The Changing World of a Bombay Muslim Community, 1870 - 1945

Description

Muslims formed a disparate and unwieldy community in Bombay in the nineteenth century. The Islam that was professedly held in common by various groups could barely provide a sense of unity or cohesion to people so widely diverse in terms of language, customs, and also of forms and practices of belief. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a class of wealthy ship owners, ship-builders, and merchants, belonging to the varied communities that constituted the city, of which Muslims formed an important part, had emerged. This class was outward-looking, modern, and generally reformist in outlook: Gujarati or Maharashtrian, its goals of social reform, education, as well as political awareness, were gradually beginning to be perceived as goals held across communities, and increasingly across different regions. The questions that were being raised in the social turmoil of the period amongst Hindus were over issues of female education, the age of marriage, widow remarriage, and female seclusion. These issues were not foreign to the Muslim community; and the part played by Muslim leaders in Bombay in discussing and negotiating them was not an insignificant one, taking into account the size and relative backwardness of the community. Within this context, this book traces the evolving identity of a Bombay family and its changing social and political views in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using three main sources: their family journals, an individual memoir/journal, and letters written home from Europe.

About the author:

Salima Tyabji (1939-2013), was a teacher and an editor, and was educated at the Universities of Bombay and Oxford. She taught at the Bombay International School and at the Anjuman-I-Islam's Saif Tyabji Girls' High School. She later became an Editor, initially with Tata McGraw-Hill, and subsequently with Oxford University Press. After retiring from OUP, Tyabji taught herself Urdu and researched at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, both of which led to the manuscript which forms the basis of this book.

Table of contents

Preface List of characters in alphabetical order List of Illustrations Introduction 1:The Tyabjee Family and its 'Akhbar' 2:Currents of Change 1876- 1939, as revealed in the 'Akhbar' 3:Passages from the 'Akhbar' 4:A Modern Woman: The Journal of Safia Jabir Ali, 1926-1945 5:Letters from Europe: 1870 Conclusion