Introduction

Begum Sarbuland’s Travels

One night in June 1909, Begum Sarbuland was lying in bed when her husband Hamidullah turned to her and said, “Would you like to go on hajj this year?” Without hesitation, she answered that if God willed it, she would. This would be her first time abroad. She began to prepare for the trip almost immediately. The journey ended up being far more than a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, as her husband had initially suggested. In addition to completing the hajj, which is typically considered incumbent on every Muslim who has the means to perform it, the couple also saw swaths of the Middle East and Europe. Even by today’s standards, the journey was ambitious and lengthy.

The trip had three primary destinations: the Hejaz (particularly Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah) in today’s Saudi Arabia, Constantinople (or Istanbul, as it is known today), and London. While all these locations were easily accessible from India by steamship, the couple avoided the beaten path and instead followed a highly idiosyncratic route between them that took them to corners of the Middle East and Europe rarely visited by Indian tourists (map 1). The reason for this seems to have been that Hamidullah had already traveled widely in the region. Their itinerary allowed him new experiences beyond the main steamship routes he knew so well. Thus, rather than going from Bombay directly to Jeddah, the port most used by Indian pilgrims to Mecca, the Sarbulands first sailed to Haifa, in Palestine.

Hamidullah was eager to travel on the newly constructed Hejaz Railway, an Ottoman-built railway line that ran from Damascus to Medina, and Haifa made for easy access to the line.7 From Haifa, they first traveled east to the holy Christian city of Nazareth. (Most Indian Muslims visiting Palestine would not have skipped Jerusalem in this way.) Then, they took the train to Medina. Typically, travelers would proceed from Medina directly to Mecca by camel caravan, but, in another unexpected twist, the Sarbulands instead rode the train northward to Damascus. They stayed there for a single day before continuing to Beirut and boarding a series of steamers to Jeddah. From Jeddah, they went by camel to Mecca to perform the hajj. Until this time, they had been accompanied by a single female servant, Amina bi, who looked after them, cooked their meals, and guarded their luggage. In Mecca, this trio was joined by a large party from Hyderabad and Bombay that included several family members and life-long family servants. Among the latter group was the family’s wetnurse, who had brought the couple’s infant son, Halimullah, along!

After performing the hajj, the larger party returned to Hyderabad with Amina bi while the Sarbulands continued their trip alone. From Jeddah, they first boarded a ship to Constantinople but abandoned the vessel when they learned that, due to a plague outbreak in Jeddah, all ships coming from the city would be subject to quarantine in mainland Turkey. The couple craftily skirted the Ottoman cordon sanitaire by disembarking at Suez and taking a train to Alexandria (skipping Cairo!). Sailing from plague-free Egypt directly to Constantinople spared them the ordeal of an indefinite quarantine.

In Constantinople Hamidullah had some unnamed business that meant he was frequently off on his own. Begum Sarbuland was left to her own devices. Uncertain of her ability to navigate such a large and unfamiliar city, Begum Sarbuland opted to spend much of her time in the hotel, which also happened to be the finest luxury European-style accommodation in the city. Nevertheless, she did manage to tour the city’s main sites when her husband was able to accompany her. She also attended several parties and even met the Ottoman sultan and Muslim caliph Mehmed V at his lavish European-style palace on the Bosporus. Despite facing significant cultural and linguistic barriers, during these social events Begum Sarbuland was thrilled to meet Muslim women from the Turkish aristocracy, with whom she sought affinities based on a shared religion and social class.

From Constantinople the couple traveled to Greece and then Italy and France. By this time Begum Sarbuland seems to have been very tired of the journey. Anyone who has ever made a touristic trip to Europe will commiserate with her sheer exhaustion at visiting one museum and garden after another. At one relatable moment, she begs her husband to spare her the torture of yet another Italian palazzo. The couple strikes a deal: she will continue the tour, but only in a convertible automobile. This lack of interest in mainland Europe was not purely a symptom of fatigue and sensory overload, though. She found Europe underwhelming compared with the emotional excitement of the holy lands and the sociopolitical pull of Constantinople, the heart of Muslim modernity and a beacon for Indian Muslims who yearned to see Islam regain its status as a religion of state in India and elsewhere in the colonized world. (In his travelogue of the city, Hamidullah called it “the Muslim capital.”)8 Begum Sarbuland identified strongly with her faith, on a political as well as a spiritual level, and was above all eager to understand contemporary Muslim life outside India and to meet her fellow Muslims in their homes and on the streets. By comparison, the glories of ancient Rome and contemporary Athens held much less appeal. Paris, it must be said, was somewhat more bearable to her, largely because the couple’s attention had shifted from museum hopping to boutique shopping.

Begum Sarbuland’s verve returned in full form when the pair reached London, a city she had heard about since childhood and whose language she spoke well. British power in India was then near its zenith, and London was a veritable Mecca for wealthy and up-and-coming Indians. It was a city filled with Begum Sarbuland’s friends and family, many of whom were living, studying, or working there, and she fit right in. Her first priority was to spend time with her family: with her eight-year-old son, who was attending a boarding school in the countryside; her brother, who was studying medicine; and Hamidullah’s nephew and their future son-in-law, a law student. (Plate 7 shows a studio portrait of the group together in London.) Nevertheless, she did make time to meet with other people in the city, including the future king and queen of Britain (the soon-to-be King George V and Queen Mary), whom she knew from their visit to Hyderabad a few years before.

From London, the couple set sail for Hyderabad. Begum Sarbuland was now running very low on steam. She was plainly relieved to be going home but also upset to leave her son behind. From London, she and her husband traveled to Brindisi and then to Bombay. Before her arrival in India, Begum Sarbuland resumed wearing the burqa that she seemingly donned only sporadically in Europe. Her arrival in Hyderabad, where she alighted from the train at a secondary station, was quiet but not anonymous. She was met on the platform by her mother and a few friends. The welcoming party immediately noticed that the long trip had invigorated her: “When I flipped my veil back, they saw that my face had been changed by the blessings of my pilgrimage to the holy places and by the European climate. . . . This is the light that God has placed upon me since my visit to the shrine of his Beloved Prophet.”

Though so much of this trip was novel for Begum Sarbuland, she largely remained within relatively familiar social spaces. The Sarbulands’ wealth allowed them to travel in enviable comfort. Their movements were largely coordinated by European tour operators, and they typically stayed in European-owned and -run hotels—except on one occasion in Damascus, when Begum Sarbuland’s desire for Islamic unity inspired her to try out a “Muslim hotel,” a decision she immediately regretted. Their modes of transport included steamships, trains, carriages, donkey carts, and camel litters. Whenever possible, though, they went first class. Moreover, they seemingly ate mostly Western food in five-star establishments or had their servant prepare meals for them, except in Arabia, where they had access to housing provided by the state of Hyderabad. Unlike some Indian Muslim travelers, neither evinced an aversion to eating non-halal food, and on the occasions when they had to eat continental European fare, Begum Sarbuland lamented fiercely the lack of puddings and other British “delicacies.”

On some occasions, though, the Sarbulands’ wealth could not guarantee their comfort. In the Middle East, the couple had largely relied on tour operators from Thomas Cook, a British company that specialized in facilitating touristic travel for Europeans (though it also had a history of organizing transport for the pilgrimage from India). Despite this, Begum Sarbuland’s sense of curiosity meant that she often ventured out to chart her own course without her husband or a Cook representative as an intermediary. In these adventures, she often encountered cultural differences that she was forced to navigate alone. These passages are where her travelogue truly shines. One of the book’s rawest moments takes place in the bathhouses of Damascus, where Begum Sarbuland was forced to completely abandon her own sense of personal space. By opting to stay in a “Muslim hotel,” which did not have a full bathroom, she was compelled to bathe in the public hammam. With almost no ability to communicate inside, she begrudgingly abandoned her inhibitions and allowed the attendants to undress and wash her, as was customary. This was a new experience for her: Indian women of her class were deeply resistant to being seen naked, even by other women.9 Ultimately, though, she came around to the experience and found herself wanting to visit a hammam once again, “in part because it gave relief to my body, but also because it was one of the more memorable experiences of our trip.”

From Private Diary to Published Book

After Begum Sarbuland completed her handwritten travel diary in 1910, the volume remained within the family until around 1935, when she had it published with light editing. The present book is an English translation of that 1935 print. The diary’s unique publishing history—a text meant only for close family and friends being published in approximately its original format twenty-five years later—is much of the reason that it is so remarkable and relevant to readers today. Had Begum Sarbuland chosen to publish a travel account immediately after her journey, as her husband had, it would surely have read very differently. Given her social position and the sensitivities surrounding Muslim women’s writing in early twentieth-century India, such a book would have carefully adhered to the gendered standards of Urdu print. What is more, with her husband then at the peak of his career, its contents would have remained circumspect and studiously politically correct (as were her husband’s writings). The result would have been far more restrained; the book would likely never have included such a candid discussion of being hand-washed in a Levantine hammam or of slipping a train conductor a bribe against her husband’s wishes.

By reading the 1935 version, printed when she was already a widow, we gain access to her more intimate reflections, experiences, and emotions. We also encounter the thoughts and feelings of an elusive life, the type of figure that rarely appears directly in Indian or Islamic history except as refracted through men’s depictions or as represented in the careful social codes that many Indian women of the period used in their public writing. As Siobhan Lambert-Hurley notes, “in women’s writing [from colonial South Asia] especially, the self may be elusive. More often than not, in South Asian autobiography the story of the self is one of self-deprecation over self-aggrandizement, with individual lives told in relational terms.”10 In private writing, though, this was less likely to be the case.

Begum Sarbuland herself realized that her book offered a rare opportunity for readers to see the world “through a woman’s eyes.” As this was her first trip abroad, her account glimmers with excitement, curiosity, and wonder. Through it, we learn what she felt as she spent her first night at sea on a steamship. We follow along as she observes with fascination the diversity of Muslim societies outside India’s borders and attempts to negotiate these unfamiliar and sometimes disconcerting spaces. And we are horrified, and yet impressed, by the calm magnanimity with which she confronts casual European racism, as when a British woman forcibly removes her veil in public.

The book also reveals how she reflected on her own beliefs, practices, and preferences in light of these experiences. What did it mean, as a Muslim woman from colonial India, to travel through the Ottoman Empire, to meet the Muslim caliph? Was it unsettling to encounter Muslim women abroad whose languages, practices, clothing, and even beliefs were so different from her own? And above all—to use her own words—what did it mean to be a Muslim woman in a time of rising Westernization? What was it like to make her way through a colonial world that was not designed for practicing Muslims like her, a world unwilling to fully accept her? It was precisely these reflections and insights that she wished to share with her readers.

Her account also sheds light on the mundane: her everyday routines, her travel logistics, the nature of her relationship with her husband. Her writing obliterates tired stereotypes of oppressed, meek, or timid Muslim women imprisoned behind the four walls of the home by jealous male guardians. For example, while the couple are in Mina, just outside of Mecca, Begum Sarbuland suddenly decides that she would like to go back to the city to visit the Kaaba before sunset. Her husband does not want to join her, so she gathers a small escort, mounts a donkey, and rides off. When she reaches Mecca, she abandons her escort but finds the sacred space around the Kaaba thronged with pilgrims. She wonders how she will ever make her way through such a dense crowd alone. Suddenly, she is approached by an African man who asks her, in Arabic, “Oh, my lady, do you need a kiss?” She answers without hesitation: “Yes, I do.”

The man takes her hand and, maneuvering through the crush of people, bears her to the hajar aswad, the revered black stone set into the Kaaba’s outer wall. She is shocked by this occurrence—it requires great luck and a fair bit of physical strength and tenacity to reach the stone in pilgrimage season. With no time to reflect on the immensity of this miracle, she kisses the stone repeatedly as he shields her body with his own to protect her from the pressing crowds. He then leads her back to safety. The pair talk and pray together (another miraculous occurrence, since they do not share a language), and then she remounts her donkey and returns to Mina. Clearly, Begum Sarbuland felt free to chart her own course, to make her own decisions, and to go her own way. She often avoided unnecessary contact with unrelated men, but as this anecdote shows, her rules of engagement were varied, complex, and entirely of her own making.

Perhaps recognizing the power of her private travel diary and the value of its candid insight for her contemporaries, Begum Sarbuland did not compose a fresh, polished narrative when she finally decided to tell her story. Instead, she edited her old diary (probably adding section headings), wrote up a preface, and sent the manuscript to a printing press near her home in Old Delhi. She called the book Dunya Aurat ki Nazar meñ: Mashriq o Maghrib ka Safarnama (The World through a Woman’s Eyes: A Travelogue of East and West) (plate 1).

This title foregrounded one of the great causes of her life: the search for an ideal and uncompromising Muslim womanhood that could thrive in a Western-dominated world without succumbing to it. She addressed the book directly to women readers, whom she called “my sisters.” This language suggests that Begum Sarbuland believed she could offer a unique perspective for women readers, who had relatively few opportunities to see the world through the eyes of someone like them. The published book contains many grammatical errors and a few passages that seem repetitive or contradictory. This roughness, though, only serves to strengthen the visceral sense of encountering Begum Sarbuland’s thoughts and feelings directly, as she wished for them to be experienced by her Muslim sisters.

Prominent Themes in The World through a Woman’s Eyes

Begum Sarbuland’s diary is among the earliest known travel accounts by a Muslim woman from anywhere in the world.11 The World through a Woman’s Eyes thus offers rare insight into a host of historical questions about colonialism, Islam, mobility, class, race, and gender. Some of those questions, many of which are vexing, are addressed below.

Muslim Women’s Travel Writing in Colonial India

Travel writing emerged in India around the early to mid-nineteenth century, when it flourished with the arrival of the steamship, the train, and the printing press. By the 1880s travelogues were appearing everywhere, in books, in magazines, and in newspapers, where readers could find weekly updates on the peregrinations of their favorite writers and politicians. By the turn of the twentieth century, the travelogue had become a central pillar of Indian literary and intellectual culture and a key genre for negotiating, debating, and adjudicating the world and India’s relationship to it.24 This rich tradition offers bountiful sources for seeing the world through the eyes of Indians of the past.

Unfortunately, not all voices from that past are equally represented. Men overwhelmingly dominated the genre of travel writing in India, with women’s writing representing only a fraction of the total number of accounts ever printed. One reason for this was that “among sharif [noble] women of the nineteenth century . . . knowing how to read was unusual enough, but knowing how to write was very rare indeed.”25 But then, becoming a published author took more than knowing how to write. Social restrictions meant that women who could write were expected to avoid full visibility in public spaces and thus often had nowhere to publish, at least under their own names.26 Poorer and lower-status women like Amina bi were physically more present in public spaces but typically illiterate.27 In short, the gender-segregated world of Urdu print offered little ground to women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.28

The earliest Muslim women’s travel writing was thus not printed but circulated in handwritten copies among family and friends.29 Begum Sarbuland’s diary is a case in point. She was initially unwilling to publish her travel narrative and seems to have been writing with an eye toward a familiar, intimate readership. By 1910, though, a few Indian Muslim women had begun to publish. As Sumaira Nawaz notes, as accounts increasingly began to appear in print, ultimately “the genres of roznāmchā [diary] and the safarnāmā [travelogue] became socially respectable and preferred means of self-expression” for women.30 The earliest accounts were published by women from wealthy, liberal families. Most prominent were the women of the Tyabji family in Bombay—Atiya and Nazli Fyzee particularly—who left purdah and actively participated in India’s public sphere.31 There were also the queens of Bhopal—extremely wealthy and educated women who ruled their own state.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw other gradual but major changes that made it possible for everyday sharif (or noble) women to circulate their writings more widely. From the 1900s, Urdu-language magazines targeted at and increasingly produced by “sharif Indian ladies” began to pop up across the country.32 A few women were even beginning to publish book-length accounts.33 Despite having this option before her, Begum Sarbuland only allowed for her travel stories to circulate beyond her family orally, via speeches given only to sharif women in small, controlled settings. A 1914 magazine article makes a chance reference to one such gathering. The piece begins by noting that it had become an established practice for the “educated Indians” who visited Shimla annually to bring their wives and families with them. The author was “pleased to see” that women avidly attended all the happenings. The women did so in purdah but in such a way that they could “see the outside world” without being seen by it themselves. One such event was hosted by Begum Sarbuland: “I found the Indian ladies [who had come to Shimla] well informed on all current topics of the day, but the war [World War I] was the chief subject of conversation amongst them. I was particularly interested to hear Begum Sar Buland Jung of Hyderabad, at her own Pardah Party, give experiences of her visits to England, France, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt, thus making the theatre of war quite vivid to us all.”34 Begum Sarbuland likely gave many talks like this after her return. She must have been an engaging raconteuse if her travel stories could still hold an audience four years after her return!35

Other women of Begum Sarbuland’s generation made similar choices about how and when to publish. One of these was Ummat ul-Ghani Nur un-Nisa (1885–1915), who like Begum Sarbuland was born in Hyderabad to an aristocratic family in the late nineteenth century. Coincidentally, the two women performed the hajj the same year, departing from Hyderabad just nine days apart. Then, they followed roughly the same idiosyncratic itinerary in the Middle East and even stayed in the same “Muslim hotel” in Damascus (which they both reviled). They may well have encountered one another in Mecca or Medina, where people of the same regional or linguistic background often met. Both women kept travel diaries, neither of which were published as books nor excerpted in popular women’s magazines like Tehzib un-Niswan. Ummat ul-Ghani did, however, publish her diary in a handwritten family newspaper that circulated only among her relatives. In this way, her writing never left the bounds of her own family within her lifetime (though it was later recuperated from family records and published).36

At the opposite pole was another Hyderabadi contemporary, Sughra Humayun Mirza (1884–1958), who was eight years Begum Sarbuland’s junior. Today Sughra is known as one of the founding figures of women’s writing in Urdu. She published more than a dozen novels and at least five book-length travel accounts, the first appearing in 1914. Like Begum Sarbuland, she was a prominent supporter of women’s education and social reform. However, while Begum Sarbuland preferred to work from within women’s spaces and without publishing her views, Sughra took an outspoken approach and ultimately became well-known nationwide.

Outside of Hyderabad, Begum Inam Habibullah (1883–1975) was another exact contemporary. A sharif woman from northern India, she traveled to England in 1924 to visit her three young sons who were at boarding school there. Like Begum Sarbuland, she learned English and became closely involved in social reform. While in England, she too kept a daily record of her trip, partly for herself but also so that she could share impressions of the journey with her “sisters” back home. After returning to India, Begum Habibullah, who was still living in purdah, only shared the diary privately. However, as with Begum Sarbuland, her views clearly shifted with the passage of time. By the mid-1930s she had left purdah. It was perhaps this shift that made her also decide to have her diary published for a public readership; it was likely printed in 1937, not long after Begum Sarbuland’s.37 Begum Sarbuland’s account may well have inspired her own effort.

Both women’s decisions were by then not particularly radical. The 1930s was a time when more and more women were leaving purdah and the risks of appearing in public continued to decrease. (Khurshid Begum, the Sarbulands’ eldest daughter, abandoned purdah at around the same time.) It may be that this more relaxed social atmosphere inspired women like them to share their experiences and impressions beyond their immediate circles.

Begum Sarbuland’s Life

Begum Sarbuland spent her life surrounded by the rich, famous, and powerful. Outside the home, she headed a wide range of social organizations, promoted reformist causes, and met with caliphs and queens. She had easy, informal access to the ear of the nizam, the ruler of Hyderabad, and was tied to many of his most important officers and advisers by blood or relation. Her family included a range of famous men. These men were the subject of biographical tomes. They also wrote extensively themselves. Given her position within this matrix of power and print publishing, one might imagine that Begum Sarbuland would appear regularly in historical sources.

In fact, Begum Sarbuland only makes the most fleeting appearances in the printed historical archive. This is not because she was meek or chose to stay at home: to the contrary, she was a vocal reformist, an avid traveler, a woman who had no compunction about mounting a donkey for a ride into town. However, she had little interest in preserving her legacy; her contemporary family members rarely wrote about her either. Her birth, for instance, is not recorded in her father’s autobiography. Her husband typically only mentioned her in passing in his own autobiographical works.

By contrast, the human archive she left behind was immense. Begum Sarbuland was survived by many children and grandchildren who loved and adored her. Much of what I learned about her, and particularly her later life, came from two years of interviews with her descendants, some of whom lived with her in the 1940s and 1950s. Family records include a huge trove of photographs, heirlooms, and even Begum Sarbuland’s own handwritten diaries. The following section is based on scattered references to her in archival sources, on her own diary entries, and on interviews with her descendants. In this introduction, I only offer a broad sketch of her life to contextualize her travelogue. Readers wishing for a deeper engagement with Begum Sarbuland’s life and work should read the biographical chapter, “Begum Sarbuland: A Life Untold,” before reading the translation of her travelogue.

Akhtar un-Nisa (who would later bear the honorific title Begum Sarbuland Jung) was born in Hyderabad in southern India around 1876. However, her ancestral roots lay in Delhi. Her father was Nawab Agha Mirza Beg (1848–1933), a descendent of the Mughal royal family (plates 2 and 3). He was still a child when his family left Delhi in 1857 to flee a violent revolt against British colonial influence. Her mother, Sikandar Zamani (b. 1857), was also of royal blood (plate 4). The events of 1857 meant that both of Akhtar un-Nisa’s parents (who were betrothed cousins) grew up in exile from their ancestral homes. Mirza Beg spent the rest of his childhood in Lucknow. After completing his schooling, which was conducted largely in English, he migrated to Hyderabad; Sikandar Zamani joined him later. In Hyderabad he rose quickly through the ranks, coming to wield enormous power as the tutor and later the trusted confidant of the state’s ruler, the nizam. From childhood, Akhtar un-Nisa watched on as Hyderabad transformed from a Mughal successor state into a paragon of Muslim modernity, partly under her father’s guidance.38

In 1894, Akhtar un-Nisa traveled to Delhi—possibly for the first time in her life—to marry Nawab Hamidullah Khan, a young lawyer who was famously the first student enrolled in the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh (plates 5 and 6).39 This institution, which became Aligarh Muslim University, was meant to provide a modern colonial education to the hereditary landowning classes of northern India. From Aligarh, Hamidullah went abroad to study at Cambridge for several years before returning to India to practice law. Yet, for all his own personal successes, it was his marriage to the daughter of Hyderabad’s most powerful official that unlocked a brilliant career in the state’s judiciary. His new father-in-law helped him find promising employment and arranged for him to be given the honorific title “Sarbuland Jung” (Sarbuland literally means “head held high”; “Jung” or "Jang" was a marker of titles from the nizam.) From then on, Akhtar un-Nisa became known as simply Begum Sarbuland Jung (lit., “the wife of Sarbuland Jung”).

The couple lived together in Hyderabad for several decades, producing at least thirteen children, of which ten survived (plates 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18). In 1912, Nawab Sarbuland took an early retirement from the judiciary and moved with his wife to Allahabad (in the north of the country) and later to Delhi. He passed away in 1930. For the following two and a half decades, Begum Sarbuland lived variously in Delhi, Hyderabad, and Solan, sometimes alone and at other times with her children. Begum Sarbuland was in Delhi in 1947 when the partition of India and Pakistan gave rise to riots, killings, and mass displacement in the city. She not only witnessed this brutality firsthand but was herself displaced, though she found a safe berth with her son Halimullah, who temporarily rented an apartment for his family in Connaught Place. Her longtime home in the Daryaganj neighborhood of Old Delhi had been incorrectly declared “evacuee property” and was thus confiscated by the Indian government for allocation to a Hindu or Sikh refugee.40 Its recovery took several years of legal battles. She passed away in 1957 and was buried in a plot beside her husband near the walls of Delhi’s old city. Their graves are unmarked but can still be pointed out by the cemetery caretaker (plate 30).

From the splendor of nineteenth-century Hyderabad to the bloodshed of a sundered nation in 1947, from the royal palaces of the Hyderabadi nizam to a rented flat above a British-style pub in Connaught Place, Begum Sarbuland saw the highest of India’s highs and the lowest of its lows. The span of her life was such that researching her biography led me through a wide swath of history. Conducting this work, I found myself variously examining dusty nineteenth-century sources and asking her surviving relatives via WhatsApp what it had been like to grow up with such a remarkable woman. Meeting with Begum Sarbuland’s grandson in New Jersey and New Delhi to hear his memories of her, or listening to her granddaughter describe what it was like to witness the chaos of partition alongside her, the proximity to the past sometimes felt astonishing; it was as if I could hear a chain of voices that led directly back to the Mughal Empire itself. After all, Begum Sarbuland would have heard similar stories of chaos in Delhi from her own father, who had witnessed the toppling of the final Mughal monarch in 1857. In this way, Begum Sarbuland and her family seem to bind together two centuries of Indian history. Her life and writing reveal fascinating and important new details about India’s historical ties to the wider world and how Muslim women in India responded to the broad political, social, and religious changes that were taking place in Islam.

Conclusion

The heart of this book is Begum Sarbuland’s own words as they were preserved in her 1909–10 travel account. Further details of her trip and her life are found in the second part of the book, which contains an expansive biography, a translation of an advertisement for the book, and selected passages from Nawab Sarbuland’s own account of the journey. If her travelogue provides a snapshot of her views in 1909–10, her biography reminds us that she was a dynamic individual who changed with the world around her. For instance, in the 1880s, she, like most girls of her time, was not taught English. Yet, by the time she began her travel diary, she had clearly mastered the language sufficiently to chat comfortably with British women, including the future British queen. Another example of her dynamism comes from her shifting veiling practices. In her diary, she muses often on what type of veiling best fit the various situations she found herself in, adapting her practice to the circumstances. Yet her calculations also changed over time. In 1909 she often chose to wear a burqa and a full face covering. By the 1930s she had transitioned to a full-sleeved sari blouse under a long coat, her head covered by a dupatta. Photographs of her ranging from 1910 to 1957 reflect these shifts.

There are several other differences emerge from reading her 1910 text alongside the 1935 preface. In her earlier writing, she was most interested in comparing the lives of Indian Muslim women with their counterparts in the Middle East. By 1935, though, she was more concerned with making comparisons to European women; the positive views she expressed about contemporary Syrian women’s lives and independence in her diary fell to the wayside as she worried about what she called the rising tide of Westernization among Indian women. In her preface, she found new models to aspire to emulate in the Muslim past. She particularly points to Ayesha, the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife, whom she describes as simultaneously devoted to her family and to assisting her society outside the home, as the ideal model for modern women. There is a photograph of Begum Sarbuland from the 1930s that seems to embody this attitude (plate 11). In it, Begum Sarbuland stands—fittingly enough—with her head held high, looking forward intently. She is dressed in a sari, with the tail end draped over the back of her head. In her hand, she holds a type of black cloth, probably a veil. Often in such pictures, the subject poses with a symbolic object—a stack of law books, in the case of Hamidullah. That Begum Sarbuland chose to pose with her veil but not wear it reflects her careful commitment to the institution of purdah without giving up her direct engagement with the world. This approach to purdah was partly shaped by her experiences in Europe and her reflections on the lives and practices of other women around the world.

Reading her 1910 diary against her 1935 preface, the photographic archive she left behind, and her biography offers a multilayered picture of Begum Sarbuland’s personality and enduring dynamism. Rich with women characters, her diary also offers potential avenues to think more broadly about the lives of women in the society she inhabited. Most of the women that she mentions have left no record behind at all. These include her mother, Sikandar Zamani, her servant Amina bi, and her friend Mrs. Mumtaz. Begum Sarbuland’s candid account of her interactions with each of them gives us a better sense of what their everyday lives were like and how they supported one another with friendship, advice, and practical assistance. For instance, Begum Sarbuland would probably never have made this journey if she were unable to leave her many young children at home with her mother, sisters, and servants.

The material history of her diary offers further insights. While Begum Sarbuland’s voice was preserved through her published diary, it might have easily disappeared. Books in India quickly succumb to the region’s fluctuating heat and dampness if not carefully cared for. Meanwhile, South Asian libraries have a poor track record of preserving women’s writing and Urdu literature in general. Of the few hundred or so copies, only three are known to survive today. The first is in a private family archive in Boston maintained by Begum Sarbuland’s grandson Abid Ilahi. The second copy belonged to the eminent historian of Muslim women in colonial India, Gail Minault. She acquired it at a secondhand book bazaar in Hyderabad and later donated it to the library of the University of Texas at Austin.41 The third belonged to an Indian scholar, Maulana Nazir Ahmad. In 1982, his personal library was donated to Jamia Hamdard, a university in Delhi, where one copy of Begum Sarbuland’s book remains today.42 This is where I initially encountered it, lying next to a dead pigeon and covered with a film of dust.

In addition to her travelogue, the final piece of material history that Begum Sarbuland left behind in the family archives and that I include in this book is a rich collection of images. These images constitute an alternative, visual history of Begum Sarbuland’s life. The photographs show Begum Sarbuland between 1910 and 1957. Some are candid; others, formal. Each image tells a story of its own, whether through objects included in the frame or through her selected outfits and adornments. They reveal her shifting sartorial style, her attention to fashion, and her attitudes toward purdah. The collection also includes further images that contextualize her life, including photographs of her parents, husband, siblings, children, grandchildren, and family servants. Nearly all the photos underline the central role that family had in her life. The earliest show her with her own children, but it is her grandchildren who are most prominent in the later images. This gradual shift visually locates Begum Sarbuland in time and affirms that she cannot be read as a disembodied voice from the past. Her legacy continues to live on through her children and grandchildren. The oldest person pictured in this collection is her father, who was born in 1848. Many of the children who appear with her in the later photographs are alive today and living in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. This visual archive thus not only explores her past but also binds her story to the present.

Finally, I offer a brief note on my translation and the structure of this book. This travelogue was intended for a general audience, and I have attempted to preserve that accessibility by remaining faithful to her informed but informal tone. I have refrained from prefacing her account with extensive biographical and historical information that would be useful for researchers and scholars but distracting to lay readers. Those who wish to hear directly from Begum Sarbuland may turn the page and dive directly into her travel diary. Readers desiring a more detailed and nuanced picture of Begum Sarbuland’s life should first read the biographical chapter following the translation, “Begum Sarbuland: A Life Untold.” The chapter also includes brief biographies of Begum Sarbuland’s father and husband, both of whom were profoundly influential figures in her life. The book concludes with a photo archive, a translated advertisement for the original travelogue, and selections from Hamidullah Khan’s travel writing. There are few, if any, other instances of a husband and wife from colonial India both writing independently about the same journey. Comparing his style and views to hers sheds light on Begum Sarbuland’s own account and shows how even closely related individuals might see and present the world differently. Finally, a glossary at the end of the book defines unfamiliar terms.

These scholarly additions to her account offer a path to understanding Begum Sarbuland’s life and words from an academic perspective, but, ultimately, they cannot come close to matching the raw, emotive power of her prose. Even as Begum Sarbuland claimed that she was not herself a writer, she nevertheless asserted, correctly, that the “heartfelt emotions [in the book] will provide some guidance to my sisters.” Quite beyond the historical value of this unique text, the heartfelt emotions of her travel diary retain the power to inspire and perhaps even guide her readers today.

Notes

1. 1.H. Khan, Safarnama-e Qustuntuniya, 84.
2. 2.Sumaira Nawaz argues that Begum Sarbuland’s use of the Turkish burqa during her travels was a conscious mark of her mobility as a modern Muslim woman: “The Turkish burqa, much like contemporary calls for Islamic modernism, stood at the intersection of Islamic nostalgia and reform, illustrating the compatibility of the Islamic way of life with even the mechanised European steamship. The Turkish burqa was thus an outcome of the Muslim world’s interaction with Europe’s technological resources, which had no single outcome, no one sense of an ‘omnipotent modernity,’ nor a unified Islam.” Nawaz, “East Is East,” 18.
3. 3.N. Akhtar, Bibi’s Room, 43; Pernau, “Female Voices,” 36.
4. 4.Majchrowicz, World in Words.
5. 5.Lambert-Hurley, Elusive Lives, 57.
6. 6.Pernau, “Female Voices,” 36.
7. 7.A second benefit of avoiding the direct ship to Jeddah was that hajj ships from India were required to quarantine for seven days before landing. Thus, arriving in Jeddah from elsewhere in the region would spare them this discomfort. H. Khan, Safarnama-e Madina, 1.
8. 8.H. Khan, 22.
9. 9.This was a long-running theme in women’s accounts of the hajj in Urdu. Quarantine regulations during the hajj pilgrimage required would-be visitors to go through a rigorous health check that included steaming one’s clothes and washing in a public bath. Elite Indian women protested vigorously and even paid bribes to avoid being seen naked. These showdowns between Indian pilgrims and quarantine officials are a stock element of women’s travel writing in the early to mid-twentieth century. For an engaging example, see a travel account written by Begum Sarbuland’s sister-in-law, Rahil Begum Shervania. Majchrowicz, “Rahil Begum Shervaniya,” 134.
10. 10.Lambert-Hurley, Elusive Lives, 185.
11. 11.For an overview of the history of travel writing by Muslim women, along with representative examples and translations, see Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz, and Sharma, Three Centuries.
12. 12.While no pictures of Amina bi are known to exist, women who worked in similar roles appear in family photographs both candid and posed, underlining the enduring relationships that Begum Sarbuland had with those she employed (plates 8 and 27). Amina bi and her daughter reportedly remained close to the family until the end of her life.
13. 13.For a similarly dismissive view from a prominent Indian theologian, see Shibli Nu‘mani, Safarnama, 16–17. For an incisive examination of the racialization of Islam during this period, see Aydin, Muslim World.
14. 14.On just one occasion, she refers to a woman she meets as an araban mem, or an “Arab mem.” In this case, she seems to acknowledge the woman’s Arabness but also others her by hyphenating her Arabness with an assumed Europeanness.
15. 15.Green, “Spacetime,” 408.
16. 16.Green, 406.
17. 17.Green, 405.
18. 18.Green, 405.
19. 19.For more on this important development in a global context, see Aydin, Muslim World.
20. 20.On this point, see Majchrowicz, World in Words, 175–76.
21. 21.On the conspicuous absence of these groups in Urdu hajj accounts from this period, see Majchrowicz, World in Words, 179–81.
22. 22.On his life, work, and spiritual and political leadership, see Robinson, Ulama of Farangi Mahall, 151–76.
23. 23.For an account of Indian responses to these events, and particularly to restrictions on devotional practices in Medina, see Majchrowicz, “Early Indian Responses.”
24. 24.For a detailed examination of the genre and its growth in Urdu particularly, see Majchrowicz, World in Words.
25. 25.Minault, Secluded Scholars, 24. On this point, see also Naim, Texts and Contexts, 202.
26. 26.On the topic of women publishing under other names than their own, see Minault, “Zay Khay Sheen.”
27. 27.For an assessment of the history of working-class Muslim women traveling to Europe, see Fisher, Counterflows, 222–24.
28. 28.These restrictions were present, to a greater or lesser extent, in most Muslim societies around the world at the time. For a global overview of Muslim women’s travel writing during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a description of further causes for the limited availability of narratives by Muslim women, see Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz, and Sharma, Three Centuries, 6–27.
29. 29.Majchrowicz, “Malika Begum’s Mehfil,” 870.
30. 30.Nawaz, “East Is East,” 6.
31. 31.For an excellent review of the earliest Muslim women travel authors in India, see Fyzee-Rahamin, Atiya’s Journeys, 3–6. See also the translated text in the same volume for a comparison with a publicly published account from 1906.
32. 32.Minault, Secluded Scholars, 105–57; Alam, Familial Intimacy, 22.
33. 33.Among them, the authors Atiya Fyzee and Sultan Jehan Begum. See Fyzee-Rahamin, Atiya’s Journeys; Lambert-Hurley, “Out of India,” 263–76.
34. 34.Datta, “Comradeship,” 289. The references to Germany and Russia are surely mistaken. There is no record or family memory of Begum Sarbuland having traveled to these countries.
35. 35.On the prominence of oral travel accounts in colonial India, see Majchrowicz, World in Words, 64–65.
36. 36.Ummat ul-Ghani, Safarnama. For a partial translation, see Lambert-Hurley, Majchrowicz, and Sharma, Three Centuries, 107–16.
37. 37.Begum Inam Habibullah, Ta’ssurat-e Safar-e Yurap.
38. 38.On various aspects of this transformation, see Beverley, Hyderabad; Datla, Secular Islam.
39. 39.On the early life of this institution, see Lelyveld, First Generation.
40. 40.Though the state eventually returned ownership to the family after years of legal wrangling, the case dragged on until after Begum Sarbuland passed away. On the lived history of evacuee property confiscation, see Zamindar, Long Partition.
41. 41.Personal communication, April 5, 2023.
42. 42.Today a digital version of the book made from this copy is available online at https://rekhta.org/.