Jahanara Shahnawaz

Jahanara Shahnawaz (7 April 1896 – 27 November 1979) was a Pakistani politician, activist and writer of Lahore, the daughter of Sir Muhammad Shafi, the prominent lawyer and politician of the Mian family of Baghbanpura. ^{1 2} She was among the first women in the Punjab Legislative Assembly (1937) and the first woman in Asia to preside over a legislative session; she founded the Punjab Provincial Women's Muslim League in 1935 and was a founding member and vice-president of the All Pakistan Women's Association (APWA). ^{1 2}

Jahanara was born at Lahore on 7 April 1896, as the English article and Wikidata give it; the Urdu article gives 7 April 1897 at Baghbanpura, Lahore, and the discrepancy is preserved in her record. ^{1 2 3} She was educated at Queen Mary College, Lahore, and married Mian Shah Nawaz in 1911 according to the English article (the Urdu article says 1914). ^{1 2} No consulted source names her religion or school — Wikidata carries no religion value for her at all — so her school is not recorded here, although her work ran through Muslim organisations; organisational membership is not a school attestation. ^{1 2 3}

In 1918 Jahanara successfully moved the All India Muslim Women's Conference to pass a resolution against polygamy. ¹ At the Round Table Conference of 1930, she and Radhabai Subbarayan were the only two members of women's organisations nominated; they argued unsuccessfully for a 5 per cent reservation for women in the legislatures. ¹ In 1935 she founded the Punjab Provincial Women's Muslim League; in 1937 she was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly and appointed Parliamentary Secretary for Education, Medical Relief and Public Health. ¹ Appointed by India's government to the National Defense Council in 1942, she refused the Muslim League's instruction to resign and was removed from the League; she rejoined in 1946, was elected to the Central Constituent Assembly, and was arrested with other League leaders during the Punjab civil disobedience movement in 1947. ¹ She sat in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan from 1947 to 1954. ¹ In 1948 she led a protest of thousands of women in the streets of Lahore against the removal of a women's economic-opportunities bill from the agenda; Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan intervened and the Muslim Personal Law of Shariat of 1948 was passed, legally recognising a woman's right to inherit property, including agricultural land. ¹ She was a founding member and vice-president of APWA, and president of the provincial branch of the All India Muslim Women's Conference for seven years. ^{2 1}

Jahanara wrote a novel, Husn Ara Begum, and her political memoirs Father and Daughter: a political autobiography (Lahore, 1971; Oxford University Press edition, 2002), and wrote for women's and literary magazines. ^{1 2} She died at Lahore on 27 November 1979 and was buried in her family graveyard at Baghbanpura beside her husband. ^{1 2} Her children included Mumtaz Shahnawaz, who died in a plane crash in 1948 on her way to represent Pakistan at the United Nations, and Nasim Jahan, later a politician of the Pakistan Peoples Party. ¹

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