Shahnaz Husain is an extremely colourful and interesting woman who has built a very successful natural beauty business where many of the products are based on ancient Ayurvedic recipes. It is a far cry from the world into which she was born in 1941. Her father was a prominent lawyer and judge and came from a family of lawyers, whereas her mother’s family was related to the Nizam royal family of Hyderabad. Her father was educated at Cambridge in England and was, as was common at that time, a staunch Anglophile. On the other hand her mother had been brought up in a very conservative Muslim household. In fact she wore a veil to her wedding and continued to wear it, much to the disappointment of her father, until one day when they were traveling in her grandfather’s private white train carriage – he was at that time the Governor of Nagpur – her father grabbed her veil and threw it out the window, so that when she alighted from the train she was without “purdah” and never wore a veil again.
Like my story on VP Singhania, Shahnaz was never allowed to go to parties and it was expected she would have little or no contact with boys until she was married. What usually happened, Shahnaz told me, was that her mother and her would go to the party before it had started, hand over their present and return home.
Despite the conservative attitude of her mother, her father was desperate to ensure his daughters received a first rate education. She remembers “… he often used to give me stanzas of Keats and Shakespeare to learn or ask me to compose my own poems. My job was to stand behind him when he was shaving in the morning and recite what I had learnt or written…I have such memories of those times and I know there was a very special and close bond between us. Why he then did what he did has always puzzled me.”
Of course I wanted to know what he did, and I suspect you might too. Her father agreed to marry her off at the age of 15, then the minimum age for a girl to marry. She believes her father regretted his decision until his death. Her husband to be was 10 years older than her and spied Shahnaz arriving and leaving school when he was dropping off one of his young sisters. Apparently her father put up the argument to the father of her husband to be that Shahnaz was too young and he wanted her to be educated to university level. The response was that post marriage Shahnaz could get all the degrees she wanted. And, of course, the final decision was made by Shahnaz’s mother who was worried that, if Shahnaz went to university in England, she would never come back.
Within a year Shahnaz was not only married but had a daughter. Not long after giving birth, her husband was posted to Tehran to head up India’s trade relationships with Iran. Shahnaz decided that, as she had not finished high school and was now living in a foreign country, for her to become a doctor or lawyer as her father intended was just not possible. She decided on the beauty business. She was in the fortunate position to be able to fly to famous beauty destinations together with her daughter and complete beauty courses at schools like Helena Rubenstein in London, Schwartzkopf in Germany and Lean in Denmark. Shahnaz used her knowledge to open beauty schools in Tehran and started to write about beauty in magazines. The business grew quickly and after several years there, Shahnaz and her husband were offered Iranian citizenship. She wrote to her father to tell him what she thought was exciting news. His reply was not as expected. It was full of anger and disappointment, including as Shahnaz told me, words to the effect “… looking at your letter I am suspicious that my blood does not flow in your veins because, if it did, you would never desert your country. We are not a family of deserters, but a family of loyalists.” And he went on to state that if Shahnaz had any respect for her parents she would immediately return home to India. This she did.
Once back in Delhi she started to build a beauty business using all she had learnt from her time in Iran. Needless to say, it has been very successful. Before I end this short extract on the life of Shahnaz I would like to share one story she told me and which has remained with me. Some years after Shahnaz became a well known figure in India, she was chatting with her father and telling him about her recent successes and he asked her whether she had planned for the future. Shahnaz told him that she was young and had many years to plan for that. Her father asked a servant to bring a torch. He switched it on and shone the light in her face and said “Do you see how bright the light is?” Of course she did. He then suddenly switched it off and said “Who knows when there could be a mechanical failure, Shahnaz? Start planning now!”
Peter Church blog 