And the World Changed (2 page)

After the establishment of the British Raj, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India in 1858, British hubris and power in India were at their height. Among Indians, nationalist sentiment grew, which the vernacular press disseminated widely, although by the late nineteenth century, English-speaking Indians played a pivotal role in conveying this nationalist, Indian point of view to the British. Thus English became the “link language” in the political debate between the representatives of India and the Raj. Meanwhile The Indian National Congress was established in 1885, and then the Muslim League in 1905, to voice the concerns of India's Muslim minority (Jalal 2001) in a new, unfamiliar, social and political order. The complex relationship between these two political parties spiraled into bitter disagreements, sometimes fostered by the colonial power. In 1947,
this led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim homeland. The founding fathers of both countries—Gandhi and Nehru in India, Jinnah and Liaquat in Pakistan—had been educated in British universities, used English as fluently as a first language, and pressed the demands of their electorates in the legislatures of British India.

For much of the nineteenth century, the acquisition of English remained gender specific and education was largely restricted to vernacular languages for most Indian women. Reformist debates on women's education “focused more on what and how much they should be taught, rather than whether they should be taught in English” (Mukherjee 2002). The gap between well-traveled Anglicized men and their cloistered mothers, wives, and sisters grew. Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), a poet, nationalist, and women's rights activist, was the most celebrated Indo-Anglian woman writer of her generation. She belonged to a Hindu family closely associated with Hyderabad, a very large Muslim princely state that was the size of France. There, in 1881 her father set up one of the earliest schools for girls (Pernau 2002). Others followed suit. Instructors began to introduce English to their students, but among Muslims in particular, a secluded life in
parda
and private education, with or without the addition of some English, continued to be the norm for the well-born woman.

At the same time, Urdu, which came to be regarded as the language of Muslim identity, had its own reform movement. The earliest Urdu women's magazine dates back to 1886 and was a platform for early women writers. They included the conventeducated, Muslim intellectual Atiya Fyzee (1877–1967), who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. She wrote beautiful English in her timeless book on musicology,
The Music of India
(1914), but she published her articles and a travelogue in Urdu in order to reach Muslim women with her liberal, egalitarian ideas. The women in her family were among the first Muslims to discard
parda
(Karlitzky 2002).

MUSLIM WOMEN WRITING ENGLISH FICTION

During the early half of the twentieth century, fiction writing by Muslim women in English remained a rarity. Among the few exceptions was Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), who grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) where she received a traditional education in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian, and with the support of her husband, taught herself English and Bengali—now the national language of modern Bangladesh. In 1905, she wrote her first and only story in English, the 12-page “Sultana's Dream” (Hossain 1988, The Feminist Press): one of the most radical of early feminist writings.
⁴
She went on to write in Bengali and attack the
parda
system and traditional attitudes toward women. She set up schools for girls, but continued to observe
parda
to allay Muslim parents' great fear that education would encourage their daughters to discard the veil. Other Indian women writers of English fiction in the early twentieth century included India's first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), and her sister, Alice Sorabji Pennell (1870–1951), a doctor. Both were educated in England and belonged to an eminent Parsi family that had converted to Christianity.

In 1921 women gained the right to be elected to the legislatures. Educated Muslim women began to discard
parda
and participate in political life. They included the Muslim League activists Jahanara Shahnawaz (1896–1979) and Inam Habibullah (1893–1974), my grandmother. Interestingly, my grandmother had a private education, learned English after her marriage, but used Urdu when she wrote a travelogue and children's books. Shahnawaz, on the other hand, graduated from Queen Mary College, Lahore, and wrote an Urdu novel, but much later recorded her life and times in an English memoir,
Father and Daughter
(1963).

The presence of mission schools for girls in British India, where “progressive” families began to send their daughters, spurred the use of English for Hindu and Muslim women alike, since these schools taught entirely in English. However many
families remained more conservative and feared that if young women were exposed to alien religious and cultural influences at these institutions and were not secluded, sexual and social anarchy would follow.

In her memoir,
From Purdah to Parliament
(1963), the bilingual writer Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah (1915–2000), a member of Pakistan's first Constituent Assembly and later, a diplomat, recalled the agitation in her family when her Anglicized father insisted she attend an English mission school, and her traditional mother, egged on by vocal relatives, opposed it bitterly. But a decision that caused such conflict in her home soon came to be the norm, Ikramullah notes:

In 1927, my going to an English school was looked upon with much disfavor and yet by 1947 every girl of good family was going to school. What my father had said had come to pass and in another twenty years' time women were taking part in processions, had been to gaol, were working in refugee camps, and were sitting in legislatures and participating in international delegations. It seems incredible, but it has happened. (1998, 32)

In British India, English was the language of instruction in all universities. Ikramullah, Ismat Chughtai (1915–1991), and gynecologist Rashid Jahan (1905–1952), were among a small number of pioneering university-educated Muslim women of their time. Ikramullah, the first Muslim woman to earn her Ph.D. from London University, wrote Urdu fiction and English nonfiction
⁵
; Jahan and Chughtai, who became literary icons, channeled their extensive reading in English of British, European, and Russian literature into revolutionizing Urdu fiction.

However, even with the growth of writing in English by Muslim women, a major problem persisted: the lack of readership. There was little encouragement to write as well. Since
many Anglicized intellectuals in India looked to England's classical literature to define the literary style of English-language writing, they had little patience with the stylistic difficulties that contemporary creative Indo-Anglian writers, regardless of gender, had to grapple with: how to find a modern voice in English that would transpose the authentic experience of the subcontinent without pandering to Western exotica. These Anglophiles disparaged Indo-Anglian poetry and fiction, propounding the belief that Indians should not write creatively in English because they “could not get it quite right.” Muslim women with a sufficient command of English, who were few in number, suffered this dismissal acutely. Furthermore, while the work of nineteenth-century Indo-Anglian writers had emulated that of British writers, by the 1930s, Indians were expected to use English creative writing as a nationalist vehicle that would “explain” India to the British colonizers. Thus, in vernacular fiction, a truthful portrayal of harsh realities was acceptable and praiseworthy—but in Indo-Anglian creative writing, such writing became a betrayal.

In the pre-Partition years, the only English novel by a Muslim woman appears to have been the satirical
Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household
(1944) by Iqbalunissa Hussain.
⁶
She uses irony to comment on the power of the mother-in-law in an extended family and lampoons callous, self indulgent, and hypocritical men:

It is a well known fact that man is superior to woman in every respect. He is a representative of God on earth and being born with His light in him deserves the respect and obedience that he demands. He is not expected to show his gratitude or even a kind word of appreciation to a woman: it is his birthright to get everything from her: ‘Might is right' is the policy of the world. (quoted in De Souza 2004, 508)

Thanks to her supportive husband, the Mysore-born Hussain learned English and graduated from college in 1930, two years before her eldest son (507). She went on to work for the education and welfare of women.

As the subcontinent moved toward independence, activists considered women's emancipation an integral part of the freedom struggle. Jahanara Shahnawaz's daughter, Mumtaz Shahnawaz (1912–1948), a Muslim League activist and a novelist, describes this very clearly in her only book,
The Heart Divided
(1959), which is probably the first South Asian English novel about Partition. She died in an air crash, leaving behind a first draft that was published unedited by her family. Despite many flaws and a narrative heavy with politics, reportage, and polemics, the book has great historical and sociological importance. The plot revolves around the love story of Habib, a young Muslim man in Lahore, and Mohini, a Hindu girl and a close friend of his sister, Zohra. Political divisions intensify the conflict of religion. At first, Zohra joins the Indian National Congress, while her sister Sughra is committed to the rival Muslim League. The two sisters attend the historic 1940 Muslim League meeting in Lahore:

‘Shall we sit behind the
purdah
?' Zohra asked curiously.

‘Of course not,” said Sughra. ‘What made you think that?'

‘I just wondered.'

‘Lots of women sat outside at the Patna session and two of them addressed the open session.' (quoted in Shamsie 1997, 37)

Through her characters, Shahnawaz debates independence, Partition, and the emancipation of women. She stops short of the Partition riots.

Widespread Partition riots occurred in August 1947 and led to cataclysmic violence and one of the great mass migrations in history. No one knows exactly how many people were affected, but many estimate that there were around ten million refugees and one million dead. This trauma, which marked the retreat of the British Empire and the birth of an independent India and Pakistan, continues to haunt both countries. Since Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were both perpetrators and victims of the horrors of Partition, this has led to a collective guilt that South Asians find difficult to confront. In politics this guilt has taken the form of India and Pakistan blaming each other for the resultant conflict, violence, war, and suffering from the time of Partition to the present day, but in South Asian English literature it has largely materialized in a tendency to sidestep ghastly details, which is why, compared to the magnitude of the event, novels about the Partition massacres are relatively few (Shamsie 2001).

In 1947, Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan, the wife of Pakistan's first Prime Minister, called upon educated Pakistani women to help with relief work in the refugee camps: They came in great numbers despite virulent criticism and abuse from orthodox clerics who believed that women should stay at home. A one-time professor of economics, Khan motivated and galvanized educated women to focus on every aspect of women's welfare, including female literacy. Her efforts spearheaded the women's movement in Pakistan. But the emphasis on nation building in the newly created country meant that social activism was considered a more praiseworthy occupation for privileged, well-educated, English-speaking women than the reclusive act of writing fiction.

In his informative book,
A History of Pakistani Literature in English
(1991), Tariq Rahman shows that by the 1950s writers in Pakistan began to agree with “the prescriptive dictum that their work must have an extra-literary purpose, namely to ‘serve the society' . . . this propagandist and chauvinistic view of literature was one which gained official support later.” By
then, all English creative writing by Pakistanis was disparaged as pointless, elitist, and a colonial hangover. The paradox was that Pakistan's English-language press flourished, but it was run and staffed by men; women reporters and editors were not even considered.

Author of a collection,
The Young Wife and Other Stories
(1958), Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah was the only woman writing English fiction of note during that era; her stories revolved around social pressures in the daily lives of women. Hamidullah (1918–2000) was also Pakistan's first woman columnist. Beginning in 1948 she wrote for
Dawn
, Pakistan's most important and influential English-language daily newspaper, but the day she commented on politics, she was hauled up by the editor and told she must not stray from “women's issues,” in other words, domestic matters. She resigned and set up a magazine,
The Mirror
, a popular glossy that recorded social happenings. Few in Pakistan remember that she utilized it to write fearless political editorials, which led to a ban on the magazine in 1957. She challenged this ban in the Supreme Court and won (Niazi 1986), becoming the first Pakistani woman to win a legal victory for press freedom in the superior judiciary. In the late 1950s and 1960s magazines such as
The Mirror
, as well as
Woman's World
and later,
She
, run by Mujib-un-Nissa Akram and Zuhra Karim, respectively, provided a platform for English-language writing by women.