Attiya Faizee

Atiya Fyzee, whose name also appears in print as Attiya Faizee and Atiya Begum, was born in 1877 in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), where her father, Hasanally Feyzhyder, worked as a merchant with commercial ties to the Ottoman capital ^[1]. The family belonged to the Sulaymani Bohra community and formed part of the extended Tyabji clan of Bombay, a network of lawyers, judges, and reformers who argued openly for the education of Muslim girls at a time when the idea met stiff resistance ^[2].

She grew up between Bombay and the princely court circles that her family frequented. Her sister Nazli was married to the Nawab of Janjira, a coastal state south of Bombay, and another sister, Zehra, shared Atiya's literary interests; the three were often mentioned together in the reformist Urdu press ^[1]. The household observed purdah loosely by the standards of the day, and the daughters received instruction in Urdu, English, and music, an upbringing that later shocked and fascinated more conservative contemporaries ^[2].

Any account of who was Attiya Faizee has to begin with this family setting. The Tyabji-Fyzee circle treated girls' schooling as a public cause rather than a private indulgence, and Atiya absorbed that conviction early. By her twenties she was contributing to Urdu periodicals aimed at women, including Tahzib un-Niswan of Lahore, which would later serialise her most famous work ^[1].

In September 1906 Fyzee sailed from Bombay to England, having secured a government scholarship to train as a teacher at Maria Grey Training College in London ^[1]. The decision was remarkable: unmarried Indian Muslim women almost never travelled to Europe alone for study, and her departure was noted in the vernacular press as an event in itself ^[2].

Throughout the voyage and her stay she wrote a running diary in Urdu, posted in instalments to Tahzib un-Niswan, where it appeared serially for readers across northern India ^[1]. The entries recorded shipboard society, London fogs, college routines, concerts, and meetings with Indian students and British suffrage-era hostesses, all in a direct, wry voice that made no attempt to disguise her opinions. Historians Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, who translated and edited the diary a century later, describe it as one of the earliest travel accounts of Europe published by a South Asian Muslim woman ^[1].

Ill health cut the London stay short, and she returned to India in 1907 without completing the teaching certificate ^[1]. The diary, however, outlived the interrupted course. Collected in book form in 1921 under the title Zamana-i-Tahsil (A Time of Education), it circulated among precisely the readership her family had long tried to reach: literate women weighing what education abroad might mean for themselves or their daughters ^[3].

London also placed Fyzee at the centre of an expatriate intellectual circle. In April 1907 she met Muhammad Iqbal, then a student in Europe and not yet the celebrated philosopher-poet of the subcontinent; the two attended gatherings together, argued about poetry and philosophy, and continued a correspondence after both returned to India ^[4]. Decades later, in 1947, she published Iqbal, a short memoir reproducing his letters to her along with her recollections, a book that remains a primary source for the poet's European years ^[4].

Her other significant literary friendship was with Shibli Nomani, the historian and founder of the Nadwat ul-Ulama seminary tradition of scholarship. Shibli exchanged a long series of letters with Atiya and her sister Zehra, and the warmth of the correspondence attracted comment both in his lifetime and among later biographers ^[2]. Gail Minault, in her study of Muslim women's education in colonial India, treats these exchanges as evidence of how a small set of educated women had begun to participate in male-dominated literary culture on nearly equal terms ^[2].

Among Attiya Faizee facts, these friendships are the ones most often cited, sometimes with an air of scandal that the surviving letters do not really support. What the correspondence documents is a woman confident enough to critique the work of two of the most admired Muslim intellectuals of her era, and secure enough in her standing that they kept writing back ^[1].

In 1912 Fyzee married the painter Samuel Rahamin, a Bombay-born artist of Bene Israel Jewish background who had trained in London under John Singer Sargent and who converted to Islam at the time of the marriage, afterwards using the name Fyzee-Rahamin ^[1]. The match crossed communal lines and drew criticism, but the couple built a productive partnership: he painted, she wrote and lectured, and they promoted Indian arts together in India, Europe, and the United States ^[5].

Her most substantial single publication came out of this collaboration. The Music of India, issued in London in 1925 under the name Atiya Begum Fyzee-Rahamin, offered English-language readers an accessible treatment of Hindustani musical theory, instruments, and performance practice, illustrated with her husband's artwork ^[5]. The book went through later editions and gave her a platform as a lecturer on Indian music abroad, including appearances in Britain and America during the interwar years ^[5].

Alongside the writing she remained active in women's associational life. She attended and addressed sessions of Muslim women's conferences in the 1910s and supported the broader push for girls' schools that her family had championed for a generation, work that connected the literary celebrity to practical reform ^[2].

After the Partition of 1947 the couple left Bombay for the new state of Pakistan and settled in Karachi in 1948 ^[6]. The government allotted them a residence they named Aiwan-e-Rifat, and for a few years it functioned as a small cultural centre where the ageing pair hoped to establish an academy of arts ^[6].

The hope faded. Official patronage dried up, disputes arose over the property, and the couple's finances collapsed. Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin died in 1964, and Atiya, by then in her late eighties, lived out her final years in reduced and painful circumstances, reportedly dependent on the kindness of friends ^[6]. She died in Karachi in January 1967 ^[1].

The contrast between the glittering Edwardian student of 1906 and the impoverished widow of the 1960s has become part of how her story is told in Pakistan, where newspaper retrospectives periodically revisit the fate of Aiwan-e-Rifat and the neglect of the couple's artistic estate ^[6].

For much of the twentieth century Fyzee survived in footnotes to the lives of famous men, remembered chiefly as Iqbal's correspondent. That began to change in 2010, when Lambert-Hurley and Sharma published Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain, an annotated translation of her travel diary with a full biographical study, restoring her to view as a writer in her own right ^[1].

Scholars now read her diary as an early example of South Asian women's travel writing and a document of how colonial subjects observed the imperial metropole rather than the reverse ^[1]. Her music book is cited in histories of how Indian performing arts were explained to Western audiences before independence, and her Iqbal memoir continues to be mined by the poet's biographers ^{[4] [5]}.

Any Attiya Faizee biography ultimately describes a mediator: between Urdu and English readerships, between reformist Bombay and literary Lahore, between Indian arts and foreign audiences. The chief Attiya Faizee achievements, a frank published diary, a durable study of Indian music, and letters that shaped the record of two major intellectuals, all involved carrying ideas across boundaries that few women of her time were permitted to cross ^[2].