To Write of the Conjugal Act:

Intimacy and Sexuality in Muslim Women's

Autobiographical Writing in South Asia
SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY
Loughboroußh University

I N MEMOIRS OF A REBEL PA7ÍYC£55,PrincessAbidaSultaanofBhopal

wrote franldy of the first night in 1933 of her brief married life with the man
who had been her childhood friend, Nawab Sarwar Ali Khan of Kurwai:
Immediately after my wedding, I entered the world of conjugal trauma.
I had not realized that the consummation that followed would leave me
so horrified, numbed and feeling unchaste. The fact that this trauma was
being perpetuated by a person whom I genuinely cared forfilledme with
greater revulsion. Due to our pristine, religious upbringing I could not
bring myself to accept marital relations between husband and wife and
considered the conjugal act unchaste, dirty and vulgar. My re\'ulsion for
marital sex produced an equally fi-ustrating and damning reaction firom
my husband. He soon showed his bitterness and insensitivity towards
me by doing what I despised most in men: he became slothfijl, gambling
with his own domestic servants and leading a life of idle leisure. We soon
had separate bedrooms and within a few weeks, our marriage was on the
rocks, existing only on paper and for the sake of appeai'ances.'
Reflecting on this passage on the occasion of the memoirs' publication
in Pal<;istan in 2004—sadly, after the author's death—I interpreted this
emotional disclosure as evidence of the memoirs' location "only on the
periphery of the long tradition of biography and autobiography in Islam."^
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 40th Annual Conference on South
Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 21-23 October 2011; and at a worlahop titled
"Women's Autobiography in Islamic Societies: Representation and Identity," at the Ameri-
can University Sharjah, 29 October-1 November 2011. I am extremely grateñil to par-
ticipants on both occasions for their rich comments and suggestions. My thanks also to my
Loughborough colleague Marcus Collins and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the
History of Sexuality tor their care&l and constructive reading of a later draft.
' Abida Sultaan, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess {Kzachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 98.
" Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, "Introduction: A Princess Revealed," in ibid., xx.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 23, No. 2, May 2014
© 2014 by the University' of Texas Press
DOl: 10.7560/1HS232Ö1

155
156 SioBHAN LAMBERT-HURI.KY

Islamic life stories, other scholars had argued, would not reveal an author's
feelings so completely, particularly on a sexual theme.' Introspection and
individualité' were the purview of the Western autobiographical tradition.
My intellectual response to these intimacies was, I would expect, not
entirely surprising. Popular perception would suggest that, beyond the "loss
and tell" memoirs of the super-rich, Muslim women simply do not write
about intimate relations nor express their sexuality in an explicit way. In
South Asia especially, the cultural codes of modesty defined by sharam and
fezÄi, shame and honor, may be presumed to militate against such public
revelations of love, lust, and the conjugal act. Indeed, a recent article in
the popular Indian press, revealingly titled "Internal Affairs," seemed to
suggest that this reticence to "confess" all was not something particularly
female or Muslim but actually a feature of Indian memoirs generally, even
in the contemporary context."^ In support, several authors were quoted
who had recounted some deeply personal moments in their life stories
but not those connected with an "ex-husband" or a "girl he loved."^ As
one author justified his omissions, "I have been selective in terms of ethics
here."* The only exception to this sexual silencing mentioned in the article
was Padma Desai's Breaking Out., in which she recounted her "violation
by a man following a deliberate seduction" and the way in which "marital
relations had infected [her] with venereal disease."^ But it seems significant
that Desai has been living and writing in the United States since the 1950s
and thus constructs herself, even in the subtitle of her book, as being on
an "American journey." Americans, this would seem to suggest, not only
tolerate sexual revelation but seem to expect it, while Indians, in the main,
remain deeply uncomfortable with the "confessional"—the unmentionable
"C word," according to the article.**
The idea of Muslim women being desexualized in public discourse is not
one that has always held true. Scholars of Orientalism have written at length
on the centralit)' of the sexualized "Oriental woman"—beautiflil, sensuous,
but captured in the gilded cage of her harem—to Western conceptions of "the
Orient" fi'om the eighteenth century onwarei.^ For evidence, one need look
no further than those highly celebrated paintings by European artists of the
See, for example, Gustave E. von Ciruncbaum's seminal essay "Self-Expression:
Literature and History," in Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation, 2nd ed.
(Ciiicago; University of C'hicago Pre.ss, 1952).
* Paramita Ghosii, "Internai Affairs," Hindustan Times, 26 June 2011, http://\vww
.iiindustantimes.eom/lnternal-af'fair.s/Articiel-ZlSSlÇ.aspx.
" Shobiia De, Shobha at Sixty: The Seerets ¡if Getting It Rijjht (Delhi: Penguin, 2010);
Swapan Setii, This Is All I Have to Say (Delhi: Roii Books, 2010).
" Ghosh, "Internal Affairs."
' Padma Desai, Breaking Out: An Indian Woman's American Journey (Delhi: Penguin,
2012).
" Ghosh, "Internal Affairs."
' See, for example. Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman
Harem (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univcrsit\' Press, 2004), chap. 1.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 157

nineteenth century, a prime example being Eugène Delacroix's The Women

of Algiers (in Their Apartment) (1834), with its languorous concubines
reclining with their opium pipes. The political purpose of these eroticized
images, whether visual or literary, is captured by Reina Lewis: "For men, the
harem woman trapped in a cruel polygamous sexual prison was a titillating
but pitiful emblem of the aberrant sexuality and despotic power that char-
acterized all that was wrong with the non-Christian Orient."'" According
to Billie Melman, Western women's writings about the harem—from Lady
Mary Wortley Montague's Constantinople letters onward—tended to be
more heterogeneous than those of their male contemporaries. Specifically,
they underlined the privileged access of the female observer and varied with
their own social concerns." And yet, as Lewis puts it so evocatively, they still
did not "evacuate the sexual and the fantastical" from their writings, often
following their menfolk to construct women's spaces as a "voyeuristic sexual
sphere" characterized by "sexual depravity and random cruelty."'^
As to how Muslim subjects themselves construed sexuality, the ewdence is
far more scant. While there is some analysis of Islam and sexualit}' in current
contexts, particularly with reference to religious customs and reproductive
health, only a few scholars have sought to apply the conceptual lens of gender
and sexuality to the Muslim past—and much of that writing, thanks to the
pioneering work of Afsaneh Najmabadi, Janet Afary, and Kathryn Babayan,
focuses on Iran.'' A book promisingly titled Sex and Society in Islam actually
proves to be a study of birth control in premodern Arab societies. Still, the
author, B. F. Musallam, points out how different notions of sexual moral-
ity were in classical Islam than in medieval European Christianity. Wliile
Christians encouraged "restraint and postponement," considering sex only
appropriate for procreation within monogamous and permanent marriage,
Muslims recognized intercourse as a "legitimate" activity, including for "sexual

'"Ibid., 13.
" Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992).
'^ Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 13.
Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and
Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge, IvlA: Harvard University Press, 2008);
Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal
Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University' Press, 2008). For an overview
of "Islamicate sexuality studies," see Valerie Traub, "The Past Is a Foreign Country? The
Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies," in Babayan and Najmabadi, Islamicate
Sexualities, 1-40. As Traub notes, lesbian and queer sexualities have been perhaps best served
in Middle Eastern scholarship. See also Frédéric Lagrange, "Sexualities and Queer Studies,"
in Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures, ed. Suad Joseph (Leiden: Brill, 2003). On
the contemporary Muslim world, see, for example, Linda Rae Bennett, Women, Islam and
Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality and Reproductive Health in Contemporary Indonesia
(London: Routledge, 2005); and Margot Badran, ed.. Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights,
Sexuality and Law (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
158 S l O B H A N L A M B E R T - H U RI. KY

flüfillment." The potential for multiple partners was, moreover, facilitated

by such practices as polygamy, concubinage, and divorce.''' In his impor-
tant Producing Desire., Dror Ze'evi has explored how this moral code—by
which sex was treated as a "natural human pursuit"—remained prevalent in
Ottoman discourses fi'om the sixteenth century up until the nineteenth. At
this point, he argues. Western influences inhibited male sexual expression.'"
But what of female sexual expression? A broad survey of autobiographical
writings composed by Muslim women in various South Asian languages,
including Urdu, English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Malayalam, mostly
from the nineteenth century onward leads to some perhaps surprising
findings. One is that those popular presumptions about Muslim women's
silence on intimate matters do not always hold true. My aim here, then, is
to explore when and in what contexts South Asian Muslim women have,
or have not, expressed a sexualized self in their autobiographical writings
in an attempt to interrogate the cultural norms that allow intimate revela-
tion. The phrase "intimate revelation" is used very purposefully here to
reflect an intimacy beyond sex. It is found in heterosexual relationships
within the framework of love or marriage—though not necessarily both.
It is sometimes about desire—but not always. And it only rarely addresses
sexual violence or same-sex encounters. In this way, my discussion differs
from some other academic writings on the history of sexuality with their
leanings, in the South Asian context anyway, toward "deviant" or "dissident"
sexualities.'* Still, it builds in many ways on those historical studies that
seek to understand the way in which love and sexual desire are translated
into a set of discourses contingent on gender, culture, and time.'^
The sources employed come fi^om all parts of the Indian subcontinent—or
at least those that have sported a substantial Muslim population: what is
now Pakistan and Bangladesh but also Delhi, Mumbai, Rampur, Bhopal,
Hyderabad, and elsewhere. They also include a number of different types
of autobiographical writing—fi'om memoirs and travel narratives to poems,
religious treatises, and novels. Not all of these sources may be identified
immediately as autobiographical, but an attempt has been made to stretch
the rubric in order to consider not only the silences and the explicit but also
the more oblique reflections on female sexualitj'. "* Still, the material used

'* B. F. Musalkini, Sex and Society in hlntn ((Cambridge: C'Linibridgc University Press,
1983), 10-11.
'" Dror Ze'evi, Producing Desire: Chanjfinji Se.xual Disconrse in the Ottoman Middle East,
1500-1900 (Berkeley: University ot"C;alifomia Pres.s, 2006).
"• Consider, for example, Ruth Vaiiita, ed., Qitcerinji India: Same-Sex Lore and Erotieism in
Indian Culture and Society {\.onáon\ Roiitledge, 2001 ); and Anjali Arondekar, For the Record:
On Sexualiv\' and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke Uni\'ersity Press, 2009).
" See, for example, Franccsca Orsini, ed.. Love in South Asia: A Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Pre.ss, 2006).
'" For a fiirther justification ot this extended definition on autobiography, see Siobhan
Lambert-Hurley, "Lifc/Hi.story/Arehi\'e: Identifj'ing Autobiographieal Writings by Muslim
Women in South Asia," Journal of Women's History 2S, no. 2 (2013): 61-84.
 To Write of the Conjußal Act 159

here is necessarily selective. A focus on the historical, for instance, means

that a number of more contemporary examples have been left to others
for further analysis.'' There is also no assumption that the sample is some-
how representative of Muslim women or South Asian society as a whole.
It probably goes without saying that, especially in a region of low literacy,
it has been primarily elite women with a unique experience to share—like
the "rebel princess" with whom I started—who wrote autobiographies.^"
Nevertheless, as the examples will make clear, by the second half of the
twentieth century more "ordinary" women and even the illiterate were
choosing to record their life stories and finding ways to do so.
In the sections that follow, female authors are categorized in three ways:
those who silenced their sexualities, those who expressed their sexualities in
an oblique fashion, and those who shared their intimacies quite freely. Not
only do I examine the form and content of the relevant autobiographical
extracts, but I also consider the identity markers of these women in terms of
social standing, education, family background, and geographical location in
order to position them in cultural terms. The examples employed will also
be considered roughly in terms of temporal sequence—though sometimes
that will mean starting in the near present and working backward—in order
to make clear the significance of historical moment. I seek to show that,
perhaps contrary to conjecture, it was those women who were most closely
connected to the colonial state who failed to reveal themselves on a sexual
theme or did so obliquely. In addition, I assess the importance of zenana
culture to these distinctions in order to break down the simple dichotomies
often made, especially with reference to autobiographical writing, between
a "West" that reveals all and Islamicate societies that do not.^'

SEXUAL SILENCES

Many female autobiographers did wöi write about their sexual experiences
or intimacies. To interrogate a text for silences is a task expected of every
careful scholar, and yet it can be marked by serious challenges. How ex-
actly do we identify and then write about something that is not actually
there in the script.' Of course, no autobiography can actually claim to be

For example, Taslima Nareen's four-part autobiography. Amar meyebela (Kolkata:

People's Book Society, 1999); Utal hawa (Kolkata: People's Book Society, 2002); Ka
(Dhaka: Chardik, 2003); and Sei sob ondhokar din ¿uli (Kolkata: People's Book Societ)',
2004), the candidness of which, especially on sexual matters, has meant that all four have
been banned by the Bangladesh government; or Nalini Jameela, Om luinßikatozhiMiyude
atmakatha (Kottayam: DC Books, 2005).
^° Just 0.9 percent of Indian women were literate in 1901 and still only 18.4 percent in
1971. See Shahida Latif, Muslim Women in India: Political and Private Realities (Delhi: Kali
for Women, 1990), 153-55.
Zenana literally means "pertaining to women," but in South Asia it generally reters to
the part of a house reserved for women of the household.
160 SIOBHAN L.AMBERT-HURI.KY

complete: every life story is inherently selective and thus constructed.^^

As such, we can assume that every autobiography has its omissions and
silences, whether these are left out unintentionally or with purpose. This
point must be especially true of inrimacy and sexuality, which, it seems fair
to assume, are part of every life, if not every life story. To identify these
gaps should be easier where we have addidonal sources on an author's
life—by the author or by others, contemporaneous or retrospective. Then,
we may plot one set of evidence against another to at least start disen-
tangling what an autobiographer chooses to tell about herself, as well as
what she does not. And yet "private" matters do not often find their way
into the public record, especially in Muslim societies—which is why we
tend to rely so heavily on autobiographical materials to uncover them. The
analyst of intimacy and sexuality in Muslim women's autobiography can
thus be faced with a kind of double silencing without ever knowing what
is being silenced. And yet there are some exceptions: cases where we do
know enough of an author's private life to know what that author has not
made public in her autobiography.
A good example is the twin travelogues of the Fyzee sisters, Atiya (1877-
1967) and Nazfi (1874-1938), written on consecutive trips to Europe in
1906-7 and 1908. If Atiya Fyzee is remembered today for anything at all,
it is usually for her "friendship" with the poet, politician, and philosopher
Muhammad Iqbal, a relationship that .still attracts attention in the popular
press.^"'While much of the gossip is based on rumor and supposition, certain
basic facts about their relationship are well known, among them that Atiya
and Iqbal first met when they were both students in London in 1907. In
Atiya's daily account of this time, however—first published contemporane-
ously in the Urdu women's magazine Tahzib un-niswan (The women's
reformer) and then later in book form—she hardly mentioned Iqbal. Indeed,
he was only referred to in passing on two occasions and, even then, very
formally as "a very learned scholar and also a philosopher and poet."'^* That
this meager description represented a silencing of possible intimacies is sug-
gested by her much later account ofthat same period in a published book of
correspondence titled Iqbal{\9A7). Here, she recounted how they met, not
just twice in London but instead very regularly and often privately, including
for discussions, dinners, and picnics. By the time of this' later publication,
the aging Atiya was living on dwindling resources as she prepared to leave
India for the newly formed Pakistan, while Icibal was several years dead and
ever more venerated—so there was good reason for Atiya to have perhaps

See, for example, Sidonic Smith and Julia Watson, Rendinjj Autobiography: A
for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd cd. (Minneapolis: Unix-ersity of Minnesota Press,
2010), 15-18.
• Saeed Naqvi, "The Other Side of Iqbal," Friday 7ï;Hf.f{ Lahore), 15 April 2011.
^'' See her entries for 22 April and 25 August 1907 in Atiya Fyzee, Zamana-i-tahsil (Agra:
Matba'Mufid-i-'Am, 1921).
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 161

exaggerated her ties with the deceased poet. And yet still she retained a sense
of propriety, describing their relationship almost as disciple to teacher.^'
Atiya's sister, Nazli, was equally conspicuous. In 1886 she was married
at the age of twelve to Sidi Ahmad Khan Sidi Ibrahim Khan, the nawab of
Janjira, apparently with the aim of raising her newly moneyed family's status.^*
The nawab's territory was a princely state on India's west coast, also known
as Jazira or Habshan. No children were born to the couple to continue the
royal line—and thus, in 1913, the couple ultimately separated when the
nawab decided to take another wife to beget an heir. Whatever the state of
their relationship by this point, the hurt that Nazli must have experienced
when her husband of neai-ly three decades decided to leave her for another
woman is palpable. One can almost feel the sadness that permeates her
travelogue, written during a royal tour to Britain, the European Continent,
and Istanbul with her husband and Atiya a few years before. Perhaps this is
why she described herself as so "depressed" that, even on her first exciting
days in London, she refiised her sister's offer to take her out sightseeing in
favor of l)ang alone in her room.^^ And yet despite her willingness to speak
openly of her emotions, she never made reference to the disintegration of
her marriage or the reason for it, only referring to her husband in a rather
perfluictory and formal way in terms of his royal duties. Her brother-in-law,
Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, later wrote a rather melodramatic novel describing
the lonely and loveless life of a nawab's wife that seems based at least thinly
on Nazli's experiences.^^ But Nazli did not talk.
So why did the Fyzee sisters choose to mask these intimacies.!' A simple
answer would be that, in South Asia's conservative Muslim society, to re-
veal a close relationship with a young poet or to speak of a failed marriage
caused by possible impotency or barrenness would have been damaging
to a woman's reputation: a challenge to her 'izzat. But equally important
here seems to be the context of publication. Both of these travelogues were
published nearly contemporaneously with the events that they described,
and so there was none of the distancing that can facilitate revelation in the
more usual "end of life" autobiography. The persons of whom they wrote
were still alive and the events still unfolding—indeed, Atiya continued a
spirited correspondence with Iqbal right up until 1911.^' Both of these texts

^^ See Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman
from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 2.
Theodore Wright, Jr., "Muslim Kinship and Modernization: The Tyabji Clan of
Bombay," in Family, Kinship and Marriage among Muslims in India, ed. Imtiaz Alimad
(Delhi: Manohar, 1976), 227.
" See her entry for 18 May 1908, in Nazli Rafia Sultan Nawab Begam Sahiba, Sair-i-yurop
(Lahore: Union Steam, n.d.).
^'^ Samuei Fyzee-Rahamin, Gilded India (London: Herbert Joseph, 1938). Eor a review,
see Times Literary Supplement, 26 Mareh 1938, 222.
^' Eor a discussion of Atiya's correspondence with Iqbal, see Lambert-Hurley and Sharma,
Atiya's Journeys, chap. 2.
162 SlOBHAN L.'^MBHRT-HURLKY

were also composed in Urdu—and a simple, colloquial Urdu at that—with

a clear awareness of their reform-oriented. South Asian audience. While
Atiya's text was addressed explicitly to her Tahzibi behen., or reformist sis-
ters, Nazli wrote that she intended her book to give her "Indian brothers
and sisters" something to "think about."''" Their emphasis on using their
experiences in Europe and the Middle East to identify possible solutions to
the problem of India's "backwardness," as they saw it, was reflective of their
own extended family's reformist bent and modernist identity. Best known
in this context is their great-uncle Badruddin Tyabji, educated in Britain,
who became the first Indian barrister and later first Muslim judge at the
Bombay high court. From this impressive position in the colonial hierarchy,
he promoted social and educational reform to his fellow Indian Muslims.^'
Significantly, it was also under Badruddin's influence that Atiya and Nazli
became two of the first elite Muslim women in India to appear in public
unveiled—a social positioning that allowed them not only to circulate in
mixed society but also to write for it. Did this awareness of writing for
men as well as women—^whether Muslim, Hindu, or British—impact what
they considered appropriate for autobiographical revelation.^ To probe this
question further, let us consider another author belonging to this early
coterie of unveiled women closely associated through their families with
Muslim reform and colonial politics: Begum Shaista Suhrawardy IkramuUah
(1915-2000). She wrote one of the best-known autobiographies by South
Asian Muslim women. From Purdah to Parliament.,firstpublished in 1963.^^
In it she documented her relationship to prominent male politicians, her
participation in the Pakistan movement, and, after 1947, her joining of
Pakistan's first Constituent Assembly as one of only two women members.
There was also some discussion of more private family matters, but never
in the context of sexual relations or even intimacies. Begum IkramuUah, for
instance, includes two flill chapters on her marriage and the "adjustment"
afterward, but in them there is almost no mention of her husband. Instead,
the focus is on rituals, food, dress, and her early experience of living with
her in-laws.'''' Glossing over the wedding night, she writes: "The greatest
change that marriage brings into the life of a girl in our society is that she
has to adjust herself to the way of life of a completely new family."''*
Interestingly, other Muslim women who wrote or published English
accounts of their public lives also failed to address intimate matters. Is
language thus important too? Jahanara Habibullah (1915-2001) was also
'"' Sec the introductory paragraphs to Atiya's Zamana and Nazli's Sair.
" On Badruddin Tyabji, sec F. H. Brown, "Tyabji, Badruddin (1844-1906)," revised
by Jim Masselos, in Oxford Dictionary of National Bioßraphv, http://\\'vvw.oxforddnb.com
/view/article/36600, accessed 23 June 2006.
'" Shaista Suhrawardy IkramuUah, From Purdah to Parliament, 2nd cd. (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
•" Ibid., chaps. 6-7.
'""Ibid., 61.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 163

part of South Asia's first generation of unveiled Muslim woman, having

left purdah in 1931 at the age of fifteen to travel first to Dehra Dun and
then to Europe on account of her sister's poor health. She wrote Remem-
brance of Days Past (2001) in a style very similar to her "very respected
and dear friend" IkramuUah—identified in the acknowledgments—when,
at the latter's encouragement, she began to record some "glimpses" of her
life.^° Focusing on her early life in the princely state of Rampur (where her
father was chief minister and her sister married the nawab), her memoirs
are organized primarily around the festivities and rituals that ordered her
youthful existence. Only the final chapter offers a "few words" about her
married life with Isha'at Habibullah, ultimately chairman and managing
director of the Pakistan Tobacco Company—and, even here, the focus is
mostly on their children.''* Her cousin Hamida Saiduzzafar (1921-88)—
raised out of purdah after her Edinburgh-educated father encouraged her
mother to discard the veil in 1911—offered even fewer personal details.
Instead, her autobiography charts the path by which she became a doctor
and, ultimately, professor in ophthalmology and director of the Institute
of Ophthalmology at Aligarh Muslim University without ever considering
the difficulties and perhaps heartache that must have accompanied her
decision to remain unmarried.'^
As this last example suggests, what most of these women had in com-
mon—besides a connection with one another—was a link to the socioreli-
gious reform movement based at Aligarh in north India. Spearheaded by
the renowned Muslim educationalist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who studied
in Britain before founding the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at
Aligarh in 1875, it represented what Kenneth Jones has characterized as an
"acculturative movement": one that "originated within the colonial milieu
and was led by individuals who were products of cultural interaction."^^ Sir
Syed's idealizing of British society- is nowhere more evident than in one of
his letters quoted in the Aligarh Institute Gazette: "I can tiaily say that the
natives of India, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated
and illiterate, when contrasted with the English in education, manners and
uprightness are as like them as a dirt}' animal is to an able and handsome

'" Jahanara Habibullah, Remembrance of Days Past: Glimpses of a Princely State during
the Raj (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), xvii, 52-60. These memoirs appear to
have been written in Urdu, but the English translation was published sometime before the
Urdu original, titled Zindagi ki yaadein: Riyasat rampur ka nawab daur (BCarachi: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
'"* Habibullah, Remembrance, chap. 13.
•'' Hamida Saiduzzafar, Autobiography, ed. Lola Chatterji (New Delhi: Trianka, 1996).
Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University' Press, 1989), 3. For a brief introduction to Syed Ahmad Khan's
career, see Francis Robinson, "Ahmad Khan, Sir Saiyid [Syed Ahmed Khan] (1817-
1898)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://w\vw.oxforddnb.com/view
/article/47667, accessed 26 March 2012.
164 SioBHAN L A M B E R T - H U R L E Y

man."'' While not all of the women named here would have agreed with
his sentiments, their own experiences of foreign travel, mastery of English,
and relative freedom of movement point to European influence in both
their lives and their life stories.'*" It seems likely that Victorian notions of
bourgeois sexuality, so filled with prudishness and restraint, permeated this
strata of Indian societ)' most closely associated with the colonial project, thus
encouraging women authors to remain stubbornly silent on sexual matters
in their autobiographies. This point will be explored further below, but let
us turn first to those who did write about sexuality, if obliquely.

OBLIQUE SHXUALITIES

To identif}' more oblique forms of sexualit)' in autobiographical writing is

perhaps even more difficult than recognizing sexual silences. How does one
tell if an author is writing autobiographically on a sexual theme if she does not
make it explicit.' Seeking to answer this question, a number of scholars have
pointed to different narrative strategies employed by authors to write about
feelings and experiences that are not considered acceptable. In South Asia, a
main method has been the use of epic, which can offer a "means of drawing
a metaphorical veil over women's voices" while at the same dme "endowing
their individual experiences with a land of validity not achievable otherwise."*'
Hence, as Velcheru N. Rao argues, women throughout South Asian history
have used the affiicted figure of Sita in the Ramayana to narrate their own
suffering.'*^ One example is Peero, a Muslim low-caste prostitute from Pun-
jab who joined a marginal Sikh sect led by Guru Gulab Das and became his
lover sometime in the 1830s. To justif\' her move from brothel to religious
establishment, she composed an autobiographical narrati\'e in poetic form
under the tide Ik sau sath kafian (One hundred and sixty verses). According
to Anshu Malhotra, the prostitute Peero fashioned henself as Sita—that symbol
of "wifely devotion and chastity"—in order to imbue herself with an "ethical
righteousness" as the "wronged" party in the story she told.*''
Another author employing a similar metaphorical strategy was Raihana
Tyabji (1901-75). She belonged to the extended Tyabji clan of Bombay

''" Aligarh Institute Gazette, 19 November 1869, quoted in Rehmani Begam, Sir Syed
Ahmed Khan: The Politics of an Educationalist {L^horc: V.inu.iiard Books, 1985), 146.
*" Atiya Fyzee, tor instance, was as often critical as celebratory of what she observed in
Britain. See Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya's Jnurneys, 39-40.
*' Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, "The Heart of a Gopi: llaihana Tyabji's Bhakti Devotionalism
as Self-Representation," forthcoming in Modem Asian Studies.
•*' Veleherii N. Rao, "A lînmayana of Their Own: Women's Oral Tradition in Telegu," in
Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula lVichman (Berkeley:
University of C;alifornia Press, 1991), 114-36.
''' Anshu Malhotra, "Telling Her Tale.' Unravelling a Life in ("onflict in Peero's Ik Sau
Sath Kafian (One Hundred and Sixty Kafis)," Indian Economic and Social History Review
46, no. 4 (2009): 541-78, esp. 561-66.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 165

associated with the reformist Badruddin, though she was actually raised
in the princely state of Baroda, where her father served in the maharaja's
judicial service. She is best known as a devotee of India's preeminent
nationalist leader, Mohandas K. Gandhi, having committed herself to
becoming, in her own words, one of "Bapu's brahmnchari soldiers"—a
cefibate devotee to the cause of India's freedom—sometime in the late
1910s or early 1920s.'''' Soon after, in 1924, she composed a small book
of religious devotionalism. The Heart of a Gopi., in which she narrated her
experience of having being "possessed" by the "soul" of Sharmila, nßopi,
or milkmaid, enraptured by the Hindu god Krishna in his legendary guise
as the cowherd.''" In many ways, this account follows a familiar narrative
form in that it employs the devotional mode of bhakti associated with the
gopi tradition. And yet, in its divergence fi"om literary convention, we are
able to see how Raihana used this tradition in order to narrate her own
self—in particular, a sexualized self that was struggling to resolve an innate
desire for sexual indulgence with her vow of celibacy. Of this struggle she
was explicit in her private letters to Gandhi and later interviews, but, at the
time at least, she seemed unable to articulate it in a more unambiguously
autobiographical form.''* By taking on the gopi persona, then, Raihana
could express a highly eroricized, earthly passion—specifically for Krishna,
who, we may even conjecture, represented Gandhi—as a means of achieving
spiritual fulfillment but without actual indulgence.*^
Writing about Middle Eastern travel writing. Reina Lewis suggests that
one narrative strategy' women may employ to discuss "unrepresentable
subjects, such as female sexuality or the author's own sexual desires," is to
"code" them as a "detailed description of physical t>'pe and costume."*^
She offers the example of Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946), who, in her
Unveiled Ladies ofStamboul (1923)., offered a "sexualised description" of her
childhood friend Djimlah, posing her as an odalisque.'" A parallel could be
drawn here with the close attention to women's bodies in the tra\'el writing
of South Asian Muslim women, particularly in hajj pilgrimage narratives
produced from the late nineteenth century. An early example is Nawab
Sikandar Begum's A Pilgrimage to Meeea (1870), composed in Urdu but

*'' Quoted in Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1976), 211.
"'° Raihana Tyabji, The Heart of a Gopi (Poona: Miss R. Tyabji, n.d.), v-vi.
'"See, for example, letter to Raihana Tyabji, 18 June 1931,in Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi Online, http://www.gandhiserve.Org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm, accessed 25 September
2013; and Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi, 209.
" See Lambert-Hurley, "The Heart of a Gopi," 22-25.
''^ Lewis, Rethinkinjj Orientalism, 147. See also Melman, Women's Orients-^ and Mary
Roberts, "Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem," in Oriental-
ism's Interlocutors: Painting;, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 179-203.
"" Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 146.
166 SIOBHAN

published only in English translation by the female ruler of the princely

state of Bhopal in central India. Here, Sikandar ( 1 8 1 8 H 3 8 ) commented
in some detail on the physical form of the women she encountered.""^" She
thus offered her own representation of Orientalized female beaut)'. Most
evocative was her description of the sherif of Mecca's two Georgian wives,
a passage thus worth quoting at length:
The Sherif has seven wives, four of whom I saw. Of these, two were
Georgians, very handsome and beautifully dressed, being, one might
say, literally covered with diamonds from head to foot. Their heads
were encircled with a wreath, composed of jewels, and when the
ladies moved or talked, the sparkling effect of these was very pretty.
Underneath this diadem, they wore on their heads very small, fine
handkerchiefs, such as English ladies carry in their hands; these were
thickly embroidered with jewels, and tied in a coquettish way. From
their neck to their waist, they were adorned with gems in the same
fashion. Altogether, in face, height, and beaut)' of limbs, these two
Georgians were as perfect women as one could wish to see.''
Of the other two wives, she only commented: "The third wife was an
Arabian, and had regular features. The fourth was an Abyssinian."" Her
frank description here is actually more characteristic of the narrative as a
whole and thus heightens the suggestiveness of the preceding passage. The
unveiled woman who, in her youth, had fought her own estranged husband
in mounted combat in order to gain control of her own territory may have
been hinting at her own unconventional sexualit)'.''"'
A third method that Muslim women might have employed to write
about female sexuality is by rooting their autobiography in fiction. Nawar
al-Hassan GoUey points to this strategy in her discussion of Arab women's
autobiography, highlighting a number of authors who used the form of
the novel to write about censured subjects like premarital sex, lesbianism,
and a woman's right to sexual pleasure.'""* An example from South Asia is
that of the celebrated author Ismat Ghughtai (1915-91), given that the
distinction in her writing between life and fiction appears to be particularly

'^"The Nawab Sikandar Begum of Bliopal, A Pilßrimaße to Mecca, trans. Mrs.Wiiloughby-

Osborne (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1870). It has been repubiisiied reeently as A Princess's
Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum's M Pilgrimage to Mecca," ed. Siobhan Lambert-
Hurley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
•'' Lambert-Hurley, A Princess's Pilgrimage, 106-7. The sherif is a custodian of the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina.
' ' Ibid., 107.
"' On Sikandar's life and reign, see Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, Reform
and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (London: Routledge, 2007),
chap. 1.
"* Nawar al-Hassan Golley, Reading Arab Women's Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her
Siorv (Austin: University' of Texas Press, 2003), 106-7.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 167

hazy. As Sukrita Paul Kumar writes, "characters... simply walk across firom
her life into her fiction and become public."" Appropriately, Chughtai is
best known for her short story LihaafÇThc quilt, 1942), in which she nar-
rated, through the eyes of a feisty eight-year-old girl seemingly intended
to represent herself, a sexual exchange between an elite woman. Begum
Jaan, and her maid, Rabbu.""^ The significance of the quilt of the story's
title comes in terms of what emerges when the two women are beneath
it: "the sound of someone smacking her lips, as though savouring a tasty
pickle."" For her frankness, Chughtai was charged with obscenity, targeted
in the press, and besieged by a letter campaign. More recently, the story
has been celebrated for its brave portrayal of lesbianism "behind the veil."°^
Chughtai also wrote an autobiography in Urdu, Kaghazi hai pairahan
(My clothes are made of paper, 1979 and 1980), in which she dedicated a
chapter to her trial for obscenity'."' There she defended her decision to write
the story on the basis that similarly "frank matters" were discussed in the
popular advice manual for women, Bihishti zewar (Heavenly ornaments),
first published by the Deobandi revivalist Muslim religious sciiolar Maulana
Ashraf'Ali Thanawi in 1905. She explained: "When I read those things as
a child my heart suffered a jolt. I thought they were filthy. Then I read the
book again when I was in B.A. [studying at the university'] and discovered
those things were not filthy at all. They were matters every intelligent person
should be aware of."*" It is perhaps no surprise, then, that she was equally
open about intimacy and sexuality in the rest of her autobiography—to the
point that the very recent translation by M. Asaduddin has been described
as "almost racy.'"^' Perhaps the reviewer is thinking of the chapter in which
Chughtai recounted her fiirtation with Zafar Quraishi Zia, mostly in the
form of a dialogue that is reminiscent of her short stories." Using this fic-
tional form seems to free any limits on her expression. When Zia asks her
" Suki'ita Paul Kumar, "Introducing Ismat," in Ismat: Her Life, Her Times, ed. Sulmta
Paul Kumar and Sadique (Delhi: Katha, 2000), viii.
"' Ismat Chughtai, "The Quilt," trans. M. Asaduddin, in Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings
of Ismat Chughtai (Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001), 13-22. According to the modem editors,
the protagonist was immediately recognizable by the author's sister-in-law (Kumar and
Sadique, Ismat, 52).
" Ismat Chughtai, "The Quilt," 22.
'* See, tor example, "Ismat Chugtai: The Quilt (Lihaaf) translated from the Urdu by
Syeda Hameed and Tahira Naqvir," on "Theinkbrain" blog, http://theinkbrain.wordpress
.com/2012/01/09, accessed 28 March 2012.
Ismat Chughtai, My Vriend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits, trans. Tahira
Naqvi (Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001), 131-47.
"Ibid., 140-41.
" Georgina Maddox, "Rebel in a Man's World," India Today, 25 March 2012, http://
indiatoday.intodayin/story/rebel-in-a-mans-vvorld/l/179307.html, accessed 28 March
2012; Ismat Chughtai, A Life in Words: Memoirs, trans. M. Asaddudin (Delhi: Penguin,
2012).
" Ismat Chughtai, "Under Lock and Key," trans. M. Asaduddin, in Kumar and Sadique,
Ismat, 33-46.
168 SIOBHAN LAMBKRT-HURLEY

about "passionate love, heartbreak, heartache," she describes her love for
an adored cousin, her thoughts on "physical love," and even her feelings
on being kissed on the lips for the first time by a "mischievous cousin."'^
Her writing thus provides an appropriate bridge to those writings in which
the sharing of intimacies was more explicit.

SHARING INTIMACIES

As noted briefly above, the one context in which Muslim women may be
more expected to discuss sexual subjects was in the "kiss and tell" memoirs
of the super-rich. One might assume that these authors, cushioned from soci-
ety's censure by their wealth and often writing for an international audience,
were able to ignore culturally defined sexual norms in a way that less elite
women were not. An example is My Feudal Lord by Tehmina Durrani (b.
1953), first published in 1991. According to the author, her aim in writing
this book was to uncover women's abuse in Pakistan's "feudal" society by
recording her own maltreatment at the hands of her "violently possessive
and pathologically jealous" husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar, himself one
of Pakistan's most eminent politicians as chief minister and later governor
of Punjab.** She thus employed a confessional mode to speak candidly of
performing her "duties as a sexual object."'^'' A short passage from the fifth
chapter is one of many such descriptions:
[My husband] continued to use my first marriage as a stick to beat me
with; my divorce and remarriage had proved to him that I was capable
of adultery. This produced complete sexual confusion in me. I was
afraid that my slightest response to his advances would reinforce his
image of me as a common slut. This was a feudal hang-up: his class
believed that a woman was an instrument of a man's carnal pleasure.
If the woman ever indicated that she felt pleasure, she was a potential
adulteress, not to be trusted. Mustafa did not even realize that he had
crushed my sensuality. His attitudes were contradictory: he expected
response, yet disallowed it. I was on automatic pilot, responding as
much as was important for him, but never feeling anything myself
If he was satisfied, there was a chance that he would be in better
humour. It was at these times that I realized that prostitution must
be a most difficult profession.'"^
Her awareness of the "perils of exposing the details of my private life to a
male-dominated Muslim society" in this way is recognized at the outset in

" Ibid., 37-38.

" See the book jacket of Tehmina Durrani with William and Marilyn Hofter, My Eeudal
Lorrf (London: Corgi Books, 1994). The book was first published by Bantam Books in 1991.
"•'Ibid., 185.
'•'• Ibid., 106-7.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 169

her author's note, and for this reason she apologized to her children in the
dedication for having to "suffer the trials of a family exposed."**^
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that My Feudal Lord was the subject of
great controversy in Pakistan, even banned initially. And yet it soon became
a "sensational European bestseller" (to quote the book jacket), published in
innumerable editions in its original English. This eager response seems to
suggest that the appetite in the West for the downtrodden but sexualized
Oriental woman is far from satiated. It was also translated into a number of
other languages, including Urdu and Hindi.** That the book is sometimes
referred to as an "autobiographical novel" may indicate that some dispute
its authenticit)'.''' Still, a number of the reviews in Pakistani literary circles
have applauded Durrani for "breaking the silence."^°
Another "shocking" autobiography written by a South Asian Muslim
woman in recent years is Cutting Free by Salma Ahmed, a renowned Pakistani
businesswoman and politician. In the book her "painful personal life," told
in "graphic detail," is juxtaposed against her successRil business and political
career.^' Especially in the fourth chapter the author wrote candidly of the
first night of her maiTied life: "The bridal suite awaited my husband and
myself Another drama, another nightmare—it was not me he was touching,
it was not me he was undressing. It was so unreal, so painfial, so shocldng.
Virginal blood gushed onto the sheets. It was a night of horror at the Beach
Luxury Hotel. As is customary, my relatives came in the morning to take
me home. I had been outraged, I felt dirty, unclean, sore, and ashamed."^^
The sensationalism of painful disclosure aside, what seems significant
to me is Alimed's connection to Bhopal: her sister, Najma, was married to
Abida Sultaan's son, Shaharyar Klian, of whom there is even a photograph
in the autobiography.^' As indicated above, this princely state in central
India was ruled by a dynasty of Muslim women in the nineteenth and

" Ibid., 5-7.

Tehmina Durrani, Mainda sain (Karachi: Vanguard Books, n.d.); and Tehmina
Durrani, Mere aaka (Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2002).
See, for example, Shabina Nishat Omar, "Breaking the Silence in Tehmina Durrani's My
Eeudal Lord" Jazbah, http://w\vw.jazbah.org/bookmfl.php, accessed 12 October 2011.
Interestingly, very soon añer I first read this book myself, I had the chance to eavesdrop on
a conversation between a group of Pakistani and Indian Muslim women whom I knew as
they discussed it between themselves. While I make no claim that their views are necessarily
representative or that this form of research is in any way scientific, their response still seems
revealing of the current cultural attitudes to témale sexual expression among some South
Asian women at least. In sum, they referred to Durrani's sexual references as "filthy,"
"gross," and "a lot of rubbish," dismissing the Hindi reprints as "low sensationalism."
Furthermore, they seemed to assume that Durrani had made the whole story up in order to
benefit from it in some way.
™ Ibid.
" See Salma Ahmed, Cutting Free: An Autobiography (Karachi: Sama, 2002).
' ' Ibid., 26-27.
'•' Ibid., 186.
170 SIOBHAN LAMBKRT-HURLHY

early twenrieth centuries (1819-1926), nearly all of whom produced au-

tobiographical writings of one sort or another. Most revealing of conjugal
intimacy was the third ruler, Nawab Shah Jahan Begam (1838-1901). In
her encyclopedic advice manual for women, Tahzib tm-niswan wa tarbiyat
ul-insan (Women's reform and the cultivation of humanity), first published
in 1889, she asserted a woman's right to carnal pleasure using her own
experiences as illustration. Specifically, she explained how she had not felt
sexually ftilfilled by her first husband, the much older and already married
Baqi Muhammad Khan, with a consequence that her whole youth had been
lost in "suffering and sadness" {ranj ogham). After his death, however,
things improved dramatically thanks to her controversial remarriage in
1871 to her personal secretary, Siddiq Hasan Klian. The pleasure result-
ing from this sexual coupling led her to assert that she had never been so
happy. Her comments are typical of a book that, in general terms, sought
to give women some control over their own lives by teaching them about
pregnancy and childrearing, as well as Islamic ritual.^'' And yet her com-
ments are somewhat surprising if one considers that her new husband was
a leading figure in the Ahl-i-hadith, a reformist Muslim movement known,
in Barbara Metcalf's words, for its "intensity and extremism."''''' Indeed, it
was Khan's radical stance on jihad and his confi"ontational style that brought
Bhopal state, otherwise known for its conspicuous loyalty to the British
Grown, into confiict with the colonial government in the late nineteenth
century. Glearly, sexual satisfaction and a happy marriage were, for Shah
Jahan, an adequate trade-off for a damaged public reputation.^''
Less revealing, though still germane, arc the writings of her daughter,
the last of Bhopal's female dynasty, Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam (1868-
1930). She composed her autobiography in Urdu in three parts in the
1910s, though it achieved greatest circulation in the English translarions
produced in the 1920s. In some of her reformist literature, she spoke out
against explicit discussion of the sexual, berating Western authors for de-
bating private matters that could only elicit "shame and disgust" in good
Muslims.^^ Appropriately, then, she was rather too circumspect to describe
sexual relations with her husband, Ahmad Ali Klian—though not, it should
be noted, too prudish to conceive five children. And yet the occasion of
his death in 1902 inspired a poignant rendering of their relationship from
which there is little doubt of the affection and tenderness they shared:
My pen may write the word "grief" and my tongue may utter it, but
the intensity' of my feelings no words written or spoken can adequately

" Shah Jahan Begam, Tahzibtm-nisivan wa tarbiyatul-insan (T>c\\\\: Matba'-i-Ansari, 1889).

'" Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India (rcpr., Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 268.
^ On this confrontation, see Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, 33-34.
' ' Sultan Jahan Begam, Al-hijab or Why Purdah Is Necessary (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink,
1922), 148.
 To Write of the Conjugal Aet 171

express. . . . To be deprived in the twinkling of an eye of one who had

been my best friend and helpmate for twenty-seven years, whose ad\ice
and affection had been my best guide during my trials and anxieties,
and whose sympathy and love my best support, was indeed a terrible
affliction. To lose him now that a sea of difficulties confi-onted me and
I needed the help of his wise counsel more than ever, was worse than
an affliction—it was an unbearable calamity.^*
The Victorian ideal of companionate marriage—^so apparent in her reform-
ist writings, in which emphasis was also placed on the Quranic adage that
the sexes should "be to each other as ornaments" (2:187)—is borne out
in this account of her own life and love.^'
Could Bhopal's unique dynasty, then, have fostered a cultural milieu that
enabled some Muslim women at least to write about sexualit}' and intimacy?
We have considered already the evidence ofAbida Sultaan and Salma Ahmed,
born or married into the Bhopal royal family. But what of other, more ordinary
women fi'om the state? Relevant here is Saeeda Bano Ahmed's Dagar se hat
kar{Oifxht beaten path)—published toward the end of her life in the 1990s
against the wishes of her own sons but then recognized with a book award
fi-om the Urdu Academy in Delhi.*° The author is perhaps best known as the
first woman news reader on All India Radio, having moved fi-om Lucknow to
Delhi in 1947 w t h only her youngest son in tow to li\'e the life of a "single
individual."^' Refiected in this description was her separation fi-om her hus-
band. Abbas Raza, afi:er a stormy marriage told with great forthrightness in
her autobiography. A parallel may again be drawn here with the writing of her
contemporary Abida Sultaan, with whom Saeeda Bano was, according to her
niece, "veryfi-iendly,"having also been born and raised in Bhopal around the
same time. Like Abida, Saeeda Bano recounted her discomfort upon being
expected to initiate an "intimate relationship" with her husband after their
marriage in 1933 and how, on their wedding night, she reftised to even lie
next to him on the basis that she had never before met him. Reflecting on
this uncomfortable episode in her autobiography, she attributed her youthfial
behavior to naïveté: "I was completely unfamiliar with the carnal nature of
men and its relevance for conjugal life."^"
More unexpected in Saeeda Bano's account is the second significant
relationship, which she described as having happened in Delhi after India's
'* Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam, An Account of My Life, vol. 2, trans. Abdus Samad Khan
(Bombay: The Times, 1922), 36-37.
Eor comparison with her reformist writings on companionate marriage, see Lambert-
Hurley, Muslim Women, 151.
*° Interview with her niece, Sakina Hassan, 13 Eebruary 2006.
*" Saeeda Bano, Dagar se hat kar (New Delhi: Sajad, 1996), 136. I am indebted to Asiya
Alam for her dedicated analysis of this text in a paper titled "Intimacy against Convention:
Marriage and Romance in Syeda Bano's Dagar se hat kar,'" given at the 40th Annual
Conference on South Asia, University ofWiseonsin-Madison, 21-23 October 2011.
'^ Bano, Dagar se hat kar, 38.
172 SioBHAN LAMBERT-HURI.HY

independence in 1947. Through a family friend, she met lawyer Nuruddin

Khan, who, like herself, was married with children but to an English woman
of Jewish descent who had converted to Islam. Faced with Delhi's tumult
during the partitioning of India, this woman and her children had returned
in 1947 to London, where they remained until 1955. It was during this
period of separation that, according to her account, Saeeda established a
friendship with Nuruddin that then developed inte:) a passionate affair that
lasted almost uventy-seven years. While she portrayed herself as resistant
at first to Nuruddin's advances, it was not long before she gave in fully
to this man who made her heart "leap with joy." When his wife returned
to Delhi and demanded that the affair end, it was Saeeda who could not
allow it to stop."' Instead, she and Nuruddin continued to meet privately
at her home, apparently with the knowledge of her fi-iends, relatives, and
children, who, according to her account, "kept the prestige of my lifest^'le"
by showing respect toward her and her lover."* Refiecting back on their
taboo relationship, she wrote: "Today when I write this, it seems childish.
But at that time, to see his gaze, to meet him for a few minutes was a mat-
ter of life and death. . . . Like the travelers of the last night, we played this
youthful game until the age of 60,65 and even 70. What strange proclivities
are engendered by prohibition."*" Clearly, as an educated and financially
independent woman in a new India—a positioning, I would conjecture,
facilitated by her Bhopali upbringing—Saeeda Bano felt empowered not
only to pursue this prohibited relationship but also to write about it.
Her example is compelling. But it would be remiss to limit this analysis
to women authors connected with Bhopal when comparable accounts
of sex and love abound from other geographical contexts too—not least
other "Muslim" princely states. We may consider Bilquis Jehan Khan from
Hyderabad (b. 1930) and Princess Mehrunissa of Rampur (b. 1933),
who also wrote about that important "first night" of marriage, whether
"traumatic" or just bewildering.*'' Others, like Hameeda Husain Raipuri
(1918-2009)—author oí Humsafar, first published in Urdu in 1992 but
translated recently into English as My Fellow Traveller—narrated with great
intimacy a full life shared with a partner of distinction, often against the
princely backdrop of Hyderabad."^ Pertinent too is the autobiography of
the well-known actress Zohra Segal (b. 1912), originally from a landowning
family connected with Rampur's princely state. She broke with tradition to

'•' Ibid., 186-90.

"" Ibid., 226.
' ' Ibid.
*'' Bilquis Jehan Klian, A Sonjj for Hyderabad: Memories of a World Gone Bv (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 114; Princess Mehrunissa of Rampur, An Extraordinary
Life{Noida, IN: Brijbasi Art, 2006), 100.
Hameeda Akhtar Husain, Humsafar {KM-cidVv. Danyal, 1992); and Hameeda Akhtar
Husain Raipuri, My Eellow Traveller: A Translation of Hum.mfar{Kwnchi: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 173

marry Kameshwar Segal, a non-Muslim many years her junior with whom
she worked at the Uday Shankar India Cultural Centre at Almora in the
early 1940s.***' Another actress, Shaukat Kaifi (b. 1928)—involved, like Segal,
with the leftist theater group the Indian People's Theatre Association—^was
even more protracted in her account, written in Urdu, of the flirtations that
led to her "love marriage" to poet and Communist Kaifi Azmi after their
first meeting at a mushaira (poetic symposium) in her native Hyderabad in
1947.^' She goes so far as to reproduce her own love letters, in which she
wrote with "complete abandon": "Kaifi, I love you boundlessly. No power
in the world can stop me coming to you; no mountain, no river, no sea,
no people, no sky, no angel, no God; and God alone knows what else."'"
His own love letters, inscribed in blood in the original, are replicated too,
with the effect that the autobiography reads as one great love story." The
language chosen for their correspondence suggests how Urdu—traditionally
the registry of love in South Asian poetry—may have been used to express
the kinds of intimacies not always possible in prose.'^
Or was this actress, used to performing great love stories on the stage
or screen, performing them with comparable intimacy in her autobiogra-
phy? We may think here too of Begum Khurshid Mirza (1918-89), one
of Bombay's early film stars whose celluloid identity' was Renuka Devi and
who invited the readers of her autobiography to eavesdrop on the most
intimate moments of her courtship, just as they had in the films in which
she acted in her youth.'' And yet one of the most evocative narrations of
the closeness of marital relationship comes not from an actress but from a
farmer(ofsorts), namely, Safiajabir Ali (1893-1962). Composed in Urdu
at different moments in the 1920s and 1940s, her manuscript memoirs offer
an intimate view of love in that she wrote rather flirtatiously of her courtship
and then marriage to her cousin Jabir Ali, telling of "shared secrets" and
covert letter writing and even ogling him at family cricket matches! To get
a sense of her tone, it is worth quoting one illustrative section at length:
I began to think like my dear brother Hattoo, that there was no-one
to compare with Jabir. He was the King, the leader! I didn't notice or
pay any attention to any of the others! We were of course on friendly
terms with all the other boys in Hattoo's group, but Jabir was someone
Joan L. Erdman with Zohra Segal, Stages: The Art and Adventures of Zohra Segal
(Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997), 104.
"' Shaukat Kaifi, Taad ki rehguzar (New Delhi: Star, 2004). The quotations that follow
are taken fi-om the recent translation, Shaukat Kaifi, Kaifi & I: A Memoir, trans. Nasreen
Rehman (Delhi: Zubaan, 2010).
'"Kaifi, Kaifi & I, 36.
" For an example of Kaifi's love letters, see ibid., 38.
'^ I am grateful to Walter Hakala for encouraging me to elaborate on this point.
Begum Khurshid Mirza, A Woman of Substance: The Memoirs of Begum Khurshid
Mirza, ed. Lubna Kazim (Delhi: Zubaan, 2005), 105-6. For example, see the final romantic
scene from her 1938 hit, Bhabi, in which she sings her love for the hero, played by Jairaj.
174 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

special. Slowly my dear Hattoo bhai started talking to me about other

things too—not just games. And Jabir began to come more fi-equendy,
often on his own, without the others. And Hattoo bhai would tell me
confidentially that Jabir liked me a lot, that he'd said this or that. I'd be
secredy thrilled, but terrified in case anyone got to know, so I'd keep
up a great pretence of being quite indifferent to Jabir in ftont of others
and quarrel and fight with him, pull his hair (which was very curly),
pinch him, smear his face or nose with soap—all that ldnd of thing.
Then he came and spent the summer with us in Matheran. We'd be to-
gether all day, and keep on teasing each other. I'd begun to guess firom
Jabir's manner—his expression, how he'd begun to feel about me.'*

It is important to recognize that Safia Jabir Ali was of the same extended
Tyabji family as the Fyzee sisters and Riihana discussed abo\'e—indeed, Safia's
own father was the aforementioned educational reformer Badruddin Tyabji.
As his youngest surviving daughter—only thirteen at the time of his death
in 1906—she may not have been so inculcated with his Victorian-inspired
reformist ideals as her older cousins. In fact, she and her husband made a very
conscious effort to put physical distance—and thus, we may conjecture, intel-
lectual distance too—between themselves and the British rulers so cultivated
by her father. Thus in the mid-1920s they left their extended family in the
great colonial city of Bombay to set up a farm in the then "completely iso-
lated" area of Chembur: even the nearest railway station, that potent symbol
of colonial influence, was several miles away.'''' Her memoirs, though now
preserved in a nadonal archive, were not intended for a public audience, as
were the writings of her cousins, but instead were addressed directly to "my
dear Amir," her only and much-loved son. Writing for this private audience
in their own intimate setting, she could write of her husband's love—and
insinuate more—in a way that her cou.sins perhaps could not.
Other women on the physical and intellectual peripheries of empire
were similarly emboldened—even to the point of narrating extramarital
intimacies. Running through the life story of Hamida Rahman, a female
educationalist and political activist from east Bengal born in the late 1920s,
is the story of her relationship with Palash. Palash first appears in Jibon
smriti (Memories of my life) in the first chapter as a student who came to
lodge in her father's home in the mid-1930s. He is said to have inspired
her to study and to have fostered her interest in nationalist politics through
the auspices of the Indian National Congress.'"' When Palash went away

'•* "Manuscript Memoirs of Mrs. Safia Jabir Ali," Badruddin Tyabji Family Papers VI, Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. A descendant, Salima Tyabji, intends to publish
a translation of these memoirs under the title "C'reating an Identitx': The Family Journals of
Tyabji Bhoymeeah of Bombay, 1877-1944." There are no page numbers to this manuscript.
'" "Manuscript Memoirs."
'* Hamida l^hman, ]ibon smriti ( Dhaka: Naoroze Kitabistan, 1990 ), chap. 1.1 am indebted
to Sarmistha Gupta tor working with me to tran.slatc this text fi'oni the original Bengali.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 175

to further his studies, he still returned for holidays, occasions that inspired
great excitement in the young Hamida. As she wrote without inhibition:
"That day on the night of Eid I would wait for him. It was a very impor-
tant moment for my life. I would keep walking in front of my gate until he
came that evening on his small bicycle. My heart would be beating fast in
anricipation. I was afraid he would not turn up. But he never failed me. Just
at nine his cycle would ring in fi-ont of our home and I would rush towards
the gate. I would feel extremely happy."'^ She went on to explain how the
two began to exchange letters and the romance budded, leading the reader
to assume that marriage was to follow. Yet, while a marriage proposal was
made, Palash's brother did not accept it on account of Hamida's father's
refusal to pay a large dowry. Hamida states blundy—without any further
detail or explication of her feelings—that her father thus began searching
for other bridegrooms, and she married someone else in 1942.'*
But the story is not over. A year or two later Hamida ran into Palash again
in Galcutta, and before long they were meeting regularly. Her description of
this time gives a sense of their relationship's indmacy, as well as its illicitness
in terms appropriate to the seventeen-year-old girl that she was at the time:
"Palash and me would go around togetlier, we would work together in the
community' kitchens, and as a result of this we came closer to each other. At
that time my husband was not in Galcutta so Palash and I became closer. If we
did not meet each other we would miss each other immensely."'' Writing her
autobiography nearlyfiftyyeai's later, she justified her behaxdor in terms of her
youth and naivete, claiming (without being endrely convincing): "I was not
aware of the fact that in a married woman's life another man'sfiriendshipis a
crime. Palash was my childhood friend. It did not occur to me that it could
be a crime to mix with him. I was really young then."'°° Their relationship
was soon found out, however, and Hamida offered an emotional account of
how she considered suicide before deciding to devote herself to an illustrious
teaching career. Still, Palash appeared once more in the autobiography, by the
1960s a member of the state assembly, married, and a father of four—and yet
still anxious to meet her. She wrote: "I did not like the idea of him coming
to meet me. But I could not tell him not to come. I cannot deny that I had
a fundamental weakness for him.""" She was uncomfortable, but she sdll let
him \'isit—and then, many years later, perhaps to assuage her conscience or
perhaps to set the record straight, she wrote about it.
And so we have personal moti\'adon, but what of the broader cultural con-
text that facilitated intimate revelarion? Notable here is that east Bengal—far
from the centers of colonial power—also provided the backdrop for an

" Ibid.
'' Ibid.
"Ibid., 28.
™
' Ibid.
'"' Ibid., 128-29.
176 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLKY

earlier account of sexuality. Nawab Faizunnessa Chaudhurani ( 1834-1903),

a zamindar fi'om Comilla best known for her patronage of female educa-
tion, was equally open about love and heartache in her own wriring.'"^ The
autobiographical introduction to her poem Roopjalal, originally published
in Bengali in 1876, is only a few pages long."" And yet in those few pages
she chose to write about two instances of love and intimacy. The first was
a marriage proposal that her parents received when she was just a child
from her father's distant nephew, who was staying with her family. As she
tells it, the "eager" and "excited" young man was so heartbroken when
his love for her was denied that he spent his life in a "piriable condition,"
even after his marriage to another woman.'"'' Her account suggests that fate
turned against her after this incident as, subsequently, her father died and
her mother married her to a wealthy man as his second wife. She recounted
her story with a certain sense of candor:

After my marriage I spent a few years happily. My husband started loving

me more than himself He could not leave me alone even for a moment.
In the meantime, because of God's wish, I gave birth to two daughters.
Seeing the way my husband was attracted towards me, his co-wife be-
came very jealous. She started thinking of ways to get me out of his way.
Secretly she spent a lot of money on tantrics and made my husband go
against me. What surprising effect sorcery had! The person who could
not leave me even for a moment wanted to leave me forever.'"•"'
The poem that follows continues the "unhappy story" that subsequently
unfolded, aiid thus this vignette offers justification for her book as a whole.
From these selective examples, then, we see that many Indian Muslim
women—from the late twentieth century back to the late nineteenth
century—wrote about their most intimate relationships in their autobio-
graphical writings. For some, it was the shock and confusion of the sexual
expectations within marriage that inspired them to revelation. But for most,
courtship, marriage, and even extramarital affairs were narrated as a form of
love story. The colonial and reformist context of their writings offers some
explanation in that this period saw the spread of female education and, with
it, the companionate ideal of marriage, as well as a proliferarion of novels
and, later, also of films. We may consider here the thorough disapproval

"" See Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876-
1939 (Leiden: E. I. Brill, 1996), 149-50. Zamindar might be translated as "aristoeratic
landowner," though it is difiieult to ecMivey the full meaning of the term. They had been tax
collectors in the Mughal regime but became landowners afi:er the Permanent Settlement in
Bengal in 1793. By this point, the colonial power was trying to mold them into benevolent
lords on a British model. They also collected taxes and were almost rulers in certain areas.
'"•' Nawab Eaizunnessa C'haudhurani, Roopjalal, ed. Mohammad Abdul Kuddus (repr.,
Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2004), 3-7.
"" Ibid., 5-6.
'"' Ibid., 7.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 177

with which the aforementioned Thanawi treated most novels and Urdu
poetry—with its common motif of love of the divine as expressed through
the metaphor of earthly passion—when considering appropriate reading
material for young girls in his popular advice manual, Bihishti Zewar.^°^
Yet, as many Muslim women's autobiographies indicate, it was those very
writings—^with their tales of love, romance, and happy marriages—to which
they were drawn.'"^ It is thus not surprising that the very style of writing
employed by many women authors often suggested an imagination more
fueled by Victorian romance novels and Hindi films than the reformist or
historical literature favored by their male relatives.'"^ And yet the question
remains of why some Muslim women shared intimacies freely while others
did not—a question with which I conclude.

Beyond the uniqueness of their individual experiences, common threads are

found in the autobiographies of Muslim women who were able to write about
love, lust, and the conjugal act in varied parts of the Indian subcontinent—from
Punjab to Bengal, Rampur to Hyderabad—over a fairly lengthy time period.
Many wrote in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period in which
female education and literacy spread among South Asian women, print culture
flourished, and autobiographical writing itself became more prevalent. Still,
what should also be clear from these examples is that sexual expression among
South Asian Muslim women did not display a linear progression. While recent
autobiographies have been explicit on carnal matters, so too were some of the
earliest, while those in the middle—that is, from the high colonial period—
were more varied in content and tone. Even within families, like the extended
Tyabji clan, there were some women who wrote on intimacy and sexuality,
whether directly or circuitously, and others who failed to do so—even when
they seemed to have had something on which to reflect. Some employed Urdu
or perhaps Bengali as the language of love, while others—but certainly not
all—considered English to offer a means to sexual revelation not possible in
the vernacular. Other factors must thus have come into play.
What seems evident—if perhaps contrary to common expectation,
though in line with Ze'evi's findings for Ottoman Turkey—is that women

'"'' See Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfeetinj} Women: Maulana Ashraf'Ali Thanawi's "Bihishti
Zeiwr''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 323-26.
'"•' A particularly useful example here are the memoirs of Hyderabadi educationalist Zakira
Ghouse (1922-2003), who wrote at length about her love of popular fiction for a family
magazine in the early 1950s. See Sylvia Vatuk, "A Passion for Reading: The Role of Early
Twentieth Century Urdu Novels in the Construction of an Individual Female Identit^' in
1930s Hyderabad," in Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobioj^raphy in South
Asia, ed. Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, forthcoming).
'"* For a particulai'ly flowery example, see the early travel writing of Atiya Fyzee quoted
in Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya's Journeys, 30.
178 S I O B H A N L A M B E R T - H U RI. H Y

representing the segments of Indian Muslim society closest to the colonial

state or, more generally, the West were leastiikdy to describe sexual matters.
That is not to say that they were not influenced by notions of companion-
ate marriage or the great love stories of English literature to write of more
innocent intimacies. But the influence of Victorian notions of bourgeois
sexuality—famously puritan, repressed, and censorious—seems to have
been greatest on those most inx'ested in the colonial project. Of course, as
Eoucault and others have shown, Victorian society may not have been quite
so subdued sexually as is generally assumed. Still, the way in which these
discourses were translated into a colonial context seemed to have accentu-
ated sexual repression and denial. And yet colonial influence was uneven,
so we cannot simply say that it was with the arri\'al of Europeans in the
Indian subcontinent that sexual expression began to change. Instead, it was
those female authors whose male relatives worked in the highest echelons
of the colonial state or participated in reform movements inspired, at least
partially, by European ideas—like that based at Aligarh—who remained
stubbornly silent on sexual matters.
In contrast, those who did choose to reflect on sexual matters appear,
on the whole, to have been operating in a context less dependent on
the colonial state because of either inherited wealth or physical location.
Perhaps they were simply very rich or living far from the hubs of colonial
power and influence. What seems highly significant, though, is that an
inordinate number of the authors, if not princes themselves, were raised
in one of India's "Muslim" princely states, including Hyderabad, Bhopal,
and Rampur. Princely India has ofiren been portrayed as a kind of anachro-
nistic backwater.'"' Whether one agrees with this portrayal or not, it seems
clear that the system of paramountcy—by which local rulers retained some
degree of autonomy within their states, even as they recognized British
overlordship—meant that princely states offered a unique space within
which to negotiate notions of colonial modernity. Muslim reform move-
ments that emerged in these contexts may have drawn on European ideas
but, just as thoroughly, adapted them to local circumstances in a reflection
of indigenous mociels."" It was here too, I conjecture, that female authors
could use their autobiographical writing to continue the long tradition of
writing about love and sexuality within Islamic literary traditions.'" Any

"" On Orientalist stereotypes, see Barbara Ramusack, 'Ihe Indian Princes and Their States
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164-67; and Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow
Crown: Ethnohistorv of an Indian Kingdom (("ambridge: C'ambridge Uni\'ersit)' Press,
1987), 3-7.
""See Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, \77.
' " I am grateful lo Farzaneh Milani and Roberta Micallef for encouraging this line of
analysis by pointing me to examples of sexual writing in classical and early modern Middle
Eastern literature that compared very fax'orabiy with my more modern ones. Consider the
poetry of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth-century Ottoman woman, reproduced in translation
in Talat S. Halman, A Millenium of Turkish Literature: A (.'oncise History (Syracuse, NY:
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 179

easy dichotomy between a sexually repressed Islam and a confessional West

when it comes to autobiographical writing is thus brought into question.
Furthermore, we see how sexuality offered a means by which some writers
could stage knowledge of an ecumene that excluded colonial power."^
A second point to be made here relates to the importance of the in-
stitution of purdah, or female seclusion, to women's writing. Even those
female authors who were freed of the most severe personal restrictions had
an awareness of writing for an expanded and mixed audience facilitated by
print culture—male and female. South Asian and European, Muslim and
non-Muslim—that could have led to a metaphorical veiling of their auto-
biographical voices. Most, if not all, of the authors who refused to spealc
about sexual intimacy experienced unprecedented levels of mobility as part
of South Asia's first generation of elite women to leave purdah—but the
resultant effect seems to have been a silencing of their sexuality. In "Veiled
Voices," Farzaneh Milani makes the point with reference to women's auto-
biographical writing in Iran that with gender desegregation came a change
in women's language to something less explicit and more public. Seem-
ingly aware of their need tofialfiUthe image of the "ideal woman" within
a conservative society, female writers composed autobiographies that, in
Milani's words, kept their "readers at a distance.""^ In other words, even
when unveiled physically, women found other ways of hiding their inner
selves, donning theatrical masks for their autobiographical performances
that veiled their voices and, in turn, their sexuality."*
An additional factor in the South Asian context was a religiously diverse
population plagued increasingly by communal conflict, particularly in the
early twentieth century. Charu Gupta has documented the extent to which
(largely male) Hindu campaigners tried to "keep Hindu women away from
Muslim men," both physically and at the level of "symbols, customs and
culture," as a means of controlling their sexuality' and firming community
identity."' The "danger" posed to the chaste Hindu woman by the "lust-
flil Muslim male" could not be replicated exactly in reverse in Muslim
propaganda literature.""* But Muslim community' leaders were not short of
Syracuse University Press, 2010), 49. On Mihri Hatun and her poetry, also see Didem
Havlioglu, "On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets fi-om the
Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries," Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010) 25-54.
My thanks to one of my anonymous readers for pushing me to this broader conclusion.
" ' Farzaneh Milani, "Veiled Voices: Women's Autobiographies in Iran," in Women's
Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, ed. Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA: Har\-ard
University Press, 1990), 13-14. '
Ibid., 13. On autobiography as performance, see Sidonie Smith's seminal article
"Pertbrmativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance," in Women, Autobiography, Theory:
A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1998), 108-15.
Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu
Public in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 268.
""Ibid., 243-47.
180 SIOBHAN L A M B H R T - H URI.HY

motivadon for wandng to "protect their women" by controlling their sexual-

ity—whether with real or metaphorical \'eils. That women authors outside
purdah—conscious of a widened but anonymous audience—reproduced
these male strictures with their sexual silence is hardly surprising in a broader
cultural context in which a Hindu man who won a Muslim woman's love
was glorified as "the uldmate hero" and Muslim women were targeted for
conversion by revivalist organizations like the Arya Samaj and the Hindu
Sabha. "^ And yet we should not undercsdmate women's agency—a concept
so central to autobiographical writing—because liere we see women who felt
entitled to shape the discourse on sexuality whether through their silence
or, in certain circumstances, the production of knowledge.
Indeed, perhaps it was precisely those women raised within the primar-
ily female and Muslim context of an elite zenana culture where there was a
space for indmacies to be discussed among women who were then able to
translate them into written form. I think here again of "Muslim" princely
states like Bhopal, where female rule led to an institutionalization of purdah
at the court, in schools, and through the establishment of women's clubs
and organizations—and from the context of which many of the fi-anker
discussions of women's sexuality emerge."*' Young Muslim girls may not
have received a detailed-enough sexual education from their female elders
to enter their marriages in any way prepared, as many of the wedding night
surprises, if not traumas, detailed in their autobiographies attest, yet a less
constrained environment for female discussion of intimacy in their childhoods
and beyond may have influenced their willingness to reflect upon these sexual
experiences in later writing. In other words, whatever their actual audience.,
their imagined audience seems to have inspired complicity. At the heart of
this argument is an assumpdon that women speak differently to women, es-
pecially in intimate matters. One might think here of the bawdy, even \ailgar
songs sung by groups of women at South Asian weddings; as Anindita Ghosh
admits: "Inherent in them is an honest admission of love and lust in the
physical world, and open enjoyment of it."'" It is perhaps no surprise, then,
that male reformers in Bengal especially—mordfied by this open fiaundng
of women's sexualit)'—characterized wedding songs as a "social disease" in
their novels and journalisdc writings from the late nineteenth century.'^"
To suggest that zenana women might speak more freely of sexual matters
may be simply to evoke the Orientalist trope and to reproduce those earlier
discourses in which women's spaces in the East were inherendy sexual.
And yet, by using autobiography as a means to recover women's voices, I

'"Ibid., 239-42.
"" On purdah's in.stitutionalization, see Lambert-Hurley, Muslim Women, chap. 4.
" ' Anindita Ghosh, "A World of Their Very Own: Religion, Pain, and Subversion in
Bengali Homes in the Nineteenth Cx'ntury," in BMud the Veil: Resistance, Women and the
Everyday in Colonial South Asia, ed. Anindita Gliosh (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008), 193.
"" Ibid., 194-95.
 To Write of the Conjugal Act 181

hope to show instead the multiple and varied ways in which Muslim female
subjects in South Asia construed their sexuality. They may have ardculated
a sexualized self, or they may have not. Regardless, their writings show
that individuality and introspection have not been limited to the Western
autobiographical tradition—or, to paraphrase Dwight Reynolds, written in
"pale" imitation of it. ™ As early as 1949, S. P. Saksena opined in his seminal
Indian Autobiographies that "self-portrayal" was of "recent origin in this
country" and "essenrially the result of English education"—an asserdon
that still resonates in much of the scholarly work on modern autobiography
in South Asia, with its emphasis on colonial legacy.'^^ The complexities of
that legacy when it comes to intimate revelation, however, are only really
uncovered when placed in the context of other, longer cultural forms of
self and self-representation in South Asia and the Islamic world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SIOBHAN L A M B E R T - H U R L E Y is senior lecturer in modern history at

Loughborough University' in the United Kingdom. She recendy led an
internadonal research network dded "Women's Autobiography in Islamic
Sociedes" (http://ww\v.waiis.org) and, with Marilyn Booth, created the
website "Accessing Muslim Lives" (http://w\vw.accessingniuslimlives
.org). Her latest publicadon, coedited with Anshu Malhotra, is Speaking
of the Self Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia (Duke
Universit)' Press, forthcoming). She is currently finishing a book project on
autobiographical wridng by Muslim women in South Asia.

'^' Dwight E. Reynolds, ed.. Interpreting the Self Autobiography in the Arabie Literary
Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 19.
S. P. Saksena, Indian Autobiographies (Calcutta: Geoffi-ey Cumberlege/Oxfbrd
University Press, 1949 ), v, vii. See, as an example of the latter trend, A. R. Venkatachalapathy,
"Making a Modern Self in Colonial Tamil Nadu," in Biography as History: Indian Perspectives,
ed. Vijaya Ramaswamy and Yogesh Sharma (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009), 30-52.
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