In 1906, Atiya Fyzee, a 29-year-old Bohra Muslim woman who lived
in Bombay, climbed aboard the steamboat Moldavia and set sail
for England, where she lived for a year. All the while she kept
a travelogue that was later published in an Urdu magazine in
Punjab. India Real Time asked questions via e-mail of
Loughborough University historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and
Boston University literature professor Sunil Sharma, whose book,
“Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to
Edwardian Britain,” was published at the end of September by
Oxford University Press, complete with their annotated
translation of her England travelogue. Edited excerpts: IRT: Who
was Atiya Fyzee? Sharma: Atiya Fyzee was an important figure in
the cultural salons of Bombay and Karachi for several decades of
the 20th century. A member of the highly educated and
influential Tyabji clan, in her lifetime Atiya traveled
throughout India and many parts of the world, often with her
sisters and her husband, the artist Samuel Fyzee-Raha