Abida Sultaan was nothing like your typical princess.
She wore her hair short, shot tigers and was an ace polo player. She flew planes and drove herself around in a Rolls-Royce from the age of nine.
Born in 1913 into a family of brave ‘begums’ (a Muslim woman of high rank) who ruled the northern princely state of Bhopal in British India for over a century, Abida continued their legacy of defying stereotypes around women in general and Muslim women in particular.
She refused to be in purdah – a practice followed by Muslim, and some Hindu women, of wearing clothes that conceal them and secluding themselves from men – and became heir to the throne at the age of 15.
Abida ran her father’s cabinet for more than a decade, rubbed shoulders with India’s prominent freedom fighters and would eventually come to have a ringside view of the hate and violence the country disintegrated into after it was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan.
She was groomed from a young age to take on the mantle of ruler under the guidance of her grandmother, Sultan Jehan, a strict disciplinarian who was the ruler of Bhopal.
In her 2004 autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Abida writes about how she had to wake up at four in the morning to read the Quran – the religious text of Islam – and then proceed with a day filled with activities, which included learning sports, music and horse riding, but also included chores like sweeping the floor and cleaning bathrooms.
“We girls were not allowed to feel any inferiority on account of our sex. Everything was equal. We had all the freedom that a boy had; we could ride, climb trees, play any game we chose to. There were no restrictions,” she said in an interview about her childhood.
Abida had a fierce, independent streak even as a child and rebelled against her grandmother when she forced her into purdah at the age of 13. Her chutzpah coupled with her father’s broad-mindedness helped her escape the practice for the rest of her life.
Already heir to the throne of Bhopal, Abida stood the chance of becoming part of the royal family of the neighbouring princely state of Kurwai as well when at the age of 12, she was married off to Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and ruler Kurwai. She described her nikah (wedding), about which she was clueless, in hilarious detail in her memoir.
She writes about how one day, while she was pillow-fighting with her cousins, her grandmother walked into the room and asked her to dress up for a wedding. Only, no one told her that she was the bride.
“No-one had prepared or instructed me on how to conduct myself, with the result that I walked into the nikah chamber, pushing the gathered women out of my way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual for being chosen again for some new experiment,” she writes.
The wedding was brief like Abida’s marriage, which lasted for less than a decade.
Married life was difficult for Abida, not just because of her young age but also because of her strict, pious upbringing. She candidly describes how a lack of knowledge and discomfort with sex took a toll on her marriage.
“Immediately after my wedding, I entered the world of conjugal trauma. I had not realised that the consummation that followed would leave me so horrified, numbed and feeling unchaste,” she writes and adds that she could never bring herself to “accept marital relations between husband and wife”. This led to the breakdown of her marriage.
In her paper on intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley underscores how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband tear apart the stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed voice on the topic.
After her marriage fell apart, Abida left her marital home in Kurwai and moved back to Bhopal. But the couple’s only son, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an ugly custody dispute. Frustrated by the drawn-out battle and not wanting to part with her son, Abida took a bold step to make her husband back off.
On a warm night in March 1935, Abida drove for three hours straight to reach her husband’s home in Kurwai. She entered his bedroom, pulled out a revolver, threw it in her husband’s lap and said: “Shoot me or I will shoot you.”
This incident, coupled with a physical confrontation between the couple in which Abida emerged victorious, put an end to the custody dispute. She proceeded to raise her son as a single mother while juggling her duties as heir to the throne. She ran her state’s cabinet from 1935 till 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
Abida also attended the round-table conferences – called by the British government to decide the future government of India – during which she met influential leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister.
She also experienced first-hand the deteriorating relationship between Hindus and Muslims and the violence that broke out in the aftermath of India’s partition in 1947.
In her memoir Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived there peacefully for generations, began to be treated as “outsiders”. In one of her interviews, she spoke about a particularly disturbing memory she had of the violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims.
One day, after the Indian government informed her that a train carrying Muslim refugees would arrive in Bhopal, she went to the railway station to supervise the arrival.
“When the compartments were opened, they were all dead,” she said and added that it was this violence and distrust that drove her to move to Pakistan in 1950.
Abida left quietly, with only her son and hopes for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she championed democracy and women’s rights through her political career. Abida died in Karachi in 2002.
After she left for Pakistan, the Indian government had made her sister heir to the throne. But Abida is still known in Bhopal, where people refer to her by her nickname ‘bia huzoor’.
“Religious politics over the past few years have chipped away at her legacy and she isn’t spoken about as much any more,” says journalist Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, who has been researching Bhopal’s women rulers.
“But her name isn’t likely to be forgotten anytime soon.”
