The Purdah Debate: Need to Pull Veil off from History

No Mughal, Arab or even for that matter Taliban asked hundreds of thousands of young modern non-Muslim girls and women of Pune to entirely cover their face and head. They do so even while riding two-wheelers and never feel inconvenient, uncomfortable or outdated. Their argument is that they want to save themselves from the environmental pollution, and may be heat too.
Thanks to head-covered septuagenarian Presidential candidate of the United Progressive Alliance, we have got another opportunity to debate the issue of purdah or hijab. Whether Mughals were actually responsible for the prevailing purdah system in Rajasthan in particular and India in general as Pratibha Patil feels is not the real issue. What she failed to explain is why, when Mughals are buried deep in history, she, in spite of her old age, is still having a pallu of sari over the head.
Of course women in Rajasthan, in general, do not wear burqa, and by purdah Pratibha meant segregation and covering of head and face. In that way she herself is somewhat close to observing purdah or hijab like traditional Rajasthani women. In fact, many Muslim women do not observe even that much of purdah as modestly-dressed Pratibha.
The debate over purdah should not necessarily be confused with burqa. Even in the early age of Islam – when women were even present in the battlefields and played a very active role in the society – there was nothing like modern-day burqa in practice. In those days in Arab – and other parts of the world too – stitched clothes were not so easily available, therefore burqa came into practice much later. Some historians said that it came to India with the Taimur’s invasion. Women started wearing it because it was convenient and decent. Besides, Muslim women could be easily identified as different from others, as sought by the Qur’an. So hijab or purdah without burqa precedes hijab with burqa.
It needs to be made very clear that Mughals or Muslims not only invaded Rajasthan, but almost the entire subcontinent. So why is it that purdah-system is much more prevalent here than anywhere else. Ironically, Kerala where Islam came first and where Muslims form a sizeable proportion, most women of the community observe purdah without burqa, though burqa too is visible now. Muslim women there are more open and liberated – to use the modern terminology – than their Hindu sisters in feudal Rajasthan.
Unfortunately, the Ulema, instead of utilising the occasion for a healthy debate, chose to politicise it. They started demanding withdrawal of Pratibha’s candidature from the Presidential election. The truth is that, according to historians, Mughal invasion had nothing to do with the Hindu women observing purdah in Rajasthan. And if it is so simple, then the Hindu women should have thrown away the veil once the Mughals disappeared and the westernized British took over. The Rajputs should have been the first to throw off the veil from their women’s head and face as many of their nobles supported the British in the 19th century. Why is it that their women continued to follow the Mughal practice and not the practice of the friendly British?
It needs to be made very clear that most of Rajasthan was conquered by the Mughal Emperor, Akbar, who was least to do with Islam or even pure Mughal culture. Many of his army generals were themselves Rajputs, so was his wife, Jodhabai. She was a cocktail of Rajput-Mughal culture and a typical symbol of medieval secularism.
Though the first Mughal Emperor, Babur, defeated Rana Sanga (1527) he survived for a brief period and his son, Humayun, soon lost his empire to Sher Shah (1540). The Mughals had no time to consolidate or enforce their own culture or even for that matter religion. It was left to secular Akbar to spread what is called the Mughal Empire in Rajasthan and many other parts in north, east and western India.
So far the status of women during the Medieval Age is concerned, the predominantly-deserted and water-starved Rajputana or present day Rajasthan had an entirely different culture from that in most part of India. The feudalism among Rajputs, the geography of the desert, the excessive heat, besides the inherent quality of womanhood might have something to do with the practice of purdah. Rajasthan, perhaps more than any other place in the country, was known for the age-old practice of Sati. While the British succeeded in putting to end the barbaric social evil of Sati, purdah continued because it was much more acceptable and not forced as Sati by their own society.
Unlike the river-side inhabitants of a large part of north India, women along with men had to go out for miles to fetch water. True, the entire Rajasthan is no desert but water-shortage is a perennial problem in most part of the state. So women going out was not a choice, but a compulsion. Since a sort of segregation between men and women existed in all the societies, it might be that they used to cover the head while going out. As the male of these arid and extremely hot zone put turban, women might have been using their pallu not only to cover the head, but also the face – as their modern sisters, who had nothing to do with purdah, do in Pune.
As geography also shapes the sociological behaviour of the people, many among us, instead of going to the bottom of the reality, just blame the Mughals for purdah in Rajasthan. The colonial-historians have deliberately distorted the entire history and did not allow the truth to come out.
Regarding Mughals themselves – or for that matter other Muslim rulers in general – it would be highly unjustified to state that they were narrow-minded religious bigots who forced women inside the four-walls of the forts or houses. There might be some individuals but the general phenomenon was not that. Those who do not know history may accept the distorted theory deliberately spread by the British and later by many Indian historians.
True, the Mughal emperors and nobles were much married people. They were known for their harem, concubines, etc. This has nothing to do with Islam – actually it is against Islam. In fact, all the monarchs – and other nobles – of the world of those earlier periods used to do the same. It was perhaps the influence of Islam, which at least prevented some Muslim nobles and kings to keep themselves from this evil. In Europe, in particular, the situation was all too worse.
In the earlier decades the British officials in India too used to marry a number of times, have concubines and kept-women. British officials like Major General Sir David Ochterlony, the hero of Gurkha War (1814-16), who later became Resident in Delhi, had at least 13 Indian wives. Earlier, the British officials were lured to India by their government in the name of beautiful women.
While Pratibha may say that Rajasthani women started observing purdah under the influence of the Mughals, how will she explain the practice of Portuguese women in Goa, who used to put up veil and wear Indian dresses in the 16th century? In Goa at least the Portuguese were the conqueror and Mughals nowhere around, yet many of their women adopted this practice on their own.
One can accuse Mughal Emperors of being anti-Islam, but blaming them for enforcing purdah would be a travesty of fact. One cannot judge the status of women of that period today while women can be compared with women of other places of the same period.
There is no denying the fact that when women in the West were being hunted down by the priests like witches, and scientists like Bruno thrown into the flame as late as in 1600 and that too in the land of Renaissance, Italy, and Galileo had to bear unspeakable torture and die in 1642, Mughal women were coming out with scholarly writings and great work of history. True, women in all societies used to have segregated lives then, yet who can deny that Humayun’s sister and Babur’s daughter, Gulbadan, wrote his brother’s biography: Humayun Nama. Aurangzeb’s sister Jahanara wrote the biography of sufi saint, Sheikh Muin-uddin Chisti. And Aurangzeb’s daughter, Zeb-un-Nissa, came up with Maasir-i-Alamgiri. Her personal library was one of the greatest collections of books and scholars of all types were greatly benefited by it.
According to William Dalrymple in The White Mughals, “Aristocratic Mughal women also tended to be much better educated than their Iranian cousins: almost all of them were literate, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or ‘learned matrons’; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry and astronomy. As a result there were many cases of highly educated Indian Muslim princesses who became famous writers or poetesses.”
Writing about Hyderabadi families, he said: “And it is also clear that in 18th century Hyderabad there was an understanding that the women of an aristocratic family – and especially the bride herself – did have a real right to veto any marriage arranged for them…”
Nizam’s army in the late 18th century had an all-women regiment called Zuffur Plutun (or Victorious Platoon). They were not only a piece of decoration, but according to Henry Russell, known for their ferocity. The last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, too had an all-women regiment. Even the Islamists who took part in 1857 rebellion against the British had a large number of women soldiers. Muslim women in the pre-1857 years were certainly not like that in the latter years.
If Mughal women right from the time of Babur’s daughter to 1857 were so well-read and liberated – according to the standard of the age – how can it be that the same Mughals enforced purdah for Hindu women and that too only in Rajasthan. True, the women of royal and noble families used to spend a segregated life and entry of males inside the women quarters was not allowed, but these practices have, perhaps less to do with Islam than with the feudal and aristocratic culture of the age.
The story of common women was quite different. In fact, Iranian writer Abdul Lateef Shushtari who arrived here at the fag end of the 18th century was shocked at the free-mixing of men and women in India. (Tuhfat-al-Alam).
The problem with the modern debate is that everyone wants to sound defensive and put blame on others. The truth is that hijab had always been an inherent quality of women, be it in the east or the west. Even today a sort of segregation does exist, even where men and women work together. Neither the Mughals nor the Arabs coined the English idiom ‘take the veil’ which means to become a nun.
The need of the hour is to explain the people that hijab in Islam had nothing to do with feudal practices, in which women are pushed into mental as well as physical slavery.