We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
#7716;ayāt-e Ashraf: Agency, Resistance, and Muslim Women's Life Writing in Colonial North India.
- Authors
AFZAL, MOHAMMED
- Abstract
The compilation by Muḥammadi Begum (1877-1908) of Ashrafunnisa's life titled #7716;ayāt-e Ashraf (1904, The Life of Asḥrafunnisa) is one of the earliest biographies of an ordinary Indian Muslim woman. This biographical account includes Muḥammadi's version of Ashrafunnisa's life, the articles and letters written by Ashrafunnisa herself, and other women. The article in which Ashrafunnisa (1840-1903) recorded the difficulties she encountered in learning to read and write in a patriarchal society was originally published in two instalments on March 23 and 30, 1899 in Tahżīb-e Nisvāñ and was subsequently included in Ḥayāt-e Ashraf. The publication of this autobiographical narrative in the women's magazine edited by Muḥammadi marks the inception of a feminist consciousness on Urdu literary scene in early twentieth-century North India. Since Muḥammadi was the first Muslim woman to edit an Urdu journal, her consequent decision to compile the life of a working woman points to what was common in their life. Muḥammadi's entry into the male dominated field of Urdu literature and Ashrafunnisa's appointment to the post of a teacher in a semi-government girls' school announced the triumphant arrival of ashraf Muslim women in the public sphere. This biography was compiled after Ashrafunnisa's death in 1903 as a tribute to the extraordinary life of an ordinary Muslim woman and reads like a female bildungsroman in Urdu. This paper investigates the dilemma faced by Ashrafunnisa after her widowhood and her negotiations with the contending demands of respectability and financial constraints. The intertwining of Ashrafunnisa's life with the growth of the educational institution she served in this biography challenged the nineteenth-century reformist discourse on domesticity that confined women to the household. My analysis of Ḥayāt-e Ashraf seeks to demonstrate that Indian women in the nineteenth-century contested the reformist discourse on womanhood and were actively engaged in recasting themselves.
- Subjects
MUSLIM women; IMPERIALISM; SOCIAL conditions of women; FEMINISTS; WOMEN educators
- Publication
Journal of Comparative Literature & Aesthetics, 2022, Vol 45, Issue 3, p7
- ISSN
0252-8169
- Publication type
Article