Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The great churning was witnessed among the Muslim intelligentsia of India in the aftermath of the failed rebellion of 1857-58 against the British regime. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who worked as a vital catalyst for creating this churning among his Muslim contemporaries, proposed modern European science and other disciplines as a panacea for his community in the British colonial situation and established an educational institution for the same to the exclusion of Muslim women. Nazir Ahmad, the putative first novelist in Urdu and champion of education for Muslim women, and Altaf Hussain Hali, reputed to be among the first to genuinely voice their plight and the need for their education, were very significant Urdu littérateurs and ardent supporters of Syed Ahmed’s educational scheme. However, a closer reading of their creative writings reveals that some of their ideas about the education for Muslim women were in conflict with his exclusionary scheme. I propose to study their didactic ‘novels’, which were intended for the edification of young Muslim women. An examination of, among other things, the allegorical characters, the subject matter of a good number of books imagined to be taught and the ambience of the imaginary home school, I argue, demonstrates that the novels were aimed at creation of the vision which the authors had of Muslim woman and her role in their own nation and community in the given colonial situation.