Abida Sultaan: India’s ‘rebel’ Muslim princess who shot tigers and drove a Rolls-Royce

Abida Sultaan was n’t your typical princess, either.

She wore her hair short, shot lions and was an ace shirt person. From the age of nine, she drove herself around in a Rolls-Royce and flew helicopters.

Abida continued their tradition of defying preconceptions regarding women in general and Arab women in particular by being born in a community of valiant “begums” ( a Muslim woman of high ranking ) who ruled the northern noble state of Bhopal in British India for more than a century.

She resisted being in caste, a custom practiced by Muslim women and some Hindu people, and became the heir to the throne at the age of 15.

Abida served in her father’s cabinet for more than ten years, forged friendships with important freedom fighters, and eventually gained an understanding of the nation’s division and divisions following its partition in 1947 to form Pakistan.

Under the direction of her aunt, Sultan Jehan, a rigid disciplinarian who was Bhopal’s king, she was taught to take on the role of ruler from a young age.

In her 2004 book, Memoirs of a Rebel Lady, Abida writes about how she had to light up at four in the morning to read the Quran- the spiritual text of Islam- and therefore continue with a day filled with activities, which included learning sports, music and horse riding, but also included chores like sweeping the floor and cleaning bathrooms.

” Our intercourse prevented us girls from feeling any inferior.” Everything was similar. We had all the flexibility that a child had, we had drive, climb trees, play any activity we chose to. There were no limits”, she said in an exam about her youth.

Abida rebelled against her grandmother when she was forced to go to caste at the age of 13 despite having an obstinate, harsh, independent streak as a child. She escaped the exercise for the rest of her life because of her courage and father’s broad-mindedness.

Abida, who was already heir to the throne of Bhopal, had the opportunity to join the royal household of Kurwai, which was also where she was married off to Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and sovereign Kurwai. She described her nikah ( wedding ), about which she was clueless, in hilarious detail in her memoir.

Her aunt asked her to dress up for a wedding when she was pillow-fighting with her relatives. Simply, no one told her that she was the bride.

” No-one had prepared or instructed me on how to do myself, with the effect that I walked into the nikah room, pushing the gathered people out of my way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual for being chosen once for some new test”, she writes.

The marriage was short like Abida’s relationship, which lasted for less than a century.

Married life was tough for Abida, not just because of her younger time but also because of her tight, pious upbringing. She openly describes how her marriage suffered as a result of her lack of knowledge and distress with sex.

” Soon after my marriage, I entered the world of conjugal pain. She writes and adds that she could never bring herself to “accept conjugal relations between husband and wife” because she was unaware that the conclusion would have left her thus horrified, numbed, and feeling unclean. This led to the collapse of her wedding.

In her paper on intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley underscores how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband tear apart the stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed voice on the topic.

Abida moved up to Bhopal after her marriage broke down. She left her Kurwai conjugal home. But the woman’s only child, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an unpleasant custody dispute. Abida made a bold move to get her husband’s side after the drawn-out argument and forbidding to leave her child.

On a hot day in March 1935, Abida drove for three days straight to approach her father’s house in Kurwai. She entered his room, pulled out a pistol, threw it in her father’s chest and said:” Take me or I may take you”.

This incident, coupled with a real confrontation between the pair in which Abida emerged victorious, put an end to the prison dispute. She continued to work as an heir to the throne while raising her brother as a second mother. She ran her country’s government from 1935 till 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the American state of Madhya Pradesh.

Abida even attended the round-table discussions, which were organized by the American government to decide the country’s coming, where she met well-known figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, Motilal Nehru, and his brother Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister.

She also had first-hand knowledge of the deteriorating Hindu-Muslim community and the crime that broke out following India’s partition in 1947.

In her memoir Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived there peacefully for generations, began to be treated as “outsiders”. In one of her interviews, she spoke about a particularly disturbing memory she had of the violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims.

She arrived at the railroad station to oversee the arrival a day after the American government informed her that a coach carrying Muslim refugees would be arriving in Bhopal.

She continued,” When the divisions were opened, they were all dead,” adding that she was influenced by the murder and hostility that led her to immigrate to Pakistan in 1950.

Abida left slowly, with just her brother and hopes for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she championed politics and women’s freedom through her political career. In Karachi, Abida passed away in 2002.

The American government had granted her girl an heir to the throne after she left for Pakistan. However, Abida is still well-known in Bhopal, where she is sometimes referred to as “bia huzoor.”

Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, a journalist who has been researching Bhopal’s female rulers, says that “religious politics have eroded her legacy and she is n’t talked about as much anymore.”

” But her name is n’t likely to be forgotten anytime soon”.

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