The Nightingale of Hind: Attiya Faizi
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , CA
Yeh Dhoop-o-Chaon ka Kheil Hai- Ya Khizaa Bihar Ki Ghaat Mai Hai
Jo Naseeb Subhai Urooj ho – To Nazar Mei Sham-e-Zawaal Rkhho
(Life is a tale of Sunshine and darkness. Here autumn is always poised to get at the spring. If ever you get blessed by a blissful morning; then never lose sight of the fact that the fall of night is not very far)
Sarojini Naido (1879-1949) and Attiya Faizi (1876-1967) both were jocundly hailed as “Bhartiaya Kokila - the Nightingale of India”, and the “Nightingale of Hind” respectively. While the former rose to unprecedented heights in India; the latter slipped into the abyss of nonentity and notoriety in Pakistan.
Emily Dickinson is right when she says, “The soul selects her own society”. Attiya perhaps made a wrong choice when she opted to migrate to Pakistan on Quaid-i-Azam’s request. Soon after the independence in 1947, Pakistan fast came to be owned by those who once had tooth and nail opposed it - the religious zealots. Unveiled women then were unanimously branded as bad in Pakistan. What future could Attiya, who believed in the free mixing of genders and who carried no guilt for being a female, have in Pakistan.
Sarojini Naido rose to become the first woman president of Indian National Congress; and the first woman to become the governor of a State in India. Attiya, however, came to be remembered in Pakistan at best as “Shibli-ke-Maushuqa”, (in fact, the literary heavyweight Dr. Waheed Qureshi wrote one lengthy essay and titled it as “Shibli-ke-Muashaqey” and read it on the Forum of “Halqa Arbab-e-Zauq” in Lahore. However, the same gentleman could not muster up courage to say the same with respect to Allama Iqbal. After all both have had their “love affairs” with this unfortunate woman); and at worst a “monotonous nonsensical talker- a Bakwasi”, as confirmed by Zia Jullundhri when he and a few others, the so-called Radio Pakistan officials, went to see her over a cup of tea. It was in such a meeting arranged at Attiya’s request that Mr. Hameed Naseem got so bored with her monologue and ranting against one Mr. Dani who had been maligning her all the time that he wrote at the back of the cigarette packet something which caught the eye of Attiya. He scribbled, “Isn’t she talking non-sense?”.
The nation in early fifties was finding it hard to tolerate the unveiled face of Begum Liaquat Ali Khan; how could it put up with a known socialite like Attiya, especially when her name ran the risk of casting some aspersions on the most eulogized name of Allama Iqbal. The same nation in 1915 on the publication of his “Asrar-i-Khudi” had derided him and had called him a kafir.
WHO WAS ATTIYA? Of the three sisters - Zohra, Nazli and Atiya - she was the youngest, and perhaps the most vivacious and versatile one. They were perhaps the first ones among the elite of those times who made their way to the UK universities for higher education. Pure Turkish blood ran in their veins and Attiya was acutely conscious of it. Attiya also went to Cambridge on a scholarship in 1906. She had the means and she visited each country of Europe and even measured the depth of the Grand Canyons of America by riding on the shoulders of two Red Indians.
Name a literary giant who did not dine with her or at hers. Jigar Muradabadi, Sarojini Naiduo, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar; George Bernard Shaw; Allama Iqbal and Maulana Shibli, to name only a few, interacted with her and held correspondence with her.
Attiya’s father, Hasan Afindi, was an advisor to Caliph Abdul Hamid II. Maulana Shibli addressed her as, “Atiya, mera her rongta aur her moo-i-badan tumhari tasueff o tareef ka aik sher hai - (every pore and hair on my body is a poetic verse in your praise). He completed his masterpiece Seet-un-Nabi, feeling free of any financial constraints, thanks to Attiya-family’s generosity, and spent a good amount of his time in the comforting settings of “Awan-i-Riffat”, the palace where she lived along with her elder sister, Nazli Begum who was married to Nawab Sir Syedi Khan of Janjeera and was addressed as “Her Royal Highness”; Quaid-i-Azam spent many a vacation on the idyllic palm-lined coasts of Janjeera Estate of Attiya’s brother-in-law, and took many a memorable strolls in the gardens of her palace; the bone-dry and stoical Gandhi smilingly once submitted himself to Attiya’s demand to pinch his finger with a pin and oblige her with his autograph in his own blood, and he did that on a ship-deck that carried them for the First Round Table Conference. Once he did that, then all the top leadership of the Indian National Congress also followed suit. Attiya preserved these autographs in a leather-bound Register that also bore the signature of Nawab Hamid Ali Khan, the Nawab of Rampur.
Allama Iqbal, during his European stay (1905-1908), spent some memorable days in her company. They frequently met, dined, picnicked and shared many an intimate moments. As per Javed Iqbal in his autobiography, “Zinda Rud”, both met every other day, and he even sought her opinion on certain portions of his thesis. It was the prerogative of Attiya that she could tell Iqbal what nobody else could. Once it so happened that she and other friends went to Hydel- Burg on Iqbal’s invitation for a picnic. All the guests waited at the railway station for Iqbal, but he did not turn up. When Attiya went to find out, she was told that Iqbal was in a strange state of mind. She called him by name in Urdu, but no response came. Then she spoke to him this classic phrase, “For God sake, get up. You are here in a small, simple town of Germany. It is not India where people would understand and appreciate your state of trance”.
Iqbal in his famous letter of July 17 th, 1909, after his arrival in India, addresses her thus. I am, “totally grateful for the letter I have just received. Today, since morning, my temperament has been uncommonly joyful. There if you perceive the sweetness of jocularity in this missive (letter), consider it a compulsion. I have not changed my plan. You do not.”. The Indian writers who are comparatively less fond of Iqbal (for political and linguistic reasons) tend to read a lot in Attiya-Iqbal friendship. Khushwant Singh is one of them. On this side of the border in Pakistan, lovers of Iqbal consider it sacrilegious to think of Iqbal any less than an angel. In this atmosphere of hero-worship, in which men are always right, Attiya stood no chance of ever having a fair trial of her relationship with Iqbal.
Attiya was not a satellite, a passive recipient, nor was she willing to be remembered so. She was a star, having her own light, energy and merit. She was a lady of many accomplishments. Critics say that her true fame owes its genesis to her interaction with Shibli and Iqbal. This sounds more plausible now than it did in its true context, because while Shibli and Iqbal grew in fame and in their literary awe; conversely Attiya in the same proportion plummeted in fame to the extent that she often came to be remembered as if she were no more than their concubine, a mere toy, and nothing else.
Visiting the Chowbaras of Tawaif was a cultural fad of Shurafas/elite. As is reported by Syed Nazir Niazi in “Danai-Raaz”, for the elite, the institution of a Tawaif was an integral part of civilization. Sir Syed and Shibli both visited them for listening to ghazals. Akbar Allahabadi even married one, Buta Begum; Mohammad Ali Jauhar on his visit to Calcutta and Lucknow, never missed visiting one, Zohra Mushtri; even during the Khilafat Movement, he and Hakim Ajmal Khan sneaked to listen to Faizabad. Mixing of men with women was all right. The problem was the mixing of women with men.
Attiya made her name as an educated and enlightened woman at a time when formal female education was unheard of. She stayed in England during the reign of Edward VII, and personally met the Western elite. Her frankness, her linguistic proficiency, and her ease to move about without a veil earned her tremendous acclaim in Europe. And all this at an age of 22 when Iqbal met her.
Even a great reformer like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan found it hard to approve a parallel education system, both for men and women, carried out simultaneously. Even for him, educated females could pose social problems for their less educated spouses. Sarojini Naido did not have to depend on any Mahatama or Maulana in a secular India; Attiya in Pakistan did not enjoy such a luxury. As states Mr. Naeem ur Rahman Justuju, “Shibli Nomani was totally unaware of any Muslim woman with such high intellect as Attiya. To him all females were feeble minded creatures”.
Attiya’s marriage to Samuel Fyzee Rahamin, (the famous painter of his times), took place in 1912. He himself was at one time the art tutor of Mary of Teck, Queen consort of George-V of the Great Britain.
THE IRONY: The irony of fate is that neither Shibli nor Iqbal (because of whom she is remembered most for good or bad reasons), could muster up enough courage to dedicate any of their books/works to her. Shibli once tried to convince the Ulema of Nadva to allow him to invite his benefactor, Nazli Begum, the elder sister of Attiya in whose palace he had completed his masterpiece, Seerut-un-Nabvi, to lay the foundation stone of one of the halls of the Institution. He was flatly refused.
And Iqbal did worse. When her father died in 1913 at Janjira, he could not go to attend his funeral. Was it due to his financial problems, or his domestic mess up, or was it because of the Ulema whom he had already irked through some of his poems, or because of his own reputation? Faiz Ahmed Faiz did have the courage to attend the funeral of Gandhi in 1948 when the Kashmir war was in full swing. Attiya really felt hurt. He did go there after 23 years in 1931, but that was too late.
THE DECLINE: First died the middle sister, Zohra in 1910. The eldest, Nazli married to the Nawab of Janjeera, remained issueless, and was thus divorced. After the death of her husband, the state where she was addressed as Her Royal Highness became a stranger to her. The Attiya family was in England at the time of partition. The looters plundered what was theirs in India. On Quaid’s special invitation, they sold all their belongings and moved to Karachi. He gave them a plot on which they built a replica of their Riffat Palace in Karachi, near the Art Council building on the Lawrence Garden Road. Their new home was an exquisite blend of Eastern and Western patterns.
Hardly had they lived there for two to three years that they got evicted. One contention is that the house they built was illegally constructed. They who had bequeathed their most famous pieces of art and paintings to friends, now once again found themselves in the Carlton Hotel. Virtually this most famous family became homeless in the early fifties. It was during this period that the creative writers of Pakistan started delving deep into “her personal love affairs” with the great literary giants. It was spicy material and it appeased all. Mr. Mahmood Jamal in his article published in the Urdu Digest of February writes, “In one antique shop he recognized some rare pieces of furniture which he had seen in Attiya’s home in Bombay. Once day, Attiya came to his office to borrow fifty rupees. As she made the request, tears welled up in her eyes. He gave her hundred rupees. Once the Shurafa/elite of the world stood at her beck and call, now she stood there with no one to wipe out her tears.
As mentioned earlier, Zia Jullundhi and others related to Pakistan Broadcasting Institution often approached her for some “Masala” material. While they grinded their axes over a cup of tea, they also felt bored. Her ranting against those who made cheap-shots on her appeared either “Idle Talk” or “Bakwas” to them. In 1965 she fell and broke her ribs. Her sister, Nazli took great care of her. Finally she had a bout of paralysis in 1967, and died as one who was neither missed nor mourned. Joseph Conrad, the famous British writer was right when he said, “Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealing with men”.
THE MINDSET: Maulana Maudodi in his Tafheen-ul-Quran, part III, page 396, interpreting Sura al-Nur quotes one Hadith to prove that mixing of men and women is not permissible in Islam under any circumstances. It is reported by Abu Daud that once the Noble Prophet saw OUTSIDE Masjid-i-Nabvi men and women all mixed up. On this occasion he spoke thus, “Wait and stop. It is not proper/appropriate/preferable for you to walk in the middle of the lane. Walk on the fringes/sides”.
Maulana Maudodi from this Hadith deduces the following conclusion. “From this command it becomes clear how diametrically opposed is Islam’s outlook towards the free mixing of men and women. Islam does not permit the mixing of these two genders even in the house of Allah. How can anyone imagine that Islam would permit their mixing in colleges, offices, clubs and public meetings”? Attiya Faizi made her appearance in India under such environments.
