History Project That Wipes Out Stereotypes

Muslim women's portrayal have been generally confined to "hijab-wearing bourgeois" yet to cross the inception of their own homes. However, a history project-cum-exhibition — Pathbreakers: The Twentieth Century Muslim Women of India — hopes to change that.
Pathbreakers puts together the lives of 21 Muslim women; the hatred of Partition notwithstanding rose to eminence in modern, independent India.
“We did it to address the stereotyping of Muslim women into an identical lump of chulha-chadar-chardeewari-polygamy-triple-talaq and other things. Syeda Hameed who is the chairperson of Muslim Women’s Forum (MVF) said that –“This discord has grown in the last four-five years”. Hameed felt it was essential to go as far back as the separation to strain these women's stories, because it is a moment when they would have been familiar to fall back soundlessly into invisibility. Hameed expressed - “A lot of these women were burqa-wearing ladies who undeterred by the vicious price that local populace had to pay for the Partition, were primitive to the building of a new India, however big or small their role”.
Pathbreakers took two years to put together, and even though some of the women displayed in it are not exactly little-known, the carnival fling light on stories that surprise all the audience, including – Hameed says — Muslims.
Pathbreakers offers lessons not just about Muslim women, but also of the way history is reported, and the way it treats its women, worldwide. History needs to be re-examined for the sake of the many women that have been lost in its pages. Pathbreakers offers a peek of independent India’s first generation of Muslim women as permissive, ‘awaken’ and comprehensively at ease with their place in the world. But is it stirring enough for young Indian millennia’s? Pathbreakers is on display at India International Centre, Delhi.

By: Tripti Varun
Content: https://www.firstpost.com/india/muslim-women-of-20th-century-india-are-being-celebrated-through-a-history-project-that-decimates-stereotypes-5671631.html