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Between 1819 and 1926 four Muslim women rulers reigned over Bhopal, the second largest Muslim state of India, despite staunch opposition from powerful neighbours and male claimants. Even the British East India Company initially opposed female rule in Bhopal until the Begums quoted Queen Victoria as their model and inspiration. Qudsia, the first Begum, was supported by her powerful French-Bourbon Prime Minister in her departure from the traditional. She was succeeded in 1844 by Sikandar, her only daughter, who discarded purdah like her mother and was a powerful and awesome ruler, leading her armies into battle, and indulging in the male-dominated pastimes of polo and tiger-hunting. Sikandar's only daughter, the highly controversial and liberal Shahjehan, made her mark on the state by building extensively, while the last Begum, Sultan Jahan, was a pioneering figure in education reform, and a standard-bearer for women's emancipation. The story ends with her abdication in favour of her son, the first male ruler (Nawab) of Bhopal in five generations. This book offers the first balanced history of the state and, in discussing the Begums' policies in dealing with the British, also provides a fascinating account of British Imperial relations with princely states.
Study conducted at the Dept. of Women's Studies, NCERT.
Account of a former ruling nawab from Bhopal, princely state in India.
The British Empire at its height governed more than half the world’s Muslims. It was a political imperative for the Empire to present itself to Muslims as a friend and protector, to take seriously what one scholar called its role as “the greatest Mohamedan power in the world.” Few tasks were more important than engagement with the pilgrimage to Mecca. Every year, tens of thousands of Muslims set out for Mecca from imperial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea. Men and women representing all economic classes and scores of ethnic and linguistic groups made extraordinary journeys across waterways, deserts, and savannahs, creating huge challenges for officials charged with the administration of these pilgrims. They had to balance the religious obligation to travel against the desire to control the pilgrims’ movements, and they became responsible for the care of those who ran out of money. John Slight traces the Empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. The story draws on a varied cast of characters—Richard Burton, Thomas Cook, the Begums of Bhopal, Lawrence of Arabia, and frontline imperial officials, many of them Muslim—and gives voice throughout to the pilgrims themselves. The British Empire and the Hajj is a crucial resource for understanding how this episode in imperial history was experienced by rulers and ruled alike.
Written shortly before her death and based on the diaries that she kept throughout her life, this book documents the activities of a Muslim princess who rebelled against societal conventions to take an active public role, first, as heir-apparent and chief secretary of an Indian princely state, then as diplomat and dissident in independent Pakistan.
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The Book is a historical analysis of the Militaries of the Bhopal Princely State. Bhopal had the singular position in the comity of Princely States in British India, with a Hundred and seventy-five years' continuous line of Begums rulers. They were visionaries, educated and erudite. They displayed tremendous administrative ability, leadership qualities and diplomatic acumen, coupled with comparable skill at horse riding and arms. These Rulers set the tone of the Militaries and its motivation. The Bhopal Battalion, as part of the Indian Expeditionary Force, was the first non-Europeans to have disembarked in France to fight the War. The Battalion was the recipient of the Victoria Cross in World War I and a Nishan-e-Haider in post-independence period, a rare feat indeed. The icing on the cake was that its Militaries were demobilized in a peaceful and a placid manner, to be absorbed by the Civvy Street in a symbiotic equation.