CHAPTER ONE
LIFE/HISTORY/ARCHIVE
INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS
In autumn 2005, I began researching the purposefully amorphous topic of âpersonal narratives of Muslim women in South Asia.â1 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 groundâthe written wordâwhile still defining âpersonal narrativesâ 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 stateâs 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 womenâs history in South Asia, many looked skeptical. âIs there any material?â they asked. âI mean, did Muslim women write memoirs?â 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 âlift the veil,â to reveal something of their inner selves or even the âprivateâ world of the zenana, or womenâs 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 âreliability, validity and authentication.â3 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 historyâs establishment: suitable to supplementing history, but not actually making it. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan writes in Real and Imagined Women, âWomenâs voices from the past come to us only as ghostly visitations, not with the materiality of âevidence.ââ5 Many historians still think of autobiography as an appropriate historical source only if it can be verified by ârealâ material from a ârealâ archive. Like Antoinette Burton in her excellent Dwelling in the Archive, we are left asking: âWho counts as a historical subject and what counts as an archive?â6
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: âIs autobiography just another form of fiction? A bastard form of the novel or of biography?â7 Hayden Whiteâs 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 âtell a storyâ 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 memoirâonly sometimes introspectiveâfrom autobiography, with its necessary âdriving force.â9 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 âheterogeneity of self-referential practices.â10 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 Conwayâs phrases, âcelebrates the experiences of the atomistic Western male hero.â11
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 materialsâfor 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 historianâs 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 itselfâthough, inevitably for a historian, grounded in appropriate academic literatureâin which I recount my own experience of trying to find, choose, and label appropriate sources for a project on âpersonal narratives of Muslim women in South Asia.â 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 womenâs 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 âBeginnings.â For Derrida, the arkhe was, to quote Carolyn Steedman, âa place where things begin, where power originates.â12 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 stateâs 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 hereâbiographies, reformist writings, and travelogues, but little identifiable autobiographyâmarked 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 âarchive feverâ 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 âblurrings,â as I title the second section. I consider the range of possibilities under the label of âpersonal narrativesâ: 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 âlabelingâ 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, âan institutional site in a faraway place that requires hotel accommodation and a gruelling nine-to-five workday.â14 Admittedly, the latter had rarely been possible in the provincial Indian archive in Bhopalâwith its truncated opening hours and extended tea breaksâin 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 archiveâsuch that, by the end of the twentieth century, it was âhardly dead but dissected into unrecognizability and memorialized as the victim of a veritable academic epidemic.â15 But really the hysteria seems ill-founded. Those âswirling intellectual currentsâ defined by the âpostâ prefixââpost-colonial, post-modern, post-Orientalist, and post-structural historical perspectives,â to borrow an unwieldy section title from Bose and Jalalâs Modern South Asia16âmay 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 womenâs writings.
Starting with the electronic catalogue, I came across a number of well-known historical examples of Muslim womenâs autobiographical writing, many of which were already in my collection. From the Mughal period was Gulbadan Banu Begamâs Ahval-i-Humayun Badshah, usually referred to, as in Annette Beveridgeâs 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 Jahanaraâs actual first-person narrative, Risala-i-Sahibiyah (1641), or âThe Ladyâs Treatise,â 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 Ikramullahâs From Purdah to Parliament (1963) and Jahan Ara Shahnawazâs 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 Pakistanâmost 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 Blumhardtâs original catalogue of Hindustani books and manuscripts from 1900, and with the generous assistance of archivist Leena Mitford, Quraishiâs more recent Urdu catalogues, published and unpublished. I searched broadlyâentry by entryâmy 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 plentifulâwith as many as twenty-eight pages of entries in Quraishiâs 1991 catalogueâwas 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 Prophetâs Companions, a Sufi shaikh, or a notable âalim, was to offer a model of Islamic practice for every âordinaryâ Muslim to become, in Barbara Metcalfâs phrase, âliving hadith.â25 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 âenduring Islamic patterns.â27 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 âprocess of interiorizationâ reflected in âthe expression of a growing sense of selfâ or, as he puts it more poetically, âthe manifold nature of the human individual.â28 As individuals became more important, biography flourishedâwith the effect that, as the esteemed W. C. Smith observed, âmore lives of Muhammad appeared between the two World Wars than in any one of the centuries between the twelfth and the nineteenth.â29 Yet the effect was ...