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  On top of all this, whenever they walked, they would hear mothers trying to hush their crying babies, pointing to them and saying, “Hush, child, hush. Look, those are Mecca and Medinah. See, those hooded witches—they are Mecca and Medina.”

  Report Thirty-seven

  A train was coming from the western provinces of India to Calcutta. In the station of Bali, three burqa-clad women boarded the “female” compartment. There were a lot of Muslim women in that compartment. They thought it curious that even after the train left the station, these three women did not raise their nekab [the detachable front part of the burqa covering the face]. Suddenly they became rather suspicious. Also, the height of these newcomers was rather awe-inspiring. After they had prayed silently for a few moments, the train stopped at Lilua station. A women ticket-collector got into their compartment. Immediately one women complained about those three women. Before the ticket-collector could advance toward them, the one next to the door on the opposite platform jumped down and ran away. The ticket-collector shouted, “police, police,” and caught hold of one. When the nekab was raised, a face full of mustache and beard was revealed. The ticket-collector, stunned, could only mutter—“What, beard and mustache in a burqa?”

  Report Thirty-eight

  A certain lady doctor, Miss Sharat Kumari Mitra [Hindu], whom I know rather well, was telling me the other day, “If you only knew the trouble some of you Muslim women cause me. Even the smallest timely assistance is out of the question. No matter what it is—a clean bandage or hot water—one has to wait so long for it.”

  Once a servant from a distant village came to ask her to go and see the younger Begum of the house. She had a severe toothache, the servant informed the doctor. The doctor took the medicine and instruments necessary for extraction of teeth. After she reached there she found that the younger Begum was actually suffering labor pain—not toothache! What was the doctor to do? She was now in Jamgaon, which is eight miles away from Bhagalpur where she lived. She could not possibly take the same pair of horses back to Bhagalpur because the pair was already exhausted. But Jamgaon was like a village. Horse-drawn carriages or palanquins were rarely to be found.

  Somehow she managed to get back to Bhagalpur and procure the medicines and instruments necessary for delivering a child. By the time she returned to Jamgaon, the poor patient was in a critical condition. When Dr. Mitra asked for an explanation from the mistress of the house as to why she was so misinformed about the problem, the senior Begum answered, “I had to send a man to you; what could I talk about but toothache? How could I have told a man about the real situation? Wouldn’t that have been too embarrassing for both of us? What sort of a lady doctor are you if you don’t have the sense to realize that?”

  Report Forty-seven

  In the words of a poet:

  Not fiction, not poetry, this is life.

  No theatre this, but my real house.

  Only three years ago, we had our school bus. The day before the bus came, one of our teachers, an English woman, had gone to the auto depot to inspect the bus. Her comment was, “This bus is horribly dark inside. Oh, no! I’ll never ride that bus!” When the bus arrived, it was found that there was a narrow lattice on top of the back door and the front door. Excepting these two pieces of latticework, three inches wide and eighteen inches long, the bus could be called completely “airtight”!

  The bus took the girls to their homes that first afternoon. The maid, accompanying the girls, reported after she came back that it was terribly hot inside the bus. The girls were very uncomfortable. Some of them vomited. Some of the little girls were whimpering in the dark.

  Before the bus went to fetch the girls on the next day, the English woman who taught in our school opened the shutter of the back door. She hung colored curtains on the open shutters. Even then it was found that a few of the girls fainted away, a few of them vomited on the way, and most of them had headaches, etc. In the afternoon, the aforementioned teacher opened the shutters on the side of the bus and hung curtains there also.

  That evening, a Hindu friend, Mrs. Mukherjee, came to see me. She was glad to know about the progress the school was making. Suddenly she said, “Incidentally, what a fine bus you have! The first time I saw it, I thought a huge chest was being drawn on wheels. My nephew ran out and said, “Oh, aunty! Look! The moving black hole of Calcutta is passing by! Really! How can the girls possibly ride that bus?”

  On the afternoon of the third day, several of the mothers came to complain. They said, “Your bus is certainly God’s punishment. You are burying the girls alive!” I said, helplessly, “What can I do? If the bus was not such, you would have been the ones to criticize the bus as “purdahless.” They said angrily, “What? Do you want to maintain purdah at the expense of our children’s lives? We are not going to send our daughters to your school anymore!” That evening the maid reported that every guardian complained about the bus and warned that the girls would not ride this sort of bus.

  The next evening, I had four letters. The writer of the letter written in English had signed himself, “Brother-in-Islam.” The other three were in Urdu. Two of these letters were anonymous.

  The third one had five signatures. The import of all four letters was the same—all of them were from well-wishers. For the continuing welfare of my school they were informing me that the two curtains hanging by the side of the bus moved in the breeze and made the bus purdahless. If something better was not arranged by tomorrow, they would be compelled, for the benefit of the school, to write in the various Urdu newspapers about this purdahlessness and would stop the girls from riding in such a purdahless bus.

  What a dilemma I was in—

  If I don’t catch the cobra

  The King will have my head—

  If caught carelessly

  Surely the cobra’d bite me!

  I do not think anyone else had tried to catch such a cobra [the irate critics] to satisfy the whims of such a king [the equally irate guardians]. On behalf of the women imprisoned in seclusion, I wish to say—

  Oh, why did I come to this miserable world,

  Why was I born in a purdah country!

  Notes to Selections from The Secluded Ones

  1. Mother of Alta; in Bangladesh rural adult women are customarily addressed as “Mother of so-and-so” or “Wife of so-and-so” by persons not related to them by blood or marriage.

  2. Kabuli is someone who hails from Kabul in particular or from Afghanistan or Northwest Frontier province by extension. In the British period, quite a few Afghan moneylenders and businessmen frequented the eastern provinces of India.

  3. The women of Afghanistan and the Muslim women of northwest India dress in trousers, which may be quite loose-fitting or tight-fitting, and a tunic generally reaching their knees.

  4. The bride-to-be used to be confined in a close room after the turmeric-paste ceremony which followed the formal engagement. The groom’s family sent new clothes and turmeric paste which was smeared on the face and hands of the bride. This seems to be more strictly followed outside Bengal.

  5. Pan-dans were made of various metals and came in various sizes. The offering of pan, or betel leaf, with various masala, or spices, to guests was as much a part of Lucknow etiquette as the tea ceremony was to the Japanese.

  6. It is customary for the parents of a bride to send a maid from the house to look after the girl’s needs and also to put her clothes and other belongings in order when she goes to her in-laws’ house for the first formal stay.

  Rokeya: An Introduction to Her Life

  Roushan Jahan

  ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN was born in 1880 in Pairaband, a small village in the district of Rangpur in the north of present-day Bangladesh, at the time of her birth a part of the colonial British province of Bengal Presidency. Her date of birth is uncertain, which is not surprising in a region which even today lacks a well-regulated system of registering births and deaths. Though some maintain that she was born on December 9, 1880,
citing her nephew as the source, this date is open to doubt.

  Of her parents, Rokeya says little beyond, “I never knew what parental love was.”1 Her mother, Rahatunnessa Sabera Chowdhurani, remains a shadowy figure. She was the first of four women her husband married. One of her co-wives was said to have been European.2 Rohatunnessa gave birth to two sons and three daughters. Her rigid conformity to purdah observance was the only memory of her that Rokeya recorded, in the dedication to The Secluded Ones, the only book she dedicated to her mother.3

  Rokeya’s father, Zahiruddin Mohammad Abu Ali Saber, was an extravagant and extremely conservative zemindar (large landholder) whose rambling estate was a stronghold of the traditional way of life. He was said to have learned seven languages: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pushto, English, Hindi, and Bangla.4 His children seem to have inherited his linguistic aptitude. Like other upper-class Muslim men of his time, he encouraged his sons to learn Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The use of Bangla was frowned upon by many upper-class Muslims because it was also the native tongue of non-Muslims. Conscious of the growing prestige and advantages a modern education could bestow on young men (especially attractive was the prospect of joining the government service), however, he allowed his two sons, Abul Asad Ibrahim Saber and Khalilur Rahman Abu Jaigam Saber, to be taught Bangla and English at first at a local school and then at the elitist St. Xavier’s College in Calcutta. Thus they could meet influential persons who might facilitate their entry into the civil service.

  But where the formal education of his daughters was concerned he displayed indifference. This was not, as we today may hasten to assume, proof of any lack of parental love. The practice of the time was to teach Bengali Muslim girls of the upper classes only to recite the Quran (often without any explanation of the text) and in exceptional cases to read a few primers, concerned mostly with ideal feminine conduct and written in Urdu, the language of the Muslim elite in northern India. These girls were not usually encouraged to read and write in Bangla. Defying custom, and valuing their Bengali identity over their religious one, Rokeya and her gifted elder sister, Karimunnessa, persisted in learning Bangla. Karimunnessa used to squat in the inner courtyard of their house and draw the Bangla alphabet on the ground with a stick, under the supervision of her younger brother, who was allowed to go to school and learn both Bangla and English. Once, when she was deeply engrossed in reading a Bangla Puthi (a popular tale written in verse), her father discovered her. She nearly fainted in fear. Her father, sensing her fear, did not forbid her outright to read Bangla books. The malicious criticism of relatives, however, soon put a stop to it. Karimunnessa was sent by her father to live in close confinement at Baliadi, the estate of her maternal grandparents, and was married off before she was fifteen.5 But Karimunnessa had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and later encouraged Rokeya to continue reading and writing Bangla. As Rokeya so handsomely acknowledged in the dedication to Part 2 of the Motichur, “That I had not forgotten Bangla during my long stay (14 years) in Bhagalpur, where there was none to speak Bangla, was only due to you. It was your care and concern and encouragement that motivated me [to write in Bangla].”6

  Throughout her life, Rokeya was haunted by the waste of human potential that she saw in Karimunnessa’s fate. It strengthened her determination to fight against the blind observance of customs she considered absurd. In The Secluded Ones, Rokeya graphically describes the strict observance of purdah in her family and the way, from early childhood, she and her sisters had to hide not only from men but also from women who were outside their kinship network.

  The support and encouragement Rokeya received from her eldest brother, Ibrahim Saber, prevented the destruction of her own potential, at least during her formative years. Ibrahim Saber had been exposed to Western thought and culture; he was strongly in favor of women’s education. He taught Rokeya both Bangla and English. Rokeya’s first biographer and close associate, Shamsunnahar Mahmud, revealed that, in order to avoid criticism and interference from parents and relatives, brother and sister had to wait for their tutorial session until everyone in the house, especially their father, had gone to sleep.7 The love and deep gratitude that Rokeya felt for this brother fill the dedicatory paragraph of her only novel, Padmaraga: “You have moulded me from childhood … your love is sweeter than honey which after all has a bitter after-taste; it is pure and divine like Kausar [the stream of nectar flowing in heaven mentioned in the Quran].”8

  Rokeya’s exceptional luck in having relatives who were sympathetic and supportive also held true in her marriage. Her husband, Syed Sakhawat Hossain, a civil servant born in Bhagalpur (in the Bihar region of Bengal Presidency), was educated in Patna, Calcutta, and London. When Sakhawat was stationed at Rangpur, Rokeya’s eldest brother, Ibrahim, met him and was very favorably impressed. Though Sakhawat was a widower and in his late thirties, Ibrahim persuaded his family to marry Rokeya to Sakhawat.9 They were married in 1896 when Rokeya was only sixteen.10

  Sakhawat was a man of liberal attitude who wanted from his wife not the traditional duty and obedience but love and sympathy; he not only loved her, he was also proud of her. They had two daughters, who both died in infancy; Sakhawat’s deep love and understanding sustained Rokeya through those losses.

  Soon after their marriage Sakhawat was transferred to Bhagalpur from Rangpur. He encouraged Rokeya to mix with women of her class who were staying in Bhagalpur. This opportunity of mixing with educated Hindu and Christian women who enjoyed the privileges of birth or rank like hers showed Rokeya that, given an opportunity, women might lead very different lives from those led by women kept in seclusion. Quite a few of her acquaintances must have been like Shudha Mazumdar—a Hindu contemporary of Rokeya whose life pattern shows many similarities with hers, but with whom Rokeya was apparently not acquainted—whose memoirs show that these women were conscious of their privileged position and possessed a keen sense of their obligations to society, which led them to engage in philanthropic activities.11 Additionally, Rokeya’s extensive reading of books in English that described alternate ways of life sharpened her awareness of the suppression and oppression suffered by Bengali Muslim women. Rokeya was aware that women in all patriarchal societies are exploited and oppressed by men, but her immediate, deep concern was for the group to which she belonged. It was to Sakhawat’s great credit that he encouraged his wife to articulate these unconventional thoughts in writing and to publish them. “If my dear husband had not been so supportive, I might never have written or published anything.”12

  Fortunately for her, Sakhawat’s thoughts on many social issues were remarkably similar to Rokeya’s. Mukunda Deva Mukhopadhyaya, a classmate and close friend of Sakhawat (and son of Bhudeva Mukhopadhyaya, a well-known Hindu educator and writer), reminisced, “As he himself enjoyed the benefits of having an educated wife, he sincerely supported the cause of women’s education.”13 However, Rokeya was not destined to enjoy her husband’s company for very long. Sakhawat was a diabetic. By 1907 his condition had worsened and his eyesight had begun to fail. Rokeya nursed him and helped him handle his voluminous correspondence, both official and personal, written in English.14 In 1909 Sakhawat went to Calcutta for medical treatment. He died there on May 3. Before his death he left Rokeya, in addition to her lawful share, a considerable portion of his savings, to be spent on women’s education.

  That same year Rokeya faithfully carried out her husband’s wish by establishing a girls’ school in Bhagalpur.15 However, the husband of Sakhawat’s daughter by his first wife (a man orthodox to the point of bigotry) was outraged by the fact that Rokeya not only inherited money but also dared to spend it on women’s education. His meanness and hostility became too much even for a person of Rokeya’s phenomenal patience and courage. She left Bhagalpur for Calcutta in 1910, but never formally severed connections with the family.16 In Calcutta she settled down with her mother, who died shortly thereafter. Rokeya’s younger sister, Humaira Chowdhury, who was also widowed, became a companion. In 1911 Rokeya ope
ned the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School in Calcutta with only eight girls in a small building at Number 8, Waliullah Lane. The school, which is still functioning, is a fitting memorial to her wonderful husband as well as to Rokeya herself.

  A self-taught woman raised in seclusion, Rokeya had had no experience in a classroom. For the first few days she could not imagine how one teacher could teach several students at the same time. With typical determination, she set about learning the techniques of teaching and of school administration. She visited the Brahmo and Hindu girls’ schools in Calcutta and became acquainted with their principals, thus learning from observation how schools are run.17

  Despite stiff opposition from the traditionalists, Rokeya’s tireless hard work and dedication succeeded in slowly attracting students. By the end of 1915, four years after the opening of the school in Calcutta, the number of students had increased from eight to eighty-four, and the school was relocated to a bigger building at 86/A Lower Circular Road. There were only two or three teachers and, to keep the school functioning properly, Rokeya had to work like a machine. She wrote to her cousin, “I find no time at all. By the Grace of Allah, we have 70 students studying in the five classes [the school was a primary school at this time] … two horsedrawn carriages. I have to keep an eye on everything. I even have to make sure that the horses are regularly massaged in the evening. And you know what reward I get from my society for all this? My community is busy looking for every little mistake I make.”18

  Rokeya acted as the very soul of moderation on questions of purdah. She hoped that by keeping her school bus well covered she would neutralize the criticism and opposition of the fundamentalists. The narration of the trials and tribulations that Rokeya and the school had to undergo during the trial run of the school bus is illuminating (see Report 47 of The Secluded Ones, reprinted in this volume). The opposition remained active until her death. But she had the courage of her convictions and the faith that moves mountains. Her requests for help and donations were routinely ignored by the rich and influential Muslims of Calcutta, but Rokeya did not give up. By 1930 the school had become a high school, including all ten grades. The curriculum included physical education, handicrafts, sewing, cooking, nursing, home economics, and gardening, in addition to regular courses such as Bangla, English, Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. She laid special emphasis on vocational training for girls which would enable them to become assets rather than liabilities to their families’ finances.