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Society: Why we work
We meet four successful Dawoodi Bohra women, whose new religious head would rather they learn home science instead of pursuing careers and callings
Ever since 68-year-old Mufaddal Saifuddin took over as the 53rd Dai or spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohras in January, his sermons have attracted curiosity from members of the million-strong sub-sect of Ismaili Shia Muslims, a large section of whom live in Mumbai. His statements on women’s roles in particular have caused much debate.
In his sermons, the syedna has mentioned that women ought not to work in call centres as that may lead them to “commit sins”. He has also reportedly stated that women ought to learn how to cook and stitch, and desist from attending institutions of higher education. Some households disallow women from being seen in public without the rida, a two-piece hijab; others prevent women from being photographed.
The public role played by women has been historically undervalued in the community, writes Rehana Ghadially, a professor who retired from the department of humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. In an article titled The Campaign For Women’s Emancipation In An Ismaili Shia (Daudi Bohra) Sect Of Indian Muslims: 1929-1945, she writes: “Unlike the fierce and prolonged debate aroused by the campaign to give up purdah, higher education for girls did not arouse similar passion.”
“The campaign by stressing the ideas of male/female complimentarily rather than equality left unchallenged women’s dependence on men in social, legal and economic matters. It never sought to redefine women’s sphere but only sought to extend it,” says the article, published in a 2002 book, Muslim Feminism And Feminist Movement: South Asia (Volume 1), edited by Abida Samiuddin and Rashida Khanam.
However, there are many in the community who do not subscribe to orthodox strictures on what women ought to do, education, work and domestic chores included. Zehra Cyclewala, a Dawoodi Bohra reformist who took on the earlier syedna’s 1985 dictum to give up working at the Saif Cooperative Society bank in Surat, refusing to give up her job as a manager, is one of them. Ex-communicated as a result, Cyclewala has fought a 29-year-long battle, often taking the help of courts and the police, against orthodox sections of her community. “These rules are meant to keep women oppressed. If the woman was educated, she would raise her voice and that’s what they don’t want,” says Cyclewala of the syedna’s reported remarks about women’s education.
We profile four successful professionals and their working relationship with their community.
Nushrat Bharucha, 26
Actor
Petite and diminutive Nushrat Bharucha insists that we send her the questions we intend to ask her before meeting the following day. “In this industry, half the things said are frivolous and for entertainment. But I don’t want that to happen for an issue that defines who you are,” she offers by way of explanation.
Bharucha, the critically acclaimed actor of films such as Love Sex Aur Dhokha and Pyaar Ka Punchnama, has good reason to be circumspect. Her choice of profession hasn’t gone down too well with the more orthodox members of her extended family.
Bharucha entered the profession at the age of 16. As a student of Jai Hind college a decade ago, she walked into a talent management firm hoping to volunteer as a scout. Instead, they hired her to act in a serial, Kitty Party, on Zee TV. The long work hours and shoddy treatment of newbies led Bharucha to quit the show in a year.
At the time, when her mother would accompany her to the studio, Bharucha would tell members of her extended family that acting was only a summer job. “In our community, we are encouraged to take up professions like medicine or engineering that offer consistency and job security. Acting is not a ‘real’ profession,” she says, sitting near the window of her Juhu, Mumbai, home, where she lives with her parents and paternal grandmother. “Some of them still look at me with a question in their eyes, ‘What have you done in the past 10 years?’”
Yet, after college, Bharucha found herself drawn to the studio—this time for a film offer. “It was then that I realized what acting meant. Film was nothing like television; there was a craft to it, and I realized how much hard work was needed. It was not some mindless two-bit job that only requires you to look good.”
Bharucha’s parents, Tasneem, a homemaker, and Tanvir, a businessman, were initially apprehensive but supported their only child’s decision. “I was slightly sceptical at first,” says Tasneem, adding that she had encouraged her daughter to take up theatre in school. The main concern, she says, was whether Nushrat would find a good Bohra match. Bharucha believes she will find the right man, who shares her world view, within the community. “Are there any?” we ask her father, who replies, “Of course there are.”
“We are very close as a family. There are uncles and aunts for whom I would stand in front of a truck,” says Bharucha, echoing a sentiment common in the Dawoodi Bohra community, known for its close network of familial, social and economic ties. “One can’t live in solitude. To survive as a single family unit is not possible. So my parents would still go to the mosque and happily do everything that is asked of them. Whom we are connected to matters more to us,” says Bharucha.
While her parents don’t pressure her to go to the mosque to pray or keep a fast during Ramzan (she can’t because of health concerns), Bharucha says she acquiesces to the more orthodox elements of her family when needed. “If I’m asked to wear a rida and attend a ceremony, I’d do it. I don’t get into a debate.”
At the same time, however, Bharucha espouses the need for a more liberal attitude towards religion. “A religion can’t define a person. It tells you what you should and shouldn’t do, but the choice is always up to you. The sanctity of faith gets lost if one is forced to do things. Let me listen to sermons and decide for myself what moves me, what I feel like thanking God for and asking of Him.”
In many ways, Bharucha’s attitude is a product of her parents’ choices. While Tasneem grew up in the predominantly Bohra neighbourhood of Bhendi Bazar, she moved to Juhu after marrying Tanvir, whose business of heat-resistant ceramic coating counts auto giants as clients. Moving away from the neighbourhood spelt small freedoms—to not wear a rida, for instance, each time she stepped out of home, to not visit the mosque out of compulsion, among others. Tanvir also didn’t depend on other Dawoodi Bohras for business, unlike the scores of hardware stores or clothes merchants’ shops that populate the locality. This, too, Bharucha’s parents count as a blessing.
“I’ve been brought up with both elements in family—orthodox and liberal. I would never tell my cousins who follow all that is preached that they’re wrong. I think being an actor helps me understand where they’re coming from.”
Ummul Ranalvi, 54
Corporate training firm owner
Tasneema Ranalvi, 51
Publisher
The view from Ummul Ranalvi’s drawing room is captivating—from the ninth floor of a tony apartment complex in Bandra, Mumbai, one can see the Arabian Sea and, beyond it, the high-rises along the Worli Sea Face and Parel’s behemoth glass facades. “We are Bandra girls,” laughs Tasneema Ranalvi, the younger sibling, who lives nearby. Masooma Ranalvi, a 47-year-old social activist based in New Delhi, who practised criminal law in Mumbai in the 1980s, is the youngest.
Tasneema runs Source Publishers, an offshoot of Super Book House (SBH), a firm for books on subjects like design, architecture and gemmology, among other things, started by their father, Shoaib Ranalvi, in the 1970s, when the family lived in the Dawoodi Bohra neighbourhood of Nagpada.
She joined SBH after completing a master’s in technology in 1988. Ummul completed her master’s in psychology and opened a training firm, Continuing Education and Training Centre (CETC), in 1986 to acquaint companies with the subjects that her father sold books on. She, however, branched out to offer soft-skills training—one of her first clients was Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, the government’s telecommunications arm. Her firm now provides audio-visual training such as videos on sexual harassment in the workplace, content development, and assessment tools for employees, among other things.
“That’s him,” says Ummul, pointing to a black and white close-up photograph in a thin steel frame. Shoaib Ranalvi, who died in 2010 was excommunicated in 1979 for taking part in the movement which fought for reforms within the community. Led by the late Asghar Ali Engineer and late Noman Contractor, among others, the movement sought greater transparency in financial dealings by the Dai and protested the coercion to perform rites and pay annual tax.
It was the excommunication that forced the family to move to Bandra in the early 1980s. “We never felt the effects of the ostracism, because the three of us were happy to just be with each other. It was our mother who felt it most,” says Ummul. Their mother Aziza, now 82, lives with Tasneema and her husband Hemant, a nuclear physicist by training. Their daughter lives in the UK.
“Our mother loved attending prayer meetings, and was very good at recitation. However, during one majlis, she was asked by the host to not return. But she remained close to her family and maintained some ties,” says Ummul.
The sisters cannot pray in a Bohra mosque and when their father died, he was buried in a Muslim cemetery, not a Bohra one. However, the sisters, who had a fairly conservative upbringing till adolescence, don’t feel troubled by it. “Our father supported us in everything we wanted to do. He encouraged us to study and work, start our own firms. Usually in the community, girls marry early, but he didn’t pressure us into doing that,” says Ummul, crediting her success to her father’s progressiveness.
The sisters are also vocal opponents of the practice of female genital mutilation, the practice of cutting off a girl’s clitoris while still a child, followed by certain members of the community. “I don’t understand why more people don’t oppose such rites. What will people lose?” asks Tasneema.
One of the biggest challenges facing her at the moment is the Internet. Her publishing firm, which comes out with two bi-monthly magazines, The Design Source and New Age Salon & Spa, cannot sustain in the digital age, where information is now available for free, and at the click of a mouse. Together with Masooma, she is contemplating shutting down the magazines (both have a print run of 20,000 copies) and going digital instead.
“Our father learnt to operate the computer when he was in his 70s,” she says. “He would compile interesting thoughts and stories into a small booklet called Chotein Chotein Baatein, which we would deliver to companies as handouts for employees,” says Tasneema.
The booklet encapsulates the sort of humour and idealistic values that kept the Ranalvi family sane in the midst of much upheaval. “We will continue to print that booklet,” adds Tasneema.
Insia Lacewalla, 27
Co-founder of a food consultancy firm
If there is one thing Insia Lacewalla has in common with her community, it is her nose for scenting a business opportunity. Rewind to a few years ago when major metropolitan cities in India were in the throes of a love affair with food—the online food market had surged to `1,000 crore the in 2012 and gourmet ingredients, plating sessions, food carving classes and MasterChef shows had everyone in thrall.
For Lacewalla, three years into food consulting for music events and restaurants and creating hospitality riders for international musicians on their India tours (including Lady Gaga), it was time to take things to the next level for home chefs without the platform to display their wares.
In June 2013, she held the first food pop-up on the rooftop of a popular Bandra store. It was called The Bakers’ Sale. “It rained all day and my phone was ringing off the hook with people wondering whether we should postpone the do. But everything had already been arranged, 13 home chefs were on board, it was too late to turn back.” The pop-up was supposed to last from 4-9pm, but by 7.30, they were sold out.
This has been a feature of Lacewalla’s pop-ups ever since—numbers that don’t let her down, and a clientele from all parts of the city.
While Lacewalla continues to work as a food consultant for food bazaars and music events, she has begun to take her food pop-up work to the point of origin: people’s homes. With friend and researcher Sneha Nair, she has held five iterations of Poppaddum, where Nair would cook a sadhya, or a traditional Keralite meal, and invite strangers (“food lovers”) to sample it. Next month, she will roll out yet another initiative for home-based chefs called Secret Ingredient. The only requirement is that members will have to cook traditional meals that are not easily available in restaurants.
“Food is a very important part of the Bohras’ community experience. We remember people’s weddings by how good the dal gosht was,” laughs Lacewalla, whose parents live in Pune. Lacewalla started her company without informing them and didn’t tell them she had quit her job. “I wanted to start my own thing, but I didn’t want them to feel that I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. Yet, she credits her folks’ willingness to let her live alone in Mumbai for everything she has subsequently achieved.
It wasn’t easy at first, admits Lacewalla. “I’ve been meeting boys since I was 18,” she says, referring to her parents’ efforts to fix her up with a “good Bohra boy” in an arranged marriage. She was in college, but her folks weren’t averse to her dropping out. Lacewalla met the boys, but refused to quit college. “It wasn’t dramatic, like in the movies. But I pushed back slowly. I told them that I wanted to complete my education.”
In 2008, Lacewalla enrolled for a master’s diploma in public relations and corporate communication at the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. Her maternal grandmother lived alone in Bhendi Bazaar and was happy that a grandchild would live with her. “It was an emotional matter and my parents agreed to the move easily.” Three years later, her younger sister Zahabia, 26, moved to the city. She now works in the television industry as a stylist.
Moving away from her parents’ home helped Lacewalla tackle the matter of meeting potential grooms; it also offered her a level playing field to explore her career options. She started off marketing the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots. She found her niche in food after working for the NH7 Weekender music festival organized by Mumbai-based production firm Only Much Louder.
“Now they’re no longer pressuring me to marry a Bohra boy, but will be happy as long as I get married,” she laughs. “They’re proud of the work I do. I’m looking to tap into this underground food culture of home chefs, for whom cooking is a genuine passion,” she says.
Her parents, she knows, will understand.