BOOK WATCH
Pilgrim's jottings
ANITA JOSHUA
A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s ‘A Pilgrimage to Mecca’, edited, introduced and with an afterword by Shobhan Lambert-Hurley, Women Unlimited, Rs. 350.
By a strange coincidence, 2007 has brought to the reading public two accounts of pilgrimages into the heart of Islam — Mecca. Both accounts of the Haj are by women. But, that’s where the similarity ends. Not only are the two accounts separated by time — all of 140 years — they are entirely different in what they have to say.
Since Standing Alone in Mecca: A Pilgrimage into the Heart of Islam by Asra Q. Nomani has already been written about in these pages, it would be unfair to dwell further on the more recent of the two accounts. A Princess’s Pilgrimage — Nawab Sikandar Begum’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1864 is a study in contrast. There is none of the spiritual soul-searching that is the sum and substance of Nomani’s book; instead it is a telling account of Arabia of the time.
Arguably the first Indian ruler — male or female — to make the then “extremely perilous” pilgrimage to Mecca, Sikandar Begum, the regent and later Nawab of Bhopal, apparently wrote this account at the behest of the British to whom she was extremely loyal, having fought with them during the 1857 uprising.
Writing as she was “in compliance with a request”, Sikandar Begum confined herself to providing information on Arabia — an area the British had an interest in after having established a protectorate in South Yemen. While the spiritual part of the Haj finds only passing mention, she writes at length about the administration — rather the lack of it — and the social mores prescribed by the Prophet which she found to be observed more in the breach.
Billed as the first Muslim woman to publish an account of her Haj, Women Unlimited offers the original English translation of 1869 vintage by Mrs. Willoughby-Osborne — wife of a British colonial officer — of an unpublished Urdu manuscript.
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