Behind the zines: A look at Kerala’s Muslim women rebels, from a century ago

“I grew up thinking most women in our community were illiterate, which is why there were no books, poems or any traces of history associated with them,” says Haneena PA, 26, an art curator from Malappuram in Kerala.

The truth is that, within the community of Mappila Muslims, generations ago in the early 1900s, there were women poets and doctors, scholars, travellers, rebels and writers.

There are surviving traces of their lives and work too, if one looks very, very hard.
Haneena finally found essays and articles in magazines published locally a century ago, and the tales they tell are dramatic. The magazines include the Malayalam-language Muslim Mahila (Muslim Women; launched in 1923), the Arabi Malayalam Nisa’ul Islam (Women of Islam; 1929), Muslim Vanitha (1938) and Vanitha (1944; Vanitha is also Malayalam for Woman).
Amid the air of socio-political reform of the time, these publications were often edited and sometimes run by Mappila Muslim women too.
Some editions are preserved in archives, library universities and in private collections, and by scouring such souces, Haneena and Jazeela Basheer, 29, an exhibitions designer, are now setting up an archive that will hopefully help other Muslim women connect with their past.
The archive is called Around the Sufrah (aroundthesufrah.in), sufrah being the Arabic word for the woven mat laid on the floor at meal times, around which families eat and chat. Here’s a look at some of the most extraordinary tales that Haneena and Basheer encountered.
Editor, publisher
M Haleema Beevi (1920-2000) fought to stay in school. She studied until Class 7, despite strong opposition, and was then pulled out.
A few years later, at 18, she decided she would not be silenced any longer. She founded Muslim Vanitha, supported by her husband, the writer-editor KM Mohammed Moulavi.
He stood by her even when she had to spend days at the printing press away from her family, her daughter Ansar Begum, 84, a retired principal, told Haneena.
In her magazine and her writings, Haleema critiqued patriarchal norms, interpreted passages of the Quran from a woman’s perspective, and campaigned for more areas of modern education to be opened up to women.
Girls need to be allowed to do more than finish school, was a rallying cry.
She would go on to be the first woman municipal councillor in Thiruvalla, Kerala. She and her husband also joined the freedom movement.
Women have a role in society, and that role will not be met — society will not benefit as it could — until they can take their place in it, she said, in her welcome speech at a Muslim Women’s Conference in 1938.
As recorded in an edition of Muslim Vanitha, she added: “…the great power of education is what has brought us all together… to take part in this assembly, braving fear and shame. As an enlightened group, our worthy plans of action cannot be realised by merely attending schools. We have the right to make explicit our needs and our rights.”
Secret scribe
Not all the rebels left as much of a trail. Some kept their writing secret.
Haneena found one essay on why women must learn to read the Quran and interpret it for themselves, written by a Havva Beevi in the Thiruvananthapuram magazine Malayalam Visheshal Prathi (Malayalam Special Edition).
Haneena did some digging and discovered a house in the area called Havva Mahal. Could there be a connection?
It turned out that the house had been built by the writer’s son, Saleem Ikka, 80, and named in her honour. He still lived there.
“He was born in 1942, seven years after the article came out,” Haneena says. He knew his mother as a schoolteacher who so cherished her job that she saved all her salary slips. He remembered how proud she was to be one of the first graduates to work at her school. But he hadn’t known about her writing.
“When I asked him if he had heard of any of the other women who wrote for that particular magazine, he recognised their names as close friends of his mother,” Haneena says.
Doctors, scholars, poets
In some of their more evocative finds, women spoke of the loneliness of being the only ones in their fields.
“Women doctors are so few they can be counted on my fingertips…” Dr MK Ayeshakutty, the first Muslim woman doctor at Ernakulam General Hospital, wrote in 1934.
Elsewhere, Dr M Rahma, educated in Travancore, Aligarh, Karachi and London, wrote joyously of freshers’ parties at the Women’s College at Aligarh Muslim University, and of women’s basketball and badminton.
Writer and poet MK Fathima Beevi likened the women fighting for their place in society to brave and powerful warriors, and called for more women to join in, at least by attending public engagements.
One of Basheer’s favourite pieces of writing, she says, is an essay titled Randu Lokam (Two Worlds), by short-story writer A Malik Muhammed. Published in 1955 in the magazine Ansari, it reflects on the writer’s interactions with the different kinds of women she has met.
She draws parallels between an unlettered woman who hesitates to speak the name of her husband and an English-educated woman who still needs her husband’s approval for the smallest financial decision.
“This is the world we live in!” she writes, in Malayalam. “If you stay within the inner chambers of your house, how will you ever understand it?” Do you even know of all the drama you could witness, she adds, if you stepped into the world?