Birth— 1905
Where—Aligarh
Education—Isabella Thoburn College Lucknow, Lady Hardinge Medical College Delhi

Bibliography

• Angāre (1932)

• نثرِ رشید جہاں

• عورت

Biography

Memoirs / Critique/Review of Works

Biography

Rashid Jahan was born on August 25, 1905 in Aligarh. Doctor (gynecologist), short story writer, social worker, feminist activist, and a communist, Rasheed Jahan detested the hypocrisy and so-called morality that existed in the society. She was the eldest of five children born to Sheikh Abdullah and his wife Begum Wahid Jahan. Her father, Sheikh Abdullah (not to be confused with the ‘Sher-e-Kashmir’). A leading pioneer of women’s education in India Sheikh Abdullah was a student and follower of  Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. Syed Ahmed was not sure if Indian Muslims were ready for women’s education yet. Disagreeing with his leader Sheikh Abdullah went ahead and established the first school for Muslim girls in India.

Early Years

From a sprawling house in Rasalganj in Aligarh, every morning, a covered palanquin carrying the girls of the Abdullah family would set off for a house in the old city. Its destination: the first school for Muslim girls in north India that had been set up a few years ago. Sometimes, the palanquin would be replaced by a cart, a big white sheet wrapped around it to maintain purdah. Inside would be the giggling children of the school’s founders and reformists, Shaikh Abdullah and Wahid Jahan. The lurching “school bus” provided much mirth, and excitement — once it got stuck on the railway tracks, as the sheet got caught in the wheels. Out jumped the eldest daughter Rashid Jahan, with blithe disregard for the restrictions of being seen in public. She tugged and pushed the cart out, a few minutes before the train would roar past. Her aunt would later admonish her: “Were you not ashamed?… There were so many men staring.”

The women on that journey were pioneers of their age, braving stares as well as opprobrium of the society. From 1906, the school set up by Abdullah, despite great opposition, to educate girls from sharif Muslim homes, would be a bridge to a better, empowered life for many young women. It would grow to become a hostel, and then the Aligarh Women’s College. And Rashid Jahan would break many more rules, on her way to becoming a doctor, a Communist and a pathbreaking writer. Her stark, angry stories about the lives and deprivations of women in purdah, would be a part of the reconfiguring of Urdu literature that the Progressive Writers’ Movement initiated.

At 16, Rashid Jahan left the sheltered world of Aligarh and the safe confines of the girl’s school to study at the Isabella Thoburn (IT) College in Lucknow. Here, new intellectual vistas began to open up. Though a science student, she read Dickens, Keats, Shelley and Thomas Hardy as also Tolstoy, Pushkin and the Russian masters as well as Maupassant and Balzac. While still in college, she wrote her very first story called ‘When the Tom Tom Beats’ in English; it was translated by Ale Ahmad Suroor, who would later become a close friend, into Urdu under the title ‘Salma’ and became quite popular.

After completing her Inter-Science from Lucknow, Rashid Jahan moved to Delhi to study medicine at the Lady Hardinge Medical College in 1924 where she trained as a gynecologist and became one of the first Muslim women doctors. Rashid Jahan joined the Provincial Medical Service of the United Provinces after graduating from the Lady Hardinge College in 1929 and after, a first stint as a Medical Officer in Bulandshahar, was posted to Lucknow in 1931.

Angry Young Woman

It was in Lucknow that Rashid Jahan blossomed and became the centre of a charmed circle of intellectually-charged and politically-driven young people. Here she met Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Ali, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, and Sahibzada Mahmuduzzafar whom she was to marry in 1934.

It was here in Lucknow, too, that the explosive Angarey was published in December 1932. Angarey contained five short stories by Sajjad Zaheer, two by Ahmad Ali, one by Mahmuduzzaafar, one short story and a play by Rashid Jahan. a collection of stories and plays that inflamed the Urdu-speaking elite Muslim society by its sharp criticism of its social and sexual mores. Given the provocative title and the deliberate defiance of existing literary norms by the four young writers, the book unleashed a storm of controversies and marked a turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Critics panned it for its crudeness and immaturity. Religious leaders expressed outrage and outright condemnation, some maulvis went so far as to issue fatwas (decrees) against the book and its authors.

All but five copies of the book were burnt when the Imperial government gave in to mounting pressure and banned Angarey in March 1933.

Rashid Jahan came to be known as “Angareywali’”. Her lifelong friend and sister-in-law, Dr Hamida Saiduzzafar wrote, ‘Considering that Rashid Jahan was the first woman in Urdu who addressed herself squarely, consistently and forcefully to the myriad problems of the middle and lower-middle class woman in Indian society, she can rightly be called Urdu literature’s first “angry young woman”.

A Woman of Substance

On 14 October 1934, while still working for the Provincial Medical Services (PMS) and posted in Bahraich, she married Mahmuduzzafar. Educated in India and England, Mahmud had received a degree from Oxford University. On his return to India, he joined the anti-colonial movement and, like Rasheed Jahan, only wore homespun clothes.  Thereafter, began a period of short stays in different cities, doing whatever work was expected of her by the party and combining it with her own abiding interests: writing and medicine. When Mahmud took up the only full-time employment he was to engage in his entire life — that of vice principal of the Muhammadan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College in Amritsar where, in addition to his administrative duties, he also taught English — she resigned from the PMS and went to live and work in Amritsar from 1934-36.

The couple had no children and was content to live on the slim allowance
Mahmud received from the Communist Party of India and the small medical fees Rasheed Jahan charged. Their house became known as a centre for  intellectuals, writers, and political activists and Rasheed Jahan’s sister once remarked that their home was a “living example of a commune”, where no one was discriminated against on the basis of religion, class or caste.

The years after Angarey ushered in a period of mellow fruitfulness for Dr Rashid Jahan.

In 1936, she was at the heart of the movement that laid the foundation for the establishment of the Progressive Writers’ Association. She was instrumental in organizing the First Progressive Writers’ Conference in Lucknow on 9 April 1936 where Premchand was invited to deliver the Presidential Address.

Celebrated as a trailblazer by liberals and progressives, Rasheed Jahan epitomized for conservatives the dangers of educating women and liberating them from purdah. Combined with her sympathy for the poor, Rasheed Jahan’s medical training led her to write about the sexual problems facing
women with a frankness that shocked her society. Through her writing and medical practice, Rasheed Jahan exposed the dangers of misinformation regarding women’s health and the dangers of relying upon superstitions instead of science. Rasheed Jahan often remarked to her friends and
family that, „women ought to be more than child-bearing machines for the pleasure of men.

In her sister Khurshid Mirza’s memoirs, A Woman of Substance, she is Rashida apa, who would arrive from Lucknow like a whirlwind, and get her sisters to knit woollens for her impoverished patients. The nationalist who would teach her sister to say: “I’m a non-cooperative”, and dissuade her from wearing Western clothes.

When she was in her 40s, Rasheed Jahan discovered that she had cancer. Though, at the time, Indian Communists were being denied passports to prevent them from visiting the USSR, Rasheed Jahan and Mahmud managed to obtain travel documents and to go to the Soviet Union for medical treatment.

Unfortunately, three weeks after arriving in Moscow, Rasheed Jahan died at the age of 47. The epitaph on her grave reads: ‘Communist Doctor and Writer’.

Memoirs / Critique/Review of Works

The Good Doctor – Rashid Jahan blazed a trail for Urdu writers
AAMER HUSSEIN
1952. ISMAT CHUGHTAI HAD BEEN, for nearly a decade, the leading short story writer and novelist in the world of Urdu literature. But across the border in Pakistan, Qurratulain Hyder’s reputation as the disaffected chronicler of the generation lost to the tribulations of Partition was rapidly rising and would soon challenge Chughtai’s supremacy.

A Rebel And Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan
Rakhshanda Jalil
I’ve just received a copy of A Rebel and Her Cause: The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan. When I first read it in manuscript last summer, I thought it was probably the best book I would read that year, and six months later my opinion hasn’t changed. Rashid Jahan (1905-1952) was a medical practitioner and writer, whose literary work has remained in print in its original Urdu. In English, however, she is known to only a few readers, largely through a handful of stories and plays which have appeared in translation in feminist anthologies.

The “Bad Girl” of Urdu Literature
Rashid Jahan was born on August 25, 1905 in Aligarh. Doctor (gynecologist), short story writer, social worker, feminist activist, and a communist, Rasheed Jahan detested the hypocrisy and so-called morality that existed in the society. She was the eldest of five children born to Sheikh Abdullah and his wife Begum Wahid Jahan.

نثرِ رشید جہاں
رشید جہاں
حمیرا اشفاق کی ترتیب و تدوین شدہ کتاب ’’نثر رشید جہاں‘‘ شائع ہو گئی ہے جو کہ افسانوں ، ڈراموں اور مضامین کا بہترین انتخاب ہے اور حمیرا اشفاق کی تخلیقی ، فکری و اختراعی صلاحیتوں اور ذوق مطالعہ کا منہ بولتا ثبوت ہے ۔بلا شبہ حمیرا اشفاق خود بھی ترقی پسند مصنفین کی صف میں شامل ہے ۔ ان کا انداز بیان اور سادہ ہے ۔ اُن کی نگاہیں جس طرح اور جس زاویے سے دیکھتی ہے اُسی انداز سے الفاظ کے زینے طے کرتی جاتی ہیں

Angaarey – انگارے
Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Dr Rashid Jahan, Mahmud-uz-Zafar
In 1932  four young Muslim friends, three men and one woman, published a thin Urdu book titled “Angāre” (“Embers”). It contained 9 short stories and a one-act  play. Its authors were Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Dr Rashid Jahan, and Mahmud-uz-Zafar.The  work was intended as internal critique of patriarchy and religious dogmatism within the muslim community.۔

رشید جہاں…عورت … ایکٹ ڈرامہ
کیریکٹرزمولوی عتیق اللہ
فاطمہ: مولوی عتیق اللہ کی بیوی
عزیز:جوان مرد۔ فاطمہ کا ایک ماموں زاد بھائی۔
قدیر:جوان مرد۔ عزیز کا چھوٹا بھائی۔
ممانی:عزیز و قدیر کی ماں۔
کرایہ دارنی:ایک عورت مع بچہ

Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu
Rakhshanda Jalil
The aim of this book is to trace the birth, development, and decline of the Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM) in the context of Urdu, and study the reasons thereof. This study begins not with the first All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference in April 1936, nor even with the publication of a book called Angarey in 1932 which is generally regarded as the harbinger of literary radicalism in Urdu literature.

‘Angareywali’ Rashid Jahan: Urdu’s Angry Young Woman
By Abid Khan and Akshay Chavan
In the winter of 1932, a raging storm broke in conservative circles in the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh), at the centre of which was a woman writer named Rashid Jahan. One of India’s earliest Muslim women doctors, Rashid Jahan is considered Urdu literature’s first ‘Angry Young Woman’, and would become ‘notorious’ for pushing the boundaries of how ‘shareef’ (respectable) women were supposed to behave.