Remembering Angareywali: Rashid Jahan

From a sprawling house in Rasalganj in Aligarh, every morning, a covered palanquin carrying the girls of the Abdullah family would set off for a house in the old city. Its destination: the first school for Muslim girls in north India that had been set up a few years ago.

Sometimes, the palanquin would be replaced by a cart, a big white sheet wrapped around it to maintain purdah. Inside would be the giggling children of the school’s founders and reformists, Shaikh Abdullah and Wahid Jahan.

The lurching “school bus” provided much mirth, and excitement — once it got stuck on the railway tracks, as the sheet got caught in the wheels. Out jumped the eldest daughter Rashid Jahan, with blithe disregard for the restrictions of being seen in public. She tugged and pushed the cart out, a few minutes before the train would roar past. Her aunt would later admonish her: “Were you not ashamed?… There were so many men staring.”

Rashid Jahan grew up to break all barriers known to women of her time. Born in 1905 in Aligarh, she went on to be trained as a gynaecologist, and became a pathbreaking writer who wrote stark, angry stories about the lives and deprivations of women in purdah. Her writings would go on to be a part of the reconfiguring of Urdu literature.

With parents who made it their life’s mission to educate women, and whose home was open to many intellectuals and political leaders, Rashid Jahan grew up with a finely-honed political consciousness. In 1934, she married Mahmuduzzafar, fellow Communist and writer. 

 

As a doctor at government hospitals, she treated the very poor, and her stories were forged out of that experience. Perhaps, that also explains the clinical precision she brought to descriptions of women’s bodies, and the frankness with which she spoke about the female form’s continual battering by the demands of men and childbirth. Before Rashid Jahan, no one thought that women’s lives, especially the lives of women in purdah were fit subjects for literature.

 

This in itself was a radical departure. She wrote in a begumati zabaan, what women of upper-class Muslim families speak to each other. A very idiomatic, flavoursome language, with lots of mohawras, long sentences interspersed with shorter ones. Syntactically, too, it was different from the language of high literature. It was, as if, Rashid Jahan was drawing the reader into the forbidden women’s quarter, and letting her see the brittle lives trapped there.

 

A generation of women writers—Ismat Chughtai, Attia Hosain, Razia Sajjad Zaheer have acknowledged the influence of Rashid Jahan on their lives and writings. Of Jahan’s influence, Chughtai writes, “She spoilt me because she was very bold and used to speak all sorts of things openly and loudly, and I just wanted to copy her”

 

With her transparent, raw, and ideologically oriented works of fiction, she became one of the founding members of Progressive Writers’ Association. Her literary activism birthed ‘Angarey’ which came out in December 1933 bringing together works of a group of dynamic young writers, which was banned within three months of its publication that led to a furore in the Muslim world. They were accused of ‘being intoxicated by English education, brainwashed into attacking Islam and its tenets’. The controversy gave her the name of ‘Angareywali’.

 

However, Rashid Jahan through her work in Angarey claimed the authority to speak not only about women’s bodies and sex but about modernity, science, progress, ethics and epistemology. Jahan is regarded as the ‘Scarlet Woman of Urdu Literature’ and wrote on provocative subjects, the idea being to shock people.

 

She wrote a short story (‘Dilli Ki Sair’) and a play (Parde ke Peeche) for the book and the reason for these works has its roots in her experiences as a doctor.

 

Parde ke Peeche - Behind the Veil, is a one act play – a feminist manifesto with unsettling issues, one in which Rashid Jahan seeks to unveil the rabid and shameless display of masculine authority. She calls into question the all pervasive patriarchy. She confronts the split between the two worlds inhabited by men and women.

 

“Dilli Ki Sair” (A Visit To Delhi) is an exceptional yet simple account of how women cannot occupy public spaces, and how the male gaze penetrates even through the confines of the burqa. The story questions male privilege in a simple and clear narration. Here is an excerpt which is emblematic of her direct style of tackling such sensitive issues:

“Well, we sat in the train from here and reached Delhi. There ‘he’ met some wretched station master acquaintance of his. Leaving me near the luggage, ‘he’ vanished. And I, perched on the luggage, wrapped in a burqa, there I sat. First this damned burqa, then these cursed men. Men are anyway no good but when they see a woman sitting like this they just circle around her. There is no opportunity even to chew paan. One damn fellow coughs, another hurls a remark.  And I… breathless with fear.  And so hungry… that only God knows. And the Delhi station! Bua, even the Fort would not be as huge.  Wherever one looked, one saw nothing but the station, the railway lines, engines, and goods trains. And what scared me the most were those blackened men who live in the engines!”

In another play ‘Aurat’, Jahan ironically, breaks through the sequence and asserts Muslim women’s right to property inheritance and the confidence it gives to her protagonist, Fatima Bi : “ Evict the tenants! You dare to do that? My father gave this house to me. Even your jinns cannot evict those people, who are you...”she tells her husband.

Rashid Jahan’s behaviour as a literary figure obviously doubly violated codes for a pardah nashin, woman under pardah: refusing to live under pardah she also made its violences the targets of her critique.

The epitaph on Rashid Jahan’s tombstone reads: ‘Communist Doctor and Writer’. She was a potent mix of revolutionary activism, nationalistic fervour, and liberal humanism and it is to her writings that one must return if we wish to know what one Angaarey Waali could do to raise the consciousness of many men and women of her times.

- Smriti Choudhary