She is also credited among the pioneers of Pakistani literature in English....
tribute
As our cars hurtle down Saddar’s congested Zaibunnisa Street, we seldom wonder how Karachi’s central thoroughfare got its name. Previously known as Elphinstone Street, this now-bustling boulevard is named after journalist, poet and short story writer Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah. Begum Hamidullah is billed as Pakistan’s first women editor and publisher, and then first female English columnist. She is also credited among the pioneers of Pakistani literature in English.
Born in Calcutta in December 1918, Begum Hamidullah was the daughter of Cambridge-educated writer and lawyer Syed Wajid Ali, who translated Rabindranath Tagore into English and rendered Allama Iqbal’s Urdu verse into Bengali. She married Khalifa Muhammad Hamidullah, a student in Calcutta who originally hailed from Punjab. Her husband’s job in Bata plucked her out of her childhood idyll in Calcutta and immersed her in the unfamiliar terrain of rural Punjab.
Before Independence, she cultivated a reputation as a poet. Her first poem was published in 1936 in the Bombay-based The Illustrated Weekly of India. She later penned a collection of poems titled The Indian Bouquet (1943), which garnered commercial success and inspired her to write a second book of verse, Lotus Leaves (1946).
Begum Hamidullah also wrote copious articles and stories for newspapers in pre-Partition India. In 1945, she was in Simla at the time when political leaders had gathered in the town for the Simla Conference. During this period, she befriended Fatima Jinnah and gained the golden opportunity to interview her brother Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Begum Hamidullah moved to Karachi with her husband in 1947 and began writing a weekly column for Dawn called ‘Between Ourselves’. This wasn’t an easy accomplishment for the young writer as patriarchal values often kept women on the fringes of professional life. Her editor had begrudgingly agreed to let her write the column on the condition that she would focus on ‘feminine matters’. Begum Hamidullah fearlessly deviated from the parameters defined by her editor and wrote about fairly political concerns. Her editor wasn’t pleased by her unwillingness to toe the line. To escape the excessive curbs on her journalistic voice, she decided to set up The Mirror, a glossy magazine that provided a useful platform for many women journalists.
Owing to her esteemed status as Pakistan’s first female editor, Begum Hamidullah became the first woman to be included in a press delegation that was sent to Cairo. As a result, she became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Al-Azhar University. She also represented at an UN-funded seminar that sought to enhance the participation of women in Pakistan’s public sphere.
In 1956, she published a travelogue of her trip to America as part of a foreign leadership exchange programme funded by the US government. The book, titled Sixty Days in America (1956), comprises columns that she wrote for The Times of Karachi and offers refreshing insights into the West at a time when the Cold War was at its peak. In Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English, writer and literary critic Muneeza Shamsie states that Begum Hamidullah’s “exuberant, and sometimes naive, account is a reminder of how much today’s Pakistanis take for granted about America”.
In 1957, Begum Hamidullah’s fiercely honest editorial comment for The Mirror became the site for considerable controversy. The problem stemmed from her vociferous critique of Major-General Iskander Mirza’s decision to do away with the government of premier Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. As a punitive measure, the government banned The Mirror for six months. Begum Hamidullah was advised to issue a public apology and lay the matter to rest. Instead, she opted for the legal route on the advice of renowned lawyer A K Brohi and appealed to the Supreme Court. The ban on The Mirror was declared unconstitutional and Begum Hamidullah earned the rare distinction of being the first woman journalist in Pakistan to defy the ruinous effects of press censorship.
In 1958, Begum Hamidullah published The Young Wife and Other Stories – a slim volume of short stories that deals with subjects that are radically different from those that dominate her journalistic endeavours. In A History of Pakistani Literature in English 1947-1998, scholar Tariq Rahman refers to the book as a collection that “deserves to be treated as serious literature”. He declares Begum Hamidullah to be “the best writer of the fifties”.
In the preface to the book, Begum Hamidullah reveals that her father often voiced his concerns that her journalistic pursuits couldn’t act as a substitute for literature. Through this collection, she channels his concerns and skilfully subverts them by emerging as a writer of stories.
The fifteen stories in The Young Wife deal with a diverse menu of themes. ‘Fame’ is an absurdist narrative while ‘Motia Flowers’ and ‘Wonder Bloom’ are seeded with supernatural elements and heavily influenced by the Gothic tradition. Other stories draw heavily on the cruelties and complexities of old age and evoke the country’s rural setting.
The titular story, The Young Wife, depicts a woman’s decision to defy conservative values and the vagaries of an arranged marriage. Her quest for independence is set against the backdrop of the Pakistan Movement, which triggered a fresh wave of confidence in the Subcontinent. ‘The Bull and the She-Devil’ is a tale of love that exposes the troubling extent of gender confrontations in Pakistan. ‘No Music before the Mosque’, another poignant story in the collection, explores the long-standing debate on the permissibility of music in an inherently orthodox society.
In addition to her journalistic and literary pursuits, Begum Hamidullah ran a publishing company called Mirror Publications between 1966 and 1971. She decided to close down The Mirror after her husband was transferred to Ireland. In 1971, East Pakistan broke away and became a new country. When Begum Hamidullah returned to Pakistan a decade later, she discovered that the country no longer subsumed her identity as a Bengali.
After her husband’s demise, Begum Hamidullah extricated herself from public life. She wrote on a freelance basis and participated in welfare activities. Begum Hamidullah passed away in September 2000 at the age of 78. She is often remembered as a symbol of feminism and a bastion of press freedom.
– Author of ‘Typically Tanya’, the writer is a novelist, journalist and literary critic.
