DISCUSIÓN

In Mahmooda Rizvi’s writings and in the Anjuman’s advertisements, images of women, particularly feminized personifications of the city of Karachi, merged with the promotion of Urdu as a connective language of scientific learning. While the use of feminine figures to represent a language or a nation was not unique to South Asia in the twentieth century, what distinguishes the Anjuman in Karachi was that a woman author was the major proponent of this feminized vision of stylized Urdu literary science.⁴⁶⁰ The importance of Mahmooda Rizvi to the Anjuman was illustrated by the circulation of her publications far beyond Karachi in the 1940s and the frequent narration of her singular impact on Urdu in Sindh in the association’s advertisements and magazines.

Mahmooda Rivzi’s books were widely distributed beyond Karachi and regularly reviewed in popular Urdu periodicals in Lahore, Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad in the early 1940s. The Anjuman’s regional branch in Karachi and the organization’s central offices in Delhi heavily promoted Mahmooda Rizvi as the exemplary pioneer of Urdu in Sindh. The advancement of Rizvi frequently emphasized her significance as a woman author. A constant refrain in the Karachi Anjuman’s advertisements and the central Anjuman’s books reviews was that she was the ‘ Adībah-yi Sindh’ or the ‘leading woman author of Sindh’ who was paving a verdant road for the Urdu language in the deserts of Sindh.⁴⁶¹ [The term ‘adībah’ is the feminine form of the Urdu term

‘adīb’ which is used for scholar of literature and language.] The Karachi Anjuman merged its

460 In her work on Tamil language devotees in southern India, Sumathi Ramaswamy discussed how representations of the Tamil language as a goddess were overwhelmingly produced by male scholars and language promoters. See:

Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.)

461 Shua’āe’-yi Urdu 4.4 (October 1944.)

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appeal to women readers with the image of Karachi through the feminized personification of the city as “Mallikah-yi Mashriq (Queen of the East)” in poetry, prose, and illustrated magazine covers. The larger institutional Anjuman’s growing interest in Sindh in the early 1940s could be attributed to the fact that it was a Muslim-majority province where Urdu had little presence. Thus, much like Bengal, it represented a potential frontier to Urdu promoters in the Anjuman.

Mahmooda Rizvi, who was in her early twenties in 1941, came from a prominent Urdu-speaking Muslim family in Sindh.⁴⁶² She was described by her fellow Urdu promoters as “the light of the Rizvi family who are patriotic, literarily cultivated, and hold exalted intellectual tastes.” ⁴⁶³ She was educated at Bombay University and Karachi’s D. J. Sindh College. Her father was the wealthy literary patron Hafiz Sharif Husain Rizvi, and in the early 1940s her brother Iqbal Hussain Rizvi pursued a PhD on the famous Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal. In the early 1940s the Rizvi family became patrons of the regional branch of the Anjuman in Karachi.⁴⁶⁴

The Karachi Anjuman expressed its hope for Karachi through the feminized personification of the city as “Queen of the East (Mallikah-yi Mashriq)” in poetry, prose, and illustrated magazine covers. The Anjuman’s promotion of Mahmooda Rizvi as the Adībah of Sindh and Karachi as

‘Queen of the East’ in the early 1940s coincided with other iterations of women as symbols of language and nation.⁴⁶⁵ What makes the figure of Karachi as an Urdu ‘Queen of the East’

462 Although Mahmooda Rizvi lived in Karachi, her deep knowledge of Persian and frequent references to Shi’a theology suggest that her family could have originated in the Khairpur princely state in Sindh, which was ruled by a Shi’a Muslim princely family that cultivated Urdu and Persian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

463 A. J. Karavani, “Peshnāmah,” Lālazār, Mahmooda Rizvi (Karachi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu- Karachi, 1942), ii.

464 A. J. Karavani, “Peshnāmah,” Lālazār, Mahmooda Rizvi (Karachi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu- Karachi, 1942), ii.

465 In her study of Tamil language devotion, Sumathi Ramaswamy traced the representations of Tamil as mother, beloved, and goddess with the feminization of the language situated as a distinctively modern development

“symptomatic of a fundamental regendering of cultural and community under colonial rule and modernity. See:

Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue, 81 and 121.

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distinctive among the gendered representation of modern South Asian vernacular languages is its paradoxical relationship to place. On the one hand, Karachi as ‘Queen of the East’ intimately tied the Urdu language to Karachi as a beacon of knowledge and a frontier for Urdu. Yet in contrast to the personification of goddesses who reigned over an Indian heartland, Karachi was geographically distant from Urdu’s North Indian base and on the eastern edge of a Persian-speaking world.⁴⁶⁶

Charles Napier established Karachi as the new capital of Sindh after he conquered the province in 1843. Much like Bombay and Calcutta, Karachi initially flourished as a colonial trading hub that linked the commerce of western India with other Indian Ocean colonial ports and the Middle East, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal. Karachi was governed within the Bombay Presidency until 1936 and the city emerged as a competitive port to Bombay, particularly for shipping from northern India.

Mahmooda Rizvi’s promotion of Urdu was fueled by Karachi’s economic rise and expanding population. The history of Urdu in Karachi can be situated within a longer history of mobility in Sindh.⁴⁶⁷ In the early twentieth century, the migration of predominantly Hindu Gujarati trading communities to Karachi and Punjabi agriculturalists into rural Sindh were transformative developments that contributed to the development of a Sindhi Muslim political consciousness of continual threat from external domination.⁴⁶⁸ World War II cemented Karachi’s growing importance as an Indian Ocean commercial hub and “a strategic port” for the British Empire since it was a secure port city in between the Asian and European theaters of the war.⁴⁶⁹ In her study of

466 Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue. 90.

467 Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh: 1947-1962 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23; and Claude Markovits, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.)

468 Ansari, Life after Partition, 32-34.

469 Ansari, Life after Partition, 25-27

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modern Sindh, Sarah Ansari argued that “by the end of the 1920s, despite the global depression, Karachi had emerged as India’s third port, and though there were fluctuations in the content of its trade, it maintained this position through independence.”⁴⁷⁰

Karachi’s growing economic heft was given added impetus between the two world wars and Sindh’s establishment as a separate province in 1936.⁴⁷¹ Muslims constituted about 80 percent of colonial Sindh’s population and the significant Hindu minority often lived in urban centers.⁴⁷² During the interwar era, Karachi’s population almost doubled and by 1941 ~386,655 people lived in the city.⁴⁷³ An important result of Karachi’s transformation into a global port city in the first four decades of the twentieth century was the influx of trading communities into the city, many of whom were Hindu traders from Gujarat.⁴⁷⁴ While Hindu and Muslim communities were roughly equal in Karachi until the early 1920s, the city subsequently gained a slight Hindu majority in the years before Partition.⁴⁷⁵ Gujarati was the predominant language in late colonial Karachi.⁴⁷⁶ Along with English, newspapers in Persian, Sindhi, and Gujarati were printed in Karachi.⁴⁷⁷

The Anjuman benefitted from this linguistic ferment and economic activity. Along with Mahmooda Rizvi, the cohort of Urdu-promoters in late colonial Karachi included Hassamuddin Rashidi, who became a major Sindhi scholar in post-colonial Pakistan, and Asif Jah Karavani, an Urdu educator from the Deccan. Asif Jah Karavani was a revolutionary-minded Urdu educator at Karachi’s D. J. Sindh College where he taught Rizvi and became her intellectual mentor. Rizvi

470 Ansari, Life after Partition, 26.

471 Yasmin Lari and Mihail Lari, The Dual City: Karachi During the Raj (Karachi: Heritage Foundation, 1996), 116.

472 Ansari, Life after Partition, 20.

473 Lari & Lari, The Dual City, 116.

474 Ansari, Life after Partition, 26.

475 Ansari, Life after Partition, 34.

476 Ansari, Life after Partition, 34.

477 Lari & Lari, The Dual City, 112-113.

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and Karavani became the primary leaders of the Karachi Anjuman in the 1940s and served as co-editors of the regional Urdu magazine. The Karachi Anjuman heavily invested in Rizvi with a total of 4,000 rupees spent on publishing twelve of her books by 1945.⁴⁷⁸ By February 1944, the Anjuman was regularly running advertisements for Rizvi’s books under the heading “The Immortal Writings of the Leading Woman Author (Adībah) of Sindh Mahmooda Rizvi.”⁴⁷⁹ The Karachi Anjuman convinced Sindh’s Department of Education to stock all school libraries with Mahmooda Rizvi’s books from 1943. For example, in April 1943, Sindh’s Director of Public Instruction accepted Rizvi’s Naame Tahdeed, which concerned early Islamic history, and short story collection Sooz aur Sāz as Urdu textbooks for all school libraries in the province of Sindh.⁴⁸⁰

Asif Jah Karavani used his connections to the Anjuman’s headquarters in Delhi and to Urdu scholars in the Deccan to promote Mahmooda Rizvi’s status as “Karachi’s famous woman author (adībah).” He requested that prominent journals in Lucknow, Delhi, and Hyderabad, including the central Anjuman’s own magazine Hamārī Zabān (Our Language), publish review her books. For example, in the stacks of the Hyderabad-based Urdu organization the Idārah-yi Adabīyāt-i Urdu, copies of Rizvi’s books can be found with hand-written notes from Karavani in which he appealed to Urdu scholars in Hyderabad to publish reviews of her books. Karavani selectively reproduced these reviews in the Karachi Anjuman’s monthly magazines to demonstrate Mahmooda Rizvi’s pan-Indian reach to her local audience in Sindh.⁴⁸¹ Ultimately, the Anjuman affixed a seal on the back cover of Rizvi’s publications celebrating her pan-South Asian status. On this seal Rizvi’s

478 Shua’āe’-yi Urdu 5.11 (May 1946), 3.

479 Shua’āe’-yi Urdu 4.5 (February 1944), ii.

480 Hindustānī 2.11 (May 1943), 19-20.

481 Hindustānī 2.11 (May 1943), 19-20.

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initials were emblazoned on a map of British India with two palm trees extending upwards to represent the province of Sindh.

“Mahmooda Rizvi, Editor of the monthly Beams of Urdu”

Mahmooda Rizvi was also appointed the leader of Karachi Anjuman’s women’s branch in March 1943.⁴⁸² Her father Hafiz Sharif Hussain Rizvi regularly provided donations to the Karachi branch of the Anjuman to fund its printing press and new headquarters, which were to be named either “Rizvi Press” or “Rizvi Hall.” He also purchased a lithograph press for the Karachi Anjuman.⁴⁸³ Mahmooda Rizvi was crucial for securing this financial largesse as illustrated by a 1943 review that “in the land of Sindh, for a woman to have published seven books in the Urdu language is a good omen for the advancement and expansion of the Urdu language.”⁴⁸⁴

Along with promoting Mahmooda Rizvi as the ‘Adībah’ of Sindh, the Anjuman in Karachi often characterized its aspirations to make Karachi a new center for Urdu under the rubric of Karachi as “Queen of the East (Mallikah-yi Mashriq),” a cosmopolitan port city figuratively reigning over the Indian Ocean. The personified figure of Karachi as ‘Queen of the East’ appeared in the Karachi Anjuman’s books, poetry gatherings, magazines, and illustrated book covers.

482 Hindustānī 2.9 (March 1943), 39.

483 Hindustānī 2.9 (March 1943), 39 & Hindustani 2.11 (May 1943), 38.

484 Shua’āe’-yi Urdu (October 1943.)

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Exemplifying this personification of Karachi, Akhtar Rizwani, a North Indian poet who visited Karachi in 1943, penned an ode to Karachi as “Queen of the East.” In the poem “Queen of the East,” Rizwani wrote that “in its [Karachi’s] lap is the spirit of a boundless sea- [Karachi is] the meeting place of a retinue of Afghans from one direction and the spirit of intoxication [from the sea.]”⁴⁸⁵ Rizwani framed Karachi as the meeting place between the Indian Ocean and Central Asia.

Nor were the Karachi Anjuman’s aspirations for Urdu in Sindh limited to poetry and prose.

Instead the cover art on Mahmooda Rizvi’s books and the Karachi Anjuman’s magazines illustrated the organization’s ambitions to make Karachi a new center for Urdu. For example, the covers of Rizvi’s books were transformed in 1944 with an image of a sari-clad woman standing on top of the globe. The woman held a torch aloft in her left hand and an unsheathed sword in her right hand. She stood atop a globe which was centered on the Indian subcontinent. However, her feet spanned from Central Asia across the India subcontinent and into Burma.

485 Hindustānī, January/ February 1943, 20.

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So who was this woman striding across the globe on the cover of the Karachi Anjuman’s books? I theorize that she was most likely a fusion of Mahmooda Rizvi as the ‘Adībah of Sindh’

and Karachi as ‘Queen of the East.’ This figure resembled contemporary illustrations of the nineteenth century anti-British Rani of Jhansi, as well as contemporary representations of India as mother and goddess and the Statue of Liberty in the United States.⁴⁸⁶ The figure of Karachi as

‘Queen of the East’ increasingly appeared in Rizvi’s writings as the 1940s progressed. For example, in September 1943 Rizvi dedicated one of her books “in the name of my own Queen of the East, Karachi.”⁴⁸⁷ Rizvi even wrote a guide book to Karachi in 1947 that was titled “Queen of the East.” Moreover, the figure of a woman stood immediately above the book’s title and

486Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue.

487 Mahmooda Rizvi, Abshār (Karachi: Hindustānī Dār-ul Ishāa’t, 1943.)

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Mahmooda Rizvi’s name. Thus, this globe-striding figure merged Rizvi as the ‘leading literary woman of Sindh’ and Karachi as ‘Queen of the East.’

In an era when political imagery of India as goddess and mother had assumed tremendous importance in Indian nationalist discourse, the promotion of Karachi as ‘Queen of the East’ and Rizvi as the leading ‘Adībah of Sindh’ provided an implicit counterpoint to the nationalist ‘Mother India.’⁴⁸⁸ The Karachi Anjuman attempted to carve out an alternative space for Urdu (and Islam) amidst competing figures of the nation and language through the figure of Karachi as ‘Queen of the East’ bearing light and knowledge on a global scale.