Rashid Jahan

Rashid Jahan (25 August 1905 – 29 July 1952) was an Indian writer and medical doctor known for her Urdu literature and trenchant social commentaries. She wrote short stories and plays and contributed to Angarey, a collection of unconventional short stories written in collaboration with Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduz Zafar.

Jahan was an active member of the Progressive Writers' Movement and the Indian People's Theatre Association. She has been called one of the first ever feminists and was a leading Indian communist. These two schools of thought animated Jahan's life and literary output.

Biography

Early life Rashid Jahan was born on 25 August 1905 in Aligarh. She was the eldest of seven children born to Sheikh Abdullah and his wife Waheed Jahan Begum. Her father was a leading pioneer of women's English-based education in India and established the Women's College, Aligarh at the Aligarh Muslim University. Sheikh Abdullah also ran the Urdu literary journal Khatun, which promoted women's emancipation and education, and to which Jahan's mother was a frequent contributor. As Jahan's future sister-in-law, Hamida Saiduzzafar, related in a 1973 interview, Rashid once said of her upbringing: ‘‘We have slept on the mattress of women's education and covered ourselves with the quilt of women's education from our earliest consciousness." Jahan wrote her first short stories for the Chand Bagh Chronicle, a publication of the Isabella Thoburn College. Mirza further relates that Jahan became a sort of mother-figure for all the poor comrades and their families. Zaheer contributed 5 short stories to the collection, Ali two, Jahan two, and Zafar one. The two pieces that Jahan contributed to Angaaray were Dilli ki Sair ("A Trip to Delhi") and Parde ke Peeche ("Behind the Veil").

Dilli ki Sair is a three page monologue told from the perspective of a Muslim woman, Malika Begum of Faridabad, who is telling her friends about her trip to Delhi with her husband. However, as her husband left her at the train station to meet one of his friends, the story largely consists of the narrator relating the happenings on the railway platform as she sits on her luggage, starving, and waiting for her husband to take her home. When her husband does return, he offers her a puri, leftovers from his meal in a restaurant, and becomes angry when she refuses.

Parde ke Peeche is a conversation between two women from affluent, sharif families. One of the women, Muhammadi Begum, has become sick due to multiple pregnancies, having given birth to a daughter every year that she has been married to her husband, who insists on a male heir. Her husband forces her to go through several operations on her sexual organs to make her more attractive and more capable of producing a boy, but Aftab Begum, Muhammadi's sister-in-law and interlocutor, eventually secures the services of a female doctor. This doctor warns Begum's husband that the continuous pregnancies are weakening the health of Muhammadi and suggests that the couple use birth control. This suggestion is clearly ignored, however, as by the end of the story, Begum has finally given birth to a boy, who is shown to mistreat his many elder sisters in the closing scene.

Aurat Aurat was a 1937 collection of six short stories and the titular play written by Rashid Jahan. A second edition was published posthumously in 1963 at the behest of Jahan's father, Sheikh Abdullah.