Individual women did not usually defy their families and throw off the veil, but rather achieved greater freedom with the help or complicity of their men, whether spouses or
relatives. The decision to leave purdah involved a lot of intra-family diplomacy. At the same time, one or two determined individuals could make a difference in an entire family. Men began to discover that granting women greater freedom made their own lives a lot easier. The women were careful to emphasise that the benefit to men’s lives was as great as to their own. In this way, the break from purdah was negotiated among family members, rather than resulting from open defiance. There were rebels—as we shall see—but most were dutiful daughters.
Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz (1896-1979) recalled in her memoirs that she and her mother and sister all left purdah in the 1920s when her father, Mian Muhammad Shafi, a leading political figure in the Punjab, became the Education Member in the Viceroy’s cabinet.
Having come out into society in Calcutta, the women of Shafi’s family remained out of purdah once they returned to Lahore. Begum Shafi’s father did not approve, but when she explained that it was her husband’s wish that she discard the veil in order to share his life, the Begum Shah Nawaz reported ”Grandfather.. waived his objections and accepted it quite happily. Shafi was concerned that his women keep up with the pace of national progress—if Begum Shah Nawaz is any indication, they were rather ahead of the curve—but the grandfather was convinced by the argument of spousal obedience.
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Begum Shah Nawaz went to serve as her father’s private secretary during the Round Table Conference in London in the early 1930s and spoke at the Round Table, advocating equal suffrage rights for women in the future constitution. An early member of the All-India Women Conference (AIWC), she was also a founding member of the women’s branch of the Muslim League. She was appointed a member of the Lahore municipal committee in 1931, and in 1937 she was elected a member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly and served as parliamentary secretary in the Unionist provincial government. She was of two minds about accepting the latter post because she was “a born Muslim Leaguer”, but ultimately, she claimed, she did it in order to work for women’s rights from within the government. Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz was, in many respects, her father’s political successor. She is an early example of a phenomenon, repeated in the post-independence generation, of woman, brought up in a political family, for whom politics was as natural an activity as her other family roles. Once out of purdah, the public-private distinction had little meaning for her.
A somewhat similar case is that of Masuma Begum 1902- 1990, a granddaughter of Sayyid Husain Bilgrami, whose correspondence was cited above. She was born into a Hyderabadi society where purdah was very stringently observed. Her mother, Tayyiba Begum Khediv Jung, though highly educated and articulate, observed purdah all her life. Masuma and her sisters all attended Mahbubiya Girls School but were delivered to the school in a closed carriage. In 1922, Masuma married her Oxford-educated cousin, who went on to chair the English department at Osmania University. Her break with purdah came gradually. She recounted that her husband introduced her first only to his close personal friends. Later, they would go out to “mixed” parties, but on such occasions, one could always inquire who was invited, and the wife could stay home if there were men invited who were not among her husband’s circle of friends. But after the Nizam’s two sons married Turkish princesses, “mixed” parties became part of the Hyderabadi court society. When the princesses issued an invitation, it was a “command performance” one could hardly refuse, nor could one inquire who was going to be there. In this way, purdah barriers began breaking down among the Hyderabadi elite.
Masuma Begum continued to wear a burqa in public in Hyderabad until the time of independence, although she was involved in the educational and social work among poor women of the city that had been initiated by her mother. By 1952, she was a well-enough known civic figure for the Congress to offer her a ticket to contest the first general elections for the state legislature. The party gave her a constituency in the heart of the old city of Hyderabad, where she canvassed from house to house early in the mornings before her prospective constituents left for work. She won the election handily and went on to serve two terms, serving also as Education and Social Welfare Minister in the government of Andhra Pradesh.
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Most Muslim women who came out of purdah in the early twentieth century, unlike Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, were not political or social rebels but dutiful daughters who left purdah only with the sanction of their families. The acceptance of the rest of society seemed to follow as a matter of course. A number of women whom I interviewed indicated that they observed purdah for their family’s sake, wearing burqas to the bus stop or train station, but then removing them once they were safely away from people who might recognise them. It seemed that in most cases, a woman veiled in order to retain her reputation and that of her kin group in the neighbourhood or town where they were known —in other words among those whose opinion counted in judging her family’s respectability If the family approved her coming out, therefore, the opinion of the rest of society hardly mattered.
Begum Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah who was born in 1915 was one such dutiful daughter who has chronicled her trajectory in from Purdah to Parliament. She grew up in a privileged family. Her mother was the granddaughter of Nawab Abdul Latif, a leader in the literary and cultural awakening of Calcutta Muslims in the nineteenth century. Her father, a son of Ubaidullah al-Ubaidi Suhrawardy, the first principal of the Dhaka Madrasa, was a British-trained doctor. He served as a district medical officer in the railways and later in life became Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University. Shaista Ikramullah emphasized her mother’s traditional upbringing and her family’s emphasis on strict purdah for women. Her father, on the other hand, with his education in England, was considerably more westernised. His service took them to railway colonies around Bengal and meant that they lived in bungalows and had British neighbours. Shaista grew up in both worlds. She studied the Quran at home when young, and learned to read both Urdu and English, but then later went to a convent school and had an English education. She wore the uniform frock to school but put on the Indian dress at home.
She was in purdah from the age of nine until her marriage at eighteen to a member of the Indian Civil Service, whose family originated in Bhopal. Her mother-in-law was worried that she would be too westernised and thus disrespectful, but Shaista’s training in her mother’s more traditional family served her well in smoothing the transition to a new household. She and her husband—who of course wanted a modern, educated wife- moved to New Delhi in the early 1930s. She made her debut into civil service society at a huge garden party given by a high government official at about the same time as New Delhi made its debut as the British Indian capital city.
Shaista continued to live between the two worlds of Anglo- Indian official life and the Muslim culture of families in old Delhi, with whom she mixed. She also became acquainted with a number of Muslims who were active in politics, including the lawyer and Congress member, Asaf Ali, and his Bengali wife, Aruna. Shaista was from a political family and she was sympathetic to nationalism. As a girl in Calcutta, she had gone to women’s meetings and had even made an impassioned speech at one of them, much to her mother’s consternation. Politics were not permitted to members of the civil service, however, and Ikramullah advised his wife to avoid getting involved. They were posted to London in the late 1930s, during which time she completed a PhD.
When they returned to Delhi in 1940, Shaista became acquainted with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his sister, Fatima, thanks to the friendship between her father and Mr Jinnah. She subsequently became involved in organising the Muslim Women’s Student Federation and the women’s sub-committee of the Muslim League. She was elected a Muslim League member of the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1946. Following partition in 1947, she became a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and served for seven years, as well as representing Pakistan at the United Nations in 1948.
Throughout her autobiography, Begum Ikramullah portrays herself as doing what was expected of her in conditions of tremendous and rapid change. She was clearly a woman of great charm and grace. In addition, however, her life involved a skilful combination of adaptability and diplomacy that permitted her to attain a considerable measure of independence. She entered politics, for example, in spite of her husband’s advice, but because of her father’s connections. It could not have been as easy as she makes it appear. Her family background and education helped her to bridge the differences in her world, but so too did socialisation that prepared a woman to be ready for anything. Of this phenomenon, Shaista Ikramullah was not the sole example.
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The women discussed here all emerged from purdah during a time of great social and political change in India. They were members of the educated, urban middle class and their families were connected either with government service or the professions. In addition, the nationalist movement helped to raise the consciousness, not only of the women but also of their men. If the men were asking for national self-determination, they argued that it behoved them to grant greater self-determination to their women. Besides, the national leaders, whether in politics or the professions, wanted wives who were educated and who could raise educated children who would be citizens of the future nation.
These ideas and pressures operated on men of the middle class, regardless of their religion. Purdah was a custom that affected both Hindu and Muslim women. But it can be plausibly argued that purdah affected the lives of Muslim women more profoundly since, for them, it was symbolic not only of social status but also of religious identity. For this reason, Muslim women in India found it difficult to break with purdah unless they had the backing of their families. The examples cited here, whether dutiful daughters or social rebels show that there were a variety of paths to follow in the process of coming out. Even when their immediate families approved, the women had to negotiate an obstacle course that involved other relations, neighbours, and public opinion at large. While mindful of the opinion of others, these women were also strong individuals who played important social roles. They were wives and mothers, but also in politics, social service, teaching, and medicine. Their writings have left accounts of their coming out, that could be multiplied by the experiences of many other women.
Professor Minault received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1972) and has taught at The University of Texas since 1972. Views are personal.
This excerpt from the paper titled ‘Coming Out: Decisions to Leave Purdah’ by Gail Minault has been published with permission.