Articulating the Woman ‘Lay’ Historian: The Twentieth Century Archive of Begum Noor-us-Sabah

This article takes an unstudied Urdu tazkirah, the Tahrīk-e Pakistan aur Ḳhavātīn, written by a purdah nashīn (veiled) Muslim woman, and analyses it to challenge presumptions about ‘lay’ women’s historianship in a South Asian context. It does so by elaborating the historical value of this quasi-autobiographical text, premised upon its author’s reconstruction of a national selfhood, by reminiscing about her belonging to a women’s collective whose activism was sustained by an emotional sisterhood between them. Tracing these affective attachments and solidarities brings out a lesser-known history of emotions connected to the lived experience of nationalism and women’s assimilation into the qaum (nation) as a gendered group formation characterised by its distinct sociability and performativity in the public sphere. In this way, this history illuminates an emotional formation of the qaum that deserves attention as much as the qaum of a high Muslim politics on the eve of Independence in India.