AN INTERVIEW WITH PROF. FARIDA KHANAM

Aapa, to begin from the beginning, please tell us about your childhood and early education. We lived in a remote village of Azamgarh, U.P. We were given some tuitions privately. That is all about my early education. The people of my family who had received higher education had all moved to the cities. There was no school for higher studies where we lived. There was no one to guide us. There were no resources. My father, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, has been a bibliophile all his life. He would spend all his time in libraries. His elder brother had a business in the city and lived there. There was a very good library, Dar-ul-Mussannifeen, in the city of Azamgarh. My father would spend all his day in the library. He used to read and write there. He would visit us for a couple of days when my mother took ill as he was so focussed on getting all the information that he needed to understand Islam in the modern idiom and write books to make the same understandable to people at large. For our basic needs, we were provided for. We had our farms and orchards to take care of our needs. Our village had no basic facilities like road and electricity. There was no hospital or school for higher education. With development all around, the village has seen much progress recently. Now my family has established an English medium higher secondary school named Ziauddin Memorial School. The city-dwellers would visit these farms and orchards during summer vacation. This was my first brush with educated people. I envied them when I heard some of them speak English words. This was very strange and thrilling. One English word that I vividly remember to this day is the word ‘seed’. When I heard this word, I just wondered what the meaning of ‘seed’ was. After the death of my grandfather, my eldest uncle got my father admitted to a madrasa (religious seminary), Madrasatul Islah, Saraimir, a place near my village. Afterwards, my eldest uncle became a well-to-do businessman; he took care of my younger uncle’s higher studies. He graduated as an electrical engineer from Banaras Hindu University. As we belonged to Pathan family, there was no particular emphasis on women’s education. My cousin who was very senior to me in age was the first woman of our family to get higher education. Her name was Muslimah. She passionately pursued her M.A. first in Urdu then in Persian appearing as a private candidate. She went on to become the principal of an inter-college in Moradabad. She then encouraged other women of the family to seek education. This was the beginning of women’s education in my family. The women who thus got educated