‘Zohra!’ Life lived to the fullest

Rohit Mahajan

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The amazing history of Zohra Segal — Sahibzadi Zohra Begum Mumtazullah Khan of Rampur — is, for the fourth time in the past 24 years, related in a biography. This time, says Ritu Menon, it’s a ‘feminist biography’. This seems apt, for if anybody embodied female agency, choice, empowerment from the India of the 1930s to the 2000s, it was Zohra.

Yet, it’s evident that her life was made amazing due to two men who would traditionally be accepted as final authority over her decisions — her father Nawabzada Mohammad Mumtazullah and her uncle Saiduzzafar Khan. They were remarkably emancipated and great enablers in Zohra’s blossoming.

When Uday Shankar, a celebrated dancer but with a reputation of being unbound by sexual mores of the time, invited her to join his troupe for a tour of Japan, even the fearless Zohra was hesitant to ask for her father’s permission. His response? He looked up a railway timetable and announced: ‘You had better take the 3:40 from Lansdowne, and change at Lucknow for the Howrah Mail.’

When she was 18, Saiduzzafar embarked upon a road trip with her, from Dehradun to Luxor, over three months. Remember, this is 1930. Saiduzzafar — with whom she could freely share her ‘disturbing thoughts’ about religion — persuaded her father to let her go to Dresden to learn dancing, and it was he who financed ‘the better part of her stay in Germany’.

When she expressed her desire to marry Kameshwar Segal — six years her junior — her father, yet again, behaved in an amazing manner, as Ritu Menon relates:

Kameshwar offered to convert, but Abbajan would have none of that. ‘No!’ he said emphatically, ‘what would be my feelings if Zohra became a Hindu? Think of your parents,’ he told Kameshwar.

Perhaps the death of his two wives — Zohra’s mother at only 30 due to ‘too many births, too close together’ — had made Mumtazullah aware that a man must not have proprietary rights over a woman. The choices he made for his daughters — including sending Zohra to Lahore’s Queen Mary’s College when she was only seven — shaped her mind and life, as Zohra said: ‘It was Queen Mary’s that gave me a career… I was good at two things — dancing and acting… I didn’t want money; I was interested in fame, I wanted power.’ Zohra pursued fame and power, and she got them in ample measure. She knew her sister Uzra was the beauty among the sisters — ‘You are meeting me now, when I’m old and ugly, you should have seen me when I was young and ugly,’ she would say. Two larger than life men, Uday Shankar and Prithviraj Kapoor, dominate much of the narrative in this book. Zohra, however, comes across as a very strong woman, in complete command of her choices and destiny, unapologetically chasing success and happiness.

Interest in Zohra remains strong 109 years after her birth, and this book is a useful addition to work on her.