Forcing Silence to Speak: Muhammadi Begum, Mir'atu 'L-'Arus, and the Urdu Novel

Forcing Silence to Speak: Muhammadi Begum, Mir’atu ’l-‘Arus, and the Urdu Novel I A to the literary histories of Urdu, my often abandoned mother tongue, I succumb simultaneously to the shock of discovery and a sense of loss. The reclamation of lost and hidden texts accounts for the first: entire intellectual trajectories—buried in the footnotes of colonial chroni- cles or sheathed in the dogmatic criticism of a bygone “progressive” era—emerge to make me aware of an age of quiet struggle of which I had only a dim or intuitive consciousness. The displacement and concealment of these texts and their creators is the reason for the second: as an expatriate from Pakistan, a sense of deprivation haunts me, for the stories and books that could have shown me the way or served as the foundation of the fictions and essays I may have written. For me, as for my generation, Urdu literature begins with poetry. Historically, this privileged genre precedes romances, legends and fables. The poetic forms all evolved from Arabic models, usually through the filter of Persian, and retain Arabic generic forms and names: ghazal, qaΩµda, ma¡navµ. The latter provided the closest equivalent to romance, and also offered early versions of realism, autobiographical and otherwise, from which we must insist an important strand of the later realist novel descends. But the earliest forms of Urdu prose fiction, as they began to emerge in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, drew largely upon the tradition of fantasy, oral and otherwise, derived from the Middle East’s common treasure of folklore. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century does fiction, as we judge it today, begin to appear—the stern, though covertly humorous, moralism of Nazir Ahmad (–), the quixotic creations of Pundit Ratan Nath Sarshar • T A U S (–), the liberal Islamism of Abdul Halim Sharar (–), the picaresque of Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa (–). Sharar is mainly remembered for his evocations of the great days of Islam, and his Middle Eastern settings, though his best works are set in realistic north Indian Muslim milieus; Sarshar used India as background, but was inspired by Cervantes, and thus returned, consciously or unconsciously, to Middle Eastern forms of narration. Of these writers, whose work spans half a century, only Ruswa has been given adequate critical acclaim, as the first modern novelist of the language.1 Nazir Ahmad, whose importance as a stylistic innovator and embryonic realist is conceded, is nevertheless consistently discussed as a conservative colonial lackey by the critics of the left. And yet it was Nazir Ahmad who first raised, albeit with diffidence, the question of women and change in the context of a living social situation. This, in itself, is enough to reevaluate his importance; for predictably, the absence of women’s voices amongst those of the founding fathers of our fiction is a deafening echo. This absence, though, was amply compensated by the appearance of the radical and feminist novelist Ismat Chughtai in the s, fully armed, like Minerva, with the weaponry of Marx and Freud. In her wake came other voices; in any history of contemporary Urdu literature the names of major women writers who refuse to consider gender a restrictive category abound. But where did it begin? As a migrant, I have always looked to literature for records of the subversive and subaltern voice—and the only early woman writer who stealthily revealed herself was Hijab Imtiaz Ali, a fabu- list of the thirties who, in spite of a feminine first-person vein of social and sexual criticism in her short stories, hardly compared with her contemporaries in China or Japan, for example. But a thesis on the Urdu novel submitted in by Shaista Akhtar Banu Suhrawardy (later Ikramullah—the first Muslim woman to gain a doctorate from the University of London)2 gave me, a few years ago, a partial answer to my question. An Urdu collection of essays on writing women had led me back to Suhrawardy, who claimed that women writers had, in the first 1For a discussion of Ruswa and some of the other early narrative fiction writers, see Ralph Russell, “The Development of the Modern Novel,” in his The Pursuit of Urdu Literature (London: Zed Books, Ltd., ), pp. –. —Eds. 2It was later published as A Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story (London: Longmans Green and Co., ). —Eds. A H • decades of the century, proved to be the preeminent practitioners of the form. But the names she mentioned have been erased from the present canon, bar that of Nazr Sajjad Hyder (–), who was known as one of her time’s foremost novelists. But even Hyder is now only known as the mother of her daughter Qurratulain Hyder, who is Urdu’s greatest living prose writer and the only literary figure who has constantly, if not analytically, signposted the pioneering presence of women in Urdu literature’s evolution. Nazir Ahmad, whom Suhrawardy admired greatly, was according to her the inspiration for these early women writers—the first of whom, Muhammadi Begum, wrote her first novel in .3 This, according to Suhrawardy’s thesis, was Sharµf B®ªµ (The Noble Daughter); she holds that it was inspired entirely by Nazir Ahmad’s first novel, the classic Mir’≥tu ’l-‘Ar∑s (The Bride’s Mirror; ), written in the aftermath of the so-called Mutiny of , in the repressed turbulence of the s. Nazir Ahmad’s novel insists, humorously and affectionately, upon the need and importance of education for women. His heroine, Asghari, is a paragon of the required virtues of Indian Muslim womanhood: chastity, charity, piety and thrift. She is also highly literate, resourceful, shrewd, self-willed, independent and, when required, wily—qualities essential in a male-dominated world which, though he accepts it with a pragmatism characteristic of his culture, Nazir Ahmad only ambiguously condones. In fact, his heroines, who demurely mouth the moral principles of that world, consider themselves innately superior to their men as managers, administrators and ethical beings. Nazir Ahmad, though much criticized for his failure to articulate a condemnation of the colonial system in his fiction, actually highlights a significant social and intellectual trend of his time: the search for new-found cultural pride amongst the defeated, weary Muslims of the Subcontinent. Thus, perhaps in spite of his supposed conservatism, Nazir Ahmad may just as well be recognized as a seminal figure in the formulation of a nascent ideology of modernity and national liberation. With wit and irony, he struggles in his writings against the outdated and restrictive practices that had accumulated in the name of religion and tradition as a result of subjugation and colonialism and were holding back his people from progress. From within his scripturally sanctioned framework, Nazir Ahmad was quick to see that the predominant evil of his community was the growing ignorance, and resulting misuse, of religious doctrine and the Qur’an’s egalitarian 3For a discussion of Muhammadi Begum, see ibid., pp. –. —Eds. • T A U S message, and even more importantly, the neglect of those Islamic laws that, far from negating them, upheld the basic rights of women. Reading Nazir Ahmad at the close of the following century, I cannot help but note that the importance of his work is not merely restricted to the elegance of his style or his unerringly accurate portrayal of a society, struggling against decline. With regret, I remark that today’s obscurantists who wage wars in the name of faith, using misinterpreted religious texts as arms and ammunition, have much to learn from him. Many of the oppressive practices that Nazir Ahmad decries have vanished, and the obscurantists perhaps would wish to reinstate them. Their disappearance is due, in large part, to Nazir Ahmad and his fellow-reformists. But it owes far more to his literary “daughters,” many of whom would have regarded with pride those scholars—Fatima Mernissi of Morocco, Leila Ahmed of Egypt, Kishwar Nahid of Pakistan—who today work unceas- ingly to wrest from the hands of the self-appointed arbiters of Islam the interpretation of its laws, offering instead insights that are fresh, enlight- ened and pragmatic. But how can the figure of Nazir Ahmad—who, at very best, we re- gard from our liberal perspective as a benevolent paternalist—have influ- enced his successors, many of whom were to declare their colors as fem- inists in the second decade of the century, when even in the imperialist Europe of the time feminism and the practice of fiction could in no sense be seen as synonymous? The answer, perhaps, lies in the fact that the edu- cated, thinking heroines of Nazir Ahmad reflected not only his reformist ideology or his fantasies, but a growing truth of which, as a realist, he was aware. Faced by a world in which the ancient stable order had changed and their men were increasingly leaving home in search of employment in the colonial services, women were responding to what was, more than an idealistic project, a practical necessity by becoming managers of large households and their commerce. Sequestered in the customary purdah, they could act only by obtaining an education that would enable them to gain a measure of autonomy at least within their homes. This is, to some extent, the reason why Nazir Ahmad’s highly respectable Asghari opens, with remarkable success, a school for the daughters of the rich. It is the centrality of the maktab, Suhrawardy holds, that links Muhammadi Begum’s Sharµf B®ªµ to Nazir Ahmad’s classic. But, as she comments, the milieu to which Muhammadi Begum’s heroine Sharifunnisa belongs is humble: it is, in fact, one of deprivation and near destitution.

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