Writing Hajj under Colonialism: Muslim Women's Authorship, Sacred Geography, and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the Safarnama of Sikandar Begum of Bhopal
Abstract
This paper examines the different aspects of the Safarnama of the Hajj pilgrimage by Sikandar Begum of Bhopal, and how it transformed from a ritual into a literary mode of narrating faith, creating a spiritual geography which connects colonized Muslim India with the wider Muslim world through sea routes and pilgrimage networks, and creates a sacred geography with cross-cultural interaction among all Muslim communities. More than a literary and spiritual experience, it extracts colonized and misinterpreted Muslim women’s authorship through leading the Hajj and literary expression in a colonial context, and annihilates the single story that “Muslim women were absent from intellectual and travel traditions.” It positioned the literature geographically, metaphorically, and metaphysically, combining spirituality and realism, and exploring spirituality, observation, gender politics, and cultural encounters.
KEY WORDS: Safarnama, Spiritual geography, Colonized India, Sacred geography, Women’s authorship
INTRODUCTION
As we see Hajj as a pillar of Islamic Sharia, it has a broader scope and concept that should be developed in the future world, just as it has grown as a mode of literature narrating in the modern age. From this tradition and culture, the ancient Islamic transregional connection has also led to the founding of the Hajj safarnama in South Asia as a part of Urdu literature. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was entirely owned by male scholars and writers.
From this framework, the Hajj Safarnama of Sikandar Begum sparked a revolution regarding her journey in 1863, in the context of colonial and Orientalist misinterpretations of Islamic traditions and customs. Sikandar Begum undertook the grueling journey to Mecca in late 1863, accompanied by a massive retinue of nearly 1,000 people, mostly consisting of women, including her own mother, Qudsia Begum. She penned down her observations in Urdu in 1867. In the 19th century, even powerful male Mughal emperors financed Hajj caravans but never went themselves due to the dangerous terrain. By documenting her journey, Sikandar Begum actively constructed her dual identity as a devout Muslim and an exceptionally capable, fearless sovereign. The Safarnama of Sikandar Begum transforms Hajj from a ritual practice into a literary, spiritual, political, and transnational narrative that negotiates colonial modernity, Muslim women’s authorship, sacred geography, and cross-cultural encounters.
Hajj as Literary Narration of Faith
The most basic thing to say about the Safarnama is that it turns Hajj into a story. Hajj has been performed for centuries. Its rituals are fixed. Pilgrims do the same things in the same order every year. So how do you write about something that is, in one sense, already completely known? Sikandar Begum's answer is to write about what it feels like from the inside. She does not describe Tawaf as a religious procedure. She describes how it feels to walk around the Ka'ba for the first time, the equality across all measures, the crowd, the movement, and the sense of being part of something enormous. The ritual becomes a human experience, and the human experience becomes literature.
Her arrival in Mecca is one of the most carefully written parts of the text. She had traveled for weeks to get there by land, by sea, and across deserts. When she finally arrives and sees the Ka'ba, the emotion she feels is not described in theological language. That combination—the long journey, the physical exhaustion, the spiritual longing, and then the arrival—gives her writing a kind of weight that abstract, other Hajj narratives do not have. But the text is not all spiritual elevation. Alongside the sacred moments, Sikandar Begum writes honestly about the hard parts. She writes about how tiring the journey is. She writes about problems with the caravan, difficulties with travel arrangements, the heat, and the physical demands of performing rituals in a crowded city. She does not pretend that Hajj is easy. She shows it as something that requires endurance under colonial Islamic caliphate control, both physical and spiritual.
This honesty is actually one of the things that makes the text so strong as literature. When everything is idealized, nothing feels real. But when a writer is willing to say 'yes, this was beautiful, and also yes, this was hard'—you trust them. You feel that they are telling you the truth. And because you trust them about the hard parts, you also trust them about the transcendent parts.
*Sikandar Begum turns Hajj rituals into literary narration through emotional honesty, personal reflection, and careful storytelling. The text is devotional and literary at the same time.
Sacred Geography and Spiritual Mobility
As a matter of fact, in this map of the Hajj spiritual journey, the spaces being passed are stages in a spiritual journey. The meaning of each place changes depending on where it sits in relation to the sacred center—Mecca—and to the pilgrim's inner state as she moves toward it. She starts in Bhopal. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Bhopal was a princely state under the shadow of British colonial power. It was, in political terms, a dependent territory—administered by a Muslim ruler but ultimately subject to British authority. As a starting point for a Hajj journey, it carries a certain weight. She is leaving a place defined by colonial control and moving toward a place defined entirely by Islamic faith. That movement—from the colonial periphery to the sacred center—is not just geographical. It carries political and spiritual significance at the same time.
Scholars now call this sacred cartography—a map of the world organized by spiritual meaning rather than political boundaries. In her version of the world, the most important direction is not north or south, or toward London or Delhi. The most important direction is toward Mecca. Everything else is oriented around that center. This matters enormously for Muslim communities living under colonial rule. The British Empire drew the maps of the world in its own image. It placed London at the center. It divided territories according to its own political and economic logic. For Indian Muslims, this was not just inconvenient—it was a kind of spiritual displacement.
She reconnects colonized Indian Muslims to a world that colonial cartography had made invisible. She shows that Muslim India belongs to something larger than the British Empire. It belongs to the ummah—the global community of Muslims—and that community has its own geography, its own centers, and its own routes. The hardships of the journey play an important role here. The desert is real. The heat is real. The difficult caravan tracks are real. She does not romanticize any of this. But by writing about these difficulties as part of the sacred journey, she transforms the physical landscape into a spiritual one. The struggle to get to Mecca is itself part of what makes the arrival meaningful. The body's endurance becomes part of the soul's transformation.
*The Safarnama builds a sacred geography that places colonized Muslim India at the center of the Islamic world, not at the edge of the British Empire. Movement through space becomes a spiritual act.
Maritime Networks and Transnational Muslim Connectivity
The ship is not just transportation in the Islamic perspective; Islam considers it as an amanah in all journeys as a part of devotion to Allah. The nineteenth-century pilgrimage from India to Arabia ran on specific infrastructure. You needed ships—steam-powered by this period—that traveled regular routes from Bombay down through the Arabian Sea, past Aden, and into the Red Sea toward Jeddah. Her descriptions of the ship reveal it as a microcosm of the Muslim world. On board were pilgrims from many different countries—from India certainly, but also from Persia, from East Africa, from the Ottoman provinces, and from places further afield. People who had never met, who spoke different languages, were all traveling together toward the same destination for the same reason.
The steamship itself is an interesting object to think about in this context. It was a product of industrial-era Britain—a symbol of colonial technological power. This is what life under colonialism actually looked like for many people: not a clean separation between the colonial and the sacred, but a constant negotiation between the two. There is also a gender dimension in these maritime passages that is worth paying attention to. Sikandar Begum led and organized a female group of travelers through steamships and ports. She handled the practical arrangements. Colonial and Orientalist thinking often imagined Muslim women as confined, as unable to move through public space without male permission or escort. What her maritime sections ultimately show is that transnational Islam in the nineteenth century was not just a matter of shared faith. It was a matter of shared infrastructure, shared routes, and shared practices of travel.
*The sea voyage in the Safarnama shows how Hajj in the nineteenth century depended on maritime infrastructure. Ships and ports became spaces of transnational Muslim encounters, not just commercial transit.
Cross-Cultural Encounter and Ethnographic Observation
Hajj brings together the Muslim world. That is one of its most important purposes—not just for the individual pilgrim, but for the community as a whole. She watches people carefully. She notices how Arabs from different regions carry themselves differently. She observes the bearing of Turkish pilgrims, shaped by centuries of Ottoman culture. She sees Africans whose presence in Mecca traces the deep historical roots of Islam across the African continent—communities that had been Muslim for generations, that had built their own traditions and practices within the faith. She notices Bedouins moving through the desert margins of the holy cities, living according to patterns that had not changed in centuries. The markets of Jeddah get particularly careful treatment in her account.
Markets are wonderful places to observe a culture. Architecture also captures her attention. The buildings of Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina are described with real aesthetic interest. This matters more than it might seem. In the nineteenth century, European writing about the Muslim world was dominated by Orientalism—a way of thinking that presented the East as exotic, backward, unchanging, and ultimately inferior to the rational, progressive West. There are also moments in her narrative where cultural difference gives way to genuine human connection. Pilgrims who share no common language still share the same prayers. By documenting Arab merchants, Turkish administrators, African pilgrims, Bedouin guides, and many others, she fills her sacred geography with living human beings, not abstract categories. The Safarnama demonstrates, simply by being the kind of text it is, that Muslim women in the nineteenth century were capable of producing writing of the highest quality.
The text itself is the argument. The ethnographic dimension of the text is not separate from the spiritual, political, and literary dimensions. They are all woven together.
*The Safarnama is a literary record of cross-cultural encounters in the nineteenth-century Muslim world. By observing Arab, Turkish, African, and Bedouin communities with care and without judgment, Sikandar Begum builds a human geography of the ummah—and proves, through the quality of her writing alone, that Muslim women were serious intellectual figures.
Muslim Women's Authorship and Gendered Mobility
The dominant story about Muslim women—told by colonial administrators, by Orientalist scholars, by missionaries, and sometimes by patriarchal voices within Muslim communities themselves—was that Muslim women were confined. They did not write. They did not lead. They did not appear in intellectual history. The Safarnama of Sikandar Begum of Bhopal is a direct, concrete, and undeniable challenge to that story. She did not write the Safarnama to make a political point about women's rights. She wrote it because she made the Hajj and wanted to record what she experienced. But the act of writing it, in the historical moment in which she wrote it, carries political weight.
Her authority throughout the journey is documented in the text in practical, concrete terms. She makes decisions about routes. She handles timing. She communicates with port authorities, customs officials, Ottoman administrators, and local leaders along the way. When problems arise with the caravan—and they do—she deals with them. She writes about it the way an experienced administrator writes about work—as something she does, because it is what the situation requires. This tone itself says something. She was not surprised by her own capability. This tells us something important about the relationship between social position and intellectual possibility. Sikandar Begum had access to education, resources, and authority that most women—and most men—in colonial India did not have. Her exceptional social position gave her the freedom to write, to lead, and to publish.
But the implications of her text extend beyond her individual story. Her writing also challenges something more specific: the idea that travel writing, pilgrimage writing, and the literary narration of religious experience were male genres. The Safarnama tradition in South Asia had been dominated by male voices. By producing a safarnama of genuine literary quality, Sikandar Begum enters that tradition and changes it. Colonial and Orientalist thinking often imagined Muslim women as literally immobile—unable to move through public space, unable to engage with the world outside the domestic sphere. Sikandar Begum's physical movement through international space is itself a kind of argument.
The Safarnama also does something for the women who traveled with her. She led and organized a female group of pilgrims through the entire journey. She makes those women visible in the historical record. They are not footnotes to a male narrative. They are pilgrims who made the Hajj, documented by a woman who was there with them.
*Sikandar Begum's Safarnama challenges the colonial and patriarchal story that Muslim women were absent from intellectual and public life. Her text proves—through its very existence and quality—that Muslim women led, wrote, and engaged with the world in serious and meaningful ways.
Colonial Modernity, Realism, and Political Consciousness
The Safarnama is a politically alert text. It contains an administrator's eye for corruption, inefficiency, and injustice. And it does not soften its observations to protect anyone's feelings. The economic burden placed on people who were performing a religious duty—one of the five pillars of Islam—struck her as both unjust and practically absurd. She writes about disorder in caravan organization. Caravans carrying pilgrims from various points of embarkation to the holy cities needed coordination, safety arrangements, and reliable provisioning. Often, these things were inadequate. Sikandar Begum, who had organized and led her own caravan with considerable care, noticed the contrast between what was possible and what was actually being done. Her observations here are not abstract complaints. They are the specific, practical observations of someone who knows how logistical operations should work.
The nineteenth century was a complicated moment for the Ottoman Empire. It was trying to modernize while also maintaining its traditional authority as the guardian of the holy cities and the caliphate of the Muslim world. She also practiced a dual politics. This is realistic. This is how actual experience works. A person does not stop being politically aware because they are on a spiritual journey. The world does not become just or well-organized because you are in a holy city. Sikandar Begum's willingness to hold both things in her narrative at the same time—the sacred beauty of the Hajj and the administrative failures surrounding it—is one of the things that makes her text so honest and so valuable.
Her text also reflects something about the position of Muslim rulers in colonial India more generally. She operated within the British imperial system. She could not ignore it. But she also maintained her own sovereignty, her own dignity, and her own obligations—including the obligation to perform Hajj and to take her people with her. That negotiation—between the sacred and the political, between faith and power, between spiritual purpose and practical reality—is another literary expression.
*The Safarnama is a politically conscious text. Sikandar Begum watches how power works—in ports, in customs offices, in official receptions, in caravan logistics—with a clear and unsentimental eye. Her political observations and her spiritual devotion sit side by side in the text, as they did in her life.
CONCLUSION
The Safarnama of Sikandar Begum demonstrates that Hajj in the nineteenth century was far more than a religious ritual. Through her narrative, pilgrimage becomes literature, sacred geography, political observation, and cultural encounter at the same time. By transforming personal experience into literary narration, Sikandar Begum turns the journey to Mecca into a deeply human and intellectual expression of faith. Her descriptions of rituals, hardships, emotions, and encounters give the Safarnama a literary depth that moves beyond ordinary travel documentation.
At the same time, the Safarnama records the diversity of the nineteenth-century Muslim world through its descriptions of Arabs, Turks, Africans, Bedouins, markets, ports, and caravan networks. These observations transform the narrative into a literary archive of cross-cultural encounter and transnational Muslim mobility. Sikandar Begum observes these communities with curiosity, realism, and human sensitivity rather than through the Orientalist gaze common in many colonial travel writings.
Most importantly, the text challenges the colonial and patriarchal assumption that Muslim women were absent from intellectual, literary, and public life. As a ruler, traveler, organizer, and writer, Sikandar Begum occupies a position of authority throughout the narrative. Her Safarnama itself becomes evidence of Muslim women’s authorship and intellectual participation in the nineteenth century.
Ultimately, the Safarnama is not merely a record of pilgrimage but a multidimensional literary and cultural text. It preserves sacred memory while also documenting politics, mobility, gender, and human encounter under colonial modernity. Through this narrative, Sikandar Begum secures an important place within Hajj literature, Muslim travel writing, and South Asian literary history.
References
Begum, Sikandar. A Pilgrimage to Mecca. Trans. Mrs. Willoughby-Osborne. London, 1870. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Sulthana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction. Edited by Haris Qadeer.