woman

Atiya Fyzee

About: 

Born in Istanbul, Atiya Fyzee was the daughter of Hasanally Feyzhyder, an Indian merchant attached to the Ottoman Court, and his first wife, Amirunissa. Belonging to the prominent Tyabji clan of Bombay, Atiya was one of the first elite Indian Muslim women to receive a modern education, appear in public unveiled and participate in women’s organizations. In her youth, she made important contributions to reformist journals for women in Urdu, including Tahzib un-niswan (Lahore) and Khatun (Aligarh).

While studying at a teachers’ training college in London in 1906-7, she also kept a travel diary that was first serialized in a monthly journal then published as Zamana-i-tahsil ('A Time of Education', 1921). Along with her sisters, Zehra (1866-1940) and Nazli Begum of Janjira (1874-1968), she patronized celebrated Muslim intellectuals such as Maulana Shibli Nomani and Mohammad Iqbal. Their published correspondence, Khutut-i Shibli ba-nam-i muhtarma Zahra Begum sahiba Faizi va ‘Atiya Begum sahiba Faizi (ed. Muhammad Amin Zuberi, 1930) and Iqbal (1947), attests to the close friendships that brought Atiya notoriety in literary and social circles.

Following her marriage to the artist and writer Samuel Rahamin, in 1912, Atiya pursued a variety of cultural activities on the international stage. Among their collaborations was an authoritative book in English on classical Indian music that ultimately went into three editions: Indian Music (1914), The Music of India (1925) and Sangt of India (1942). In this work, Atiya’s impressionistic and colourful prose was used to explicate Samuel’s illustrations of Indian melodies (ragmalas). Atiya also arranged music and choreography for two of her husband’s plays, Daughter of Ind and Invented Gods, when they were staged in London in the 1930s. While abroad, she gave lectures on Indian women, like ‘Epic Women of India’ (1919), which were published in international journals.

At partition, Atiya and Samuel migrated to Karachi with Nazli where they continued to bring together artistes in their private salon at their home, Aiwan-e-Rifat, modelled on their famous Bombay residence. After being evicted in the 1950s, they lived in reduced circumstances, suffering great hardship in their final years.

Published works: 

Indian Music (London: Goupil Gallery and W. Marchant, 1914)

Zamana-i-tahsil (Agra: Matba‘ Mufid-i-‘Am, 1921)

The Music of India (London: Luzac, 1925)

Sangt of India (Bombay, 1942)

Iqbal (Bombay: Victory Printing Press, 1947)

Gardens (Karachi: Ameen Art Press, n.d.)

Date of birth: 
01 Jan 1877
Connections: 

Shaikh Abdul Qadir, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Syed Ali Bilgrami, Alma Latifi, Syed Ameer Ali, (Arthur) Oliver Villiers Russell Ampthill, M. A. Ansari, Thomas Walker Arnold, Badruddin Tyabji, the Maharaja and Maharani of Baroda, Emilie Barrington, Emma Josephine Beck, Mancherjee M. Bhownaggree, Mary Frances Billington, Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Blood, Hemangini Bonnerjee, Camruddin Abdul Latif, Vazirunnisa Latif, William Coldstream, Sunity Devi - the Maharani of Cooch Behar, Sir Henry Cotton, Catherine Crisp, Frank Crisp, Major-General John Baillie Ballantyne Dickson, Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh, Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh, Lady Alice Louisa Elliott, Sir Charles Alfred Elliott, Bhagwatsinghji Sagramsinhji - the Thakur of Gondal, Mrs K. G. Gupta, Lala Har Dayal, Major Saiyid Hasan Bilgrami, Edward Hughes, Syed Husain Bilgrami, Mohammad Iqbal, Jabir Ali, Margaret Elizabeth Child-Villers, countess of Jersey, Jagatjit Singh - the Maharaja of Kapurthala, Emily Kinnaird, Dame Maude Agnes Lawrence, Esther Lawrence, Sir William Lee-Warner, Sidney Low, Sir Charlies Lyall, Lady Florences Lyall, Miss A. J. Major, Mrs Sarala Bala Mitter, Theodore Morison, Nazli Begum of Janjira, Rafia Tyabji, Donald James Mackay, the eleventh Lord Reay, Lady Margaret Rice, George Frederick Samuel Robinson - first Marquess of Ripon, John Gerald Ritchie, Mrs P. K. Roy, Mrs P. L. Roy, Salman Tyabji, Sarhan Camruddin Latif, Flora, Mozelle Sassoon, Rachel Sassoon, Lady Edgeworth Leonora Scott, Lady Sinha, Cornelia Sorabji, Sydney Sprague, Navajbai Tata, Ratan Tata, Lady Mary Augusta Temple, Tyab Ali Akbar, Mary Augusta Ward, Helen Webb, Raymond West, Alice Augusta Woods, Sir (William Hutt) Curzon Wyllie.

Maria Grey Training College

Contributions to periodicals: 

The Indian Magazine and Review (‘Some Reminiscences of Kashmir’, 432, December 1906, pp. 314-16)

Asia (as “Shahinda” (Begum Fyzee-Rahamin), 'Epic Women of India’, 19.6, June 1919, p. 580)

Tahzib un-niswan (series of articles on studying in Britain in issues dated 26 January 1907 - 30 November 1907)

Precise DOB unknown: 
Y
Reviews: 

Kathleen Schlesinger, ‘The Basis of Indian Music’, The Musical Times (London) 56.868, 1 June 1915, pp. 335-9

Secondary works: 

In English:

Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan and Sharma, Sunil, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Justuju, Naeem-ur Rahman, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2003/June/13/04.html

In Urdu:

al-Qadri, Mahir, 'Atiya Faizi', in Yadgar-i-raftagan, vol. 2 (Lahore: al-Badr, 1984)

Jafri, Ra’is Ahmad, 'Atiya Begum Faiz', Nigar 58.5 (November 1979), pp. 25-7

Nasrullah, Shaikh, 'Atiya Begam Faizi', Kya qafila jata hai (Karachi: Tahzib o Fan, 1984)

City of birth: 
Istanbul
Country of birth: 
Turkey
Other names: 

A. H. Fyzee (used in print)

Atiya Fyzee-Rahamin (used after marriage in 1912)

Atiya Begum (used after marriage in 1912)

Shahinda (pen-name)

Date of death: 
01 Jan 1967
Precise date of death unknown: 
Y
Location of death: 
Karachi, Pakistan
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
17 Sep 1906
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1906-7, 1908, 1914, perhaps mid-1920s, 1937-9.

Location: 

Primarily London

Susila Anita Bonnerjee

About: 

Susila Bonnerjee (known as Susie) was the daughter of W. C. Bonnerjee and his wife, Hemangini. Born in India, she first moved to England as a child and lived in the family house in Croydon. Her parents travelled between England and India frequently with the intention to educate all their children in England. Susila attended the Croydon High School for Girls and then gained admission to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1891 (as her sister had). Susila was awarded a second class in her Part 1 exams in 1894. She then joined the London School of Medicine for Women, and was attached to the Royal Free Hospital. Susila gained her MB degree in 1899.

A little later she returned to India and worked in Calcutta and at the St Stephen's Mission at Delhi. After her father's death in 1906, Susila took up research work at Cambridge. She was Demonstrator of Physiology in Balfour Laboratory, Newnham College, 1910-12, and was in private practice at Ealing for five years. In 1911 she became Secretary of the Indian Women’s Education Association, which was involved in raising funds to educate Indian women in England in methods of teaching. During the war, in 1915, she went to Calcutta but returned to England in early 1916. She left for India again in 1918 due to declining health and died in September 1920 in Lahore.

Connections: 

W. C. Bonnerjee, Janaki Agnes Majumdar (sister).

Through the Indian Women's Education Association: Countess of Minto (President), Lady Lyall and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (Vice-President), Maharani of Cooch Behar, B. Bhola-Nauth, Sarala Ray, Lolita Roy.

Reviews: 

Obituary by Harihar Das,  Britain and India 1.9 (Oct-Dec. 1920), pp 360-1

The Times (28 Feb. 1912)

Secondary works: 

Burton, Antoinette (ed.), and Majumdar, Janaki Agnes Penelope, Family History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002)

Archive source: 

London School of Medicine for Women Archives, Royal Free Hospital Archives Centre, London

Newnham College Archives, Newnham College, Cambridge

Sir William Wedderburn mentions Miss Bonnerjee in a letter to Mrs Fawcett, 25 Feb 1916, 7MGF/A/1/162, The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University

Involved in events: 

Indian Women's Education Association's promotion of Kumar Sambhava or The Coming of the Prince, Court Theatre, March 1912

City of birth: 
Calcutta
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Kolkata
Current name country of birth: 
India
Other names: 

Susie

Locations

Bedford Park, Croydon London, CR0 2BS
United Kingdom
51° 23' 10.824" N, 0° 2' 58.7364" W
Hamilton Road, Ealing London, W4 1AL
United Kingdom
51° 29' 23.0532" N, 0° 16' 7.7952" W
Newnham College, Cambridge , CB3 9DF
United Kingdom
52° 12' 0.6336" N, 0° 6' 26.0028" E
Date of death: 
25 Sep 1920
Location of death: 
Lahore, India (Pakistan)
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1874-1918 (with spells in India during this period)

Location: 

'Kidderpore', 8 Bedford Park, Croydon, London (family home from c. 1890)

43 Hamilton Road, Ealing, London (location of her home and private practice)

Dhanvanthi Rama Rau

About: 

Dhanvanthi Rama Rau was born into a Kashmiri Brahmin family in the south-west of India. She attended Presidency College in Madras, graduating in 1917 with an honours degree and the Griggs Gold Medal in English, and progressing to an Assistant Professorship at Queen Mary’s College, Madras. She first arrived in England in 1929, when her husband Benegal Rama Rau, Financial Advisor to the Simon Commission, was asked to travel to England with the other members of the Commission for the writing of their report. Their daughters, Premila and Santha, then aged 9 and 6, travelled with them and became the first Indians to attend the Hall School in Weybridge. Initially the family lived at Oatlands Park Hotel in Weybridge, before moving to a flat in London when their daughters started to board at school. In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes the racism she experienced in 1930s England, and their struggles to secure a flat for this reason. The family were, however, in part protected by their social status and wealth which allowed them to travel throughout Europe when based in Britain.

In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes her work for organizations campaigning for Indian independence, which took her throughout Britain, as well as for a variety of women’s organizations. In 1932, with a group of Indian women based in London at the time, including Sarojini Naidu, she attended the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Berlin, leading the Indian delegation at the behest of Naidu. She continued to work for the Alliance and writes in her memoirs that the meetings gave her her ‘first experience of dealing with international work for women’s rights’ (p. 180). She also founded the Women’s Indian Association, an organization that aimed to provide links between Indian women in Britain and British women interested in India with Indian women in India. She was awarded the Kaisir-i-Hind gold medal by the British Government for her work with women’s associations.

In 1938, Rama Rau’s husband, by then Deputy High Commissioner for India, was called to South Africa by the High Commission. She followed him there, leaving her daughters in the care of a Jewish lodger, Lilian Ulanowsky. War broke out while all of the family were in South Africa the following year, and it was this that triggered their return to India.

Finally settled in Bombay in 1941, Rama Rau immersed herself again in social welfare activities, joining several women’s organizations, including the All-India Women’s Conference of which she was elected President in 1946. The squalid conditions of the Bombay slums led Rama Rau to establish the Family Planning Association of India of which she became President. She also served as President of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Published works: 

An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977)

Example: 

An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 170-1

Date of birth: 
01 Jan 1893
Content: 

This is Dhanvanthi Rama Rau’s autobiography in which she describes her stay in England.

Connections: 

Annie Besant, Sarojini Naidu, Motilal Nehru, Sylvia Pankhurst, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Santha Rama Rau, Eleanor Rathbone.

All-India Women’s Conference, British Commonwealth League, Family Planning Association of India, International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Townswomen’s Guilds, Women Citizens Associations, Women’s Indian Association.

Precise DOB unknown: 
Y
Extract: 

I was comparatively young, excitable when slighted, somewhat rash and certainly courageous enough to face so important a person as Eleanor Rathbone in the chair, and women in the audience like Sylvia Pankhurst and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, stalwarts of the exceedingly controversial suffragette movement. I asked for permission to speak, and was graciously allowed five minutes. I did not speak on any of the subjects on the agenda, but merely disputed the right of British women to arrange a conference on Indian social evils in London, when all the speakers were British and many of them had never even visited India. Not one of them had even asked if there were any Indian women’s organizations that were dealing with the problems on the spot, the same problems that British women were exploring from the great and deceptive distance of fifteen thousand miles. I added that, even though we had offered to help with the conference when arrangements were being made, our offer had been ignored. I told them that educated Indian women were working in every province of their country to eradicate social evils and outmoded customs and prejudices, and we refused to accept the assertion that the removal of social evils in Indian society was the responsibility of the British. We were already assuming the responsibility ourselves, and we were sure we could be more successful than outsiders, especially those who were ignorant of the cultural patterns of our social groups and therefore could not be as effective as our own social reformers.

Secondary works: 

Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)

Relevance: 

Here, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau describes her uninvited participation in a ‘Conference on Indian Social Evils’ called by the MP Eleanor Rathbone. The passage provides a fascinating historical example of western ‘feminist’ constructions of South Asian women as passive and in need of ‘saving’ from cultural and patriarchal constraints. Rama Rau’s intervention here can be read as an act of political resistance against colonialist forms of feminism. Her assertive behaviour offers a glimpse of the ways in which female South Asian subjects might have impacted on British cultural and political life in this early period of migration.

Involved in events: 
City of birth: 
Hubli
Country of birth: 
India

Location

Oatlands Park Hotel
Oatlands Drive Surrey
Weybridge, KT13 9HB
United Kingdom
51° 22' 39.4608" N, 0° 26' 6.0576" W
Date of death: 
01 Jan 1987
Precise date of death unknown: 
Y
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1929
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1929-30, 1930-4

Santha Rama Rau

About: 

Born in 1929 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and president of the All-India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just six years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s, she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey, with her older sister Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.

Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through Southeast Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.

In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and Orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.

Published works: 

Home to India (New York: Harper, 1945)

East of Home (New York: Harper, 1950)

This is India (New York: Harper, 1954)

A View to the Southeast (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957)

My Russian Journey (New York: Harper, 1959)

A Passage to India: A Play by Santha Rama Rau from the Novel by E. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1960)

Gifts of Passage (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)

The Cooking of India (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969)

The Adventuress (New York: Dell, 1970)

Example: 

Rama Rau, Santha, Gifts of Passage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), pp. 23-4

Date of birth: 
24 Jan 1923
Content: 

This book comprises a series of short stories prefaced with brief autobiographical passages which provide a context to the stories. The stories loosely follow the first thirty years of Rama Rau’s life.

Connections: 

E. M. Forster (adapted his A Passage to India for the stage), Sarojini Naidu, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (mother).

Contributions to periodicals: 

'Letter from Bombay', New Yorker (3 May 1952)

Holiday (October 1953) [Cover story on India]

Travel Bazaar: India, an Explorer’s Country’,Harper's Bazaar (September 1957), pp. 106, 308

Holiday (series of articles on Southeast Asia; July, August, September 1955; February, July, August, September 1956; August 1957)

Reviews: 

New York Times

Extract: 

In London we could not, of course, help knowing a good deal about what was going on in India. My father, as Deputy High Commissioner for India, was inextricably involved in many of the developments, and conversation at home was full of references to the growing power of the nationalist movement, of the imprisoning of Indian leaders, of Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas…We talked about Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, and countless other names that became great in Indian history in their own time. Some of them were related to our family, many were personal friends. It was a curiously intimate yet distant view of India’s progress.

Meanwhile all around us in Europe, we got a similarly personal though far less exalted view of the events that were shaping our generation. On French beaches we might meet groups of Hitler Youth on some kind of organized walking tour. At school in England we might be asked to support the international youth camps of the League of Nations. Like so many of our friends, we took in refugees from Dachau and other concentration camps until they could find places of their own in London or get a work permit or a visa to America. My sister, with thousands of idealistic people of her age, felt strongly about the Spanish Civil War, and I, deeply impressed by her sentiments, fell in love with a young man I had never met only because he wrote beautiful poetry and was killed in Spain.

All this was, naturally, quite typical of the generation that grew up in Europe between the wars. The only thing that set us apart in our minds was that we would return to India to live, that eventually our loyalties would be tied to a country that was growing daily less familiar.

Secondary works: 

Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)

Rama Rau, Dhanvanthi, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1978) [1977]

Relevance: 

The autobiographical passage is highly suggestive of the cosmopolitan lifestyle which Santha Rama Rau led for much of her childhood and adulthood. Her description of the way in which she was shaped by events in England, Europe and India position her as an elite transnational subject, crossing boundaries of nation with relative ease. Her privileged social background is also clear from her personal connections with major figures in Indian history, as well as the fact that her migrant family were able to offer shelter to refugees during the war. Indeed, this last subverts conventional constructions of Indians in Britain as in need of shelter and patronage, and emphasizes the role of class as well as ‘race’ in shaping the position of minorities. Rama Rau’s relationship with India – defined by both intimacy and distance – anticipates contemporary descriptions and discussions of the South Asian diasporic experience.

Archive source: 

Santha Rama Rau Papers, Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

City of birth: 
Madras
Country of birth: 
India
Current name city of birth: 
Chennai
Current name country of birth: 
India
Other names: 

Vasanthi Rama Rau

Santha Rama Rau Wattles

Locations

St Paul's Girls' SchoolLondon, W6 7BS
United Kingdom
51° 29' 27.4596" N, 0° 14' 2.5872" W
Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 9EE
United Kingdom
51° 22' 53.4216" N, 0° 26' 58.7472" W
Date of death: 
21 Apr 2009
Location of death: 
USA
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
01 Jan 1929
Precise 1st arrival date unknown: 
Y
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

1930-9

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