The just arrived memoir of Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (born 1942), A Drop in the Ocean: the Story of My Life♚, surely deserves specific attention for various significant reasons. It is a story of pedigree related privileges and an unwittingly confessed testimony of regressive and opportunist character of Muslim leadership. Syeda is not a politician to have been into electoral fray. She is nor a professional civil servant (bureaucrat). Nor is she a professional academic, except that she did teach briefly in the LSR College (Delhi). She obtained best possible education from the Delhi’s prestigious Modern School, Miranda House, and higher education from the Wisconsin, Hawaii and Alberta (USA).
♎Married to a Hyderabad born Pakistani in May 1967, Syeda migrated to Canada. Having lived in Canada during 1967-1984, she got separated, left Canada, came back to save (from the real estate grabbers) and reclaim her father’s house in New Delhi’s Jamia Nagar in April 1984. In some way, this separation may find a parallel with the sufferings of Indore’s Shahbano Begum (1916-1992), except that Syeda didn’t have to fight legal battles with her Canada-based Pakistani husband for maintenance.
ꦯSyeda has got highest possible connections emanating from her strong and accomplished pedigree. Her mother Aziz Jahan Begum (1911-1963), came from the Rampur dynasty and her father K G Saiyidain (1904-1971) was the Education Secretary in the 1950s with Maulana Azad, besides having been in services with the Nizam of Hyderabad, Bhopal, and Kashmir in the 1930s and 1940s.
ꦬImmediately, in fact, almost instantly, after landing back in New Delhi (1984), therefore, Syeda became Correspondence Secretary of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister. Unfortunately, in a few months, the PM was assassinated in October 1984, and Syeda became jobless. She contemplated working towards getting nominated to the Rajya Sabha, but she was dissuaded from becoming too ambitious so hastily and impatiently. Mohammad Yunus (1916-2001), the then Special Envoy to the PM, counselled Syeda, “political kamon mein der ho jati hai. When your name comes from the highest quarter, your entry will be more graceful” (p. 88). Yunus further counselled her that writing ‘books will make you famous’ (p. 89). After all, her father was an erudite scholar besides being a seasoned educational thinker and administrator, with a rich library comprising the Urdu, Persian and English language books (p. 89), but strikingly, not Hindi language books! Enough of Ganga–Jamuni tehzib that Syeda never tires of talking about! At the same time, she also adds, “I was conscious of the wordless boundaries drawn by my family. Friends from all communities, yes, but marriage (or love) is only within my faith” (p. 53).
🍨K G Saiyidain’s prodigy, sparks and genius have been narrated beautifully in the memoir of the AMU alumnus, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987), I am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (1977); Abbas, the cousin, protégé and fan of K G Saiyidain devotes a long chapter to his, “Bhaijan”. KGS’ genius was acknowledged by his friends in AMU (Aligarh). One of his friends, Sajid Ali Khan, happened to be from the Rampur dynasty, who chose KGS for his inter-class marriage; Sajid’s sister (Syeda’s mother) was married to KGS, “by Nawabi definition, a commoner” (p. 169), who got a “monthly salary of four hundred …not enough to bear the expenses of [Aziza’s] paandaan” (p. 169). KGS was also a descendant of the greatest of Urdu biographers and Sir Syed Ahmad’s comrade, Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914) of Panipat, who also opened a girls’ school in Panipat in the 1890s. Syeda calls Hali to be “India’s first feminist poet” (p. 169). The inter-class (mis)match, however had adverse impact on mental health of Syeda’s mother, who “suffered from ‘dauras’ which literally means fits” or “hysteria” (p. 170).
The role of the Muslim elites in creation of Pakistan and migration of theirs to the new nation state, “Khuda Ki Basti” (God’s Own Land), is too well known. Thus, one of Syeda’s uncles, Mubashir Hasan (1922-2020) became minister in Pakistan, just as Liyaqat Ali Khan was the Prime Minister of Pakistan; a brother of Dr. Zakir Husain (1897-1969) as well as a brother of A. G. Noorani (1930-2024) also became ministers of Pakistan. Syeda’s uncle in Pakistan, Mubashir, would help her become an author of repute as under his “watchful eye” (p. 136), her book on Maulana Azad would come out from Karachi’s Oxford University Press in 1998, after the Indian publishing houses of repute, refused to publish. The book (1998), Islamic Seal on India's Independence: Abul Kalam Azad - A Fresh Look on Azad𓃲, was an outcome of the library and fund (1989-1990) of New Delhi’s Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR). This was after she had already become known through her columns and film-reviews in the English dailies and translation works that she brought out in 1986-1987, thanks to magnanimous helps from Yunus and from her father’s friend Khushwant Singh (1915-2014), the noted writer.
🦩Subsequently, Syeda would be only at a phone-call distance from the Prime Ministers such as I. K. Gujaral (1919-2012) and Manmohan Singh (born 1932). This connection would help her become a member (1997-2000) of the National Commission of Women (NCW) and afterwards, a member of the Planning Commission (2004-2014) and the Chancellor of the MANU University Hyderabad.
A Self-declared Progressive Muslim Woman in the Midst of the 'Regressive Qaum'?
Having left her two sons in Canada with their Pakistani father and her widowed elder sister (who is insinuated by Syeda to be a live-in partner of her husband, Hameed), she came back to India. Syeda isn’t brave enough to reveal much about this aspect of her private life. One could argue that one should write an autobiography only when one has got the guts to make confessions. In fact, the very genre of autobiography owes its origins to confessions, be it St Augustine’s of 4th-5th century AD or Rouseau’s in 18th century. Within a year of Syeda’s comeback to India with her daughter, Ayesha, (April 1984), the Supreme Court 🐼verdict on Shah Bano came out in April 1985. One would expect that Syeda’s memoir would write at great length on the issue, particularly because the protests of the Muslim orthodoxy against the verdict provided ominous fodder for the Ayodhya campaign of the Saffron forces from early 1986 onwards and ever since then the electoral strength as well as socio-political dominance of the majoritarian forces have steadily been rising, to the extent of now becoming the hegemonic force and ruling dispensation by the time Syeda’s memoir comes out in late 2024.
On this count of exposing the Muslim regression, the readers are treated with massive disappointment. This is what makes a critical reading of this memoir extremely necessary. This is a fittest case of, and most helpful account to, see through the cunning craft of the narrative making elites of India’s Muslims. The Muslim elites, the narrative-makers, trace their ancestry from Iran, Central Asia and Arab. Syeda claims her ancestry from Medina, Herat, Istanbul, etc. (Chapter Two, “Mirror to the Past: My Ancestors”). These elites keep cataloguing the details of victimisation, sufferings, marginalisation of common Muslims very religiously. But they rarely help and enable us see through the opportunism of the Muslim elites played out at the expense of the common Muslims, the local converts. True and consistent to the character of the Muslim elites, Syeda too lists all the instances of the sufferings of common Muslims under the current Saffron dispensation, from Gujarat (2002) to Dadri (2015) and in the rest of north and western India since 2014. Does she write in detail against the Rajiv Gandhi’s abject and extremely disastrous capitulation before the Muslim orthodoxy in 1986? No. Does she write against Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999), the then chief of the All India Muslim Personal Law Abroad (AIMPLB, founded in 1973, against certain progressive amendments in the laws pertaining to maintenance to divorced women and for adoption of children, by the Indira Gandhi led government in 1972)? No. And then she jumps very long to blame the “apocalypse” of 2014 which didn't let anything good happen for Muslim women. Does Syeda refer to the confessions made by Ali Miyan in his Urdu memoir, Karwan-e-Zindagi𓆉 (1988)? No. On the contrary, rubbing salt into the wounds of the hapless Muslim women, Syeda writes essentially in appreciation of Ali Miyan, with utmost deference, and thereby she reinforces regressive patriarchy, even while pretending, throughout her memoir, to be a progressive Muslim woman, an Islamic feminist. While swiftly rising the ladder of her ambitious career in India since April 1984, admittedly through her writings, did she write columns against brazen display of Muslim regressivism in 1985-1986, actively encouraged by the Rajiv Gandhi-led regime? No.
Rajiv Gandhi, on his part, did subject himself to introspection and he did confess, “I was young. I made mistakes” (Vir Sanghvi, A Rude Life෴, 2021, chapter 29). Ali Miyan too made partial confession, howsoever reluctantly, and may be a bit unwittingly, in his memoir. But, Syeda chooses not to grill either Ali Miyan or Rajiv Gandhi.
🐽In the 1980s, the AIMPLB brand of forces among the Muslims made their own contributions of providing fodder to rising majoritarianism. On 15 January 1986, in a session of the Momin Conference in Delhi, the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi announced his intention to amend the law to nullify the Supreme Court’s April 1985 verdict in favour of Shah Bano. A bill was introduced in March and it became the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act in May 1986. In January 1986, across the country, there were strident Muslim protests against the progressive verdict, which had granted Shah Bano, a Muslim woman, alimony/maintenance after her divorce.
Ali Miyan Nadvi’s memoir (vol. 3, chapter 4, p. 134) clearly narrates that it is he who had persuaded Rajiv Gandhi not to accept the proposition that many Islamic countries have already reformed their personal laws. Nadvi’s narration is triumphant and deceitful; he rejoices in the successful accomplishment of his effort to stymie a similar reform in India. He says his persuasion had a particular psychological impact on Gandhi and that his “arrow precisely hit the target—woh teer apney nishaaney par baitha”. On page 157 comes Nadvi’s candid “confession”: “Our mobilisation for protecting the Shariat in 1986 resulted into complicating the issue of Babri Masjid and vitiated the atmosphere in a big way—is ne fiza mein ishte’aal wa izteraab paida karney mein bahut bara hissa liya,” he writes.
For further substantiation, one must read Nadvi’s memoir along with Nicholas Nugent’s book (1990), Rajiv Gandhi: Son of a Dynasty (p. 187):
“...a decision had been taken by the Congress High Command in the early 1986 to ‘play the Hindu card’ in the same way that the Muslim Women’s bill had been an attempt to ‘play the Muslim card’... Ayodhya was supposed to be a package deal... a tit for tat for the Muslim women’s bill... Rajiv played a key role in carrying out the Hindu side of the package deal by such actions as arranging that pictures of Hindus worshipping at the newly unlocked shrine be shown on television.”
༺The lock was opened within 40 minutes of the order being delivered by the district court of Faizabad on 1 February 1986. As said earlier, the deal between the Prime Minister, the Muslim clergy and the Momin Conference’s Ziaur Rahman Ansari (1925-1992; the then Union Minister of State for Environment) had already been struck in January 1986. There is a reference to this in Z R Ansari’s biography, Wings of Destiny, 2018, written by his son Fasihur Rahman.
Despite the confessions of the then PM, Rajiv and the then AIMPLB chief, Nadvi, the Syeda’s memoir chooses not to speak forthrightly against the most explosive issue of 1986, which went a long way in strengthening the Hindutva forces quite menacingly. Syeda devotes so many pages to cry against rise of Hindutva♔. On the contrary she narrates her satisfaction at certain roles played by the AIMPLB (pp. 113-114). This was precisely the time Syeda was being helped to rise as Muslim spokesperson.
One recalls Abdus Samad's Urdu novel Khwabon Ka Savera🤪 (Dawn of Dreams), wherein, a character Wasim, descendant of a landed family allied with the Muslim League, became chief of the Minority Cell of the ruling Congress, in New Delhi, after coming back from USA, whereas his co-villagers, unaware of Waseem’s arrival in India and having been made their leader, rather knew him to be pursuing his career in USA.
How do the post-independence ruling dispensations create Muslim Leaders/Spokespersons/Intelligentsia and foist them upon the Qaum?
🉐This is revealed and testified more clearly through the rise of Syeda narrated by herself in her memoir. Arvind N Das (1949-2000) would therefore rightly call such an intelligentsia to be “Un-intelligentsia”.
🍌Syeda, in her capacity as the member of the NCW, claims to have prepared reports with the titles such as “Voice of the Voiceless” and “My Voice Shall Be Heard”; and launched an outfit in 2000, Muslim Women’s Forum (MWF). Unfortunately, her memoir reveals that she didn’t raise the voice for the hapless and abandoned Muslim women, such as Shahbano. This job was left to her ailing aunt Saliha (1913-1988), the second wife of Abid Husain (1896-1978; one of the three prominent founders of the Jamia Millia Islamia).
Ali Miyan Nadvi’s memoir (1988) reveals that he had committed to Rajiv Gandhi to make some arrangements for the maintenance to be paid to such women through Waqf Boards. Syeda doesn’t say anything about that promise. She repeats the old hollow words of reform from within, “Muslims should themselves eschew triple talaq and polygamy” (p. 112). She doesn’t write a word why did the Shariat Application Act 1937 discriminate against the women; she goes silent on why have the Muslims doggedly refused to bring reforms from within- the reforms which almost all Islamic countries have implemented long ago. Turkey implemented it in the pre-Republican, Ottoman era, and Pakistan implemented in 1961. She, rather jumps on to blame (as well as intimidate) the regime since 2014, “given the current regime’s existing antipathy, if a law is made then blood will be spilt of the ignorant and innocent” (p. 112). She, then adds, “all great Islamic scholars - Hali, Iqbal, and Maulana Azad, have asked the quom [qaum𓃲] to wake up and act” (p.112). One must ask Syeda, did Iqbal (d. 1938) and Azad (d. 1958) speak out against the Jinnah’s regressively patriarchic Shariat Application Act 1937?
Why does this self-styled progressive Muslim woman become so forgiving for the regressive Muslim leadership?
Is this the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of the Muslim elites? Perhaps, yes! Syeda was a good friend of Prof Mushirul Haq (1933-1990), the then VC of Kashmir University, who had played host to Syeda and her daughter; she played badminton in the lawns of the VC Lodge of the Kashmir University. This was just a few weeks ahead of Haq having been abducted and brutally killed by the radicalised fanatics of Kashmir on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramzan. Haq’s academic writings stood firmly against Muslim regressivism. In his books, Haq wrote against Muslim hypocrisy resisting secularisation and thereby contributing to communalisation of Hindus. Haq’s 1970 book, Muslim Politics in Modern India 1857-1947, didn’t spare even the staunchest nationalist Muslim, Maulana Azad, for his early, pan-Islamic phase; he wrote an essay, “Secularism? No, Secular State? Well-Yes”, included in his 1972 anthology, Islam in Secular India.
ꦡAt least in order to pay tribute to her friend, Haq, Syeda should have subjected the Muslim regressives to criticism. She chose not to do so. But she makes her memoirs yet another aide to the victimhood-narrative by speaking out loudly on the Gujarat pogroms (2002). Certain activists did fight the legal battles which resulted into a minister (Ms Kodnai) and an IPS officer (Mr. Vanzara) sent to the prisons, of course with the judicial battle waged by the likes of Teesta Setalvad. As against this, the IPS officer of Bhagalpur pogroms (1989-90) rose further to become Bihar’s DGP. Yet, this doesn’t find mention in Syeda’s memoir, nor does she talk about Muzaffarnagar (2013) massacre of the Akhilesh era. This selectivity must be called into question.
These are the duplicitous ways of self-perpetuation. Small wonder then, why many soap operas꧟ of Pakistan depict Muslim women associated with the NGOs pretending to be standing for women uplift more as vamps and oppressors of women.
Contrast it with Ghazala Wahab’s recent book, Born A Muslim🎃. She is a journalist and author, professionally accomplished by sheer hard work. Her class location may be of an elite, in relative terms (elite is after all a relative notion), but she is not in the circuit of the clique called ‘Kutcherry Milieu’. She is therefore quite unforgiving and fiercely objective about telling the truths throughout her book, and even more particularly in her exclusive chapter on women. She is putting all the records straight. She is living by her professional merit, not preying upon the NGOs and civil society circuits funded lavishly by the government.
🌼Otherwise, the AMU teachers played their own regressive roles in 1985 in the case of Shah Bano, when endorsement for maintenance was signed by a mere two dozen of Left leaning teachers that too on the initiatives of the tall Marxist historian Irfan Habib (b. 1931) who also happened to have been exercising great influence in the recruitments and promotions of AMU. Whereas around 600 teachers (including 60 plus women teachers) signed against Shah Bano getting maintenance, and thus, stood with the regressive forces.
🌳All these explain/reveal the hidden truths about the status quo and opportunistic of the leadership and intelligentsia of India’s Muslims.
Postscript:ꦏ Not many Muslim women of India have written English language memoir. In recent decades, Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1909-2001), From Purdah to Parliament: Memoirs of a Muslim Woman in Indian Politics (2001), and Mohsina Kidwai (My Life in Indian Politics, October, 2022) have brought out their memoirs. Najma Heptullah’s memoir (In Pursuit of Democracy: Beyond Party Lines) has also come out in November 2024. Qudsia’s title is plagiarized from that of Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah (1915-2000), which was published in 1963. Qudsia was one of the 15 women members (and only Muslim woman) of the Constituent Assembly of India. A recent book, by Angellica Aribam & Akash Satyawati’s The Fifteen: The Life and Times of the Women in India’s Constituent Assembly, and Pratinav Anil’s book, Another India have written on Qudsia’s interventions inside the Constituent Assembly. Interesting thing about Qudsia is, having pursued her electoral politics with the Muslim League (elected as independent from Hardoi in UP, a Muslim reserved seat in the province, but not reserved for women, in 1937, which was, in her own words, her “political baptism”), she suddenly turned into a radically different politician inside the Constituent Assembly. She was the one who opposed reservations for Muslims in the cabinet. Anil says, “According to K. M. Munshi [1887-1971], who was witness to these parleys [in the subcommittee for minorities in the Constituent Assembly Debates], [Sardar] Patel recruited two northern League rebels, Tajamul Hussain, Shia landlord from Bihar, and Begum [Qudsia] Aizaz Rasul, League chief in the UP legislative council and the only Muslim woman in the [Constituent] assembly, to scuttle the work of his party colleagues [Maulana] Azad and Hifzur Rahman Seohaarwi [1901-1962], both in favour of reservations, [though, all of them against separate electorates].” Qudsia asserted, ‘now that Pakistan had been formed, in the interest of Muslims who are left in the country, it would be better not to isolate [our]selves from the general community by asking for reservations’.
