Maskat Ayoub Thakur
By asserting her and other women’s right to speak about topics such as maternity, science, progress, ethics, and epistemology, in addition to bodies and sex, Rashid Jahan had made a groundbreaking breakthrough into the literary public sphere. Rasheed Jahan’s language, implications, customs, and traditions in her texts vividly depict the social, political, socioeconomic, and sociocultural conditions of Muslim women from lower class, lower middle class, and occasionally upper middle class Muslim societies . As it happens, it would not be incorrect to characterise her as a humanist who has been inspired by a holistic perspective. Politics, society, and culture are all intertwined for her. Her philosophy has never been to only write about issues; rather, she maintained that one should actually practise what one preaches.
It is disheartening that most of us have never heard of Rashid Jahan, despite the fact that she is the first woman—let alone a Muslim woman—to speak out about a variety of social issues, including pregnancy, abortion, prostitution, sexual harassment, and birth control—all of which are still taboo in many sections of our supposedly modern society. As a result of her efforts to free women from the shackles of the conservative society, her struggle to understand the identity of Muslim women and her opposition to fundamentalism, was dubbed the “Angarewali” and the “Bad Woman” of Urdu literature.
It is also important to take into account that, despite being a founding member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association and the Progressive Writers’ Movement in India, Rasheed Jahan did not become as well-known as her contemporaries in Hindi and Urdu like Ismat Chugtai and Prem Chand. She was a devout realist and her writings were political in nature, radically so; it is evident from reading them how furious, and quite rightly so, she was with the system. Despite her fluency in English, she recognized the value of vernacular language, demonstrating her desire to use her work to encourage social change. Because there were fewer elite and English-educated Muslims, she decided to write in Urdu so that the general public could understand her.
“Are there no women Political thinkers? Can women not think? Why do we treat them like women are incapable of thought?” Women are capable of thinking of course; it’s just that we don’t treat them with the respect or give them the recognition that their contributions as serious thinkers merit. In addition to being dismissed as unintelligent, women also inspire dread for their freedoms, as they may inspire other women to resist patriarchal control and dominance. It’s similar to being labelled a witch in the middle ages and burned at stake by the Church for utilising herbs to heal the sick or in even in the relatively modern times being compelled to publish writings under a male alias in order to reduce prejudice, as was the case with the renowned Brontë Sisters, J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, Mariam Cross and Louisa May Alcott.
Charlotte Brontë was asked why she used a male alias and she replied “We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” Can we imagine a world where classics like Little Women, Harry Potter, To Kill A Mockingbird, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would’ve gone unnoticed just because they were written by women? One wonders if Rashid Jahan had published under a male alias would she have been so heavily boycotted by the muslim elite and would her exceptional work have gained the recognition it deserves?
Reading Rashid Jahan makes us realise that, in the context of women, particularly Muslim women, her work is as relevant now as it was back then. She is a timeless figure who breaks down barriers. In this piece, we will consider her not only as an author but also as a political thinker.
Angarewali: Doctor, Writer and Communist.
Rashid Jahan was a doctor by profession, a writer by passion, and a communist by conviction. She had a huge impact on the literary world. Rashid Jahan, a major member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, was also a controversial figure. She was born in 1905 to Thakur Das, a Kashmiri Brahmin, converted to Islam who became widely known as Shaikh Abdullah. Her mother, father, and aunts were active in establishing women’s institutions and schools in Aligarh.
Rashid Jahan’s statement, “We slept on the mattress of women’s education and covered ourselves with the quilt of women’s education from our earliest consciousness.” speaks to her desires for the growth of feminism. Rashid Jahan attended the Aligarh school founded by her father before moving to Lucknow to attend Isabella Thoburn College and then Lady Hardinge College in Delhi. Her first piece of writing, “When the TomTom Beats,” was in English and appeared in the IT College journal. It was translated into Urdu as “Salma.”
At the turn of the 20th century, Rashid Jahan’s family led the intellectual and educational reformist movements in the Muslim community. Rashid Jahan was an intellectual who was devoted to the social and intellectual movements of her era. She was editor of Chingari, a political magazine. In addition to writing stories and radio plays, Rashid, better known by her stage name Rasheeda, founded the Indian People’s Theatre Association’s Lucknow chapter. She dramatised Premchand’s short story Kafan.
After marrying her fellow comrade Mahmuduz Zafar in 1934, she established a successful private practice in Lucknow, but the majority of her earnings were donated to the Communist Party, of which her husband was an active member. She continued to be a bold and provocative woman till her untimely death in 1952 due to Cancer. Her works laid the groundwork for the nascent feminism which had begun to take roots in South Asia. She is buried in a Moscow cemetery with a gravestone that reads, “Communist Doctor and Writer,”
Wage War With Orthodoxy (Laced With Anger).
The collection of short stories and plays known as Angarey was published in 1932 by three angry young men and a woman, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Mahmuduz Zafar, and Rashid Jahan. It included a play by Rashid Jahan titled “Parde ke Peeche” (From Behind the Veil) and a short story titled “Dilli ki Sair” (A Trip Around Delhi). It unleashed the wrath of conservatives, and how convenient that just one of the four anthology contributors received death threats, and not coincidentally, it was the only woman among the four. Rashid Jahan was threatened with acid attacks (how moral and religious?) for acting outside the bounds of what was appropriate behaviour for a Muslim woman in pre-independence India in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rashid Jahan wanted to show readers the fragile lives of the women confined in the forbidden women’s quarters by bringing them in through her stories. The book was banned in March 1933 under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code for harming the “religious susceptibilities of a section of the community” due to the controversy it caused in the conservative circles of the United Provinces. Rashid Jahan was dubbed as “Angarewali” as a consequence. Not only was the collection called “vulgar,” but it was also called “violation of ideas,” “obscene, morally depraved, base, filthy and foul, trash, shameless,” and other derogatory terms. Rashid Jahan was threatened with dire consequences like her face being burned, body disfigurement and even chopping off her body parts, for daring to confront the repulsive face of the forces of masculine hegemony.
The narrative Dilli ki Sair portrays an illiterate lower middle class society through its typical expressions and dialogues. In the story, Among her friends and acquaintances, Malka Begum is the only one who travelled to Delhi by train. She describes her trip and accuses the kambakht burqa and kambakhts of coughing and making remarks in and around the train and station. She also talks about her husband and his nigora Station Master, as well as the muas who teased her and asked to show off her face. The protagonist uses phrases from the Urdu language that are typically used by the lower class.
Rasheed Jahan revealed the closed-off and repressive reality of Muslim women in the lower strata of Muslim society by depicting this typical woman. Nonetheless, the Muslims in the elite class did not approve of this move. Unexpectedly, religious authorities became enraged and condemned her outright for this brief fiction. A few maulanas even issued fatwas against the author and threatened her with acid attacks.
In an objective interpretation of the story, Rashid Jahan was describing to the reader how non-elite Muslim women who are deprived of freedom live vicariously through the experiences of a married woman and her careless husband, who who left her alone with their luggage in the hot Delhi train station while she was wearing a heavy ‘kambakhat’ (cursed) burqah. There, she encountered a wide range of people, including sahibs, memsahibs, and muas, who harassed her in public. When Malka’s husband returned after what seemed like an eternity, he informed her that he had dined in a hotel with the station master, to which she retorted, “I was supposed to be on a tour to Delhi, but you keep the tour; I want to go back home.”
Why the religious orthodoxy found this text blasphemous is a serious point of inquiry. Was Rashid Jahan’s demonstration of the indifference of husbands the reason the Mawlanas went to such lengths to issue fatwas against her? The reason could be that the short story’s “Malka” referred to the burqah as “kambakhat,” hinting at the more serious reality of being a Muslim woman in a patriarchal society. No other middle-class Indian Muslim woman had ever so explicitly condemned male chauvinism, religious bigotry, and exploitative mechanisms that contradicted Muslim elite orthodoxy so it is obvious why Rashid Jahan was vilified. She was at war with the orthodoxy and while the other side used violence, bigotry and chauvinism (exactly what she criticised them for) her weapons were mere words, satire laced with anger.
Trail Blazing Revolutionary Writer? A Political Thinker.
Rashid Jahan was a trailblazing member in the Progressive Writers’ Movement who spoke out against injustice, inequality, and forces that oppressed the poor and vulnerable. The first wave of feminism in India was characterised by women’s clear demand for political and legal rights as well as their acute awareness of how men see a woman’s status and position in society. Though practically all of these women who were interested in women’s rights had arrived to politics through social work and a sense of service, many of them were also involved in the political movement. A prime example of this is Rashid Jahan.
While the majority of prior Urdu texts were androcentric—that is, they saw the world through the eyes of men—Rashid Jahan gave women a voice and relevance. She tackled the subjugation of women in her plays as well as the dynamics of power in her short stories. She investigated sexism in society because she saw theatre as a possible form of expression and emancipation. Despite social backlash, her passion for theatre laid the groundwork for a vibrant theatre group. Rashid Jahan utilised her writing to express her opposition against religious prejudice and patriarchy because she understood the need of self-expression. Concerned about the inferiority of women, she opted to criticise the supremacy of the patriarchal Muslim worldview.
Rashid Jahan was the founding member of the progressive movement, a literary turning point in India’s social, intellectual, and political history which was led by upper middle class writers who were joined by intellectuals, journalists, and academics with a communist inclination. Not only did they criticise the fundamental tenets of Islam and Hinduism, but they also ridiculed the attitudes and customs that caused a particular group of people to be marginalised in society. This was a new generation of writers who rejected the idea of an all-powerful religion, rebelled against sexual oppression, and supported social equality and equal opportunity gave rise to Taraqqi Pasand Adab, a progressive literary movement.
Rashid Jahan describes communal riots in the form of mandir-masjid (Hindustani), the intersection of feminism and communal harmony (Padosi), myths about empowered women (Mardwa Aurat), the urgent need for birth control (Pardeke Peeche), the need for women’s economic empowerment (Aurat), men burdened by their possessive wives (Gosha-e-Aafiyat), the exploitation of the underprivileged after independence (Kaante Wala), Indian husbands who lack empathy (Dilli ki Sair), a battlefield of Jehad transforming itself into a request for understanding, tolerance and solidarity in sisterhood (Meraek Safar), prostitution and venereal disease (Woh), the belief that being a widow is far better to being a spinster (Bezubaan), childbirth in unsanitary and deadly circumstances, and child marriage (Asif Jehan).
The purpose of Rashid Jahan seems pretty clear, to give the real life issues of people a voice and if that doesn’t constitute a Political Thinker I don’t know what does. Even now, the flame that Rashid Jahan sparked in the shape of feminist literature continues blazing.
Conclusion
By asserting her and other women’s right to speak about topics such as maternity, science, progress, ethics, and epistemology, in addition to bodies and sex, Rashid Jahan had made a groundbreaking breakthrough into the literary public sphere.
Rasheed Jahan’s language, implications, customs, and traditions in her texts vividly depict the social, political, socioeconomic, and sociocultural conditions of Muslim women from lower class, lower middle class, and occasionally upper middle class Muslim societies . As it happens, it would not be incorrect to characterise her as a humanist who has been inspired by a holistic perspective. Politics, society, and culture are all intertwined for her. Her philosophy has never been to only write about issues; rather, she maintained that one should actually practise what one preaches.
Rakhshanda Jalil who in her A Rebel and Her Cause opines “My sense was that a lot of people talked of her (Rashid Jahan) with awe and admiration, but had not read her, or having read her, not treated her as a serious writer”. She adds “writing was an agency of change for her, a very Marxist concept. That’s why her works continue to be relevant today”.
Maskat Ayoub Thakur is a student of Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia
Edited By: Gunjit Verma
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.
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