 Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali (1883 – 1971) Fourteenth President of AIWC

Roshni  July - September 2021

By Smt. Hema Sheth, Zonal Organiser, West Zone B

Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali was born on December 12, 1883, to a progressive Muslim family in Baroda (now known as Vadodara), in Gujarat.She was the daughter of Ameena Tyabji and Abbas J. Tyabji, the nephew of the Indian activist and politician Badruddin Tyabji. Her father, Abbas J. Tyabji, was the Chief Justice of Baroda State and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. Her mother Ameena was one of the first prominent Muslim women to disavow purdah. Shareefaji Ali followed her mother’s example and supported the movement against this restrictive law, as she saw it as a symbol of social division and gender oppression.In fact, her parents had supported her and her sisters by sending them to school despite purdah restrictions. Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali learned to speak six languages- Urdu, Gujarati, Persian, Marathi, English and French. As she was raised in the cultural city of Vadodara, she also devoted her time to painting, drawing and music.

In 1907, at the age of twenty four, Shareefaji Ali attended a session of the Indian National Congress, which developed her interest towards the Swadeshi Movement and the support and upliftment of Harijans. She also worked in villages to start nursing centres and classes for women.

At the age of twenty-five, she married her cousin Hamid Ali, an Indian Civil Service Officer. After their marriage, they moved to the province of the Bombay Presidency in India. She remained involved in social work and continued to cultivate her interests.

Education of the masses took an upsurge in the colonial era, but what hindered girls’ education was the system of child marriage, which may be banned today, but hundred years ago, it was legal. She addressed Muslim women in Sindh. She strongly believed that until girls were educated and mature, they should not get married and legal age for marriage should be eighteen years. One of her most renowned achievements was organizing a campaign to encourage the Sharda Act, also known as the Child Marriage Restraint Act, which was passed on 28 September 1929 with girl’s age fourteen and boy’s age eighteen for marriage.

The Sharda campaign had support from women unified by liberal feminism, including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and other castes. These women banded together to eliminate doubt about what women wanted and embarrassed the colonial state. The movement resulted in the passing of the Sharda Act in 1929, making it the first legislation for minimum age of marriage in India. It was set at fourteent years old for girls and eighteen for boys.

At the age of fifty-one, she even represented the All India Women’s Conference at the Istanbul Congress of the International Alliance of Women.

At the age of fifty-four she took part in the Congress

8

Roshni  July - September 2021

of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom at Lohacovice, Czechoslovakia. The United Nations Commission for the Status of Women, which aims to create an egalitarian society with respect to the status of women was founded around 1946 and Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali was one of the key persons involved in its establishment.

In February 1947, Shareefaji Ali represented India as one of fifteen women to attend the first United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She worked alongside delegates from Australia, the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Guatemala, Mexico, Syria, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Venezuela. At the Commission, Begum Ali and the other delegates established the guiding principles of the Commission, which were:

To raise the status of women, irrespective of nationality, race, language or religion, to promote equality with men in all fields of human enterprise, and to eliminate all discrimination against women in the provisions of statutory law, in legal maxims or rules, or in interpretation of customary law.

Today, the Commission is still guided by these principles, and has influenced the drafting of resolutions related to Begum Ali’s work in India in the 1950s and 1960s. This includes the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages.

The Indian Government appointed her as the Indian representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She also became a member of the National Planning Commission of the Indian National Congress and the Hindustan Textbook Committee. Moreover, one needs to note that she achieved all of this in pre-independent India – at a time when women had little to no rights in the socio-cultural and political scenario.

Her work in AIWC

Shareefaji Ali was a prominent leader in the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC). She was, in order, the Honorary Treasurer, Chairperson, VicePresident, and President of AIWC, and started several of its branches across India. She was also named Chairperson of the Governing Body of the All India Women’s Education Fund Association.

She became a part of the AIWC as the previous President, Sarojini Naidu, a political activist and a poet who fought for Indian Independence, was in prison. As a result, there were rotating presidents for each session, and Shareefaji Ali became one of two Indian women who took up this role.As part of the AIWC, she testified in front of the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform in London in 1933. Begum Shareefaji Ali was one of the three women at the Round Table Conference in 1933 where she was the voice for women and demanded universal adult franchise, i.e., equal political rights for all, irrespective of gender.The AIWC advocated for a common civil code that was consistent with the organization’s commitments and that also took both non-communal and communal approaches. Ali and other Muslim women within the AIWC feared domination by Hindus, but there were diverging opinions even among the Muslim women. In the end, the AIWC hoped for a secular

9

Roshni  July - September 2021

civil code and did not explicitly call for a common civil code. The marriage and inheritance rights proposals of the AIWC did pertain more to Hindu concerns than those of Muslim women.

“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” — Maya Angelou

Begum Shareefa Hamid Ali always stood at the forefront in the battle for justice, at a time when women’s voices were usually shunned. Being a broad-minded woman with the kind of liberal upbringing she had, she was determined to bring about revolutionary changes in the lives of women who had been oppressed by society’s bigotry and she sought to bring about legal reforms to improve their lives.Like many eminent women from Indian history, her work too has been neglected and her name was omitted from the social science textbooks. Her work spans from heading the All India Women’s Conference to then going ahead and representing the country at international committees. She has done exemplary work in the field of feminism and to improve the status of women across all strata of society.

Sharifa Begam, Daughter of Abbas Tyabji, ESQ

Begum Sharifa with her husband and sister

10