Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: 1948 Police Action—A Silenced History of Hyderabad
- 1 No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim
- 2 “All Muslims Are Not the Razakars”: The Political Idiom of an Independent Hyderabad
- 3 “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
- 4 For the Love of Urdu: Relocating Urdu in Postcolonial Hyderabad
- Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Police Action and Contemporary Muslim Debate
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: 1948 Police Action—A Silenced History of Hyderabad
- 1 No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim
- 2 “All Muslims Are Not the Razakars”: The Political Idiom of an Independent Hyderabad
- 3 “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
- 4 For the Love of Urdu: Relocating Urdu in Postcolonial Hyderabad
- Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Police Action and Contemporary Muslim Debate
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I am a woman and I can sense and feel the sound of an impending danger sooner than anyone. Now writers have to pay more attention to this world than ever before. The new knowledge, the dangers of the new politics have flared up this world. The darkness of hostility, destruction, and disenchantment are everywhere and constantly increasing!
—Jeelani BanoIn Jeelani Bano's 1963 novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal (The palace of the ghazals), two ashraf Muslim women, Qaiser and her daughter Kranthi, join the radical squads of the Telangana armed rebellion led by the communists that fought valiantly between 1946 and 1951. Members of an extremely conservative family known for its absolute loyalty to the Nizam and its conservative Islamic practices, Qaiser and Kranthi take a path that unsettles the entire family and the local community. In fact, Qaiser's cousins Chaand and Ghazal had been predecessor rebels in the family; however, Qaiser's leftist politics—according to one of her elderly family members—“create nothing less than extreme chaos in the family.” The entire confrontation begins with what historian Mahua Sarkar terms an “invisible everyday agency.” However, in the case of these four Hyderabadi Muslim women characters whom I will introduce in this, this everyday agency gradually becomes strikingly visible in their interactions with the family, thanks to their explicit interventions in the political sphere of Hyderabad. Along with Qaiser and Kranthi, Chaand and Ghazal demonstrate two modes of gender activism with their participation in the Hyderabadi public sphere. In what follows, I discuss the magnitude of such gender activism and of the political dimension of Muslim women's selfhood as manifested in this novel. This chapter explains how amidst the intersections of the rise of new politics in the city, the system of modern education, the Telangana activism of the 1940s, and the progressivist ideology—all four of these women forcefully demonstrate their agency as resistance against traditionalism, and specifically against the normative definitions of Muslim womanhood and the hegemonic patriarchy. During my interviews and field research, I came to realize that the life story of the author also plays a crucial role in the making of this compelling political agency of Muslim women and their participation in the public sphere.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Remaking History1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, pp. 145 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024