• Historians shed light on modernity and creation of Pakistan in a thought-provoking discussion
• Scholar says Thatta had 6,000 institutions of education for boys and girls before colonial era

KARACHI: Modernity in the context of India, the role of women of the calibre of Miss Fatima Jinnah, Jahanara Shahnawaz and Shaista Ikramullah in Muslim nationalism and politics were in focus at ‘Negotiating Modernity: Women in the Making of Pakistan’, a learned conversation between Associate Professor of South Asian History at Georgetown University, Dr Reza Pirbhai, who also happens to be member of faculty at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and scholar Nusrat Khawaja at the Mohatta Palace Museum here on Friday.

From examining conflict and reconciliation between movements in Islamic thought and institutions, and those introduced by the British in the colonial context, Dr Pirbhai talked about the idea of a clash between tradition and modernity, the fluidity of culture and the conjoined impact of various strands of thought on the cultural formation of identity for post-Partition society.

“When we speak of modernity, we pin the concept to 18th and 19th century Europe and the present,” said Dr Pirbhai.

“When we pin modernity on the European concept, we take everything else and put it in the box of ‘tradition’. All this tradition is set apart from modernity and that is how we achieve something negative,” he pointed out, while explaining that it was like making colonialism more important. Like the British telling you that they rule over you to bring you into the modern world. And that idea was being reinforced by the educational institutions and political institutions.

“Colonialism says, ‘all you need to know is how we define the world’,” he added.

Deconstructing the idea of modernity, he said, “When we think of tradition in Pakistan, we think of Islam. We are not looking at modernity going back here for over 1,400 years because it is in the box of tradition that has been put away.”

Coming to the topic of women and modernity, he said that the ideal women in the Victorian world were domestic women. “Mothers, daughters and wives, who were householders, women who nurtured others and led a life of seclusion,” he said.

He said that in 1843, when the British took over Sindh the major centres of learning here were the matabs and madressahs. “For example, a place as small as Thatta had 6,000 such institutions of learning and not just for boys and men, but also for girls and women, who were taught literature and arithmetic, too. Then the British shut down these centres of learning,” he said.

“Thanks to those education institutions before the colonial era, the literacy rate there was significantly high. But after the British shut the institutions, they replaced those 6,000 institutions in Thatta with five schools, and you had to pay fees to go to those five schools. The girls and women were the first ones there to find no place for themselves in those schools. They were instantly at a disadvantage,” Dr Pirbhai added.

It was also pointed out that the modern or educated women had the support of educated men, who were either their fathers, husbands or brothers, to widen their horizons. All of these men were touched by English education and believed in the western ideal of the educated woman. Educated women were seen as westernised, and not in the Islamic frame.

The discussion turned to politician and activist Jahanara Shahnawaz, former member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Begum Mohammed Ali Jauhar, Miss Fatima Jinnah and Shaista Ikramullah, who all had an educated man by their side, encouraging them to pursue their interests. They did away with the ideas of seclusion.

At the time there were two extremes of the burqa and veil and the Victorian woman who did not cover her head or face. The well-educated dentist that Miss Jinnah was, compromised between both these looks when she came into public by covering her head. Actually, even the much more modern Benazir Bhutto found that compromise suitable for herself also.

Back to Miss Jinnah, she was leading a kind of retired life after the passing of the Quaid-i-Azam in 1948 until 1962 when she was unhappy with Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s reforms and was urged to join politics by Jahanara Shahnawaz and the other ladies.

It was said that had she won the elections, she would not have just been the first female county head in the world, but she would have also reversed Ayub’s decisions and gone back to having both Urdu and Bengali as the two national languages of this country and we would not have lost East Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2023