Glossary of Bengali (or Hindi/Urdu) words
Aborodh-basini
besieged woman/women; 'Aborodh' means confinement in a small area and 'basini' is the feminine of ‘basi’ which means a dweller
burqa
an all-enveloping tent-like cloak worn by many Muslim women
Gurkha
a Nepalese ethnic group, many members of which loyally served the British army in India during the first independence war in 1857
Kabuli
an Afghan (from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan)
mardana
Men’s quarters
nekab
the semi-detachable part of a burqa covering the face. It contains two small holes over the eyes
Pairabond
paira means pigeon; bond means ‘a plot’ (of land). the name of a village where Rokeya was born
Parsi
a small community descended from Persian Zoroastrians who migrated to India long ago.
They retain their distinctive religion. Parsis were first to allow their women to wear western dress.
India’s richest industrialist, the Tata family belongs to the Parsis
purdah
a curtain, also means seclusion behind the curtains at home or full covering of the body out of doors
purdanshin
who maintains the purdah
Rama
is the 7th incarnation of God, the crown prince of the kingdom Ayodha, the hero in the epic Ramyana
Sita
is the wife of Rama [ra:m].
Sita and Shupornakha in the epic Ramayana are two typical examples of irrational brutality made by men to both Aryan and non-Aryan women.
Sita, the daughter of Earth, embraced death when she could no more bear the unjust rejections, utter humiliations and endless torture
zenana
women’s quarters
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Ever since I turned five, I have had to hide myself from women even. I could not understand the rationale behind it. Yet I had to disappear as soon as a stranger approached.
Men, naturally, were not allowed in the inner apartments. Therefore, I did not suffer from them. But women were permitted to roam around the inner apartments quite freely, and I had to hide from them. The village women dropped in for sudden visits. Then somebody would instantaneously make a sign, and I had to find the nearest hiding place, – the kitchen, inside the rolled mats of the maidservants, – under the beds even.
I had to run for a hiding place just like a little chicken run to her mother whenever the hen flashes a sign warning them of approaching kites and hawks. But there was a difference. The little chicken had a foreordained place, – her mother’s wings, where they could hide. But I had no such naturally determined, safe hiding place. Moreover, the chicks instinctively recognize the danger signals sent by the mother hen.
Alas! I had no such instinctive understanding. Therefore, at times I would fail to interpret signals correctly, and be slow in hiding myself. At such times, the well-wishing female elders of the family never hesitated to berate the “shameless and immodest conduct of modern hussies” like me.
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When I was five, we stayed in Calcutta. Once, the aunt of my second sister-in-law (wife of second elder brother) sent two maidservants to visit with her. They had a ‘free pass’ to wander at the length of the house,– and I had to run like a deer fleeing the hunters in all sorts of hiding places, behind the doors and under the tables. The usual hiding place was the attic on the third floor which was seldom frequented by the family. My ayah (governess maid) would carry me there in the morning, and I would stay there the whole day.
When the two maids finished surveying the rest of the house, they decided to look at the attic. My nephew (elder sister’s son) named Halu, who was also five, ran to warn me of the impending catastrophe. Fortunately, the room had an old four-poster. I crawled under it.
I hardly dared to breathe, – lest those heartless women hear the sound and look under the bed. There were a few empty boxes and old stools stored in the room. Poor Halu summoned all the strength of his five-year-old body and managed to drag few of those before me. We arranged them around me to afford better cover. No one else, except Halu, came to ask me whether I needed anything. He would bring me some snacks or a glass of water when I asked him to do so. Sometimes, though, he would go to fetch something and would not come back for a long time. He was a boy of only five, after all, and easily got involved in games.
I had to stay in this miserable plight for four days.
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One day in our village of Pairabond we were performing the ritual ablutions before the midday prayer. All of them were through except the last girl. She was in the middle of the ritual. Her personal maid ‘Alta’s mother’ (called after her first child’s name Alta) was pouring water on her palms from a metal pitcher.
Suddenly they saw a tall and stout Kabuli woman walked through the back entrance of the inner courtyard.
Alas! What a stir! The water pitcher dropped from Alta’s mother’s inert fingers, – she started screaming – “Alas! Where did this fellow come from?” The woman laughed and protested, – “Fellow? Of whom are you talking about? I am a woman.”
The girl left her ablution and ran to the house for her dear life. She reached her aunt’s room nearest to her. Out of breath, trembled, she blurted out, –“Aunty, a woman in trousers is here!”
Her aunt was startled and asked, – “Has she seen you?” The girl reduced to tears, nodded yes.
The other women in the meantime stopped their prayers and rushed to shut all the doors to prevent the Kabuli woman from seeing the other girls of the family. From the speed and urgency with which they locked the doors, one would have assumed that a wild tiger was loose in the courtyard.
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Once, a house caught fire. The mistress of the house had the presence of mind to collect her jewellery in a handbag and hurry out of the house.
But at the door, she found the courtyard full of strangers fighting the fire. She could not come out in front of them. So, she went back to her bedroom with the bag and hid herself under a bed. She burned to death but did not try to come out.
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A wedding was being solemnized in the house of a Bengali landlord living in a village. His house was full of rich guests. The event attracted thieves. Some burglars planned to rob the house at the late hours of night when all were asleep. They dug a tunnel and broke into a room.
A night-guard suspected something amiss. He woke the owner of the house. The landlord and all his men armed themselves quietly and started to look for the burglars. They were upset and angry at the audacity of the burglars.
In the mean time, a thief had entered in one of the big bedrooms where the ladies were sleeping. They awaked up by a sudden noise in the room. As soon as they saw a stranger, they hid themselves under their bedclothes and held their breath. The thief broke the safe and took everything he wanted. When he approached one lady and asked for her jewellery, the rest of them hurriedly started taking off their jewelleries in order to offer those quietly to the thief.
The thief gladly noticed this and decided to wait patiently till this was fully accomplished. Unfortunately, there was a new bride in the room who, though was able to take off her huge nose-ring, found herself unable to take off her heavy ear-rings, all entangled in her hair. The thief, after polite wait, became impatient. He took out his knife and after severing the ears of the bride, made a hasty retreat.
While all such things were taking place quietly inside this room, the men of the house, all armed to the teeth, were looking about the thief. The women did hear them moving around, but none of them made a sound because then the thief, not of the “permitted category” would hear her voice. As soon as the thief was out of the room, they started screaming.
This is how we observe purdah!
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An aunt of my husband was travelling by train from Patna to Bhagalpur in India. She was accompanied by her maid only.
At Kiul railway-junction they had to change trains. While boarding the train, my aunt-in-law stumbled against her voluminous burqa and fell down on the railway track. Except the maid, there was no woman at the station. The railway porters rushed to help her up, but the maid immediately stopped them by imploring God’s name, not to touch her mistress.
The maid tried her best to drag her mistress up by herself but failed. The driver of the train patiently waited for half an hour but no more.
The Begum’s body was smashed, her burqa torn. The station was full of people who witnessed this horrible incident. But yet none of them was permitted to assist.
Finally, Begum’s mangled body was taken to a luggage-shed. Her maid wailed piteously. After eleven hours unspeakable agony, she also died.
What a gruesome way to die!
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A Hindu family travelled far away from their home for taking a ritual bath in the holy river Ganges. The family consisted of a young woman, her husband and her mother-in-law.
There were tens of thousands of people taking their bath at that place. After taking her bath, the young woman could not find her husband or mother-in-law nearby. Abiding the social custom, she kept her face almost covered before the strangers by the end of her Sari, just leaving a small opening to peep at the outside world. Therefore, she could not see well. After waiting sometime she found the yellow-bordered endings of her husbands “Dhoti” hanging on his backside. She had held it and followed behind him.
Her husband had informed the police about her lost wife. A police constable could soon catch the man behind whom the young house-wife was leaving the bathing place. The policeman shouted after him, “Whose wife is she whom you are seducing away?” The gentleman fell from the sky and turning back he saw a young woman following him holding the end of his Dhoti hanging behind.
When the woman was interrogated, she said that she could not see well because of her veils made by the end of her sari covering her face. Never did she see her husband well (generally a new wife was not allowed to see her husband during the daytime). She had only seen that her husband had yellow bordered Dhoti and when she saw the endings of a yellow bordered Dhoti, she held it and followed after it.
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While I attended a Ladies’ Conference in Aligarh, I saw many delegates who had various types of burqa on. One woman had a peculiar burqa on. When I mentioned about it, she immediately said, “Oh, No! Don’t talk about burqa! I had such horrible experiences.” She told me a few of her own experiences.
Once she went to attend a wedding ceremony in a Bengali Hindu family. As soon as the children saw her coming in a burqa, they started screaming in fright and began to hide.
Her husband had some other Bengali Hindu friends. She was obliged to pay at least one visit to each of them. But she created panic in every house. The children started trembling and screaming at the sight of burqa.
Once she visited Calcutta. In the evening she and her companions all burqa-clad went out in an open-top car.
The children along the way started shouting,
– “Oh, my God! What are those?”
One of them screamed,
– “Quiet everybody! I’m sure those are Ghosts.”
When the long nekabs of their burqas moved forward in the breeze, someone said,
– “Hi, Look, the ghosts are moving their trunks like elephants. Run! Run! They are after us!”
Once she went to Darjeeling. At Ghum station, a crowd was observing a midget. He was only as tall as a boy of seven or eight, but he had the face of an adult, with a full beard and all. Suddenly she found that the curious eyes of the crowd were turned upon her instead. They were not amused by the midget anymore. Her burqa was infinitely more entertaining!
When they reached Darjeeling, they decided to go out after dinner. They took a rickshaw to the Mall. The Mall was crowded. People were watching at the soldiers returning from Tibet that afternoon. Her rickshaw-puller parked the rickshaw on a side and joined the crowd. After a while she found that the pedestrians were rather taking a look inside her rickshaw.
Wherever she went for a walk, the dogs started howling and followed her. A horse reared when confronted with her. Once while she was visiting a tea garden, a little Gurkha girl raised a pebble to hit her.
Once she was walking with five other burqa-clad women. While walking along the side of a little stream, all of them stumbled in the pebbles and mud and fell down in the stream. The women workers in the nearby tea-garden ran and rescued them.
One of the women chuckled and said them affectionately,
– “Look at you! You have shoes on and those sacks. Of course, you would have fallen in the stream! What else you could expect?”
Alas, the embroidered veils of the ladies were soiled. Their burqas were soaked!
On the top of all this, whenever they walked, they would hear mothers trying to hush their crying babies, pointing to them and saying,
– “Hush! Child, Hush! Hush! Look there! Those are Mecca and Medina. See the hooded witches! They are Mecca and Medina.
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In the words of a poet:
Only three years ago, we had our school bus. The day before the bus was delivered, one of our teachers, an English woman, had gone to the auto-depot to inspect the bus.
Her comment was, – “This bus is horribly dark inside. Oh, No! I’ll never ride that bus!”
When the bus arrived, it was found that there was a narrow lattice on the top of the back door and one at the top of the front door. Excepting these two pieces of latticework, three inches wide and eighteen inches long, the bus could be called completely ‘airtight’!
The bus took the school girls to their homes that first afternoon. The maid, accompanying the girls, reported after she came back that it was terribly hot inside the bus. The girls were very uncomfortable. Some of them vomited. Some of the little girls were whimpering in the dark.
Before the bus went to fetch the girls on the next day, the English woman who taught in our school opened the shutter of the back door. She hung coloured curtains on the open shutters. Even then it was found that a few of the girls fainted away, a few of them vomited on the way, and the most of them had got headaches.
In the afternoon, the aforementioned teacher opened the shutters on the side of the bus and hung curtains there also. That evening, a Hindu friend, Mrs. Mukherjee, came to see me. She was glad to know about the progress the school was making. Suddenly she said,
– “Incidentally, what a fine bus you have got! The first time I saw it, I thought a huge chest was drawn on wheels. My nephew ran out and said, -‘Oh, Aunty! Look! The moving black-hole of Calcutta is passing by!’ Really! How could the girls ride such a bus?”
On the afternoon of the third day, several mothers visited me to complain about the bus. They said,
– “Your bus is certainly God’s punishment. You are burying the girls alive!”
I said helplessly, “What can I do? If the bus was not such, you would have been the ones who criticize the bus not having enough purdah”.
They said angrily, “What? Do you want to maintain the purdah at the expense of our children’s lives? We are not going to send our daughters to your school anymore!”
That evening the maid reported that every guardian complained about the bus and warned that the girls would not ride this sort of bus.
The next morning I received four letters. The writer of one letter written in English had signed himself, “Brother-in-Islam”. The other three letters were written in Urdu. Two of these letters were anonymous. The third one had five signatures.
The contents of the four letters were same – all of them were from well-wishers. For the continuing welfare of my school they were informing me that the two curtains hanging by the side of the bus moved in the breeze. People could see the girls sitting inside. If something better was not arranged by the next day, they would be compelled, for the benefit of the school, to write in various Urdu newspapers about lack of proper purdah and would stop the girls riding in such purdahless bus.
What a dilemma I was in…
I don’t think anyone else had tried to catch such a ‘cobra’ [the irate critics] to satisfy the whims of such a ‘king’ [the equally irate guardians].
On behalf of the women imprisoned in seclusion, I wish to say–
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For a long period of time we have been used to seclusion. Therefore, we, – especially I myself – had nothing in particular to say against the seclusion. If you ask a fisherwoman, “Does rotten fish smell good or bad to you?” how would she answer that? …
It is necessary to mention here that all over India seclusion is observed, not only against men but also against women, “outside” one’s own family. No woman, except the closest relations and housemaids, is allowed to see an unmarried girl. Married women also hide themselves from gypsy women and other professional itinerant performers and entertainers.
Among women whoever succeed in hiding most in the corner like an owl, proves thereby to be most “aristocratic” by breeding. Even wealthy urban women run away at the sight of English missionary women. Let alone English woman, even the sight of Christian or Hindu women (though in Saris but not veiled) would drive them to the safety of their closed bedrooms.
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Recently we see the Parsi women moving about unveiled, but are they truly free from mental slavery? Certainly not! Their unveiling is not the result of their own decision.
The Parsi men have dragged their women out of the curtains in a blind imitation of the Europeans. It does not show any initiative of their women. They are as lifeless as they were before. When their men kept them in seclusion, they stayed there. Then the men dragged them out by their nose-rings, they came out. That cannot be called achievement by women.
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Rama’s relationship with Sita is exactly that of a boy and his favourite doll. A boy may be terribly fond of his toy. He may miss it awfully when he is away from it. If it is stolen he may be mad at the thief. He may be delighted when he gets it back. Yet he may throw it in the mud the next moment for no good reason at all. But the doll does not say anything for it is lifeless….
Did Rama ever act in a way which showed that Sita also has feelings?
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How strong our habits are! We desire the badges of slavery since we are accustomed to slavery just as an alcoholic hankers after a drink. Our jewelleries, of which we are so proud, are nothing but badges of slavery! Prisoners wear handcuffs made of iron. We wear bracelets of gold or silver. Our gem-studded chokers are probably imitated from the “dog-collars!”
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Had God intended women to be inferior, it would have been ordained so that mothers would have given birth to daughters at the end of fifth month of pregnancy. The supply of mother’s milk would naturally have been half of that in case of a son. But this is not the case. How it can be? Is not God just and most merciful?
Men are using religion as an excuse to dominate over us at present. Therefore, we should not submit us quietly to such oppression in the name of religion.
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