[Reader-list] fellowship posting

[Taran Khan]

Sarai Posting April 2004
‘Very Progressive People: Stories of Women and Movements from 
post-Independence Bombay’
Taran Khan 280404

I thought of several ways of doing this posting. The most tempting option 
was to simply transcribe the interviews I have been conducting with Zehra 
over the past weeks. Not for reasons for convenience or methodological 
scruples (preserving the unmediated nature of the source) but because that 
would be make for the most interesting reading. I am avoiding this form of 
narrative because in the process of transcribing Zehra’s words to English, 
and in adding the footnotes necessary to understand them as isolated text, 
the sparkling wit of her conversation dries up.

So instead I will try and give a brief account of what it feels like to 
listen to her talk, try and communicate a sense of her conversations and my 
way of listening to them. In many ways, Zehra was the country girl in the 
threesome--unsophisticated, domestically inclined and without pretensions to 
‘intellectual-pana’ (intellectual-ness) as she calls it. (She is fond of 
this reading of herself, it is one of her favourite poses, yet constantly 
contradicts and problematises it). On an ‘objective’ level however, it is 
easy to appreciate her initial discomfort as well as excitement at being in 
Bombay. One of several daughters in a large household, a prominent Shia 
landowning family, she was brought up in a fragmented world where the men 
had brushes with new ideas, some of which trickled into the women’s lives. 
She has little formal schooling, and was fond of her unadorned domestic 
life. However, her family’s active political affiliation and involvement (to 
the Congress and later the Left) and cultural status(1)  gave her intimate 
insights into different worlds. All these influences notwithstanding, it was 
clear when she got married that she was expected to live in the city as the 
previous generation and her contemporaries lived in the qasbas. She was to 
live according to the same codes and the same rhythm, suitably adapted to 
the Bombay setting. This is what interests me the most in her narratives, 
the sense of attachment to a world that most of her friends either disowned 
or disregarded. Her admiration for Ismat Chugtai in many ways is rooted in a 
common sense of ownership-Chugtai’s work is exciting precisely because it 
speaks of her roots, a place she shares in many ways with Zehra.

This is also part of the reason why Zehra’s descriptions of figures like Ali 
Sardar Jafri and Maqdoom Mohiyeddin have always fascinated me-- because of 
the simplicity of her vision and her descriptions.  In part his is because 
she saw them up close, and knew them well. But it is also because she saw 
them as herself, with links to a world similar to the one she held dear. The 
thrill is not in listening to stories of famous people doing ordinary 
things. It is in the view she gives of a turbulent time, and of dazzling 
personalities, seen with a simplicity of vision that disregarded the 
reputations and recorded only the unadorned persona, with its talent and 
brilliance. She is fond of telling an anecdote where a jaded Kaifi, tired of 
the machinations of the film industry, says in a letter that the sound of 
her laughter brought back to him a sense of innocence and uncomplicated 
purity. To me, this is interesting because she sees herself clearly as being 
removed in a way from that ‘corrupt’ world. Yet it is this same corrupt 
world she blithely defends to her sister-in- law who wonders that she will 
let her husband stay out all hours without a word of explanation. ‘Tum nahin 
jaanti Aliya, hum bohot progressive log hain, hamare yahan aisa hi kiya 
jaata hai.” You don’t understand Aliya, we are very Progressive people, this 
is how we do things. This priceless retort, at once defense and jibe at the 
world she is defending, has come to represent for me the sum of her 
balancing act through life. One that reminds me in so many ways of my own 
attempts at living in several separate worlds. Both of us, grandmother and 
granddaughter –have had the privilege of travelling to different worlds and 
living layered lives. Both have (been) denied the luxury of denouncing or 
alienating the values and habits of ‘home’. Both have tried to explain to 
this idea called ‘home’ the things we do when we are not there, to explain 
people and behaviour ‘our’ people know only as caricatures, characters on 
TV, friends of friends who do strange things. The state of being an Indian 
Muslim woman (I dare not extend this to AnyWoman AnyWhere) has not moved 
along a continuum, a linear trajectory of forward motion (slow or fast, 
however you care to argue it). My conversations with Zehra and with Sultana 
and Shaukat put me in mind of threads on a spider’s web, meeting at odd, 
arbitrary yet ordered intervals, supporting a whole we cannot see but try to 
guess at. It is a fragile, almost invisible connection, that re-casts time 
from its linearity of past-present-future. Like characters in Calvino’s 
‘Castle of Crossed Destinies’, our stories have points that intersect, have 
moments that inspire other stories from a different time, and continue to 
their conclusions.

We have talked of several things by now, but like I said I would prefer them 
to be heard in Zehra’s own voice. I will be travelling to Bombay next week 
to talk to Sultana and Shaukat, to listen to different stories and different 
versions of the same stories.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
1. One of the most active centers of cultural production, the ‘qasbas’ of 
Awadh created and perpetuated their particular form of syncretic culture 
through the patronage of the feudal gentry, like Zehra’s family. Most 
members of the family were thus reared with an intimate understanding of 
poetry, music and criticism, as texts and as lived art especially in 
Moharram through marsias and other gatherings.

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