by NYLA ALI KHAN
(The following is an excerpt from the biography Professor Nyla Ali Khan is currently writing about her grandmother Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, the wife of Kashmiri leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah. Dr. Nyla Ali Khan teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Part I of V. Ed.)
Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan Palgrave Macmillan
Living in a culture that is plagued by a blinkered consumerism in which most people find themselves leading mechanical lives and opt for situations that would be most lucrative, regardless of the damage done to their consciences in making those choices, I write with wonder and amazement about a woman, Akbar Jehan, born and raised in the lap of luxury, who made the exacting choice of marrying a young Kashmiri Muslim greenhorn, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. The wedding took place on 5 Jamadi-us-Sani 1352 A. H., which would translate as 1933. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had undertaken the gargantuan task of determining his intellectual, political, and personal trajectory in an environment that sought to stifle even embryonic expressions of Kashmiri selfhood, self-determining, and nationalism. In this undulating landscape Akbar Jehan’s resolute and self-willed temperament is amply borne out by her intractable decision to relinquish the safety, security, and plenitude of her maternal home for life with an idealistic, self-willed rebel whose political ideology spoke to the repressed masses of J & K in the 1930s and 1940s but whose political future was uncertain. Akbar Jehan had, of her own volition, embraced a path strewn with thorns. Lest the reader perceive the former statement as the forgivable bias of a granddaughter, I would remind the reader that, historically, Kashmiri Muslims had not been allowed to climb the political and socioeconomic hierarchy during Dogra rule in the State. At the time, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s arduous undertaking of constructing Kashmiri nationalism, demanding the political enfranchisement and socioeconomic empowering of Kashmiri Muslims was a nebulous and tottering enterprise, the success of which was, by no means, guaranteed.
Despite the anxiety generated by her decision, Akbar Jehan, born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, bedecked in jewels, bedizened in satin, blessed with the knowledge that the world was her oyster, made the intransigent decision to throw in her lot with a determined and politically savvy young man whose fiefdom was the political battlefield, whose entourage comprised the poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, dispossessed, denigrated masses, whose palace was his family home in Soura, on the outskirts of Srinagar.
I came across an interesting passage on Akbar Jehan’s and Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s marriage in one of the books that I read during the course of my research for this biography:
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah soon met Harry Nedou [,] now Sheikh Ghulam Hassan and a recent European convert, who had a daughter from his wife, a Kashmiri [sic] Muslim. He contacted Sheikh Mohiuddin, Abdullah’s brother, and when he saw that Abdullah—he was twenty-seven years old then—was also interested, advised him to marry, take up a government job or settle for business and give up politics. But Sheikh Abdullah’s mission being the liberation of his countrymen, did not agree with his brother though he was aware that the rejection of the offer would create a bad impression about Kashmiri Muslims in the minds of Harry Nedou and his family. But Sheikh Mohiuddin proved correct in forewarning his younger brother, for soon Sheikh Abdullah was arrested and sent to Udhampur jail. When, on the release, the offer was renewed, Sheikh Abdullah argued that his future wife, having been brought up in the lap of luxury, would find no comfort in the company of a jail bird. But the girl and her parents assured the revolutionary that she would share the roses and the thorns with equal cheer. . . . Begum Abdullah proved as good as her word, supporting and strengthening his secular outlook and the spirit of sacrifice. (Kaul 13-14)
Not a particularly tall woman, she had a regal demeanor, resembling a statue in dignity, grace, and proportion. Akbar Jehan’s appearance, as her photographs bear out, was as resplendent as her will was resolute. I remember her fierce though uncritical pride in the political ideology and cultural regeneration that she and her husband had fought a grueling battle for. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that she skillfully straddled the linguistic paradigms of English, Urdu, Gojjri, and Kashmiri and just as dexterously straddled three cultural paradigms, European, Gujjar, and Kashmiri. Having been raised in a milieu that enabled Akbar Jehan to burgeon not just academically but socially and culturally as well, she was as much at ease campaigning at a political rally for Sheikh’s political organization, the National Conference, as she was in conversing with career diplomats and statesmen.
While earnestly answering questions about his personal life, political commitments, grueling political tasks undertaken by him, and the hardships embraced by Akbar Jehan not just as Sheikh’s wife, but as an activist in her own right, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah says,
My wife was a Muslim even before our marriage. Her father, Mr. Nedou, had embraced Islam and was running an exclusive hotel in Srinagar. His Islamic name was Sheikh Ahmed Hussain. One of his cousins had also embraced Islam and had married a Muslim lady. I have three sons and two daughters. My wife has always shared the joys, sorrows and the ups and downs of my life and has inspired me even in my most difficult days. (Abdullah 67)
I would posit that Akbar Jehan was one of the harbingers of State feminism in J & K. I borrow Gul Ozyegin’s proficient definition of State feminism: “the inclusion of women in political citizenship and top-down reforms initiated by the State, without the notable participation of women, for the improvement of the legal, social, and economic status of women” (33). With the oral and historical resources on Akbar Jehan available to me, I investigate the impact of her work for the legal, social, economic status of women in J & K. She was an passionate advocate of women’s education, which would place girls, including those of impoverished backgrounds, in “the public world of money-making, power, and scientific and intellectual life with a mission of modernizing the country and its people, side by side with their male peers” (Ozyegin 33). Akbar Jehan’s work with Lady Mountbatten, wife of the first Governor General of post-Partition India, Lord Mountbatten, in the repatriation of young women who had forcibly been removed from their families during the turbulent and bloody partition of the country, was exemplary. She worked indefatigably to restore the honor of those unfortunate women who had borne the brunt of communal vendetta, recalls her older daughter, Khalida Shah (Conversation with author, 1 February 2012). To what extent did Akbar Jehan’s vision of a modern Kashmir challenge the contours of traditional roles for women and domesticity? Was her ardent wish that women search for parity with men inundated with patriarchal contradictions?
The early part of her life with Sheikh, even as the consort of the Prime Minister of J & K was constrained by hardship, uncertainty, political duplicity, privation, and constant attempts to curb freedom. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s ouster on August 9, 1953, at the behest of Jawaharlal Nehru, and his subsequent arrest because of Sheikh’s vociferous protests against, what he perceived as, endeavors to erode the constitutional autonomy of the state and legitimize its integration into the Indian Union was an event that alienated the Kashmiri masses and cast his immediate family as personae non grata. The reproduction of Sheikh’s testimony regarding his arrest in 1953 and the plight of his persecuted family might benefit the reader:
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com
Part II of this excerpt will appear in tomorrow’s edition of Globeistan.