GAIL MINAULT, Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Pp. 373. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Abstract

The Urdu novelist and short story writer Intizar Hussayn, in his story “IhsanManzil,” describes the anxiety produced in a northern Indian Muslim community when amagazine arrives addressed to the daughter of a respectable household. Set in the early part of the20th century, the story depicts how the Muslim woman's name on the envelope, exposed asit was to the whole world, became a metaphor for modernity, the public, and the outsidepenetrating Muslim moral boundaries and domestic ethos. Similar to Hussayn's incisivedepiction of changes within Indian Muslim households, Gail Minault gives us a sense of howreligious reform, expanding opportunities for education for both genders, and colonialmodernization in the first half of the 20th century undermined and challenged traditional aspectsof middle-class Muslim life in northern India.