Book review: Muhammadi Begum,A Most Noble Life: The Biography of Ashrafunnisa Begum (1840–1903)

A Most Notable Life is primarily an English translation of the Urdu biography of a non-elite nineteenth-century Muslim woman, Asrafunnisa Begum (1840–1903), titled Hayat-e-Ashraf (meaning ‘the noblest life’). The book also has a long essay on Muhammadi Begum (1877–1908), the author of the biography, by C. M. Naim. She made a name for herself as a prolific writer of fiction, verse and instructional texts for women. An extraordinary woman in her own right, Muhammadi Begum was the first woman to edit an Urdu weekly journal for women, titled Tahzib- e-Niswan, that her husband Munshi Mumtaz Ali had started publishing in 1898. In the brief period of just 10 years, Muhammadi Begum wrote five pieces of prose fiction for adult women, five books for children, three books of verse for adult women and the same number for children, and five instructional books for young women.

The biography begins with certain aspects of nineteenth-century middle-class Muslim women’s lives in small towns in North India and ends with the nascent changes among women in Lahore at the end of the century. As is the convention, the biographical subject is introduced through the intricacies of the kinship networks and affiliations of Ashrafunnisa Begum’s clan—a culturally accomplished and economically prosperous patrilineal genealogy. She was born in a conservative Shia family in a small town in Bijnaur district of Uttar Pradesh on 28 September 1840. Her father, Fateh Husain Sahib, worked as a lawyer in the princely state of Gwalior, and she was raised under the strict control of her grandfather and uncle. She died in May 1903 in Lahore, where she was widely known as ‘Ustani Sahiba’ or a female teacher.

The two women met on 20 March 1898 at a betrothal party in Lahore, and they developed a gendered bonding and sisterly comradeship. It is likely that Asrafunnisa Begum saw in Muhammadi Begum the two daughters she had lost, and the latter found her deceased mother and an inspiring role model in Asrafunnisa Begum. Muhammadi, in fact, persuaded Asrafunnisa to write several pieces for Tahzib-e-Niswan, including an account of how she had learnt to read and write. After the latter’s death, Muhammadi Begum expressed her love and admiration for Bibi Ashraf in a short biography entitled Hayat-e-Ashraf. It was privately published, and remained lost till it was reprinted in 1978, though again for private distribution.

Coming from a family that upheld that ‘conversing with male relatives makes a girl disrespectful’ (p. 9) and believed that girls were to be taught little more than the ability to recite the Arabic text of the Quran, they could also read a bit of Urdu so that girls and women had some knowledge of their faith and learnt the rules for praying and fasting. A live-in ustani, a young Pathan widowed at the age of 15, was hired for ₹10 per month to instruct the girls in the family in homemaking talents such as cooking and sewing. When she remarried a Sayyid, out of ‘shame’ and ‘modesty’, Bibi Ashraf’s grandfather ended the girls’ education, declaring: ‘I can’t even bear the thought of having an outsider in the house teaching my girls’,…‘It would be better if the girls remained totally ignorant’ (p. 9).

When she was only eight, Bibi Ashraf’s mother died soon after giving birth to her brother. Her grandmother, seeing the child’s inconsolable grief at losing her mother soon after the ustani’s departure, told her to read the seven chapters of the Quran that were taught to her. She finished reading the Quran in just one year, and a majlis was held to celebrate the occasion. With undaunted determination, she then decided to learn Urdu. The women in the family reprimanded her for this ‘madness’ and asked her to find a ‘cure’. Asrafunnisa then promised herself that if she ever learnt how to read, she would teach it to anyone who desired to and also those who might be unwilling. Very soon, she copied some devotional poems with ink that she prepared with the soot from the tava [griddle] in the kitchen and with a few twigs from the broom. Ashrafunnisa writes: ‘Childhood can be so innocent—no sooner had I copied a few words than I felt I had won the battle’ (p. 15). With a society acquiescent in its denial of literacy to women, she kept her ability to read and write Urdu a secret. It was only after her father joined his brother in Gwalior that Bibi Ashraf’s ability to read and write became known to all the women in the extended family. Many of them started coming to her to get letters to their husbands written. Her father, on learning that she had learnt to write, sent her many gifts, but her uncle, however, was very upset, and sent only a note, chiding her.

In 1859, Bibi Ashraf was married to Syed Alamdar Husain, who after a stint in a minor position in the Education Department, was appointed as an assistant professor of Arabic and Persian at the Government College, Lahore. The narrative displays mutual compassion and an effortless companionship in the conjugal relationship. It was consolidated due to Husain’s decision to bring his wife to Lahore, where they had four children. Only two survived beyond infancy. Husain died of tuberculosis in 1870 at the young age of 39. Shortly thereafter, Bibi Ashraf lost her father too. Initially, she chose to support the family by sewing and lacemaking at home, but eventually, in 1878, she began her 25-year-long career at the Victoria Girls’ School, fulfilling the promise she had made to God.

One is amazed by the similarity in the misery that women in the inner quarters of the home suffered in nineteenth-century colonial India. While the book does not intend to draw a larger picture, one gets a notion of how—irrespective of religious, regional and cultural difference—the female world was regulated by rigid patriarchal norms of disciplined conduct, practice of feminine propriety, habitual timidity and methodically assigned responsibilities. Tanika Sarkar’s Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography, dealing with the first Bengali autobiography by Rassundari Dasi (1809–1899), explicated how women in nineteenth-century Bengal who were educated became an eyesore to the entire family and suffered great anguish. As in the case of Ashrafunissa Begum, Rassundari too writes that in her times ‘if the old grandmother saw a piece of paper in the hand of a girl, she expressed her displeasure at such a transgression’ (p. 168). At a time when the axioms of good conduct dictated that a woman ought to abandon her literary pursuits to discharge domestic obligations, the self-educated Rassundari complained about the material constraints on education for a woman: the acquisition of paper, a quill, ink, an ink-stand and a guide. While both Rassundari and Ashrafunnisa began their journey of conquering the world of letters to quench their thirst to read devotional literature, the former composed a life of her own and wished to present it in the public sphere, and the latter taught countless little girls not only to read and write but also to aspire to dream big.

This parallel in the harsh and hostile domestic surroundings, material conditions and social experiences of nineteenth-century women from different backgrounds who left behind personal narratives could not have been drawn if C. M. Naim, a scholar of Urdu literature and culture, had not ventured to meticulously translate from the original Urdu biography. A compelling aspect of the book is the detailed explanatory notes and an Afterword provided by the translator that allows readers to reconstruct the life, works and times of Muhammadi Begum. The Afterword deals with two key social issues around which the women’s question revolved in nineteenth-century colonial India: women’s literacy and widow remarriage—issues that were crucial to both Ashrafunnisa and Muhammadi Begum. The book also includes three essays by Asrafunnisa Begum, titled Anger’, ‘The Evils of Pampering’ and ‘On Adopting a Child’, and three contemporary short pieces on the Victoria Girls’ School in Lahore. As an extension of the study of nineteenth-century debates in Muslim communities over women’s education that Gail Minault had engaged in Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India, this book by C. M. Naim would be useful to scholars interested in literature in translation, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies, and English language and literature.