Sofia Khatun’s Silsila: A Genealogy of Foremothers in Print

Abstract

Between 1922 and 1925, Sofia Khatun, a Muslim woman writer, published over 25 essays in some of Calcutta’s most widely circulated Bengali periodicals. Among these essays, her accounts of women’s position in premodern Greece, Rome, India and Egypt and her speculation on the originary sites of women’s movements are particularly interesting. Khatun here challenges the primacy of western actors and explicitly connects women’s emancipation with the era of Islamization in West Asia and North Africa. While reconfiguring dominant narratives of women’s social and political activism, she seeks foremothers in both obvious and obscure milieux. In doing so, Khatun traces a silsila or chain of predecessors, who are sources of inspiration to herself as well as her contemporary readers. A time-honoured tradition in Islamicate cultures, salasil (plural) usually foreground Sufi pirs (spiritual guides) and transmitters of Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet), more often men than women. Khatun reorients this practice to showcase women activists as key players in a male-dominated textual space. The conceptual metaphor of silsila captures her bringing together of Anglo-American suffragists, Arabian sultanas and African women warriors within a single genealogy. Khatun draws on two genres popular in medieval Arabia to enable her eclectic assemblage of foremothers to speak to the concerns of women readers in twentieth-century Bengal. The first, tabaqat, are biographical dictionaries that provide emulative paradigms. The second, a set of belletristic genres encompassed within the term adab, are short prose pieces and precedents to the ‘modern’ essay. Building on the former’s didactic function and the latter’s anecdotal quality, Khatun allows her foremothers to articulate multiple models of gender justice pursued at different times and across transregional spaces. By upholding such pluralistic and heterodox feminist pasts, she pays attention to the intersectional nature of gender inequity and addresses the ‘woman question’ in all its complexity in late colonial Bengal.