Revisiting legacy of India’s first Muslim woman teacher – Times of India

Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh. Pioneers of women education in India. Both trained under a common teacher, Cynthia Farrar, an American missionary. And they helped Savitribai’s husband Jyotiba Phule start schools for girls. Later, when Jyotiba’s father Govindrao Phule asked his son to leave his house, it was Fatima and her brother Usman, who sheltered them in their home.
Call it destiny or negligence on the part of professional historians, the Phule couple are known to most educated Indians but such recognition eludes Fatima Sheikh (1831-1900), the couple’s comrade in arms.
As Fatima’s death anniversary (October 9) nears, a group of writers, scholars and social activists have joined hands to remember her. Fatima, India’s first Muslim woman teacher, may not suffer obscurity anymore. Leading the band that wants Fatima to get her place under the sun posthumously, is writer Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta whose recent book ‘Savitribai Phule: Her Life, Her Relationships, Her Legacy’ lucidly and comprehensively captures the bonds the Phule couple and Fatima shared. It also details, in narrative non-fiction style, their works, struggles and achievements.
“History traditionally has been written by males and upper caste historians,” says Gupta. “Women lose when it comes to getting recognition unless they strive themselves. Fatima never did it.”
Gupta’s own significant contribution to “understanding of the triumvirate (Jyotiba, Savitribai and Fatima)” materialised because of the feeling that not many women pick up the pen to write about women revolutionaries.
It was Gupta’s then 18-year-old daughter who, one day three years ago, asked her a valid question. After Gupta published her third book, including one on actor Sanjeev Kumar, her daughter asked: “Mom, why are you writing only about men? Why don’t you write about women too?”
“That made me think. I began searching for a strong subject. The search ended with Savitribai whose story is incomplete without Fatima Sheikh and her brother. They helped the Phule couple to the hilt,” she says.
Not many, adds Gupta, know that Fatima and her brother Usman, belonged to a traders’ group called julahas (weavers) of Uttar Pradesh who migrated to Maharashtra and initially stayed at Malegaon. Subsequently, the siblings mov,ed to Pune which became their karam bhoomi. Today, the word ‘julaha’ is considered derogatory and Muslim weavers are respectfully called Ansaris even if they are in other professions. “It is nice to hear that Fatima and her brother Usman came from the weavers’ community. Even if history does not record them as Ansaris, we consider them as our own. We will do our best to make the new generation aware of their work,” resolves Pervez Ansari, general secretary of All India Momin Conference, a pre-Independence nationalist body comprising weavers. Ansari plans a discussion on Gupta’s book around Fatima’s death anniversary. “People have written volumes on Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule but there is not much material on Fatima. I had to depend a lot on oral history and scanty references scattered in books and essays,” says Syed Naseer Ahamed from Andhra Pradesh who wrote a book on Fatima in Telugu in 2021.
Both Gupta and Ahamad sought out Pune-based activist-scholar Shamsuddin Tamboli while researching. Head of Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, Tamboli fights for reforms within Muslim community. Dalwai’s Mandal is inspired by Jyotirao’s Satyashokar Samaj (1873) or Society of Truth Seekers. It was Ghaffar Munshi, a school inspector and Persian-Urdu scholar, says Tamboli, who convinced Jyotirao to continue his education after he had dropped out of school on some Pandits’s advice to his father. It was Munshi who asked Fatima to shelter the Phule couple in her house where the first school for girls by an Indian was opened in 1848.