Women of the past

I have been reading William Dalrymple's White Mughals. In one of the chapters, he describes the lives of Muslim women in the Mughal aristocracy in the eighteenth century. His description is largely based on the travelogue, written by an Iranian man, Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari, called Tuhfat al-Alam. In the book, Shushtari continuously expresses his disgust at the great freedom that Muslim women in India enjoyed. They mixed with men more easily and tended to have more political and financial power than their counterparts in Iran and the Middle East. In fact, the position of women in Mughal society appears to be even more advantageous than the position of women in our society today, three centuries later. Pakistanis seem to have rejected the liberal spirit of the Mughals – with whom Pakistanis so like to identify – in favor of the puritanical social and religious codes of the Middle East. Below is an extract from White Mughals that underscores my point:

"Muslim women in India have always played a more prominent role in politics than their sisters in the Middle East. Indian society, both Hindu and Muslim, was certainly very patriarchal and hierarchical; yet there are nevertheless several cases of very powerful Indian Muslim queens: Razia Sultana in thirteenth-century Delhi; or Chand Bibi and Dilshad Agha, the two warrior queens of sixteenth-century Bijapur, the first of whom was famous for her horsewomanship, while the latter was renowned for her prowess as an artillerywoman and an archer, personally shooting in the eye from atop her citadel Safdar Khan who had the temerity to attack her kingdom.

"Moreover Mughal princesses tended to be richer, and to possess far greater powers of patronage, than the secluded Iranian noblewomen Shushtari would have been familiar with in Iran: half the most important monuments in Shah Jehan's Mughal Delhi were built by women...

"Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or 'learned matrons'; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy. As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses." (168-9)

Women and Public Spaces

It was only when I visited Sri Lanka that I realized how far behind Pakistan is in terms of women's lib. On the streets in Sri Lanka, whether in Colombo and Kandy or in the smaller villages, there were women everywhere – and I mean everywhere, not just in and around bazaars as is the norm here. They walked in groups, alone or with other men. They did not seem worried or badgered. One could tell that these women have grown up walking on the streets without fear of being harassed, humiliated or attacked.

There were female traffic police officials and, wonder of wonders, people were not hitting on them or being rude to them.

Equally wonderful was the number of stores owned by women. Photocopy shops, restaurants, grocery stores, all run by women.

I even saw women on motorbikes, something completely unimaginable here.

Well, actually, all these things are unimaginable in Pakistan. The roads are a purely male-dominated space. Most women are kept at home, allowed only to leave to go to the bazaar or with a male escort. Richer women, who are not fettered by these conservative rules, move around in their chauffeured cars. They hop into their cars at the gate of one place and hop out at the gate of another, completely avoiding the need to walk on the roads. And those few women who have to brave the roads and the public transport must tolerate stares and worse.

My maid always wears a burqa when she is out on the road. This, she says, is purely for utilitarian reasons. If she wears a burqa, men tend to harass her less. But she clarifies that even this does not prevent some men from staring or making lewd comments.