Recollecting the first time she encountered her literary mentor Rashid Jahan as a B.A. student in 1936, the noted Urdu feminist writer, Ismat Chughtai describes the scene of a young woman, donning a sleeveless blouse and sari, delivering an impassioned speech at a meeting of progressive writers and poets in Lucknow. Defying conventions which otherwise ordered both women’s attire and presence within public spaces, Jahan emerges in Chughtai’s account as a rebel, as someone unreservedly unmoored, unafraid, and fierce.

A doctor by profession but a writer by political choice, Jahan left a lasting impression on Chughtai, her boldness convincing her that “one woman like Rashid Apa was far superior to ten ordinary women” (Chughtai 2001, 108). Importantly, for the young Chughtai, Jahan’s boldness also upended notions that had historically given force to how women should be and what women could be. In other words, for Chughtai, Jahan opened up other possibilities of being a “woman”, possibilities in excess of familiar and familial norms that had historically framed the image of the “woman” as homely, virtuous, and inert.

And yet this liaison far from eliciting the approval of the people around Chughtai, invoked a sense of concern, especially in the eyes of her family. In a later interview with the journal Mahfil, Chughtai recalled the disapproval her family harboured against Jahan. In her family’s view, by encouraging Chughtai to express herself freely and openly, Jahan had in some irrevocable way spoiled her.

It is no accident that it is from the locus of the family that such a critique of Jahan’s influence on Chughtai was advanced. As Geeta Patel has noted, in postcolonial South-Asia, notions of domesticity and the family – with the obliging woman as its centrepiece – had been integral in articulating an emerging national consciousness. Within this figuration, the category of the family, as mediated by the unchanging, homely, and virtuous image of the woman becomes a necessary icon for performing soon-to-come nation-ness and nation-hood (Patel 2004).

So, in a sense by introducing Chughtai to non-familiar (and in turn non-familial) ways of being, Jahan’s (spoiling) influence on Chughtai can be read as constituting a transgression against the boundaries of behaviour permissible to a young Muslim woman in the India of the 1930s. Importantly, Chughtai’s account of Jahan offers an important analytical and political entry-point to both situate and understand Jahan. When read through Chughtai’s re-collections of Jahan, the theoretical and political import of Jahan lies in not only how she inspired, but in also how she spoiled.

Born to Shaikh Abdullah and Wahid Jahan Begum in 1905, the couple who famously undertook the reform movement for Muslim women’s education in Aligarh, Jahan was brought up in a household where – as she once laughingly remarked – she and her sisters had “slept on the mattress of women’s education and covered ourselves with the quilt of women’s education from our earliest consciousness” (Quoted in Saiduzzafar 1973, 159). Together with starting the journal Khatun (Woman), a periodical intended to educate women following purdah, the couple also set up the first all-girls school in Aligarh in 1906.  

It was to this school that Jahan went every morning in a covered palanquin to study. While at school she studied history and modern science, at home she would help her mother with publishing and editing the family-run journal Khatun. It is thus obvious that from an early age Jahan had access to a well-rounded education that was not traditional of most Muslim households of that era. And yet, although her upbringing equipped her with a freedom quite unusual for a Muslim woman, like the other women of the Abdullah household, Jahan was expected to observe purdah, a practice she was vehemently against.

As soon as she left the confines of her family home in Aligarh to study medicine in Delhi (and much to the annoyance of her family), Jahan gave up purdah and cut her hair into a bob, “a style she later made her younger sisters at home follow” (Bano 2012, 60). After graduating from medical school in 1931, Jahan was assigned to Lucknow by the provincial medical commission to work as a government doctor, a post she would eventually give up to start her own private practice which offered women from lower caste and class communities free treatment.

Begum Khurshid Mirza, Jahan’s younger sister, describes this period in Jahan’s life as one of wide-ranging activism. She remembers Jahan as a doctor who always “went beyond the call of duty”, and as someone who not only “got patients admitted into hospitals but also looked into their general welfare” (Mirza 2005, 94). In addition, and apart from offering free medical treatment, Jahan held adult education classes about reproductive health, and even encouraged other Muslim women to undertake a career in medicine.

It was also in Lucknow that Jahan first ventured seriously into experimenting with the literary craft. Introduced to a politically driven and intellectually-charged group of writers by a friend of her brother, she met here for the first time Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar. Like Jahan, these individuals belonged to upper-class Muslim families, and like her were concerned with transforming society through an engaged critique of its oppressive orthodoxies.

The most significant outcome of this collaboration was the publication of a pioneering collection of short fiction in 1932, provocatively titled Angarey (Burning Coals) and to which Jahan contributed a play and a story. The writers (who would come to be known as the Angarey group) were “filled with a zeal to change the social order” and Angarey was their attempt to initiate a new radical trend in Urdu literature (Bano 2012, 58).

As Snehal Shingavi notes in his introduction to Angarey, its authors were attempting to “shift the direction and focus of literature”, openly criticizing and challenging the era’s social mandates on sexuality and gender, especially as it was instituted in the realm of the family (Shingavi 2014, xx). In doing so, the members explicitly took up for the first time the cruelty women experienced in everyday life, laying bare, in Ali Husain Mir and Raza Mir’s words, the “prevailing familial and sexual mores, the decadence and hypocrisy of social and religious life in contemporary India” (Mir & Mir 2006, 3).

Predictably, the publication earned the outrage and backlash of the religious orthodoxies and Jahan, as the only woman in the group, found herself at the centre of the controversy. As Priyamvada Gopal writes, the “religious zealots were unable to stomach the fact that it was a Muslim woman who was rebelling against them and writing about the woman’s body and the oppression she had to endure” (Gopal 2005, 32).  And yet, even as ordinances were passed against her and death threats issued, a defiant Jahan refused to succumb. Rather than lying low as some of her friends suggested, Jahan opted instead to continue her work as a practicing doctor.

But, what was exactly so vile and blasphemous in Jahan’s stories that had upset the orthodoxies?

As noted above, Jahan contributed a play and a short story to Angarey. In line with her previous activist work, both pieces explore the neglect women endure within the suffocating and domesticating space of the home. In her one-act-play “In the Women’s Quarters” Jahan provocatively pushes behind the “veil” to uncover the oppressive demands domesticity and the family place on women. Written in the style of a dramatized conversation between two women observing purdah, the play tells the story of a sickly Mahmudi Begum whose body has been subjected completely to the whims of her husband. Mahmudi laments how since she turned seventeen, she has been forced to have a child every year with grievous consequences for her emotional and physical health (116).

Rather than being spoken for, Mahmudi herself speaks about her body, the sexual demands placed on it and the resulting pernicious medical effects of having repeated childbirths and abortions. Importantly, in centring Mahmudi’s own voice in the narrative, Jahan’s play is able to deal with problems that had otherwise remained un-examined and unacknowledged. And yet, even as Mahmudi speaks openly in the “Women’s Quarters”, she remains ensconced within a world which disregards and ultimately refuses to acknowledge her woes.

While in the play Jahan elevates the tyranny and violence women face within the otherwise cordoned and homely space of the women quarters, Jahan’s shorter piece in Angarey, “Seeing the Sights in Delhi” tells the story of Malika Begum and her experience of an uneventful trip made to Delhi. Made possible by the benevolence of her husband, the trip which initially arose a sense of excitement, ends up not even proceeding beyond the railway station. Upon reaching the station at Delhi, Malika’s husband saunters off to meet a friend, leaving her alone, anxious, and scared at the station. Miserable in the heat of her burqa and disgusted at becoming the object of lewd comments and gazes passed by the men around her, Malika, on her husband’s return quickly asks him to take her back home (107-110).

Thus, in both her contributions to Angarey, Jahan not only named what had hitherto remained unnameable within upper-class Muslim households: sexual practices, reproductive health, the oppressiveness of purdah, but did so with an unprecedented frankness that directly challenged the core values associated with the figure of the “woman.” While an earlier generation of Muslim writers through the 1920s and 30s had begun tackling what in popular parlance was understood as the “woman question”, unlike Jahan, their arguments (and much like those of Jahan’s family) concerning gender inequality were of a “reformist kind, proposing piecemeal changes that were palatable to the community” (Bano 2012, 59).

In contrast, gender in Jahan’s writings came to have a “constitutive rather than merely a thematic importance” (Gopal 2005, 5). For Jahan, gender was not merely reducible to the figure of the woman, and studying it required interrogating how it intersected with other issues such as education, domesticity, and the family. Consequently, for Jahan, to effectively understand and tackle the oppression and inequality women faced required above all a complete upheaval and transformation of familiar and familial issues like domesticity, family, and marriage.

Even as her unabashedness earned her the wrath and censure of some conservative readers, Angarey firmly established Jahan within the literary landscape of India, and even earned her the public admiration of literary stalwarts like Premchand and Faiz. Further, in 1936, four years after the publication of Angarey, Jahan played an instrumental role in setting up the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in Lucknow, the most prominent literary movement of the 20th century in the subcontinent. However, although she helped set up the PWA, in the years that followed Jahan wrote only fragmentarily, and instead devoted her time to jointly edit the Urdu political journal Chingari (Sparks) with her previous Angarey collaborator and later husband Mahmuduzzafar.

Though from all accounts, editing Chingari meant that Jahan lived a very busy life through the 1940s and only wrote intermittently, the few short stories that she did write continue to merit literary acclaim. However, unlike her earlier work in Angarey which was singularly concerned with unveiling the oppressive world of upper-middle-class Muslim women, Jahan’s later work would attempt to problematise the very category of the “woman.”

In her most notable story from this period, “That One,” written sometime in the late 1940s, the narrator, Safia, a young upper-middle-class female doctor recounts her experience of treating a nameless syphilitic ex-prostitute, who everyone in disgust refers to as That One. Despite the revulsion that Safia and her colleagues feel towards That One, she visits the clinic every-day and even offers Safia a Jasmine flower on her visits. The high-point of the story occurs at the conclusion when upon seeing That One blowing her nose and wiping her fingers on the wall, the old sweeper Naseeban losing “all the good breed culled from twenty years of working in the school” starts kicking and punching That One (121). In many ways the critical purchase of “That One” lies in the manner in which it complicates the assumption that there exists a universal definition of the “woman.”

It is instructive to note that the “decisive act of repudiation” comes not from the disgusted Safia, but “from another working-class woman” (Gopal 2005, 46). In this regard it becomes plausible to read this moment as a broader reflection “surrounding the failure or limits of empathy and female solidarity” (44).

Unfortunately, Jahan died soon after writing this story. Cancer that had first emerged in 1942, re-appeared in 1950. While Soviet medical expertise was promptly offered, and Jahan flew to Moscow on the 9th of July, 1952, little could be done to improve her condition and Jahan died within three weeks of reaching Moscow, on the 29th of July, 1952, at the age of 47 (Coppola and Zubair 1987, 172).

Although Jahan never garnered the literary acclaim of her protégé, Chughtai, nor was she ever as prolific as her, the importance of her craft and activism cannot be minimised. Concluding on a more personal note, I like to think of Jahan not as a person but as a wayward idea, her legacy lying not so much in what she wrote but how she did so. Indeed, throughout her life, Jahan always refused and rejected comfortable closures and enclosures, instead pursuing with an almost unwavering persistence and passion different ways of knowing, being and relating to the world.

The promise of Jahan’s life and work lies in precisely this legacy, this refusal to never yield to oppressive grids that presume and establish the place of certain bodies.

Bibliography

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Chughtai, Ismat. ISMAT CHUGHTAI: A Talk with One of Urdu’s Most Outspoken Woman Writers. Interview by Mahfil, 1972, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/ismat/txt_ismat_interview_mahfil1972.html.

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