Dr. Nazia Akhtar presented a paper on Dream, Mirror, Trance: Reality and Reform in the Writings of Sughra Humayun Mirza (1884-1958) at a workshop on Jamia’s Women. Delhi and Beyond: Ways into the Public Sphere at New Delhi on 10 and 11 October. The workshop was organised by Max Weber Stiftung, Max Weber Forum, and Muslim Women’s Forum.

This paper examines the literary character of Sughra Humayun Mirza’s fiction, which is frequently overlooked in favour of the more easily apprehensible reformist motivations and aspects of her work. Through an examination of the representation of dreams and trances in her writing, the author argues that Sughra Begum’s reformist message would not be so successfully and powerfully communicated, were it not for the power of her literary imagination in wielding the resources of fiction and non-fiction to her particular ends. Furthermore, this paper tries to explain why Sughra Begum resorts to experiences that defy reason and rational consciousness in order to define and legitimise a social reform agenda for her contemporary readership. 

About the workshop: For longer than Muslim women in other contexts, Jamia’s women have remained invisible in public perception and in scholarship alike. While the knowledge about the founding fathers of Jamia has been handed down over the decades and has become the object of renewed academic interest since the early 2000s, we know very little about their wives, sisters, and daughters, and about the other women who had an influence on the foundation, the development and the everyday running of Jamia. It is not that these women were silent: even cursory investigations bring out a multitude of sources.

The conference focused on two of the paths that these women took to enter the Urdu public sphere. The first one is through literature and poetry – Saliha Abid Husain was the most famous one, but not the only one to write novels; others favoured short stories, and many engaged with poetry. The second one is through social work – often leaving the public face to the men of the family, Jamia’s women were central to the establishment of institutions for the education of girls, for health care, and for the well-being of mothers and children.

Jamia never stood in isolation from initiatives and movements elsewhere, in India and beyond. The last section of the conference therefore had a comparative gaze, focusing on Aligarh, Lucknow, and Hyderabad.

October 2023