India’s ‘rebellious’ Muslim princess shoots tigers and drives a Rolls-Royce

Abida Sultaan doesn’t look like a typical princess at all.

She has short hair, shoots tigers, and is an excellent polo player. She has been flying planes and driving Rolls-Royce everywhere since she was 9 years old.

Born in 1913 into a family of brave ‘beginners’ (a Muslim woman of high status) who ruled the northern state of Bhopal in British India for more than a century, Abida continued Her legacy is to challenge stereotypes surrounding women in general and Muslim women specifically.

She refused to stay in purdah – a practice followed by Muslims and some Hindu women, wearing clothes that conceal the body and separate from men – and became heir to the throne at the age of 15.

Abida ran his father’s cabinet for more than a decade, worked shoulder to shoulder with India’s famous freedom fighters and eventually took a deeper look at the hate and violence that The country fell apart after partition in 1947 to form Pakistan.

She was groomed from an early age to take on the role of ruler under the guidance of her grandmother, Sultan Jehan, a strict disciplinarian who ruled Bhopal.

In her 2004 autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Abida wrote about having to wake up at 4 a.m. to read the Quran — Islam’s religious text — and then continue a day filled with activities, including sports lessons. , music and horseback riding, but also includes housework such as sweeping floors and cleaning bathrooms.

“We girls are not allowed to feel guilty because of our gender. Everything is equal. We have all the freedom that boys have; we can ride horses, climb trees, play whatever whichever game we chose. There were no restrictions,” she said in an interview about her childhood.

Abida had a fierce, independent personality from an early age and rebelled against her grandmother when she forced her into purdah at age 13. Her chutzpah coupled with her father’s generous personality helped her escape practice this profession for the rest of your life.

Already the heir to the throne of Bhopal, Abida had the opportunity to become part of the royal family of the neighboring state of Kurwai when, at the age of 12, she married Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and husband. ruled Kurwai. . She described her nikah (wedding), which she knew nothing about, in hilarious detail in her memoir.

She wrote about how one day, while she was having a pillow fight with her cousins, her grandmother walked into the room and asked her to get dressed for a wedding. The only thing is, no one told her that she was the bride.

“No one prepared or instructed me on how to behave, as a result I walked into the nikah room, pushed the gathered women out of the way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual because I had been chosen for a some new experiment,” she wrote.

The wedding was as short-lived as Abida’s marriage, lasting less than a decade.

Married life was difficult for Abida not only because of her young age but also because of her strict, pious upbringing. She candidly describes how her lack of understanding and discomfort with sex affected her marriage.

She wrote, adding that she could never “accept the marital relationship” on her own. between husband and wife”. This caused her marriage to break up.

In her paper On intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley highlights how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband broke stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed tone on the issue. topic.

After the breakdown of her marriage, Abida left her matrimonial home in Kurwai and moved back to Bhopal. But the couple’s only son, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an ugly custody dispute. Frustrated by the long war and not wanting to part with her son, Abida took a bold step that forced her husband to back down.

On a warm night in March 1935, Abida drove three hours to her husband’s house in Kurwai. She walked into his bedroom, pulled out a revolver, threw it into her husband’s lap and said, “Shoot me or I’ll shoot you.”

This incident, along with a physical confrontation between the couple, which Abida won, ended the custody dispute. She continued to raise her son as a single mother while carrying out her duties as heir to the throne. She ran her state cabinet from 1935 to 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Abida also attended round table conferences – called by the British government to decide the future government of India – in which she met influential leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister.

She also experienced firsthand the deteriorating relations between Hindus and Muslims and the violence that erupted after the partition of India in 1947.

In her memoir, Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived peacefully for generations, began to be treated like “outsiders”. In one of hers interviewshe spoke of a particularly disturbing memory she had of violence breaking out between Hindus and Muslims.

One day, after the Indian government informed her that a train carrying Muslim refugees would arrive in Bhopal, she went to the train station to supervise its arrival.

“When the compartments were opened, they were all dead,” she said, adding that it was violence and mistrust that prompted her to move to Pakistan in 1950.

Abida quietly passed away, with only her son and hope for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she supported democracy and women’s rights through her political career. Abida died in Karachi in 2002.

After she left Pakistan, the Indian government made her sister the heir to the throne. But Abida is still known in Bhopal, where people call her by the nickname ‘beer huzoor’.

“The religious politics of the past few years have dented her legacy and she is no longer mentioned much,” said journalist Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, who is researching the women who ruled Bhopal. .

“But her name will not soon be forgotten.”

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