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She was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. We began to see the effects of the resolution when fighting started to erupt in the villages of Sahaspur,” she says.She was 25 years old and at Rang Mehal in Delhi when Partition was announced. “Before that, there was lot of unity and trust between the Hindus and Muslims. Recalling events leading up to Partition, she said Hindu-Muslim communal tensions had begun to escalate after May 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed. The barat stayed at our haveli for seven days,” she recalls.By 1947, Arghwani Begum, mother of two children, a daughter and a son, was pregnant with her third child. “It was a three-month long wedding considering the time-consuming journeys on elephants. We stayed there for about three months and returned to Karachi via Jeddah,” she says.In 1943, she was married into a family from Delhi. We completed the pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina, and then went to Jeddah. We were at sea for 10 days before reaching Mecca. I grew up on Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s compilation of Islamic teachings in Urdu called the Bahishti Zewar and the novels of Maulana Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi,” she says.In 1935, Arghwani Begum and her family went on their first annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on ship via Karachi. She never went to an academic school of learning. Arghwani Begum received her early and advanced religious schooling at home as well. We’d use two types of bamboo pens, the ones with flat nibs was used for writing alphabets and the ones with narrow nibs were used for punctuation marks and dots,” she recounts. “Before I entered my teens, I was officially a boy with no purdah restrictions,” she says.She learnt to read and write in Urdu at home.
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Most of Arghwani Begum’s childhood friends were daughters of farmers from all ethnic and religious backgrounds who used to visit her haveli with their parents quite often, especially during harvest seasons and crops distribution days. Our mothers used to stitch the wedding clothes for the dolls,” she recalls. “Sometimes we would marry the dolls and enact a proper Indian wedding in their honour.
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“I used to get together with my friends and climb the falsa and the morus trees and pluck the fruits.” She recalls having many dolls and playing with her friends. Jewellers from Delhi used to come to Sahaspur to sell gold and diamond necklaces and earrings as well, she says.Recalling her early childhood days, Arghwani Begum says she was overtly fond of climbing the trees. “On the first or second of every month, they’d be electroplated,” Arghwani Begum’s clothes, shoes and other household amenities mainly came from Delhi and Muradabad. Copper pans and utensils were mainly used for cooking. The men used to eat outside mainly, while the women ate inside,” she recalls. “We used to have both male and female cooks assigned to the dining areas. There was a separate building for guests within the haveli and stables for the elephants and the horses as well, and a garage for cars. The same rules applied to the servants and the maids, she says. “Men and women living in the house were not allowed to trespass into each other’s sections,” she says. “Before electricity arrived in our area, we used to have oil-powered fans,” she recalls.Their haveli was segregated into mardana (male) and zanana (female) sections including the living rooms, dining areas and the kitchens, she recalls. Electricity came to Sahaspur in 1934, when Arghwani Begum was 10 years old. Each village in Sahaspur had its own well.She grew up with three sisters at their haveli (mansion) in Sahaspur. The irrigation system for the lands at Sahaspur was well-based. That was our family’s main source of income,” she says. A portion of the harvest would come to my father. “Seasonal crops were grown in the villages with mainly rice, sugarcane, pulses and sesame from what I’ve seen. Residents of the villages were mainly Muslim, Hindu and Christian families and most of them were farmers, she recalls. Her father, Mr Samiullah Khan was a Governor of the Princely State of Sahaspur with 22 villages in the Bijnor district under his possession and supervision. Her mother, Ms Ghafoorunisa was a purdah-observing home-maker. Oral history with Arghwani Begum, 2015 August 31īegum, Arghwani, 1922- and Hassan, Fakhraīegum, Arghwani, 1922-, Hassan, Fakhra, Hassan, Fakhra, and Hassan, FakhraĪrghwani Begum was born on 2nd January, 1922 at the Princely State of Sahaspur in Uttar Pradesh.