Bano: Bharat Ki Beti By Jigna Vora Book Review

Jigna Vora (b. 1974) is a journalist doing crime-reporting in Mumbai. She became known as an accused in the Jyotirmoy Dey murder case (June 11, 2011) and she was incarcerated for 9 months in a Bombay jail, under the stringent MCOCA. On acquittal, she came out with her autobiography, Behind Bars in Byculla: My Days in Prison. This was made into a Netflix movie, Scoop (2023).

Moving on, in 2024, she wrote a biography of another woman sufferer Shah Bano Begum (1916-1992). This has got a reprint in 2025 and a movie, Haq, has also been made based on this biography. The movie released this month (November 2025).

The biography, Bano: Bharat Ki Beti is written in a very lucid and beautiful prose. In some ways, research is poor, superficial and weak but the portrayal of the life-story is powerful and beautiful. Written, a bit, in a form of diary (an account of now and then, then and now), Vora has added some fictive imaginations to make the story into a gripping tale without compromising too much with the facts. The book, comprising small chapters, is arranged almost in chronological sequence except the beginning and then going into flashback. It seems, the biography has been written with a prior intent of making it into a movie. Vora narrates the un-Quranic Instant Triple Talaq (ITT) having been pronounced inside the house, whereas, some oral accounts suggest, the divorce was pronounced inside the magistrate’s lower court of Indore, just to get rid of the meager amount of maintenance paid by the affluent and arrogant advocate. The meager amount hurt the male ego of the haughty, polygamous, philanderer advocate, perhaps a “Vilayat Palat” (London Return/Educated). Vora writes, “Ahmad expelled Bano from their home, even though she had put up with so many of his antics and even infidelities” (p. 13).

So many writer-activists bearing Muslim names, men and women, didn’t write Bano’s biography, except Asghar Ali Engineer’s 1987 book/anthology, The Shah Bano Controversy, which again isn’t a biography exploring the last seven years of Bano’s life. They are content at writing against Hindu bigotry; turning a blind-eye to or even denying the existence of Muslim conservatism-communalism. They love Apoorvanands, Harsh Manders, Ravish Kumars for their consistent outpourings against the bigotry of their own community of Hindus, but they don’t have compunction as to why can’t these Muslims emulate (the Hindus they admire), to write against the conservatism of their own Qaum. The Muslim dominated government funded universities, their academics and alumnae alike, didn’t write such a biographical account either. Jigna Vora did it. She has written a sympathetic account, struggling to find out Quranic provisions guaranteeing rights to women but its practice and interpretations by the patriarchy-clergy gone wrong. Vora struggles to articulate the disjunction between the scriptural provisions and lived realities, existing in sharp contradiction with each other.

She hasn’t bothered to write profiles of Bano’s sons and daughters (five, in all)- the eldest one, bon in 1933. By 1978, when Bano finally approached the lower court of Indore, for maintenance, the eldest son, Jameel (in Vora’s account) was 45 years old (actually, Jameel happens to be Khan’s youngest son). Vora hasn’t bothered to know and write about the son’s responsibilities towards his struggling mother. Roles of this son’s wife in adding to the troubles of Bano haven’t been explored by Vora.

Vora has preferred to name the second wife of the affluent advocate Mohammad Ahmad Khan (1913-2006) as Hamida (her actual name was Halima, born in 1927), married in 1946; 14 years after the first marriage (with Bano). Vora hasn’t told that both wives of Khan were his cousins, nor does she specify the year of the second marriage.

Profiles of the clergy-parliamentarians, such as Ali Miyan Nadvi (1913-14 to 1999), Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait (1922-2005), Syed Shahabuddin (1935-2017), etc., have largely been avoided, except some fleeting mentions. It seems Vora, in this exercise of writing biography, is focused, almost singularly, on a woman’s struggle accidentally having fallen into a personal trouble: identifying or relating herself with Bano. She doesn’t seem to have bothered much to expose, in detail, the clergy and the clergy-controlled Qaum, ever willing to perpetuate regressive patriarchy with eager, enthusiasm, and as an exercise in salvation in the other world. Vora has demonstrated her case with the reforms undertaken in so many Muslim countries (though she has avoided mentioning Pakistan having reformed the Shariat Act 1937, way back in March 1961).

Vora hasn’t written about the Qaum’s rally held out in front of Bano’s Indore residence in 1985 threatening her, protesting against the Supreme Court verdict. Vora also skips the fact of Prime Minister’s pressure on Bano to refuse the maintenance granted by the Supreme Court verdict of 23 April 1985.

Most importantly, Vora hasn’t bothered to explore and articulate/depict the struggles of Bano from 1985 to 1992 when she died a wretched woman [even the liberal, progressive media didn’t bother to write obituaries of Bano in 1992]. This is in spite of Vora’s assertion that Bano’s “fight was more than just maintenance” (p. 14).

Vora has avoided writing it with a feminist’s pen. She describes, “Mehr emphasised the wife’s autonomy and financial independence” (p. 12). She has therefore avoided looking into what Zahra Daudi (1923-2003) told about Mehr, in her Urdu memoirs.

Vora hasn’t looked much into the communal politics of clergy and clergy influenced “modern educated” self-serving elites of Muslims. Why the similar judicial verdicts of 1979, 1980, 1984, were not made out into as big an issue as it was made out in 1985-86? This question has not bothered much to Vora. Nevertheless, Vora hasn’t skipped the political fallout of the Muslim opposition to the verdict and the parliamentary legislation “undoing” the verdict, in May 1986. India’s Hindu conservatives turning rabidly majoritarian, nursing a wound that so called meek Muslim minority has been appeased by upturning the Supreme Court’s verdict.

A few years ago, I had suggested one of my female research students to get into the venture of writing a comprehensive biography of Shah Bano. For that purpose, I prepared a profile-timeline, with some important bibliographic references. I also shared this profile-timeline on FaceBook, and other social media platforms, in 2023-24. Its Hindi rendering was carried by a Hindi literary periodical, Baya (October 2024-March 2025). Recently, this old draft-piece of mine was carried by the SabrangIndia.In (Nov 6, 2025), after the movie, Haq, faced a legal notice from Bano’s daughter Siddiqa Hasan Khan, and this legal notice hit the news headlines.

Vora devotes chapters 16 and 25, on the AIMPLB’s roles into opposing the verdict. Jigna Vora however doesn’t bother to detail that this body of the Qaum came into existence in April 1973 at Hyderabad as a result of the Muslim protests across India in late 1972 against certain amendments/reforms in the relevant laws including the one for adoption/custody of babies. [In a way, the immediate factor behind founding the AIMPLB was adoption/custody of baby. Not to be forgotten a historical fact that the Prophet Muhammad had “adopted” a son, Zaid, and the relevant Quranic verse doesn’t prohibit adoption per se; it only prohibits concealing the biological paternity of the child in adoption/custody. Zaid’s custody wasn’t disrupted by the Prophet]. This is partly explored by Saumya Saxena’s essay, “Commissions, Committees, and Custodians of Muslim Personal Law in Post-independence India”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 3 (2018), pp. 423-438; she later developed it into a book (2022), Divorce and Democracy.

In the chapter seven, Vora has delineated the history of law-making in colonial India and codification of the Personal laws in 1937-39. In this section, while fictionalising to make it into a “delicious” account, she insinuates about a seamless interconnection between Muslim elites enjoying “benefits of the secular democracy, and the rise of Muhamamd Ali Jinnah, and a mutual appreciation for poetry” (p. 43). This fleeting reference to poetry reminds me of the recently concluded Bihar Assembly elections 2025, wherein a “star campaigner” of the Congress, Imran Pratapgarhi, through his superficial poetry pulled huge crowds of Muslim youth, even while, in an era of Hindu majoritarianism, such a mobilisation of assertive Muslim youth in the seats of Muslim concentration, repelled more of Hindus to rally behind the BJP-led NDA, giving them a huge mandate.

Vora however loses sight of the historical facts as to how the Waqf Validation Act of 1913, 1923 and the Shariat Act of 1937, provided Jinnah with an all India united Muslim political constituency which eventually helped him get Pakistan from the colonial state in 1947. “While Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah desired a Shariat Act that would help him create a pan-Indian Muslim identity, he also wanted the party to do well in the Punjab – a province where large zamindars held sway. In the end, a compromise was struck and “agricultural land” was excluded from the purview of the Shariat Act. The Central Legislative Assembly, the parliament of British India, passed the Shariat Act in 1937 – a move that was seen as a significant victory for the Muslim League at the time”. Surprisingly, the nationalist Muslim leaders such as Maulana Azad remained silent on the issue and Madani wrote an Urdu booklet on it much later, that too almost in conformity with the Muslim League’s patriarchic understanding of Shariat.

A little of effort from Vora could have taken her to much helpful in terms of enriching the insights from academic works such as Julia Stephens (Governing Islam, 2018) and Sylvia Vatuk (Marriage and its Discontents, 2017).

In the chapter 22, Vora has narrated press interviews of Bano’s advocate. In this context, she ignores various press interviews of supposedly not so conservative Muslim advocates. For instance, the English fortnightly, Frontline (11-24 February 1986), carrying some interviews. One such interview asserted (p. 32), “Shah Bano is a rich woman, owner of two houses, … and does not require even a penny from the husband or anybody for maintenance”. Please do note it down: a woman, with no earning through a job, trading, or rental incomes, with five children, owning two houses, is enough to look after the family of six members- a family having drained herself out in a series of expensive legal battles up to the Supreme Court!

Zia Us Salam wrote a book (2018), Till Talaq Do Us Part, putting the records straight and finally asserting that “No judgment of the Supreme Court has gone against the Quran” (p. 210). This is a wonderful, sympathetic account, also profiling seven Muslim women who suffered and struggled to have brought out change in 2017-19 (chapter 12). The book however didn’t go back in time to write an exclusive profile of ShahBano. I reiewed it for The Wire.In (28 March 2018). Salam also underlines a “suppressed” fact of Islamic history. Caliph Umar, while exceptionally and reluctantly allowing ITT in just one single case, had also applied criminal punishment of flogging the husband pronouncing such a divorce, and also the fourth Caliph Ali did away with the ITT.

In summing it up, Jigna Vora, by now, apparently devoted to life-writings, has done a great job of writing Bano’s biography, even though, a comprehensive biography of the Bano and of the Indian nation (and state) is still awaited.