Women as Participants in the Pakistan Movement: Modernization and the Promise of a Moral State David Willmer Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Jul., 1996), pp. 573-590. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-749X%28199607%2930%3A3%3C573%3AWAPITP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6 Modern Asian Studies is currently published by Cambridge University Press.

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Modern Asian Studies 30, 3 (1gg6),p p 573-590, Printed in Great Britain

Women as Participants in the Pakistan Movement: Modernization and the Promise of a Moral State DAVID WILLMER La Trobe University, Melbourne '. . . if political consciousness is awakened amongst our women, remember, your children will not have much to worry about . . .' Mohammad Ali Jinnah, addressing the Twenty-seventh Session of the All-India Muslim League, Lahore, March 22, 1940.' 'Muslim women are fully alive to their responsibilities today and are more impatient for Pakistan than men.' Begum Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, speaking at a women's fair in honour of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's birthday, Lahore, December 25, 1945.'

Photographs taken in Lahore in 1946-47 record the mass participation of women in the pro-Muslim League demonstrations against the Khizar Unionist government.3 This was the first such mass public mobilization of Muslim women anywhere in pre-independent India. The mobilization of women became a vital element in the League's tactics during the dramatic last months leading up to Independence and Partition. A small group of relatively emancipated female Muslim Leaguers from the Punjab who had been at the vanguard of the anti-Khizar demonstrations were also instrumental in mobilizing the unemancipated women of the North-West Frontier Province to protest against the Khan Sahib Congress ministry.4 This latter mobilization was evidently so successful that the British governor of the province, on seeing the crowds of burqa-clad women, was reported to have I am greatly indebted to Don Ferrell for the valuable comments and constructive critic& he contributed to various drafts of this paper. ' Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All-Zndia Muslim League Documents, 1go6zg47, vol. 11, 1924-1947 (Delhi: Metropolitan Book Co., 1982) p. 32;. Dawn, 29 December 1945. Struggle for Independence, 1857-1947: A Pictorial Record (Karachi: Pakistan Publications, 1958) p p 92-S "ahan Ara Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiografihy (Lahore: Nigarishat, 197I ) pp. 220-1. 0026-74gX/g6/$7.50+$0.10

0 I 996 Cambridge University Press

574 DAVID WILLMER declared that 'Pakistan is made'.5 It is perhaps no mere coincidence, then, that Jinnah made his statement about 'awakening the political consciousness' of Muslim women at the same session of the AIML at which the demand for Pakistan was made official League policy. The political awakening of Muslim women seemed to be inextricably linked to the struggle for a separate Muslim state in India. The question that this paper deals with, however, is whether in fact the Pakistan movement had a surplus of meaning for women over and above the nationalism of the Muslim League and why it was that many Muslim women were, in Begum Jahan Ara's words, 'more impatient for Pakistan than men.' The Pakistan movement was a peculiar case of a nationalist movement without a clearly defined nation to represent. Consequently, the movement's agenda was for the most part elusive and fragmented. The dominant ideology of the movement was a form of heroic romanticism that incorporated vague notions of Islamic revivalism. This was reflected in the kind of propaganda that the Muslim League directed towards women. As 'mothers of the nation', women were represented in the narrative of the Pakistan movement as the possessors of a special kind of power. But this power was limited to the particular historical situation in which the Muslim community of India found itself at the time and in many ways was nothing more than symbolic. The Muslim League's 'agenda' for women seems to have been mainly a case of identifying an obvious and distinct constituency which could be readily exploited for rhetorical purposes and politically mobilized to good effect. In this paper, however, I argue that the Muslim League did not generate its discourse on women independently, but was in fact drawing on already existing social tensions around gender and modernization as the source of its rhetoric. The League was in effect appropriating a self-contained social discourse in order to add social meaning to the nationalist discourse of the Pakistan movement. The social and political concerns of an educated elite among Muslim women were thus incorporated into the nationalist agenda of the Pakistan movement, thereby diminishing the potential that these concerns had to generate an independent, modernizing feminist movement amongst Muslim women in the Indian sub-continent. It was as though the grand narrative of Pakistan overwhelmed many of the more immedi-

'

Begum G. A. Khan, 'Emancipation of Women' in Quaid-I-Atam and Muslim Women (Islamabad: National Book Foundation, 1976) p. 45.

WOMEN IN THE PAKISTAN MOVEMENT

575

ate social concerns of the period, a process which has been reflected in most subsequent historiography dealing with the period."his paper, therefore, seeks to extend the historiographical boundaries of the Pakistan movement, based on both social and political categories.

I n reality, the process of social and political development that this emergence of Muslim women into the public sphere might seem to indicate was at best a n uneven one. There was the obvious unevenness between different regions, such as the highly conservative N.W.F.P. and the relatively more progressive Punjab, as the retention of the burqa in the former province would suggest. But there was also considerable unevenness of development within a province like the Punjab, where the degree of emancipation enjoyed by a woman was determined primarily by the class and social milieu to which she belonged. The same photographs referred to in the opening paragraph of this paper reveal that large numbers of the women demonstrating in public were also wearing burqa, just like the women in the N.W.F.P. I t was only a fairly small vanguard of women from the socially liberal, western-educated urban ashraf in the Punjab who were unveiled and thus identifiable as individuals. T h e rest of the women present in the pictures were rendered anonymous by the tentlike veils that concealed their individual identities. As in the case of the N.W.F.P., no doubt, it was their collective appearance as representatives of Muslim culture that created the spectacle required by the Muslim League politicians. Whether or not Muslim women had the right (in their own minds as well as in the minds of men) to be present in the public political sphere as recognizable individuals was clearly still a matter of some conjecture on the eve of the birth of Pakistan. The question of gender and the relationship between public and private space had been part of the social discourse of the Muslim community in India since the late nineteenth century. Faisal Fatehali Most studies of the period ignore women's experiences entirely. Sarfaraz Hussain Mirza, Muslim Women's Role in the Pakistan Movement (Lahore: Research Society of Pakistan, 1969) focuses on women's participation but portrays this participation as the culmination of a narrative of modernization which has the attainment of Pakistan as its point of closure. Thus, Mirza's study also conforms to the 'grand narrative' in historiographic terms.

DAVID WILLMER 576 Devji describes how reform movements in the nineteenth century aimed at women were concerned with exerting, through the process of Islamization, the hegemony of shariat values over the 'pagan' or 'nondiscursive' private sphere that women inhabited.' Devji relates this process to the loss of power and authority that Muslim men had experienced in the public political or 'discursive' sphere-the 'moral city'-due to the consolidation of colonial rule since 1857. This loss of iower, especially among the urban ashraf, led Muslim men in India to look to the home as the new stronghold of Muslim civilization in a polity no longer ruled by Muslims. Social and religious reform and the imposition of orthodox Islamic values on the private spherewhich previously had been regarded to some extent as beyond the pale of shariat control-came to be seen as the means by which Muslim civilization could be protected in India. T h e public discourse of the Muslim community was thus extended to include the previously non-discursive world of the private sphere in its range of interests. By the early twentieth century, however, the boundaries between the publicldiscursive and the privatelnon-discursive spheres had begun to overlap to some extent among some sections of the Muslim community. The female inhabitants of the private sphere had already, in the early years of the century, reached the point whereby they had a considerable influence on the political discourse of the public sphere, if the comments of one notable officer of the British Raj are anything to go by. Harcourt Butler, the lieutenant-governor of the United Provinces, wrote to the Viceroy in 1919that:

My problem is to keep the Musalman women right. If they pet a handle, as they did over the Cawnpore mosque incident, they will force their husbands and male relations to do something for Islam. No Government in the East can control a combination of priests and women.8

The events in Kanpur in 1913 to which Butler referred began with the grievance that the local Muslim community felt over the encroachment of a municipal works project onto a mosque site. This seemingly minor incident soon developed into a small-scale jihad for

'

Faisal Fatehali Devji, 'Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women's Reform in Muslim India, 1857-1900' in South Asia, vol. xiv, no. I (1991) P P '41-53, Harcourt Butler to Chelmsford, 2 0 April 1919, Chelmsford Papers (22), India Office Library, quoted by Francis Robinson, Sefiaratism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces Muslims, 1860-1923 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974) P. 294.

WOMEN IN THE PAKISTAN MOVEMENT

577

the defence of Islam against the colonial a u t h ~ r i t i e sButler .~ identified the greater degree of religious orthodoxy amongst Muslim women, in comparison to their menfolk, as a crucial factor in this early example of unified action by a Muslim community in India. His concerns in 1919 were prompted by the involvement in the Khilafat movement of Abdul Bari, an influential alim from Lucknow.lo Butler was worried about the influence that ulama like Bari might be able to exert over otherwise apathetic Muslim men via their more orthodox womenfolk. This would seem to indicate that women in their domestic territory, although spatially segregated from the public sphere, were able to participate indirectly in the affairs of the latter through the moral force of Islam. Thus, the move to exert male control over the domestic sphere, through the process of Islamization, seems to have had the ironic consequence that the latter sphere had now been given the chance to influence the discourse of the masculine public sphere through the medium of Islam itself. During the time of the Khilafat movement, some Muslim women participated in the public political arena despite the restrictions of purdah. These women were able to develop considerable organizational skills amongst themselves, and even, as in the case of Bi Amman, mother of the Ali brothers, address all-male gatherings as long as they remained veiled." Mohamed Ali also coopted his wife into speaking at public meetings in his place when he was under detention for his anti-Raj activities. His memoirs recall the male audiences who had 'their enthusiasm whipped up by the stirring address of a veiled Muslim woman'.12 Thus, even in the rare instances that Muslim women during this period crossed the boundaries between the separate female and male spheres and spoke in public, the veil was still retained as a symbol of their segregation from male society. It served as an indication that women were privileged guests in the public sphere rather than equal partners. Muslim women's political activities during this earlier, 'non-communal' phase of the nationalist Sandria B. Freitag, 'Ambiguous Public Arenas and Coherent Public Practice: Kanpur Muslims, 1913-1931' in Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shari'at and AmbiguiQ in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) pp. 147-53. l o Robinson, Sefiaratism among Indian Muslims, pp. 292-6. I ' Gail Minault, 'Purdah Politics: The Role of Muslim Women in Indian Nationalism, 1911-1924' in Hanna Papanek and Minault (eds), Sefiarate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia (Delhi: Chanakya, 1982) pp. 245-61. Mohamed Ali, M y Life, A Fragment: A n Autobiografihical Sketch ofMaulana Mohamed Ali, edited by Afzal Iqbal (Delhi: Seema, 1979) p. 151.

578 DAVID WILLMER movement in India was confined for the most part to organizing amongst themselves. The strict segregation of the sexes that characterized Muslim social life (segregation which the male-dominated reform movements of the nineteenth century had tended to reinforce rather than challenge) was thus reproduced in Muslim nationalist politics in the period preceding the emergence of the Muslim separatist movement.

During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the existing system of sexual segregation began to be contested in the social discourse of the educated elite among India's Muslim community. This contestation centred in particular on the institution of purdah. Pardai-lsrnat, an Urdu monthly published by a Sayyid in Lucknow in the early ~ g o o s boasting , a circulation of 250, advocated the abolition of the purdah system.13 By the 1g3os, the debate within the mus slim community about purdah had spread well beyond the Urdu-speaking elite of Lucknow. Violet Jones, an English missionary and contemporary observer, noted the wide range of views on the subject represented in the English-language press in India.14 The opinions expressed came from a wide cross-section of the Muslim educated elite, and presented no clear correlation between factors such as class or sex and the positions, whether for or against purdah, that various individuals adopted. What was clear, however, was that purdah was now an issue on the social agenda of the Muslim community. Moreover, this emergence of sexual politics into the public arena coincided with the emergence of a separate Muslim nationalism as the dominant political discourse in Muslim India after 1930, when Iqbal had first introduced the concept of Pakistan. In a sense, the Pakistan movement offered a new discursive arena within which the question of sexual territory in Muslim society could be debated. The empty public space that had existed in India's Muslim community since the loss of the 'moral city' in the nineteenth century had effectively been filled by the promise of the new 'moral state' that Pakistan seemed to offer. Thus, the discourse on gender District Gazetteer of United Prouinces and Oudh, vol. xxxvii (Lucknow, 1904) p. 69. Violet R. Jones and L. Bevan Jones, Women in Islam (Lucknow: Lucknow Publishing House, 1941) pp. 2 I 1-32. l3

"

WOMEN IN THE PAKISTAN MOVEMENT

579

and modernization, represented by the purdah debate, soon became closely interwoven with the the discourse on Muslim political selfdetermination, represented by the Pakistan movement and its leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The challenges to existing territorial limits that were posed within this new discursive arena met with extreme reactions in some sections of the Muslim community. Wilfred Cantwell Smith noted the hostile reception given to unveiled young women at a meeting of Aligarh Muslim University students for Jinnah in I 940. l5 This seems consistent with an image of Aligarh as an institution that was politically modern but at the same time responsive to conservative social attitudes in the Muslim community. Although the Aligarh modernists might agree on the need for improvement in women's conditions within their designated social territory, the idea of women transgressing into male social territory was another matter entirely.16 At least there was general acceptance among the Aligarh community of women's right to be present in this male space on appropriate occasions as long as their otherness continued to be acknowledged by the wearing of a veil or burqa." But the presence of unveiled women clearly challenged the whole concept of separate sexual territory. The women who were present at the Aligarh meeting were present as identifiable individuals rather than anonymous representatives of an alien culture. This was what posed the threat to the overwhelmingly masculine culture of Aligarh (influenced as it was by the British public school system)18 since it implied that women were entitled to be present in the same space as men, and on the same terms as men. When the defence of purdah entered overtly into the political discourse of the Muslim League, it tended to be in a way that was reactive rather than systematic. The conflict over purdah came to I' Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1963 [rev. ed.]) p. 182. l6 See editions of Muslim UniversiQ Gazette (Aligarh) between 1939 and 1942 for an ongoing debate on the problem of how to admit women to the university while still preserving the boundaries between male and female space, especially the article 'Education of Girls in the Muslim University', 15 July 1940. 17 The University Convocation last year demonstrated the most impressive feature of the women candidates in Burqahs being conducted to the dais by their Lady Provost and taking their respective degrees and diplomas.' Muslim UniversiQ Gazette, 15July 1940. l 8 See David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 978) for this and other aspects of the Aligarh ethos. i

580

DAVID WILLMER

the surface at the 1938 all-India session of the League when Maulvi Mohammad Farooq, speaking in support of a resolution moved by Begum Habibullah for greater participation of women in League politics, condemned the retention of purdah as an obstacle to progress. The uproar that this provoked from the conservative sections of the meeting necessitated the intervention of Jinnah in his role as Chair. Jinnah placated the offended conservatives by pointing out that the actual resolution simply stated that women should be allowed 'to organize themselves under the League in order to support it.' The resolution was subsequently 'carried by an overwhelming majority.'lg It was expedient for socially liberal Muslim Leaguers such as Jinnah to pay a t least lip service to the conservatives' concepts of sexual territory in order to retain their support for the League's political programme. In this sense, Jinnah's role in the League was a reconciliatory one, balancing the conflicting social attitudes of the various groups within the organization in order to maintain a focus on the central political issue of Muslim self-determination.

Jinnah's reconciliatory approach to 'women's issues' indicated the important role women were assigned in the propaganda output of the Muslim League. Women's support for the cause did not have to involve direct participation in the public arena, as Lady Haroon pointed out when she stated that: I t is the women who can mould and unmould their menfolk, and it is to their sense of responsibility that I make this appeal-not only to vote solidly for the women candidates of the Muslim League but also to influence their menfolk, their fathers, brothers and husbands to stand united, solidly and under one green banner of the crescent and star of the Muslim League.20

Women could respond to such an appeal without having to abandon the restraints of purdah, or could even join one of the many 'Zenana' Muslim League branches frequently mentioned in the pro-League press. There were echoes of Harcourt Butler's comments about the ability of Muslim women to exercise moral persuasion over their husbands and male relations in an appeal made by Khan Iftikhar Hussain Khan of Mamdot, President of the Punjab Provincial l9

20

Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan, p. 319.

15 December 1945.

Dawn,

WOMEN I N THE PAKISTAN MOVEMENT

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Muslim League, to Muslim women of the Punjab. He told the women that: You can strengthen and inspire your men more than any outside propaganda or appeal can. By showing courage and self-reliance you can urge your men to a self-sacrifice for which otherwise there might be r e l ~ c t a n c e . ~ '

That the Khan's appeal was made in respect of the Direct Action Campaign of 1946 was an indication of the potent source of political force that was considered to reside in the Muslim home-a force which had so worried Butler some years before. Here, however, the stakes were somewhat higher than in Butler's time. I n the same issue of Dawn as the Khan's appeal was the report that the Muslim League Women's Sub Committee in Lahore 'passed a resolution assuring M r Jinnah that Muslim women will make every sacrifice of their own selves and of their children for the solidarity and glorification of Islam in India.' 'Traditional' women could thus be seen to be supporting the struggle for Pakistan without exceeding the limits of their customary domestic sphere. The Muslim League ideologists did not need to trouble themselves over the contradictions of modernity in cases such as these. Nevertheless, not all of the propaganda that was directed at women was quite as cautious about respecting the customary spatial boundaries of India's Muslim communities. The Pakistan movement also included militants, both women and men, who advocated more direct political action on the part of women. Major Khurshid Anwar of the Muslim National Guards, although obliged to address 'over 5000 Muslim girls' from behind a screen a t the Islamia College for Women in Lahore, urged them 'to join the Muslim Women National Guards and thereby strengthen the hands of the male members of their community in their struggle for the attainment of their cherished goal of Pakistan . . .'. Begum Bashir Ahmed, speaking a t the same meeting, urged Muslim men to let their women 'come forward and assist them in their struggle for e x i ~ t e n c e . Major ' ~ ~ Anwar, at another meeting, called on Muslim women 'to wake up from their age old slumber and stand shoulder to shoulder with their m e n f ~ l k . "Clearly, ~ there were those in the League who thought that the cause could best be served by bringing women out of the zenana and onto the battlefield. This challenge to the existing notions of sexual territory was justified by

'' Dawn, 7 September 1946. '' Eastern Times, 28 May 946. 1

23

Eastern Times, I4 June 1946.

582 DAVID WILLMER the desperate times the community was experiencing, virtually a state of war in the eyes of many. For some Muslims in India this was a situation which called for a rapid acceleration of the process of social modernization. Similar sentiments could also be expressed in a specifically Islamic context. The historical precedent for women joining men at the front was pointed out at a women's prayer meeting for victims of Direct Action riots in 1946, when Maulana Abul Lais Saheb . . . praised the Muslim women and girls of Calcutta who [came] forward and did voluntary service . . . [and] related the bravery of the great Muslim women of the past who went to the battlefield with their brothers during the early advent of Islam.24

The distinctions between male and female territory became less rigid when the defence of Islam was a t stake. There were still, of course, separate roles for men and women in this state ofjihad, as the Maulana indicated when he referred to the role, that of nursing the wounded, that was assigned to women in particular. But the main point was that women could perform these roles outside of the customary spatial restrictions that had previously characterized the purdah system. The territory women were being encouraged to enter was still essentially male territory. Women were there because they were required in the defence of 1slam rather than for reasons of individual self-fulfilment. All this seems to suggest that the sexual organization of Muslim society may have differed according to whether the community was living- in a state of dar ul-Islam or dar ~l-harb.~"Vhat is clear, however, is that women were being urged to emerge from their seclusion in a context of Islamic historical destiny rather than in a context of modernity. The unique historical situation in which India's Muslim community found themselves meant that any developments towards social modernization that may have been occurring as a matter of course were swept up by the unfolding drama of the demand for Pakistan. I n this sense, an appropriation of the discourse of social modernization was taking place, one in which the individual interests of modernizing groups within the community (such as women) were made subservient to the greater interests of the Muslim nation. '"awn, 6 September 1946. 25 That is, in a state ruled by Islam or one in which Islam was in conflict with its enemies.

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Many Muslim women, however, saw the issue of social modernization as an important one in its own right, and one that could be discussed rationally in a Muslim nationalist context without nationalist rhetoric taking over. Such women were able to look beyond India to the wider Muslim world for their precedents, as is evident from a long article by Saida Begum on 'Modern Women of Iran' that was published in ~ discussion of at least two major pro-Muslim League d a i l i e ~ . ' The recent Iranian history in this article was clearly intended to provide a parallel to the situation of women in Muslim India. The writer described the 'revolutionary changes' that 'were forced on the Iranians' by the Reza Shah regime as it attempted to modernize Iranian society. She pointed out that, prior to the Reza Shah revolution, 'Iranian women were completely veiled against men, education and enlightenment, [and] Purdah in its present form, though un-Islamic, had obtained religious sanctity in Iran as it had in some parts of India.' The article then referred to the early period of Islam, when women supposedly accompanied men on the battlefield, in order to show how their position had become degraded over the succeeding centuries. I n Iran, as in India, social custom had suffocated true Islamic values and prevented women from taking their rightful place in society. Saida Begum went on to describe the efforts made by early Iranian social pioneers, both men and women, to break down the barriers of purdah. These pioneers were motivated by the concern that women, 'because of their exclusion from society, had been unable to make full use of their talent and ability-and even less to do their duty towards their country and people.' For a number of years, these pioneers battled on in isolation until at last: The freedom of women caught the imagination of the late Reza Shah and with a mighty blow at the old prejudices and customs he tore the veil from the face of Iran. From that day the women took to the social field with iconoclastic zeal.

This is clearly an allusion to the situation in Muslim India, where a relatively small number of elite families had released their women from the restrictions of purdah, thus allowing them to become more socially and politically active. Given the context in which her article 26

Dawn, r I December r 945 and Eastern Times, 6 January r 946.

584 DAVID WILLMER was published, the writer is obviously implying that the dynamism of the Pakistan movement under the leadership of Jinnah could accelerate the process of modernization in much the same way that the Reza regime had done in Iran. This process would in turn revitalize Muslim Indian society and presumably contribute to a more dynamic and progressive new Islamic state in Pakistan. Saida Begum also referred, in a cautionary manner, to the problem that arose in the Iranian case whereby some women became 'modern by becoming socially westernized'. This imposed an inappropriate model 'on an eastern soil without giving thought to whether the soil ' also pointed to the problem in Iran whereby was ~ u i t a b l e . ' ~She modernization had been confined largely to the 'social sphere', thus allowing most women 'no right of franchise and therefore, no place in the political life of their country.' This lack of integration of the social and political aspects had prevented the early promise of the revolution from being fully realized. The lesson in all of this for Indian Muslims was that social modernization and political modernization should go hand in hand in any national movement. The publication of this article in the pro-Muslim League press was clearly intended to get a message across to Indian Muslims, especially women concerned with social issues but perhaps wavering over their political commitment to the Pakistan cause. Readers at the time would have noted that women in India (those that were qualified through property or status) did have political franchise and thus the motivation and opportunity to be politically active. The Muslim League was anxious to represent itself as the most appropriate vehicle for such a commitment. Those who were able to represent the movement for Pakistan as a modernizing 'revolution', i.e., the Muslim League, were therefore also able to appropriate the energies of socially modern women for their own political purposes. The underlying purpose of Saida Begum's article was to relate the problems faced by the Muslim community in India to the question of nationalism and social modernization in the wider Islamic world. Halide Edib also made the same association with her frequent references to the Turkish example in her account of India in the 1 9 3 0 s . ~ ~ However, the conditions for the rise of nationalism in countries such 27 Jinnah expressed similar sentiments to the female students at Aligarh when he advised them 'to shed superstition and undesirable social customs but at the same time to steer clear o f the evils o f western civilization.' Muslim University Gazette, 15 November 1942. 28 Halide Edib, Inside India (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1937).

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as Iran and Turkey were vastly different from the conditions which the Muslim community in pre-Partition India faced. In both Iran and Turkey, the cultural, geo-political and historical bases for a modern nation-state were already fairly well defined before the nationalist movements emerged to take the place of the previous regimes. Moreover, the semblance of a state structure was already in place in both of these cases, hence the emergence of the modern nation-state was arguably no more than a transformation of the political superstructure. In the case of pre-Partition India, however, there was no existing state structure to which Muslims could lay claim. There was only the British colonial structure, within which the Muslims were a minority community. Some of the cultural, geo-political and historical preconditions were there, but only in a vague or fragmentary sense. Right up until its actual creation in 1947, the state (and social structure) of Pakistan existed primarily in the realm of theory and speculation.

There was, however, one notable attempt made to envisage in a literary form the kind of moral state Pakistan might represent for its citizens. This was Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's novel, The Heart Di~ided.'~ Written between 194.3 and 1948 (although not published posthumously until 1g57), Mumtaz's novel gave narrative structure to the history of the Pakistan movement's emergence by linking political events from the period with the personal and social lives of the novel's central characters. T h e novel was written from the perspective of a directly involved participant in the Pakistan movement, and is at least partly autobiographical in content.30I t traces the gradual emancipation and coming to maturity of the two daughters of a Punjabi ashraf family over a period from 1930 to 1942. T h e society described is one which had previously been divided into

. . . two parts that were almost like two different worlds, one a man's world reflecting in its myriad activities all the rush and turmoil of the world outside, and the other, a serene and sheltered domain, a woman's world where none but the closest of male relatives could enter, and where clothes and food and children were the chief interest and the main topic of conversation. Lately, however, other interests and new thoughts were beginning to enter

*'

M u m t a z Shah Nawaz, The Heart Divided (Lahore: M u m t a z Publications, 1957). See Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz ( M u m t a z ' s mother), Father and Daughter, for correlations between M u m t a z ' s life and the narrative contained i n her novel. 30

586 DAVID WILLMER this secluded domain, and its peace was disturbed by a flood of ideas from the surging world outside, a flood that could no longer be held back by its old walls and ancient tradition^.^' Interwoven with this narrative of modernization is the narrative of the gradual emergence of the Pakistan movement out of the political and social turmoil experienced by the characters. There is a clear nationalistic purpose to the narrative, that is, to represent the demand for Pakistan as the result of a developmental process rather than a mere political expedient. I n this respect, Mumtaz's vision of an Islamic state echoes the rhetoric of the Muslim League, and fits in with the nation-building mythology of the Pakistan movement and the eventual state of Pakistan itself. But The Heart Divided also speaks of social tensions and contradictions within the narrative of the Pakistan movement. I t does this by presenting its discourse on gender and modernization as a narrative in its own right, one inextricably linked to and having status equal to the nationalist narrative in the novel. Central to Mumtaz's narrative on gender is the question of sexual territory in Muslim society. This is encapsulated in the personal narrative of Sughra, the older of the two sisters who are the novel's central characters. Unlike her younger sister Zohra, who (much like the author herself had) follows a relatively secular path to modernity, Sughra struggles with the problem of how to restructure her life within a specifically Islamic context. I n order to do this, she first has to break away from the oppressive regime of the conservative family she has married into, and thus leaves her husband. Sughra then begins to establish a new identity for herself by devoting herself to social and political work for the Muslim League. She soon comes to realize that Muslim women stand 'on the crossroads' where they must either decide to 'take their place bravely beside men in the national struggle for freedom' or be confined 'to the four walls of their homes for generations to come'.32 Sughra's political work, and the extension of territory that it entails, takes her to Delhi, where she meets Kamal, a Muslim Leaguer who, like her, is trapped in a stultifying traditional marriage. It is Kamal, in fact, who first introduces Sughra to the concept of Pakistan and they soon become political comrades. Kamal also shares Sughra's sense of disillusionment with the traditional system of arranged marriage and the two of them begin to see in each other the possibility 31

32

Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, The Heart Divided, pp. ro-r Ibid., p. 336.

I.

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of a more idealistic kind of partnership. Social responsilibility and the reality of their situation ultimately prevail, however, as Sughra and Kamal realize that their love is impossible, and Sughra decides to leave Delhi and Kamal and go home. O n her return to the Punjab, Sughra then discovers that her husband has transformed his own life in her absence by devoting himself to the same cause for which she has been working. The Pakistan movement thus provides Sughra and her husband with the context in which to face the future as a modern self-contained, yet still Islamically informed, heterosexual couple. Pakistan, it seems, will be the moral state in which they will resolve the contradictions of modernity and tradition together in a shared social space. When she leaves Delhi, Sughra is letting go in two ways, one real and the other symbolic. Firstly, she is leaving behind Kamal and the totally modern, individualistic relationship they might have had if only circumstances had been different. At the same time, Sughra also represents the newly-emerging Islamic state in the Punjab, and must therefore leave behind the old associations in Delhi in order to build the brave new world in Pakistan. Sughra's narrative thus defines the parameters of possibility for the new state of Pakistan, both at the personal and the public levels. KamalIDelhi represent the extent to which SughraIPakistan might have hoped to go, but Sughra's return to the Punjab then represents an acceptance of the 'real' boundaries of Pakistan's territory. It is an acceptance that, although in the most sweepingly idealistic terms, the 'nation' of Pakistan included all Muslims in the Indian sub-continent, in reality a nation must have identifiable territorial boundaries if it is to become a state. Likewise, the modernization of conduct between men and women that the new state offers must still be contained within a framework of sociallysanctioned relationships. Thus, it is clear that some territorial restraints have to be accepted by Muslims like Sughra, both at the personal and at the geo-political levels, if the state of Pakistan is to be achieved. Mumtaz finally leaves no doubts as to the physical and ideological boundaries of the anticipated moral state that provides her narrative with its point of closure. In a sense, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz has, in her narrative of Pakistan, foreshadowed the essential concerns of modern Arab-Muslim feminists such as Fatima M e r n i ~ s iThe . ~ ~ dynamic that is described both in 33 Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (London: A1 Saqi, r 985 ) .

588 DAVID WILLMER Mumtaz's fictional/historical narrative and in Mernissi's sociological analysis involves a redefinition of private space as intimate space, that is, as a spatial relationship between two partners rather than within the family. But, again in both cases, this redefinition of private space does not mean a total assertion of the individual as the basic unit of society. Instead, it involves a notion of the couple as the basic unit within a social framework that is specifically Islamic as well as modernistic in construction. In the concept of Islamic modernization that Mumtaz and Mernissi share, men and women interact with each other to influence dynamically the process of nation-building in the post-colonial state. Mumtaz's narrative of Pakistan, in effect, foregrounds a social discourse that the state could never really call its own, that is, one concerned with the meaning of private space as it is experienced by individual men and women. As the Muslim League (and the Pakistani state after Partition) confined its activities to the public domain, this more private discourse continued to be a marginal one in political terms.34Thus, alternative texts such as Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's novel can be valuable tools for historians concerned with the task of reclaiming social meaning of this kind-meaning that would otherwise remain submerged in the dominant political narrative of the Pakistan movement.

Conclusion This paper has described the kinds of social meaning that the Pakistan movement seemed to offer one of its various constituencies, i.e., modernized or modernizing women. It is evident from both Saida Begum's article and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz's novel that, during the period of the Pakistan movement, many Muslim women were engaged in a discourse of social modernization that was centred on gender issues. Such women identified the need to integrate social and political modernization as the central concern of this discourse. The Pakistan movement, through the propaganda output of the Muslim League, seemed to be addressing this concern through its incorporation of the discourse on gender into its own nationalist discourse. The 34 The state in Pakistan has, of course, frequently become embroiled in controversies centred on gender in Pakistani society. See the many examples provided by Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Steb Back? (Lahore: Vanguard, 1987). But it must be argued that the state's role in these cases was essentially reactive rather than proactive.

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anticipated state of Pakistan thereby seemed, in the eyes of these modernizers, to promise far more than just political selfdetermination for India's Muslims. For idealists such as Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, Pakistan also held the promise of a 'moral state' in which Islamic society could be reformed and revitalized. However, this promise was in reality an illusory one, largely confined to the realm of rhetoric, since the willingness and ability of the Muslim League to act on the issues in question could not really be tested while the actual state of Pakistan remained unrealized. The Muslim League, in effect, appropriated the broad ideology of the feminists (or 'proto-feminists') in the Muslim community in the interests of its own nationalist agenda without actually formulating a definite agenda for women. Consequently, since the Muslim League had come to dominate the public discourse of the Muslim community in the last years before Partition, the real concerns of these feminists continued to be marginalized to a great extent.35 Other constituencies read different kinds of social meaning into the concept of Pakistan and responded accordingly to the Muslim League's political agenda.36 Indeed, the League's flexibility (or ambiguity) regarding social issues seems to have been one of its greatest assets in drawing together, however temporarily and tenuously, the diverse threads of pre-Partition Muslim India. These threads became woven, not only in the politics of the two post-colonial states but also in most subsequent historiography, into the grand narrative that was Pakistan. The picture of pre-Partition Muslim Indian society that emerges from this process is very much a static and monolithic one. However, the descriptive and analytical categories employed in this paper indicate a far more problematic social context for the politics of Muslim separatism. The picture thus emerges of a Muslim Indian society that was highly fragmented and in a state of flux in the period leading up to Partition. That this situation, essentially a crisis of modernity and modernization, coincided with the process of See Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, Father and Daughter, Ch. 4, as well as the frequent allusions made by the contributors to Quaid-I-Azam and Muslim Women to the sense of disillusion these women felt regarding the position of women in post-Independence (and post-Jinnah) Pakistan. 36 See, for instance, David Gilmartin, 'Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in Punjab' in Modern Asian Studies, I 3, 3 ( 1g7g), pp. 485-5 17 and Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988) for an illustration of how the Muslim League was able to appropriate the concerns of a very different constituency, the sufi of rural West Punjab.

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de-colonization in India meant that the Muslim League could be seen to be responding to the resulting tensions through its nationalist agenda. Moreover, as the only 'modern' (in the political rather than the social sense) organization representing India's Muslim communities, the League was to a great extent able t:, monopolize the public discourse on these tensions. The discourse on gender and modernization described here was perhaps only one of many such social discourses that were appropriated by the Pakistan movement in this way. It seems, therefore, that the most useful approach for historians seeking to gain deeper insights into Muslim Indian politics and society before Partition would be to look beyond the sta*dard archival sources dealing with the political superstructure and employ alternative texts that reflect the broader social and cultural context. In so doing, it should then be possible to view pre-Partition Muslim India as an historical subject (or network of subjects) in its own right, rather than merely as-the object of a narrowly-defined political agenda.