Many years ago, I read a book by Chaturvedi Badrinath entitled “The Women of the Mahabharata: The Question of Truth”. This book discussed 12 women characters that figure in the epic and included, along with the well-known Draupadi, Shakuntala, Savitri and Damayanti, some little known women such as Suvarchala, Sulabha and Madhavi. It was a truly rewarding experience to read about Suvarchala who, while living the life of an ordinary woman with her husband Shvetaketu, meditated upon the relationship between word and meaning and carried on a detailed and sustained philosophical discussion on the problem over a long period of time.
The question also engaged the attention of the great Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa who saw word and meaning as intertwined entities. Even Tulsidas, the great saint-poet of the 16th Century, wrote in “Ramacharitmanas” that the word and its meaning were like the water and the wave that look separate but are in reality not. In the Mahabharata, Suvarchala asks, “What can word prove? I believe that (beyond a point) word serves no real purpose”, thus anticipating what the Existentialists said about the impossibility of interpersonal communication, or what Wittgenstein concluded regarding the limits of language.
A recent book on the firebrand Progressive writer Rashid Jahan by Rakhshanda Jalil reminded me of the great Indian tradition — hailed in theory but suppressed in practice — of women who questioned social norms and moral values and did not allow others to think for themselves. They were naturally viewed with suspicion and had to face stiff opposition by those who regarded status quo as the natural and desirable condition.
Much before Simone de Beauvoir became a role model for the modern, free-thinking and rebellious woman, Rashid Jahan had taken the world of Urdu literature by storm. Her captivating story is told by Jalil with passion in her book “A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan” published by Women Unlimited in association with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
A multifaceted woman, Rashid Jahan was a medical doctor, a dedicated member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and one of the founding members of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA). Later, she actively took part in the activities of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). In the words of Jalil, she was “a life-long campaigner for women’s rights and a pioneering short story writer and dramatist in Urdu”.
How she came to be known as Rashid Jahan ‘Angareywali’ informs us a lot about her as well as her times.
Born on August 25, 1905, to progressive yet puritanical parents, Rashid Jahan left Aligarh to join the Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow in 1921.
Three years later, she moved to Lady Hardinge Medical College, Delhi, to study medicine. Jalil offers a portrait of the young Rashid Jahan who had “mesmerised” Ismat Chughtai who later emerged as one of the most significant fiction writers in Urdu.
“With her cropped hair, her penchant for wearing either plain cotton saris or long kurtas over tight pajamas and no jewellery or make-up, her air of extreme self-assurance and her free and frank interaction with members of the opposite sex, she was quite unlike any other young woman from a sharif household. Studying in Lucknow and Delhi, she travelled alone by train.” Jalil quotes Ismat who in an interview said, “She spoiled me because she was very bold and used to speak all sorts of things openly and loudly, and I just wanted to copy her.”
Three angry young men and a woman — Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Mahmuduzzafar and Rashid Jahan — published a collection of their short stories and plays entitled “Angarey” in December 1932. It contained a short story “Dilli ki Sair” (A Tour of Delhi) and a play “Parde ke Peechhe” (From Behind the Veil) by Rashid Jahan. Soon, abusive articles started appearing and fatwa were being issued from mosques lambasting the book, resulting in a ban on the book in March, 1933. And Rashid Jahan became notorious as “Angareywali”. This courageous trailblazer of the Progressive Writers’ Movement died in Moscow in July 1952. However, the embers are still burning.
(The author is a literary critic)
