Rasheed Jahan played a pivotal part
in the growing role of Muslim women outside the four walls of the house in the
third decade of the twentieth century. Though she is remembered more for her
afsanas that were published in the explosive issue of Angarey in 1933, she was
greater than the sum of all her parts. Being a medical doctor, a political
activist and a writer paled in comparison to her symbolic contribution as a
flag-bearer of a new role that was being chartered for the women of the
subcontinent, especially the Muslim women.
Now a collection of her essays, short
stories and plays by Humaira Ashfaq has inveigled us to take a second look at
those momentous events and times, and the pioneering role played by her on
issues like women emancipation and their role in society. It is all the more
poignant because even after almost a century the same issues, some of them
foundational, still bedevil this society. One of the more thorny issues is the
education and role of women in the society at large.
Perhaps the question may have been settled
in actuality because in the institutions of higher learning in particular,
women outnumber men and there is also a growing number of them in the
workforce. Still, at the intellectual and emotional level, the resistance is
just as stiff and waiting to explode at any moment. It does so in limited form
from time to time. Therefore the struggle of Rasheed Jahan becomes even more
relevant and pointed than ever before.
The tragedy of Rasheed Jahan was that she
gained notoriety by getting published in Angarey in 1933, a magazine that
challenged many stereotypes of this society. It provoked an instant reaction.
If the intention of the writings of Ahmed Ali, Sajjad Zaheer, Mehmoodur Zafar
and Rasheed Jahan was to shock, it was more than achieved. But, in retrospect,
it may be conceded that the quality of those writings, particularly of Rasheed
Jahan, did not square up to a certain level of literary finesse. She has been
forever judged by the quality of her writings in retrospect rather than the
impact they had at the time of their publication.
She went to a school set up by her
enlightened father Sheikh Abdullah in Aligarh and later to Isabella Thoburn and
Lady Hardinge Medical Colleges in Lucknow where she graduated to become a
medical doctor in 1929 which must have placed her as being one of the first Muslim
women to qualify for this profession. She formed part of the revolutionary
bohemian lot of that period and while the Progressive Writers Association was
being set up in India by her friends led by Sajjad Zaheer she was fully
associated with it in both theory and practice. She got married to Mehmoodur
Zafar, her ideological soulmate in Amritsar where he was the vice principal of
MAO College.
For years, all the writings of Rasheed
Jahan were not available or readily available and there was also the issue with
Angarey which was banned after the fierce reaction that it caused and was lost
to history. Her two pieces, a short story Dilli Ki Sair and play Parde ke
Peechey, were realistic and not provocative but some of the other writings were
and she was bracketed and hence condemned and threatened.
Though Rasheed Jahan continued to write,
she was also kept back by her other professional engagements — being a medical
doctor and an activist. Then, unfortunately, she died rather young of cancer in
Moscow where she had gone for treatment. She was perhaps in her mid-forties at
that time. Her death cast a pall of gloom among her friends, fellow ideologists
and men and women belonging to the artistic/literary community.
Rasheed Jahan was greatly inspired by the
new wave of realism that was sweeping poetry and fiction in the early decades
of the twentieth century. Urdu prose was struggling to come out of the cocoon
of highly romanticised narratives and a florid descriptive style and was
thought not suitable to express the seething problems that faced society at
large particularly the condition of women. Many of the subjects were considered
taboos and were only mentioned indirectly. Rasheed Jahan plunged the surgeon’s
knife of her writings right into the middle of this cancerous growth and it led
to the spilling of a lot of bad blood.
This realism was being developed by greater
writers like Munshi Premchand in Hindi and Urdu. He had started to write about
the people and landscape with his greater realism but for a women to be writing
about sex was akin to a volcanic eruption and it caused so much commotion that
Rasheed Jahan was put on the defensive and was made to doff an armour. She did
not grow to become a writer of higher merit.
Her first attempt at writing was a short
story Salma written in English while she was a student at Isabella Thoburn
College in Lucknow. She got to write in Angarey because a sister of Ahmed Ali
was her friend in college and she got to know the family well. Humaira Ashfaq
has collected these writings from various sources mainly Rasheed Jahan’s
collection of stories like “Aurat Aur Doosrey Afsaney” and Shahida Hasan’s
doctoral thesis “Dr. Rasheed Jehan –Hayat aur Karnamey”.
Humaira Ashfaq is a short story writer,
folklorist, critic, and a Phd scholar and is associated with the Urdu
Department of International Islamic University in Islamabad. It appears that
many of her manuscripts are under print and she is involved in many projects
associated with culture in and outside the country.
Nasre Rasheed Jahan
Compiled and edited by
Humaira Ashfaq
Sang-e-Meel Publication, 2012
Price Rs 500
Pages 295
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