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The last Begum of Bhopal: How Begum Sultan Jahan fought patriarchy and educated a generation of women

Bhopal, MADHYA PRADESH :

Born in 1858, Begum Sultan Jahan ascended the throne in 1901. While she was the fourth female ruler of Bhopal, she is credited with many firsts. She was known for ruling in the present with her eyes set on the future. Her progressive policies for women, at a time when they were shackled by the forces of patriarchy, have made her a feminist icon even today.

Begum Sultan Jahan was a pioneer in the field of education and even authored a book, Dars-e-Hayat, about the education and parenting of young girls.

Nearly a century ago, when the term feminism was not yet part of common parlance, the princely estate of Bhopal was run by a line of powerful women. In the absence of male successors, they initiated a matrilineal reign from 1819, which continued till 1926. These rulers are often referred to as the Begums of Bhopal.

During this era, they ruled with authority, dignity and bold reforms — disrupting the patriarchal system that had been laid down centuries before them.

The last Begum of Bhopal was Begum Sultan Jahan. She ruled from 1909 to 1926 after which she stepped down and was succeeded by her son.

Begum Sultan Jahan died on May 12, 1930 at the age of 71. She was known for ruling in the present with her eyes set on the future. Her progressive policies for women, at a time when they were shackled by the forces of patriarchy, have made her a feminist icon even today.

Apart from being a philanthropist and prolific writer, she was a symbol of women empowerment, known for taking up the cause of female education. She was the first female Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, which she had nurtured during its nascent stage, when it was still known as the Mohammadan Anglo Oriental College.

In a time when it was rare for women to venture out due to a strict purdah system, she famously constructed a Meeting Hall for Ladies in Lahore.

But above all, Begum Sultan Jahan was an astute ruler who restored the glory of her estate.

It is hard to find a female ruler who authored over 40 books, designed school curriculum, founded women’s clubs, travelled to Europe, met British officials with authority, funded almost all major institutions — both in the country as well as one in Saudi Arabia — and even headed a University as its first female Chancellor.

Interestingly, film actress Sharmila Tagore is the granddaughter-in-law of Nawab Hamid Ullah Khan, the youngest son of Begum Sultan Jahan.

Begum Sultan Jahan, the ruler of Bhopal

Born in 1858, Begum Sultan Jahan ascended the throne in 1901. While she was the fourth female ruler of Bhopal, she is credited with many firsts.

She was not one to stand on the sidelines. An incident from the early days of her regime is often cited to highlight her penchant for ruling from the front. When she took over as Queen, there was only Rs 40,000 in the treasury which was not enough to even pay the salary of her employees. Begum Sultan Jahan decided to tour her kingdom and interact with the village folk. After learning their concerns, she set up the municipality system and even introduced municipal elections.

She also constructed a walled city and a palace for herself. She took steps for improving public health, sanitation, and water supply in the walled city and implemented widespread vaccination drives for its residents.

Apart from being a philanthropist and prolific writer, she was a symbol of women empowerment, known for taking up the cause of female education.

Recognising that women needed a space exclusively for them to assemble and discuss ideas, she laid the foundation stone for a meeting hall in Lahore in 1913.

To encourage women and promote handicrafts, she organised an exhibition called ‘Numaish Masunuaat e Hind’ in Bhopal, where she displayed her own creations. Queens from other kingdoms, such as Gwalior, Jhanjhar, Sultanpur, Narsinghgarh and Gulburgah also participated and displayed their handiwork.

Begum Sultan Jahan as an educationist

She was a pioneer in the field of education and even authored a book, Dars-e-Hayat, about the education and parenting of young girls. There was a time when almost every city of the country had one or more educational institutes for girls which were funded by Begum Sultan Jahan.

To encourage parents to educate their daughters, she set up several schools. However, most initially resisted the idea, as at the time it was considered socially acceptable to teach their daughters at home.

Undeterred, she started the Sultania School and also improved the condition of two existing schools — Madarsa Bilqisia and Madarsa Victoria. She even revamped the syllabus and added subjects such as English, Urdu, Arithmetic, Home Science and crafts. These schools were meant for underprivileged children and hence their expenses were borne by the Bhopal estate. Even in those times, she got the Madarsa Sultania affiliated to the Allahabad Board. This Madarsa was well equipped and even had an ambulance and sections for medicine and nursing. Later she also started a nursing school called Lady Minto Nursing School.

Begum Sultan Jahan did not solely focus on uplifting Muslim girls. She famously founded the Barjeesiya Kanya Paathshala’ and even instituted a scholarship for the underprivileged students of Jain Shwetambar Paathshala.

Despite being a small princely estate, Bhopal had an education budget of one lakh rupees. The educational institutions she supported were not confined to Aligarh alone. She was also funding a Madarsa in Deoband, Nadwatul Uloom in Lucknow and even Madarsa Sultania in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Institutions such as Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi and some renowned colleges in Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata) received generous grants from her.

Begum Sultan Jahan established the Ladies Club in Bhopal with the aim of involving more women in her mission. She addressed the functions of the Ladies Club. Later, she even organised an event under the aegis of All India Women Association in Sadar Bhopal and established the Sultan Jahan Endowment Trust with a corpus of Rs three lakhs for helping needy students.

Begum Sultan Jahan also went as far as encouraging the rulers of other princely states to promote education. Even Lord Harding praised her efforts.

She authored 41 books, many of which were distributed for free. She also translated a number of English books into Urdu.

Begum Sultan Jahan and AMU

Around that time, more than 600 kilometres away from Bhopal, in the province of Uttar Pradesh, the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College was taking shape in Aligarh.

In 1910, while returning from Mussoorie, she stayed in Aligarh for the first time. During her visit, she donated Rs 50,000 for the construction of the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference, which still exists today and is known as Sultan Jahan Manzil.

A monthly grant of Rs 100 was sanctioned by her for the girls school started in Aligarh by Sheikh Abdullah, which is now known as the Women’s College of AMU. She designed the syllabus herself and offered it to the school authorities. It was done at a time when there was a paucity of funds and women ’s education had taken a backseat. Later, when MAO College became AMU, she was named its first Chancellor.

During AMU’s centenary celebrations on December 22, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tribute to Begum Jahan and her contribution to the historic institution — “The AMU has the rare distinction that Begum Sultan Jahan took over the responsibility of its founder chancellor. How daunting it would have been one hundred years ago!”

In 1910, she stayed in Aligarh for the first time. During her visit, she donated Rs 50,000 for the construction of the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference, which still exists today and is known as Sultan Jahan Manzil.

As Chancellor of the AMU, she addressed its first-ever convocation ceremony in 1922 amidst renowned scholars from across the country. She also arranged cars and lodging for 175 persons during the jubilee ceremony of the University. Begum Sultan Jahan visited Aligarh seven times, with her last visit being in 1929.

Her speech during the foundation stone laying ceremony of Sultania Boarding House in Women’s College reflects her vision. She said, “Today is the beginning of a new era in the history of Muslims. And, whenever, in the coming time, the history of this era is recorded, today’s programme will be remembered as one of its brightest chapters.”

Her prophecy came true. The school patronised by Begum Sultan Jahan has grown into a college drawing over 3,095 female students from across the country and overseas enrolled in 34 courses taught by 107 faculty members.

The women’s college attracts international students from more than 20 countries including, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia, Iran, UAE, Iraq, Yemen, Bangladesh, Libya, Nepal, Syria among others.

The Nasrullah Hostel for Boys in AMU, too, was constructed with her support. It is often said that whenever AMU needed help, Begum Sultan Jahan of Bhopal Estate was among the first to step up.

Following in her footsteps, her son Hamidullah Khan, who studied in Aligarh, founded a Science College in the city, and donated Rs two lakh to it.

(Nasir is Assistant Professor, Department of Law, Aligarh Muslim University; Fareed is Media Advisor, AMU)

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Lifestyle> Art & Culture / by Faisal Fareed & Mohammad Nasir (Aligarh, UP) / May 27th, 2021

The remarkable Begums who defied patriarchal norms to rule Bhopal for more than a century

Bhopal, MADHYA PRADESH :

These women embodied feminism long before it became a part of the zeitgeist.

ShahJahanBegumOrigMPOs06jun2019

The heiress apparent to the throne of Bhopal, Abida Sultan, wore her hair short, played the saxophone, had her own band, sped around in a Daimler, and when her husband announced that he’ll assume custody of their son, threatened to kill him with the pistol she kept in her pocket. All the while, she remained pious and committed to Islam.

Abida Sultan’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, was unabashed and far from removed from the stereotypical picture of an oppressed Muslim woman. In the book, she wrote frankly about her conjugal life and her inability to be the good, dutiful wife. But could one expect any less from the child of a feminist royal lineage?

This matrilineal reign, which began in 1819, lasted more than a hundred years, with the lone interruption in 1926, when Sultan Jahan Begum abdicated in favour of Nawab Hamidullah Khan. Hamidullah Khan’s daughter Abida Sultan was to succeed to the throne, but when she chose to leave for Pakistan after the Partition of India, her younger sister Sajida became the Begum of Bhopal.

Sajida Sultan. — Unknown/Wikimedia Commons
Sajida Sultan. — Unknown/Wikimedia Commons

Unlike the Queen-Regent of Travancore, whose brief radical rule ran only till her son came of age, these women ruled for unexpectedly long periods, facilitated by the absence or death of male contenders to the throne, and through sheer grit. A photograph taken in 1872 of Nawab Shah Jahan Begum, Abida Begum’s great-grandmother, shows a booted woman staring straight at the camera, much in the manner of a Vogue cover shoot. The Begums of Bhopal practised feminism much before it gained prominence. They were interesting, headstrong and opinionated, but their wars weren’t fought on the battlefield.

Archival records are filled with the Begums exhibiting their commitment to Islam: donating money to build a mosque in Basra, Iraq, funding the Muslim University at Aligarh, and opening a school for girls in Delhi in the early 1920s. At the time, it was unusual to have a ruler devote time and money to women’s education — even a progressive thinker like Syed Ahmad Khan was focused on Muslim men getting Western education — but to do so outside their state was truly remarkable. So much so that when Lord Edwin Montagu, the British Secretary of State for India, met Begum Sultan Jahan in 1917, he noted in his diary that she was “frightfully keen on education, and jabbered about nothing else”.

Sultan Jahan Begum. — Wikimedia Commons
Sultan Jahan Begum. — Wikimedia Commons

Fringes of history

Women and their assumption of political power have always been sidelined in Islamic history, though there is reason to believe that Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, had a role to play in the establishment of the first Islamic state. Razia Sultana’s brief reign as the Sultanah of Delhi in the 1200s and her killing demonstrated the near impossibility and legitimacy of a Muslim women ruler.

Nothing changed over the centuries. Though it was a young woman, Queen Victoria, who reigned over the hundreds of Indian monarchs at the start of the Paramountcy, assuring them gently of their territorial sovereignty, this mattered little in India. Indian monarchies have been patrilineal and patriarchal, guarding the male and natural right to ascend the throne.

Against this background, to have four Muslim women successively rule a state is unprecedented in world history. But what makes it all the more remarkable is that these women administered a state dominated by feudal warlords accustomed to male privilege over the throne.

The modern city of Bhopal was founded in the early 18th century by Dost Mohammad Khan, an Orakzai Pathan from Afghanistan, and it soon became the second-most important Muslim princely state after Hyderabad. Its geographical location — in Central India — was vital for the suppression of the 1858 War of Independence.

Dost Mohammad Khan. — Wikimedia Commons
Dost Mohammad Khan. — Wikimedia Commons

In North India, there were several Muslim princely states — such as Bahawalpur, Mahmudabad, Tonk, Pataudi and Rampur — which were supported by the British under the Paramountcy. Under this policy, while nearly 500 princely states were autonomous and maintained internal sovereignty, their foreign policy and right to wage wars was controlled by the British.

The reign of the Begums began in Bhopal in 1819, when the ruling Nawab, Mohammad Khan, died without an heir and the British decided to crown his young wife Qudsia till her daughter Sikandar came of age. Sikandar Begum’s husband too died in 1844, and she proved to be a competent ruler and a worthy ally to the British, playing a vital role in the First War of Independence in 1857-1858. This compelled the British to make a provision that the Begum was a sovereign in her own right. Three years later, in 1861, she was invested with the Exalted Order of the Star of India, making her, at the time, the only female knight in the British Empire besides Queen Victoria. She was succeeded by her daughter Shah Jahan Begum and then by Sultan Jahan Begum.

Sultan Jahan Begum went on to have a 25-year-long reign, marked by a commitment to progress, education and women’s health reforms. She was the last Begum of Bhopal as the heiress apparent, Abida Sultan, abdicated the throne in 1948.

Sikandar Begum. — Louis Rousselet/Wikimedia Commons
Sikandar Begum. — Louis Rousselet/Wikimedia Commons

‘Magical island’

The first and foremost among them, Qudsia Begum, set the template of the ideal ruler. Spartan, and shunning jewellery, she refused to take loans and made sure that any money spent would be solely for education and philanthropy. As the British agent Lancelot Wilkinson in Bhopal noted: “She rides and walks about in public, and betrays her determination to maintain herself in power by learning the use of the spear and other manly accomplishments. At times she became quite frantic; and as one of the soldiers observed, more terrible to approach than a tigress.”

This “magical island”, as at least one commentator called it, was as rare as it was difficult to create. Like all figures of power, the Begums too attracted people who wanted to manipulate them — and in their case, this meant both the British and the ruling clan.

Qudsia Begum and her daughter, early inheritors of an uneasy throne, responded to the tugs and pulls by quickly learning traditional masculine skills like fencing and hunting. Shah Jahan Begum embraced the Purdah, asserting notions of orthodox Islamic femininity. She withdrew from public life into strict seclusion and refused to meet the British Viceroy in 1875. Her daughter would later recount in her autobiography that “even as a young girl, she preferred to meet with other girls of her age to discuss ‘a thousand little points of household duties and of domestic management than to perform outdoor activities’.” None of this though got in the way of being a good ruler, and she proved that a veiled woman could rule as competently as anybody else.

Shah Jahan Begum. — Louis Rousselet/Wikimedia Commons
Shah Jahan Begum. — Louis Rousselet/Wikimedia Commons

Balance of power

The Begums carefully navigated the multiple demands of power by ingeniously playing around with tradition and modernity. They would sometimes opt to let go of the burkha and at times wear it to demonstrate a different modernity. In their writings, the Begums constantly acknowledged their mothers and grandmothers, paying obeisance to the strong women who shaped their lives and characters.

Their commitment to austerity and Islam set them apart from the wasted royal lives that were given to overindulgence and dissipation. They constantly drew upon the Quran and respected Islamic scholars, reinforcing the idea that Islam speaks of equity between the sexes. Their spartan lives struck Mahatma Gandhi too, when he visited the state in the late 1920s, on invitation. He was suspicious that the Begum’s cotton clothes and thin mattress had been “put on as a show”, till his travelling companion Sarojini Naidu assured him otherwise.

The Begums of Bhopal, who styled themselves as “Nawab Begums”, were radical and unconventional (the term ‘Nawab Begum’ itself was ingenious as there is no word for queen in the Islamic political imagination). Nonetheless, with consummate ease and success, they proved they were no less. Keeping in line with the Islamic tradition of maintaining a diary, like the founder of their state used to, the Begums invested much energy in maintaining records — of the state and of themselves.

Sultan Jahan Begum. — The Graphic/Wikimedia Commons
Sultan Jahan Begum. — The Graphic/Wikimedia Commons

Shah Jahan Begum, the third in the line, established a History Office, along with a system for retrieving and maintaining records of important characters in her family. Abida Sultan’s son, Shahryar Khan, a former career diplomat in Pakistan, has carried on this family tradition by writing an authoritative account of the dynasty, The Begums of Bhopal.

Like a host of other wealthy Muslim ashraf women, the Begums travelled to Europe and to West Asia as part of the obligatory hajj. And despite the seriousness of the occasion, they never failed to display flashes of their chutzpah. There are anecdotes of Sikandar Begum not disembarking from the ship to Europe without her bottles of pickle. And upon reaching London, she mistakenly wore a dressing gown to meet King George V and Queen Mary, a realisation made only owing to the headlines in the newspapers the next morning.

Many princesses have ascended to power in democratic India by contesting and winning parliamentary elections. The Begums of Bhopal, however, are remarkable for sustaining a determined succession of women monarchs, despite hostility to their gender ruling — the very first Begum, Qudsia, had declared that her infant daughter would succeed after her. Despite the religious and political odds against them, their reign was marked by benevolence and modernity, a radical openness to change, like women’s education and medicine, while maintaining a steadfast commitment to the tenets of Islam. The Begums are icons for women, Muslim or otherwise.


This piece was originally published on Scroll and has been reproduced with permission.

source: http://www.dawn.com / Dawn / Home> Prism / by Priya Mirza / June 04th, 2019