The Begum

by Deepa Agarwal

  Shivani, whose maiden name was Gaura Pande, eloquently describes the allure of forbidden treats—‘maddening aromas of delicious meats being cooked in their house wafted over, sneaked across to our boring Brahmin kitchen to inflict a resounding defeat on the pathetic dal, potato curry and rice that Devidutt [the cook] dished up day after day.’3

  She also talks about her friendship with Henry: ‘We knew the children on the other side of the Berlin Wall—partly because we were from the same stock but also because their free and open lifestyle was so different from ours . . . Of all the children on the other side of the wall, Henry Pant was my special friend. He wore shining leather shoes, striped socks and sparkling white shirts with starched collars and a smart tie.’ There are some more delightful details about Henry’s glamorous sisters: ‘His sisters Olga and Muriel (whom we called Marial behind her back) would change into gossamer Bamberg georgette saris in the evening for their customary stroll to the market. We almost died of envy.’4

  The envy was because it was unthinkable for girls and women from orthodox Brahmin families to ‘stroll’ in the market, or deck up in gossamer georgette saris rather than dull khadi, and ‘Marial’ because Muriel was extremely slender. Shivani also narrates a hilarious episode in which Henry shares a whiff of ‘the ambrosial meat pot’ with his young neighbours in exchange for walnuts from their tree! And mentions how her brother Tribhi complained that they were forced to read improving books like Pilgrim’s Progress and Amar Kosh, while Henry led a carefree life and even ate an egg every day.

  Mischievous Henry would continue to astonish his friends and neighbours in the coming years. Prema Joshi, who lived close by in the locality of Bistakura, recalls how her cousins had hurried to meet Henry after he returned from a visit to his older sister, Begum Liaquat Ali Khan, in Pakistan along with his wife Shiela. There was something they were eager to take a look at: ‘a shirt that opens and closes by itself’. It was a shirt with a zip—something that no one had encountered previously in Almora!5

  These reminiscences provide us with interesting insights into the lifestyle of the Christian Pants, particularly the liberation from the four walls of the inner courtyard that the daughters enjoyed. Shivani also shared with her daughters the fact that the convivial Daniel Pant liked to visit his relatives, despite the taboos enforced on the children. The chair he sat in and the cups (or glasses) in which he was offered tea were kept separately from those used by the family, as was customary in those orthodox times.

  The Pants were indeed an outstandingly sophisticated family for the conventional little town. Even among the local Christians, hardly anyone could afford the glamorous clothes Irene, Olga and Muriel sported. Not too many were emancipated enough to stroll down to the stone-flagged Lala Bazaar, simply to take the air, either.

  If Almora was the town of Irene’s birth, Lucknow could well be described as the city that was the springboard for her destiny. She passed her most impressionable and formative years here and was fortunate to receive the kind of education that helped to shape her into a future leader and visionary. It was the place where she met her future husband and had her first encounter with the freedom movement. She also imbibed the highly evolved culture of the sophisticated city. On a lighter note, though she dressed in saris at that time, she fell in love with the outfit that later became the trademark of her persona, the elegant and graceful gharara-kurta.

  The plan was that she would continue her studies in Isabella Thoburn College or Chand Bagh, as it was known informally, the ‘older sister’ of Lal Bagh High School, meant for students who wished to pursue higher studies.

  As mentioned earlier, both Lal Bagh and IT College owed their origin to the efforts of an indefatigable American missionary, Isabella Thoburn. A member of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, Isabella had arrived in India in response to a call from her brother, James Thoburn, who found his missionary work in India considerably hampered by the fact that the purdah system prevented him from communicating with the women.

  Not to say that women who decided to engage in missionary work did not encounter opposition in the US at that time. But the persistent Isabella managed to storm this male bastion with support from like-minded women. After a concerted effort was made by the members of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society in Boston to raise funds for their expenses, Isabella and Dr Clara Swain, both unmarried women, set sail from New York on 3 November 1869, reaching their destination in India—Bareilly in UP—on 20 January 1870.6 Apart from preaching the gospel, one of their important objectives was to emancipate and educate the ‘depressed women of India’. While Dr Swain remained in Bareilly where she later set up a famous hospital, Isabella went on to join her brother in Lucknow.

  The founding of Lal Bagh School was a huge milestone in the field of education. When Isabella began to teach her first six students in a small room in the noisy, crowded Aminabad bazaar, she discovered that opening the first girls’ school in northern India was a challenge beyond any she could have imagined. To quote: ‘On that fair white morning, several visitors stopped by to wish them well including the mother-in-law of Joel Janvier, an early convert, who brought her granddaughters to the school and her grandson to stand outside with a bamboo stick to guard against rowdy protests from those who opposed the idea of girls leaving the seclusion of home to venture into the public world, or those who objected to missionary intervention into local cultural spaces.’7 The school thrived and continued to grow and acquired the name Lal Bagh from its location, as mentioned in a previous chapter.

  The story of its further expansion into Isabella Thoburn College in 1886 is an interesting one. Isabella was already running Lal Bagh and the Methodist High School in Kanpur. One of her students in Lal Bagh was keen to study medicine but needed to complete her FA first. The only women’s college in India at that time, a non-religious institution, existed in Calcutta. The girl’s mother, a Komal Chuckerbutty, a Bengali widow and a Christian convert from Benaras, did not want to send her so far away. She also preferred that her daughter, Shokat, continue her education in a Christian college. Komal Chuckerbutty was the one who motivated Isabella to add the FA classes to the course of studies in her school, and the Lucknow Women’s College, the first liberal arts college for women in Asia, took birth. Komal contributed Rs 500 for the additional expenses.8 Isabella used the example of this donation to send out an impassioned appeal to her American supporters and funds poured in. Interestingly, Komal joined the FA course along with her daughter and was among the first three students of the college, the third being Lilavati Singh who would later play an important role in its affairs.

  The institution became an important landmark in the field of women’s education though it had to surmount several hurdles first: the inevitable opposition from conservative sections; the perpetual shortage of funds; and the difficulty of finding qualified staff.

  In 1898, while visiting the US on furlough, Isabella managed to raise $20,000 for a new building for the college. After she succumbed to an attack of cholera in 1901, Lucknow Women’s College was renamed after her in 1902.

  This indomitable crusader for the cause of women’s education may have passed away, but her spirit and philosophy continued to inspire and motivate many young women who passed through the portals of IT College. The students were encouraged to take the initiative in problem-solving and be independent and assertive. Perhaps this training helped to prepare Irene for the daunting tests she encountered in her future life. Most significantly, as Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, the wife of the first prime minister of Pakistan, she continued to pursue the cause of women’s emancipation in Pakistan with tireless commitment. Her upbringing and her education had taught her that women were not born to remain uneducated and in purdah.

  Years later, in an interview she gave to the Herald in Pakistan in 1984, she stated: ‘I advertised then in all my speeches that no girl should get married until she has a profession. I constantly said that.’9

  The colleg
e stressed the importance of extracurricular activities and physical education and could boast of having groomed several women who attained firsts in many fields. Among them were Lilavati Singh, one of the first students, who was also the first woman from India to chair the women’s committee of the World Student Christian Federation in Tokyo in 1907, and Irene’s cousin, Isha Mukund Joshi, the first woman to join the Indian Administrative Service in UP.

  Thus, when Irene entered IT College, she was continuing her education at an institution where girls were encouraged to discover and develop their inborn talents and face the world with confidence. True, the period of World War I had seen a decline in the college—the student population dropped and it faced financial problems. However, things began to look up after the war, and it acquired a formidable academic reputation.

  When Irene joined her FA classes, the college had just moved out from the old building in the Lal Bagh campus. The colonial Department of Education had certain requirements for collegiate education which demanded separate premises for institutions of higher learning. Thus, in 1923, the college moved to Chand Bagh or Moon Garden, a spacious estate of almost thirty-two acres. Florence Nichols, another missionary from the US, was the principal.

  In Chand Bagh timings for prayers, meals, classes, sports and the personal study hours were strictly observed. The college may have been a great leap forward in the field of women’s education, but the authorities followed all the contemporary codes, governing women’s behaviour strictly. Girls could not leave the hostel premises without proper escorts; they had to observe decorum in their dress and behaviour; and visiting hours were fixed, as were the visitors, who had to receive approval in advance from parents. But for many of the girls, Chand Bagh was an experience of unbelievable transformation. For the time and place, it was radical that young women could participate in sports like tennis, basketball and badminton, and learn how to swim. There was an excellent library where they discovered the work of numerous classic writers. It is worth noting that this exposure led to a flowering of literary talent. Independent thinking was encouraged, and it is no wonder that a whole generation of path-breaking authors, including Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Rashid Jahan and Attia Hosain were products of IT College. Rashid Jahan was also one of the first Muslim women to study medicine at Lady Hardinge College at Delhi and join the Provincial Medical Service.

  The students were also encouraged to participate in debates and act in plays. In that era when so many middle-class women were confined within the inner courtyard, it was extremely unusual for girls from established families to appear on the stage and express their opinions in public. Even in folk theatre, men enacted the roles of women characters. Public performances were associated with prostitutes. Consequently, there were adverse responses to such experiments. But the college weathered it, and continued to allow its students an unusual amount of freedom. ‘Gunjing’—trips to the posh shopping centre of Hazratgunj in Lucknow—was a popular pastime; it was considered daring at a time when men did all the shopping or merchants brought goods to the homes of even modestly affluent families. In many families women did not even choose their own clothes, the men made all the decisions for them. This education was thus transformational, because the students of IT College learnt something very important: the power and ability to be independent.

  The Awadhi culture of meticulous politeness was also part of the college’s own unwritten rules. Whether it was the bhisthi or water carrier irrigating the garden, or the sweeper cleaning the rooms, everyone had to be addressed as ‘aap’ and ‘ji’.

  Irene’s contemporaries were pioneering young women like Rashid Jahan, who was one of the first Indian Muslim women to practise modern medicine, besides being an acclaimed writer. Her brilliant cousin, Isha Basant Mukand, later Joshi, the first woman to enter the Indian Administrative Service, would join a couple of years later. After Irene completed her BA, she moved on to Lucknow University for her post-graduation.

  Kay ‘Billy’ Miles writes in her biography of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, A Dynamo in Silk, ‘Both in school and college her personality and vitality made her an active and leading figure in the student life and government; and these qualities, combined with an innate and irrepressible sense of humour and love of fun, created many a problem for her teachers and professors. But as some of them said many years later at a college function, “Where she was there was always life and movement—such a lively, intelligent student is both a pleasure and a responsibility.”’10

  Isabella Thoburn College had originally been affiliated to Calcutta University. When Allahabad University was established, it shifted its affiliation to the new institution in northern India. And when, following the efforts of Sir Mohammad Ali Mohammad Khan KCIE, the Maharaja of Mahmudabad, Lucknow University took birth in 1921, IT College provided important support as an established educational institution. However, it maintained its independent identity as an affiliated college, unlike Canning College which became a part of the university.

  It was a tremendous achievement for a woman to acquire a bachelor’s degree at that time. As for a master’s degree, it was a goal for an extraordinarily ambitious girl. Not just to accomplish it, but simply to aspire to it, required both steely determination and talent far above the ordinary.

  Irene had both in ample degree. She was the only girl in her class when she joined the comparatively new university for her master’s in economics and sociology. She was undaunted by the fact that she had left the comfortable environs of the all-female Chand Bagh for the predominantly male precincts of Lucknow University.

  She must have caused much consternation on her first day in class. Jaws must have dropped; nudges, stares and frowns of disapproval must have been exchanged at the sight of a woman in the MA class and that too of a subject like economics!

  Her classmates reacted in a way that was perhaps predictable, given the times. Liaquat Ali Khan’s biographer, Ziauddin Ahmad, described Irene’s experiences in Lucknow University: ‘Here she used to be mercilessly teased by the boys. On entering the classroom, she would find a caricature of herself on the blackboard and on leaving for home find her cycle tyres deflated.’11

  Irene remained unfazed by their attempts to cow her down, and made excellent academic progress, consistently outperforming all her classmates. By the end of the academic year, she had effectively silenced her critics, beating her most determined rival, who was favoured by her classmates. Her examiners and professors lauded her wholeheartedly when her thesis on ‘Women’s Labour in Agriculture in the United Provinces’ was stated to be the best one of the year in the university and brought her a very high honours grade. Thus, knocking down the barriers of prejudice, she passed her exams with flying colours, receiving a first class, as her proud father noted in his diary.

  But Irene, inevitably, was also affected by the temper of the times. In 1925, the Kakori Conspiracy case had captured the imagination of the people. This was a daring robbery planned and executed at Kakori, a place near Lucknow, by members of the Hindustan Republican Association. Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and Chandra Shekhar Azad were prominent among them. When four of the accused were sentenced to death there were widespread protests.

  There was further outrage when the Simon Commission arrived in India in 1928 to recommend constitutional reforms. Not a single Indian had been included in the commission. Irene was among the students who demonstrated in Lucknow, carrying placards proclaiming: ‘Simon Go Back’.

  The UP secretariat had shifted to Lucknow from Allahabad by then, so her family was living in the same city. Her younger brother, Norman, had joined Lucknow Christian College and took an active part in the demonstrations as well, including attending the meeting addressed by Motilal Nehru at Aminabad Park, and he shared with his son Jitendra how Jawaharlal Nehru motivated the students to join the movement.12

  There were many forms of protest against the commission. Apart from writing slogans all over the city’s walls, the students fle
w black kites and dropped them at the tea party the taluqdars of Awadh had hosted for Sir John Simon.

  Irene was intensely stirred by these happenings. This burgeoning interest in the struggle for independence motivated her to attend the debate concerning the Simon Commission in the UP Legislative Assembly.

  It was almost as if her fate was drawing her, and it was inextricably bound with that of her nation. Because this was her first glimpse of her future husband, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan.

  Liaquat Ali Khan, son of Nawab Rustam Ali Khan and Mahmuda Begum, was born on 1 October 1896 at his ancestral home in the city of Karnal, now in the Indian state of Haryana. He was their second son. The family possessed many landed properties both in Punjab and the United Provinces. His father was a man with vision and a great believer in the Western style of education. He had donated large sums of money to many centres of learning and Liaquat Ali was to continue this tradition by donating to schools and colleges. In keeping with his views, his father sent him to Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh. Liaquat Ali completed his BA in 1918 and married Jehanara Begum in the same year. His oldest son, Wilayat Ali Khan, was born in 1919. While studying in Aligarh, Liaquat was an all-rounder, rather like Ra’ana. He enjoyed sports, music and other activities and was the monitor of his hostel and the captain of the cricket team.

  After his graduation, he went to England and joined St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1920. Later he moved to Exeter College and completed his bachelor’s in jurisprudence in 1921. Subsequently, he went to study in London and was called to the Bar at Inner Temple in 1922, though he never really practised law. While at Oxford, he began to get interested in politics, and started taking part in debates. He was also elected treasurer of Oxford Majlis, a debating society. The question of independence from British rule had begun to preoccupy the minds of young Indian intellectuals, and there were many heated discussions on the issue. Several young men who would play an important role in the building of the nation were Liaquat Ali’s contemporaries at Oxford—men like Shoaib Qureishi, M.C. Chagla, P.N. Sapru and K.P.S. Menon. When he returned in 1923, he plunged into the hurly-burly of politics. It is said that the communal riots that flared up in Karnal soon after he came back influenced his decision to throw in his lot with the Muslim League in preference to the Congress. However, at that time the League was riven by the dissensions created by the Khilafat Movement. Eager to make a contribution, Liaquat Ali attended the Lahore session in 1924 when attempts were on to revive the League and instil enthusiasm into its membership.