Sultana's Dream Read online

  Rokeya’s specific concern was the practice of purdah among the Muslims of Bengal; in this essay, I take a somewhat broader view. It is not easy to define purdah; the word is a kind of shorthand for practices that might include, depending on choices made by families, veiling the face, wearing a concealing cloak, living in secluded quarters, and never meeting men outside the family. It is making a comeback: Veiling is being revived in a number of countries, and some women are carefully limiting their contacts with men. Even where veiling has not been widely revived, other changes in women’s dress (long skirts, long sleeves, head coverings) signal change in belief and practice.

  Seen from a global and historical perspective, the rejection of purdah and its recent partial revival present a striking paradox. Both rejection and revival are founded on ideas of national identity and stress the central importance of women in the symbolism of nationhood. Both show how events that seem unrelated to personal life—large changes in economic, political, and social structures at the level of the nation-state—are reflected in dramatic changes in self-perception and the public presentation of the self.

  In the first half of this century, the emancipation of women and the rejection of veiling were closely related to national movements for independence from colonial rule. Leaders of nationalist movements often encouraged women to join and to appear more freely in public, even if they had not been in seclusion and only custom or modesty had prevented their participation. Among Indian Muslims, for example, women’s participation in the nationalist movement, not only as followers but also as leaders, was paralleled by their gradual emergence from purdah. The modernized, educated elite in the former colonies, which included Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, were also interested in convincing rulers that they were ready to govern their own countries. Releasing women from seclusion, if that had been the practice, was part of the process of demonstrating their modernity and often reflected a desire to emulate the colonial rulers in order to become equally strong.1

  In the second half of the twentieth century, well after most nations had achieved independence from colonial rule (in the 1940s and 1950s), a revival of veiling and the introduction or reintroduction of “modest” dress are taking place in many Asian and African countries, particularly those with large Muslim populations. Among Muslims, these changes are occurring in the context of a great religious tradition. They are part of a new nationalism, a reaffirmation of national identity in the idiom of a revitalized Islam, a rejection of values perceived as “Western” and alien to the nation’s needs. Changes in the public demeanor of women are important signals of conformity to these new ideas; equally important, they are convenient ways of communicating them to a wider audience. But these changes are more than superficial: Many women show a renewed interest in religious activities and are sometimes breaking new ground by participating in activities, such as religious studies, in which few women have been openly active in the past.

  Movements that encourage the revival of purdah in Muslim populations also have a direct counterpart in other parts of the world. They involve other great religious traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism. In the United States and parts of Europe, for example, movements that seek to prohibit access to abortion, contraception, and divorce use religious traditions as a basis for trying to achieve changes in public morality and private behavior. These movements usually seek to impose their own ideology of womanhood on a broader public, just as do many movements that encourage the revival of purdah. These parallels cannot be overlooked for they are global in scope and meaning.

  The sexual and reproductive powers of women are central to the efforts of these new movements, regardless of their religious or ideological context. The connection is obvious in the case of movements to limit contraception and abortion; it is more indirect in the case of purdah, but fears of sexual freedom and moral chaos are generally part of the appeal made by proponents of purdah. Issues involving sexuality and reproduction are excellent mobilizing devices to appeal to large constituencies, because most people have opinions on them even if they do not participate actively in other kinds of political or social movements. The revival of veiling, therefore, is not an isolated phenomenon in a distant part of the world—it has its direct counterparts in countries where most people have never heard of purdah.

  Both kinds of movements also share another characteristic: the appeal to religious prescriptions said to be ancient and unchanging. In fact, these prescriptions are less solidly grounded than they appear and are usually the subject of intense controversy. Purdah, for example, is by no means universal in Muslim populations, and, where it does exist, it varies widely in form and severity. It has changed greatly over time in different countries and has never been a stable institution. Similarly, in other religions, ideas about abortion and contraception have varied over time, even in the last few centuries, but are presented as if they have always existed in precisely their present form.

  These similarities suggest the obvious: Social and religious movements construct what might be called synthetic traditions to embody the goals and needs of the present, clothed in ancient garb to make them more powerful. They are obviously open to challenge but, especially in the case of synthetic traditions that directly affect women, challenges have often been slow in coming.

  One particular issue that complicates the development of challenges to new synthetic traditions involving women presents serious difficulties. Running like a common thread through the ideas of movements to revive veiling and limit reproductive rights is the idea of women’s “special” status. This idea shows women as very different from men, as “closer to nature,” better equipped than men to be “carriers of tradition,” and therefore indispensable to family life in a “special” role. Religious rituals often reinforce the specialization. Almost inevitably, the concept of women’s “special” status is linked to ideas of male–female “complementarity” rather than to equality.

  Ideas about women’s special nature are shared by many women, in part because they can also be sources of great strength. The new synthetic traditions, such as those associated with the revival of purdah, emphasize this source of strength and usually link it to women’s renewed religious commitment. But others in these same countries continue to feel that anything that sets women apart will limit women’s participation in public and private life. Ideas about male–female complementarity may be only another way of stressing women’s dependence on men in social, economic, and legal realms.

  Lack of clarity about women’s special status may make it harder to understand what is happening with respect to the new synthetic traditions in many countries. In view of the ambivalences and ambiguities aroused by conflicting views on these issues, it is also becoming more difficult to analyze why women and families play such central roles in social and religious change or how such issues are used in mobilization efforts by new political and social movements.

  Rokeya’s story itself and the closer look at purdah that it brings with it can be among the starting points in trying to understand these new changes.

  She Who Sits Behind the Curtain

  Rokeya wrote as a Muslim about purdah among Muslims in Bengal (present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal), but it is hard to reconstruct life in purdah only from her utopian mirror images. What does it really mean to “be in purdah” or, even if not veiled, to live in a society where some women are in purdah? Some of the evidence can be read in The Secluded Ones—but things have changed and Rokeya, after all, wrote as an activist against a custom she hated.

  In thinking about purdah, both its rejection and its revival, we must pay attention to the vast differences among the women who observe it. Purdah is not monolithic, although this is the way it is usually seen in countries where it is unknown, and moralists and observers have usually presented it in very simplistic form, as a single set of customs.

  In the sections that follow, I present purdah from many angles, seen through a s
ort of kaleidoscope, before going on to a discussion of the larger context within which purdah functions in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka). Even if there were no veiling at all, I believe, the prevailing “family ideology” would continue to constrain both women and men. “Abolishing” the family is patently absurd in societies based on functioning families, but we certainly need new ways of asking new questions about the nature of family structures and ideologies. The study of purdah provides an opportunity to do so.

  A woman in purdah is often called pardanashin—“she who sits behind the curtain.” The word parda (purdah is the common Anglicized form) means “curtain,” but the dictionary definition goes far beyond this meaning. To cite only a few selected meanings from a great dictionary of Urdu and Hindi:

  parda … A curtain, screen, cover, veil … secrecy, privacy, modesty; seclusion, concealment; secret, mystery, reticence, reserve; screen, shelter, pretext …

  parda chorna … to drop the curtain or veil; to lay aside concealment; to come into public …2

  The zenana, or women’s part of the house, was the area where the women of purdah-observing families spent their lives, except when they went on visits to other women in their own zenanas. The term is less widely used today but this internal arrangement of houses may still exist, perhaps in modified form, where purdah observance is strict. The real significance of the zenana and mardana (men’s quarters) lies in the spatial separation between the women of the house and those males with whom they cannot have contact (see below). The forms of purdah observance include spatial separation, the wearing of special garments, several kinds of portable seclusion in which women can move about in public, and certain kinds of body language. Much has been written about the form and substance of purdah in South Asia; here I will summarize only enough to make Rokeya’s story understandable to readers unfamiliar with purdah and its implications.3

  Spatial separation among South Asian Muslims involves setting aside a part of the home for the exclusive use of women and those men before whom they do not observe purdah. Male guests outside the permitted categories of close relatives (whom Rokeya calls “sacred relations”) must stay outside this part of the home. Usually this means that male guests of the men of the family sit in a separate room near the front of the house, on a veranda, or on seats in the open courtyard. In the larger homes of better-off families, especially earlier in this century, typical Muslim houses contained a separate inner courtyard around which rooms opened onto a veranda. These were rooms for sleeping, as in the warm climate of South Asia many other activities took place in the open air, in the courtyard, or on the open veranda. Women and children spent their days in this part of the house which usually also contained the kitchen; men of the family entered it for meals and at night; female servants (and perhaps young boys working for the family) also went in and out but adult male servants did not. This was the type of house in which my friend Hamida Khala, whose struggle with purdah I will describe in the next section, grew up in the years around World War I.

  Women living in strict purdah could travel outside their homes in a doli (palanquin), a kind of cloth tent attached to four wooden poles carried by strong men. It is still used in rural areas of South Asia, especially on ceremonial occasions such as weddings, but automobiles are now used by those who can afford them. Cars may have tinted or curtained windows. Some extremely strict families still insist that the path from car to house be shielded from public view by people holding up long sheets on both sides of the path, even though the women are heavily veiled, but this is an uncommon practice.

  In addition to the segregation achieved by spatial separation within the home and in segregated transport, there are also covering garments that provide what I think of as portable seclusion. This is especially important for those families who crave the respectability conferred by purdah but cannot afford to keep women off the streets altogether and do not have segregated transport. In South Asia, Muslim women in purdah wear the burqa, a clumsy garment meant to conceal the female face and body. Wearing the burqa is what is usually described as “being veiled,” but this term is really a misnomer: Many people unfamiliar with purdah think of a veil as a transparent piece of gauze over the face that adds to a woman’s allure. The burqa is more like a tent, worn over a woman’s clothes like an over-coat. It covers the person from the top of the head to the wrists and the ankles. There are various designs for burqas, as fashions change quickly; thirty years ago, in the cities of Pakistan, the more traditional white cotton model was worn by poorer women while middle-class pardanashin wore dark blue or black models made of synthetic fabrics. Nowadays, these garments come in many colors and in different designs. Most have a double layer of material in front of the face, not quite transparent, which the wearer can lift up if she wishes. Women who wear the burqa but who do not cover their faces are considered to observe “open-face purdah”; at one time this was quite common in Pakistani cities and is related to the controversy over whether the Quran requires women to veil their faces.

  The use of the burqa is not universal among pardanashin, even in South Asia, and forms of covering women’s bodies and faces are often quite different in other countries. Nowadays, sunglasses are often worn to provide a kind of partial anonymity, sometimes together with covering garments, sometimes not. The form of purdah observance is also different in rural areas than in cities, although the urban burqa has spread widely through the countryside. Village women in many parts of South Asia still do not use it but shield their faces, if they observe purdah, with shawls. The burqa itself seems to have been unknown in India until some time in the nineteenth century.

  The rules for purdah observance among Muslims are derived from the Quran, which Muslims believe to be the word of God. Verses in the Quran specify the men with whom women may interact, including husbands, fathers, fathers-in-law, brothers, nephews, and sons.4 Basically, these are the members of the extended kin group and these rules essentially set up boundaries between the family and the rest of the society. The implementation of the rules of purdah, elaborated in the commentaries on the Quran (hadith), has been the subject of debate among Muslims for centuries and this debate continues today. Among the points at issue are the forms of observance—for example, whether or not women should be required to cover their faces—rather than the boundaries of the group within which contact is not limited by purdah.

  A complicating feature of South Asian society is that some Hindu castes, especially in north and central India, also observe customs that involve veiling and spatial separation. These customs are sometimes called purdah and sometimes referred to otherwise.5 Hindu practices follow very different rules, in terms of both form and substance, but there is some overlap between Hindu and Muslim practices. In the most general sense, Hindu purdah emphasizes respect relations within the family into which women marry and the boundaries between women’s natal and marital families. Hindu women, in purdah-observing communities, must veil their faces before their husbands’ elder male relatives and, by extension, before all elder males in the village into which brides come as strangers. They do not veil in their natal villages before marriage nor when they return on visits home as married women. Muslim practices, by contrast, set the family somewhat apart from the wider society by limiting the interactions of all women with all men who are not part of the family. In both cases purdah observance marks social boundaries, but these boundaries mark out different grounds.

  Both Muslim and Hindu purdah are potent instruments for teaching women their place in the social order. In both cases, purdah rules communicate how women must behave and with whom they may interact. But Muslim and Hindu purdah are very different in both ideology and practice. The differences between them reflect differences in social organization between these groups in South Asian society. Muslim women often learn to be afraid of the world beyond the home and venture out only reluctantly, especially where purdah is strictly observed.6 About Hindu veiling practices in a nort
h Indian village, the anthropologist Ursula Sharma notes that purdah teaches a woman “the distinction between those situations in which she ought to be passive and submissive and those in which some degree of responsible activity and control are allowed her.”7

  Parentally arranged marriages are still the norm throughout South Asia, and the norms governing the arrangement of marriages are highly relevant to the norms of purdah among Muslims and Hindus. Muslims tend to prefer marriages within a known circle of families, and in some instances there are strong preferences to arrange marriages among cousins, especially between women and cousins on their father’s side. Outside South Asia (among the Bedouins of northern Egypt, for example) this preference for paternal cousin marriage is so strong that any other choice faces staunch opposition.8 Among north Indian Hindus, by contrast, it is customary to marry women into families of the same caste, preferably the same subcaste but not closely related, and living in somewhat distant villages in the same region. Hindu women, therefore, come into the marital home as strangers and veil before elders they have never met; Muslim women may come into the home of known relatives, before whom they have never veiled. Educated urban families throughout South Asia often disregard these norms and establish new rules more closely related to class and wealth, but the traditional norms remain very powerful. Parents of young women as well as young men retain a large share of control over the choice of a marriage partner in many instances, even among highly educated urban families.