The Dissertation Committee for Asiya Alam Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation
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The Dissertation Committee for Asiya Alam certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: MARRIAGE IN TRANSITION: GENDER, FAMILY AND MUSLIM SOCIAL REFORM IN COLONIAL INDIA Committee: Gail Minault, Supervisor Syed Akbar Hyder, Co-Supervisor Kamran Ali Cynthia Talbot Rochona Majumdar Marriage in Transition: Gender, Family and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India by Asiya Alam, B.A, M.A, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillments of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedicated to my parents, Rizwana Muzaffar Alam and Muzaffar Alam Acknowledgements My primary debt is to my co-supervisors, Gail Minault and Syed Akbar Hyder who have written on Urdu culture and Islam in South Asia. Throughout the process of writing, they provided extensive comments on every chapter of my dissertation and gave me new ideas to approach my arguments. The other members of my committee, Kamran Ali, Cynthia Talbot and Rochona Majumdar also gave me feedback that was extremely valuable. As scholars working outside the specialization of this dissertation, their critiques have helped me identify the broader implications of my work. I would also like to thank the Department of Asian Studies whose congenial atmosphere of friendship and generous support for South Asian studies has helped many young scholars including myself. In India, I owe my gratitude to staff at various libraries of the country whose help and cooperation made this research possible. I thank here the staff at Khuda Bakhsh Library and Bihar Urdu Academy in Patna. Iqbal Academy, Osmania University Library, Idarah- e Adabiyat-e Urdu and Salar Jung Musuem in Hyderabad also owe a special mention of thanks for sharing their invaluable collections with me. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my parents whose support and love has nourished me not only academically but also given me the strength to pursue a doctoral program. Special thanks to Adnan and Sahba for their sense of humor, love and friendship. iv Marriage in Transition: Gender, Family and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India Asiya Alam, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisors: Gail Minault, Syed Akbar Hyder This thesis examines how marriage amongst Urdu-speaking Muslims of colonial India was transformed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The thesis illustrates this transformation by investigating changes in public debate on key familial issues such as consent in marriages, appropriate marriageable age, women’s education, polygyny, separation and divorce. Discourses on these questions are explored in hitherto unanalyzed archive of Urdu print culture particularly women’s magazines, novels, pamphlets and commentaries published during the colonial period. Examining the various debates conducted in this space of Urdu press, this thesis makes three major arguments. First, the various reformist efforts and ideas expended in improving and remaking women during the colonial was driven by the larger push to redefine family, and that the ‘women’s question’ triggered in social reform was, in effect, an agenda to remake and re-imagine the family. Secondly, these debates generated normative discourses of ‘good wives’ and ‘good husbands’ inhabiting an ideal familial space where relationships were supposed to be harmonious. These norms were centered on notions of ‘respectability’ and produced new role models for men and women. At the same time, v these debates also raised questions about the nature of the ‘respectability’ ideal, criticized the silence and complicity of reformers in generating social norms, and emphasized financial autonomy and choice for women. Thus, the social order envisaged in these debates cannot be called ‘new patriarchy’ of colonialism but involved forms of emancipation as well as control. Finally, this thesis argues that these familial and social changes were held together by a common desire to actualize and fashion a new form of ‘Muslim self.’ Islam and notions of Muslim identity were central to social reform, and there were varying opinions on it producing new dilemmas and predicaments about the colonial present. These discussions thus illustrate not just changing family history of South Asian Muslims but also a dynamic Muslim intellectual culture during the colonial period. vi Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………....1 Chapter 1: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform…………….......18 Chapter 2: The Domestication of Intimacy…………………………………..61 Chapter 3: ‘Respectable’ Conjugality……………………………………….114 Chapter 4: Polygyny………………………………………………………....157 Chapter 5: Separation and Divorce…………………………………………..217 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...267 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………273 vii Introduction The history of marriage and family among Indian Muslims during the colonial period remains a crucial gap in modern South Asian historiography. This thesis seeks to explore that gap in our understanding. Specifically, I examine how marriage evolved and was transformed among the Urdu speaking population of Indian Muslims from late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The way I map the evolution and transformation of marriage is to follow some key familial issues that attracted discussion among Muslim literati and intellectuals of colonial India. These issues include women’s education, consent in marriage, appropriate marriageable age, disagreement and marital discord, polygyny and the dissolution of marriages. In this thesis, I illustrate not just how each of these topics were intertwined with each other but also how they were connected to the larger question of women’s rights, familial modernity and the construction of gender in Muslim society of colonial India. The thesis makes three main arguments to shed light on Muslim familial modernity during the colonial period: first, I argue that the notion of ‘perfecting women’ was, in effect, based on the idea of ‘perfecting family’ and placed new prescriptive norms on men as well as women. 1 These norms produced role models for men and women based on the notion of ‘conjugal respectability,’ which was represented in the medium of the didactic social novel in Urdu literature. Other places where these images appeared was in the female centered space of Urdu women’s magazines such as Khātūn, Tahzīb-i Nisvān 1 I borrow the phrase ‘perfecting family’ from Barbara Metcalf’s study of Maulānā Ashraf Alī Thānavī’s Bihishtī Zewar. Barbara Metcalf, trans., Perfecting Women: Maulānā Ashraf Alī Thānāvī’s Bihishtī Zewar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 1 and Ismat although they carried a greater number of articles and stories devoted to the image of the ‘good wife’ rather than the ‘good husband.’ The site of discussion for these familial transformations was the Urdu press, and therefore a history of conjugality and family cannot be separated from the development and the flourishing of the public sphere of Urdu print. Secondly, although these norms were based on notions of sexual difference, many of the issues directed at the respectable sharīf wife under the banner of familial reform were often encapsulated by the terms ‘huqūq-i niswān’ (rights of women) and ‘tahrīr-i niswān’ (freedom of women). Articles titled ‘huqūq-i niswān’ and ‘tahrīr-i niswān’ appeared with great frequency in women’s magazines and confronted the challenges of lack of women’s education, non-consensual marriages, polygyny and marital separation. Furthermore, by the mid 1920s, many writers questioned the nature of women’s education and the role of domesticity, raised the prospect of women entering the labor force, financial autonomy, and the acquisition of agency through education. As a result, the new social order generated from the twin effects of communication technologies such as printing and the powerful thrust for women’s education and familial reform cannot be referred to as ‘new patriarchy’ because it wasn’t hegemonic in any simple, unilinear way.2 This is not to deny that these social transformations lacked patriarchal privileges or that the social conditions of men and women were the same but that the burdens and demands of an increasingly competitive and changing colonial society produced new modes of conflict and collisions that could not be easily resolved by calls to overthrow male oppression. 2 For an elaboration of the concept of colonial ‘new patriarchy,’ see Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, “Introduction,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 1-26. 2 Finally, I argue that these familial and social changes were motivated by a desire to actualize and fashion a new form of ‘Muslim self’ that felt invigorated by the opportunity of service to the qaum (community). This passion for service was both an internal intellectual transmutation involving a re-interpretation of Islamic history as well as a public one including multiple responsibilities of societal transformation such as journalism, production of scholarship, fund raising, public action and formation of associations. Islam was central to reformers expectations of themselves and of society, and because it played such a crucial role, opinions differed as to what it meant, or should mean to be a ‘Muslim,’ which led to conflicts, debates and dilemmas. Furthermore, I would argue that even though these debates may