoy opines in his book, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture

and Society (1971), that in Indian families, across religions “Individuality is

subordinated to collective solidarity, the younger generation generally strictly, but not

systematically, controlled by others” (86). In Muslim culture, akin to other traditional

cultures, respect and esteem increase with age. Elderly parents are respected on

account of their life experiences and their hierarchic position within the family unit.

The Muslim family unit in India must also be a major area of analysis because

their social nexus and cultural mores can give a significant glimpse into their

interaction with the outside world of politics as well as the socio-cultural conditions

and how they were affected by them in their times. A notable aspect when it comes to

discussing about Indian Muslim society is the Qasba culture of Uttar Pradesh,

considering the major involvement of people from the latter in political and social

history of India as a nation. A Qasba is understood as any place between a village and

a town in terms of area and population. Qasbas were the principal realms of social and

cultural activities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was there that life

was ‘lived’ vibrantly and social gatherings were common. The Qasbas were “where

poetry, literature, and music flourished, and the fusion of cultures took place” (Hasan

4).

Qasbas comprised of people from various classes and strata of Muslim society.

The ashraf or high classes, scholars, administrators, theologians and many others

lived together in Qasbas, but not so much as a unified community — although

 Mamnoon 120

marriage ties often brought them together — but as different sub-communities. These

hierarchies became even more defined with the advent of the domination exercised by

the landed gentry such as the zamindars and taluqdars over the peasants who lived

under wretched conditions. The lower or ajlaf classes included landless labourers,

julahas or weavers, manihars or glass bangle makers, darzis or tailors, qasais or

butchers, hajjams or barbers and so on. Also, descendants of low-caste Hindus who

had converted to Islam also lived at the peripheries of the households they served. The

Qasbas were a thriving centre of knowledge and also had close connections with

many premier educational institutions. Historian David Lelyveld, for instance, in his

work on M.A.O. college, Aligarh, opines that about fifty-four per cent of its students

hailed from “distinctly rural, old fortresses now torn down or small market centres”

(181).

Not so much in contemporary times, but traditionally, Muslim families have

been known to have the Purdah system. Women were thus mostly confined to the four

walls of the zenana or women’s quarters. The zenana is the inner spaces of a house in

which the women of the family live. Women were generally confined within the

premises of the zenana and did not step out into the market or any such public places.

Things such as clothes and others were generally sent to them inside the zenana

through a servant. A first-hand account of this has been given by Zarina Bhatty in her

celebrated memoir, Purdah to Piccadilly (2016) wherein she talks about certain

traders who

[…] often visited our homes and I remember, there used to be these

Chinese traders who brought special silks. There were also Afghan

traders who used to bargain very hard. Arguments and bargaining was

done through a third person or from behind the curtain. (40)

 Mamnoon 121

The main sources of recreation and entertainment for women were festivals or life-

cycle occasions. Such occasions “also provided scope for their organisational skills

and to show off their fine clothes and jewellery” (Bhatty 41).

In addition to the women of rank, the zenana was also a space for servants and

attendants and all visiting friends as well as entertainers were invariably female. The

Purdah system also entailed ensuring the family’s honour by keeping women away

from the male gaze. Eminent sociologist Imtiaz Ahmad is of the view that Purdah

gave “males authority over women, and bases family honour, in part, on the sexual

purity of women, using such institutions as early arranged marriage, and Purdah to

control female sexuality” (37). The Purdah system was also considered a sign of

gentility and affluence as it meant that the women of the house do not need to step out

of the house for work or anything else; their needs were taken care of by the many

servants.

The Unhomely Housewife: An Appraisal of Select works of Ismat Chughtai

The narratives of Ismat Chughtai center around the domestic space wherein

societal evils are exposed as male and more so, female characters reveal the home as a

site for malicious behaviour. At the time when Chughtai was writing, national and

communal identities began to be formulated on the basis of the behaviour of women.

The works of Ismat Chughtai, however, defy such symbolic conceptions of woman as

a national and cultural signifier during and post the national struggle in India. By

describing the daily lives of women in homes riddled with hierarchies, Chughtai

makes a case for the figurative as well as physical marginalisation of women in

patriarchal families. In doing so, she contests the dominant ideology that a perfect and

harmonious family life was essential in maintaining Muslim culture in North India.
 Mamnoon 122

At a time when Indian nationalists were combating British rule and trying to

seek independence, the Indian-Muslim community concentrated inwards for reform.

An ensuing discussion over familial honour and domestic harmony became the norm,

mainly through literature such as Ashraf Ali Thanavi’s book, Bahishti Zewar

(Heavenly Ornaments) which propagated a set of teachings to be followed by women

in order to be the perfect homemaker. This, and many other such didactic pieces were

a way of the Muslim community in India to hold sway over their lives and

respectability. An elite Urdu-speaking Muslim population emanated from such

endeavours which strived towards a communal minority identity which was quite

distinct from that of the Hindu majority. The harbinger of such changes was Sir Syed

Ahmad Khan.

By their rulers, Muslims were perceived to be disloyal to the crown and they

were subjected to multiple stereotypes such as being essentially warlike and even

fanatical. In his report which was subsequently published in the form of a book, The

Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound to Rebel Against the Queen (1871), W.W. Hunter

outlines that while Islam itself did not necessarily drive Muslims to rebel against its

non-Muslim rulers, the Indian Muslim community had ‘fanatical’ elements which, if

left unchecked, would prove to be a threat in inciting others. He describes them as a

race with intense feelings of nationality and a predisposition to expressing such

sentiments in ‘warlike enterprise’2.

Under such circumstances, Sir Syed took to the task of assuring the British of

the loyalty of Indian Muslims, refuting Hunter’s generalisations. For the purpose, he

wrote a comprehensive critique of British policies, Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind (The

Causes of the Indian Revolt) in 1873. He also assumed the role of advising his
 Mamnoon 123

community that cooperating with, and learning from the West, would be beneficial for

them:

In direct contrast to our English rule, the common people enjoyed no

rights under [Hindustani] Government. Now the people have obtained

freedom, and each person is master of his own thing […] To the extent

that the English government protects its own right, to the same extent

does it also protect the rights of the people. (Khan 107-109)

Within the new concept of ‘representational’ politics of the British, Sir Syed saw an

opportunity to articulate a defence of the Muslim role in the uprising that yielded little

to the heterogeneity of India’s Muslim population. His idea of a collective Muslim

qaum — a term that could mean a religious sect, clan, or group — became one of the

key concepts of discourses around Muslim identity during colonial rule.

According to Faisal Devji,

Indian Islam is founded as a national identity, which is to say a polity

based on the affiliation of abstract Muslim individuals […] [which]

emerges during the second half of the nineteenth century among the

salaried gentry, (mostly working with the colonial administration) in

north India. (19).

Thus, Initially resisted by Indian Muslim scholars and people of rank, the British

efforts towards Western education were later adapted by Muslims to bring about

reforms necessary for the community’s advancement towards emancipation. The

direct bearing of the reform movement was the need for a separatist Muslim state and

therefore a distinctive set of identity politics for the improvement of women also

emerged, the result of which were the didactic literatures mentioned earlier. “The

Muslim home became a socio-political space where India's largest sub community
 Mamnoon 124

could preserve a unique sense of cultural specificity” (10), as Mohanalakhsmi

Rajakumar opines in his book, Haram in the Harem (2009). The central figure of this

home was the Muslim housewife, who was the preserver of cultural values and

tradition, following practices such as gender segregation and veiling.

The image of the proper, well-behaved housewife was enunciated through

didactic novels and handbooks, as mentioned earlier, perhaps most significant of

which were Nazir Ahmed's Mirat ul' Uroos (The Bride's Mirror, 1869) which was a

sort of treatise on the importance of education for women so that they may produce

better citizens and also, Thanavi’s Bahishti Zewar which, in a way, handed down

instructions regarding the duties and accepted behaviour of women who were

considered as preservers of the family’s honour. Chughtai’s narratives blatantly

contest such texts and codes of behaviour which were an integral part of the

nationalist project in order to safeguard the minority against Hindu and colonial

influences. Through her depiction of rebellious and non-conforming female

characters, she makes a strict distinction from their ‘proper’ image which is part of the

mainstream. Chughtai challenges the nationalist ideal of womanhood and ideal

domestic life as opposed to regressive models purported by scholars such as Thanavi

in several of her short stories, especially “Lihaaf”.

“Lihaaf” is a story where a young woman enters into her marital home, a

journey with proves disastrous for her freedom, self-respect and sexuality. It is a tale

of how a young bride becomes a victim of and transforms at the behest of her much

older husband’s conceited behaviour, thus deconstructing accepted notions of familial

harmony. Chughtai’s defiance of the conventional conception of women can be said

to have precedents in her more extensive socio-political bearing. Her writings brought

the middle class into mainstream literature as opposed to her contemporaries, the
 Mamnoon 125

progressive writers who were articulating a more socialist realism through their works

by focusing on the lower and underprivileged segment of the society. “Lihaaf”

comprises the childhood recollections of a young female about the exploitation of

Begum Jaan at the hands of her husband, Nawab Saheb, which she saw while being

their visitor.

Both the Begum as well as the Nawab put up socially acceptable pretences of

a heteronormative marriage while giving way to their non-normative sexual desires.

The interior realm of the home reveals that the Nawab has a desire for young boys

while his public image remains unscathed. Although he marries the Begum, he

confines her to the women’s quarters while himself keeps befriending young boys.

His negligent disposition towards his wife is reflected in the state and order that

prevails at home:

The household revolved around the boy students and that all the

delicacies produced in the kitchen were solely for their palates […]

From the chinks in the drawing room doors, Begum Jaan glimpsed

their slim waists, fair ankles, and gossamer shirts and felt she has been

raked over the coals! (Lifting 6)

Begum Jaan’s relatives, including the narrator’s mother are unable to look past the

harmonious exterior of this house and cannot delve into their interior existence. They

and many others, understand such households as a pure and unpolluted realm where

the inhabitants, including the wife, behave in a respectable way and which must be

considered the epitome of a blissful domestic life. Gaytri Gopinath argues that the

element of sexual desire in this story, that of the Nawab for the young boys and

Begum Jaan’s for her maid, Rabbu, is antagonistic to the idea of the home as a

“privatized, seemingly sanitized, domestic space” (635) which is instead “a site of

 Mamnoon 126

intense female homoerotic pleasure and practice” (635) and male homoeroticism as

well.

There is absolutely no dialogue between the husband and wife which further

explicates their union as a sham. The Nawab indulges with the boys while the Begum

is no more than a captive within his home. Still, within the little space which she

occupies, she tries to satisfy her own desires. The narrator in “Lihaaf” can see but not

name the relationship between Begum Jaan and Rabbu. Their homoerotic desires are

therefore exempt from labels and in giving expression to their sexuality beyond the

male formulated definitions of female sexuality, they emerge as women who are in

control of their desires and thus do not conform to patriarchal notions of womanhood.

The Begum and Nawab’s dual identities thus breach the ideas of a heteronormative

household proposed by Thanavi and Muslim nationalist leaders.

Glimpses of another failed marriage can also be seen in Chughtai’s short story,

“Mother-in-Law” where, in the beginning, the mother-in-law, who has been addressed

as a ‘crone’ is unsympathetic towards her ‘bahu’, only to support her when her son

acts inhumanly towards his wife. At the beginning of the story, the mother-in-law

scolds her bahu on being disturbed in her siesta. She hurls invectives at bahu for

playing with the urchins of the neighbourhood. From this, the insults go on to

complaints about the dowry which Bashariya came with. The “Imitation bangles and

chrome-plated tops” become subjects of mockery and continues with her

[…] interminable litany about the samdhan’s gulbadan pyjamas that

were frayed at the bottom, the tasteless zarda served during the

wedding feast and the wooden bed with moth-eaten legs that were

given as dowry. But the shameless bahu, her body lying half on the cot

half on the ground, was fast asleep. (Lifting 194)

 Mamnoon 127

Bahu is also cursed because she has not been able to “give birth to a child” (194).

Within patriarchal homes, becoming a mother is intricate, in order for a

woman to experience ‘complete’ womanhood. Marriage and giving birth to children

are the means by which women are refrained from exhibiting behaviour that may

bring dishonour to the family. Deniz Kandiyoti postulates a link between

marriage and motherhood in Muslim societies as: “The young bride enters her

husband’s household as an effectively dispossessed individual who can establish

her place in the patriliny only by producing male offspring”. She also uses the term

‘classic patriarchy’ to define how male family members arrange marriages of younger

female members of the home:

“Under classic patriarchy, girls are given away in marriage at a very

young age into households headed by their husband’s father. There,

they are subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior

women, especially their mother-in-law” (279).

Kandiyoti's definition applies to many of the writings of Chughtai, especially

“Mother-in-law”.

Echoes of a loveless marriage, which is a far cry from what marriages are

thought to be in Muslim families can be heard when Asghar, Bahu’s husband walks in

and begins to curse his wife. “Kick out the bitch. Ammi, let’s bring another woman”

(196) is what he thinks of her. His mother, however, does not concede to his son’s

whims, reprimanding him, “You had a decent marriage. Did she elope with you that

you’re treating her like this?” (197). Asghar’s brutality is even more expressive when

Bahu is hurt, leaving her toe badly bruised, but he does not even get up to pour cold

water on it, despite his mother repeatedly asking him to. It is only when she

commands him that he gets up reluctantly. The closing image of the story is one of
 Mamnoon 128

self-assertion on the part of Bahu, where she “dug her teeth into his shoulder […] The

bahu kept on smiling triumphantly while Asghar grumbled as he rubbed his shoulder

that had gone pale” (198). This image does not come any closer to the idea of a well-

behaving housewife as propagated in the nationalist ideals.

In many of Chughtai’s stories, it is quite apparent that patriarchy does not

operate only in terms of men subjugating women but also, women being subversive

towards other women. Being conditioned by patriarchy, women are seen keeping

alive the flame of injustice against other women and thus reinforcing as well as

contributing towards their exploitation and harassment. Rivalry among women

themselves paves the road to greater exploitation and subjugation. In “Touch-me-not”,

for instance, all the women in the household in general and Ammi Begum and Bi

Mughlani in particular, are depicted as insensitive towards the health or well-being of

Bhabijan, and all they want is a male heir to the family. Despite being women

themselves, they are indifferent to the sufferings of Bhabijan. After two miscarriages,

when she gets pregnant for the third time, “The poor thing was choked with pills and

syrups. A sick pallor gave her the look of a sweet potato turned bulbous. Her evenings

stretched to the early hours of dawn. Ammi Begum and Bi Mughlani were not too

pleased” (Lifting 96). Their insistence made her so much desperate to deliver a baby

which affected her adversely and resulted in another miscarriage.

Ismat Chughtai’s writings endeavoured to depict realistically the world of

aunts, nephews, Muslim joint families crammed into small houses, feuds, gossip, and

scandal that she lived within in Uttar Pradesh in the first half of the twentieth century.

Critically acclaimed for being one of the first women writers to lift the metaphorical

veil to highlight Muslim women’s position at home and in the world, Chughtai’s

novel, Tehri Lakeer or The Crooked Line unfolds into the intricacies of a middle class
 Mamnoon 129

extended Muslim family. It focuses on Shaman and her world, and the dynamics of

women’s relationship with each other as well as about young women’s sexual urges

and quest for identity on the brink of India’s independence. The narrative, inspired

significantly by Chughtai’s own life, begins with the birth of Shaman, the tenth and

youngest child in a middle-class Muslim family where religious and cultural

constraints maintain a stronghold on the lives of all its members, particularly women.

In the beginning of the novel we see how women, having no rights of their

own, begin to oppress other women in order to feel a sense of empowerment. For

instance, Shaman’s eldest sister, Bari Aapa, who is widowed few years after her

marriage and returns to her parents’ house with two children, gives up on the joys of

living and in keeping with tradition, “had annihilated her femininity for the sake of

her father’s honour” (The Crooked Line 21), although being still very young.

Chughtai, by delineating the character of Bari Apa, lays bare what ordeals a widow

undergoes and how her every breath becomes restricted and suffocated. Being

sexually and emotionally frustrated and having lost her respectable status in the

society as a wife and mother, she finds a scapegoat in her younger sister, Shaman who

herself has no regard for conventions. A brilliant psychological narrative about

childhood fixations and experiences, Chughtai weaves a tale about Shaman’s

emotional deprivation while growing up in a home full of siblings, nannies, servants

and her parents. Shaman feels unloved and side-lined in her family on account of the

distance between her parents and herself as well as her troubling experiences at the

hands of her sister, Bari Aapa. She eventually marries an Irish man who is her choice,

instead of getting married to her cousin whom she was engaged to. Chughtai also

acknowledges this fact in her autobiography about how she was engaged to her
 Mamnoon 130

cousin, Jugnu, with his consent only to escape from the impending marriage

proposals.

Shaman’s birth is considered “ill-timed” (1) and her early arrival proves to be

a disappointment for her mother whose “longstanding desire to send for the English

midwife came to naught” (1). Shaman becomes an easy target for Bari Aapa to vent

out her own disappointments. She doesn’t forego any chance to torture her younger

sister by drawing continuous comparisons between Shaman’s incompetence and her

own daughter’s superiority, constantly deprecating her in mean ways. This leads to

Shaman developing hatred towards her sister, thinking of her as a snake and that she

“would not have minded at all if Bari Aapa decided to sell herself” (45). Bari Aapa’s

disposition springs from her own past experiences in terms of the cruel treatment of

her at the hands of her mother-in-law who tried to make her feel unhappy, her efforts

mainly aimed at keeping her away from her son’s bedroom. This vicious cycle of

domination and torture thus continues within the household where women oppress

each other.

Chughtai impeccably draws connections between culture and women’s

experiences, especially in middle-class Muslim societies which form the backdrop to

most of her works. In order to achieve this, she keenly deconstructs rituals and

customs and hence her works can be read both as psychological studies as well as

ethnography. Rituals associated with weddings are an apt instance of repressed female

sexuality coming to the fore. As young girls playing wedding games with their dolls,

Shaman and her niece Noorie happen to witness certain wedding rituals in a space

largely dominated by women as the only male present there is the bridegroom. The

bride, wrapped in dupattas, sits there coyly while the groom “happily” licks kheer

from her palm as “the women tittered merrily at every lively ceremony imbued with
 Mamnoon 131

innuendo” (56) and “Shaman too found herself in the grip of a strange longing” (56)

while “Noorie insisted that they go to the storage room and play the wedding game

right away” (56). Later, unmarried young girls are asked to go away while “like flies,

women were glued to the windows and the chinks in the doors” (56) at another

ceremony in which “a few, fun-loving females were taking active part” (56) while

“husbands and children wait impatiently at home” (56). This is the world of Chughtai,

the family space where women reign supreme.

In acknowledging their sexual yearnings as well as sexual orientations, in

certain cases, as well as challenging the status quo, Chughtai’s characters tend to

come across as ‘unhomely’, but strong as they shatter all pre-conceived notions of a

perfect and harmonious household. They move beyond regressive ideas of familial

honour and stability which were supposedly the basis for India as a nation. The

placing of Indian women within domestic walls was perhaps “the most illustrious

symbol of orthodox privacy” (Devji 22), rendering women as subjects others could

discuss but ones who themselves remained silent and away from the public sphere. As

Anne McClintock explains, “All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender.

Despite nationalism’s ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations

have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference”

(61). The structures of family, home and community as a whole expose the strong

supremacy wielded by the families over their women. Consequently, Chughtai’s

stories and novels can be read as vocal studies in how women live with or hold out

against the constraints of family and community as well as how structures of

domesticity shape the notions of self within women. In that sense, her narratives move

beyond the idea of family as a unit of social hierarchy which was a significant

strategy.
 Mamnoon 132

The character and situation of Bari Aapa reminds one of another character by

Chughtai, Qudsia Bano in her book, Dil Ki Duniya, translated into English as The

Heart Breaks Free, who is the neglected first wife of a Muslim man who has returned

from England with a degree in medicine and an English wife. In The Heart Breaks

Free, Chughtai dextrously portrays the various facets of life within a Muslim family

of Uttar Pradesh and most of it drawn possibly from the reminiscences of her own

childhood in Bahraich. The story unravels around Bua, a woman who strives to be

independent in a family which upholds old values and customs in the highest esteem.

Bua is constantly goaded into submission by the women in the family and her free

spirit ultimately submits to the forces of circumstance. Not one to be happy with such

a conclusion, Chughtai devises another character who rebels and succeeds in eking

out a new life for herself. It is a complete surprise when Qudsia Apa, a quiet and

abandoned wife, suddenly transforms with the turn of events even as Bua, the real

rebel, is subdued by powers that become too strong for her. Qudsia blooms from

living a life of celibacy to eloping with her cousin Shabir. Qudsia's status as the first

wife of a polygamous husband and the ‘illegality’ of her second relationship point to

one of the first major concerns of the Indian women’s movement in its early stages:

reform in marriage laws. It also focuses on belief systems and contrasting views about

the Purdah system.

By turning her attention inwards to the household and focusing on familial

relationships and scandals, such as that of Qudsia’s elopement with Shabbir, Chughtai

shows the close links between marriage, gender and desire. In doing so, she

challenges the misconstrued belief that the domain of the domestic is private and

uncontaminated. These narratives depict the reality of women’s lived experiences

wherein complex identities take root, challenging the prevailing image of women as
 Mamnoon 133

well-behaved daughters, wives and mothers. The realm of the domestic has to be

understood as a space which “implies more than houses and gardens (or the liminal

spaces of garden gate, doorstep, porch, garage) [...] Domestic space implies the

everyday, the rituals of domesticity in their cyclical, repetitive ordinariness”. (Mezei

and Briganti 837).

The world of Dil Ki Duniya is dominated by women — aunts, mothers,

mothers-in-law, housekeepers and such. This is a society where women are oppressed,

not by patriarchy so much as by the cruel treatment women dole out to other women.

Together, the women of the household — whose mentality is marred by regressive

thinking and age-old conventions — go on to treat Bua in an inhuman way, ruining

her life. Qudsia is “the family's most urgent social issue” (The Heart 35) and Bua is

also a ‘social issue’, much like Qudsia, since “the good women enclosed in the four

walls of their home, tightly bound by the constraints of society, also […] could not

tolerate Bua’s freedom” (30). Such characters might seem to be tragic figures but they

are not. Chughtai’s characters are often “faced with tragedy when they try to cross

social boundaries (A Chughtai Quartet i) but they “seek and find agency in the

exercise of an obdurate will that cannot be bent; they cannot therefore be regarded as

tragic figures” (i).

Chughtai’s short story, “Bichu Phupi” is an endearing tale where extended

families live together. It focuses on the bittersweet relationship between the narrator’s

father and her aunt, Bichu Phupi. It is also about outsiders’ perception, in this case,

about Rehman Bhai, the narrator’s father, who is treated as a social outcast because of

his affair with his sister-in-law. Rumors spread like wild fire in a close family setup

and the society and it is not important if they are true or false. The story also has a lot

of mingled relationships which is typical of an Indian Muslim family. It is a society

 Mamnoon 134

which looks down upon love marriage and this is why Bichu Phupi severs ties with

her daughter. Rehman Bhai brings her and the groom to live with them which leads

Bichu Phupi to hurl invectives at him every now and then. Her brother also teases her

by sending messages to her through his son who asks her “Well, Phupi, what did you

eat today?”, to which she would reply, “Your mother’s liver”. His brother would in

turn send her another message, “Why, Phupi, that’s why you have haemorrhoids in

your mouth. Take some laxative, I say, some laxative.” What would follow were a

series of curses hurled on her nephew such as that “his virile body be picked by crows

and vultures”.

The story, however, brings forth the human side of a seemingly arrogant and

headstrong character such as Bichu Phupi as one comes to realise that she is only

outwardly harsh. Towards the end of the story, as Rehman Bhai lies on his death bed,

Bichu Phupi’s love and care for him come to the fore. He asks her to curse him, as she

had always done, but “her voice quivered and broke instead” as she begged, “O God,

bless my brother with my life […] dear God, in the name of your beloved prophet”.

That day, her love for her brother takes over everything else and “Not a single curse

fell from Bichu Phupi’s lips that day”. Chughtai’s stories thus present a realistic

portrayal of Indian Muslim society in general and middle-class familial relationships

in particular, focusing mainly on women and their relationships with themselves as

well as with the world.

Chughtai’s stories also manifest the apprehension around the marriage of

daughters, especially at an early age. This is because marriage is considered a

yardstick which determines a woman’s social status or the lack of it in Indian Muslim

society. Chughtai’s short story, “Chauthi Ka Joda” (The Wedding Suit), for instance,

is about a poor widow, Bi Amma who has two daughters, Kubra and Hameeda. The
 Mamnoon 135

story focuses on Bi Amma’s obsession to get Kubra married as soon as possible, but

every time she nears her goal of marrying off Kubra, something terrible happens and

Kubra’s marriage gets cancelled. And then one day Kubra’s cousin Rahat arrives at

their place for a stay for one month for police training. Hameeda, Kubra’s sister feels

happy over this and tells Bi Amma to use this opportunity to impress Rahat to marry

Kubra. They leave no stone unturned to make Rahat’s stay comfortable at their home

and leave everything at his disposal. But Rahat develops interest in Hameeda and

flirts with her by making livid remarks and touches her inappropriately on various

occasions and after a month he leaves without marrying either of them which leaves

Bi Amma devasted. She laments Kubra’s fate, “Rahat doesn’t even look at her

because God hasn’t given her fair features”.

This shows how much importance is given by the society, especially the extent

to which the lower class is worried about the features and complexion of the girl and

how it is one of the obstacles in getting a girl married. On leaving Rahat, Kubra dies

the next morning of tuberculosis and thus comes an unexpected end to a miserable

and wretched life of a poor girl. And, the ‘Chauthi Ka Joda’ ultimately becomes

Kubra’s shroud. The story depicts how financial burden is another reason for the

plight of lower middle class women and also the farce that lies in family’s ‘honour’.

Rahat’s character shows how men in privileged positions easily get away with their

wrongdoings.

Home and the World: The Concerns of Qurratulain Hyder

As opposed to the middle-class society which Chughtai deals with,

Qurratulain Hyder’s world is a bit different, drawing mostly on upper-class landed

gentry. Her issues are different too, focusing more on the individual’s relation with
 Mamnoon 136

the world, but family structure is an essential part of it nevertheless. Hyder’s novella,

The Housing Society (1965), for instance, deals with the story of three characters who

have known one another while in India and meet once again when all three of them

take refuge in Pakistan. The Housing Society is a prestigious residential area in

Karachi. The narrative is about how the individual social positions of the characters

are reversed because of the upheaval of Partition. Salma, affluent while in India, is

reduced to penury in Pakistan, while Surayya and Jamshed who have been servile to

Salma’s family while in India, find their positions elevated. The partition of the

country turns their lives upside down. With the focus on problems faced by Muslims

migrating from India to the newly created state of Pakistan, the novella explores the

cataclysmal relocation of the populace resulting in an abrupt change of social order.

The novel begins during the time of the British raj and ends after partition in

newly-formed Pakistan. Salma, a magistrate’s daughter, yearns for conventional

happiness, only to be forced by circumstances to take up a job as a hostess for the

managing director of a big company. The Housing Society thus depicts the change in

the economic and social status brought about by the partition in the life of people and

subsequent migration. Salman is a communist, although he comes from a well-to-do

family. Giving up the comforts and luxuries given to him by his parents, he starts

leading a life of simplicity. He is as much disgusted by the feudal system of

Zamindari before the partition as he is now by the rise of new capitalism. Once he

tells Surayya, his former love interest, “The mansions of the past have burned down,

but the mansions of the new bourgeoisie will soon rise on their debris in both

countries. Yesterday’s feudal lords give way to today’s capitalists. Our real struggle

begins now” (Season 210). Towards the end of the tale, however, Salman meets with
 Mamnoon 137

his tragic fate by languishing in a jail in Karachi, while Surayya marries the rich

businessman, Jamshed.

The novel is a reminder of the tragic consequences of Partition, where familial

ties severed permanently and the ones to suffer most were Muslim women from the

middle class and affluent families in India, such as Salma. Confined to the house, with

no access to proper education, such women were expected to wait for their elders to

get them married so that they could perform duties towards their new home and be

responsible towards her marriage obligations, things which they had traditionally

learnt as maidens. The narrative thus speaks for the many Muslim families, especially

from the landed gentry of North India which had fallen on difficult times post the

abolition of the zamindari system and subsequent migration to Pakistan. Like

Chughtai’s women characters, Hyder’s are also not weak and cannot be seen as

victims. In his introduction to a collection including The Housing Society, C.M. Naim

writes that “despite the crumbling away of the social and economic certainties of their

childhoods and adolescent days, these women do not fail to shore up new lives for

themselves. They are not benumbed into total inaction” (x). Thus, even when they

make certain compromises, as Surrayya does, for instance, at the end of the novella,

by marrying Jamshed, a business tycoon, she does so for the most basic of human

needs, that is, survival. Hyder’s narratives thus also focus on familial relationships

where families are torn apart or new relations are formed as well but they are different

from Chughtai’s mainly in the sense that they are not about bickering aunts or

domestic disputes between women but about members in larger relation with the

world, with fate and their own actions.

Both Chughtai as well as Hyder’s works unveil the previously covered and

largely ignored world which, as Priyamvada Gopal characterises as one that “tends to
 Mamnoon 138

be less visible than the public sphere with regard to processes of modernisation and

democratisation” (Gopal 39). It is the world of the domestic sphere of the female

space out of which emerge larger issues of education, domesticity, sexuality, class and

gendered modernity. In his works on modernity in colonial India, Partha Chatterjee

draws a special dichotomy of home and the outside world, that is, between the private

and the public which mapped the division between the national and the familial and

became a framework of self-assertion amidst colonial hostility:

The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home

represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity [...] [The world]

is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must

remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world —

and woman is its representative. (120)

The West definitely had immense superiority to rule over the world and had been

successful in subjugating its colonies but, as Chatterjee expresses, “it had failed to

colonise the inner, essential, identity of the East” (Gopal 61), that belonged to the

private space of the house.

The domestic sphere in both Chughtai and Hyder’s works depicts a very

vibrant environment with large houses in which landlords and other upper class

people reside, along with their Begums, children and other relatives. These homes

employ multiple domestic helpers who are an essential part of the home and all that

happens in it. As David Lelyveld describes in his seminal study, Aligarh’s First

Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (1978),

In all but the poorest homes there were usually servants, often quite a

number of them. Long-term guests and poor but “respectable”

 Mamnoon 139

personages with no place else to go were often put up in a spirit of

almost limitless hospitality. (39)

These domestic workers, as characters, often invoked laughter and indulged in gossip,

such as the ones in Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” where the maids express disapproval and

jealousy towards the closeness between Begum Jaan and Rabbu, a maid just like

themselves: “Someone would mention their names, and the whole group would burst

into loud guffaws. What juicy stories they made up about them!” (Lifting the Veil 17).

The domestic workers depicted in such literature are mostly lower-class

women who often move between the domestic quarters and the public bazaar, often

providing comic relief. In the first few pages of Hyder’s novel, Chandni Begum, one

is caught and enchanted by the witty utterances of Al Hamdu, the personal maid of

Bitto Baji:

While Ramzani, the cook makes kababs, AL Hamdu would

philosophically mutter: ‘Ah, the fate of this dumb animal! Saints

meditate sitting on its hide; poets compose verses about its eyes, but

the poor beast ends up being scorched into kababs!’ (2-3)

Such banters are typical of Muslim households which Hyder centres her novel around.

Through the words of Waziran, another domestic worker in Qambar’s home, Hyder

highlights the different hierarchies amongst servants as she teases Nuran,

Should they put up pictures of your grandfather who was a water-

career and who spent his life, a red band around his waist, filling water

and was called the bhisti? When he died, he was buried in the

graveyard meant for the indigent. Batashan Bua’s father was a cook.

(97-98)
 Mamnoon 140

The presence of domestic workers looms large in the novel and they assume an even

important place when Chandni herself is left to mingle and live with them as hard

times befall her.

Apart from the domestic sphere, the landed gentry in the early twentieth

century and their downfall after the Indian Partition are also a major part of Chughtai

and Hyder’s works. The world of the zamindars and taluqdars, such as the family of

the narrator in “Gainda” and that of Qambar Ali in Chandni Begum — once affluent

but rendered powerless following land reform measures after Partition — is the world

of their literary space. In the large and populous state of Uttar Pradesh, for instance, a

Zamindari Abolition Committee was appointed even before independence, in I946

and its report formed the basis of the legislation, enacted in 1951, which stripped the

affluent landlords of the bulk of their estates and awarded that land to the cultivators.

For the Oudh taluqdars, who had been accustomed for decades to support themselves

from the rental income of their extensive estates, the process of adjustment to the new

order was a mammoth task, one which would try their reserves of adaptability.

Similar legislation was soon passed into law elsewhere, and provides to this day the

fundamental legal framework for India's agrarian order.

An initial idea behind the abolition of the zamindari system was to get rid of

poverty, however, as W. C. Neale concludes his exhaustive study of land reforms in

Uttar Pradesh with the flat assertion that “the abolition of the zamindari system will

not end poverty in Uttar Pradesh or even contribute much to the solution of that

problem” (288). There were many zamindars in the Barabanki and Faizabad districts

of Uttar Pradesh. It was only natural for these men, once zamindari abolition had

deprived them of their lands, to drift into nearby Lucknow in search of new

opportunities3. But they were no ordinary job-seekers. Status conscious members of

 Mamnoon 141

the province’s rural elite, they had no interest in manual labor or in the demeaning

minor clerkships that their limited skills and training could alone ordinarily command.

As a result, many spent more time looking for jobs than working at them and the jobs

they did find were rarely very remunerative.

In 1864, six years after the revolt of 1857, the taluqdars, many of them

Muslims, through their association, founded Canning College, later affiliated to the

University of Lucknow; a few years afterwards they established the Colvin Taluqdars’

School as a preparatory school for the college. The support of these two institutions

remained until the very eve of zamindari abolition, the taluqdars’ major corporate

philanthropic activity. From the start, however, the bulk of the taluqdars gave their

support to the schools not out of any deep commitment to education, but as a

prestigious act of charity and because their British rulers expected it of them. Secure

in their local position, and often orthodox in their Hinduism, they saw no benefit to

themselves in education. The Colvin School catered especially to the sons of

taluqdars, with special classes set aside for them, and modeled many of its activities

and customs on those of the English public schools; yet its appeal to the aristocratic

sentiments of the taluqdars was only moderately successful.

In addition to the support of their own class, the taluqdari culture was

somehow sustained by the deference of the lower classes who considered them

superior. Chandni’s consciousness about her own class and the subsequent reverence

of the domestic workers is a reflection of this continuing deference, although she loses

all her wealth in an extraordinary change of circumstances. It depicts how the

taluqdars, although having lost most of their old legal and economic sanctions were

respected on account of social ties.

 Mamnoon 142

One thing characteristic of Hyder is that she loves to invent names, especially

the ones she gives to the landed gentry. The Teen Katori house in Chandni Begum is

inhabited by Bobby Mian, Vicky Mian, Pinky Mian, Dinky, Jenny, Penny, Fenny and

more. Anyone who is familiar with the nomenclature favoured in landed Muslim

households — especially in cities such as Lucknow and Bhopal where there has been

a more robust royal culture — would not need a verbose description of the character

after hearing these names. They would immediately decipher their class and socio-

cultural milieu.

Although Hyder’s writing is generally believed to have been influenced by

styles and techniques of Western modernist writers, her stream of consciousness style

preceded her readings of Virginia Woolf. Hyder’s works have always been a study in

profound, philosophical ideas, historical perspectives as well as emotional and

psychological complexities of the human mind. Her immense knowledge of Urdu,

Persian, Turkish and English cultures and languages as well as the poetic allusions her

works embody, give a different richness and depth to her writings.

Unlike her contemporaries such as the Progressive writers who insisted on

socialism, Hyder drew on personal experience and familiarity, concentrating instead

on the realistic patterns of existence, emphasising the dichotomies and ironies that

human beings get engulfed in. Hyder’s central protagonists are frequently women, but

women’s issues are not her primary concern. Instead, she provides an artist’s

impression of woman in relation to the environment and other people’s perceptions,

such as the painter Lily captures the essence of womanhood through her painting of

Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).

 Mamnoon 143

Thus, this chapter analyses the socio-cultural mores of Indian Muslim society

and what goes into the formation of an essentially religious group into a self-

actualised community. Historian Ayesha Jalal, in her book, Self and Sovereignty:

Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 shows how the entire idea

of ‘community’ was shaped in relation to the changing politics of late colonialism and

how community meant very different things at different times for Indian Muslims.

Jalal details how the colonial state defined the arenas of politics available for Indian

Muslims — from enumeration schemes to educational reforms — which led to the

Muslims’ “articulation of a discourse based on the colonial state’s privileging of

religious distinctions in Indian society” (Jalal xii). As opposed to assuming that

Muslims had a prior existence of a community, Jalal shows how ideas of nationalism

conceived by both Hindus and Muslims were established along regional, class, and

linguistic lines whereby Muslim voices “sought location within the emerging

discourse on the Indian nation while trying to find accommodation for their sense of

cultural difference” (Jalal xiv).

This chapter thus gives a comprehensive overview of the Indian Muslim

society, which has been a category formed as a result of multiple forces, right from

the struggle against the colonisers, to a certain understanding of their own religious,

social and cultural heritage with the aim of reform and improvement that resulted in

carving out a significant identity of their own.

 Mamnoon 144

End Notes

1. For a clearer overview on this, see History of the Freedom Movement in India

(1962) by R.C. Majumdar.

2. For more on the zamindars of Uttar Pradesh, see "From Raja to Landlord: the

Oudh Taluqdars 1850—1870," by T.R. Metcalf in Land Control in India

(1969) edited by R. E. Frykenberg.

3. See Khan, Syed Ahmad. Review on Dr. Hunter's “Our Indian Mussulmans —

are they bound in conscience to rebel against the queen? Premier Book

House, 1959.
 Mamnoon 145

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Naim, C M, and Qurratulain Hyder. “Introduction.” A Season of Betrayals: A Short Story and

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Neale, Walter C. Economic Change in Rural India: Land Tenure and Reform in Uttar

Pradesh, 1800-1955. New Haven, 1962.

Rajakumar, Mohanalakshmi. Haram in the Harem: Domestic Narratives in India and

Algeria, Peter Lang, 2009.

Stout, Jeffrey. “Commitments and Traditions in the Study of Religious Ethics.” Journal of

Religious Ethics,vol.25,no.3,1998,pp.23–56., www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40015238.pdf.

Zaman, Muhammad Qasim. The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change.

Princeton University Press, 2007.

 Mamnoon 149

Conclusion

This dissertation thus charts out the intellectual and cultural history of Muslim

society, including Muslim writers, who, although representing a relatively small

fraction of the entire anti-colonial Indian intelligentsia came to play a very strong role

in the radical, left-leaning literary landscape and identity formation. Attempts have

been made to show how a minority community, historically organized around a

'religious' identity, became the harbingers of ‘secular’ nationalism wherein a

culturally informed social identity became paramount. I have also tried to establish

how eminent Muslim social reformers and writers, radical in their belief-systems,

challenged not only colonial rule, but also the indigenous social hierarchies within

their own Muslim communities including conservative sexual politics, illiteracy and

other social ills. Literature in all its forms, mainly in Urdu, was seen as a potential

tool towards the same end.

This dissertation examines how writers from Muslim backgrounds of late

colonial India who exhibited an extraordinary strength of character and resolve, were

critical of practices such as purdah, the hierarchies of stratification, subjugation of

 Mamnoon 150

women and other such matters while striving, through their writings, towards a better

and reformed society. For the present purpose, socio-cultural milieu of the Muslims of

North India has been looked at. Additionally, culture and mores of Muslim

bourgeoisie or the upper middle class ashraf or sharif Muslims have been studied

against their humble domestic workers — the ajlaf. One of the main issues this

dissertation focuses on is that of women subjugation, highlighted deftly by Muslim

women writers who wrote at a time when women’s voices were generally suppressed.

Certain recurrent issues and themes in women’s writing were an outright

indictment of time-worn beliefs and customs, illiteracy and ignorance among women

as well as the desire to portray what it truly meant to be a woman. While stress was

laid on women's learning, they were also regarded as promoters of culture and

therefore the need was felt to preserve, cherish and nurture their learning which they

would pass on to future generations. Education, thus, acted as a mediator between the

private and the public world of Muslim women. While the private world meant

seclusion and subjugation, the public domain included active involvement in social

and political affairs through education. The pioneers who took the responsibility of

educating women were aware of the difficulties they would face at the hands of the

ignorant society but their dedicated efforts overcame all barriers and they became

promoters of knowledge.

These writers also challenge the flawed interpretation of ‘nation’ as an entity

bound by territories and define nation in terms of urban modernism as they migrated

to different cities and in Hyder’s case to a different country (Pakistan, for some years)

and playing significant roles in bringing to light social ills while propagating social

justice. Muhammad Iqbal’s idea of ‘khudi’ became an invigorating idea as Indian

Muslims drifted towards a significant understanding of selfhood in the midst of

 Mamnoon 151

challenges by external forces. Through an overview of the various religious and

educational reform movements, role of Islam, educational setups for women and other

such forces, and contextualizing categories such as class, gender, nationalism and

modernity in the wake of colonial rule and subsequent struggle for and attainment of

Independence, an attempt has been made to establish how such categories are

intricately woven and intersect one another at different points in history.

Finally, this dissertation attempts to answer the following questions — how

writers from Muslim backgrounds, forming a part of the anti-colonial Indian

intelligentsia brought about a revolution in terms of their radical, left-leaning beliefs

which they propagated through their writings. Secondly, how Islam and the

subsequent reform movements by the Ulama brought about a certain consciousness of

what it meant to be a Muslim in India and finally, the effort has been to chart out the

politics of class and gender within the Muslim society in India and its appraisal

through literature.
 Mamnoon 152

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