Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
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Tanvir Sachdev
Abstract
Multiple patriarchies have attempted to circumscribe women within the private sphere, encrypting their identities with broader definitions of class, caste, community, and nation. Malashri Lal in The Law of the Threshold has suggested the threshold – a real as well as symbolic bar that patriarchies place before women – as a tool for literary criticism. The paper takes up Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column to examine negotiations of women from varying classes and communities with the dynamics of the threshold and their positioning inside, on, and outside the threshold. Issues of gender and the transgression of the controls and harness upon women’s sexuality are examined with the intersecting paradigms of class, community, and the changing face of the nation. The forces and anxieties emanating from opposing pulls of the inner world of the traditional order and the outer modern Western world that pre-empt the move outside the threshold are also traced against a colonial backdrop.
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©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
