In 1929, Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul married Nawab Aizaz Rasul, a taluqdar, a landowning aristocrat from Sandila in the Hardoi district of the United Provinces, now known as Uttar Pradesh. She was now known as Begum Aizaz Rasul. The match was said to have been arranged by Malcolm Hailey, the governor of Punjab. Qudsia’s first glimpse of the prospective groom was from behind a curtain when she was in Lucknow to assist her father with work related to the Simon Commission.
Her marital home was mired in orthodoxy; Qudsia had a very traditional mother-in-law who favoured a strict adherence to purdah. It was only when the couple left Rasul’s ancestral home for a smaller accommodation that Qudsia gained a degree of personal freedom. This was when she decided to discard the purdah. It was not an easy decision, as Rasul was not pleased with her initially but came around later.
Rasul, a leader from the Awadh region, was part of the 1931 United Provinces Muslim Conference26. It was attended by distinguished men from the province who later joined the Muslim League. In 1935, Britain enacted the Government of India Act, a new constitutional scheme that gave Indians limited autonomy in governance matters. The Act retained separate electorates and reserved seats for women in legislatures. When elections to the provincial assemblies and councils were announced in 1936, Qudsia and her husband decided to take the plunge into electoral politics.
Rasul contested for the United Provinces Assembly from Hardoi district on the ticket of the newly formed National Agriculturalist Party (NAP), a coalition of “Hindu and Muslim landlords along with sections of business capital.” Qudsia on the other hand, contested as an independent on a seat reserved for Muslims representing Hardoi, Sitapur, and Kheri districts in the Legislative Council. Both Rasul and Qudsia emerged winners. However, it was Qudsia who faced an eventful and tumultuous campaign.
The religious leaders were not amused by her candidature and issued a fatwa, the second recorded incident in Qudsia’s case. They declared that voting for a non-purdah Muslim woman was un-Islamic. The anger amongst the conservatives was not only due to her disregard for purdah but that a woman had dared to openly compete with men. Qudsia ran a spirited campaign, receiving unstinted support from Rasul. She won the election with a thumping majority. Her victory was significant as she was contesting for a general seat (seat not reserved for women). Across the country, only ten women had won the general seats, one of them was Hansa Mehta. The fact that voters were often from a similar social standing as hers contributed to her victory. Qudsia later pointed out that her win was an indication that Muslims were “not really as orthodox as they were made out to be”.
Qudsia called the 1937 election her “political baptism” and claimed that she had been goaded to contest by friends. She herself was keen to do “something to ameliorate the condition of Indian women”.
By this time, Qudsia had formally given up purdah for public gatherings, maintaining the practice only during her meetings with her orthodox mother-in-law. In fact, her mother-in-law once sent a curtained palanquin to pick up Qudsia from a railway station. This was much to the amusement of the public and press who called her the “two-faced Begum” – one-moment observing purdah and the other discarding it. The name-calling did not deter the young politician. She decided to be pragmatic about the purdah and chose her battles wisely. She wrote, ‘Revolution, be it political or economic, must have strong roots; otherwise, it will be wiped out by a counter-revolution. And so I blended orthodoxy and modernism harmoniously, yielding without compromise and uncompromising with rancour.”
Excerpted with permission from The Fifteen: The Lives and Times of the Women in India’s Constituent Assembly, Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali, Hachette India.
