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Daniel Majchrowicz, "A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910" (Indiana UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
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- [00:36]
Nicole Carreri
hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I am your host, Nicole Carreri. Thank you for joining me today. In today's episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Makrowitz for a second time. Our first episode was on his book the World in Words, Travel Writing and the Global Imagination in Muslim South Asia that was published in 2023. Daniel is an Associate professor of South Asian Literature and Culture at Northwestern University. Welcome Daniel hi.
- [01:06]
Daniel Makrowitz
I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me back for a second time.
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Nicole Carreri
It's a pleasure. I'm glad we had a chance to do this. Today we will be discussing your book, A Journey to Mecca in the Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909-1910. And you are the translator for the majority of this book. And you say that this book is by Begum Sarbalanjang. This particular edition has been published by Indiana University press earlier in 2025. So who is this woman? She's descended from Mughal nobility. Her name is Akhtar al Nisa Begum Nawab Sargolan Jang, and she grew up in Hyderabad in South India, where she lived a quiet and private and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. So in 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Mohammed Hamidullah Khan Saruland Jang, who was a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. So in 1909, this wealthy couple embarked on a four month long journey through the Middle east and Europe, performing the Hajj in Mecca and sitting for tea with the future King and Queen of England. Now this particular work you've done is the first full English translation of her travel diary from this journey and apparently there were only three original copies that remained. So with this amazing background and this opportunity to hear from a voice from over a century ago, we are going to have insight into what it was like to see the world through a woman's eyes. So tell me, what began your intellectual journey that has led you to this particular publication.
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Daniel Makrowitz
So this book really emerged from the two books that I worked on previous. The book that you just mentioned, the World in Words, was the History of Travel Writing in Urdu. And at the same time that I was working on that book, I also completed an anthology with two colleagues of mine called Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women. In that latter book, we compiled an anthology of approximately 40 different Muslim women authors who traveled before 1950 and tried to look at the ways that tried to choose excerpts from their travel writing to see how they conceived themselves as travelers, as women, as Muslims, how they located themselves in the world. One of my sort of passions, there's this idea, right, that once you finish the big book, the monograph, then you get to do sort of what you think is, is most fun. And one of the, one of my passions was to translate a full travelogue, to provide a full translation from Urdu of one of the books that I just enjoyed the most. And to me, this book was the most fun of all the travelogues that I read while working on. But those two previous, the monograph and the anthology. So you know, the book by Begum Sarbalanjang is captivating just from the title. In utu, it's Dunia Orat ki Ne Zarme, which means the World in a Woman's eyes. And it's one of the first travelogues ever written by a woman in urtu, written in 1910, so very early. And it's just this extremely personal engagement with the world. She's not sort of Begum Sarbuland who was, you know, a very aristocratic, wealthy woman. She's not sort of sugarcoating anything the way she sees it, that's how she tells it. And it's just filled with these kind of personal anecdotes, these sorts of aspects to travel that you wouldn't normally see in a more polished travel account. Lots of really entertaining stories, lots of really fascinating insights. And so this was just, you know, this, this part, this, this book really came from me just loving Begum Serbolon's writing and wanting to share it with the world.
- [05:16]
Nicole Carreri
That's amazing. So this is really your passion project. And not only did you find it the most interesting, you also experience it as something that was fun to read, something that was insightful and entertaining. But also it gives us, like you said, a vision of how much Muslim women see themselves and locate themselves in the world and how to hear from them directly about their own self identity. And that's fascinating because I Actually wanted to ask you to explain the significance of her name and then talk a little bit about how she saw herself at the time of writing this and then later in life. Because at the end of or at the part of the book you talk about how she saw this particular time of her life when she was much older. Can you start with a little bit about her name and go from there?
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Daniel Makrowitz
Absolutely. So her name was one of the, initially one of the really tricky parts of the project. When you pick up the Urdu print of the book, which I believe came out in the 1930s, the COVID page just says that it is, you know, the World in a Woman's Eyes by Begum Nawab Begum Sarbulanjang Begum Nawab Serbulan Jung. And that tells you from the word Begum that she is an aristocrat or she's kind of styling herself as such. The word Nawab Begum also suggests that she is the wife of somebody. So then the rest of the name is essentially her husband's title. So Nawab Serbulan Jung was her husband. He was the very first student to be enrolled at the, this very elite institution for Muslim students called today called Aligarh Muslim University. And he, after graduating from Aligarh Muslim University he goes to Cambridge and then from Cambridge he comes back to India and then he moves to the, the state of Hyderabad where he becomes the Supreme Court justice and the ruler of the state gives him this title. We can talk about the history of that title later on. That's also a really great story. But he's given the story, this title Serb. So his wife kind of adopts that title as well and she starts to go by the name Wife of Serb. But what was her actual name? It was really I, there was, I had no sort of sense of what it was. The only clue I had was midway through her travelogue where she is at the court of. She's at the Ottoman court sort of she's at the house of the vizier. And she's talking to these very high ranking Ottoman women and they ask her what her name is. She tells them my name is Akhtarun Nisa Sultan. So then they're very interested and they want to know why is her name Sultan. So she explains to them that she is descended essentially from Timor Lane, from Amir Timur and she is a descendant of the Mughal family. So they're very fascinated by this, the women. And from there I start to understand sort of who she is. And you know, I use that to that, that, that name to sort of set off on my research journey to find out who this woman actually is. But the question of naming is really interesting because she uses different names in different contexts. In a more personal setting, she used the name Akdrunisa. That's what her parents named her. That's who she went by in the house. But in more formal settings, she preferred always to go by the name, to refer to herself as the wife of her husband.
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Nicole Carreri
That's an interesting history.
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Daniel Makrowitz
Right.
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Nicole Carreri
And like, how much you had to do to uncover, well, who is she actually independently or, you know, and then you find out about her lineage and how that relates to the Ottoman Empire itself in many unusual ways. So fascinating. And also just what it means to name yourself in different locations. So that tells us she had obviously, an awareness of what it meant to, to present herself a particular way in particular places. So that's also very insightful and gives us a sense of a woman in a different time period, because that's not something you would find in our contemporary period, typically. So another question I'm really curious about is how does this book give us insight on what it means to be a Muslim woman in a time of rising Westernization? This is something you mentioned in the introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about how you see that and what are the components at play? What are the changes? What does this mean that there's a rising Westernization?
- [10:21]
Daniel Makrowitz
Yeah. So this is one of the really interesting aspects of the book. And obviously I am not a Muslim woman myself, but I'll try to interpret what I have found in her book. And so, so the book is. So the, this, your question kind of rises from the history of the book itself, which begins its life in 1910, 1909, 1910, as this private diary that she decides that she's going to keep throughout her journey from Hyderabad to Makkah and then later on to Istanbul and to London. So she keeps this diary, she writes everything down, and as I understand it, she intends for that diary perhaps to be read by her children, perhaps by family members, but certainly not to be published much later in her life. I, I, I think around the 1930s, she suddenly decides, okay, I do want to publish this. She, she claims that her children really love the diary and they think that other people will want to read it. So she decides to go ahead and publish this thing. When she publishes it, as a much older woman, she writes a preface. In that preface, she is a little bit at pains to explain why she's doing it. She's this, you know, again, aristocratic woman who's coming from a very money background. You know, why would she publish this book? Why would she put herself in the public sphere? So she has. That's kind of explained in, in two places. In the. On the back page there's an advertisement saying that all funds from the sale of the book would be going for the benefit of a school that she established for indigent and orphaned women. Children. Female children. The front of the book has a preface in which she explains what she hopes that readers will get from the book. And there she really talks about this idea of what she calls the riding tide of Westernization. She argues that women have become sort of enchanted by the idea of the west and they have lost their true essence. And she asks that readers examine what she has found in other countries and use it as a mirror to consider, reconsider their own practices and take from, you know, the Arabian women from Damascene, women from Istanbul, women from British women, what they think is best and to reject what they think is not worthy of emulation. And then she kind of gives the whole thing away when she. Actually none of these women were particularly great. The only women that are worthy of emulation are the women from the time of the Prophet who managed to balance a family life and a public life. So she really expresses her respect for the women of the prophets time who would take care of the Prophet's family but also go out into the battlefield to tend the wounded and that sort of thing. So she gives you this picture of her ideal woman in society who is committed to the family but absolutely engaged in the public sphere. And you see that come out in the diary itself where she has sort of no hesitations about going out into the market, about going out in the social spaces. She is extremely social. She'll talk to anybody about anything. But she's sort of analyzing everything through her framework of right actions, of her conceptions of Islam and her sort of sense of self as an Indian woman and as a Muslim woman. Those are, those are sort of not concepts that I tried to impose in my introduction and in my translation. But those are her own frameworks for how readers should understand what she's trying to convey.
- [14:22]
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- [14:53]
Nicole Carreri
I think it's beautiful too, because it shows that there's fluidity in how we conceive of ourselves, that this interaction she had gave her some ideas, then her age and growing and wisdom gives her different ideas. And then what does she hold on to in the later years of life? Right, because at the end, you know, as she's getting older, she talks about how that she wrote this book, she said, when her life was still pervaded by the intoxication we call life and signs it the dweller of the dust of Medina. Which leads me into talking about confessional lines and the ways in which Muslims express their devotion. Because in contemporary period, we have very strict sectarian definitions of what constitutes Sunni identity, Sunni practice, Sunni orthodoxy, if you will, and Shia orthodoxy, orthopraxy and so forth. But she really fits between the two because she does some of the things that we associate more with Shia devotion and. And that includes this idea of the earth or the dust having some kind of spiritual significance. She talks about how she wants to lay her eyes on the dust of Medina. She talks about how she reflects back to the time of seeing the Prophet's mosque, and that's what gives her solace later in life. So in many ways she confounds these confessional lines, and one of them includes tomb visits, which again, is often associated with either the Sufi tradition and or Shia tradition. But it's very mixed at this time, and it's not uncommon for a variety of people to visit these sacred locations. She talks about the Milad celebration and participating in that. And then another thing comes up which is interesting is when she reflects on how the Christians she meets in the Arab world speak Arabic. And she is then brought back to reflect on herself in a way where she says, I cannot speak Arabic, the language of Muhammad. So some of that stood out for me. And, you know, this is also. You write that she's experiencing this travel and her own identity at a time where religious identity was moving to the forefront of Indian identity. So those things together really give me as a reader, an interesting view on how she positions herself as a religious person, as a devotee, and these blurring of what we consider very strict confessional lines in this time period. Can you talk a little bit about what stood out for you?
- [17:34]
Daniel Makrowitz
Absolutely. I'm so glad that you brought up these points. And I think actually we could talk about just that One question for the rest of this conversation, but I do want to foreground my answer by saying that one of my passions in this book, one of my goals was actually to let Begum Sarbulan kind of speak for herself in the context of this work, which had almost completely disappeared from the archive. It certainly wasn't when I started working on it. It wasn't available at all in the original Urdu. I really wanted Begum Serbalan to sort of be able to speak for herself through my translation. So I'll sort of give my opinion on what she's doing and how all these things are coming into play. But I really, you know, I would encourage kind of the reader, the listener to just read the book for themselves and encounter the richness of the way that she's thinking about Islam. The sort of presence of confessional sentiment, but also sort of a complete lack of it. It's really, really fascinating. So I think I'll start from the end of your question and say that yes, there is this kind of sense of an I. A very self conscious identity as a Muslim woman. When she decides to go on this trip. She's very concerned about being able to communicate with other Muslim women to the extent that she hires an Arab woman as a servant and a tutor so that she can understand basic Arabic when she goes to the Middle east, which she succeeds in doing. Which is a very interesting move, right, because era traditionally the standard is sort of. You would get sort of a man who is a scholar of Arabic to come and teach you classical standard Arabic, but she doesn't do that at all. Instead she finds a woman who is from the region to just speak her, teach her how to speak the language of everyday women's conversation. So that was a really sort of wise decision on her part and really reveals how much thought she put into her engagements with this region. Her. It reflects her excitement for getting to know the lives of other people. So she, so she does sort of go into the region with this sense that I am a Muslim woman. And she's quite surprised again and again and again to find that there are people of other religions who are not only living in the Middle east, but are from the Middle east, indigenous to it, Christians in particular. And, and that sort of shapes her engagement with the Middle east where she thinks, well, what? Oh, you know, she. You can see her kind of struggling with the idea that maybe there are Christians who belong in this region more than me do she? Than more than I do. So that's one really fascinating aspect to the travelogue that I think is you sort of need to read, you know, across the entire account to get a sense of what she's trying to do. As for the sort of Shia Sunni question, this is a really special aspect of the account. I mean, Begum Sarbuland is if you're, if you're sort of into Indian history, you'll know that the city of Hyderabad is this kingdom that is in the south, but has a lot of its administrators, intellectuals coming from the north. And they've got this divide there called the mulki, Mulki divide, where people who are quote, unquote, sort of native and southern tend to be Shia and the people, the intellectuals and administrators who have come from the north tend to be Sunni. So she's coming from a family that migrated from the north after 1857. After, you know, everything sort of implodes in the north. Her family moves to the south. She's born there, so she comes from this north Indian Sunni family, but she's living in a milieu that is very Shia. So, for example, when she departs from Hyderabad, she has guests sort of come and visit her. They have all these dinners and every single guest who comes gives her an Imam Zamin.
- [22:03]
Nicole Carreri
Yep, that was an interesting part.
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Daniel Makrowitz
Yeah. Right.
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Nicole Carreri
So.
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Daniel Makrowitz
So she's Sunni, but she's getting these Imam Zamins or these bands of protection that invoke the name of the imam. They have some token amount of money, sometimes a large amount of money sewn into them for her protection. So even from the beginning, the sort of ritualistic, the, you know, so she is, you know, she is Sunni, she's engaging in the Shia practices before she departs. She's also very clear that she goes to several Sufi shrines before she departs for this trip. So a part of that sort of sectarian, the, the, the question of, you know, confessionalism. So she's just in a. In a milieu. She's just like at the center of this Indian Muslim milieu where you. Where people sort of appreciate everything, they engage in everything, they respect everything. She was deeply devoted to the Prophet. She was deeply devoted to the Prophet's family. She was herself inducted in various Sufi lineages, the Qadari lineage above all. So she's. She's very much a woman of faith and she's not so concerned with these kind of sectarian lines that really start to, to harden around that time or a little bit later. And for me, one of the really interesting aspects of the travelogue, when she's in Makan Madinah is that she's writing Huna as this woman who's there before the sort of Saudi takeover. So she's seeing a more cosmopolitan version of the Hijaz, where she is able to practice in the ways that she wants to without any worries or concerns that there might be restrictions. So, you know, when they. She holds various events, she gives out food on days sort of honoring the prophet that might not have been possible, you know, 15 years down the line.
- [24:06]
Nicole Carreri
Yeah, I love. I love this aspect of the story, and I think that's what brings it again. It's. It's a lived experience of Islam. This is how Islam looks on the ground in this time and in this frame and in from a woman's eyes in particular. And the devotional and sacred acts she does, like you say, span a variety of practices. And I'm really glad that you mentioned the history of the city that she is born in, because again, yeah, that's a very Shia majority city with lots of rich history and tradition as well. But there's this intermixing of different people because of the administrators, as you mentioned. So that's a fascinating aspect of history to bring into understanding what this story means. So I really appreciate that. So what else stands out to you in terms of any of the vignettes that she shares with us? I know one of the things that you remark on often, too, is what it meant for her as a woman to travel. How did she get from point A to point B? Because there was a time where she got left on a, you know, a railway platform and wasn't sure if she was going to make it or if she should wait. There's an. There's issues of, like, accessing food and sending her servant out to gather things. And what did it mean for her to send out a woman into an unknown space as well, independently to retrieve the items she needed for her travels and so forth. I think the physical aspect of the story is interesting as well. It's not an easy journey. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the logistics and experiences of the physical travel for her and for the people around her?
- [25:53]
Daniel Makrowitz
Sure, yeah. So one of the questions that I get the most in my work on the history of travel writing, and specifically on women's travel writing, is whether or not we're able to access the experiences and lives of, you know, people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. What was it like to be poor and going on hajj, you know, a hundred years ago? 50 at 1000, 150 years ago. And so this. And that's a really hard question to answer just because, you know, literacy rates were much lower and any materials that might have been prepared have been lost for the majority. You know, people from those backgrounds wouldn't have even had access to sort of writing and printing in the first place. So for me, one of the points that really stood out in this account is that Begum Serbulan brings a servant with her and she a woman. And this servant shows up on nearly every single page of the book.
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Nicole Carreri
Amina B. Or Amina B, depending on pronunciation. Right?
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Daniel Makrowitz
Amina Abi. Exactly. You got it right. So in the really, the really cool thing about this book for me, again is that her husband, so they're traveling as a group of three. Begum Sarbulant, her husband Hamidullah, and the servant Amina B. And Amina B, as far as I know, doesn't leave any record of her experiences on the trip, but Begum Sarbulan does. And her husband also writes several travelogues based on this exact journey. So when you read her husband's accounts, they're very different. And there's almost no mention of Aminabee at all. You almost. There's. There's almost no mention of Begum Serboland at all. You get the sense that he's traveling by himself. Whereas when you read Begum Sorbolin's account, you see that in fact, their entire trip is kind of facilitated, made possible, smoothed by Amina B, this woman from South India, from Hyderabad, who is, you know, they, you know, Begum Sibaland had been with Amina B from the beginning of her life. She stayed with the family to the end of her life. But you, Aminabi, had never been to the Middle east, had never left India. And yet she's given this incredible list of tasks sort of daily. She's asked to, you know, go find food, go to the grocery, go to the bazaar, buy things. And she, Amina B. Is the one who sort of makes sure that the Cerbolans are comfortable and well fed and so on. And so you don't ever get Amina B's voice directly. But from Beckham Sarbulin's account, you can kind of sort of, in a subaltern studies sort of way, start to approximate what it might have meant to go on this journey as a servant. And as, as far as I know, this is one of the very few accounts where you get such a clear picture of what that would have been like. And it's really impressive to think about the sorts of work that, that Amina B managed to accomplish without sort of any translator, without any intermediary. So the Cerebellons would sort of like arrive in a town and they'd say I mean we're hungry, could you go and buy a chicken and cook it for us? So she, she'd take the money and she'd go off and she'd buy. We have no idea how she managed to do all of this but, but you do get this really great picture of, or at least the best picture available so far to my knowledge of what it was like to travel in those conditions where you're not sort of wealthy yourself. So that's one answer to the question.
- [30:13]
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- [30:43]
Nicole Carreri
That is an interesting part of the story. It's like we have the travelogue and how did this woman, you know, how did she get from point A to point B in this travel journey? I mean that's extraordinary on its own. Then how do you then go another level? And Aminabi, how did she go out into the middle of a bazaar she's never seen and find what she needed to come back, do all the things. I think it's also interesting. I'm looking at a passage that includes Aminabi and it's about when she's seasick and they're near Mount Sinai and then the night before they're having dinner with the captain of the ship who, who is a Muslim himself and he's elderly and with much experience and a Muslim. She writes and she says we had a long conversation on religious matters and took turns reciting verses from the Quran. And then she went to bed, wakes up in the morning, Aminabi is seasick. But they recognize where they are near Mount Sinai. And supposedly these are the locations where Moses led his tribes through the waters and the pharaoh drowned and so forth. And, and then she says we both read a Fatiha for the prophet Moses. So she's engaging with religious acts both with the captain of the ship, with her servant. So in a way it shows us how her religious devotion is just infused and it doesn't know boundaries of top to bottom, if you will. She's engaging in these devotional acts with both of these people, which I think is interesting. And another thing that's interesting in this particular passage is when she talks about going for a stroll on the deck of the ship and seeing Egyptian women in the third class behind a door. And she says, I walk over to the door, open a gesture to them so that I can have a conversation in Arabic. And again, as you mentioned earlier, her Arabic was not perfect, but she was practicing it. So she says, these poor but noble women came and sat just before the doorway and began to speak in Arabic. And she says, now I can understand a little bit better than before. And I examined their burqas and their clothing attentively. I. They are also going to Mecca for the hajj. And I couldn't learn much more about them because I didn't yet speak well enough. So then she took her leave this passage, too. Again, she's connecting with women she doesn't know through their devotions. Right. They're on the trip to make the hedge. I also find it interesting that she takes the initiative to engage with other people. She has asks questions, she explores them. Do you want to talk a little bit about how she's. She's a rather outgoing woman. In. In some ways, would that be common or uncommon, do you think?
- [33:21]
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- [33:23]
Daniel Makrowitz
I probably, you know, the. The, you know, I don't know if she. I assume that it was common whether or not people represented it in their writing or not. You know, maybe less so. But, yeah, she is super outgoing. What I. One of the. So this book includes the travelogue and also has a very long history of Begum Tsarbolen's life and her family. And a lot of the material that I got for the biography came from interviews with her descendants. And every single person I spoke to who had spent time with her or remembered her attested to the fact that she was a presence. She was there. If she had an opinion, everybody knew it. She was not sort of demure in any way. One relative called her sort of the queen of the house. So, yeah, so she is really out there. She's just ready to engage. She's ready to talk to anybody, men or women. You know, at various points in this diary, she's talking to women from various parts of the Middle east who are from much lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Later on in the book, you know, she's bantering with the prince and princess of Wales. She's just, she's ready for whatever comes up and she's, she's very interested to learn and she's writing down the things that she's recording what stands out to her sort of on a daily basis. The, the travelogue itself bounces back and forth between the past tense and the present tense. So you can really get a sense from the grammar itself that these are sort of fresh ideas and she hasn't updated them at least significantly for the publication of the book in the 1930s. So it's just a really, you know, you really feel like you're seeing the world through her eyes. You're looking at the world through the perspective of this incredibly curious, curious but also very self assured woman. And I'm trying to think if there are any interactions that I want to highlight. I will say that one of the, what I got from reading from spending time with this book is that she was most fascinated with the lives of Muslim women, but she was also most comfortable with, at least abroad with women who had learned English and who were from a slightly more British colonial background or from a British background. So she ends up sort of looking for those interactions with Muslim women, but she spends the majority of her free time speaking to British women that she meets on the ship or Christian women who have had a fully British education in Palestine in, in Istanbul and so on. So it's a very interesting. So it's my, my sort of reading of it, you know, personally is that this is a woman who has this ideal of Muslim unity, but it's not a sort of unity that has become, it's one that she wants to create. And so her sort of aristocratic background, her admittedly, you know, her training in English wasn't super large, but it was much larger than her training in spoken Arabic. And so she is more comfortable. She's like, she's. When, you know, when she gets to Istanbul, which is pretty far into the trip, she says that this is the first time that I'm having food that is not Indian or British. And she's really fascinated by like, what do the Turks eat? And at that point you kind of realize, like, wow, she has really been staying at five star hotels where they're serving either German food or British food. And yeah, this is the first time that she's really in a purely Muslim space. And she's very fascinated by it and confused by it. So that whole negotiation of sort of what she expected to find as a Muslim woman of the Middle east and what she actually encountered is really Interesting. It's very subtle. I think it's the sort of thing that would, you know, if somebody picks up this book and wants to write a paper or an article on, I think that's a really fascinating topic to engage with. How her categories were kind of challenged, but also often reaffirmed, firm. So I don't get the sense that she sort of left the Middle east thinking, oh, everything that I had assumed about this place was. Was wrong. You know, earlier on, you highlighted that she is distressed that Christians, you know, Palestinian Christians speak Arabic better than her. I don't think she ever entirely gets over that concern. Arabic to her is a Muslim language from start to finish. So you kind of watch her confront these situations and negotiate them, but not necessarily find a resolution for them.
- [38:42]
Nicole Carreri
Yeah, it's fascinating. And thanks for sharing that portion of the story. And then, you know, the complexity of a human being. Right. You've got categories you don't fit one way or another. Exactly. But you did highlight, too, again, how much of a presence she was, how outgoing. Because there's even another passage where she. She says, I played it on the piano. Then a Turkish man came and sat at the piano, and he played very well. So she's playing piano with a Turkish man. I mean, this is just. It's also breaking stereotypes for your readers. And I think that's one of the most interesting parts of this travel log as well. So tell me a little bit about what her experience was like in Europe. Are there any particular vignettes that stood out to you and why?
- [39:30]
Daniel Makrowitz
So the European portion of the trip is quite different from everything that has come before it. This is more or less the last quarter of the book. After she leaves Istanbul, she goes to Greece and then to Italy and then passes through Switzerland to France and ultimately ends the trip. Or her final destination is in London, where she has a bunch of family and friends, and she has a very lively social life that culminates in sort of meeting the Prince and Princess of Wales, who would become very soon after, the King and Queen of England. And, you know, what I really love about these passages on Europe are just how real they feel. It's almost like they could have been written in the present day. So her husband is this very international man who did his studies in Cambridge, and he's been to all the museums, he's been to all the castles, he's done all the things he walks around Europe with. A Baedeker's Guide to Europe, sort of like the travel guides that people use now or used until Very recently. And he's really excited to show his wife the glories of European history. And so that from Athens onward, they're constantly going to churches and museums and castles. And, you know, at first, you know, her observations are very interesting. She's really surprised by the churches, which seem to her to be very grand, but incredibly dark and cold. At first, she's fascinated by the art. She's particularly surprised at the amount of nudity that she's seeing in these museums. And then, you know, as they continue to go to museum after museum, she gets tired of it. And she says, like, I am not going to another museum. And her husband says, you know, come on, the only reason we're here is so you can see these museums. And he ends up having to bribe her by renting a convertible to drive her around. Anyway, at that point, she says, yes, okay, that sounds actually very nice. Let's do that. But no more museums after today. So they come to this agreement. And what I love about that is it just. It sounds like a standard American trip to Europe where you're very excited and there's lots of museums with lots of strange art in the museums. But after the fifth museum, you're like, oh, gosh, can we do something else now? So it's just incredibly relatable and incredibly human. But at a more, you know, at a more analytical level, what you see there is not only is she getting tired of the trip, but she's also. She's kind of lost the spark. She just doesn't have that passion for European history and society that she did for the sort of Muslim reasons that she was passing through. So the kind of excitement that she has is starting to fade away, and she doesn't feel as much of a connection with the people that she's meeting or she's not trying to make as many connections. She's still talking to people and asking all sorts of really great questions. She's still telling all sorts of incredible stories about the things that are happening to her. But there's a real shift that happens when she gets into the European portion of the trip that really contextualizes what had happened to her in the Ottoman Empire and in the Middle east previous to that.
- [43:13]
Nicole Carreri
Yes, it says it's a real human experience. You know, I'm glad you're sharing that aspect. And getting to go on a. In a convertible around Florence is certainly not a bad deal. But, yep, she's losing steam and they're ready to go home.
- [43:30]
Daniel Makrowitz
Yeah, well, it had been four months, so that's exhausting. And I totally sympathize.
- [43:35]
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- [43:35]
Nicole Carreri
Because at the end of this passage, it's like, it was beautiful. She did admire it. She's like, what beautiful garden, squares, fields. I cannot praise the city enough. It is vibrant, clean and beautiful. It's so nice that it's like a heaven on earth. And then she says, we returned to the hotel in the evening, had dinner and went to bed.
- [43:51]
Daniel Makrowitz
Yeah. She is so done. And you know, and I actually think that's a, that's a really, from, from a certain perspective that's really important because when you read a lot of literature on the history of travel writing in India, you get this sense that England and Europe was kind of the Mecca for the Indian traveler, that everybody was very excited to go there and that it was a place of fascination that was sort of technologically very advanced and very different and very important. Begum Soberland provides, I think, a very different perspective where she's, she's, she's just not that interested. And it serves as kind of an antidote to the more European focused travel writing that I think previous scholars have tended to prioritize.
- [44:47]
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- [45:17]
Nicole Carreri
Again, it really gives us a different sense of what these places meant compared to what stereotypes are. But also now, what's a real life experience sound like from the voice of this woman? So thanks for adding that particular vignette. I'm really glad we had a chance to hear about how her experience of Europe was. And just to note for the listeners, her departure for Florence is less than two pages. You know, her experience with Florence, so
- [45:49]
Daniel Makrowitz
she's really speeding it up.
- [45:51]
Nicole Carreri
Yeah, we woke up, we did this, we went to bed. So yeah, it's a real human experience. And I think the readers of the book will have an opportunity to relate to her even more, which is really valuable part of hearing her voice. To see that you can relate to a Muslim woman of a noble background from, from the early 1900s and somehow you share some human experiences and observations with her is extremely important. It's a Time travel experience for the reader. And I think that's a great addition to think about how this book can be used and enjoyed by different students, non academic readers and different departments.
- [46:35]
Daniel Makrowitz
Yeah, you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast about how she gets kind of lost on the train platform. And that's another great example of just how human this whole thing is, right? Because she goes, when she's in London visiting, you know, her brother and her children who are studying there, they say, you know, mom, you need glasses. And they go to the store, they go to an eye doctor, and they make two copies of glasses for her. She pays for them, she receives the glasses. And then when it's time to leave London, she and her husband are separated. She's on the train to Calais. When they get to Calais, he goes off to do something and she's not sure what train she's supposed to get into. And she is looking around for her husband to figure out what's going on. And she can't see him because she's not wearing the glasses that she had just bought. And she's kind of regretting like, God, why am I not wearing the glasses? Why did I leave them in the train? I can't see anybody. And that's a very sort of a real feeling of like she just doesn't want to wear the glasses and now she's paying for it. So again, the same sort of idea of like, this is just, you know, a very relatable person sharing her everyday sort of foibles and mistakes with the reader. And you do feel that connection, despite there being a century between us and her.
- [48:05]
Nicole Carreri
I would love for you to talk a little bit about how you hope your fellow professors across disciplines can use this book to explore history, to explore religion, to explore gender studies, to explore literature. I think this book can fit in many, many syllabi across disciplines. What are some of your thoughts about that?
- [48:28]
Daniel Makrowitz
So, first of all, my thought is just that this book is fun. I mean, we're talking about it in an academic way and sort of analyzing it. But if you just go back to the text itself, it's just this, you know, the travelogue can be a boring genre, but sometimes it can just really make it just fascinate you and make you want to read more. And this book is the kind of thing that for students, would be close to a page turner academically, she's just constantly encountering new things. And she's also really sassy when she has something on her mind, she just kind of writes it without Any concern for, you know, what society is going to think. So on the one hand, I think that this is a great piece to assign because it's super engaging. It's just an individual who's not sort of quantificating or trying to convince anybody of anything and they're just sharing their thoughts. But at the same time, it gives us so many different perspectives to think about religion, about history, about gender studies. And yeah, it's just a really fun, fun text to teach. And some of your questions already have underline some of those aspects. It's a fast. It provides, for example, so some of the things that I really focus in on. For me, it's a really fascinating look at the Haramain at Makkah and Medina
- [50:03]
Nicole Carreri
before
- [50:05]
Daniel Makrowitz
the, you know, the arrival of the Saudis, before the sort of Wahhabi approaches to managing the cities, when it. When it's sort of at the end of its Ottoman period, that this is kind of a last picture from a woman of the cities in their sort of full cosmopolitan bloom before those major changes come. And those major changes are, of course, still present today. So this is a really interesting way to. To look at the past of the cities from a woman's perspective who's going into spaces in those cities that a man typically cannot access. So that's one. The sort of question of confessionalism, I think, is also really interesting. Sort of the way that you picked up on in your earlier question where Begum Server Lunches does not care that much, as far as we can tell about, you know, what is Shia, what is Sunni, she's interested in Islam. And so she'll go to any site that seems to be important, whether it's Shia, whether it's Sunni, she wants to be. Whether it's Sufi, she wants to be there. I also think that the book is interesting for thinking about the. The growing sense at that time, at the beginning of the 20th century of communalism, sort of in a more combative sense, where she's starting to. Begum Sorbet is really starting to categorize people by their religion. Where people's primary identity is not, you know, where they're from or what language they speak, but what their religion is. And that, to me, sort of gives you a sense of what would culminate in, you know, the split of India and Pakistan and the prioritization of religion as an individual's primary identification. There's, you can see a kind of history of that coming out.
- [52:07]
Nicole Carreri
And I think that's. That's, you know, pushed forward of course, by the rising Westernization that you. You allude to as well.
- [52:14]
Daniel Makrowitz
Right.
- [52:14]
Nicole Carreri
She's at this cusp of a rise in idealizing the West. And then we see, okay, she's right at that cusp where confessional identity is coming to the fore to respond to that difference, if you will, in some respects.
- [52:31]
Daniel Makrowitz
Right.
- [52:31]
Nicole Carreri
And then the pre Wahhabi time, it's. It's fascinating. I mean, this really gives so much or so many different disciplines, right? The history, the, you know, gives a little bit of sense of kind of the political world. It gives a little bit of sense, you know, we get a lot actually of the religious aspect, the gendered dimensions and so on. I think this is so valuable for so many departments. If you have like to. What would be your wish? Is there a department you. You think might not consider your book, but you'd wish they would? Who would it be? Or which department would it be?
- [53:02]
Daniel Makrowitz
I don't know. So I would say Global History, I think, might not instinctively reach for this book. That's not a department per se, but any, any sort of faculty who are teaching a course on global history, I would love to pick up this book. They may not think to do so at first. It fits a bit. It's clearly, you know, it fits with Middle Eastern studies, with South Asian studies, Islamic studies. But I think that she is a great source for looking at global trends in the early 20th century. Again, she's. Again, we're getting this look at three different regions of the world, of India, of the Middle east, the Ottoman Empire, and. And Europe before World War I. And we're getting it from the perspective of a woman from the global south, which is not particularly easy to access. So any course that's sort of trying to look at, you know, global trends, global connections like Begum Surbaland is just such a great person for it because she's really trying to grapple with these, you know, the. She really struggles in. In, for example, port cities in places like Port Suez in Istanbul. Istanbul fascinates her and just confuses her so much because she wants this to be. She wants this city to be kind of the capital of the Muslim world. It's the place where the Caliph resides. It's the one sort of major empire left on earth that is still Muslim. And she's very excited about. When she gets there, she finds out that there's so many non Muslim people, there are lots of Greek people, and she doesn't really know what to do with it. And so her kind of bewilderment and struggle to understand this very complex world. I think makes the book a great teaching resource for courses that are trying to grapple with the same sorts of ideas.
- [55:09]
Nicole Carreri
This is a brilliant answer, so thank you for that. As we wind down this really lovely conversation, I want to thank you again for the opportunity to do this interview and also just hearken back to something from our previous conversation, which was the scene where you arrive at that unexpected library in the middle of. You don't even know where. Right. You know, that you found when you were in another bookstore at the back, where there were so many documents that you wanted to get your hands on. I just want to say it's such valuable research that you've been able to bring the voice of a woman from this time period to our awareness as academics and hopefully beyond academia. Because, as you said, this is a great book. Maybe, you know, an average person would enjoy having the opportunity to hear her voice and see through her eyes. So I just want to thank you for choosing to do this as your academic journey too. And, you know, you've always been around so many options of texts that you could potentially translate, and I'm really glad that you've chosen the ones that you've had. You really contribute an important voice to our academic record. So thank you for that. Is there anything else you want to mention before we close up for any today?
- [56:30]
Daniel Makrowitz
Thank you so much for that. It's very, you know, as a translator, as a scholar, you're kind of just working on your laptop, so it's very gratifying and rewarding to hear that somebody finds your work valuable. The last thing that I might say about this book is that I felt that it deserved to be translated, it deserves to be read globally. And so I did that work. But it also bothered me a little bit that the Urdu original was only published once, in 1935. And as far as I know, there are only three existing copies. And I thought that, you know, she deserves to be heard in her original voice as well. And so this was really, really hard for me. But I worked with a publisher in India on producing a. A new print of the Urdu original, which came out earlier this year. And that was just a really. Has been a really rewarding project to sort of bring Begum Serbulan's voice back into the conversation in Urdu itself. So if there are readers here who are listeners who sort of also read Urdu, that may be an even better route for listening to Begum Sorbilant Voice rather than, you know, redo my translation. So I just wanted to add that sort of at the end.
- [57:51]
Nicole Carreri
Thank you for that. And thank you again, Daniel, for this time and for this rich conversation. And I want to thank our listeners for joining us on this episode of the New Books Network. I am Nicole Carreri saying farewell. Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.