Another kind of love

WITH debates on colonialism and nationalism receding into the background and being replaced by an odd, unwieldy and often unintelligible combination of esoteric themes, it is no wonder that several important texts are consigned to the dustbin of history. I therefore venture to introduce a remarkable text and its equally remarkable author from Turkey. The author is Halide Edib (1884-1964) and her book, published in 1937, is entitled Inside India. There is food for thought for those who are curious about the minutiae of India’s political history in the 1930s, as well as those interested in the great themes — nationalism, colonialism and communalism. There is this imposing figure, imposing through its burning passion and that amazing power over the language that grips the attention and is so intimately connected with the writer’s personality.

A bewildering variety of Western images and representations of India exist, and yet one can both learn a great deal more from Inside India and enjoy the sparkle of its author’s intellect. One is struck by the empathy and understanding displayed by a person whose entrance into the Indian world was in itself an event in her life. She was not concerned to imagine, inscribe or invent India, but to come to terms with its multifaceted personality. Her idea of India was firmly anchored in the historical and sociological insights she gained during her stay in India in early 1935.

Halide lived through some dizzying changes in her generation. As a woman with a revolutionary mentality, she was a part of a momentous transformation of Turkey, traumatic but epoch-making and irreversible. She shared her countrymen’s hatred for colonial occupation. On one occasion, she addressed the crowd with the words, ‘‘When the night is darkest and seems eternal, the light of dawn is nearest.’’ Again, she asked the people to take the sacred oath that they would not bow down to brute force on any condition. ‘‘We swear,’’ answered thousands of voices. She wore a nurse’s uniform. She even wore the army uniform to thwart the Greek assault. When forced into exile, she disguised her husband and herself to cross the dark restive waters of the Bosphorus. She did all this because of her unflinching faith in the stubborn perseverance of the Turkish people to prepare for their liberation.

Halide Edib and Jawaharlal Nehru knew each other well. They would have found each other congenial, because they possessed the quality — greatly valued by each of them — of being entirely free from dogma. Their intellect stands out clear-cut, robust, and confident, against the background of their times. With all its ambiguities, the past served as a reference point to unify the nation and its fragments. Though Nehru’s judgement was clouded by the country’s partition, he knew that a modern and secular Republic was the only answer to India’s chronic problems. Halide, too, believed that nationhood could not be built on religion. Religion was a reality for the people, but it was purely a relation between God and the individual. It, therefore, had no relation with the State.

Like Nehru’s, Halide’s mind was vibrant and eclectic. Sharing Nehru’s antipathy towards organised religions, she was dissatisfied with orthodox Islam and the intolerance of Christianity but ‘‘charmed and soothed’’ by her reading of Buddha. Nehru recalled that she had told him about Swami Vivekananda visiting her school in Constantinople (now Istanbul) when she was a little girl. She remembered how impressed she had been by his presence. As was the case with Nehru, she has an infinite longing for the infinite, in religious thought as in every other thought activity.

Halide was the first Muslim Turkish graduate from the American College for Girls at Uskudar (Scutari) in 1901, and one of the first Turkish feminists to establish the Society for the Development of Women. She played a major role in the Turk Ojak (‘Turkish Hearth’) clubs, designed to raise Turkish educational standards and encourage social and economic progress. This programme included public lectures attended by men and women together, a great social innovation of that day. In her 20 novels, essays and memoirs, she borrowed extensively from Ziya Gokalp’s thesis on the status of women in pre-Ottoman Turks, a thesis that served as a basis in formulating the official history of the Turkish republic during the 1930s. Indeed, her name is constantly invoked for and intertwined with the emancipation of Turkish women.

Dominating the literary scene as ‘‘the only canonical female writer’’ until the 1960s, Halide denied being a feminist. She did not believe in one sex in any country rising and struggling for its rights.

mancipation was a joint venture of man and woman. Consequently, it was through sharing her responsibility and bearing her own burden with man that a woman could win her freedom. Going by current feminist trends, she was not a feminist. And, yet, for decades, she was not only an authoritative spokesman of women’s rights but also set an example by her refusal to accept polygamy. Commented the historian Arnold Toynbee, one of her ardent admirers: ‘‘In parting from her first husband, she had been fighting a battle for a vital human right in the teeth of the law that was then in force, and she had not been fighting simply for her own hand. It had been a battle for all the women in Turkey and, indirectly, for all the women of the rest of the Islamic World as well.’’

Halide Edib shared her experiences in the eight lectures she delivered at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia. When Mahatma Gandhi listened to her on January 19, he drew many a parallel between the story of India and Turkey, and found, owing to their common suffering, an indissoluble tie binding India to Turkey. Moreover, Turkey’s large Muslim population had so much in common with India’s Muslims, ‘‘who are flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood and bone of our bone’’. ‘‘May Begum Saheba’s coming in our midst result in binding Hindus and Muslims in an indissoluble bond.’’

On November 19, 1962, Toynbee, met Halide in Istanbul. She lived in the quarter between the Conqueror’s Mosque and the shore of the Marmara, in which she and her husband had settled after returning home from exile. But Adnan Adivar had died in 1955. Now, when he was no more, the old impetuosity had given way to tenderness. Adnan’s widow was living in her love for him. She died on January 9, 1964. As a writer, as a patriot, as a woman, and, above all, as a human being who had loved and been loved, Halide had lived to the full.

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