Author: Siobhan Lambert-Hurley
Publisher: Kali/Women Unlimited
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 180
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188965383
Description
In 1870, Nawab Sikandar Begum of Bhopal became the first Muslim woman to publish an account of her Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. She traveled with a retinue of a thousand, visited Jeddah and Mecca, performed the requisite rituals and observances, then returned to India and wrote her impressions of her visit.
Sikandar Begum’s critical and often surprising description provides unique insight into the factors that went into writing this quintessentially Muslim journey in a colonial environment. At the same time, it documents a process by which notions of the self could be redefined against a Muslim ‘other’, and the way in which Arabia was constructed by a colonial subject as part of a modernist discourse about ‘the Orient’. What emerges is a snapshot of Sikandar Begum as a genuinely complex individual as she negotiated with the colonial power, her fellow Indians and her South and Western Asian co-religionists to craft an image of herself as an effective administrator, a loyal subject and a good Muslim.
Reproduced here, “A Pilgrimage to Mecca” is the original English translation by the wife of a British colonial officer, of an unpublished Urdu manuscript. It is accompanied by a critical Introduction and Afterword that make this offering a comprehensive resource on travel writing by South Asian Muslim women, and encourage the reader – whether scholar, student or enthusiast – to rethink established understandings relating to travel writing, colonialism and world history.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
An Introduction to Nawab Sikandar Begum’s
Account of Hajj
SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY
A PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA
The Nawab Sikandar Begum of Bhopal
Preface
Translator’s Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Appendices
Afterword: Muslim Women Write
Their Journeys Abroad
SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY
Bibliography