Art: New Light by Susan McCollum
PRE-PARTITION INDIA FROM LIFE AS A KASHMIRI WOMAN
My maternal grandmother Akbar Jehan’s forebears, the Nedous’, had emigrated from Dubrovnik, a Croatian city on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, to Lahore in British ruled India in the 1800s. Croatia is currently an independent country, but from 1815 to 1918, it was part of the Austrian Empire, and from 1918 to 1991, it was part of Yugoslavia. Serendipitously, I found the naturalization certificate of Michael Adam Nedou, Akbar Jehan’s paternal grandfather, in the depleted family archive.
C. U. Aitchinson, Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and its Dependencies, conferred upon hotelier, Michael Adam Nedou, on February 28, 1887, the rights and privileges of naturalization, in compliance with an ‘Act passed by the Governor General of India in Council on the Sixteenth July One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty two, reciting that it was expedient to provide for the Naturalization of Aliens resident in the territories under the Government of the East India Company, it is enacted among other things that “any person” whilst residing in any part of the Terretories [sic] under the Government of the East India Company may present a Memorial to Government, praying that the privilege of Naturalization may be conferred on him “and that” that Government may, if they shall think fit, issue a certificate in writing reciting such of the contents of the Memorial “(so presented)” as they may consider to be true and material, and granting to the Memorialist all the rights, privileges and capacities of naturalization under this act, except such rights, privileges, or capacities, if any, as may be specially excepted in such Certificate. (“Certificate of Naturalization”)’ In the “Memorial” presented to C. U. Aitchinson, Michael Adam Nedou explained that he was born in Ragusa, Austria (Ragusa is the Italian and Latin name for Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast); he was of Slovak nationality, and had been in British India for the past twenty-five years. At the time of the presentation of the “Memorial” Michael Adam Nedou was fifty years old and settled in Lahore in pre-partition India. He sought to be granted the rights and privileges of a British subject of Queen Victoria, “of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, within her Majesty’s said Indian Territories,” in compliance with Act XXX of 1852 (“Certificate of Naturalization”).
He had sailed to India from Ragusa in 1862, where, after a period of adversity and hard knocks in which his will and perseverance had been tested, he had accomplished much. He had, corroborated Cynthia Schmidt, crossed the roiling waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean and borne the stormy turbulence of an immigrant’s precarious existence to land on the shores of Bombay, now Mumbai, India. The lithe, imaginative, and vivacious young woman who later became his wife, Jessie Maria, made his acquaintance while visiting her brother, George, who was a sea captain in the British Royal Navy. That acquaintance, rather magically, metamorphosed into love, and the wedding was solemnized soon after their first meeting. Their older son, Michael Henry [Harry] Nedou, Akbar Jehan’s father, according to his birth and baptism certificate, was born in Pune, British India, in 1877. Michael Henry [Harry] Nedou was one of nine children. He was born to Jessie and Michael Adam Nedou after six daughters, an event that was celebrated with much gusto. The birth of the second son, William Arthur Nedou, in 1879, was soon followed by that of the third son and youngest child, Walter Douglas Nedou.
According to family sources, my Nani Akbar Jehan’s paternal grandfather, Michael Adam Nedou started out as a photographer and architect, but destiny had willed otherwise, and the decisions that he took shaped that destiny as though with the finesse of a calligrapher’s brush. His first venture in hoteliering was the acquisition of the Sind Punjab Hotel in the port city of Karachi. He built the imposing and courtly Nedous’ Hotel in Lahore, characterized by charm and grace, in the 1870s. He and the rest of his family later built the Nedous’ Hotel in Gulmarg, Kashmir, in 1888.
The hotel in Gulmarg is built on an elevation, overlooking the once luxuriantly lush meadow, with its cornucopia of fragrant, beauteous, and flourishing flowers. The riot of colors in Gulmarg in the summer has always had the power to revive my spirits! The cozy cottages around the main lounge, furnished with chintz drapes, chintz covered armchairs, soothing pastel counterpanes on the canopy beds, and hewn logs around the fire places would warm the cockles of any anglophile’s heart. Despite the concretization in Gulmarg, the Nedous’ Hotel has always retained an old world charm, maintaining, against all odds, its heritage character.
Akbar Jehan’s sister-in-law, Salima Nedou, observes in her unpublished manuscript that “Michael Nedou was the pioneer of the hotel industry in India and he laid the first stone in the splendid structure of the country’s hotels. His name is woven forever in the tapestry of our tourism” (16). The then grandiose Nedous hotel in Srinagar, which was opened in 1900, boasted a confectionary that, for a long time, had no parallel. The thought of the delectable jams and jellies that we got from the Nedous’ bakery in my childhood makes me drool. Until the decade of the eighties, the Nedous hotel in Srinagar epitomized a rare and appealing excellence, and a flawless execution, which, over the years, deteriorated. It is now, sadly, in a dilapidated state.
In Akbar Jehan’s father’s lifetime, the Nedous’ hotels in Lahore, Gulmarg, and Srinagar retained their reputations as classy, plush, and magnificent havens in colonial India. Akbar Jehan’s father, the stoic looking, stocky, and thick-set, though not short, Michael Henry [Harry] Nedou took over the management of the restful hotel in Gulmarg, exquisitely and intimately described by M. M. Kaye in her whodunit novel, Death in Kashmir, from his father. Several people have testified to his proverbial philanthropy, beneficence, and kindness. Mother tells me that his advocacy of the nationalist movement in Kashmir, the stirrings of which began in the 1930s, encouraged Akbar Jehan to relinquish a life of affluence and repose to marry the rebel from Soura, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. Michael Henry [Harry] Nedou “spent his time helping the poor, built houses for them, and saved people wrongly convicted from jail and twice from the gallows” (Nedou 59).
Although a charming hotelier, his altruism and charitableness had given him a larger purpose in life, which earned him the admiration and appreciativeness of not just the “highest names in the land [Lahore], but also those whose sufferings he had soothed and who remembered his kindness and charity” (Ibid). Akbar Jehan’s mother, Mir Jan, respectfully called Rani jee by family, friends, and acquaintances was an indomitable Gujjar woman, who has an imperturbable expression in all the pictures I have seen of her. Rani jee’s family traced its lineage to the martial, patrilineal, and rigidly traditional Rajputs of Rajasthan. The impression that I get from her pictures is that she must have been a phlegmatic woman, secure in the knowledge that she was propertied and wealthy, not requiring anyone’s good offices to lead a comfortable life. She and her siblings were the proud owners of sprawling acres of magnificent land in Gulmarg, a resort which found a prominent place on the international map in that late 1800s and early 1900s through the endeavors of Michael Adam and Jessie Maria Nedou.
Reprinted from The Life of a Kashmiri Woman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): Story of Pre-Partition India
About the author:
Nyla Ali Khan is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan has also served as an guest editor working on articles from the Jammu and Kashmir region for Oxford University Press (New York), helping to identify, commission, and review articles. She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com.
“The oracle neither explains nor conceals, but shows by a sign.” –Heraclitus
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415803083/
http://us.macmillan.com/islamwomenandviolenceinkashmirhttp://us.macmillan.com/theparchmentofkashmir/NylaAliKhanhttp://worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/march/parchment-kashmir-history-society-and-polity#.USz3n-3TnIU
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/edinjnNGsEYJyhfiUvrv/full#.UmsrtRDVvIU
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref:oiso/9780199764464.001.0001/acref-9780199764464-e-0016?rskey=WPv3N6&result=171
http://wgs.publishpath.com/interview-with-nyla-ali-khan-from-oxford-islamic-studies-onlinehttp://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-life-of-a-kashmiri-woman-nyla-ali-khan/?K=9781137465634
Art: New Light by Susan McCollum, @susan_mccollum_art
In the artist’s words:
I make mixed media collages, using a variety of papers painted with acrylic. Some are pure collage; others have additional acrylic paint, pencil, and other water-based media. The list of inspiring artists ebbs and flows; a short list includes Lee Krasner, Brian Rutenberg, and Alison Gildersleeve. The visual splendor of the world causes me to gaze, explore, and collect images of natural and man-made forms, patterns, and textures affected by time and weather. I enjoy walking, sketching, and taking photos, then playing with color, line, and shape to suggest these forms and their movement and growth. I use collage, drawing, and painting to express my delight and wonder.I live in Townsend, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and am currently spending some time in Port Isabel, Texas.
Review: The Life of a Kashmiri Woman: Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation, by Nyla Ali Khan
The author’s grandfather, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, was Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, a state historically fought over and trapped between Pakistan and India, from 1948 to 1953. When the two countries refused to follow through on promises to allow a referendum on the fate of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad was imprisoned for advocating self-determination for the state. As Pakistan and India continued to fight over the state, the Sheikh was increasingly marginalized by both sides.
The Sheikh’s wife, Akbar Jehan, supported her husband and was deeply involved in the politics of the state u6ntil her death in 2000. She represented the state in the Indian parliament from 1977 to 1979 and from 1984 to 1989. This book is a clearly written detailing of Akbar Jehan’s struggle for Kashmiri self-determination. It is an impressive account of Akbar Jehan’s self-actualization as an agent for change, though suppressed in her native land and, metaphorically, the author’s quest to come terms with the fate of her home state as a fundamental aspect of her own identity.
The author’s own mother, Akbar Jehan’s daughter, has had to deal with what the author terms “unpalatable motives attributed to her parents and grotesque misinterpretations of their political, and socioeconomic ideologies.” The state itself is divided between India, which controls a large part of it, Pakistan, which continues to assert that the state rightfully belongs to it, and China, which “annexed a segment of the land in 1962. “
The Life of a Kashmiri Woman combines personal biography of Akbar Jehan and history of her involvement in the constantly shifting political scene in her home state. The author shifts seamlessly between the two, making transitions clear to the reader by using her grandmother’s name when discussing political history and “my grandmother” when focusing more on family connections and stories. At the same time, the combination of the personal and the familial consistently demonstrates how inextricable the two are, as Jammu and Kashmir are clearly both beloved homeland and family origin. The former brings a response of sadness about the fate of the state but a sense of hope that a more just and satisfying result is still possible. That hope is grounded in the citizens’ ongoing struggle to improve the situation, which leads back to the personal.
Dr. Khan writes clearly, and seemingly without obvious bias, of the frequently changing political situations in her home state while interjecting the personal when it seems relevant. It becomes clear that the chosen subject—her grandmother’s agency in the struggles of Kashmir—is deeply personal to the author despite her current geographical distance from it. She accomplishes enlightening the reader about the post-partition history of the state, her grandmother’s active involvement in those events, and how much those events matter to both the people in the state and the author herself. For people in the U.S., many of whom tend to have a monolithically oversimplified view of predominantly Muslim cultures, this book’s emphasis on the important contributions of Akbar Jehan and other Kashmiri women can serve as a means to provoke questions about those overly simple views.
It seems, for the author, to be a statement of determination to work to a better solution for her home state as an extension of her grandmother’s hard work and sacrifices, despite the author’s current physical separation from the state.
This book review was written by David Ferrari, M.A., Adjunct Instructor of English at Rose State College.