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The Heart of a Gopi: Raihana Tyabji's Bhakti

Devotionalism as Self-Representation

SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

Modern Asian Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 03 / May 2014, pp 569 - 595

DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X12000704, Published online: 09 July 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X12000704

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SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY (2014). The Heart of a Gopi: Raihana Tyabji's
Bhakti Devotionalism as Self-Representation . Modern Asian Studies, 48, pp
569-595 doi:10.1017/S0026749X12000704

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Modern Asian Studies 48, 3 (2014) pp. 569–595. 
C Cambridge University Press 2013
doi:10.1017/S0026749X12000704 First published online 9 July 2013

The Heart of a Gopi: Raihana Tyabji’s

Bhakti Devotionalism as
Self-Representation∗
SIOBHAN LAM BERT-HURLEY

Loughborough University, UK
Email: S.T.Lambert-Hurley@lboro.ac.uk

Raihana Tyabji is best known in history, not for her writing or even her singing,
but as a devotee of Gandhi. Yet in 1924 this at least nominally Muslim woman
composed a small book of bhakti devotionalism that has continued to garner
popular interest right into the twenty-first century. She gave it the evocative
title, The Heart of a Gopi, on the basis that what had been revealed to her was
the very ‘soul’, the inner self, of the gopi and, through that, an understanding of
Lord Krishna himself. This paper considers the question of how far this piece of
bhakti devotionalism may be read as a kind of personal narrative, an evocation
of the self. Does the referencing of an established narrative tradition give the
author’s feelings and experiences, especially as a Muslim woman devoted to
Krishna at a time of increasing religious rigidity and growing communal strife, a
kind of validity not achievable otherwise? And, if so, how do we separate out the
author’s ‘self’ from the literary conventions—in this case, the gopi tradition—that
structure the story? In the tradition of Islamic life-writing, can the gap between
the miraculous and the mundane be breached in order to understand the mystical
experience charted here as a kind of autobiography? Even from the rationalist’s
perspective, should not the life of the imagination still be considered part of the
life?

∗
Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the panel, ‘Speaking of the
Self? Women and Self Representation in South Asia’, at the European Conference
on Modern South Asian Studies in Bonn, Germany in July 2010; and at the
South Asia Studies Seminar at the University of Leeds in March 2011. My thanks
to the participants, and especially to my co-convenor in Bonn, Anshu Malhotra,
for their extremely useful comments on these occasions and after. I am also
grateful to Anand Vivek Taneja and Sunil Sharma for their suggestions. More
generally, this paper has benefited from lively discussions held in connection with
the international research network, ‘Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies’
[http://www.waiis.org, accessed 14 October 2012].

569
570 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

Introduction

In 1924, a young woman called Raihana Tyabji ‘suddenly felt’, in her

own words, ‘a tremendous, an irresistible urge to write’. She sat down
at her desk ‘with sheets of foolscap and poised pen’ and, over the
next three days, poured out the story of Sharmila, a gopi, or milkmaid,
enraptured by Krishna in his guise as the cowherd at Vrindavan. At the
time, she understood this narrative to be, as she called it, a ‘Fragment
of a Gopi’s Diary’. But, in time, she recognized that what had been
revealed to her—for she understood herself to be ‘possessed’ at the
time of writing—was the very ‘soul’, the inner self, of the gopi and,
through that, an understanding of Lord Krishna himself. Hence, when
her tale was eventually published in 1936, she gave it the evocative
title, The Heart of a Gopi.1 Subsequently, her little book went into several
reprints and editions in its original English (1941, 1953, 1971),
while also being translated into several European languages, including
French (1938), German (1977) and Dutch (1995).2 Excerpts from the
French edition, L’ Âme d’une Gopi, were even crafted into songs sung by
Raihana herself, certainly in a recording for the American composer
and choral singer, Catherine Urner (1941–1942).3 Today, the book is
still available and often quoted in a most diverse set of contexts—from
academic studies of Hinduism and websites on spirituality to a blog on
‘Godwriting’ and the ‘official George Harrison messageboard’.4 Most
recently, it has even been made into a musical that takes dialogue
directly from the original text.5

1
Raihana Tyabji, The Heart of a Gopi (Poona: Miss R. Tyabji, n.d.). The quotes here
come from pp. v–vi.
2
Raihana Tyabji, The Heart of a Gopi (Bombay: Vora, 1941; n.p.: n.d., 1953;
Delhi: East West Publication, 1971); L’Ame d’une Gopi, trans. Lizelle Reymond
(Frameries, Belgium: Union des Imprimeries, 1935); Das Herz einer Gopi (Darmstadt:
Synergia/Syntropia, 1977); Het hart van een Gopi (Rotterdam: Synthese Uitgeverij,
1995).
3
See Inventory of the Catherine Murphy Urner Collection, [ca. 1910-ca. 1942],
Music Library, University of California, Berkeley: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/data/
13030/5x/tf0z09n55x/files/tf0z09n55x.pdf [Accessed 14 October 2012].
4
See, as examples, René Guénon, Studies in Hinduism, trans. Henry D. Fohr
(Hillsdale New York: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pp. 194–195; Lord Krishna: http://www.
ramdasstapes.org/krishna.htm [Accessed 14 October 2012]; The heart of a gopi:
http://board.georgeharrison.com/viewtopic.php?q=board/viewtopic.php&f=7&t=
4111 [Accessed 14 October 2012]; and Heart of a Gopi: http://www.blogcatalog.
com/blog/godwriting [Accessed 14 October 2012].
5
‘The Heart of a Gopi—The Screenplay’ [http://heartoagopi.org’, accessed 10
December 2009].  c 2008-2010.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 571
The ongoing interest in The Heart of a Gopi—right into the
twenty-first century—points to the success of this at least nominally
Muslim woman in having her spiritual writings accepted within other
religious traditions. With this achievement, we are reminded of other
individuals and communities in South Asian culture and history that
have inhabited the shifting ground between faith groups and thus
rejected an exclusively ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ (or, indeed, ‘Sikh’ or
‘Christian’) paradigm.6 Perhaps the most popular of these liminal
figures would be the fifteenth century poet and saint, Kabir. In
mocking both pandit and mullah, he rejected ritualistic forms of religion
as practiced in the mandir or the masjid, the temple or the mosque. It is
this trope of resistance to organized Hinduism or Islam that makes him
so important not only as a foundational figure within certain Sikh sects,
but also in the Bhakti movement with its emphasis on spontaneous
expressions of devotion, as directed at Rama or, especially, Krishna.7
One may also think of Sufi poets, like Bulleh Shah in eighteenth
century Punjab, who, to the extent of none before, absorbed ‘Hindu’
elements, including Krishnaite images, into his ‘Muslim’ devotional
poetry.8 Perhaps the best model here though, in that his ‘elegant and
impassioned verses in praise of Krishna’ did not just borrow ‘Hindu’
imagery, but, in the words of Rupert Snell, demonstrated a ‘complete
commitment to Vaishnava sentiments’, is the sixteenth century poet
Raskhan. Like Raihana, this Muslim Pathan’s ‘trascendental persona’

6
Two studies of such liminal communities in a historical context are: Dominique-
Sila Khan, Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia (London:
I.B. Tauris and Co, 2004); and Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the
Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a more
popular, contemporary study, though with a strong historical element, see Yoginder
Sikand, Shared Spaces: Exploring Traditions of Shared Faith in India (Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
7
On Kabir and the Bhakti movement more generally, see John Stratton Hawley,
Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas and Kabir in Their Time and Ours (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
8
My coverage of Bulleh Shah here draws on Anshu Malhotra, ‘Telling her Tale?
Unravelling a life in conflict in Peero’s IK Sau Sat.h Kāfiaṅ (one hundred and sixty kafis)’,
The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46:4 (2009), p. 572–573, but, for a more
comprehensive discussion, see Denis Matringe, ‘Krsnaite and Nath Elements in the
Poetry of the Eighteenth Century Panjabi Sufi Bulhe Sah’ in R. S. McGregor (ed.),
Devotional Literature in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
pp. 190–206. On ‘shared philosophical beliefs and imageries’ between the Bhakti
and Sufi movements more generally, see Bruce Lawrence, ‘The Sant Movement and
North Indian Sufis’ in Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod (eds), The Sants: Studies in
a Devotional Tradition of India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), pp. 359–373.
572 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

was that of a gopi endowed with such ‘urgent passion’ that his devotion
to Krishna is conceived as ‘conversion’.9
Yet The Heart of a Gopi is not just of interest as an example of ‘crossing
the threshold’, to borrow the phrase of Dominique-Sila Khan.10 It
also attracts interest as part of a literary and historical project of
theorizing the relationship between gender, history and the self.
Historians of South Asia have been at the forefront of those scholars
going beyond conventional autobiography to examine the diverse ways
in which individuals—including those from marginalized groups and
pre-modern societies—have found means for self-fashioning and self-
representation.11 To draw out women’s conceptualizations of self has
proved more difficult within the specific cultural conventions and
constraints of a society that privileges the silencing of female voices—
to the point that Gayatri Spivak has asserted that the South Asian
woman has no real ‘voice’.12 And yet, where the effort has been made
for recovery, it has pointed to the creative ways in which women have
been able to narrate their life stories, or at least aspects of them,
by ‘negotiating’ with entrenched gender ideologies to manipulate the
specific cultural resources at their command.13 As Anshu Malhotra
writes of the recusant Peero’s 160 Kafis, this may be a ‘convoluted
and metaphorical path’ to ‘unfold[ing] one’s own drama’, but it
still represents ‘careful self-fashioning’ in a ‘universe comprehended
through emulation, allegory and allusion’.14
Raihana Tyabji left to history not a memoir per se, but, rather
enigmatically, a few letters, some recordings, a couple of thin books
in Hindi, plenty of memories and reminiscences, and The Heart of a
Gopi. To be considered in this paper is how far this piece of bhakti
devotionalism may still be read as a personal narrative, an evocation

9
Rupert Snell, ‘Raskhān the Neophyte: Hindu Perspectives on a Muslim Vishnava’
in Christopher Shackle (ed.) Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph
Russell (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 29–37. For particular quotes, see
pp. 29, 32, 34. My thanks to Sunil Sharma for this reference.
10
Khan, Crossing the Threshold.
11
As an example, see David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Telling Lives in
India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
12
See Gayatri Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in
Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society IV
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 330–363.
13
Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Gender and Society 2 (1988),
pp. 274–298.
14
Malhotra, ‘Telling her Tale?’, pp. 544–545, 566.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 573
of the self. A starting point will be to gain some insight into Raihana’s
personhood by piecing together some biographical information about
her life from family papers, interviews, the national archive and her
own writings. Her recourse to bhakti as a trope of the liminal self
will then be considered. Does the referencing of a great tradition
give the author’s feelings and experiences, especially as a nominal
Muslim devoted to Krishna at a time of increasingly religious rigidity
and communal strife, a kind of validity not achievable otherwise?
The third section considers the text itself within the context of the
gopi tradition. Is it possible—and, if so, how—to separate out the
author’s ‘self’ from the literary conventions that structure the story?
In conclusion, the paper will ask if, in the tradition of Islamic life-
writing, the gap between the miraculous and the mundane can be
breached in order to understand the mystical experience charted here
as a kind of autobiography? Even from the rationalist’s perspective,
should not the life of the imagination still be considered part of the
life?

Raihana’s personhood

So, who is Raihana Tyabji? As her surname may suggest, she was born
into the prominent Tyabji clan that was at the forefront of Bombay’s
Sulaimani Bohra community in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Her father, Abbas Tyabji (1853–1936), was the grandson
of the clan’s founder, Tyab Ali (also known as Tyabji Bhoymeeah),
through his father, Shamsuddin. Though Abbas was first married
to his elder paternal uncle Camruddin’s daughter, Ashraf-un-Nissa
(with whom he had two sons), upon her death he married Ameena
Begum, eldest daughter of the Tyabji clan’s perhaps most famous son
(and Abbas’s younger paternal uncle), Badruddin (1844–1906). With
his second wife, Abbas produced four children (one son and three
daughters), including Raihana (1901–1975). The family was based,
not in Bombay like most other Tyabjis, but instead in the princely state
of Baroda in Gujarat, ruled in Raihana’s youth by the larger-than-life
figure of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III (1863–1939, ruled 1875–1939).
In 1879, the maharaja, or at least his dewan, was responsible for
appointing the then young Abbas, who had fairly recently returned
from studying law in London, to Baroda’s judicial service. By 1885,
Abbas had risen to the top of this service as a judge of the Baroda high
574 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

court, a position that he retained until his retirement in 1913.15 In

Baroda, Ameena too distinguished herself, not just as a hostess and a
companion to the maharani (including on a trip to Europe in 1894),
but also as an educationalist. Specifically, she oversaw the Muslim
girls’ school established by the maharaja at her encouragement in the
mid 1890s.16
According to Abbas’s recent biographer, Ameena should also be
attributed with involving her husband and children with India’s pre-
eminent nationalist leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, soon
after his return from South Africa in 1915. Seemingly, she had ‘great
respect and affection’ for the Mahatma-to-be having known him since
the early 1890s when her esteemed father, Badruddin, himself a
president of the Indian National Congress in 1887, had befriended the
unknown lawyer before he left Bombay for Natal.17 Abbas too had been
a member of Congress from its establishment in 1885, even attending
the historic sessions held in 1889, 1906 and 1907, but always, in
his own words, as a representative of the ‘Moderates’ committed to
achieving concessions for the Indian population by working with the
British government.18 A first meeting with Gandhi at an elegant party
in Bombay in 1915 did not change his views, instead leaving him ‘not
particularly impressed’.19 The following year, however, ties between
Abbas’s family and Gandhi were firmed up when Ameena arranged
for her brother, Salman, to invite Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba,
to dinner, before they all visited the couple at their own home the
next day.20 Sometime later that year, Abbas’ and Gandhi’s budding
friendship seems to have blossomed when both stayed with Ameena’s
youngest sister, Safia, and her husband, Jabir Ali, at their home in
Tavoy in Burma.21 In time, Abbas—referred to within the context of
the nationalist movement as the ‘Grand Old Man of Gujarat’—was to

15
On Abbas’s judicial career, see Aparna Basu, Abbas Tyabji (New Delhi: National
Book Trust, India, 2007), pp. 24–42.
16
On this school, see Basu, Abbas, pp. 34–36. On Ameena Tyabji’s experiences in
Europe, I consulted a transcript of a speech delivered by her at the family ladies’ club,
Akdé Suraya, on 22 August 1904. It is kept in the private collection of Rafia Abdul
Ali in Mumbai.
17
Basu, Abbas, pp. 43–44.
18
Ibid., pp. 50, 53.
19
Ibid., p. 43.
20
Ibid., p. 44.
21
Safia Jabir Ali, ‘Manuscript Memoirs of Mrs Safia Jabir Ali’, in Badruddin Tyabji
Family Papers VI, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 575
become one of Gandhi’s most dedicated lieutenants, even leading the
famous Dandi salt march after Gandhi’s arrest and being jailed for his
political activism.22
If the occasion was the same as the party referred to above, the
teenage Raihana was rather more drawn to the saintly Gandhi on
their first meeting than was her father. As she recalled in an interview
with Ved Mehta at some point in the 1970s:
I caught a glimpse of him in the midst of silks and brocades, frills and sparkling
jewels. He was dressed in a coarse khadi dhoti and looked like a small-time
tailor who’d wandered in by mistake. I lost my heart to him. He became my
father, my mother, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my daughter, my son, my
teacher, my guru.23
In subsequent weeks, the rising politician and the cosseted young girl
sought one another out at a number of other parties in Bombay and
then privately, quickly establishing what Raihana described as a ‘very
intimate’ relationship that was to last until the Mahatma’s tragic
end.24 Their amity is evident in that his Collected Works contain over 80
epistles from Gandhi to Raihana over the 20-year period from 1927
to 1947—and these appear to be only a fraction of their original
correspondence. Indeed, Gandhi’s diary suggests that he actually
wrote to her at least every couple of weeks and sometimes as often as
twice a week, especially from prison.25 Unfortunately, we do not have
Raihana’s side of the exchange beyond a few extracts in published
articles; as Gandhi explained to her in a letter from 1927, ‘I destroy
all your letters after replying’.26 Still, one gets a good sense of their
familiarity and fondness for one another in that Gandhi addressed

22
On this, see Basu, Abbas, pp. 67–74.
23
Quoted in Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penquin Books, 1976), p. 211. For another account of their first meeting,
see the interview with Raihana Tyabji in Usha Thakkar and Jayshree Mehta (eds),
Understanding Gandhi: Gandhians in Conversation with Fred J Blum (Delhi: Sage, 2011),
p. 158–160.
24
Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, p. 160.
25
See, as an example, ‘Diary, 1932’, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
Online: http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html [Accessed 15 October 2012]
[subsequently CWMGO]. From Gandhi’s letters, we know too that, at the least, he
began reading The Heart of a Gopi in its first incarnation as a ‘Gopi’s diary’ before
leaving it for the Bardoli satyagraha in 1928. Sadly, there is no record of his opinion
other than that he considered it ‘quite good news’ to hear that it was to be first
published in the mid-1930s. See letter to Abbas Tyabji, 4 August 1928; and letter to
Raihana Tyabji, 30 January 1934.
26
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 12 July 1927, CWMGO. For an example of a published
extract, see ‘Position of Women’, Young India, 17 October 1929, CWMGO.
576 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

Raihana affectionately, if unusually, as ‘Raihana the Crazy’ or, more

conventionally, as ‘beloved daughter’, and often finished his letters
with ‘a slap’ if not ‘a kiss’.27
It is perhaps no wonder then that Raihana was inspired to become,
in her own words, one of ‘Bapu’s brahmachari soldiers’.28 Reflected
here was her decision not to marry, but instead to live according to
Gandhi’s principles while serving the nationalist cause. According to
family sources, her commitment to celibacy was made after a possible
engagement to a first cousin was broken, perhaps on account of her
father’s concerns about the medical effects of intermarriage within
families (discussed in more detail below) or perhaps on account of
her skin condition, a pigment deficiency known as leucoderma, that
took the form of white patches all over her body.29 Interestingly, this
medical condition gave Raihana an aura of exceptionalism that led
one Tyabji descendant, quite approvingly, to describe her as ‘more
than normal’: one who ‘knew so much more than we do’.30 Yet
Raihana’s poor health often left her bedridden and sometimes in
need of medical intervention (including an operation on her displaced
nasal septum in 1930).31 Her body’s fragility thus interfered with
her ‘public work’ at least until the early 1930s—a cause of great
frustration, if Gandhi’s letters to her on the subject are anything to
go by.32 Still, she was responsible for acting as president of the Youth
League (or Yuvak Sangh) in Baroda in the late 1920s,33 picketing
liquor shops and fasting against foreign cloth merchants during the
Civil Disobedience Movement of the early 1930s,34 and serving as a
trustee of the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust in the mid

27
See, as examples, letters to Raihana Tyabji, 25 January 1931, 1 October 1932,
23 January 1933 and 14 August 1941, CWMGO.
28
Mehta, Mahatma, p. 211.
29
Mark Devereux, ‘The Early Tyabji Women’ from Retroblog of Najm
Tyabji (1930+): http://nstyabji.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/the-early-tyabji-women/
[Accessed 15 October 2012]; and interview with Salima Tyabji, New Delhi, 3 February
2006.
30
Interview with Rafia Abdul Ali, Bombay, 16 December 2005.
31
See, as examples, letters to Raihana Tyabji, 29 December 1930 and 25 April
1945, CWMGO.
32
See, as an example, letter to Raihana Tyabji, 20 June 1932, CWMGO.
33
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 10 October 1928, CWMGO; Thakkar and Mehta,
Understanding Gandhi, p. 204.
34
Letters to Raihana Tyabji, 11 April 1930 and 25 January 1931; Draft Letter to
Viceroy, 27 April 1930; and ‘What Should One Not Do?’, Navajivan, 1 March 1931,
CWMGO; Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, p. 202.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 577
1940s.35 During the Quit India movement, she was even imprisoned
on at least two occasions for participating in banned processions.36
Hence, Gandhi was inspired to write of her in Navajivan: ‘Raihana,
poor cripple, spends her days and nights thinking of India only.’37 To
Raihana herself, he opined: ‘What a strange girl you are! You fall ill,
return home, go out again to work and again fall ill. What wonderful
enthusiasm [for] the cause!’38
Though generally resident at her parents’ home in Baroda (where
she appears to have written The Heart of a Gopi), Raihana often visited
Gandhi’s ashram at Sevagram and, a year after her mother’s death
in 1940, settled at Wardha with two of Gandhi’s other disciples, D.
B. Kalelkar (popularly known as Kakasaheb) and Sarojini Nanavati
(shortened to Saroj). Raihana seems to have met the latter, the
daughter of Judge D. D. Nanavati, while doing some sort of work at
the Oriental Research Institute in Pune in 1932, and the two had soon
become inseparable.39 As Gandhi wrote to Saroj 14 years later, ‘May
your devotion to service go on increasing and Raihana’s with yours,
or yours with Raihana’s. You may be separate in body, but are not
you one in spirit?’.40 In Wardha, Raihana also became very involved
alongside Kalelkar in an organization to advance Hindustani as a
national language for India, the Hindustani Prachar Sabha.41 This
cause was perhaps surprising in the light of her earlier preference
for English, Urdu and even Gujarati—and all the more so because
Gandhi’s letters and articles on the subject indicate that Raihana was
‘rigidly’ in favour of Hindustani being written in the Nagari script
only (rather than the Urdu script as well). Apparently, she felt that
the latter encouraged a ‘separatist tendency’ among Indian Muslims.42
After independence, Raihana, Saroj and Kalelkar relocated to a house
in Gandhi’s ashram in Delhi from where Raihana dedicated her latter
years to offering spiritual guidance as comfort to those with mental

35
Draft of Power-of-Attorney, 1 April 1945, CWMGO.
36
Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, p. 172, 183, 237.
37
‘The Spirit of Raas’, Navajivan, 27 April 1930, CWMGO.
38
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 25 January 1931, CWMGO.
39
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 28 June 1932, CWMGO.
40
Letter to Saroj Nanavati, 1 October 1946, CWMGO.
41
Proceedings of the Hindustani Prachar Sabha Meeting, Wardha, 16 February
1946, CWMGO.
42
‘Hindustani Written in Nagari Only’, Harijan, 9 November 1947; and letter to
Raihana Tyabji, 30 November 1947, CWMGO.
578 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

difficulties.43 Part of the service, it seems, was to recount the past

incarnations of visitors as she ‘saw’ them.44
In the context of Gandhian mythology, the Muslim-born Raihana is
attributed with having taught Urdu to the Mahatma and for having
encouraged him to incorporate verses from the Qur’an into his prayer
meetings—two contributions that are well-documented in Gandhi’s
Collected Works.45 Feminist scholars also sometimes point to the way
in which Raihana influenced Gandhi’s writings on women’s rights.46
In a piece in Young India from 1929, to take just one example of
the evidence, Gandhi quoted a long passage from one of Raihana’s
letters in which, in the context of debates over the Sarda Act (or
Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929), she expressed her support for
raising the minimum age of marriage for girls to 18 (rather than 14)
and asserted women’s rights to inheritance.47 What Raihana is best
remembered for, however, is the bhajans, or devotional songs associated
with the Bhakti movement, that she sang at the commencement of
meetings at the ashram or on tour with Gandhi and even at annual
sessions of the Congress.48 On this account, many around Raihana
apparently considered her to be a ‘reincarnation of the legendary
Mirabai’, a reference to the sixteenth century songstress and Krishna
devotee that will also resonate with contemporary readers.49 Gandhi’s
love of Raihana’s singing is recorded in many of his letters to her. As
he wrote to her from jail in 1932, ‘The bhajan you have sent will seem
good only when I can hear it sung, and that can be when you come and

43
For two separate accounts of these spiritual services offered by Raihana in her
later years, see Devereux, ‘Early Tyabji Women’; and Mehta, Mahatma, p. 3.
44
See ‘letters concerning past incarnations’ from Raihana Tyabji to Mary
Cushing Niles, 1954–71, in Niles Family Papers, RG 5/ 267, Friends Historical
Library of Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania: http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/
friends/ead/5267nile.xml [Accessed 15 October 2012].
45
For an example of the secondary literature, see Gandhiji’s Associates in
India: http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/gandhicomesalive/comesalive_associates_
india.htm#Tyabji,%20Raihana [Accessed 15 October 2012]. On Raihana’s Urdu
lessons and the Qur’an at prayer meetings, see, as examples, letter to Devdas Gandhi,
11 May 1932; and ‘Speech at Prayer Meeting’, Sodepur, 8 December 1945, CWMGO.
46
Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, p. 40.
47
‘Position of Women’, Young India, 17 October 1929, CWMGO.
48
One particularly memorable performance at the Ahmedabad session of Congress
in 1921 was recalled in Anil Nauriya’s obituary of Raihana’s sister, Sohaila
Habib, ‘Memories of another Gujarat’: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/12/24/
stories/2002122400941000.htm [Accessed 15 October 2012]
49
Yasmin Lukmani, ‘The role played by the Tyabji women in the National
Movement’ in Nawaz B. Mody (ed.), Women in India’s Freedom Struggle (Mumbai: Allied,
2000), pp. 219–236. The page quoted here is p. 227.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 579
sing it to me’.50 It is perhaps not surprising then that Raihana, along
with her father Abbas and niece Hamida, was one of the chosen few
permitted by Gandhi to see him in jail—his explanation being that
they were ‘like blood relations to me’.51
More racy accounts of Gandhi and Raihana highlight their shared
interest in Tantric practices. This sexual fixation was alluded to by
Raihana herself when, in her interview with Ved Mehta, she referred
to brahmacharya experiments (which involved sleeping naked with
members of the opposite sex) that later inspired Gandhi’s own.52
This strange juxtaposition of eroticism and celibacy is something that
emerges in Gandhi’s correspondence with Raihana as well. On one
occasion, he referred to her as a ‘stranger to sensuous passion’.53 And
yet, on another, he offered sympathy in response to a letter in which she
had clearly unburdened herself about the difficulties of ‘discipline’—
before admitting that he too was not ‘too pure for sex-consciousness’.54
Much later in life, Raihana explained in her interview with Blum that
she had come not to accept the principle of brahmacharya as practiced
by Gandhi. ‘Abstinence in an army’, she explained ‘was a necessity’,
but ‘abstinence must not be made the rule of life for everybody’. Their
point of departure seemed to be Gandhi’s insistence on celibacy within
marriage—an idea that, in her opinion, contradicted the ‘sacredness
of the marital relationship’. From her experience of watching others,
she had come to believe that a man who practiced abstinence would
become a ‘sadist’: someone who would be ‘violent on the mental or
emotional plane’.55
Accounts of Gandhi’s closest associates thus cannot avoid
mentioning Raihana. In characterizing her religious allegiances and
identities, however, the depictions are varied. Sometimes she is
recognized as a ‘devout Krishna bhakt’, or devotee, though ‘born in a
Muslim family’.56 Elsewhere, she is described as a ‘devout Muslim’, but

50
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 4 April 1932, CWMGO.
51
Letter to R. V. Martin, Yeravda Mandir, 8 July 1930, CWMGO.
52
Mehta, Mahatma, p. 5. For just one example of the former, see Nicholas F.
Gier, ‘Was Gandhi a Tantric?’: http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/gandtantric.htm
[Accessed 15 October 2012].
53
Letter to Abbas Tyabji, 12 September 1934, CWMGO.
54
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 18 June 1931, CWMGO.
55
Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, pp. 175–176.
56
‘Gandhiji’s Associates in India’: http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/
gandhicomesalive/comesalive_associates_india.htm#Tyabji,%20Raihana [Accessed
15 October 2012].
580 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

‘with respect for all religions’.57 Ved Mehta, on the other hand, opens
his section on her in the oft-quoted Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
with: ‘By birth and upbringing she is a Sufi Muslim, and by inclination
and choice a Vishnuite Hindu.’58 In many ways, these divergent
descriptions reflect Gandhi’s own attempts to account for his disciple
before different audiences. To a Muslim challenger questioning his
inclusion of Qur’anic passages in prayer meetings at the height of
communal conflict in January 1947, Raihana, as the instigator of
the practice, was a ‘devoted Muslim with a religious mind’.59 In
a speech to Muslim women in Patna less than two months later
though, she was ‘a devotee of Krishna’ who ‘reads the Gita and the
Koran together’: a model for ‘girls’ to give up ‘distinctions of caste
and creed’.60 To Raihana herself and her father Abbas, her spiritual
practices were referred to as those of a ‘mystic’ who should be left to
‘[sing] away in praise of Allah the Good and the Benevolent’.61 On
other occasions, Gandhi referred to her as a ‘reader of the Gita’, and
noted her correspondence with the Bengali musician, Dilip Kumar
Roy, on theories ‘about Krishna’.62
In contrast, contemporary Tyabjis now tend to depict her as a Sufi, or
at least ‘influenced by Sufism’, seemingly in an attempt to contain her
unusual religious beliefs and activities within the Muslim fold.63 This
characterization resonates with Raihana’s own account of her spiritual
practice in her interview with Blum in 1973 in which she asserted:
The Sufi is quite different from the Mussalman. I am Sufi. I don’t call myself
Mussalman because I don’t believe in and do not belong to the Mussalman
sect. But I am Islamic, in that I accept whole-heartedly the blessed tenets of
Islam, and the way that I live my way of living, is that of a Muslim monastery.64

And yet, earlier in the same interview, she had accounted for differ-
ences with Gandhi over the importance of ahimsa, or non-violence,

57
V. Ramamurthy, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last 200 Days (Chennai: The Hindu, 2003),
p. 41.
58
Mehta, Mahatma, p. 207.
59
Speech at Prayer Meeting, 29 January 1947, CWMGO.
60
Advice to Muslim Women, Patna, 16 March 1947, CWMGO.
61
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 5 September 1934; and letter to Abbas Tyabji, 20
September 1934, CWMGO.
62
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 19 December 1927; and letter to Dilip Kumar Roy,
17 June 1936, CWMGO.
63
Interview with Rafia Abdul Ali, Bombay, 16 December 2005; Interview with
Salima Tyabji, Delhi, 3 February 2006; Basu, Abbas, p. 21.
64
Thakkar and Mehta, Understanding Gandhi, p. 217.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 581
in terms of her preference for a ‘middle path’: one that was ‘both of
the Gita and of the Koran’.65 On other occasions, the balance swung in
the opposite direction in that she portrayed herself as ‘80% Hindu’,
‘though born a Muslim’, on account of believing in karma and samsara,
or the cycle of birth and rebirth.66 This representation rings true with
comments made during her interview with Mehta (carried out not
long before her death) during which she made a number of references
to his and her ‘previous incarnations’.67 In that she also described
Lord Krishna appearing and speaking to her (even in the course of
the interview), one may assume that—however her religious identity
was constructed by her and others—the passion aroused in the course
of ‘writing’ The Heart of a Gopi in the 1920s did not leave her.68 What
this recourse to bhakti reveals in terms of self-representation will be
explored in the following section.

The recourse to bhakti

According to Raihana, she had no role in crafting the story that came
through her hand. As she specified from the outset with the certainty
of any life writer depicting their outpouring as ‘truth-telling’, ‘the
truth is that this story is not mine except in that it has been written
by this hand.’ She went on: ‘During the three days that it took to
write I had a distinct sensation of being possessed by something
from outside myself and of being compelled to write even in spite
of myself’.69 Her abdication of responsibility for writing smacks of
a ‘convention of passivity’ within the long tradition of writing life
stories and journeys with Islam by which no suitably modest author
should really be seen to be writing on his or her own initiative.70
Barbara Metcalf has pointed to this phenomenon with reference to
the hajj narrative of Pakistani novelist, Mumtaz Mufti. He records
that he wrote about ‘what happened in Mecca’, though ‘not knowing

65
Ibid., p. 179.
66
Basu, Abbas, p. 20.
67
Mehta, Mahatma, p. 209.
68
Ibid., p. 211.
69
Tyabji, Heart, p. vi. Bold type in the original.
70
Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘What Happened in Mecca: Mumtaz Mufti’s “Labbaik”’ in
Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 149–167. The quote here comes from
p. 157.
582 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

what happened’, because ‘God grabbed him’.71 In this context, we may

debate how far it is appropriate to speak of choice per se in the form
of the story that Raihana told. Perhaps it is better to treat it simply
as part of that corpus of Islamic literature concerned with dreams
and visions, revelation and prophecy.72 And yet, within the religious
context in which she was writing, her recourse to the bhakti tradition—
so often associated with a rejection of religious authorities and the false
spirituality in which their rituals could trap the pious individual—
in itself seems highly revelatory of a liminal self caught between
increasingly monolithic conceptions of ‘Hinduness’ and ‘Muslimness’.
Of course, to seek a more personalized relationship with God by
depicting oneself as a female lover in relation to the divine, as
Raihana does in The Heart of a Gopi, is not exclusive to the bhakti
tradition. In devotional poetry and music associated with Sufi Islam,
whether sufiana-kalam, qawalli or the ghazal—the poetic voice is often
indeterminate or female, addressing a beloved representative of the
divine that may also be of indeterminate gender or identifiably male
or even female.73 There is even a story—though not substantiated
by Urdu or Persian sources—of the fourteenth century poet, Amir
Khusrau, posing as a female lover before his pir, Shaikh Nizamuddin
Auliya, apparently during the Hindu spring festival of colour, Holi.74
The trope is one of longing to be united with the cruel and fickle lover
from whom the devotee experiences painful separation. Here we may
quote a line from early in Raihana’s text to draw a parallel: ‘That
Krishna seems to be a wonderful being! Who he is, what he does,
where he lives, where he is now, all this [is] a complete mystery. . .this
Krishna, is he, too, full of colour, full of light, full of music? Ah, one
day I shall know’.75 Yet, as the last line suggests, whereas the highest
aspiration of the devotee within Sufic literature is to suffer in the face
of the beloved’s indifference, the gopi does not, ultimately, remain
apart from her God. Worth noting here too is that, while Raihana

71
Metcalf, ‘What Happened in Mecca’, p. 158–159.
72
On this sub-genre of Islamic literature, see Kate Brittlebank, ‘Piety and Power:
A Preliminary Analysis of Tipu Sultan’s Dreams’ in her edited volume, Tall Tales and
True: India, Historiography and British Imperial Imaginings (Victoria: Monash University
Press, 2008), pp. 31–41. My thanks to Andrea Major for this reference.
73
On the female voice in the Sufi tradition, see Shemeem Burney Abbas, The Female
Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional Practices in India and Pakistan (Austin, Texas: University
of Texas Press, 2003).
74
My thanks to Sunil Sharma for this anecdote.
75
Tyabji, Heart, pp. 10–11.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 583
demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the ghazal tradition in her
letters to Gandhi—often sending him favoured lyrics (for instance,
by Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’) in Urdu or Gujarati translation76 —it was
bhajans that, as noted previously, she chose to write and sing herself.
Raihana thus laid claim to a place within the bhakti tradition in an
act that may itself be read as self-representation.
It has been noted already that, by birth, Raihana was a Sulaimani
Bohra, a denomination of especial relevance in this context. The
Bohras were a sect of Ismaili Shiism originally established in Yemen,
but who probably came to Gujarat in western India at some point
in the thirteenth century. Over the centuries that followed, the
community experienced innumerable schisms with the Sulaimani
branch to which the Tyabjis belonged recognizing the leadership of a
different da’i, or spiritual leader, than others such as the Daudi Bohras
or the Jafari Bohras.77 In Crossing the Threshold, Dominique-Sila Khan
has explored the way in which Ismaili Islam in Gujarat especially
represented an ‘intricate interface’ between supposedly separate and
even antagonistic religious groupings in South Asia as represented
by the labels, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’.78 The ongoing openness of
Sulaimani Bohras to a range of different religious practices, even
at a time of growing communitarianism and intolerance, is evident
from those customs and attitudes recorded in the goodly stash
of autobiographical writings produced by different Tyabjis in the
twentieth century.79 Raihana herself wrote in her later book of
reminiscences, Suniye Kakasahib80 , of the ‘inter-communal culture’
within her childhood home in Baroda by which the family ‘celebrated
Diwali, Dussehra, Holi, Bhai duj, Nagpanchami, Utran (the kite festival),
Muharram, Id, Papeti (the Parsi New Year) and Christmas with equal

76
See, as an example, letter to Raihana Tyabji, 7 July 1932.
77
For a brief introduction to the Bohras, see Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic
Societies, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 377. For a more
comprehensive study, see Asghar Ali Engineer, The Bohras (New Delhi: Vikas, 1980).
78
Khan, Crossing the Threshold.
79
For just one example, see my discussion of Atiya Fyzee’s ‘openness, or at least
curiosity, to other religious faiths’ in her Zamana-i-tahsil in Siobhan Lambert-Hurley
and Sunil Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian
Britain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), Chapter 4.
80
R. Tyabji, Suniye Kakasahib (Wardha: Hindustani Pracher Sabhai, 1954),
quoted in Basu, Abbas.
584 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

enthusiasm’.81 Of her father, Gandhi wrote too: ‘His Islam had room
for all the great religions of the earth’.82
Nevertheless, by the time of Raihana’s birth in 1901, the Tyabjis
as a family group were, as Khan terms it, ‘creating orthodoxies’83 —in
the sense that they were seeking to prove their Islamic credentials
in a number of different ways. One method was the jettisoning of
the clan’s mother tongue of Gujarati for the north Indian lingua
franca of Urdu by family decree in 1859.84 Another was through the
establishment or patronage of Islamic organizations associated with
a broader movement of socio-religious reform—a prominent example
being the Anjuman-i-Islam founded in Bombay in 1876.85 Yet another
method was intermarriage with more ‘mainstream’ Muslims, whether
Sunni or Shia, from other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Raihana’s
two older sisters, Shareefa and Sohela, for instance, were married,
not to cousins within the clan as was the usual Tyabji practice,
but instead to Hameed Ali, an officer in the Indian Civil Service,
and Muhammad Habib, a university professor at Aligarh Muslim
University.86 According to Theodore Wright Jr, these marriages were
less to do with hypergamy than exogamy after Abbas Tyabji read a book
on the ‘undesirable and inheritable physical traits’ that could result
from ‘too much inbreeding’ within a family.87 Still, when combined
with ‘Urduization’ and reformism, these marriages (and many others
besides) had the effect of tying the Tyabjis much more closely to what
Wright calls, the ‘old Mughal ruling class’88 —in other words, making
them more identifiably ‘Muslim’.
And yet, for all these efforts, there is no doubt that Raihana’s birth
community still retained a liminal status within South Asia’s complex
religious landscape during her lifetime. As evidence we may consider

81
Basu, Abbas, p. 41.
82
Basu, Abbas, p. 78.
83
Khan, Crossing the Threshold, Chaper 3.
84
On the Tyabji clan’s adoption of Urdu, see Marlen Karlitzky, ‘The Tyabji Clan—
Urdu as a Symbol of Group Identity’, Annual of Urdu Studies, vol. 17 (2002); Theodore
P. Wright, Jr’s ‘Muslim Kinship and Modernization: The Tyabji Clan of Bombay’
in Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Family, Kinship and Marriage among Muslims in India, Delhi:
Manohar, 1976), pp. 217–238, especially p. 227; and Lambert-Hurley and Sharma,
Atiya’s Journeys, Chapter 1.
85
On this organization, see Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and
Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 182–
192.
86
Basu, Abbas, pp. 20–21.
87
Wright, ‘Muslim Kinship and Modernization’, p. 229.
88
Ibid., p. 227.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 585
an incident recorded in her Suniye Kakasahib in connection with her
father. Apparently, having found the Jama Masjid in Baroda to be in
a poor state of repair, Abbas Tyabji decided to collect donations for
it to be renovated, perhaps sometime in the 1890s, in part from the
Muslim community and in part by securing a grant from the maharaja.
And yet, when the mosque was renewed, he was excluded from entry.
As Raihana records: ‘On the first Friday after the inauguration of
the mosque, when babajan [her father] together with some Sulemaini
Bohras went to offer namaz, the Sunnis said, “You cannot offer namaz
here. You are not Muslims.” They drove them out with lathis’ (sticks).89
Even as Abbas asserted his Islamic credentials with a great act of
piety, so he and his community were denied a place in the Muslim
fold. Raihana’s disgust at her father’s treatment, and by extension the
organized and dominant forms of Islam represented by the ‘Sunnis’
at the mosque, is plain from her response to this incident: ‘What
shameful behaviour to make such distinctions in the House of God!’.90
In the light of this past, both communitarian and familial, Raihana’s
recourse to bhakti as a means to tell her story makes much more
sense. The very form and practice allowed her to legitimize a sense
of self that was, not just at odds with increasingly rigid definitions of
religious identity, but actually embraced the inclusivity that had been
at the heart of the Sulaimani Bohra community and her own family’s
practice, at least until very recently. Of course, it is important to
recognize that the Bhakti movement too was undergoing a process of
solidification and sedentarization in this period.91 An effect of this new
orthodoxy, in a point of especial relevance for the next section, was
that bhakti was increasingly purged of its eroticism—to the point that
the nineteenth century Bengali mystic, Ramakrishna, though willing
to dress up as a woman to replicate being a gopi before Krishna (a
practice known as madhura bhava), often equated sex with defecation.92
Still, for the Muslim-born Raihana, bhakti’s connotation, even more
than that of Sufism, must have been that of a rejection of a formulaic
and exclusionary paradigm in favour of a celebration of her inherited

89
Basu, Abbas, p. 36–37.
90
Ibid., p. 37.
91
On this process, see Peter Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious
Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1989); and Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times’
in his Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 282–357. My
thanks to Oliver Godsmark for raising this point during my seminar in Leeds.
92
Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga’, p. 313.
586 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

and inherent liminality. How and why she then used the gopi tradition
specifically to tell her particular story will be explored in the following
section.

Using the gopi tradition

Those familiar with the Islamic context will know that it boasts a
long tradition of recording life stories quite apart from the Western
biographical and autobiographical tradition. From the time of the
Prophet Muhammad himself, ‘narrations’ of an exemplary life—
whether scholar, saint, poet or king—were used to didactic purpose:
as a model for ‘ordinary’ Muslims. Distinctive to this literary heritage
were a number of specific features, not least a humoral understanding
of personality, a lack of chronology, an attention to moral lessons,
a rejection of individual agency and an emphasis on relationships
with others.93 Until the nineteenth century it was rare for women to
participate in the genre, but not entirely unheard of.94 The onslaught
of colonialism accompanied by the introduction of print culture to the
Indian subcontinent was still, however, transformative on Muslims
writing lives. It inspired, in Francis Robinson’s words, a ‘growth of
self-consciousness and reflective habit’ among South Asian Muslims,
male and female, represented in one form at least by a proliferation of
life-writing.95 Increasingly, Muslims from all walks of life wrote more
and different autobiographies in which the emphasis was less on the
‘Perfect Man’ of the Sufi tradition (to borrow Robinson’s formulation
once again) and more on the ‘perfect person’: ‘the manifold nature of
the human individual’ or, more simply put, the self.96
The Tyabji clan offers an excellent case in point, starting with
the dynasty’s founder. Having established himself as a prosperous
cotton merchant in a Bombay flourishing under East India Company

93
This summary is based on Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘The Past in the Present:
Instruction, Pleasure and Blessing in Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya’s Aap Biitii’
in Arnold and Blackburn, Telling Lives in India, pp. 116–143. Relevant pages are
pp. 119–121.
94
For a South Asian example, see Ruby Lal’s discussion of Gulbadan Begam’s
Humayun-nama in Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
95
Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2000), pp. 95, 115.
96
Robinson, Islam, p. 95.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 587
rule, Tyab Ali recorded his ‘rags to riches’ story in an autobiography
that offered important inspiration to his many descendants.97
Subsequently, an inordinate number of individual Tyabjis narrated
their lives, or fragments of them, in memoirs, autobiographies and
travel accounts that date from the nineteenth century to the present.98
Among them were a significant number of women. Two out of three
daughters of the first generation of the Fyzee branch of the clan, to
take a representative example, published full-length travelogues—or,
more properly, travel diaries (roznamchah)—in which they recounted
their journeys, physical and metaphorical, to Britain, Europe and West
Asia in the Edwardian era.99 The clan’s various branches also kept
unusual family diaries, known as Akhbar ki Kitab (or ‘news-books’),
in which public and private events, quotidian and otherwise, were
recorded. Women especially were urged to contribute, and thus it is
not surprising that it was here that Raihana’s mother, Ameena, wrote
a short account of her life that was later published in a prominent
women’s magazine.100 Her father, Abbas, too kept a personal diary in
which he recorded earlier incidents revelatory of his adult self.101
For Raihana then there was no shortage of autobiographical models
close at hand. Hers was not so much a problem, as Malhotra writes of
Peero living in nineteenth century Punjab, of finding a way to write
about her life in a ‘society unfamiliar with the self-absorption required
of an autobiography’.102 And yet, for her first foray into public self-
representation—if we may interpret it as that—Raihana explicitly
chose not to write a memoir, nor even a travelogue. Instead, she
elected, like many women before her, to employ a familiar narrative
form—in this case, the devotional mode of bhakti associated with
the gopi tradition—as a means of writing about her feelings and
experiences. We might draw a parallel here with the way in which

97
Ali, Asaf A. A. (ed.), ‘The Autobiography of Tyabji Bhoymeeah’, Journal of Asiatic
Society of Bombay (New Series), vol. 36–7 (1961–2).
98
For a well-known example by a male Tyabji, see Badruddin Tyabji, Memoirs of an
Egoist, 2 vols (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1988).
99
Nazli Rafia Sultan Nawab Begam Sahiba, Sair-i-Yurop (Lahore: Union Steam
Press, n.d.); and Atiya Fyzee, Zamana-i-tahsil (Agra: Matba‘ Mufid-i-‘Am, 1921). For
a translation and commentary on the latter, see Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya’s
Journeys.
100
‘A Page from the Past: Extracts from the Diary of Amina Binte Badruddin
Tyabji’, Roshni (Delhi), Special number 1946, pp. 69–73.
101
Abbas Tyabji’s diaries are now preserved in the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library.
102
Malhotra, ‘Telling Her Tale?’, p. 555.
588 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

women throughout South Asian history have used epic, including

the Ramayana, and the afflicted Sita especially, to narrate their own
suffering.103 This narrative strategy could be interpreted as a means
of drawing a metaphorical veil over women’s voices—not meant to be
heard in the South Asian context—while, at the same time, endowing
their individual experiences with a kind of validity not achievable
otherwise. Where then may we find Raihana’s ‘self’ in her little book
of bhakti devotionalism so firmly located with the gopi tradition? And
what was she trying to relate that she could not say otherwise? What
did the gopi tradition offer specifically that other readily available
models of life-writing did not?
As a starting point, it is important to note that, in many ways, The
Heart of a Gopi follows conventional, even formulaic, patterns. Great
importance is invested in the devotee, Raihana’s alter-ego Sharmila,
gaining a vision of the deity, a darshan that cannot help but fill her
with ‘nameless ecstasy’.104 As she exults in the latter stages of the
narrative, ‘before my eyes that incarnation of divine beauty began
to shine with greater and with greater brilliance, until there stood
before me a Form made, from head to foot, purely of dazzling blue
light. . .’.105 There is also that ‘literal and realistic interaction’, to
borrow Snell’s phrase, between the devotee and the deity himself.106
Sharmila, like the best of gopis, spends her days frolicking with the
other milkmaids and the child Krishna, partaking in his pranks,
revelling in his mischief.107 She is driven into a frenzy by the sound of
his ‘Celestial Flute’, loses her earrings (if, notably, not her sari) in this
state of ‘madness’, and even allows her husband’s supper to be pilfered
while in a state of having ‘lost all consciousness of self’.108 Her sister-in-
law, representing society’s censure of a married woman disregarding
‘normal social roles’, chastises her for her impropriety—for following
Radha and the other ‘vile’ gopis into forgetting ‘their vows and their

103
My thanks to Veena Oldenburg for encouraging me to draw out this point. It
has been developed in: Velcheru N. Rao, ‘A Ramayan of their Own: Women’s Oral
Tradition in Telegu’ in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Tradition
in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 114–136.
104
Tyabji, Heart, p. 57.
105
Ibid.
106
Snell, ‘Raskhān’, p. 32.
107
See the section entitled ‘Two weeks later’ in Tyabji, Heart, pp. 62–69.
108
Tyabji, Heart, pp. 30, 47, 53. For comparison with the early gopi tradition,
see David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious
Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 83–85.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 589
Pati Vrata’ by chasing after Krishna.109 And yet, ultimately, it is those
moments in which Sharmila’s earthly soul submits to Krishna’s grace
that represent, as one would expect, the pinnacle of the narrative.
‘The world hath been flung off like a soiled garment, I am clad in the
shining robes of Bhakti, pure white, gleaming as a white pigeon’s wing
in sunlight!. . .I come, my lord, I come!’.110
To find self-representation then one must look beyond the
convention outlined here to the level of emphasis and innovation
within this particular telling of the gopi story. We may ask: in what
ways, however subtle, does Raihana’s account diverge from the gopi
formula? Is there a sense in which Sharmila is not the average gopi? If
so, in what ways and in which contexts? And what do these ways and
contexts tell us about Raihana’s decision to use the gopi tradition to
narrate her own story, her own self? Did the gopi tradition open up
avenues for self-representation and perhaps even self-fulfilment not
achievable otherwise? To begin answering these questions, let us take
two examples of distinctive themes within the narrative—one relating
to social status and the other to erotic mysticism—that help illustrate
the way in which the self may be revealed in this type of text, and also
the reasons why.
The first theme that stands out as distinct in Raihana’s telling of
the gopi story relates to the leaving behind of social status. Unlike
your usual milkmaid, Sharmila is located from the outset in social
terms as a ‘rich man’s beloved daughter’ who has been married off
hurriedly to a Gauli, a keeper of cattle, seemingly to protect her from
the ‘wrath of the King’.111 Whereas yesterday she was ‘clad in silk’,
today only a ‘red rag conceals [her] nakedness’.112 She sleeps on the
floor of a poor man’s hut when used to a palace, milks cows with the
other maidens when accustomed only to picking flowers, waits on the
‘father, mother, sisters’ of her low-caste husband rather than issuing
commands.113 She is ‘abased, humbled to the dust’.114 The resonance
with Raihana’s own experience of staying in Gandhi’s ashram seems
pronounced when set against her later account of arriving there with
her own personal commode. Displayed ‘royally’ on top of her luggage,

109
Tyabji, Heart, p. 24.
110
Ibid., pp. 51–2.
111
Ibid., pp. 1–2
112
Ibid., p. 1.
113
Ibid., pp. 1–2.
114
Ibid., p. 19.
590 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

it announced to all others that she, from her privileged background

among Bombay’s elite—a ‘spoilt girl’, as Gandhi characterized her in
1932115 —was incapable of ‘squatting over a trench latrine without
a proper seat’. ‘You can imagine how silly I felt’, she told Ved
Mehta, ‘how chastened’. And yet ‘because of Bapu’, Raihana went
on to explain, ‘I—like Sharmila enchanted by Krishna—learned to go
anywhere, sleep anyplace, eat anything’.116 Her autonomous self, we
come to see, takes form when removed from the social context.
In this connection, it is also worth noting that Raihana’s decision to
become a disciple of Gandhi was not uncontested. Though members of
the Tyabji clan are often celebrated now for their early and consistent
espousal of Gandhian ideals,117 we see from Gandhi’s Collected Works
that Raihana often found herself in conflict with her parents, Abbas
and Ameena Tyabji, over her chosen path. Throughout the late 1920s
and early 1930s, she wrote lengthy epistles—sadly, not preserved,
though they are referred to in Gandhi’s own correspondence—in which
she complained bitterly that they would not allow her, in Gandhi’s
words, ‘to wear whatever you like and to see or be seen by any friends
you like’.118 Indicated here is not a young woman’s tempestuous
assertion of false independence, but rather a political statement in
favour of spurning ‘Western facilities and contrivances’ in favour of
wearing khadi, or clothes made of homespun cloth, and meeting fellow
nationalists of different castes, classes and religions.119 In response,
Gandhi advised Raihana not to oppose her parents openly—not least
because they were ‘rulers of the household’ on whom she depended
for her ‘maintenance—but rather to ‘convince everybody around you
of the justice of your action’ through ‘gentle suggestions’.120 The Heart
of a Gopi may have fulfilled that very function in a suitably oblique
fashion.
A second theme emphasized in Raihana’s narrative is the expression
of love of the divine through the love of an individual. Despite
being chastised by her sister-in-law, Sharmila ultimately convinces
her alarmed husband and in-laws that her love of Krishna, though
expressed in highly eroticized, earthly terms, is acceptable on the

115
Letter to Dr Mohammad Alam, 26 November 1932, CWMGO.
116
Mehta, Mahatma, pp. 210–211.
117
Lukmani, ‘The role played by the Tyabji women in the National Movement’,
pp. 219–236.
118
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 12 July 1927, CWMGO.
119
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 14 and 19 July 1927, and 5 March 1930, CWMGO.
120
Letter to Raihana Tyabji, 12 July 1927, and 19 October 1929, CWMGO.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 591
basis that the love of a God and the love of a man may actually be
complementary. As Sharmila describes her attraction to her husband:
It is not thy body that I love, it is thy soul, and all the goodness, and sweetness,
and strength thereof. I love thee for thy strong manhood; for thy virtue; for thy
intellect; thy skill, thy tenderness; for thy simplicity, truth and steadfastness.
All of this, yea, every single one of these qualities, is Krishna! All, all is
Krishna! All is Krishna!121

The gopi tradition is, of course, by nature playful and erotic (regardless
of what Ramakrishna made of it). But the connection between the
intense passions described in The Heart of a Gopi and Raihana’s own
sexual experimentation, as referred to in the earlier section, seems
plain. Consider another quote from her later interview with Mehta: ‘I
often told Bapu that there was a great difference between repressing
libido and outgrowing it, and that the only way to outgrow it was to
give free rein to it—to indulge it and satiate it’.122 This, she explains,
is what she had done in previous incarnations—to the point that even
her skin condition was attributed to ‘recklessly indulging my sexual
appetite’.123 In alluding to Mehta’s own sexual conquests in a previous
life, she also grouped herself with other ‘passionate, romantic girls’.124
Though a brahmachari, Raihana’s self is revealed as sexual.
This second theme especially suggests why the young Raihana
may have chosen bhakti and the gopi tradition specifically as a
means of self-representation, rather than participating more explicitly
in the autobiographical tradition of her clan or Islamic societies
more generally—namely, it allowed her to circumvent prohibited
expressions of female sexuality. Contrary to popular perception,
Muslim women in South Asia have written autobiographically about
their sexual relations in the modern period. We might consider, as just
one early example, Nawab Shah Jahan Begam’s encyclopaedic manual
for women, Tahzib un-Niswan wa Tarbiyat ul-Insan, first published in
1889. Here, she used her own experiences with her first and second
husbands as illustration in a passage on women’s right to carnal
pleasure.125 Indicated by this example is that it was primarily in
a princely context that sexual matters were broached by female

121
Tyabji, Heart, p. 61.
122
Mehta, Mahatma, p. 211.
123
Ibid., p. 209.
124
Ibid., p. 211.
125
Shah Jahan Begam, Tahzib un-Niswan wa Tarbiyat ul-Insan (Women’s Reform, or
the Cultivation of Humanity) (Delhi: Matba‘i-Ansari, 1889).
592 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

memoirists—perhaps on account of the authors’ more elite status,

a more developed zenana culture or the relative autonomy of ‘native
states’.126 In reformist circles like those frequented by the Tyabjis,
autobiographical references to sexual matters were much scarcer,
most probably reflecting the greater influence of Victorian notions
of bourgeois sexuality. Certainly Raihana’s female cousins who wrote
life histories in a more conventional way were highly modest in their
approach—Atiya Fyzee not even alluding to her reputed affair with
the poet Iqbal, nor Nazli, the Begam of Janjira, to the problems in her
marriage, in their respective European travelogues.127
For Raihana The Heart of a Gopi seems to have offered a means
of justifying her unconventional lifestyle—her leaving behind of
the comforts associated with the Tyabji’s social status to live as
a brahmachari in one of Gandhi’s ashrams—while, at the same
time, allowing her to speak of a mystical path expressed through
earthly passion. By juxtaposing her individual telling of the gopi story
against later accounts of her own life, the seeming contradictions
of a brahmachari experimenting with Tantric practices and writing
in bhakti’s amorous mode are brought into sharp relief, but also, in
a way, resolved. We are given a sense of the innate tensions and
even conflict that must have played out in Raihana’s mind, if not her
body, between her innate desire for sexual indulgence and her vow
of celibacy: a sexualized self that she dare not articulate in a more
unambiguously autobiographical form. And yet, just as she writes so
convincingly of love without ever making explicit any amorous physical
encounter between Sharmila and Krishna, so the gopi persona seemed
to offer her an erotic outlet without consummation. Krishna—or
may we read Gandhi?—is Raihana/Sharmila’s salve: the promise of
spiritual fulfilment expressed as human desire, but without the actual
indulgence. We may recall here the quote from the second section in
which Raihana identified Gandhi not just as parent and teacher, but
also as companion and child. Appropriately then, at the end of her
tale, Sharmila is finally reunited with her husband, in-laws, parents
and sister in expressing a common devotion to Krishna. Together,
their hearts ‘thrilling with love’, they sing, ‘Jaya Krishna! Jaya, Jaya

126
I have developed this point as part of a separate paper on intimacy and sexuality
in Muslim autobiographical writing in South Asia, forthcoming.
127
Atiya, Zamana-i-Tahsil; and Nazli, Sair-i-Yurop. For an analysis of these silences,
see Lambert-Hurley and Sharma, Atiya’s Journeys, Chapter 2; and Delight and Disgust:
Gendered Encounters in the Travelogues of the Fyzee Sisters’ in On the Wonders of Land
and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing, eds. R. Micallef and Sunil Sharma, forthcoming.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 593
Krishna!’128 This mysticism is considered as a form of autobiography
to conclude.

The marvellous and the miraculous: conclusion

I first read The Heart of a Gopi in the personal collection of Salima

Tyabji, herself a descendant of Tyab Ali, at her home in Delhi. The
copy that she generously allowed me to peruse at her kitchen table
(while, memorably, drinking the most delicious cinnamon tea) had,
apparently, been presented by Raihana herself to Salima’s father,
Saif. In the back was a handwritten note, perhaps attributable to this
Cambridge-educated lawyer, then mathematician. ‘The only element
I personally dislike’, it read, ‘is that miraculous touches have been
used. But it is a habitual device with mystics and bhaktas of all times
and creeds. Some get so fond of the marvellous and the miraculous
they make it the dominant note in all they say or sing’.129 This most
eloquent scribble sums up, effectively, what might be the expected
response to this text from one rooted in a Western rational tradition.
How could Raihana have written this text, and yet not? Does she
seriously expect us to believe that she was ‘possessed’ for three days
during which she wrote things that even she ‘could not understand’?
How could she have been transformed into a gopi living in Vrindavan at
the feet of Krishna? Raihana herself recognized these likely misgivings
in her introduction to the text when she wrote: ‘I must risk being either
smiled or sniffed at by “rationalists” if I am to speak the truth here’.130
As a trained historian, it would be easy for me, too, to dismiss
The Heart of a Gopi as little more than a wild and creative tale
by a slightly barmy woman. And yet, whatever we may think of
it, Raihana believed it happened. In that way, it becomes a very
personal tale of her mystical experience, not so very different from
those highly individualized accounts written by Muslims on hajj, for
instance, in the modern period. We may think again here of Mumtaz
Mufti. Though a self-proclaimed ‘nominal Muslim’ laying claim to
a cosmopolitan intellectual inheritance, he experienced all sorts of
‘strange things’ in the course of his pilgrimage to Mecca—from

128
Tyabji, Heart, p. 74.
129
Ibid., inside back cover.
130
Ibid., p.vi
594 SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY

dreams indicating the future to idols (or bat) in the Ka’aba.131 Metcalf
points out that this ‘expanded sense of reality’ is only to be expected
from a text rooted in the long Urdu-Persianate tradition of writing
autobiography and biography.132 Here, as she writes, ‘the definition
of what is presented as part of life’s experience is very inclusive. Put
differently, magic is on the loose’.133 We may consider, as just one other
example, the hajj narrative of one of South Asia’s greatest Islamic
scholars, Shah Waliullah Dihlawi—‘in no sense a travelogue but
rather a compendium of visions and dreams’.134 Approached from this
perspective, Raihana’s little book of bhakti devotionalism—mediated
through a long tradition of Islamic life-writing—becomes as valid to
those interested in self-representation as any other more identifiably
autobiographical text.
The Heart of a Gopi then requires us to rethink what we actually
mean by autobiographical writing. Standard definitions of autobiography
elaborated by literary theorists in the context of a Euro-American
tradition have tended to celebrate the Enlightenment ideal of
the autonomous individual crafting his own life story—for the
hero is usually male—into a coherent, retrospective narrative as a
function of personality.135 The historical contingency and gendered
representation inherent to these definitions have encouraged a
number of post-modern and post-colonial theorists to jettison the
term ‘autobiography’ in favour of other monikers considered more
accepting of temporal and geographical diversity.136 Often preferred
in the South Asian context in that, in this mode, it is deemed more
inclusive of the heterogeneity of autobiographical practice is the term
‘life history’. As Arnold and Blackburn write in the introduction to their
important Telling Lives in India, they choose to employ ‘life histories’
to apply to their collection on the basis that it does not ‘privilege print

131
Metcalf, ‘What Happened in Mecca’, p. 149.
132
Ibid., p. 154.
133
Ibid., p. 152.
134
Ibid.
135
Consider, as an example, Philippe Lejeune’s definition, often considered
definitive even as his own work has belied it: ‘We call autobiography the retrospective
narrative in prose that someone makes of his own existence when he puts the principal
accent upon his life, especially upon the story of his own personality’. Translated
from his L’autobiographie en France (1971) in Robert Folkenflick (ed.), The Culture of
Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993), p. 13.
136
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives: Reading
Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 2nd edn.), p. 3.
 THE HEART OF A GOPI 595
over orality’, nor does it ‘ignore the often fragmentary or allusive
nature of many life-historical forms’.137 ‘Fragmentary’ and ‘allusive’
are two descriptors that may rightly be applied to The Heart of a Gopi
too. And yet, if we hope to disrupt the established Western canon
of autobiography in order to imagine what Smith and Watson refer
to as a ‘new, globalized history of the field’138 —as this paper and
the wider project to which it belongs hope to do139 —it seems only
appropriate to employ the term that has resonance on a global scale
as well. In the end, I would assert that we can read Raihana Tyabji’s
bhakti devotionalism as self-representation and even, to take the point
further, as a form of autobiography, if only an autobiography of the
imagination. The adjective autobiographical is thus appropriated as an
inclusive holdall for a wide range of self-referential writing—even ‘the
marvellous and the miraculous’.
So what can we say of the self represented here? Raihana Tyabji
is best known to history as a devotee of Gandhi, rather than for her
writing or even her singing. But standard narratives of the Mahatma’s
followers or associates rarely get beyond a brief and rather confused
attempt to explain her unusual status as a Muslim-born Krishna
bhakt. In this circumstance, The Heart of a Gopi provides access to the
inner self—the ‘soul’, as Raihana terms it in her introduction—of this
particular gopi. Her recourse to the bhakti tradition itself is revelatory
of her experience of growing up with her family’s Islamic ambitions,
but still ambiguous status as Sulaimani Bohras within South Asia’s
colourful religious spectrum. Here is a woman, her chosen genre says,
who will not be trapped by religious authority or ritual or convention—
even to the point of stepping outside her ‘Muslimness’. Yet it is
the points of disjuncture with more conventional gopi narratives—
whether in terms of emphasis or innovation—that offer the best
insights into this liminal self. Only by using the metaphorical language
of bhakti can Raihana explain her rejection of social hierarchy, but
acceptance of a mystical path expressed through earthly passion. A
creative reading of this miraculous account then allows a woman’s
resistant voice to be recovered.

137
Arnold and Blackburn, Telling Lives in India, p. 9.
138
Smith and Watson, Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, p. 5.
139
I speak here of my individual research project on autobiographical writing by
Muslim women in South Asia, as well as the international research network to which
I belong on ‘Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies’ (see http://www.waiis.org
[accessed 15 October 2012]).