Husnara Begum

Abstract Jamila Begum’s Urdu short-story “Husnara Begum” appeared in December 1915 in the Urdu journal Tehzeeb-e-Niswan, which was founded by Mumtaz Ali (1860-1935) in 1898 in partnership with his wife Muhammadi Begum (1878-1908). This story highlights the plight of an abandoned wife, whose husband deserts her and his daughter Husnara to get married to the daughter of a rich trader. This is a fictional account of the misery and struggles of a Muslim woman, who opens an elementary school to eke out her living and educate her daughter. The success of their enterprise and consequent prosperity delivers the radical message of women’s empowerment, demonstrating how education can be used as a tool to battle economic adversity. The story ends in the marriage of Husnara to a barrister as a reward for their hard-work. This woman’s narrative rewrites the traditional concept of sharafat in order to accommodate the idea of women’s economic independence. “Husnara Begum” demolishes the stereotypes about Muslim women as mere victims of Muslim patriarchy and raises the issue of women’s agency in the age of feminism. No information is available about the author of the story except that she published this short-story in Tehzeeb-e-Niswan in 1915. The translation of this story from an Urdu women’s journal is aimed at recovering the lost voices of Indian Muslim women in the early twentieth-century.