Lot 105
Shah Jahan Begum, Nawab Begum of Bhopal (1838-1901)
Tahdhib al-niswan wa-tarbiyah al-insan
£1,638
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs
Auction: 21 June 2023 at 11:00 BST
Description
[Arabic title, i.e. 'The refinement of women and the education of mankind']. Bhopal: Matba' al-Sadiqi al-Ka'in, 1302 AH [1884/5 CE]. 8vo (24.8 x 16.5cm), contemporary half cloth, marbled sides, 7 491 pp., text in Urdu with occasional Qur'anic quotations in Arabic, lithographed throughout, browning, variable marginal worming, pp. 47/48 and 49/50 torn, pp. 381/2 dog-eared with paper consequently thinning along crease
Footnote
Note:
First or early edition of the third Nawab Begum of Bhopal's advice manual for women, a work 'wholly unprecedented in Urdu publishing' (Metcalf, 2011); secondary literature variously cites original publication dates of 1883/4, possibly a miscalculation of the range covered in the Gregorian calendar by the Islamic year 1302, and the evidently incorrect 1889; no other copy traced in commerce or in readily visible library catalogues.
Bhopal was unique among the princely states of British India for being ruled by a dynasty of four successive women. Shah Jahan Begum's work covers all aspects of a woman's life, including medical advice, correct ritual practice, fitness and exercise (notably horsemanship), and even sexual activity. Remarkably, she 'asserted a woman's right to carnal pleasure using her own experiences as illustration. Specifically, she explained how she had not felt sexually fulfilled by her first husband, the much older and already married Baqi Muhammad Khan, with a consequence that her whole youth had been lost in "suffering and sadness" ... After his death, however, things improved dramatically thanks to her controversial remarriage in 1871 to her personal secretary, Siddiq Hasan Khan. The pleasure resulting from this sexual coupling led her to assert that she had never been so happy' (Lambert Hurley, 2014).
Literature:
Barbara Metcalf, 'Islam and Power in Colonial India: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess', The American Historical Review, vol. 116, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-30.
Lambert-Hurley, 'To Write of the Conjugal Act: Intimacy and Sexuality in Muslim Women's Autobiographical Writing in South Asia', Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 23, no. 2, 2014, pp. 155–81.
