Knowledge of Tahirih’s life and love for her poetry went east and south to the Indian subcontinent where her memory has been celebrated ever since. The first mention of Tahirih made on the Indian subcontinent was in 1870. A steady stream of Babi and Baha’i teachers came to India to spread the new teachings, including one of the Bab’s Letters of the Living, Shaykh Sa’id-i Hindi, who hailed from the city of Multan, a center of Islamic mystical practice.(1) Sa’id-i-Hindi, who, like Tahirih, had been part of the Shaykhi school and then became a follower of the Bab, was sent to the Indian subcontinent to announce the good news of the advent of the Bab. He reached Multan—in today’s Pakistan—in 1844, where he carried out his mission to his fellow countrymen. One of those who converted to the new faith was Basir-i-Hindi, a blind man of the Multan area who had great spiritual and intellectual qualities.2
Members of the Bab’s family, also, had settled in India. The Bab had worked in his uncle Siyyid Ali’s cloth trade, and business contacts had been made in India. The family business had offices in Shiraz, Bushihr, and Bombay (Mumbai). It was probably in 1870 that, Haji Siyyid Mahmood Afnan and Haji Siyyid Mirza Mahdi Afnan, established in Bombay a business by the name of “Haji Siyyid Mirza Mahmood Afnan & Co.,” and, later, a printing press, the Nasiri Printing Press, to publish the Babi and Baha’i holy writings. These maternal relatives and other followers could spread the new teachings from Bombay to the rest of India and Burma, and it became the first major center of Baha’i activity in the Indian subcontinent.
The first written mention of Tahirih in India came thirty-seven years after her execution, in a compilation of Persian poetry edited by ‘Abdulghafur Nassakh, and published in Calcutta.
The first researcher to write about her from an academic perspective was Prof. M Hidayat Hossein who was the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in Cal- cutta.3
In 1902, a Baha’i came to Lahore to spread the Baha’i teachings. In the neighborhood in which he was staying, he met and befriended one of the most influential Indians of the early 20th century, Muhammad Iqbal.4
Iqbal was a much admired poet who wrote in both Urdu and Persian and a philosopher- activist who laid the intellectual ground- work for the formation of a separate Muslim state to be carved out of northwestern India. As a Muslim Indian, he was concerned that the Muslim population of India would be at the mercy of the Hindu majority and so proposed a two-state solution. Educated in England, he was eventually knighted. In death he was memorialized as one of the founders of Pakistan with his birthday becoming a national holiday and many institutions named after him. In 1930, Iqbal met Martha Root twice. In the intervening years since he had first heard of Tahirih, a booklet about her had appeared in Urdu, and, in 1930, a collection of some of her poems was published in Karachi which was then presented to Iqbal at his first meeting with Martha Root.
At their second meeting in June of 1930, Iqbal spoke with reverence to Martha Root and expressed his deep interest in the figure of Tahirih. He said that he was including the Persian mystic in his long poem about the spiritual journey.5
On his journey through the skies, Iqbal meets three important holy figures, one of whom is Tahirih. In the first section of the “Song of Tahira,” he is deeply moved by their spiritual ardor, and it appeals to his own inner longings:
“If ever confronting face to face my glance should alight on you I will describe to you my sorrow for you in the minutest detail That I may behold your cheek, like the zephyr I have visited house by house, door by door, lane by lane, street by street. Through separation from you my heart’s blood is flowing From my eyes river by river, sea by sea, fountain by fountain, stream by stream, My sorrowful heart wove your love into the fabric of my soul thread by thread, thrum by thrum, warp by warp, woof by woof. Tahira repaired to her own heart, and saw none but you page by page, fold by fold, veil by veil, curtain by curtain. The ardour and passion of these anguished loverscast fresh commotions into my soul; ancient problems reared their heads and made assault upon my mind.
The ocean of my thought was wholly agitated; its shore was devastated by the might of the tempest. Rumi said, “Do not lose any time,you who desire the resolution of every knot; for long you have been a prisoner in your own thoughts, now pour this tumult out of your breast!’”6
In another section of “Song of Tahira,” he marvels at how spiritual passion can bring new life into being and break through the old ways. Iqbal was a poet and thinker who was very interested in the relation- ship between sacrifice and progress: “From the sin of a frenzied servant of God new creatures come into being; unbounded passion rends veils apart, removes from the vision the old and the stale,and in the end meets its portion in rope and gallows neither turns back living from the Beloved’s street Behold Love’s glory in city and fields, lest you suppose it has passed away from the world; it lies concealed in the breast of its own time—how could it be contained in such a closet as this?”
Martha Root continued with her journey meeting other known leaders and writers who may have included the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. She wrote it seemed that many people could recite verses from Tahirih. On her third trip through India in 1936- 7, she brought with her the short biography of Tahirih which she had written. Using information from her 1930 trip to Iran where she met Tahirih’s family, she was able to begin a short biography, Tahirih, The Pure. In early March, 1938, she stayed at the home of the first Baha’i of Hindu background, and while she looked out over the ocean, she finished this book.Then she had 3,000 copies of 7 it printed in Karachi and mailed many to prominent Indians as well as giving them away to those whom she met. The book was soon being translated into Persian, Czech, Urdu, and Japanese.
In the following decades of the 20th century, there were over one- hundred authors, most working in Urdu, who made mention of Tahirih, translated her poems, included them in compilations, wrote books, short stories and articles about her, and held symposiums in celebration of her life. A number of these were due to her having been one of the subjects of poems and essays by Iqbal. Prof. Jagannath Azad, a prolific writer who wrote over seventy works and who was also an expert in the writings of Iqbal, travelled to the United States from India and wrote a book about his travels, In the land of Columbus, in which he remembered:
“When I reached the Mashriqu’l-Adhkar (Baha’i Temple) of Chicago, I was charmed by the atmosphere and freshness of its gardens. My friend Iftekhar Nasim chanted for me the poem of Qurratu’l-Ayn Tahirih “Gar bat u Uftadam Nazar...” and I lose myself in its melody and felt the same 8 Independent of the connection with Iqbal, much was written in the Indian subcontinent about Tahirih’s poetry. She was one of the poets included in the 1905 compilation by Prof. Mohammad Ishaque, published in Calcutta, titled, Four Eminent Poetesses of Iran. Abr Ahsani Ginnauri Badayuni, a Baha’i poet who had a very wide circle of influence among poets wrote a piece on Tahirih for the Baha’i Maga- zine, published in Lahore. A famous poet writing in Urdu, Ra’is Amrahvi, who had founded an institute for self-improvement in Karachi, wrote poems regularly for a daily paper, and one of these was in a style imitating a poem by Tahirih which was re-published in a compilation.9 Over the decades, many other poets imitated her work as well as reprinting and compiling it, so much so that a renowned critic and journalist, Dr. Mohammad Ali Si, asserted in a Karachi newspaper article: “There would seldom be any poet of the Urdu language who would not have said a poem following the style of Tahirih.”10
Tahirih was also the subject of short stories. A story bearing her home name, “Zarrin Taj,” written by Prof. Aziz Ahmad, a much respected writer whose short stories were especially notable, was published in a monthly literary magazine in Lahore. It was given a dramatic reading on Radio Pakistan in Rawalpindi, in 1963.11 Sheikh Manzoor Elahi, another well-respected short story writer produced a piece titled, “Qurratu’l-Ayn,” which appeared in print in Lahore in 1965.12
Book length works about Tahirih also appeared such as a short biography put out by the Baha’is of Lahore in 1974, and Jamilah Hashmi, a novelist who imagined her storied life in his work, Chihra bachihrah rubaru. An English-language, fictionalized rendering of Tahirih’s life by Clara A. Edge was translated into Urdu, published in a monthly journal in its entirety in 1998, and sold to its readership and in bookshops, creating a much greater awareness of her.13
1 Afaqi, “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn Tahirih in Urdu literature,” Tahirih in History, 29.
2 Mazandarani, Zuhur’ul-Haqq, vol. 3, 454.
3 Afaqi, “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn Tahirih in Urdu Literature.” 29.
4 Ibid., 29-30.
5 Ibid., 30-31.
6 Ibid., 47-8.
7 Ibid., 48-9
8 Garis,Martha Root 462-464
9.Ibid,32-34
10.Ibid,38-9
11 Ibid., 37.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid., 35, 40-1.
Members of the Bab’s family, also, had settled in India. The Bab had worked in his uncle Siyyid Ali’s cloth trade, and business contacts had been made in India. The family business had offices in Shiraz, Bushihr, and Bombay (Mumbai). It was probably in 1870 that, Haji Siyyid Mahmood Afnan and Haji Siyyid Mirza Mahdi Afnan, established in Bombay a business by the name of “Haji Siyyid Mirza Mahmood Afnan & Co.,” and, later, a printing press, the Nasiri Printing Press, to publish the Babi and Baha’i holy writings. These maternal relatives and other followers could spread the new teachings from Bombay to the rest of India and Burma, and it became the first major center of Baha’i activity in the Indian subcontinent.
The first written mention of Tahirih in India came thirty-seven years after her execution, in a compilation of Persian poetry edited by ‘Abdulghafur Nassakh, and published in Calcutta.
The first researcher to write about her from an academic perspective was Prof. M Hidayat Hossein who was the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society in Cal- cutta.3
In 1902, a Baha’i came to Lahore to spread the Baha’i teachings. In the neighborhood in which he was staying, he met and befriended one of the most influential Indians of the early 20th century, Muhammad Iqbal.4
Iqbal was a much admired poet who wrote in both Urdu and Persian and a philosopher- activist who laid the intellectual ground- work for the formation of a separate Muslim state to be carved out of northwestern India. As a Muslim Indian, he was concerned that the Muslim population of India would be at the mercy of the Hindu majority and so proposed a two-state solution. Educated in England, he was eventually knighted. In death he was memorialized as one of the founders of Pakistan with his birthday becoming a national holiday and many institutions named after him. In 1930, Iqbal met Martha Root twice. In the intervening years since he had first heard of Tahirih, a booklet about her had appeared in Urdu, and, in 1930, a collection of some of her poems was published in Karachi which was then presented to Iqbal at his first meeting with Martha Root.
At their second meeting in June of 1930, Iqbal spoke with reverence to Martha Root and expressed his deep interest in the figure of Tahirih. He said that he was including the Persian mystic in his long poem about the spiritual journey.5
On his journey through the skies, Iqbal meets three important holy figures, one of whom is Tahirih. In the first section of the “Song of Tahira,” he is deeply moved by their spiritual ardor, and it appeals to his own inner longings:
“If ever confronting face to face my glance should alight on you I will describe to you my sorrow for you in the minutest detail That I may behold your cheek, like the zephyr I have visited house by house, door by door, lane by lane, street by street. Through separation from you my heart’s blood is flowing From my eyes river by river, sea by sea, fountain by fountain, stream by stream, My sorrowful heart wove your love into the fabric of my soul thread by thread, thrum by thrum, warp by warp, woof by woof. Tahira repaired to her own heart, and saw none but you page by page, fold by fold, veil by veil, curtain by curtain. The ardour and passion of these anguished loverscast fresh commotions into my soul; ancient problems reared their heads and made assault upon my mind.
The ocean of my thought was wholly agitated; its shore was devastated by the might of the tempest. Rumi said, “Do not lose any time,you who desire the resolution of every knot; for long you have been a prisoner in your own thoughts, now pour this tumult out of your breast!’”6
In another section of “Song of Tahira,” he marvels at how spiritual passion can bring new life into being and break through the old ways. Iqbal was a poet and thinker who was very interested in the relation- ship between sacrifice and progress: “From the sin of a frenzied servant of God new creatures come into being; unbounded passion rends veils apart, removes from the vision the old and the stale,and in the end meets its portion in rope and gallows neither turns back living from the Beloved’s street Behold Love’s glory in city and fields, lest you suppose it has passed away from the world; it lies concealed in the breast of its own time—how could it be contained in such a closet as this?”
Martha Root continued with her journey meeting other known leaders and writers who may have included the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. She wrote it seemed that many people could recite verses from Tahirih. On her third trip through India in 1936- 7, she brought with her the short biography of Tahirih which she had written. Using information from her 1930 trip to Iran where she met Tahirih’s family, she was able to begin a short biography, Tahirih, The Pure. In early March, 1938, she stayed at the home of the first Baha’i of Hindu background, and while she looked out over the ocean, she finished this book.Then she had 3,000 copies of 7 it printed in Karachi and mailed many to prominent Indians as well as giving them away to those whom she met. The book was soon being translated into Persian, Czech, Urdu, and Japanese.
In the following decades of the 20th century, there were over one- hundred authors, most working in Urdu, who made mention of Tahirih, translated her poems, included them in compilations, wrote books, short stories and articles about her, and held symposiums in celebration of her life. A number of these were due to her having been one of the subjects of poems and essays by Iqbal. Prof. Jagannath Azad, a prolific writer who wrote over seventy works and who was also an expert in the writings of Iqbal, travelled to the United States from India and wrote a book about his travels, In the land of Columbus, in which he remembered:
“When I reached the Mashriqu’l-Adhkar (Baha’i Temple) of Chicago, I was charmed by the atmosphere and freshness of its gardens. My friend Iftekhar Nasim chanted for me the poem of Qurratu’l-Ayn Tahirih “Gar bat u Uftadam Nazar...” and I lose myself in its melody and felt the same 8 Independent of the connection with Iqbal, much was written in the Indian subcontinent about Tahirih’s poetry. She was one of the poets included in the 1905 compilation by Prof. Mohammad Ishaque, published in Calcutta, titled, Four Eminent Poetesses of Iran. Abr Ahsani Ginnauri Badayuni, a Baha’i poet who had a very wide circle of influence among poets wrote a piece on Tahirih for the Baha’i Maga- zine, published in Lahore. A famous poet writing in Urdu, Ra’is Amrahvi, who had founded an institute for self-improvement in Karachi, wrote poems regularly for a daily paper, and one of these was in a style imitating a poem by Tahirih which was re-published in a compilation.9 Over the decades, many other poets imitated her work as well as reprinting and compiling it, so much so that a renowned critic and journalist, Dr. Mohammad Ali Si, asserted in a Karachi newspaper article: “There would seldom be any poet of the Urdu language who would not have said a poem following the style of Tahirih.”10
Tahirih was also the subject of short stories. A story bearing her home name, “Zarrin Taj,” written by Prof. Aziz Ahmad, a much respected writer whose short stories were especially notable, was published in a monthly literary magazine in Lahore. It was given a dramatic reading on Radio Pakistan in Rawalpindi, in 1963.11 Sheikh Manzoor Elahi, another well-respected short story writer produced a piece titled, “Qurratu’l-Ayn,” which appeared in print in Lahore in 1965.12
Book length works about Tahirih also appeared such as a short biography put out by the Baha’is of Lahore in 1974, and Jamilah Hashmi, a novelist who imagined her storied life in his work, Chihra bachihrah rubaru. An English-language, fictionalized rendering of Tahirih’s life by Clara A. Edge was translated into Urdu, published in a monthly journal in its entirety in 1998, and sold to its readership and in bookshops, creating a much greater awareness of her.13
1 Afaqi, “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn Tahirih in Urdu literature,” Tahirih in History, 29.
2 Mazandarani, Zuhur’ul-Haqq, vol. 3, 454.
3 Afaqi, “Qurratu’l-‘Ayn Tahirih in Urdu Literature.” 29.
4 Ibid., 29-30.
5 Ibid., 30-31.
6 Ibid., 47-8.
7 Ibid., 48-9
8 Garis,Martha Root 462-464
9.Ibid,32-34
10.Ibid,38-9
11 Ibid., 37.
12 Ibid., 33.
13 Ibid., 35, 40-1.
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