In his preface to the third edition of Sharif Beti [The Gentle Daughter], published in 1918, its publisher Syed Mumtaz Ali gently complains that 1,000 copies of the second edition of the book took five years to sell out.

Now, we know that this is a complaint many of us still have about the sales figures of serious Urdu books; very recently, I was surprised to see the first edition of a classic collection of stories on the shelf of Sang-e-Meel’s bookstore, 40 years after it first appeared.

Ali — husband of Sharif Beti’s author Syeda Muhammadi Begum — also points out that this little tale, as he describes it, is about a family in the lower income bracket, and suitable for young girls who are normally fed a diet of unrealistic stories set in palaces. It’s something of a paradox, then, that Sharif Beti is now back in print in an anthology of Muhammadi Begum’s writings, published by Sang-e-Meel, that costs Rs2,200 — not an easy price for the audience which the writer and publisher envisaged.

But that, along with the omission of most of Muhammadi Begum’s charming poems, is a minor caveat. As a reader who first found Muhammadi Begum’s books in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) library, and has carefully preserved Xeroxed copies for 27 years, Majmua Muhammadi Begum [Collection Muhammadi Begum] is a bounty. I bought it in Lahore in September and it’s been a companion through self-quarantine and various forms of lockdown.

The editor, Humaira Ashfaq, has brought together all of Muhammadi Begum’s fiction. She has also included manuals of etiquette, a translation of Guy de Maupassant and, notably, Muhammadi Begum’s biography of her older friend and role model, the teacher and headmistress Ashrafunissa Begum.

I’ve wanted to see Muhammadi Begum’s work back in print ever since I first read Sharif Beti with the delight a child takes in a wonder tale. But far from being a wonder tale, it’s a very realistic work — except for its almost superfluous happy ending. Sharifunnisa, a clerk’s adolescent daughter with a mentally ill mother, moves from sewing and stitching for the small income that her handicrafts raise, to rearing livestock and selling milk and eggs, to putting her considerable talents (synonymous with virtue in Muhammadi Begum’s rule book) to use as a teacher of young girls, in the borrowed house she inhabits. She achieves this under the guidance of a very beguiling character, the rambunctious nayan [hairdresser], who teaches her to combine the virtues of her gentle upbringing with the resourcefulness and entrepreneurship of a working-class woman.

The biography of ‘Bibi Ashraf’ has much in common with this tale; even the heroines’ names are similar and each describes the triumph of resilience over adversity. Along with the incomparable value of education, the biography also underlines two of Muhammadi Begum’s major ethical concerns: virtue, in the sense of an upright existence; and industriousness, in one form or another, for women.

Widowed at an early age, Bibi Ashraf — as she was affectionately known by her colleagues — found employment teaching at a girls’ school in Lahore, partly funded by the bourgeoisie of the city for the education of their daughters, under the aegis of the colonial administration. Muhammadi Begum recounts the tragedies — the deaths of her husband and her children — and ultimate gains of Bibi Ashraf’s life with the elegance and compassion of the great storyteller she is. And one lesson she imparts, as she does in her fictions, is that success is not achieved in isolation; each positive step a woman takes towards freedom will contribute to the progress of all women and of society.

Muhammadi Begum’s own biography proves this. History remembers her as the editor of the pioneering Lahore-based journal Tehzeeb-i-Niswan which, in the early years of the 20th century, created a cross-country network of women correspondents and, indeed, some of the earliest Urdu fictions by women. It has been chronicled in Gail Minault’s feminist history Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India, which inspired a somewhat limited interest in Muhammadi Begum’s life and times.

What was forgotten — and is now proudly reinscribed in our literary history — is Muhammadi Begum’s role as the first woman writer of fiction to create an oeuvre, albeit small, in Urdu. Her other works of fiction, which Humaira Ashfaq terms ‘novels’, though they are all brief and Muhammadi Begum herself accurately describes them as qissa [tale] or kahani, are the relatively conventional Safia Begum, in which a talented young woman dies rather than succumb to an arranged marriage, and the very unusual Aaj Kal [Today and Tomorrow] the cautionary autobiography of a woman driven to misfortune by her pathological indolence and apathy. Both novels are set against the shifting mores of colonial times.

Both stories employ a degree of self-reflexivity. Safia, before dying, writes a letter about the circumstances of her life to Muhammadi Begum. Fahmida of Aaj Kal is a somewhat unreliable writer-narrator of her own story, told in the first person. Beginning with a degree of self-blame, she switches register to indict a husband who, after indulging and encouraging her indolence, neglects and blames her when it becomes pathological. He abandons her, kidnaps their living son and remarries when one of their children dies in a freak accident.

But for me, Muhammadi Begum’s finest fiction remains Sharif Beti, for the sparkle, wit and beauty of its language and dialogues, which far surpass her other works of fiction. That her career ended because of her premature death in 1908 at the age of 30 is Urdu literature’s misfortune.

But other women novelists would, in the following decades, appear on the literary stage: the very sophisticated Tyaba Bilgrami in Hyderabad Deccan, Sughra Humayun Mirza in the same city, and the peripatetic Nazar Sajjad Hyder, the most prolific and famous of them all. As Ismat Chughtai later wrote, these women — most of whom never abandoned seclusion — opened the gates for a new and fearless generation of writers, from Rashid Jahan and Hijab Imtiaz Ali to Chughtai, Aamna Nazli, Qurratulain Hyder, Khadija Mastur and Nisar Aziz Butt, who would collectively build the new edifice of the Urdu short story and novel.

The columnist is a London-based novelist and short story writer

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 27th, 2020