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Mainstream Mainstream, VOL LIX No 4, New Delhi, January 9, 2021 Aligarh and Women’s education: a brief overview | Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan Saturday 9 January 2021 by Ishrat Mushtaq and Sajad Hassan Khan Women’s education in nineteenth-century India was no easy task. In the case of Muslim women, the task was even more difficult due to their triply marginal identity: as colonial subjects, as women, and as Muslims. Not only did the custom of purdah added to their seclusion from the social and cultural changes, their men hated everything about the western cultural influence (being displaced as rulers by the British). As a result, the middle class (the initiators of reform) was to develop late among the Indian Muslims than their Hindu counterparts. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, a middle-class among the Indian Muslims was fledging. For this, no institution of the nineteenth-century can be given more commendation than Aligarh Mus ....
In his preface to the third edition of Sharif Beti [The Gentle Daughter], published in 1918, its publisher Syed Mumtaz Ali gently complains that 1,000 copies of the second edition of the book took five years to sell out. Now, we know that this is a complaint many of us still have about the sales figures of serious Urdu books; very recently, I was surprised to see the first edition of a classic collection of stories on the shelf of Sang-e-Meel’s bookstore, 40 years after it first appeared. Ali husband of Sharif Beti’s author Syeda Muhammadi Begum also points out that this little tale, as he describes it, is about a family in the lower income bracket, and suitable for young girls who are normally fed a diet of unrealistic stories set in palaces. It’s something of a paradox, then, that Sharif Beti is now back in print in an anthology of Muhammadi Begum’s writings, published by Sang-e-Meel, that costs Rs2,200 not an easy price for the audience which the writer an ....