Series on Mewat – Part 4
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
On my last day in Mewat, I fixed an appointment to meet a Meo woman whom I had heard much about—46 year-old Mohammadi Begum. When I did fieldwork in Mewat two decades ago, she was the only Meo female to have earned a Bachelor’s degree. Today, there are some three hundred others like her—which, considering that the Meo female population is estimated at around 600,000, still does not amount to much.
When I met Mohammadi ji, she was surrounded by a flock of men and women who had come to hear for various requests, for, as a well-known social activist, she has wide contacts in all the right places. I asked her to tell me her story—from being a girl child of a poor Meo family, fighting against poverty and deeply-entrenched patriarchal prejudice, to becoming the first-ever Meo woman to study in college and acquire a government job.
‘My parents were not educated but they were socially very aware’, Mohammadi begins. ‘We shared our house in Maholi village with a family of Punjabi Hindu refugees from Pakistan. They had educated their girls, and so my parents felt that they should do so, too.’ Those were the days when hardly any Meo girls went to school, being made to work in the fields or graze livestock instead. ‘My mother insisted that she would do all the work but that we all—me, my two sisters and two brothers—must go to school. At that time it was simply unheard of for Meo girls to ride cycles, but my mother insisted I should learn to do so. If boys could ride circles, she would say, why not girls?’
Mohammadi’s elder sister soon dropped out of school, and began helping her father on his small plot of land. She tended to the family’s buffaloes, selling their milk to earn money to support her siblings’ education. Mohammadi, however, continued with her education. In 1979, she passed the matriculation examination, and, four years later, won the proud distinction of becoming the first Meo woman graduate. Many men in her family frowned on the idea of her enrolling in college. Some even claimed it was not proper for Muslim girls to do so. ‘My brother opposed this, saying that boys might trouble me’, Mohammadi goes on, ‘but my mother told him off, saying that he was useless if he could not protect me from the boys’.
At this juncture, one man came to her rescue—Mr. Madhur, the Hindu principal of the Nagina College. ‘Madhur Sahib was so excited on learning that I, a Meo girl, had passed the tenth grade exam that he came all the way to our house and pleaded with my father to let me study in his college. We did not have enough money for the fees. Madhur Sahib covered the charges himself, saying that I was like his own daughter.’
A thin presence of girls in schools in Mewat
Mohammadi did so well in college that from the second year of her BA degree she began receiving a scholarship. And, contrary to the fears that she might go ‘astray’ or be troubled by boys, the boys in her college, mostly non-Muslims, came to greatly respect her, she says with a hint of well-deserved pride.
After her graduation, Mohammadi worked as a teacher for a year at the government’s Bal Bhawan school in Nuh town—the first Meo woman to take up such a post. A year later, in 1984, she married Basheer Ahmad, who was then a naik in the Indian Army and who later went on to become an engineer in the Haryana Electricity Board and then a Sub-Divisional Officer and the sarpanch of his village. When her husband was posted to Hyderabad, she went to Delhi and enrolled for a Master’s programme in History at the Jamia Millia Islamia, after which she did a degree in Library Science from the same university and B.Ed. from Sonepat University. In 1988 she joined the government’s Mewat Model School in Ferozepur Jhirka town as a librarian—again, the first Meo woman to take up such an occupation—a post that she continued in till 1996.
‘I wanted my husband to have at least a graduate degree’, Mohammadi relates, ‘and so I insisted that he enroll in an engineering course. He did so, failing five times consecutively, but I told him never to give up. Finally, in the sixth attempt, he passed!’
‘I loved my work in the library’, Mohammadi rambles on, ‘but I wanted to do something more substantial for my people, especially for Meo women, who have the dubious distinction of being the least literate women in the whole country. Grueling poverty, deeply-rooted male prejudice and authoritarianism, opposition from some maulvis and indifference on the part of politicians and bureaucrats all add up to make life for Meo women extremely harsh.’ Mohammadi then joined the Mewat Mahila Evam Bal Vikas Sanstha, an NGO working for Mewati women and children. Her task was mainly to promote women’s empowerment, health and self-help groups and vocational centres. She carries on this work today, but in the capacity of field-coordinator for projects run by the government-funded Mewat Development Authority. As part of her work, she often travels outside Mewat for workshops and seminars on women’s issues.
‘I’m kept busy the whole day, traveling throughout Mewat. I leave home at 7 in the morning and get back only by around ten at night’, she says. Witnessing her dedication, she says, even diehard religious conservative among the Meos, including Tablighi Jamaat activists and ulema, many of who frown on women working outside their homes and dealing with men, now hold her in high regard. ‘I have found that if one’s intention is good, then no one will object’, she muses. Seeing her example, she says, her relatives who had initially opposed her going to college are sending their own girl children to school. ‘The greatest joy for me’, she tells me, ‘is when people tell their girls that they should become like me.’
A mother of four—two girls and two boys—Mohammadi wants her children to carry on in her path. Her eldest child, Feeha Benzair, scored almost 90% in the twelfth grade and is now in Kota, where she is taking tuition for the medical entrance examinations. Her other children are still at school. She has high hopes for them. ‘I want them all to live in Mewat and to work for our people’, she beams.