Elusive Lives
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Elusive Lives

Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley

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Elusive Lives

Gender, Autobiography, and the Self in Muslim South Asia

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley

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About This Book

Muslim South Asia is widely characterized as a culture that idealizes female anonymity: women's bodies are veiled and their voices silenced. Challenging these perceptions, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley highlights an elusive strand of autobiographical writing dating back several centuries that offers a new lens through which to study notions of selfhood. In Elusive Lives, she locates the voices of Muslim women who rejected taboos against women speaking out, by telling their life stories in written autobiography. To chart patterns across time and space, materials dated from the sixteenth century to the present are drawn from across South Asia – including present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lambert-Hurley uses many rare autobiographical texts in a wide array of languages, including Urdu, English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Malayalam to elaborate a theoretical model for gender, autobiography, and the self beyond the usual Euro-American frame. In doing so, she works toward a new, globalized history of the field. Ultimately, Elusive Lives points to the sheer diversity of Muslim women's lives and life stories, offering a unique window into a history of the everyday against a backdrop of imperialism, reformism, nationalism and feminism.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9781503606524
CHAPTER ONE
LIFE/HISTORY/ARCHIVE
INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS
In autumn 2005, I began researching the purposefully amorphous topic of “personal narratives of Muslim women in South Asia.”1 My intention was to look at ways in which women reconstructed their life stories in written sources. I thus placed myself, I thought, on solid historical ground—the written word—while still defining “personal narratives” broadly to include autobiographies, memoirs, journal articles, and travel narratives. I had then put together a list of primarily published autobiographical writing, the starting point for which had been those memoirs produced by women at the Bhopal royal court that I had consulted as part of my doctoral and early-career research on the last of the state’s four female rulers, Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam.2 It certainly made the project look viable, but in reality, it hid my uncertainty about what was out there to be found. When I mentioned my plans to fellow academics of Muslim or women’s history in South Asia, many looked skeptical. “Is there any material?” they asked. “I mean, did Muslim women write memoirs?” This, it turned out, was a question I would face continually. The general assumption seemed to be that these silent and secluded creatures would not deign, or perhaps dare, to participate in a genre that required them, in popular parlance, to “lift the veil,” to reveal something of their inner selves or even the “private” world of the zenana, or women’s quarters.
Other historians greeted my project with even greater suspicion. If interdisciplinarity has inspired exciting challenges to traditional historical methods on the pages of Rethinking History, to my colleagues at a provincial British university, it was as if Ranke and his notions of objectivity had never died. More times than I can count during my work on this project, questions have been raised of “reliability, validity and authentication.”3 As a historian of women and gender, I was all the more surprised by this response, because, as noted in the introduction, feminist scholars have been at the forefront of borrowing disciplinary techniques and seeking out new sources: ethnographies, oral traditions, life writing. These materials have transformed history by recovering voices of women and other marginalized groups whose pasts may have been unwritten or unrecorded.4 And yet still these materials, reliant on memory, can be deemed fickle and limited, if not unreliable, by history’s establishment: suitable to supplementing history, but not actually making it. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan writes in Real and Imagined Women, “Women’s voices from the past come to us only as ghostly visitations, not with the materiality of ‘evidence.’”5 Many historians still think of autobiography as an appropriate historical source only if it can be verified by “real” material from a “real” archive. Like Antoinette Burton in her excellent Dwelling in the Archive, we are left asking: “Who counts as a historical subject and what counts as an archive?”6
Scholars from other disciplines have asked rather different questions of autobiography. For literary theorists, the debates have often focused on defining autobiography as a genre by asking if it can be distinguished from other literary forms. As Jill Ker Conway puts it on the first page of her pithy and accessible When Memory Speaks: “Is autobiography just another form of fiction? A bastard form of the novel or of biography?”7 Hayden White’s persuasive interventions from Metahistory onward have encouraged other scholars to ask if life writers are so different from historians: are both not just aiming to “tell a story” about the past?8 Others have looked inward, seeking to differentiate forms of personal narrative within the autobiographical genre. In Design and Truth in Autobiography (still widely consulted, though it was first published in 1960), Roy Pascal seeks to separate memoir—only sometimes introspective—from autobiography, with its necessary “driving force.”9 Significantly, both terms have been abandoned fairly recently in favor of the more inclusive life writing and life narrative by postmodern and postcolonial theorists attempting to recognize the “heterogeneity of self-referential practices.”10 And yet, for gender specialists, the question remains of whether women of all nationalities can even participate in a genre that, to borrow another of Conway’s phrases, “celebrates the experiences of the atomistic Western male hero.”11
Far from hypothetical, these questions about where to draw the line seem all the more pertinent to the historian in the field faced with the very real problem of identifying and collecting materials—for whatever the attempts on the part of academics to define and categorize, historical sources rarely sit comfortably in one theoretical box or another. The problem seems compounded when the historian’s subject is Muslim women in South Asia, a group often presumed not to write autobiography at all. What I offer in this first chapter is an autobiographical narrative in itself—though, inevitably for a historian, grounded in appropriate academic literature—in which I recount my own experience of trying to find, choose, and label appropriate sources for a project on “personal narratives of Muslim women in South Asia.” I do this to flag methodological and theoretical questions that this process raised in relation to the broad categories of gender, autobiography, and history itself: questions about the nature of the archive and the distinctiveness of women’s writing as they relate to issues of nomenclature, structure, chronology, language, voice, and regional specificity. To justify my title, this chapter is about life, history, and the archive, as well as a life history archive.
A necessary first stage was exploration of the colonial archive par excellence, the British Library in London. In tribute to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, I title this stage “Beginnings.” For Derrida, the arkhe was, to quote Carolyn Steedman, “a place where things begin, where power originates.”12 This statement has resonance when working in the Oriental and India Office Collections (now, notably, renamed Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections) with all their historical associations with an imperial state’s glory and authority.13 But my beginnings here were twofold. On the one hand, my forays into the British Library marked the (frustrating, unsatisfactory) beginnings of my research process. On the other, they led to a realization that the kind of material that I uncovered here—biographies, reformist writings, and travelogues, but little identifiable autobiography—marked a kind of beginning for South Asian Muslim women writing lives, whether lives of others or their own or both. The second, longer section acts somewhat as an antidote to the “archive fever” of the first by charting my subsequent experience of seeking a new collection of sources outside the conventional archive. Yet this process led to problems of categorization: to “blurrings,” as I title the second section. I consider the range of possibilities under the label of “personal narratives”: novels, devotional literature, letters, diaries, journal articles, oral sources, film, biographies, memoirs, and ghosted narratives. I conclude this chapter by reflecting on the issue of “labeling” itself, reflected in the title of the third section.
BEGINNINGS
When I began this project, I was accustomed, as a trained historian, to thinking of the archive as a physical location: as Antoinette Burton summarizes, “an institutional site in a faraway place that requires hotel accommodation and a gruelling nine-to-five workday.”14 Admittedly, the latter had rarely been possible in the provincial Indian archive in Bhopal—with its truncated opening hours and extended tea breaks—in which I had apprenticed as a historian. But still, this description was familiar enough to my own general experience. The cultural turn has been interpreted by some imperial historians as having dealt a nearly fatal blow to the archive—such that, by the end of the twentieth century, it was “hardly dead but dissected into unrecognizability and memorialized as the victim of a veritable academic epidemic.”15 But really the hysteria seems ill-founded. Those “swirling intellectual currents” defined by the “post” prefix—“post-colonial, post-modern, post-Orientalist, and post-structural historical perspectives,” to borrow an unwieldy section title from Bose and Jalal’s Modern South Asia16—may have involved a robust critique of the colonial archive, but not an attempt to get rid of it entirely.17 Most often, the British Library in London is still the first stop for British-based scholars of South Asia, and many others besides. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that I began my research by perusing bibliographical records there. In this section, I offer an extended discussion of this process of interrogating the colonial archive for South Asian Muslim women’s writings.
Starting with the electronic catalogue, I came across a number of well-known historical examples of Muslim women’s autobiographical writing, many of which were already in my collection. From the Mughal period was Gulbadan Banu Begam’s Ahval-i-Humayun Badshah, usually referred to, as in Annette Beveridge’s early-twentieth-century translation, as the Humayun-nama.18 By this time, Ruby Lal had already probed this fascinating memoir as a source for the domestic life of the early Mughal court.19 There was also a rather dubious little volume published in 1931 by a German linguist, Andrea Butenschon, claiming to be the translation of a handwritten memoir by the Mughal princess Jahanara, stumbled upon behind a marble slab at the Agra Fort.20 Even if not authentic, it pointed to Jahanara’s actual first-person narrative, Risala-i-Sahibiyah (1641), or “The Lady’s Treatise,” then being examined by Afshan Bokhari for her doctoral research and soon to be republished in English translation.21 Most familiar to me, in that they related to the colonial period, were Shaista Ikramullah’s From Purdah to Parliament (1963) and Jahan Ara Shahnawaz’s Father and Daughter (1971), both recounting the political careers of well-known female activists in the All-India Muslim League who later became Pakistani parliamentarians.22 There were also a few contemporary autobiographies from Pakistan—most of them the sensationalist variety, charting untold sorrows and political melodramas, but also a couple by feminist poets and even one by a blind social worker.23
As a historian with some facility in South Asian languages, I thought there must be more: more from the colonial period and soon after, more in Urdu. I spent some days in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room scrutinizing Blumhardt’s original catalogue of Hindustani books and manuscripts from 1900, and with the generous assistance of archivist Leena Mitford, Quraishi’s more recent Urdu catalogues, published and unpublished. I searched broadly—entry by entry—my eyes attuned to anything related to auto/biography and/or women (by, for, and about). The findings were revealing, if not necessarily what I thought I was looking for. What was most plentiful—with as many as twenty-eight pages of entries in Quraishi’s 1991 catalogue—was biography, primarily of saints, scholars, and poets, though with some princely rulers and a few reformers thrown in. Those interested in the Muslim world will know that life history has long been a staple of Islamic scholarship, the earliest biography, or sira, of the Prophet Muhammad being compiled within a century of his death in 632.24 This early example set a precedent: to narrate an exemplary life, whether of one of the Prophet’s Companions, a Sufi shaikh, or a notable ‘alim, was to offer a model of Islamic practice for every “ordinary” Muslim to become, in Barbara Metcalf’s phrase, “living hadith.”25 No wonder that biography and its related genre, the biographical dictionary, or tabaqat, were to flourish as the key mode of historical writing in the Arab world and beyond, at least from the eleventh century onward.26
The focus on biography in the India Office Collections, then, was not entirely surprising, reflecting as it did these “enduring Islamic patterns.”27 But a seeming proliferation in nineteenth-century South Asia also appeared indicative of a more modern trend: the spread of print culture and the religious change that accompanied it in the colonial era. Francis Robinson indicates how the acceptance of print among South Asian Muslims initiated a “process of interiorization” reflected in “the expression of a growing sense of self” or, as he puts it more poetically, “the manifold nature of the human individual.”28 As individuals became more important, biography flourished—with the effect that, as the esteemed W. C. Smith observed, “more lives of Muhammad appeared between the two World Wars than in any one of the centuries between the twelfth and the nineteenth.”29 Yet the effect was ...

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