Abida Sultaan, Remains of a Rebel Princess (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004),
pp. 315. Price Rs. 595/-.
Abida Sultaan, born in 1913, was the eldest daughter of Hamidullah Khan, the ruler of Bhopal. Bhopal was a state carved out in 1819 by the Orakzai pathans when the Mughul empire declined. Its distinctive characteristic was that it had been ruled by four women---Qudsia Begum (1801-1881); Sikandar Begum (1816-1968); Shahjehan Begum (1838-1901) and Sultan Jehan Begum (1858-1930). The last, called Sarkar Amman by the author, brought her up and abdicated the throne in favour of her youngest son (the eldest and the middle ones having died one after the other) Hamidullah Khan.
The history of the state---one of nearly six hundred principalities in British India-has been written by Abida Sultaan’s son Shahryar Khan, the former diplomat and presently head of the Pakistan Cricket Board, in his book The Begums of Bhopal: A Dynasty of Women Rulers in Raj India (2000). This book is a necessary prelude to Abida Sultan’s life because her life is shaped by a tradition which this history places in its context. For those who have not read the Begums of Bhopal the Appendix entitled ‘Bhopal-a brief history’ and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley’s extremely competent and scholarly introduction should provide useful insights. Armed with these insights the reader should listen to the voice of this daughter of a powerful family, one of a long line of matriarchs, begin her life under a powerful, loving but disciplinarian grandmother, Sarkar Amman, the Begum of Bhopal.
Little Abida was taken away from her mother, Beeva, and brought up by the grandmother herself; The grandmother taught her the Quran in the strictest possible manner. Indeed, she would make her recite the holy book from dawn till noon and again in the afternoon. And, if Abida made a mistake, woe betide her for she would be cuffed, slapped and humiliated in public. Her head was banged against the wall till sometimes she even bled. The author says this made her rebellious and she developed a dynamic resistance to the imposition of other peoples’ will. According to her this streak of rebelliousness made her a tomboy and she wore masculine dress and short hair. She also loved riding horses, shooting tigers and playing games as if she were a man. When her father became the Nawab of Bhopal Abida Sultaan became the heir apparent. She was married to the Nawab of neighboring Kurwai (whom she calls Dadabhai) but could not acquiesce to conjugal life. However, she doted upon her baby son Shahryar (whom she called Mian or Bubbles later), and had the intrepidity of fighting with her husband for his possession. In her usual dashing style she drove a hundred miles from Bhopal to Kurwai, barged into the bedroom of her husband and threw her loaded revolver to him. ‘The weapon is mine and loaded---use it and shoot me or else I will shoot you’, she said. Dadabhai yielded and Shahryar stayed with his mother. Later she got on amicably with her former husband and Shahryar met his father, who married again, in a cordial atmosphere.
This high drama was repeated when Abida was confronted by her father, the Nawab, when he had decided to merge the state with India and hand over the throne (a powerless symbol now) to her. This time it was the father who pointed his pistol at Abida but on her it did not work. She asked him to pull the trigger because she would not agree to merge the state with India as people would say that ‘a woman could not prevent the handover of a state our forbears had won through blood and sacrifice’ (p. 169). Having refused the throne Abida migrated to Pakistan where she built a house in Malir. Here she lived, except for a brief foray into diplomacy when Pakistan sent her as its ambassador to Brazil, till the end of her life. She participated in prominent social events in Karachi and supported Fatima Jinnah in her bid to power against Ayub Khan. She was full of life, being fond of playing upon musical instruments, sports and telling colourful stories. Besides being a public persona she was also a family person obviously enjoying the company of her grandchildren and friends. She was, indeed, a unique personality whose biography repays reading.
The biography is also interesting as a sociological study of power. Abida Sultaan’s life can be seen as an embodiment of the Neitzchean will to power which the modern age with its philosophies of egalitarianism, democracy and liberty tends to tame and even outlaw. She comes to admire the very person who dominates her to begin with, Sarkar Amman. She tells us that Sarkar Amman not only dominated all around her being a ruler but especially dominated those who were dependent upon her such as Beeva and little Abida. Thus the entire training she admires is of assertion of power. The principality was carved out by the power of the sword. Its majority Hindu population had to pay taxes to maintain the Nawab’s lifestyle. The premier sport, big game hunting (shikar), asserted the power of man over animals. It was this admiration of power, something which is all too common both among the rulers and the ruled, which made her the adventurous, confident, assertive rebel she was. She observes once when she had been estranged from her father that it was her family’s power which made her so carefree. Says she:
Gone was the secure, carefree existence that comes from being cocooned in the womb of a protective, all-powerful family (p. 169).
She was obviously unusually intelligent to have realized that confidence and security are as much the outcomes of power as of genes.
One gets an excellent impression of the author’s dignity and integrity since she neither begs for honours and jobs from the rulers of Pakistan nor does she make money from crooked deals. Nor, indeed, does she go back to India when she could have become the Nawab and possessed property if not power.
However, for all her support to Fatima Jinnah against Ayub Khan’s dictatorship, Abida Sultaan was an admirer of authoritarian rule deep down in her heart. The major reason she did not want to merge Bhopal with India was because it was painful for her to accept that no ruling family but the peoples’ representatives should rule upon this earth. She knows how one-person rule can be tyrannical if the ruler is a tyrant and how, at best, it is a benevolent autocracy. She mentions how the Begum of Junagadh (whom she calls Maa-Saab) treated her servants with such appalling cruelty that one of them, being beaten and tortured by her chief maid on her orders, actually died. Such a crime would not have been punished in a princely state but in Pakistan Maa-Saab was taken to the jail though even there she was treated much better then the other prisoners. The point is that, even with this knowledge of how undemocratic one-person rule can lead to cruelty and oppression, she still admires such rule. Indeed, she defends the principle of royalty and aristocracy which goes against the basic philosophies of egalitarianism and democracy.
Her views on Pakistani politics, despite her opposition to both Ayub Khan and Zia ul-Haq, are more often supportive of the establishment than otherwise. For instance, she seems to believe the establishment’s argument that politicians were removed from power because of their own corruption and incompetence. The alternative view is that an intrusive civil and military establishment removed them in order to retain its own dominance in the country. Similarly she considers the Bengalis as rebels and does not, except in passing, concede the faults of the West Pakistani establishment whish ruled them. However, much to her credit and somewhat inconsistently, she Praises Sahibzada Yakub Khan because of his advocacy of ‘a political solution that eventually led to his dismissal’ (p. 280). If Yakub Khan was right, as in my view he undoubtedly was, one does not see why she says that Tikka Khan attempted ‘to stem the tide of revolt by the people of East Pakistan’ without clarifying that the way Tikka attempted this was the opposite of what Yakub Khan had advocated.
On the whole, despite the admiration of the power principle which her aristocratic background had given her, Abida Sultaan was a most interesting, intelligent and colourful personality. She lived during a time of rapid and revolutionary change and adapted herself to this change because of her self-confidence, intelligence and foresight. She proves herself to be a deeply loving person as her relationship with her son tells us. Had Bhopal remained a princely state she would have been the fifth Begum of Bhopal and would have made a mark for herself as a modern princely ruler. The book is immensely readable except that the punctuation is often wrong. It cannot be determined whether this is the fault of the author, the editor or the proof reader but it is only a minor fault as meanings do not change. It is recommended to all historians, political scientists, sociologists and the general reader.