Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain Edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma. Oxford University Press. 282 pages. October 2010. £22.50.
History is often written by victors, and the language of the victors is an obstacle that is not overcome by the conquered.
That means consumers of histories lack a whole narrative of the conquered in their understanding of a people or a place. Atiya’s Journeys is part biography and part travelogue, offering fascinating insights into the world around her.
It is the perspective of a group often silenced twice in South Asian history: that of Muslims and a woman.
This book is a biography of her life through the translation of her letters back home, compiled in a book called Zamana-i-Tahsil published in an Urdu journal in 1906-07. Her writings and her story are not remarkable, but what marks this book out is the narrative of the everyday aspects of the experience of a Muslim woman of South Asian descent in Georgian England.
Atiya mentions how her presence in aristocratic settings baffled those around her.
It goes to show how deep the colonial perspective of the ‘native’ was and how Atiya’s presence in Georgian England seemed to challenge that narrative. “Yet, in the flesh, Atiya seemed to confound the expectations of many Britons with whom she came in contact.” They were amazed by the ‘artistry and suitability’ of her clothes. (p 70)
This perspective of the ‘native’ that is artistically accomplished is still considered an anomaly, and I wonder what it would take for British society to acknowledge the elevated level of artisanry exhibited in Indian clothes we see today.
As a lover of dal, rice, and green chillies, her take on accessing spicy food after a hiatus resonated with me; ‘I asked for green chillies, and our lunch became so delicious… Imagine how dal chutney, etc. would taste after eating bland food for so many days….If only I had brought some achar (pickle) with me! It would have been enjoyable.” (p 114)
She was a woman of considerable knowledge and she is known for her documented interactions with two of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals of her time, Maulana Shibli Numani and Muhammad Iqbal “For men like Shibli who were seeking patrons for their institutions, it was educated and newly moneyed women, like the Fyzee sisters, who had become the heirs to and patrons of the cultural traditions of the past.” (p 50)
They sought them out for those connections, and it paved the way for some immensely powerful interactions.
Shibli’s letter to Atiya when talking about the education of women, “I am totally opposed to there being a separate syllabus for girls. This is a fundamental mistake which is afflicting Europe too. Efforts must be made to reduce the distance that has emerged between these two groups, not to increase it, and if conversation, conduct, speech, social intercourse, and pleasantries, all become separate, the gap increases, then the two will be different species” (p 53).
The above paragraph is extremely insightful as it is so different from Atiya’s take on what women’s education should concentrate on domestic sciences which Shibli vehemently disagreed with.
Atiya Fyzee was an accomplished and educated woman of her time, but she too was a woman of privilege, and her experience of Georgian England is that of an elite one. I loved how the book managed to combine being a biography for the first half and shifting to a first-person diary-form narrative in the second half, and I haven’t encountered that before.
I enjoyed the combination of the profound interactions (that have been translated for an English reader), but it is the everyday observations of the weather, the food, and the people that she encounters that I found particularly endearing and helped me feel connected to Atiya Fyzee.
Aasiya I Versi
