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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King’S Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Agency and its Discontents: Nationalism and Gender in the Work of Pakistani Women Ali, Abu Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 This electronic theses or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: Agency and its Discontents: Nationalism and Gender in the Work of Pakistani Women Author: Abu Ali The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Agency and its Discontents: Nationalism and Gender in the Work of Pakistani Women Writers, 1947-2005 Abu-Bakar Ali Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London 2012 CONTENTS Acknowledgements I Abstract II Introduction: Nation, Gender and the (Pakistani) Postcolonial Question 1. Pakistani Women Writers in Discourse, Practice and History 1 2. ‘South Asia’ and Pakistan 3 3. The History Boys (And Girls) 8 4. Pakistan- Future as Past? 28 5. Gender and the Spectre of the Nation in Khadija Mastoor’s ‘Godfather’ 35 6. Partition, Romance and Diaspora 42 Chapter 1: Feminist Agency: In Theory, In Practice, In Nations 1. Gendered Interventions, Nationalist Politics 50 2. In Theory 52 3. Narrating whose Nation? 57 4. ‘a voice or an echoing memory?’- Performativity, Postcoloniality and Feminism in Farkhanda Lodhi’s ‘Parbati’ 66 5. ‘It’s a story for girls, not for boys’- Nationalism, Cultural Memory and Gender in A.R. Khatun’s ‘Grandma’s Tale’ 75 6. ‘Why were they silent?’- The Location of Pakistani Women Writers in Postcolonial (Feminist) Theory 83 7. ‘Parbati’ and ‘Grandma’ across Postcolonial Feminist Theory 94 Chapter 2 : Nation, Narration, Partition- A Re-Entry 1. The Partition of Memory- Violence and Pain in the (gendered) National Consciousness 104 2. Embodied Nationalisms Across Local and State Cultures 110 3. Partition- An Historical Overview 113 4. Women, Gender and Violence in the Nationalist Equation 122 5. ‘Memory demands poetic licence’- Gender, the Body and Partition in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice- Candy Man 129 6. ‘Is there anything to compare with such cosy bliss?’- Feminism and the Body at the Intersection of Nationalism 136 7. ‘Exile is such a hard thing’- Exile, Exchange and Women in the Literary National Consciousness 140 Chapter 3: Romancing the Nation 1. ‘So what if my dupatta fell down for a few seconds?’- The Romantic Imaginary in Pakistan 148 2. Want Your Bad Romance- Janice Radaway on How Romance Should be Read 157 3. The Progress of Romance (?) - Critical Developments Since Radaway 161 4. ‘It was Pakistan but so different’- Memory, Representation and Imagination in the Romance of Qaisra Shahraz 170 5. From Romanticisation to Islamization- General Zia’s Consciously Gendered Nationalist Design 173 6. Women Scorned- The Zia Era as a Narrative of Resistance 180 7. ‘Without him life loomed like a void’- Romance, Agency and the Play of Imagination in Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman 186 8. A Life in Purdah- The Politics of Zarri Bano’s Veiled Subversion 202 9. ‘allow yourself to discover the joys of womanhood’- The Epilogue 205 Chapter 4: Diaspora and the Political Poetics of Migration 1. The Diasporic Turn in Pakistani Women’s Literature 209 2. History’s DissemiNation 217 3. Mapping the Global 223 4. ‘A strange country amidst strangers’: The Ambiguity of Arrival and Bodily Performance in Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat 229 5. Hybridity, Agency and Gender- The (Un)making of Feroza? 235 6. ‘To go home really wasn’t an option I felt in any state to exercise’- Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography 239 7. ‘A country where self-consciousness was basic survival’- The Contingencies of Space, Transnationalism, and the Imagination in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing 250 8. ‘The contrast pained more because it highlighted the limits of each’ 260 Conclusion 263 Bibliography 267 I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my cousins in Pakistan and my Grandmother. Their memories, narratives and practical help were vital, and in no small part contributed to this project becoming a reality. A very special thanks to Anna Snaith, my supervisor, for her continuous patience, encouragement, support and invaluable expertise and criticism. My eternal gratitude also go to Ameena, my wife, for her dispassionate advice as she toiled listening to page after page, her unwavering faith in me and her absolute determination that I complete what I had started. My thanks extend to Ian Henderson and Max Saunders for always being available to listen. And Ruvani Ranasinha, for her constructive comments and encouraging my interest in Pakistani women writers. Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to my family (both of them), for their patience, tolerance and for the love, security and drive they have all given me. II ABSTRACT This thesis explores the fraught intersections between gender and the nationalist imaginary in the work of Pakistani women writers, from the period of the country’s inception in 1947 to more contemporary narrative treatments of the subject and its various tropes. The central concern is how these complex literary interventions figure across a hegemonic nationalist historiography which refuses to grant them a representational space. My project views the literary practice of these women authors in terms of what is at stake when their varied and diverse gendered contributions compel Pakistani nationalist discourse to re-evaluate its own precarious ideological foundations. These writers and the repressed histories their texts are a repository for, negotiate a tenuous path between the potentially regenerative power of an independent, postcolonial future and their position as marginalised silence within this supposedly ‘inclusive’ reality. The project addresses its main research questions in an Introduction and four chapters. The first section unpacks how the work of authors such as Khadija Mastoor and Hijab Imtiaz Ali has been elided across various postcolonial discourses. In Chapter 1 I examine the various routes to agency that have been theorised by feminists in the postcolonial context and how this can be applied to the work of Pakistani writers, Farkhanda Lodhi and A.R. Khatun. These methodologies are tested III against the bloody Partitioning of the Indian sub-continent in the second chapter, necessitating a rethink of the possibilities of agency represented by the female body when it is under the threat of violence and erasure. My penultimate chapter focuses on the seemingly banal, but immensely popular genre of romance literature in Pakistan, on which very little research has been conducted. To this end I have chosen Qaisra Shahraz's romance epic, The Holy Woman. The final chapter explores tropes of migration and return in the diasporic imaginary of contemporary Pakistani women writers, Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamila Shamsie and Uzma Aslam Khan and their novels An American Brat, Kartography and Trespassing respectively. 1 INTRODUCTION NATION, GENDER AND THE (PAKISTANI) POSTCOLONIAL QUESTION I said impatiently, ‘You always look for tidy surfaces and never peep into dark corners. That’s why you’re so proud of the depth of your love. But unfortunately Zulfie, I’m obsessed with discriminating between the genuine and the fictitious. It’s that preoccupation of mine that whispers to me: Within the calm surface of your sea of love there are underwater predators. 1 Pakistani Women Writers in Discourse, Practice and History This thesis focuses on exploring the representation of feminist agency in writing by Pakistani women. An endeavour of this kind poses several challenges. The work of these often neglected writers not only engenders unease in historical accounts of Pakistan’s rise to nationhood.
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