DEEPA AGARWAL
TAHMINA AZIZ AYUB
THE BEGUM
A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady
Introduction By Namita Gokhale
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
The Begum: An Introduction
Namita Gokhale
Part One: A Himalayan Dynamo
Deepa Agarwal
1. A Fateful Day
2. Irene Ruth Margaret
3. The Pant Family of Kumaon
4. Irene Goes to School
5. The Springboard of Destiny
6. An Untraditional Marriage
7. The Long Road to Pakistan
8. Achieving the Goal
Part Two: Madar-e-Pakistan
Tahmina Aziz Ayub
1. August 1947: Arrival Of The Liaquats In Pakistan And The Years Of Turbulence And Struggle
2. October 1951: The Assassination Of A Prime Minister
3. Ra’Ana Liaquat Ali Khan’S Professional Life:
The Philanthropist
4. Diplomatic Career And Political Life: 1954–
5. Begum Ra’ana’s Family Life and Her Last Years: 1978–
Afterword
Laila Haroon Sarfaraz
Illustrations
Annexure 1
Annexure 2
Annexure 3
Annexure 4
Annexure 5
Footnotes
The Begum: An Introduction
Afterword Laila Haroon Sarfaraz
Annexure 5
Notes
Bibliography for The Himalayan Dynamo
Bibliography for Madar-e-Pakistan
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
‘The Begum is a rare, unusual and riveting biography of Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan. The co-authors, Deepa Agarwal in India and Tahmina Aziz Ayub in Pakistan, have drawn on unique resources in their respective countries to create a narrative—the first ever—to provide an informed account of the two different aspects of a remarkable life. Agarwal explores unusual family documents to provide insights into Begum Liaquat Ali Khan’s early life and the social, cultural, historical and political influences which forged her: born into a Christian family of Brahmin origin in Almora, she was a strong, intelligent and determined young woman who became a professor of economics in Delhi and converted to Islam to marry Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan. He became the first prime minister of Pakistan. Aziz provides vivid insights into Begum Liaquat Ali Khan’s legendary work in the newly created Pakistan, as a great humanitarian, a women’s rights activist and nationalist, and her astonishing courage when her husband was assassinated in 1951. She continued to work tirelessly for the empowerment of women in Pakistan. She also became the country’s first woman diplomat and later the first and only woman governor of Sindh. The book is framed by an excellent Introduction by Namita Gokhale and an Afterword by Laila Haroon Sarfraz’—Muneeza Shamsie, critic and author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English
‘A sensitive and perceptive collaborative biography of Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan that brings out the rich texture of her life and times. A wonderful read about one of the most fascinating figures of modern South Asia that captures the intertwined histories of the subcontinent’—T.C.A. Raghavan, former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan and author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India’s Relation with Pakistan
‘[About] a visionary and an intrepid patriot, The Begum weaves the personal and public lives of one of Pakistan’s and South Asia’s most alluring personalities, Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan. Her selflessness, dignity and fight for progressive values are sublimely chronicled in this compelling biography’—Razi Ahmed, director, Lahore Literary Festival
‘This fascinating and adventurous book crosses borders in the best possible way. Seventy years after the event that created two countries, India and Pakistan, out of one, this joint telling of a life subverts, expands and stretches borders that seek to divide; it shows how the real-life stories of people confound the decades-old attempt to limit our histories within the boundaries of nation states. That the story is told by two women, one from India and one from Pakistan; and—as Namita Gokhale’s Introduction highlights—that it rescues from history the story of a woman who belonged to both countries, makes it both unusual and important’—Urvashi Butalia, publisher, Zubaan and author of The Other Side of Silence
‘A captivating, timely and masterfully coherent portrait of a sprightly and remarkable woman that will strike a chord with women across South Asia. This page-turner is a revelation as it shines light on the little-known, myriad influences of her upbringing and stellar academic career that shaped her personality and thinking. The annexures, interviews and anecdotes are riveting, as is the moving panorama of undivided India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. A gem not to be missed’—Ameena Saiyid OBE, S.I. (Sitara-e-Imtiaz), founder and director, Adab Festival Pakistan
THE BEGUM: AN INTRODUCTION
Namita Gokhale
Reflecting on how and what to write while introducing this important biography, I wonder once again if it is one or two books I have before me. This collaborative account, co-authored by Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Ayub, mirrors the fissures and fault lines that divided Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life into two astonishingly symmetrical halves. A well-researched portrayal of an intrepid and passionate woman, it presents her personal narrative and political convictions, and mirrors the history of the subcontinent, in a timeline truncated by the uncompromising contours of the Radcliffe Line.
Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India on 8 July 1947. The eminent barrister was given all of five weeks to divide up a nation, a culture, a people. His brief was to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’. A handful of men—five persons in each ‘boundary commission’ for Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west—worked day and night on a hurried and ignominious exit from an increasingly precarious and unstable empire. Equal representation given to politicians from the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, each hostile and intractable in their positions, only added to the tensions.
In New Delhi, at 8 Hardinge Road, a sprightly forty-three-year-old woman, all of five feet tall, was hastily putting together some personal belongings. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was preparing to depart in a government aeroplane for Karachi airport, where her husband Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was soon to be sworn in as the first prime minister of Pakistan.
The future first lady was leaving her magnificent double-storeyed home, set in three acres of garden, for an unknown and uncertain life in a newly formed nation. This elegant colonial bungalow (now 8 Tilak Marg) had been her home since her marriage. Both her sons, Ashraf and Akber, had been born here. 8 Hardinge Road had become the focal hub for the activities of the Muslim League. Her husband had been appointed finance minister of the interim government, and indeed the papers for the interim budget presented on 2 February 1946 had been taken directly from his home to Parliament House.
Not so far away, at 10 Aurangzeb Road, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had also made preparations to depart Delhi, and India. However, he had been more pragmatic than the idealistic and high-minded Liaquat Ali and had sold his house to the industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia for Rs 3 lakh. Liaquat and his wife Ra’ana, on other hand, had decided to gift their home to Pakistan—it was to become the residence of the new nation’s future high commissioner. ‘Gul-i-Ra’ana’, the bungalow that her adoring husband had named after her, would henceforth be known as ‘Paki
stan House’. Their vast and eclectic library was also gifted to the new nation in which they had invested their hopes and lives.
What were the thoughts and emotions that jostled in her mind and heart as she observed all that she had struggled for come to fruition, even as the looming shadow of Partition prepared to bathe the two nations in a fierce spasm of blood and sacrifice?
Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, born Irene Ruth Margaret Pant on 13 February 1905, to an apostate Brahmin lineage, was a practising Christian until 1933. After her marriage, she converted to Islam and was renamed Gul-i-Ra’ana. This fiercely independent lady, who carried her myriad identities within a core self of unchanging conviction, departed this world on 13 June 1990, by which time she was known, recognized and honoured as ‘Madar-e-Pakistan’ or ‘Mother of Pakistan’.
The first half of her life was spent in undivided India, where she transited two religious identities, and repudiated a third, albeit through her grandfather. With almost mathematical precision, her eighty-six years were divided into forty-three years plus some months in each of her two lives. She was an intimate witness to history—the two nations, the bifurcation of East and West Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, the course of the Cold War, the rise of Gorbachev, and the increasingly unequivocal hold of the army in Pakistan. From Jinnah, through Zulfikar Bhutto and to General Zia-ul-Haq, she spoke her mind and held her own.
Before her marriage, she was a professor of economics in Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha College. Her doctoral thesis had been on women in agriculture in rural Uttar Pradesh. Begum Ra’ana was an important, even crucial, catalyst to Jinnah’s return to politics and the unfolding of the ‘two-nation theory’. In the summer of 1933, she and her husband met Jinnah in his home in Hampstead and appealed to him to return to India. Unafraid to champion difficult causes, she was radical in her attempts to bring about gender equity within the Islamic State of Pakistan and unflinching in her defence of her friend Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he was facing the gallows. And at all times, she was charming and gracious as an accomplished diplomat and stateswoman.
Where then did she get her steely resolve and infinite reserve of strength? How did she negotiate the transitions and transformations of history with such seeming ease? I have always been fascinated by this formidable woman, and her ability to stand tall in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society even after losing her husband, with no grown male—or indeed female—relatives to support her in the newly birthed nation of Pakistan.
I do not claim to be a historian, and my role in writing this introduction arises from the desire, as a novelist, as a woman, as an Indian, to understand the complex chain of convictions and actions, the immediate and historical sources, as well as the accidents of fate and destiny, that dictated the course of her life.
Begum Ra’ana was born Irene Pant. We share maiden surnames, and a common ancestry. I was born Namita Pant, and a faded family tree documents these connections, with a branch of it cryptically cut off. With his conversion to Christianity, her grandfather Taradutt Pant had placed himself outside the pale of caste and kinship. Yet whenever I encountered the half-told stories of Begum Ra’ana, I could sense the mountain grit in her, the legendary strength that comes so naturally to Kumaoni women. There was also a strong family resemblance—to my sister, to several of my aunts. I wanted to know more about her, to understand her as a determined woman, a thinking, feeling human, a creature of her times and circumstances.
It was serendipity that brought me in contact with Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Ayub, both of whom were, from their own perspectives, searching to tell the story of this extraordinary figure. Their styles and approaches match the different phases of her life that they have documented. Deepa’s anecdotal account traces the life of her protagonist from the blizzard that accompanied her dramatic birth to the storms of life she was to so bravely face. We follow her through school and college, through the personal and the political, until that final departure in 1947 to another country and another life.
Tahmina Ayub’s more formal biography documents the young first lady of Pakistan, the visionary founder of the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), the diplomat, stateswoman and Madar-e-Pakistan who left the stamp of her unique personality on all that she did.
Together, the two segments build up a magnificent portrait of a free-thinking woman, the epitome of glamour and grit. She remained determinedly non-political after her husband’s tragic assassination, and her unfading mystique resonates all the stronger for that.
Going through Begum Liaquat Ali Khan’s collected speeches, I found several examples of her forward-thinking vision. I quote from her words to get the resonance of her voice. At the APWA national headquarters, on 12 July 1969, she declared:1
At APWA meetings, it is permissible to use any language spoken in Pakistan. We were among the first to include Bengali and Arabic classes for women, and we now also have Turkish and Persian classes . . . We are fortunate in having inherited the English language which is universally accepted today. We must try not to reject it, but on the contrary, to learn and understand it more thoroughly, as it will be of great help to us in the international field.
This farsightedness and empathy with linguistic identity, especially with respect to Bengali, came at a time when the state was trying to impose Urdu as a state language on East Pakistan, later to become Bangladesh.
She speaks of Braille projects for the visually impaired, of beautician training courses, housing communities, hostels for working women, the Human Rights Society of Pakistan, problems of the physically challenged, and other development projects that illustrate her inclusive and pragmatic idealism.
To get a sense of her thinking, here she is addressing the 9th Conference of the General Federation of Iraqi Women in Baghdad, in March 1980:2
Muslim women share a common value and heritage—that of their religion and the culture it fosters. To learn, gain knowledge, and live by it, are the progressive teachings of that faith. No distinction was made that these were to be the privileges enjoyed by men. Beginning with the example of Hazrat Khadija, a woman of trade and business, Muslim women have consistently played their part in all sorts of fields. Today we have Muslim women, not only as housewives, but as teachers, nurses, social workers, pilots, doctors, architects, scientists, economists, and also women in trade, business and industry. So the pace is set and it will and must go on.
On another occasion, in December 1979, she speaks of her recent visit to China, where she encountered another formidable woman of similar commitments and vintage:3
The highlight of our tour was a visit by us to Madame Soong Ching Ling, widow of the illustrious late Dr Sun Yat Sen, the architect of China’s reconstruction. In her own right, Madame Soong Ching Ling enjoys an enviable position among the great women leaders of the world. For over fifty years, she has been held in high esteem and trust by the government and people of her country, as much for her untiring work for the emancipation of China’s women and children, as for her political and business acumen. In her eighties, she continues to work tirelessly.
Her speeches are formal and pedagogic, requiring by their very nature a degree of built-in homily, but she often breaks loose and one encounters an energetic and alert mind full of humour. In a talk on ‘Value of Contract Bridge in International Relations’ she reflects:
. . . In earlier, more leisured days, I have enjoyed a good game of contract bridge with friends, but although I am not of championship class, I am happy to meet those who are, and offer them my congratulations, personally, upon their success . . . Bridge offers not only merely pleasant social entertainment, (with or without the usual post-mortems) but the more important requirements, among other things, of play strategy, assessment, concentration, psychological approach, and an almost psychic feel for the right card at the right time.4
And finally, as the governor of Sind, she had this to say about ‘Why the Computer is Feminine’ (at the Caledonian Ball, Karachi, 29 November 1975):5
Women, by instinct, have a certain native cunning, but in an office argument about the sex of a computer, it took a laddie from Bonnie Scotland to decide that computers were definitely feminine, since . . . they are admired for their configurations, have the ability of total recall, correct all mistakes, predict man’s future foolishness, and of course are always right.
In the pages that follow, the reader will encounter a woman with intelligence and generosity, with the ability to love and offer the gift of genuine friendship. Her loyal companion since college days in Lucknow, Kay Miles famously called her the ‘Dynamo in Silk’. This is how Kay described her lifelong friend:
This brave and busy little Begum, resolutely determined to carry on the same fine traditions of her great husband, whose loss has left a void that can never be filled, but whose inspiration and example are her constant and conscious guides; the untiring leader, guide and philosopher of her country’s women in their onward progress and social and humanitarian work, which neither distance nor official duties can considerably curtail; the conscientious ambassador, whose duties and interests have very wide and elastic limits; the essential woman who enjoys good music, good reading, the company of good friends, good conversation, good perfume, good mangoes, and good bridge (when she can get it for relaxation); and the lonely, anxious mother who has to be both father and mother in affection, in discipline, and guidance to her two sons, one of whom has made her a proud and happy grandmother.6
This very long, multi-claused sentence effectively summons the essence of the ‘little woman, no more than five feet in height’ whom readers will encounter in the pages to come.
This book is a reminder that the momentum of history is shaped by individuals and the accidents and synchronicities of their lives. This feisty yet intensely feminine woman played her part in changing the very map of the Indian subcontinent. History is told in hindsight, and it is a matter of speculation whether Ra’ana would have recognized the charged contours of the future political landscape she had helped create.
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