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UNIT 30 CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF SUNLIGHT ON

A BROKEN COLUMN

Structure

30.0 Objectives

30.1 Introduction

30.2 Attia Hosain's Lie

30.3 Works

30.4 Influences on Hosain

30.4.1 Literary Influences

30.4.2 Education and Life

30.5 Other Contemporary Female Muslim Writers

30.6 Narrative Techniques

30.7 Fi&lity,m a technique

30.7.1 Fidelity to social institutions

30.7.2

Fidelity

to time and place

30.8 Lyguage in the Novel

30.9 &t Us Sum Up

30.10 Answers to Exercises

30.0 OBJECTIVES

In the preceding units we have already looked at the theme and characterisation of the novel Sunlight on a Broken Column . After a consideration of some of the various other aspects as well-viz. narrative technique, formative influences on the writer, and fidelity as a technique and her use of language, we shall come to a summative critical assessment of the novel. At the end of the Unit you should be able to discuss the importance of the novel, its place in the mainstream of other writings of the same genre and why it has made a mark at all. You should be able to describe the narrative techniques used by the novelist, and discuss whether the author bas attempted any innovations and how far she has succeeded. It shall not be our attempt to provide an overview of the mainstream of Indian writing in English (see Unit 26). Suffice it to note that very few Indian Muslim novelists in English have been women.

30.1 INTRODUCTION

The novel Sunlight on a Broken Column can be compared to other novels taking up various aspects.for consi&ration. Some of these aspects are: a glance at the central theme of disintegration of a feudal lifestyle and the emergence of a new order; partition as a theme; other novels by Indian women writing in English; the Muslim perspective and so on. i A close study of the novel will show you that the dominant theme of the novel is the first mentioned-the disintegration of the feudal lifestyle of the rich landowners of Lucknow (Avadh) and the emergence of a new order. This of course was one of the aftereffects of the Indian Independence when the Zamindari and the Taluqdari systems were abolished and the landlords were summarily deprived of their ownership of the land without having acquired the capability of earning their own livelihoods. In this Unit we shall show how the novelist has dealt with this theme, whether she hrtd any role models in this area, Indian or otherwise, and the narrative strategy she chose to project her vision.

WgY or, a Broker, Cdunn

(In case you wish to follow up any of the other aspects mentioned, you may refer to the reading list given to you at the end of this Block in Unit 3 1)

30.2 ATTIA HOSAIN'S LIFE

Attia Hosain was born in Lucknow, in 1912 and belonged to a Taluqdari, land-owning family. Her education combined English liberal schooling with traditional lessons in Urdu. Persian and Arabic at home. Influenced in the 1930's by the nationalist movement and the Rogresssive Writers Group in India, she became a journalist, broadcaster.and writer of short stories. She went to England in 1947 where she presented programmes for the BBC Eastern service and appeared on TV and the West End stage. Like her protagonist Laila, Attia too had lost her father when she was a little girl and this "had obviously made her brood on the evanescence of life". (Anand) Attia's studies at the La Martiniere school and Isabella Thoburn College made her grow up between the proverbial two worlds "the one not yet quite dead and the other refusing to be born". (ibid)

Attia's narrative technique

too is similar--there is not the "and then and then" narrative but the shuttling between the past and the present, the entire story being seen in flashback. She has adopted what would be technically the stance of the "narrating and experiencing I"- the narrarator is not only telling the story but also participating in it. Among those who influenced her were "the modernists, DP

Mukhe jee, Professor

Shreshta, Hussain and Sajjad Zaheer, Mahmuduzaffar, Rashid Jehan and Abdul Aleem". The net result was that she was caught up in conflicting ways of life.

Exercise 1

Briefly discuss the conflicting influences in the life of Attia Hosain (30 words).

30.3 WORKS

Attia Hosain is best known for her collection of short stories Phoenix Fled (1953) in which 'The First Party' appeared and for her novel

Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). Both

books essentially draw upon a pre-Partition, pre-Independence India in the middle of huge political and social changes.

Now read on:

Very little critical

information being available on this collection, given below is a quotation from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar's Indian Writing in English (1935 ed). This being a good starting point to assess her contribution to the mainstream hence the quotation is given at some length. Miss Attia Hosain's novel Sunlighf on a Broken Column (1961), and her earlier collection of short stories, Phoenix Fled (1953). gave evidence of a talent for reminiscence and sensitive ohsewation that doesn't seem to have been exploited since to the full. The title story in the collection starts with the description of an old woman and suddenly works up to evoke the horror of the partition when neighbours turned murderers, and villagers who had once feared the amval of soldiers now dreaded their departure. But the old woman refuses to go with the rest, merely telling them: I am old, I am feeble. 1 shall slow your flight. It is the children you must save". The shocks to which a bride brought up in a traditional home is exposed when she attends a drink and dance party is the theme of 'The First

Party'. In 'The Street of the Moon', an elderly

widower weds a girl-wife who promptly takes her step-son as her lover. In another story, a soldier returning to his wife after many years, with a fibre suitcase full of presents, feels nevertheless that she is like a stranger to hi and so walks out of their bedroom, leaving her alone to have a cry. And so on, in story after story there is one moment of poignant truth, and it is this that makes the fiction leap to life. The sutpese that satisfies, the unexpected that rings true the inspiration behind Attia Hossain's short stories comes from life - the unexpected, the poetic and the emotive aspects of it.

P 30.4 INFLUENCES ON ATTIA HOSAIN

In order to come to a better appreciation both of what she is trying to say and the techniques she has adopted for the purpose, a look at mine of the formative influences in her life will be useful. - Mulk Raj Anand, one of the 'Big Three' Indian writers in English, has provided a useful introduction to the literary and socio-cultural influences that shaped Attia Hosain's life and works. He describes how when he fmt met her at the house of Ishat Habibullah, her brother-in-law, she had been diffident about her having written "some stories about the zenana". She had told him then itself that

DP Mukherjee and Sarojini Naidu too had been

urging her to write of the society she came from (incidentally, 'Taluqdari' and 'Zamindari' are words that are used interchangeably, but the former meant the bigger landowner).

30.4.8 Literary Influences

Attia was a voracious reader and had read the classics of English Literature', specially the women writers--the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot.

Anand had suggested to

her that she read the contemporaries, Joyce, Lawrence and Virgina Woolf. She was most impressed by Woolf. She had seen how the English novel had gone beyond the uncles,

Galsworthy, Bennet and Wells,

to the stream-of-consciousness process, "and she understood, very perceptively,.that there was no beginning and middle and end in fiction any more. No plot. Only pattern". And the form fascinated her because , having read Urdu poetry, she was aware of the romantic agony. Ghalib's phrase: "Oh my innocent heart, what has happened to you!"evoked from her an agonised look always when Bunne recited I it to her". (Anand in Introduction) This conviction about the form and the romantic agony is amply borne out in her use of the narrative technique in her solitary novel.

Exercise 2

List the two convictions revealed in Attia's use of the narrative technique (30 words)

30.4.2 Her Concerns

Attia herself vlras not able to shake off her doubts and uncertainties. This is visible in all her writings as well. "Deep from within the centuries-old feudal network, with fears of constraints becoming nightmares, the conscience of a young woman awakening to every new morning, brought hangovers of doubts about the days to come."

Sunlight on a Btvken Column

There were the harrowing contrasts of the old myths by which Attia had been forced to live and the new myths of Revolution and the many freedoms which some of the sons of the big houses were building up. She had doubts about everything and brooded a lot.

Exercise

3 Read the novel and note some of the situations you think could have been embarrassing to' the heroine-narrator's sense of humanness. (List two)

30.5 OTHER CONTEMPORARY FEMALE MUSLIM

WRITERS

While a number of writers have described life in Muslim households ( Twilight in Delhi by Ahrned Ali for example), very few women writers have provided a fictive account of such households. When the house is a central symbol ( Inside the Haveli - and Remember the House ) women have tried their hands but Sunlight on a Broken Column is unique in this category as well. Qwttulain Hyder does not write in English, Ismat Chughtai - one of Urdu's bold and most outspoken women writers "played an important role in the development of the modem Urdu short story .... Not only did she make strides in the areas of style and technique, she also led her female contemporaries on a remarkable journey of self-awareness and undoubted creative expression". (Tahira Naqvi, one of the translators of The Quilt and other stories, in the Introduction). In the India of the thirties and forties. writing by and about women was tentative, it was generally held that literature had no place in women's lives. ... Ismat proved that this was a fallacy". No such claim can be made for Attia

Hosain's work.

30.5.1 In the Mainsteam?

Sunlight

on a Broken Column is about a genteel household where purdah is the norm, people speak softly and hierarchy is observed almost rigidly. The first meeting of the

Progressive Writers Movement in

Lucknow (1996) Dr. Rashid Jahan was there. She wrote stories and radio plays. Certain other women were heard too: Begum

Yaldram, Hajab

Ismail and Begum Nazar Sajjad. "These early works by women were largely remarks or were instructional and reformist in nature, the characters and subject matter remaining stilled and unbelievable"

Many other voices joined

'Chughtai - Quruttulain Hyder, Mumtaz Shireen, Hajira Masroor, I 1 Akhtar among others. Iqbalunissa's Purdah and Polygamy : Life in an Indian Muslim I I Household (1944) was a novel written by one of those "national story-tellers even when they don't write and publish". (Iyengar).

Zeenat Futehally shows Zohra in Zohra (1951)

growing from innocence to the age of marriage to maternity". In Zohra there is a I I description of Muslim life and culture, manners and modes of behaviour side by side with the story of

7~hra. (You can read more about Indian English Women Novelists in M.K.

Naik's Perspectives on Indian Fiction in English ).

30.6 NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

Attia Hosain's narrativf: technique has been overed in the unit Reading the Novel (Unit-

28) already. However, since the works of other women writers are being discussed here as

well, we shall briefly summarize her technique again. "She understood, very perceptively, that there was no beginning a~d middle and end in fiction any more. No plot. Only pattern". (Anand). So the novel begins when the narrator is fifteen and goes through a period of twenty years, ending when the columns of the house are broken "And the voices are /in the wind's singing / More distant and more solemn / than a fading star". (quoted on the frontpiece of the novel Sunlight on a Broken Column from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot). So the novel begins, and ends, in medias res (in the middle of things) one gets the feeling that the novel's chracters are still living on in these various chosen niches. Attia's story has both the intimacy of felt experience and yet the distance of time in it. It is written in the fmt person singular but often the omniscient author, the seeing-reporting - experiencing-commenting "eye" is obtrusive. The characters are both types and individuals such as may be found in

Twilight in Delhi as well.

The novelist, to use a critic's phrase, "shows" more than "tells' hence is more convincing. (The Inuoduction by Anand gives more details, in case you wish to follow this up).

Hosain's language is unique

- it is English, no doubt, but the shaping sensibility is Urdu/ Muslim. The metaphors are transliterated and yet can be appreciated even if one reads only the novel, without a reference to the Urdu context.

30.7 FIDELITY AS A TECHNIQUE

Attia IIosain has written a novel that has made no great narrative experiments. So much so, that she has not even taken any liberties with the social situations, the political events, and the places and the people she is writing about. Tbe novel thus seems to develop organically --what is happening is inevitable because things are what they are--since people don't want to bend they break, if the girls are exposed to the world outside the purdah it is more or less inevitable that they are going to find their own life partners. Since Freedom is coming those who have been exploited by the landlords are going to demand their rightful share. In this fidelity and narration, Attia makes a statement:since things are changing all round, the old institutions --the "Ashianas"--too are going to collapse and then there will be an illumination of the inner weakness that caused their collapse.

30.7.1 Fidelity to social institutions

Fidelity to the society Attia is writing of is absolute-- so much so that the translators of the book "Guzishta" refer to Sunlight on a Broken Column &d Twilight in Delhi as the two books that exemplify those aspects of the society that

Shararr describes.

A fidelity to customs and social institutions like the professional singers--the mirasins, who were often old family retainers, the joint family, marriage customs--this then leading sud~YonaB*n ahn

30.7.2 Fidelity to time and place

Fidelity to time and place is an important factor while considering what the writer is saying and how she is saying it. Often it is observed that a writer, in order to appeal to a western readership, either invents a place that is the "East" as the westerner would visualise it, complete with holy wws and snake charmers or goes overboard explaining the genuine thing till it loses all its charm. Fidelity to place is absolute--take for example the ride out of the city to the ancestral village for the funeral of Baba Jan. She takes no liberties and the route her heroine's car takes can be followed literally. On the way out of the city the car passes, after leaving the Mall behind-successively, a pair of royal tombs, the "golden unbrella over the dome of the palace that was now an English club" (now called the Chhatar Manzil from the chhatri or umbrella) then the "shell-ravaged ruins of the Residency", the Imambaras and "the distant clock tower piercing through the trees of its surrounding park". (Since you would be curious to see the monuments mentioned we have included illustrations of some of them for you) 1)

The Royal Tombs

Tbe Residency,

30.8 LANGUAGE IN THE NOVEL

Attia Hosain, by providing a glossary of the Urdu terms and a list of the principal characters, has really solved the problem of simultaneous translation, interpretation of nuances in interpersonal relaiionships andlor Indianisation of terms. Her language is neutral, within these parameters, and is standard English in vocabulary and syntax. The use of short chapters is inexplicable especially since the story has such a flow' that it could iery well have stood as four large chapters instead of four parts with several sinall chapters. Mulk Raj Anand (in the Introduction) writes that she was a voracious reader, had read the classics of English Literature, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austep and George Eliot. She approximates most closely to Jane Austen in her choice of theme and her narrative style.

Her language

md style are nostalgic and even sentimental but do not degenerate into being maudlin. In this the control of the author is obvious.

Every description

has a rationale and where she does translate Urdu metaphors it is because they will provide the Urdu flavour and not because she does not know the English equivalent. To summarise, the language of the novel is used to express and show rather than merely communicate.

30.9 LET US SUM UP

Sunlight on a Broken Column is unique in several ways. It is a novel by a woman about a time and class which had not been earlier depicted except in the works of writers mentioned in the preceding section. It projects a sensibility that is essentially female, graceful and cultured. There are no rash comments on communities and classes. There are idealists and cynics in this novel as in life itself but the optimism about the future is evident. -onally one gets the feeling that some of the events are contrived -- "Do you know who led all the others who had no Sitas and Ranjits? Where were all their leaders? Safely across to the border. The only people left to save them were those very

Hindus against whom they

had ranted". However, the overall impression conveyed is that incidents "tested the mettle of one's loyalties and failings at a time when all values were on the boil and spewed the same of opportunism and falsehood" and the protagonists emerged unscarred through this fire.

30.10 ANSWERS TO EXERCISES

Exercise 1 Her liberal English education and her feudal, Taluqdari background

Exercise

2 Her understanding that there was no beginning, middle and end

anymore, no plot, only pattern and her appreciation of the romantic agony Exercise 3 Some of the situations could be : when the old woman is unable to pay her rent and is appealing to Laila's aunt;when the maid Nandi is being whipped.quotesdbs_dbs42.pdfusesText_42

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