Workshop on ‘Jamia’s women. Delhi and Beyond – Ways into the Public Sphere’ organized by the Muslim Women’s Forum and MWF Delhi, 10-11 October, 2023

About the workshop:
For longer than Muslim women in other contexts, Jamia’s women have remained invisible in public perception and in scholarship alike. While the knowledge about the founding fathers of Jamia has been handed down over the decades and has become the object of renewed academic interest since the early 2000s, we know very little about their wives, sisters, and daughters, and about the other women who had an influence on the foundation, the development and the everyday running of Jamia. It is not that these women were silent: even cursory investigations bring out a multitude of sources.
The conference will focus on two of the paths that these women took to enter the Urdu public sphere. The first one is through literature and poetry – Saliha Abid Husain was the most famous one, but not the only one to write novels; others favored short stories, and many engaged with poetry. The second one is through social work – often leaving the public face to the men of the family, Jamia’s women were central to the establishment of institutions for the education of girls, for health care, and for the well-being of mothers and children.
Jamia never stood in isolation from initiatives and movements elsewhere, in India and beyond. The last section of the conference therefore will follow a comparative gaze, focusing on Aligarh, Lucknow, and Hyderabad.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
mwfdelhi (September 27, 2023). Workshop on ‘Jamia’s women. Delhi and Beyond – Ways into the Public Sphere’ organized by the Muslim Women’s Forum and MWF Delhi, 10-11 October, 2023. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved March 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rpti