Kashmir's Sheikh Abdullah's Grand-Daughter Revealed Her Grandmother Never Marries 'Lawrence of Arabia'!

When Prof Nyla Ali Khan, a US-based Kashmiri academic and granddaughter of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, writes about her grandmother Begam Akbar Jehan, she demolishes “many a myth”. 

According to her, the biggest fiction being peddled as history is that Sheikh Abdullah was Akbar Jehan’s second husband, after the latter’s divorce from T.E. Lawrence, alias “The Lawrence of Arabia”.

Leftist historian Tariq Ali had written that Jehan married Lawrence in 1928, while he was on a visit to Kashmir.

Prof Khan, the niece of Farooq Abdullah, is a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma in the US and member of Scholars Strategy Network. She is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir. 

In an interview with INNLIVE, she said: “The biography of Jehan provides an insight into the history, politics, and society of Kashmir in the major part of the 20th century.” 

While debunking the Lawrence theory, Khan said that Jehan herself had told her that “this tall tale was just another fabrication, the purpose of which was to denigrate her and to belittle her work”. 

Khan quoted Stephen E. Tabachnick, a renowned Lawrence scholar, to make her point: “Tabachnick unequivocally pointed out the story of that betrothal or marriage is completely false. If it had happened, it would have been impossible to keep it a secret, considering Lawrence’s world-wide fame. And given Lawrence’s homosexual tendencies and flagellation compulsion, the odds are really against it being true.

"He pointed out that John Mack and Jeremy Wilson have written the best Nyla Ali Khan’s (right) biography is an insight into Kashmir in the major part of the 20th century and Begum Akbar Jehan (above). biographies of Lawrence. But, neither had mentioned this apocryphal story nor do any of the other biographies that he was familiar with.” 

Khan’s biography, titled The Life of a Kashmiri Woman: Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation is published by Palgrave Macmillan, and available in North America and the United Kingdom. The book is likely to be available in India in mid-summer this year. 

For Khan, Jehan had a substantive role in “public events”, and she cannot sink into the shadows or be “memorialised into the realm of abstractions”. 

Jehan’s father, Michael Henry [Harry] Nedou, later Sheikh Ahmed Hussain, of Slovak and British descent, was a charming hotelier. Her mother, Rani Jee, was an indomitable Gujjar (pastoral tribe) woman, with her clan’s lineage traced to the martial, patrilineal, and traditional Rajputs of Rajasthan. 

“Jehan, born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, made the intransigent decision to throw in her lot with a determined and politically savvy young man, Sheikh Abdullah.” 

Khan said: “The Sheikh’s fiefdom was the political battlefield; his entourage comprised the poverty-stricken, disenfranchised, dispossessed, denigrated masses; his palace was his home in Soura, on the outskirts of Srinagar.” 

“During her husband, Sheikh Abdullah’s incarceration, Jehan was burdened with the arduous task of raising five children in a politically repressive environment that sought to undo her husband’s mammoth political, cultural, legal attempts to restore the faith of Kashmiri society in itself.” 

Jehan’s forebears, the Nedous, had emigrated from the Croatian city of Dubrovnik to Lahore in the 1800s. 

Croatia, now independent, was in the Austrian Empire from 1815 to 1918 and part of Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1991.