Breaking Through

It all began with a library. Intrigued when she inherited her mother’s collection of Urdu books, including the 1905 feminist novel Anwari Begum, the 76-year-old educationist Syeda Hameed began to find out more about its author, Tyeba Khedive Jung. The first Muslim woman in India to have received a university degree—in 1894—Jung was a beautiful, poised-looking woman from a nawab’s family in Hyderabad. She had also chaired the annual conference of the Hindu reformist sect, the Brahmo Samaj. “All those boundaries became irrelevant for her,” Hameed, who began to research and document the stories of other pioneers to reclaim their place in public memory, told me earlier this year.

These stories—some, first shown in Delhi in 2018 and scheduled to return to its home city when public events resume. Produced by the Muslim Women’s Forum, showcases 21 achievers from the first 50 years of independent India, who raised the country “from the blood, gore and rubble of Partition.” Hameed, who also chairs the MWF and is a former member of the Planning Commission, remarked that the women “joined Nehru and Gandhi and shed the burqa, but they were all believing, practicing Muslims.”