— Unknown/Wikimedia Commons. Sajida Sultan Ali Khan Pataudi (4 August 1915 – 5 September 1995) was the daughter of the Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan, and the begum of Iftikhar Ali Khan, 8th Nawab of Pataudi and, in her own right, the 12th (and last, titular) Nawab Begum of Bhopal. She withdrew from public life into strict seclusion and refused to meet the British Viceroy in 1875. Under this policy, while nearly 500 princely states were autonomous and maintained internal sovereignty, their foreign policy and right to wage wars was controlled by the British.The reign of the Begums began in Bhopal in 1819, when the ruling Nawab, Mohammad Khan, died without an heir and the British decided to crown his young wife Qudsia till her daughter Sikandar came of age. Hamidullah Khan’s daughter Abida Sultan was to succeed to the throne, but when she chose to leave for Pakistan after the Partition of India, her younger sister Sajida became the Begum of Bhopal.Unlike the Queen-Regent of Travancore, whose brief radical rule ran only till her son came of age, these women ruled for unexpectedly long periods, facilitated by the absence or death of male contenders to the throne, and through sheer grit. They would sometimes opt to let go of the burkha and at times wear it to demonstrate a different modernity. So, the title came to the second daughter, Sajida Sultan.

Their spartan lives struck Mahatma Gandhi too, when he visited the state in the late 1920s, on invitation. Her daughter would later recount in her autobiography that “even as a young girl, she preferred to meet with other girls of her age to discuss ‘a thousand little points of household duties and of domestic management than to perform outdoor activities’.” None of this though got in the way of being a good ruler, and she proved that a veiled woman could rule as competently as anybody else.The Begums carefully navigated the multiple demands of power by ingeniously playing around with tradition and modernity. Unlike the Queen-Regent of Travancore, whose brief radical rule ran only till her son came of age, these women ruled for …

She was 80… Though it was a young wo… And upon reaching London, she mistakenly wore a dressing gown to meet King George V and Queen Mary, a realisation made only owing to the headlines in the newspapers the next morning.Many princesses have ascended to power in democratic India by contesting and winning parliamentary elections.

Sajida Sultan was the begum of Iftikhar Ali Khan, 8th Nawab of Pataudi and, in her own right, the 12th Nawab Begum of Bhopal.Sajida Sultan was born on 4 August 1915 in the Qasr-e-Sultani Palace, Bhopal, to Nawab Hamidullah Khan, last ruling Nawab of Bhopal and his wife, Begum Maimoona Sultan, she was the second of three children.On 23 April 1939, Sajida married 8th Nawab of Pataudi. Sajida Sultan biography/ wiki/ biodata/ profile/ information/ Details/ Updates/ Latest News/ Personal life /History/ Interview about Sajida Sultan here.

At the time, it was unusual to have a ruler devote time and money to women’s education – even a progressive thinker like Syed Ahmad Khan was focused on Muslim men getting Western education – but to do so outside their state was truly remarkable.

So much so that when Lord Edwin Montagu, the British Secretary of State for India, met Begum Sultan Jahan in 1917, he noted in his diary that she was “frightfully keen on education, and jabbered about nothing else”.Women and their assumption of political power have always been sidelined in Islamic history, though there is reason to believe that Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, had a Nothing changed over the centuries. The heiress apparent to the throne of Bhopal, Abida Sultan, wore her hair short, played the saxophone, had her own band, sped around in a Daimler, and when her husband announced that he’ll assume custody of their son, threatened to kill him with the pistol she kept in her pocket.

Sajida Sultan is the begum of 8 th Nawab of Pataudi and the captain of Indian National Cricketer Team for the tour to England in 1946, Iftikhar Ali Khan Pataudi. This matrilineal reign, which began in 1819, lasted more than a hundred years, with the lone interruption in 1926, when Sultan Jahan Begum abdicated in favour of Nawab Hamidullah Khan. Though it was a young woman, Queen Victoria, who reigned over the hundreds of Indian monarchs at the start of the Paramountcy, assuring them gently of their territorial sovereignty, this mattered little in India.