A Convenient & Misleading Claim

Government media advisor Dilip Mandal sparked a controversy recently by claiming that Fatima Sheikh, a Muslim woman who is considered to have been a close colleague and friend of 19th-century women’s education pioneer Savitribai Phule, was not a historical figure but a “fabricated character” that he had created.

Mandal went on to claim that interest in Fatima Sheikh had vanished in 2022 after he “abandoned” her story. “It is my mistake that, during a particular phase, I created this name out of nothing – essentially from thin air,” he wrote. “I did that knowingly.”

In 2019, Mandal had written an article in The Print that had been headlined, “Why Indian history has forgotten Fatima Sheikh but remembers Savitribai Phule.” After the controversy erupted, the publication retracted the article and said it is investigating the matter.

It all seems to be a matter of convenience for Mandal: invoking Fatima Sheikh as a symbol of Dalit-Muslim unity on one day and discarding the claim and denying the historical existence of Fatima Sheikh on another – notably after having been designated a government media advisor.

Mandal’s claim is patently false, as several rebuttals correctly point out. But why did Mandal make such a strange remark? What is at stake in his opportunistic stance? Before we get to that, let us give ourselves an overview of the major rebuttals. 

Of Course She Exists!

Tabassum Barnagarwala and Divya Aslesha, in an article in Scroll on 12 January rightly pointed out that though historical evidence is scant, there is enough proof that a person named Fatima existed and worked alongside the Phules. Fatima Sheikh is even mentioned in government publications. For instance, in a biography of Phule published by The Maharashtra Bureau for Literature and Culture in 1998, there is a description of the methods Savitribai Phule and Sheikh used to teach children from underprivileged communities at a time when learning was the exclusive domain of Brahmins.

Shradda Kumbhojkar, a professor of history at Savitribai Phule Pune University, said that “Fatima” is mentioned in a letter Savitribai Phule wrote to Jotirao Phule in 1856. The letter was reproduced in a volume by the Maharashtra State Bureau for Literature and Culture, she said.

“While Savitribai is writing to Jotirao from her maternal village, she expresses reassurance that ‘Fatima must be shouldering the hardships in my absence, but she is not a person who would complain,’” said Kumbhojkar.

Similarly, Oxford historian Rosalind O’Hanlon, who has extensively researched caste in 19th-century Maharashtra and the life of Jotirao Phule, writes that Fatima Sheikh is an “elusive figure” since no material she may have written has survived. In an article published in January 2022, O’Hanlon refers to a black-and-white photograph of Savitribai and Fatima sitting side by side that she dates back to the 1850s based on its appearance and print.

O’Hanlon writes that Fatima was the sister of Mian Usman Sheikh, a close friend of Jotirao and a resident of Ganjpeth in Pune. O’Hanlon also points to a third, older female figure behind the two, “dressed in a traditional white khimar hijab”, suggesting that woman might be a member of the Sheikh family.

The photograph may have been taken when the Phules, ostracised for their efforts to educate Dalit and girls from marginal castes, lived with the Sheikh family, O’Hanlon writes.

In an email message to Scroll, which Barnagarwala and Aslesha reproduced in their article, O’Hanlon said that the photograph of Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh may well have been thoughtfully posed to suggest the idea that a unity of educational purpose was more important than religious divisions.

Islamophobia, Division and More

There is an obvious reason why a pro-government “activist” would want to downplay the role of Fatima Sheikh, and in fact try to erase her from history altogether. The Hindu majoritarian forces have done their level best to either render Muslims in Indian history invisible or to malign them. There are also persistent efforts to portray Muslims as “backward” and Muslim women as a group that needs the “protection” of the state against Muslim men. Denying the pioneering role of a female Muslim reformer – the precursor of the Muslim women who led the anti-CAA protests in 2019-20 – certainly falls within the Hindu nationalist tactical landscape.

Dilip Mandal is an influential as well as controversial Bahujan activist. Depending on his proximity to the government he seems to conveniently subscribe to two radically contrasting templates: the democratic template of Dalit-Muslim unity against Brahminical Hindutva fascism, and the Hindu nationalist template of division between Dalits and Muslims and attempts at the appropriation of Dalit Bahujan traditions within the Hindutva fold.

In fact, there is a lot more at stake in the Fatima Sheikh story. Increasingly, the partnership between Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh in pioneering the education of Bahujan, working class and Muslim women, has been looked upon a foundational moment in the decolonization of knowledge.

Secular nationalist narratives tend to look upon the upper-caste led “national education” efforts against British colonial education as the key moment in breaking the colonial hegemony. Hindu nationalist narratives lament the loss of caste and gender differentiated traditional education as the moment of onset of the colonial paradigm – a paradigm which, according to this narrative, remains in place.

Increasingly, new democratic narratives are transcending both secular nationalist triumphalism and Hindu nationalist nostalgia, and understanding the coloniality of power as a continuum – a complex but clearly discernible history of Brahminical traditionalism morphing into colonial and post-colonial casteism in the state and institutions. Within this narrative, the Phules and Fatima Sheikh in tandem emerge as pioneers of a pluralist and counter-hegemonic education challenging both traditional as well as colonial (and capitalist) power structures and value systems; their work constituting a foundational moment for a new democratic India beyond colonial remnants, Brahminism and capitalism. This is an imagination that Hindu nationalists and their friends wish to nip in the bud.