Role of Women in Pakistan: A case Study of Begum Shaista Ikramullah

Abstract

This research analyzed the great personality of Begum Shaista Ikramullah and her services for the Muslim women. She belonged to elite family and her family were very prominent in politics. Her cousin Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy also remained prime minister of Pakistan. Begum Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah was a Pakistani author, politician, diplomat and social-activist whose life bridges the late colonial and post-colonial phases of South Asian history. Her biography illustrates the discursive pressures shaping the lives of upper and intermediate class men and women of her generation, particularly as manifested in the unquestioned tropes of modernization theory. However, the same life reveals that her notion of the tradition-modernity dichotomy does not extend to the equation of Islam with tradition. The secular-religious divide, in fact, does not feature in her thought or activism at all. The latter activism also problematizes the assumption that Muslim women, any more of less than non-Muslims, are marginal or peripheral players in the history of the twentieth century. She was one among the two women of first Constitution Assembly of Pakistan. Begum Shaista stood for the reservation of seats for women. The earliest post-independence women’s agitation was to secure economic rights for women which led by Jahanara Shah Nawaz, Shaista Ikramullah and other thousands of women marches to the assembly in 1948. But the role of Shaista Ikramullah for the women made her an ideal figure. Shaista’s work became the cause of emancipation of Muslim women.  In every society, women played a very important role. This thesis is exploring the role of women in politics, especially in the context of Begum Shaista Ikramullah. Begum Shaista Ikramullah has been known politician and leader in the social welfare. Thesis additionally plates the different organization which had started of women during freedom movement. Very few works on the Pakistan movement have analyzed the efforts of women in the freedom struggle. Further, available works highlights services of women in the elite section of societies. This research is an attempt to bring to light the process of developing political consciousness among women belonging to all section of society. It also elaborates their services and sacrifices which they rendered during the Pakistan movement.