The Movement for Women's Emancipation Within the Bengali Muslim Community in India

Abstract

This article examines the changing role of Muslim women in Bengal in the early twentieth century. Lack of education and backwardness in social ideas were responsible for women's inferior position in society. Scholars such as Ghulam Murshid, Gautam Neogi and Meredith Borthwick have shown in depth how Muslim Bengali women worked to improve their own position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; key figures included Begum Rokea Sakhawat Hossain, Begum Shamsunnahar Mahmud and Begum Sufia Kamal. This article focuses on obstacles to social progress as well as on the positive role played by a section of the Bengali Muslim community in enabling modernisation through a programme of social reform designed to emancipate women from their traditional position of bondage in the male‐dominated society. It examines the writings (in Urdu) of women involved in the social reform movement and focuses in turn on three issues: purdah, women's rights, and education for women.