Discourse of Difference: Cultural Resistance, Identity Politics, and Feminist

Nationalism in Indo-Muslim Fiction

by

Khurram N. Khurshid

LL.B., Punjab University, Pakistan, 1992

M.A., Punjab University, Pakistan, 1984

B.A., Punjab University, Pakistan, 1981

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: John Clement Ball, PhD, English

Examining Board: Carolyn Bassett, PhD, Political Science, Chair

Tony Tremblay, PhD, English

Diana Austin, PhD, English

External Examiner: Jill Didur, PhD, English, Concordia University

This dissertation is accepted by the

Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

May, 2010

©Khurram N. Khurshid, 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

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For my mother and to the memory of my father

ii ABSTRACT

English fiction produced by Muslim writers of India and Pakistan between 1905 and

1964 provides insights into the social, cultural, and political sensibility of the Muslim community in pre-Partition India. These Indo-Muslim texts deploy tropes of cultural resistance, identity politics, and feminist nationalism, and unsettle the hegemony of colonial and Hindu discourses of the period, suggesting alternative epistemologies and spaces of alterity and cultural difference. Read as benchmarks of Indian Muslim identity and consciousness, these narratives reveal the crisis of identity that vexed Indian Muslims in the decades preceding India's Partition in 1947, and shed light on the ideology of

Muslim political separatism of the period. The principal texts examined in this study suggest the cultural distinctness of the Muslims of India, and employ the resources of identity politics and politics of difference as modes of ideological resistance. Ahmed

Ali's Twilight in Delhi uses an Urdu-centric English voice to resist the hegemony of official English in colonial Delhi; Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column deploys the identities of marginalized women to challenge the patriarchal structures of Lucknow's upper-class, feudal society; and Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided weaves an

Islamic feminist narrative to construct a polemical discourse of Muslim political separatism and Pakistani nationalism. The works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Zeenuth

Futehally, Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, among others, carve distinctive Muslim cultural spaces to register feminist protest and articulate anti-colonial resistance. The Muslim texts of this oeuvre engage with Islamic history and the Islamic cultural ethos in India, suggesting an Indian Muslim consciousness negotiating its sense of self between past and present, and evincing anxiety about its cultural identity and iii historical destiny. The Indian Muslim identities conjured up in this discourse are poised on the threshold of change and new articulations, struggling to formulate a viable synthesis between the contradictory influences of tradition and modernity. This Indo-

Muslim imaginative discourse underscores the significance of religion in identity- formation in India and Pakistan, and projects a Muslim identity informed by an eclectic and pluralist conception of Islam.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation and thanks to my teacher and supervisor, Dr.

John C. Ball, who offered invaluable advice and encouragement at every stage of this project. I learnt immensely from his meticulous scholarship and editorial judgement, and this document would have been a great deal poorer without his interventions and guidance. I am also thankful to Dr. Mary Rimmer, not only for reading the dissertation and offering invaluable advice, but also for her support throughout my stay at UNB. I also learnt a lot from Dr. Diana Austin and Dr. Gwendolyn Davies when I began my graduate studies. Thanks are also due to Dr. Carolyn Bassett, Dr. Diana Austin, Dr. Tony

Tremblay, and Dr. Jill Didur for examining this dissertation and offering very constructive and nuanced feedback. Special thanks to my wonderful friend Bill Randall, who has been an ever-willing sounding board for my thoughts through the years. I would also like to thank Dr. Jennifer Andrews for reading the dissertation, and Tony Robinson-

Smith and Madeline Bassnett for their help and encouragement. I am grateful to my mother for her unconditional love, and to my sister, Yasmin Haroon, and her family.

Most of all, I am indebted to Naushaba, Hassan, and Amna - fellow travelers - who have borne the many hardships of my PhD journey with patience and good cheer, and whose love has kept me going.

v Table of Contents

DEDICATION ii ABSTRACT iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v Table of Contents vi Introduction: Indo-Muslim English Fiction 1 Muslim Identity and Consciousness: Aspects of a Debate 5

Islam in India: Historical Ethos 13

Cultural Resistance: Paradigms of Alterity 32

Identity Politics: Epistemes of the Self 37

Feminist Nationalism: The Nation and its Margins 44

Politics of Difference: Pluralist Ontologies 48

Chapter 1 52 "Bol Gai My LordKukroon-KoorT\ Urdu Tropes in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi 52 Negotiating English: Language and Resistance 57

Urdu/English Intertexts: The Short Stories 64

Unsettling English: The Vernacular Voice 71

Subversive Intervals: Authority of the Ghazal 85

Forms of Resistance: Narration, Imagery, History 94

Conclusion 110

Chapter 2 113 "Beyond the Encircling Walls": Resistance and Women's Identities in Sunlight on a Broken Column 113 Indian Feminism: Local Epistemologies 115 vi Lucknow: Pre-Colonial/Colonial Histories 120

Sunlight: The Text and its Critics 123

Personal is Political: Identity, Resistance, Patriarchy 128

Women's Lives: Forms of Oppression 141

Women's Lives: Forms of Agency 148

Laila's Quest: Agency/Authenticity 152

Cracking India: Partition and Nationalism 168

Conclusion 179

Chapter 3 181 "We Shall Build the World Anew": Islamic-Feminist Nationalism in The Heart Divided. 181 Feminist Nationalism: Theoretical Constructs 185

Religious Nationalism: Hindu/Muslim Constructs 188

Politics of Romance: Marriage and Nation 195

Politics of Difference: Hindu/Muslim Identities 204

Parting the Veil: Purdah and Islam 212

Islamic Polemics: Imagining the Nation 216

Conclusion 228

Chapter 4 230 Other Voices, 1905-1958: An Overview 230 "We Shut Our Men Indoors": Narratives of Feminist Protest 231

"Religion is a Force in India": Islam and Muslim Identities 244

vii "The Undoing of My Country": Indicting Colonialism 248

Narrating Partition: Voices in the Silence 254

Conclusion 258

Chapter 5 260 Conclusion 260 History and Indo-Muslim Fiction 260

Difference and Identity 262

Narratives of Resistance 263

Elite/Subaltern Consciousness 264

Works Cited 268 Curriculum Vitae

viii Introduction: Indo-Muslim English Fiction

Religion [in India] seems to be a natural, populist political force, articulating people's cultural and national identity at a level of emotive meaning more basic andfundamental than other kinds ofpolitical affiliations. David Ludden

Communalism [...] is a form of colonialist knowledge. Gyanendra Pandey

By the end of the [nineteenth] century, Indian nationalism had become synonymous with Hindu nationalism. Partha Chatteijee

In 1905, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali Muslim woman writer and social activist, published "Sultana's Dream: Purdah Reversed," the first English-language narrative by a

Muslim published in India. "Sultana's Dream" is set in "Ladyland," a feminist Utopia where women have appropriated social and political power, and men are consigned to the seclusion of the zenana. While the men attend to household duties and the rearing of children, the women of Ladyland excel in scientific invention and herald a technologically advanced, efficient, and progressive society. "Sultana's Dream" is striking for its radical feminist ideology, and in its subversion of the power hierarchies of

Indian culture, its resistance to patriarchy, and its imaginative construction of a new state and society, it sets the stage for an Indian Muslim tradition of resistance narratives in

English in colonial and post-colonial India and Pakistan.

This study examines three principal Muslim authors, Ahmed Ali (1910-1994),

Attia Hosain (1913-1997), and Mumtaz Shahnawaz (1912-1948), whose fictional works provide insights into the cultural and political consciousness of the Muslims of northern

1 India during the first half of the twentieth century. Along with these writers, the study also looks at lesser-known Muslim narratives between 1905 and 1964 to formulate an overarching appraisal of the Indian Muslim English fictional corpus of these years. The principal texts examined herein were published between 1940 and 1961; taken together, they construct a narrative of the years spanning 1911 and 1952. As documents of sociological, cultural, and political history, these texts construct alternative historiographies that unsettle and resist the dominant historical discourses and grand narratives of Indian history. These grand narratives included histories of India produced by British historians from the early nineteenth century onwards; official reports, life writings, and ethnographic surveys of India by colonial officials; diaries and memoirs of colonial wives; and popular writings like the Mutiny novel, all of which taken together constituted an Orientalist discourse and an archive of Western knowledge about India.1

These master texts of colonialism constructed an exotic India in the image of the seminal

Other of Europe and the West: culturally backward, scientifically primitive, religiously communalist, psychically atavistic, politically despotic, and incapable of self-governance.

Alongside this body of colonial writing, the discourse of Indian/Hindu nationalism began to emerge from the 1920s onwards as another master narrative, partly in response to denigrating accounts of India in colonial discourses, yet building its own hegemonic categories. The discourse of Hindu nationalism constructed a homogeneous narrative of

11 deploy the term "Orientalist discourse" as it has been theorized by Edward Said: "Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world (40), [and] supplie[s] Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere (42) [....] In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or [...] a discourse" (Orientalism 94).

2 India grounded in the ancient grandeur of its civilization, the supremacy of Hindu religion and culture, and the idea of a unified Indian nation in the annals of the historical past. This nationalist narrative acquired a distinctively Hindu aspect, deploying Hindu mythological symbols, invoking ancient Hindu hero kings and epic warriors, and constructing a spiritually and morally superior community of Hindu coreligionists. Read as a counter-discourse to these two traditions, the Indian Muslim fictions of this study present alternative accounts of this period in Indian history, articulating a distinctly

Muslim perspective on the culture, society, and politics of the times.

The English-language medium of the texts of this study affirms the privileged social status of their authors, and attests that these texts constitute an elitist discourse of the upper strata of Muslim society in northern India. However, despite their elitist

position, the texts undercut their upper-class privilege by constructing holistic accounts

across the class divides and including the voices of subaltern and marginalized subjects in

their discourses. The tension between elitist and subaltern articulations in these texts constitutes an essential element of their thematic structures, raising questions of

representation, power, and agency. The texts of this study have received scant attention in

the critical discourse on Indian fiction, relegated to the margins by critical interest

evinced in the canonized Indian English writers of the period: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja

Rao, and R. K. Narayan. The critical marginalization of these texts situates them in a

position of subalterneity in relation to mainstream Indian English fiction, a factor that

undercuts their purported elitism. While independent studies of some of these texts have

been done, they have not been analyzed as a singular fictional corpus constituting a

discourse of the Muslim creative imagination of this period. Secondly, these Indo- 3 Muslim narratives have not been interpreted as hypothesizing the cultural, political, and religious identity and consciousness of the Muslims of northern India during this period.

Thirdly, these texts have not been read for an understanding of Indian Muslim political separatism and Muslim nationalism in the years preceding Partition. This study situates its primary texts within these three main frameworks, deploying tropes of cultural resistance, identity politics, and feminist nationalism to interpret them as the imaginative expression of an Indian Muslim identity and consciousness.

The Indo-Muslim narratives studied here provide insights into Indian Muslim sensibility and self-perception, and offer a Muslim perspective on the politics of northern

India, on the British and the Hindus, and on the Muslim community's relationship with place and its sense of its own historical destiny. These texts are examined in this study as touchstones of the Muslim ethos in India during the first half of the twentieth century, and to address seminal questions of Indian politics such as communalism, the politics of the colonial state, the social and political role of women, the role of religion in the construction of identities in India, and Hindu and Muslim nationalisms. While answers to these questions are more often sought in social, political, and historical writings, imaginative literature reflects the cultural identity of a people and provides nuanced and

unique insights into their society, culture, politics, and history. As the imaginative expression of the Muslims of northern India, the narratives of this study provide such insights into the political, cultural, and intellectual sensibility of the Indian Muslims of

Delhi, the United Provinces, and the Punjab, and signpost the crisis of identity that vexed the Muslim community of India in the decades preceding India's Partition and independence from colonial rule. Read collectively as the imaginative English discourse 4 of the Indian Muslims of northern India, these narratives capture the stirrings of a Muslim consciousness that crystallized into separatism and the articulation of a distinct Muslim political identity during the Pakistan freedom movement.

Muslim Identity and Consciousness: Aspects of a Debate

In his study of Muslim discourses in English, Amin Malak identifies Ahmed Ali's

Twilight in Delhi (1940) as the "first major work of fiction written by a Muslim ever to

be published in English" (3). Malak makes a distinction between the terms "Muslim" and

"Islam," the former referring to a person who "espouses the religion of Islam" and whose

"roots are situated in [its] culture and civilization," and the latter alluding to the Islamic faith as practiced by Muslims (5). To categorize a work as a "Muslim text" is to aver that its producer has had an "affiliation with Islam as a source of spiritual and/or aesthetic inspiration," irrespective of her religious or political beliefs (Malak 7). The terms

"Muslim text," "Muslim discourse," and "Muslim fiction" as used in this study allude to works that are the products of a Muslim cultural milieu, and whose aesthetic, thematic, and ideological configurations are interwoven with a Muslim cultural ethos in India.2

Twilight in Delhi conforms to these definitional parameters: it portrays the Muslim community of early twentieth-century Delhi, enacts the private lives of Muslim men and women, and problematizes the cultural crisis confronting the Muslims of Delhi at that

2 While this study does deploy these categories in the general connotations suggested by Malak, it also uses the terms "Muslim" and "Islamic" (not Islam) interchangeably, implying identity of meanings. Malak's distinction, however, is useful because these differences are easily overlooked, especially in "Western" discourses.

5 juncture in Indian history. Moreover, a predominantly Muslim mohalla (locality or district) of old Delhi constitutes the core setting of the novel, and the omniscient narrator provides a Muslim perspective on the historical events recounted in the book, notably the

Mutiny of 18573 and the Coronation Durbar of 1911.4 This conglomerate of influences configures a Muslim "consciousness" in the text, which insists on the difference of

Muslim culture and fashions the novel's anti-colonial rhetoric on that premise. Similarly,

Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) is set in an upper-class Shiite

Muslim household of Lucknow and depicts the Muslim cultural milieu of 1930s and

1940s colonial Lucknow/Oudh, revealing the complex formulations of Muslim thought and consciousness in that time and place. Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided

(1957) is focalized on a group of Muslim characters and constructs a politico-historical narrative of pre-Partition India, capturing the configurations of Muslim identity and consciousness in Indian Punjab in the 1930s and early 1940s. All three texts demonstrate patterns of Muslim resistance to the dominant ontologies of the period and shed light on the frameworks and ideology of an emerging Muslim consciousness.

3 The Mutiny of 1857 was a watershed in the British-Indian relationship in the nineteenth century, "a rebellion that shook the Raj to its foundations" (Metcalf and Metcalf, History 99). According to William Dalrymple, the Mutiny was "the most serious armed challenge to imperialism the world over during the course of the nineteenth century" (Last Mughal 21). Starting as a revolt by the soldiers of the Bengal army, it spread quickly and was joined by other soldiers and disaffected groups, and the "British lost control of a large swathe of north India, from Bihar to Punjab, as well as pockets of central India" (Metcalf and Metcalf, History 100). Barbara and Thomas Metcalf cite the views of a contemporary Indian official loyal to the Raj on the causes of the Mutiny: "Contrary to British wishful thinking at the time and after, the revolt was not merely a mutiny on the part of disgruntled soldiers. It was rather [...] a response to multiple grievances. Among these were British cultural policies, the severity of revenue assessments, and the degradation of princely and landed elites, notably the recently exiled nawab of Oudh" (99). 4 The Coronation Durbar refers to the coronation of King George V ["the Coronation of a new and foreign king" (Twilight 65)] held in Delhi in 1911. The Mutiny and Coronation Durbar are discussed in more detail in chapter 1.

6 It is tenable to speak of a "Muslim consciousness" with reference to India's anti- colonial politics, because of the close nexus between religion and the cultural-political fabric in Indian society. Cultural resistance movements in Muslim societies elsewhere in the Islamic world have displayed similar trajectories. As Amin Malak notes (see 17),

Frantz Fanon uses a similar formulation in The Wretched of the Earth, while theorizing the freedom movements in the Arab world, and talks about the reciprocity between anti- colonial resistance and Islamic revival: "The struggle for national liberty [in the Arab world] has been accompanied by a cultural phenomenon known by the name of the awakening of Islam. The passion displayed by contemporary Arab authors in reminding their people of the great chapters of Arab history is in response to the lies of the occupier" (Fanon 151). In a similar mode, the excavation and glorification of Islamic history and culture, especially in Twilight in Delhi and The Heart Divided, function as counter-hegemonic tropes that resist the vilification of Indian Muslim culture and history in colonial and Hindu discourses. In Sunlight on a Broken Column, the intimate depictions of Muslim culture and family life, and the views of Muslim characters on

Partition and the Hindu-Muslim relationship, create a space that captures the thought patterns and ideologies of Muslim culture and politics of the period. The Muslim texts discussed in chapter 4 similarly suggest Muslim self-perception and collective sense of identity and consciousness during those years.

While it may appear essentialist and totalizing to speak of an "Indian Muslim" identity, given the heterogeneity of Indian Muslims and their "regional, linguistic, class, and sectarian differences," it is plausible to postulate an Indian Muslim identity in historical terms, a collective identity that the Muslims of northern India managed to forge

7 during the Indian freedom movement (Minault 3). In her study of the Indian Khilafat

Movement, Gail Minault discusses the possibilities of a cohesive Indian Muslim communal identity: "Indian Muslims had a common denominator, Islam, and with it a set of symbols of solidarity: the community of believers, the ummah\ its symbolic head, the caliph; its central place of pilgrimage, Mecca; its scripture, the Quran; its sacred law, the sharia; and its local reference point, the mosque" (3). Therefore, while Indian Muslims constitute a heterogeneous group, it is reasonable to theorize the idea of an Indian

Muslim identity in order to interrogate and understand the Muslim separatist ideology of the Pakistan freedom movement.

The origins and characteristics of Muslim identity and consciousness in India have been the subject of contentious academic debate. According to one view, the notion of a homogenous Indian Muslim identity is based on a "false consciousness"; a contrary view suggests that Muslim identity and consciousness in India exist (and have existed) in discernibly coherent formulations (Talbot 84). The truth may lie somewhere in the elusive middle ground between these two positions. In his introduction to India's Islamic

Traditions, Richard M. Eaton argues that it is a fallacy to demarcate Indian history into categories like "Muslim period" or "Islamic era"; he attributes the origins of such labeling to "medieval Indo-Persian chroniclers" who were in the service of India's

Muslim rulers and "at least implicitly identified Islam with the fortunes of their royal patrons and assumed that India had entered history with the advent of Indo-Muslim rule"

8 (10).5 Eaton observes that non-Muslim pre-colonial Indian chroniclers did not refer to the advent of Muslim rule as the "Islamic" era or "Muslim" period, but either condemned the

Muslims as mleccha (barbarians) - especially "when they [Muslim conquerors] used their power to destroy the social order" - or "praised or even imitated them when they used it to preserve that order" (11). Eaton argues that "European Orientalist scholars in the colonial period privileged the use of Indo-Muslim chronicles over other kinds of pre- modern historical data," which entrenched categories like "Muslim period" and "Islamic era" in modern historical discourse (11). The historical accounts of "European

Orientalist" historians were compelled by "contemporary anxieties or political agendas

[rather] than [by] past realities," and projected these dichotomies "backwards in time"

(14). Eaton shows in detail the diversity of "Indian Islamic traditions across many centuries," which reflect "both the dynamism of Islam and the fluidity of Indo-Islamic identities" (27).

In her study of pre-colonial Hindu and Muslim identities, Cynthia Talbot rejects the view that identities are either "imagined" and "invented" or "primordialist" and

"inherent" (85). Talbot argues that modern Indian Muslim and Hindu identities did not

"spring fully fashioned out of nowhere," but drew on identities developed over time:

"They [identities] commonly employ the myths and symbols of early forms of identity, which may be less clearly formulated and more restricted in circulation but are nonetheless incipient cores of ethnicity" (85). Talbot uses Sanskrit and Telugu documents

5 Eaton reminds us that modern historical texts do not speak of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, for instance, as a "Christian conquest," or the post-1492 period in US history as the "Christian era" (Introduction 10).

9 and records of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh between 1325 and 1650 to piece together a Hindu discourse on the Muslim conquests of those years.6 According to

Talbot, the Muslims did not assimilate into existing Indian society as earlier settlers had done; they "retained their distinctive religious and linguistic practices derived from the high culture of Islamic civilization" (86). For this reason, they were cast as the "Other par excellence, and their presence heightened Indian society's sense of self' (Talbot 86).

Talbot argues that after around 1000 AD, the Hindus began to valorize the ancient epic

Ramayana, and the "hero-god Rama's conflict with the demonic king Ravana" became a

"profound symbol for Indian kings beleaguered by Central Asian Muslim warriors entering the subcontinent in growing numbers" (86).7 Hindu accounts of this period

"demonized" the Muslims by invoking the symbolism and imagery of the Ramayana, representing the Muslims as "demons of ancient myth who engaged in endless battle against the forces of good" (Talbot 89). Consequently, Hindus and Muslims "used the language of us-versus-them to strengthen emergent identities in a fluid and constantly changing socio-political milieu" (Talbot 108). In short, while scholars like Richard Eaton see Muslim Indian identities as fluid and holistic, others like Talbot are inclined to view

Muslim and Hindu identities in more straitjacketed forms.

6 The period between 1325 and 1650 "commences with the collapse of Andhra's indigenous Kakatiya dynasty under repeated military pressures from the [Muslim] Delhi Sultanate and ends at the point in time when the last major Hindu dynasty in Andhra was extinguished" (Talbot 85). 7 The Rama myth is still potent in present-day right-wing Hindu imagination. For instance, Hindu mobs demolished the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 on the pretext that it had been built on the birth site of Rama.

10 Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich Von Stietencron argue in their introduction to

Representing Hinduism that Orientalist and Hindu discourses cast Indian Muslims as the

Other and blamed them for India's afflictions: "Both the Orientalists and nationalists [...] saw the present misfortunes of India as stemming from centuries of unscrupulous and tyrannical Muslim rule" (23). Dalmia and Stietencron endorse the view that the Muslim sense of difference was strengthened by essentialist Hindu discourses and by

Hindu/Indian nationalist discourses from the late nineteenth century onwards: "The rise of 'communal' consciousness among Muslims in the second half of the nineteenth century had to do, on the one hand, with the Muslim drive to consolidate Islam and purify it of its Hindu features and, on the other, with the tendency in Hindu nationalist thought to cast Muslims in the classic role of a bestial and malignant 'Other'" (28). In "History and the Nationalization of Hinduism," Partha Chatterjee analyzes history textbooks from nineteenth-century Bengal to assert that "Indian nationalist historiography" emerged around this time and supported the claims of a pure Hindu identity, which could become

"possible only within the modern forms of historiography, a historiography which is necessarily constructed around the complex identity of a people-nation state" (103). The influence of Western historiography from the 1870s onwards further strengthened the idea of the distinctiveness of Hindu and Muslim traditions: "The history of the country - divided now into the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian periods - had shifted to be seen, for the first time in this modern Indian historiography, as the history of the people, of the country, and of sovereignty and statehood rather than of kings" (Dalmia and Stietencron

24).

11 In Origins of Indian Nationalism, C. A. Bayly recounts instances of communal strife in pre-colonial India that unsettle the notion that Hindu-Muslim confrontation began only in the late nineteenth century following the tabulation and demarcation of the

Indian population on the basis of religious identities by the colonial administration. Bayly asserts that Indian religious identities existed prior to the nineteenth century; however, these were, according to him, amorphous rather than fixed, and it is "difficult to show

[...] that there was any unilinear or cumulative growth of communal identity before

1860" (Origins 233). Bayly suggests alternative ways of thinking about "identity" and

"consciousness" in order to interrupt the meanings ordinarily attached to these terms: "In some ways, the Annates term 'mentalite' seems much more acceptable, implying as it does a more variable, ambiguous and fragmented form of consciousness and one that is partly contingent on social and economic circumstances rather than constructive of them"

(Origins 233-34). Therefore, for Bayly, not only are identities difficult to define and pigeonhole, but they are complex formations that encompass and are shaped by multiple psychological, cultural, and political influences. According to Bayly's argument, it is inherently problematic to conceive of well-defined, reified Indian communal identity and consciousness, especially before 1860. However, since Bayly unearths instances of communal strife in pre-colonial India, he is essentially in agreement with Cynthia

Talbot's views (quoted above) that nineteenth-century communal identities drew on identities, however amorphous, formed earlier in history.8 Similarly, Bayly's suggestion

8 This view is also corroborated by David Ludden in his study of Hindu politics in India: "Though people

12 that identity and consciousness be thought of in new ways does not refute their existence, but suggests that they should be construed in a more nuanced manner.

Following the contentious and varied points of view on Indian Muslim identity and consciousness outlined in this section, it would be pertinent for the purposes of this study to consider objective historical evidence in order to shed light on the genealogy of

Muslim communal identity and consciousness in India. The following section tracks significant developments in the Indian Islamic historical ethos that played a role in shaping a collective sense of Muslim identity and consciousness in India. This historical contextuaiization will be useful to the reading of the Indo-Muslim fictions discussed in this study; moreover, it will provide a framework for the seminal investigation of this study: the origins and characteristics of Indian Muslim identity and consciousness during the first half of the twentieth century.

Islam in India: Historical Ethos

As evident from the above discussion, the idea of an exclusive Indian Muslim identity and consciousness has been subjected to much scholarly scrutiny. Did the Muslim community perceive itself as exclusive from the beginning of its settlement in India, or did it acquire its sense of difference at some later time in history? If the latter is true, is

whom we can identify as Hindus and Muslims did use religious ideas to mobilize religious identities politically in premodem times, the activity of organizing antagonistic Hindu and Muslim collective identities became widespread only in the 1890s, during the Cow Protection Movement when Hindu groups attacked Muslims across northern India. By this time the Indian National Congress had already been formed (1885) to embrace all religious, ethnic, and linguistic identities within one overarching Indian national identity" (13).

13 there an approximate "moment" in Indian history when Indian Muslim consciousness began to acquire a distinct sense of its collective self? South Asian Islam reflects features of what Ishtiaq Ahmed calls the "Arabic-Islamic ethos as well as specific South Asian peculiarities and innovations" (212). Ahmed argues that the majority of Muslim converts in pre-colonial India continued to practice "earlier beliefs and customs alongside a popular version of Islam," and peasant converts continued to use customary law based on

"caste and tribal traditions" in their internal affairs, without state interference (214). In An

Intellectual History of Islam in India, Aziz Ahmad attests to a heterodox set of influences on the intellectual and social development of Indian Islam as early as the reign of

Muhammad Bin Tughlak (ruled 1325-1351): "[A] multiple influx of Muslim religious ideas and nuances of beliefs [was] brought by foreigners from all over the Islamic world during Muhammad Bin Tughlak's reign" (4). During the Mughal period, both syncretic and orthodox versions of Islam were introduced and practiced. Dynastically, the Mughals were Sunni Muslims, yet Babar (ruled 1526-1530) and Humayun (ruled 1530-1556) had

"sought Persian help and paid lip service to Shiism under Safavid pressure," suggesting traces of Islamic sectarian pluralism in the Mughal polity of the period (A. Ahmad 18).

The Mughal Emperor Akbar (ruled 1556-1605) abolished jizya (tax on non-

Muslims) in 1564, encouraged Hindu warrior Rajputs to join the imperial army, placed

Rajput princes in high positions in his administration, and married Rajput princesses, in a bid to amalgamate the Hindu community with its Muslim rulers (I. Ahmed 216).

Following his tactics of appeasement, Akbar also founded a "new composite religion,

Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith)," which included syncretic and heterodox elements, including

Shiite esoteric influences (216). It was also from Akbar's reign onwards that state grants 14 were given to Hindu schools and schools unattached to mosques (A. Ahmad 58). Akbar's inclusive and tolerant policies reveal that the Indian Islamic polity during his reign was based on an eclectic concept of Islam, nurtured by heterogeneous and pluralist socio- cultural practices and institutions. Shiite influence found direct inroads into the Mughal ruling elite during the reign of Emperor Jahangir (ruled 1605-1627), whose wife Nur

Jehan was from a powerful Shiite family, and "Shiism [became] entrenched as a spiritual and cultural variant among the Muslim elite of northern India" (A. Ahmad 18). This was accompanied by the rise of Shia dynasties in Oudh and Rampur, which furthered the sectarian heterogeneity of Indian Islam.

While Indian Islam evolved on holistic and eclectic foundations, powerful currents of religious orthodoxy had also begun to permeate its ethos from the late seventeenth century onwards. Muslim ulema (religious scholars) and religious leaders resented the syncretic practices of Indian Islam, and during the reign of the last of the great Mughal kings, Aurangzeb (ruled 1658-1707), the jizya (tax on non-Muslims) was reimposed and syncretic religious elements were suppressed.9 Aurangzeb gave grants to

Islamic theology students and founded two of India's famous Islamic religious schools, the Firangi Mahal in Lucknow and the Madrassah Rahimya, run by Shah Walilullah's father, Abdur Rahim, in New Delhi (A. Ahmad 58). This history shows, as van der Veer has argued in his study of religious nationalism in India, that state institutions were

9 Syed Nesar Ahmad notes that the Mughal emperors Akbar (ruled 1556-1605) and Shahjahan (ruled 1628- 1658) adopted a tolerant religious policy because the Mughal state was strong during their reigns and centralization continued to consolidate it. Aurangzeb adopted a more closed, inward-looking religious policy because the state was under continual threat from external forces during his reign (15).

15 involved in the construction of religious identities in pre-colonial India, and Hindu-

Muslim identities were not simply a construction of the colonial powers and of colonial and Orientalist discourses, as argued by nationalist, anti-colonial historians (32). In the early eighteenth century, when the Mughal Empire began to decline, Hindu Marathas and

Jats acquired power and influence, and Shah Waliullah (1703-1762) began his Islamic reform movement. Waliullah insisted on reiterating the fundamental principles of Islam, calling for a "back-to-the-book," "back-to-pious-Caliphate" approach and preached the

"exclusiveness of the Muslim community from the Hindu majority" (I. Ahmed 217). Aziz

Ahmad calls this an important moment in the history of Indian Islam, because the

"religio-intellectual leadership of the Muslims passed for the first time to a theologian,

Shah Waliullah" (8). David Gilmartin endorses the significance of the eighteenth-century

Islamic revival movements: "Beginning with Shah Waliullah in the eighteenth century, the leading Delhi 'ulama [religious scholars] spearheaded a movement of reform that ultimately affected the entire structure of Indian Islamic leadership, redefining the role of religious leaders in general within Indian Islam's 'cultural system'" (53). In her study of the Indian Khilafat Movement, Gail Minault points to the unifying effect of Islamic educational and religious movements that consolidated the sense of an Indian Muslim identity during the nineteenth century. Speaking of the Firangi Mahal, Deoband, and

Aligarh movements, Minault says, "As each of these movements sought support for its institutions from the wider community, leaders emphasized themes which helped promote Muslims' awareness of themselves as a community, all-Indian and Islamic"

CKhilafat 8).

16 From the 1820s onwards, a series of Islamic revivalist movements swept northern

India and engendered a sense of Muslim communal and religious consciousness.10 Sayyid

Ahmed Barelvi (1786-1831) called for the establishment of an Islamic polity in India on the model of the pious caliphate and was joined by Shah Abdul Aziz, Shah Waliullah's son and a leading Muslim scholar, who issued the fatwa (religious decree) that India was

"dar-al-harb (enemy territory)" under British domination and it was incumbent upon

Muslims to join in jihad against them (A. Ahmad 10). Shah Abdul Aziz and Sayyid

Ahmed Barelvi's movement strove for the restoration of a purist Islam by "eliminat[ing] syncretic elements [...] borrowed from Hinduism" (10). Although the movement was crushed in 1831, Syed Nesar Ahmad believes that it "kept flaring up till as late as the

1920s" (28) and created a "heightened sense of Muslim identity among its followers and supporters" (31). These revivalist movements "rejected peripheral, eclectic, and heterodox elements and polytheistic associationism" and "developed into the first mass movements of Islam in India" (A. Ahmad 10). According to Syed Nesar Ahmad, if syncretic, instead of orthodox, Islamic movements had evolved in India, a "cultural synthesis" would have been achieved, Muslim separatism would not have gained momentum, and Partition might not have taken place (18).

10 While these revivalist religious movements were on the rise, it is pertinent to keep in view the qualification that "religious movements which tended to suppress differences between the major religious traditions [also] flourished contemporarily with the more purist ones (Bengal Vaishnavism and the followers of Kabir in north India, for instance)" (Bayly, Origins 213). However, Bayly cautions that the existence of syncretic practices was not a guarantee against communal violence: "[There is no] necessary antithesis between forms of syncretic religious practice and communal violence: that is to say that while Hindus and Muslims lived face to face in villages and towns, conflict could not emerge" (Origins 233). This indicates that while clearly distinct religious identities cannot be postulated as having existed prior to the nineteenth century, a semblance of communal identity has always defined the religious groups in Indian society.

17 In addition to the revivalist movements, myriad sufi centres, institutions of religious and spiritual learning, had fostered and nourished the spread of Islam in India since the twelfth century AD. Van der Veer explores the significance of sufi shrines and sufi teachings in the spread of Islam and the formation of Islamic identity in India. As he makes clear, the sufi mystics had elaborate religious rituals and networks that established religious communities and provided their members with a sense of religious identity:

"When I speak of Sufis I do not refer to something as vague as 'Islamic mystics', but to brotherhoods (tariqat) of people initiated by a vow of spiritual allegiance (bai 'at) to a saint (pir) who claims to belong to a spiritual lineage going back to the founder of the brotherhood and ultimately to the Prophet himself' (34). These "Sufi fakirs" included

"warrior Sufis," "religious soldiers (ghazi) and martyrs (shahid)," who continued to exert their influence until they were "wiped out by the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century" (van der Veer 34). Van der Veer refutes the generally held notion that the participation of Hindus in the rituals and ceremonies of sufi saints was a sign of religious syncretism in the pre-colonial period, suggesting that Hindus were only permitted to benefit from the "saint's day [...] of power [in sufi shrines] within clearly defined limits" (36). The sufi brotherhoods "inculcated a sense of identity in Muslims," forming an "egalitarian community of believers, clearly demarcated, spiritually and religiously" from other religious groups (37). In his study of the Muslim sufi saints of

India, Simon Digby comments on the influence of one of the most eminent of the Delhi saints, Shaikh Nizamuddin Aulia: "The dominance of Nizam al-Din at this place and moment in time, in Delhi at the apogee of the power of the Sultanate, has permanently affected the historical consciousness of the Muslims of the subcontinent" (243).

18 While it is a difficult historical question to demarcate when, how, and if a coherent sense of Muslim identity developed and was perceived by Indian Muslims, van der Veer cites Richard Eaton's quantitative research to argue that conversion to Islam through one particular sufi shrine (the shrine of Baba Farid in the Punjab) continued from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries (42-43). This research offers some measure of the sufi influence in the formation of Muslim identity and consciousness in northern

India, because a plethora of other shrines and sufi khanqas (seminaries) across India produced similar impact with varying degrees. David Gilmartin has argued that although the British colonial government "rejected religion as a cultural foundation for the state's authority," it established close linkages with many rural shrines in the Punjab and used their status as cultural and religious centres, bringing the local structure of Punjabi society within the ambit of the imperial system of government and establishing a rural support base for the colonial state (46). This argument attests to the cultural and political influence of sufi shrines during the colonial period.

As opposed to Hindu sadhu (mystic) cults, the Islamic sufi cults were subject to more centralized unity because of their adherence to "one revelation and one prophet"

(van der Veer 46).'1 As Richard Eaton notes, the shrines of Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer,

Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi, and Baba Farid at Pakpattan "became the first Muslim holy places within India. As such they assumed immense importance, for it meant that South

" David Ludden compares the dynamic of Hindu and non-Hindu religious identities, which points to the more fissiparous nature of the Hindu faith: "The vast religious tradition that we refer to as 'Hinduism' has no single unanimously agreed upon core set of institutions analogous to the Quran, umma (community of believers in Islam), the Bible, Catholic Church, or Talmud around which a Hindu religious identity could have been unified traditionally" (6).

19 Asian Muslims were no longer compelled to look exclusively to the Middle East for spiritual inspiration" ("Baba Farid" 280). Similar movements were initiated in Hinduism and Sikhism to purify their religions from syncretic influences, giving shape to Hindu and

Sikh religious identities. Notable among the Hindu reform movements are the Vishva

Hindu Prasad (VHP) and Arya Samaj movements in the nineteenth century, and the militant Hindu nationalist movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which was founded in 1925 (van der Veer 65-71).12 The Hindu Cow Protection Movement, which flourished between 1880 and 1920, urged the British government to ban the slaughter of cows and showed undercurrents of nationalist sentiment. As van der Veer explains, like the other religious movements, the Cow Protection Movement also marked the distinction between Hindu and Muslim religious identities: "The Cow Protection Movement was particularly directed at defining the Hindu community against Muslim sacrificers and

British rulers. Muslims bore the brunt of the ensuing violence and reacted by asserting their own identity in distinction from the Hindus" (95). Among the Sikhs, the Singh

Sabha movement was established in 1873 and preached the purification of the Sikh faith from Hindu influences, which culminated in 1905 in the removal of Hindu images from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the centre of Sikh worship (van der Veer 74). All these movements show the "discursive grounds on which nationalists in South Asia operate"

(van der Veer 77), and suggest the importance of "ritual communication" and "ritual space" as loci for religious identity in India (80).

12 In Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's Inqilab (1955), Kaka Rameshwar, Akbar Ali's Hindu friend, supports the Arya Samaj and its Shuddhi movement that is aimed at converting lower-class Muslims to Hinduism, and Akbar Ali is an adherent of Tabligh, "the Muslim answer to Shuddhi" (248).

20 In early nineteenth century, the Muslim Faraizi movement in Bengal, under the leadership of Haji Shariat Ullah (1781-1840), established its own "courts and methods of non-cooperation and civil disobedience" (I. Ahmed 220). The Faraizis (from farz, or obligatory religious duty) preached that all land belonged to God and demanded the abolition of private ownership. The movement had a peasant base and protested against the exploitation of landlords, most of whom were Hindus, creating conflict between

Muslim peasants and Hindu landlords and giving the movement a communal twist.

According to Syed Nesar Ahmad, who studies these developments in the context of

India's entry into the global economic market, the rise of the Faraizi movement was linked to the East India Company's Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, which recognized the majority Hindu landlords, who had been revenue-collecting officials under Mughal rule, and empowered them to fix rents and collect taxes, even for such flimsy reasons as "celebration of Hindu rites and offering to goddesses" (26). The Faraizi movement was quelled in 1831, when its then leader, Titu Mir (1782-1831), mobilizing the weavers and peasants of Calcutta, was killed during a military operation conducted by the East India Company. Nesar Ahmad affirms that most landlords of East Bengal were upper-caste Hindus and most cultivators were "Muslims and Hindu depressed classes," which gave the "relations of landlords and tenants [...] a communal or caste complexion"

(40). Ishtiaq Ahmed endorses this view, maintaining that the militancy of Bengal peasant uprisings took "puritan Islamic overtones reflective of Wahhabistic monotheism" (219).

The influence of Indo-Islamic revivalist movements affirms the nexus that has existed between religious faith and political mobilization in India, supporting the idea of an

Indian Muslim identity imbricated in the religio-political culture of Indian Islam.

21 Nesar Ahmad argues that the Islamic revivalist movements in India created "an intense and distinct Muslim consciousness" (27); he links their rise to the economic depression of 1820s and 1830s, which bred social unrest that impelled Muslims to respond "by attempting to assert their identities as Muslims" (32). He also cites the introduction of lease farming by the British in Bengal as a factor in the Hindu-Muslim estrangement, because lease farming mandated the granting of land to the "highest bidder," recognized "cash security," and favoured the Hindus because they "monopolized banking" (41). Muslim landlords lacking cash "had to surrender lands to Hindu speculators, merchants, and bankers," stoking resentment and communal sentiment (N.

Ahmad 41). While the Muslim peasants suffered due to these changes in the system, the

Muslim landed aristocracy also found it hard to adjust to them, and were exploited by local traders and government officials. It is for this reason that the "Muslim landed elite in Bengal that survived took a leading part in communal politics later" (46). These were the economic and social conditions that led Bengali "Muslim aristocrats, unemployed soldiers, poor urban dwellers, and distressed peasantry" to rally and assert their Muslim identity in response to persecution by the Hindu bankers and upper classes (48).

Another factor that engendered communal sentiment in British India was the newly introduced English judicial system. Peasants could not resort to the new system because it was complicated, expensive, and susceptible to corruption and bribery, all of which "encouraged oppression of Muslim tenants by Hindu landlords" and created

"communal feeling" (N. Ahmad 42). Commenting on the institution of English law and jurisprudence in the Indian court system, Dalmi and Stietencron observe: "The British

Indian legal system saw itself as the harbinger of modernity. Yet in its attempt to generate 22 a uniform legal code on the basis of the dharmasastras [ancient Sanskrit/Hindu religious and legal tracts] plus imported measures of English law (which by the time they reached

India were themselves sometimes outdated in England) it proved, in some cases, to be regressive rather than progressive" (24). Under the Mughal legal system, Muslim educated classes had provided qazis and muftis (judges and legal scholars) and the East

India Company continued to employ them, which was one of the reasons the Muslim scholarly class stayed away from the Islamic revivalist movements. However, in 1830,

English was made the language of the upper judiciary and the Muslims lost their primacy in the higher judiciary to the English-educated Hindus, which bred communal resentment and insecurity. According to David Gilmartin: "The Mughals [...] based their legal system symbolically on principles of Islamic law. However often in practice they ignored the shari 'at for political expediency or reasons of state, the Mughals, like other Indian

Muslim states, maintained a symbolic commitment to shari'at as an important source of legitimation for their authority" (13). With colonial rule, the indigenous foundation of the

Indian legal system was displaced with a mix of different jurisprudential influences.

Muslim self-perception was further sharpened after the Mutiny of 1857 when the

Muslims were persecuted for their perceived role in the rebellion. After the Mutiny, "the general feeling among the British was that Muslims were the main culprits. The old

Muslim aristocracy of northern India had to pay dearly in terms of loss of life, material

23 possessions, and influence" (I. Ahmed 220).13 Hafeez Malik has noted that Muslim identity had never been called into question under the Mughals or the British until 1857, and the need for a Muslim nationalist identity was recognized only when the Indian

National Congress (formed 1885) aimed at creating a "joint Hindu-Muslim nationality"

(qtd. in N. Ahmad 7). Syed Nesar Ahmad corroborates this assertion and identifies the proclamation by Congress of an all-inclusive nationalism in the nineteenth century as the moment and "historical conjuncture when Muslim identity was asserted by a section of the Muslim population" (7).14 Nesar Ahmad argues that even when efforts towards harmony and assimilation between Hindus and Muslim were made, both communities kept their separate identities and exerted them "in times of social stress" (7). In a study that compares Jewish minority status in Europe with the Muslim minority position in

India, Aamir Mufti also maintains that the crisis of Indian Muslim identity "first emerged in the decades following the great rebellion of 1857" (1).

After the Mutiny, the Muslims stayed away from English education and, therefore, could not compete for posts in government services that the colonial

13 The Mutiny is a central referent in Twilight in Delhi. In The Heart Divided, Zohra's father describes to her the impact of the Mutiny on Indian Muslims: "So much your history books tell you, but they forget to tell you how the Muslims were crushed and beaten after the revolt of 1857. The white rulers weakened them in every way, their lands were confiscated, their well-known families obliterated, their industries destroyed, and in some cases even the thumbs of the skilled workers cut off' (41). 14 It is interesting that Indian Muslims began to express the need for a distinct Muslim identity in close proximity to the historical "moment" when the Indian National Congress articulated its definition of a composite Indian identity. This opens the important question of the role of Congress in the alienation experienced by the Muslim community. In a recent book, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence (2009), Jaswant Singh, a senior BJP member who held important ministerial posts in the BJP governments from 1998 to 2004, places the blame for Partition on the shoulders of the Congress leadership and exonerates Jinnah who has been consistently demonized in Indian and pro-Hindu accounts. In August, 2009, Singh was expelled from the BJP on account of the views he expressed in the book.

24 government was gradually opening to Indians. As a consequence, government services, along with trade and commerce, were monopolized by the Hindus. The Indian Muslim community began its difficult transition to modernity with the so-called Muslim modernist movement, led in the late nineteenth century by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-

1898), who established the Muslim Educational Conference in 1886, introduced a rationalist approach to religious doctrine and interpretation, and urged the Muslims to learn English and the new sciences.15 Sir Syed founded the Muhammad Anglo-Oriental

College at Aligarh (later Aligarh Muslim University), which introduced Muslim students to contemporary science and the Western intellectual and literary tradition, and spearheaded the influential Aligarh Movement.16 The Muslim modernists belonged to the former Mughal ruling elite - "royalty, nobility, and intellectuals" (N. Ahmad 62). They pushed dogma to the background and "emphasize[d] a communal identity based on

Islamic culture and past grandeur" (I. Ahmed 221). The rationalism and religious re­ orientation introduced by the modernists showed the impact of the West on Indian Islam after the Mutiny of 1857. Sir Syed urged the "scientific examination of the corpus of hadith" and maintained that there was "nothing in scripture contrary to the laws of

15 In Sunlight on a Broken Column, "Baba Jan ha[s] been influenced by ideas of reform among Muslims" and gives Uncle Hamid an English education (86). In The Heart Divided, Sheikh Nizamuddin is similarly influenced by this emphasis on modern education: "Sheikh Nizamuddin had soon realized that Western education would be a great asset to young men in the future, and had sent both his sons to England" (4). 16 Aligarh's mention in Twilight in Delhi reveals the ambivalence and resistance of Indian Muslims towards Western education in those years: "I wanted to go to Aligarh to study further [says Asghar], but father put his foot down. He wouldn't hear the name of Aligarh. It is after all a Muslim institution, but he says it is all the evil-doing of the Farangis who want to make Christians and atheists of all of us" (36).

25 nature" (A. Ahmad ll).17 The Muslim League was founded in 1906 by Sir Syed's followers, "Muslim professionals of landowning and bourgeois background [,] in response to the growing power of Congress in politics and the growing economic power of the Hindu middle classes" (I. Ahmed 223). The Muslim League remained "a party of the gentry," concerned only with safeguarding the Muslim share in employment and representation in government services and legislative bodies, until the 1930s, when it gradually transformed into a political organization of the Indian Muslim masses (I.

Ahmed 223).18

An important moment in the consolidation of religious identities in India was the setting up of separate electorates for Muslims by the colonial government. According to

David Gilmartin, "The idiom of religious solidarity was incorporated into the structure of the representative system when separate communal electorates were introduced - first in the 1880s in municipal committees, and later in elections for the provincial Legislative

Council and Assembly" (27). Separate electorates were introduced in Bengal and the

United Provinces in 1909 and "became the norm in Punjab after 1919" (Gilmartin 27).19

17 In Inqilab, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas praises Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, "the brave and far-sighted old man" who sought to integrate "a thirteen-hundred-year-old culture [...] with the western sciences brought with them by the new rulers of the country" (129). 18 The politics of the Muslim League is a subject of discussion in the later sections of Sunlight, while The Heart Divided presents the point of view of the Muslim League in detail. In the latter, Zohra talks about her reasons for joining the League: "Besides, the League, which was once the organization of the nawabs and landlords and the rich few only, has grown by leaps and bounds and today no one can deny that it's a people's organization" (448). 19 In her autobiography, Jahan Ara Shahnawaz, Mumtaz Shahnawaz's mother, records the reaction of her father after the Minto-Morley Reforms in 1909 established the principle of separate electorates. Her father, Sir Muhammad Shafi (Mumtaz's maternal grandfather), who was president of the Punjab Muslim League at the time, said, "The separate entity of the Muslim nation in the subcontinent has been established for all times" (50).

26 In his study of the factors leading to Partition, David Page sees the institution of separate electorates for Muslims as a critical stage in the development of communal identities in

India: "By treating the Muslims as a separate group, it [the Imperial power] divided them from other Indians. By granting them separate electorates, it institutionalized that division. This was one of the most crucial factors in the development of communal politics. Muslim politicians did not have to appeal to non-Muslims; non-Muslims did not have to appeal to Muslims. This made it very difficult for a genuine Indian nationalism to emerge" (260). Like the census, which established the status of Indian Muslims as a minority group, the introduction of separate electorates was a colonial administrative intervention that significantly influenced the evolution of communal identities in twentieth-century India.

The Indian Khilafat Movement of the 1920s also shaped the developing Muslim communal consciousness in India in the twentieth century. In 1919, after the end of the

First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the Central Powers at the hands of the Allies, "Muslims in India launched a movement designed to pressure the

British government to preserve the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire as they had been in

1914, and to preserve intact the spiritual and temporal authority of the Ottoman sultan as caliph of Islam" (Minault, Khilafat l).20 While the Khilafat Movement has been interpreted widely as a pan-Islamic response of the Indian Muslims to Islamic religious symbolism and centres of authority, Gail Minault also emphasizes its nationalist character

20 In Sunlight on a Broken Column, Asad and Zahid's father is introduced as a devotee of the Khilafat Movement: "Their father, a deeply religious man, never very strong, had sacrificed his life and money in the cause of the Khilafat movement, fighting the British" (36).

27 and its "use of pan-Islamist symbols to forge a pan-Indian Muslim constituency"

{Khilafat 2). The Khilafat Movement created the sense of a cohesive Indian Muslim identity as the ulema (religious scholars) of various schools of thought joined ranks against the British to demand the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate. The Khilafat leadership called for hijrat (migration) from India to Dar-al-Islam (territory of Islam, or land of peace), and thousands journeyed to Afghanistan in harsh conditions in 1920, only to return disillusioned and penurious. Although unsuccessful, the Khilafat Movement enabled the ulema to enter mass politics and exert political influence in the modern period. Even though the modern-educated Muslim elite showed little support for the

Khilafat Movement (I. Ahmed 223), it bred a sense of Muslim collective identity that was asserted during the Pakistan freedom movement in the 1940s. As Aamir Mufti explains, the word "hijrat (exodus, emigration)" had "semantic associations with the migration of

Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 [AD]," and was thus "appropriated in

Urdu at Partition" to denote the displacement of Muslims and to confer on it an epic, sacred quality (210). The hijrat call of the Khilafat Movement can be said to have created similar sentiment among the thousands of Muslims who responded to it.

After the collapse of the Khilafat Movement, Syed Ataullah Shah Bokhari and other

Punjabi ulema (religious scholars) organized the Majlis-i Ahrar in the 1930s for the

"defense of Muslim interests in Kashmir," using "Islamic symbols to create an active

Muslim community in Punjab, independent of British imperial authority" (Gilmartin 96), demonstrating "the emotional power and political importance of Islamic symbols in

British Punjab" (100).

28 In the first half of the twentieth century, the Indian Muslim imagination was also captivated by the soul-stirring poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), who called for a

Muslim renaissance and in 1930 put forward his vision of an Islamic Indian state, suggesting that the Muslim majority areas of North-West India form an autonomous state or loose union within India. Iqbal called for Islamic rejuvenation by emphasizing "Ijma or consensus of common Muslims and elite" through a "parliamentary system in an

Islamic state" in which state and religion would be inseparable (A. Ahmad 11). In 1930, addressing the All-India Muslim League Convention at Allahabad, Iqbal articulated what came to be regarded as the genesis of the idea of Pakistan. Iqbal urged "the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state [as] the final destiny of Muslims, at least of

North-West India" (qtd. in Wolpert 317). He argued that the "life of Islam in this country very largely depends on its centralization in a specified territory" (qtd. in Jalal 12).21 Like

Sir Syed, Iqbal had a great impact on the Westernized Muslim intelligentsia. Gilmartin comments on Iqbal's influence on the Punjabi Muslim community: "Iqbal expressed a vision of Muslim political solidarity that captivated large numbers of urban Punjabis with its emotional intensity and stress on the active, personal commitment of each individual to the mission of Islam" (85).

21 Iqbal's idea was picked up by a young Muslim student at Cambridge at that time, Chaudhuri Rahmat Ali, who came up with the name "Pakistan" for the proposed Muslim state, where "'P' stood for the Punjab; 'A' for Afghanistan or the North West Frontier Province; 'K' for Kashmir; 'S' for Sind and 'tan' for Baluchistan" (Jalal 12). It is interesting that Iqbal did not include Eastern Bengal in his conception of the new territory. 22 In Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided, Sughra finds inspiration in the poetry of Iqbal: "Her growing years had been deeply influenced by the stirring poetry of Iqbal and she too, like so many others, had dreamt the dream of a Muslim renaissance" (260).

29 In 1940, in its annual meeting at Lahore, the Muslim League passed the "Lahore

Resolution" (later to be called the "Pakistan Resolution"), which did not mention

"Partition" or "Pakistan" but demanded that India's Muslim-majority provinces be

"grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign" (qtd. in Jalal 58). The Muslim-majority provinces voted comprehensively for the Muslim League in the crucial 1945-46 elections, effectively conferring on the League the authority to speak on their behalf.24 In 1946, the British government presented the Cabinet Mission plan, which proposed a formula for the transfer of power to the Indians. The Cabinet Mission proposed a united India, as a confederation with dominion status, comprising the Muslim-majority provinces - Punjab,

N.W.F.P, Sindh, and Baluchistan - as one region and the Hindu-majority provinces in central and southern India constituting a separate region or group. Bengal and Assam were to comprise a third region in this scheme (Jalal 192-209). The Muslim League accepted the Cabinet Mission plan, demonstrating the willingness of its leaders to share power with the Hindus in an Indian confederacy. The plan, however, was rejected by the

Congress because its leadership could not reconcile to the idea of equal power sharing with Muslims in an independent India. The Congress and not the Muslim League,

23 In his presidential address to the 1940 session, Jinnah said, "Mussulmans are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory, and their state. We wish to live in peace and harmony with our neighbours as a free and independent people. We wish our people to develop to the fullest our spiritual, cultural, economic, social, and political life in a way that we think best and in consonance with our own ideals and according to the genius of our people" (qtd. in Metcalf and Metcalf, History 205). 24 Jinnah had gone into the elections with the avowal that success in the ballot would mean that the Muslim League had been given a mandate to "ask for Pakistan to be constituted on the basis of the existing Provinces without any further investigation or plebiscite" (qtd. in Jalal 135).

30 therefore, should take a good part of the "blame" for India's Partition; by rejecting the

Cabinet Mission, Congress squandered a crucial opportunity to stave off Partition.

Following the stalemate of the Cabinet Mission, reeling from their postwar economic plight and in haste to devise an exit strategy, the British announced the 3rd June Plan of

1947, which stipulated the Partition of India and the setting up of a Boundary

Commission to draw the map of separate India and Pakistan as two independent nation- states. When Partition came in August 1947, an estimated 12 to 15 million people were dislocated and moved across the new borders in the bloodiest migration in human history, while Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs massacred each other with impunity, as if atavistic religious hatreds had been let loose. One to two million people are estimated to have been killed in Partition's communal carnage. Muslim separatism, sense of difference, and collective identity were actualized and found political expression in the creation of the new state of Pakistan.

The Muslim ethos in India had deep and complex roots that found nourishment in powerful Islamic symbols, historical precedent, and religious vocabulary, which were deployed by charismatic religious and quasi-religious personalities to mobilize the Indian

Muslim community at various key moments in Indian history. These influences worked to consolidate a relatively cohesive sense of self-perception among the Indian Muslim community, which helps to explain the mass political mobilization that sparked Muslim separatist sentiment during the Pakistan freedom movement. While these developments do not necessarily provide evidence of a homogenous Indian Muslim identity, they reveal the complex terrain of the historical, cultural, and political ethos of the Muslim community in India. From this perspective, it is reasonable to postulate that the Indian

31 Muslim ethos found direction and historical culmination in the ideology of the Pakistan movement. These historical developments provide a backdrop to the study of the Indo-

Muslim fictional oeuvre between 1905 and 1964, revealing the multiple influences and counter-influences that impinged on and swayed the Muslim sense of collective identity and consciousness during these years.

Cultural Resistance: Paradigms of Alterity

In The Prison Notebooks, the Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci postulates that power does not just reside in institutions and other hegemonic constructs but is also vested in the ways ordinary people make sense of the world. Gramsci argues that the experiences and consciousnesses of ordinary people have the potential to shape revolutionary agendas and create a counter-hegemonic culture of resistance. Gramsci calls this populist consciousness "spontaneous philosophy," which is manifested in three principal ways.

Firstly, it appears in language, "not just words and grammar," but "language itself [and the] totality of determined notions and concepts" that it entails (59). Secondly, this spontaneous philosophy resides in "common sense and good sense," by which Gramsci implies the understanding and knowledge of ordinary people, or the proletariat, at a given time in history. Thirdly, spontaneous philosophy is contained in "popular religion [...], the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and acting, collectively [known as] folklore" (59). Gramsci's premise of inciting change through the resources of popular consciousness is relevant to the politics of the texts of this study.

These texts articulate Muslim cultural identity and consciousness in pre-Partition India as

32 mediated by what Gramsci calls "language," "common sense, and good sense," and

"popular religion," unsettling the ideological constructs and systems of meanings imposed by dominant (colonial) and majoritarian (Hindu) discourses of the period.

Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi creates an Urdu-centric English narrative that unsettles the hegemony of official colonial language/discourse in India. Attia Hosain's

Sunlight on a Broken Column resists the patriarchal configurations of Oudh's feudal society to offset the power hierarchies of colonial Lucknow. Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The

Heart Divided deploys an Islamic- feminist nationalism that challenges the discourses of

Indian/Hindu nationalism. As narratives of resistance, these texts permeate the interstices of contested cultural and political spaces to challenge received meanings and settled patterns of thought, and constitute counter-hegemonic interventions in the hierarchies of power obtaining in colonial India. The interventionist strategies of these texts open new cultural spaces that resist dominant ontologies and create alternative representations of reality and epistemes of meaning. Twilight in Delhi and The Heart Divided in particular tap into a popular Muslim consciousness pervading the cultures of colonial Delhi and

Punjab respectively to construct alternative knowledges that constitute the "counter- hegemonic culture of resistance" theorized by Gramsci.

In his introduction to Cultural Resistance Reader, Stephen Duncombe defines culture as "a process [...], a set of norms, behaviours, and ways to make sense of the world" (5). From this it follows that cultural resistance implies practice that is used

"consciously or unconsciously, effectively or not, to resist and/or change the dominant political, economic and/or social structure" (5). If politics is a "cultural discourse" with a

"shared sense of symbols and meanings" through which culture is created and debated, 33 cultural resistance, according to Duncombe, rewrites that cultural discourse and marks a political intervention in its hierarchies of power (6). Cultural resistance creates a "free space" and works in two basic domains, ideological and material (Duncombe 8).

Duncombe argues that material resistance involves the building of "community, networks, and organizational models," while ideological resistance creates "new language, meanings, and visions of the future" (8). Raymond Williams concurs with this view and argues that culture, when referenced in archaeology and cultural anthropology, primarily implies "material production," while in history and cultural studies it implies

"signifying or symbolic systems" ("Keywords" 40). The texts of this study are exemplars of ideological resistance: "signifying and symbolic systems" that provide new vocabularies of emancipation, new modes of thought, and new cultural epistemes that refract colonial, patriarchal, and Hindu systems of knowledge. While the effectiveness of cultural resistance depends to a large extent on its reception and interpretation, "the action of producing culture, regardless of content or form or reception, is the political message" (Duncombe 8). The liberatory ideologies articulated in the texts of this study configure acts of cultural resistance that have the potential to destabilize dominant Indian discourses of the period, and thus to "ease the way into political activity" (Duncombe 8).

Similarly, by projecting ideologies of resistance, these texts articulate "revolutionary ideas" that "presuppose the existence of a revolutionary class," and hence constitute overtures towards political change (Williams, "Keywords" 49).

In Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation, David

Jefferess interrogates the idea of resistance in postcolonial theory and argues that

"discourse, narrative, and language inform material relations of exploitation and 34 inequality" and thereby have the potential to intervene in the material structures of political power in society (7). Constructing resistance narratives and oppositional cultural discourses in colonial/postcolonial spaces is a political gesture that dismantles what Arif

Dirlik calls the "ideological and cultural legacy" of colonialism disseminated by dominant colonial discourses (qtd. in Jefferess 7). Jefferess reiterates Ngugi's concept of colonial resistance, which emphasizes that "decolonization requires the colonized to seize back control of the means of communal self-definition, including language and literary production" (17). The texts of this study are cultural artefacts that aspire to "communal self-definition" and assert the difference of Indian Muslim identity and consciousness on that basis.

Cultural resistance involves "values or ways of seeing and understanding [that] transform the structure of power assumed within colonial discourse by recognizing [...] the relationship of Self and Other [as] one of mutual interdependence rather than antagonism" (Jefferess 17). Thus, colonial discourse creates the binary of "us" and

"them," which undermines "them" (or the "other") because of the unequal power that the discourse creates between these binaries. By constructing alternative histories and different representations of reality, the discourse constructed in the Indo-Muslim narratives of this study dislodges the binary structure of power inherent in colonial discourses, and carves what Homi Bhabha has called a "third space" of alterity.

According to Bhabha, "Third Space [...] constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew" (37). The "third space" of the Indo-Muslim narratives of this study unfixes the 35 unified and integrated meanings presumed in colonial and Hindu nationalist discourses.

Jefferess deploys Johan Galtung's theory to describe cultural violence as "aspects of the discursive sphere, from language to religion to empirical science that legitimize structures of exploitation and marginalization, [and] enable and [are] reinforced by forms of direct and structural violence" (19). Colonial discourse is cultural violence as postulated by

Galtung, and it is reinforced by "forms of direct and structural violence" that, in the colonial context, stem from the colonial state and administration (19). The cultural sphere, therefore, is not divorced from the material, and intervention in one implies intervention in the other. Colonial and dominant discourses enact the material conflicts of colonization and domination in terms of story, narrative, and text, and the counter- discourses of this study, which posit resistance to these hegemonic voices, register an intervention in their structures of power through their own tangential modes of story, narrative, and text. These Muslim narratives counteract the cultural violence of colonial and Hindu discourses by enacting cultural spaces that stand in opposition to the representations of the dominant culture. Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, for instance, constructs a Muslim cultural identity by employing a set of linguistic strategies that decentre the locus of power in colonial Delhi; Attia Hosain's challenge to the patriarchal and feudal order of colonial Lucknow in Sunlight on a Broken Column by implication resists the colonial state that has legitimized these hegemonic institutions; and Mumtaz

Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided imagines an Islamic state that opposes the exploitative and patriarchal paradigms of colonialism and Indian/Hindu nationalism respectively.

Twilight in Delhi is a prime example of a cultural resistance narrative. It deploys

Urdu tropes and motifs to construct a deviant English voice, undercutting the standard 36 forms of official English discourse in colonial India. Using Urdu vocabulary and expressions, verses from Urdu poetry, Urdu idioms, untranslated Urdu words, and Urdu folk-religious songs as synecdoches of Urdu Muslim culture, Twilight in Delhi insinuates a Muslim identity and consciousness in its Urdu-inflected English text. This linguistic strategy decentres the language of colonial officialdom and overwrites it with a buried

Urdu script. By altering the "language of authority" through its Urduized interventions,

Ali's text aligns with an Indian Muslim consciousness because of the close nexus between Urdu language and culture and the Muslim milieu in India. Twilight in Delhi deploys a distinct Islamic/Muslim subtext that lends to its voice a subversive edge, drawing energy from the anti-British sentiment and vocabulary of the Indian Islamic revivalist movements from the eighteenth century onwards. The projection of a Muslim consciousness in Ali's novel augments its rhetoric of resistance and difference, as

Muslim culture and history become modes to subvert the dominant worldview represented by British colonial and Hindu majoritarian discourses.

Identity Politics: Epistemes of the Self

Identity politics can be defined as "political activity and theorizing of shared experience of injustices of a social group to secure political freedom"; the Black Civil Rights

Movement, second-wave feminism, and indigenous rights movements in the second half of the twentieth century are typical examples of identity politics in praxis (Heyes). This study situates the Indian Muslim freedom movement of the twentieth century within the tenets of identity politics. Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi evinces this epistemology as its

37 narrative dwells in depth on the culture and historical past of Indian Muslims, lamenting the erosion of Muslim cultural value systems by British cultural imperialism. Ali's text becomes a site to recover an Indian Muslim identity that is under strain from the influence of dominant political ideologies. The novel deploys a "consciousness-raising" strategy by drawing attention to the unique cultural identity of the Muslims of Delhi and their experience of fragmentation and alienation in the early decades of the twentieth century. The purported defeatism and nostalgia of Twilight in Delhi represent a political manoeuvre that imaginatively recreates the atmosphere and emotional ambience of a

Muslim period prior to colonial oppression, problematizing the condition of Muslim identity and consciousness in the novel's present.

Detractors of identity politics criticize it as a cultural ideology that creates factions between groups, depoliticizes capitalist exploitation, and promotes singular subject positions that play on a "victim mentality" (Heyes). However, the search for a group identity does not necessarily imply divisiveness, because the "epistemic resources of identity" can also enhance understanding across cultures and enable group members to envision the concept of "cultural pluralism" (Alcoff and Mohanty 2-8). Identities are not merely primordial attachments but are shaped by the political, cultural, and social structures in the historical present. In this framework, the identity politics of the Muslim freedom movement is also aligned with what is referred to in critical theory as the

"politics of recognition" - political practice that resists the vilification and erasure of specific identity groups in dominant discourses and calls for their political and cultural

"recognition" (Taylor, "Politics" 39). Ali's Twilight in Delhi excavates Indian Muslim cultural identity from the historical past, Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided constructs a 38 separatist Indian Muslim identity, and Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column deploys

Muslim women's identities to construct its feminist politics. Hosain's novel draws attention to the rights of minority groups (marginalized women in Hosain's context), complying with one of the central matrices of identity politics praxis - the invocation of minority rights. Critics of identity politics argue that identities are ideological fictions that are imposed from above within a social and historical structure; however, by deploying women's identities to challenge the patriarchal constructs of Lucknow society,

Hosain's text shows that identities are social and historical constructs that have a

"socially verifiable reality" and enable individuals to understand and negotiate their social worlds (Alcoff and Mohanty 11). By asserting the identities of women marginalized by feudalism, patriarchy, and colonialism, Hosain's text demonstrates that the politics of minority groups is shaped by the positive affirmation of their identities within the social, cultural, and political sphere.

Identity politics can lapse into essentialism and totalizing tendencies with problematic implications, reducing the autonomy of the subject and casting heterogeneous selves into fixed, well-defined "scripts" of identity. According to Anthony

Appiah, "Collective identities [...] provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories" (97). Appiah argues that Western culture deprives certain individuals - "women, homosexuals, blacks,

Catholics" - of dignity by constructing denigrating "scripts" of their identities (97).

Because, as Charles Taylor suggests, identities are dialogically constituted, individuals belonging to these marginalized groups have to contend with negative scripts of their lives tailored by dominant discourses. For such persecuted groups, identity politics 39 activism is a strategy to reconfigue these negative scripts of identity: "In order to construct a life with dignity, it seems natural to take the collective identity and construct positive life scripts instead" (Appiah 98). In Orientalism, his classic study of the representations of the East in European discourses, Edward Said demonstrates the denigrating constructions of the Orient or the Other that these discourses produced. Said identifies various forms of writings about the Orient - "philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry" - that became receptacles of this body of knowledge that he calls Orientalism (15). In the Indian context, Said identifies the writings and translations of Indian texts by Abraham-Hyacinth

Anquetil-Duperon, as early as the late 1750s, through which for the first time "Asia acquired a precise intellectual and historical dimension with which to buttress the myths of its geographic distance and vastness" (77). Anquetil-Duperon was closely succeeded by the acclaimed Orientalist scholar William Jones, who arrived in India in 1783 and began his study of a vast range of subjects relating to the country, "domesticat[ing] the

Orient and thereby turn[ing] it into a province of European learning" (78).

By the early nineteenth century this Orientalist discourse had paved the way for what Ranajit Guha has called "the stable and official discourse of British historiography of India" (21). These historiographies produced, to return to Anthony Appiah, "negative scripts" of India and Indians, which have been challenged and resisted in Indian English

40 discourse from the beginning of the twentieth century.25 Negative scripts of Muslim identities were also created in the discourse of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, developed in the 1920s, that "equates religious and national identity: an Indian is a Hindu - an equation that puts important Indian religious communities, such as Christians and

Muslims, outside the nation" (van der Veer 1). Hindutva attacked British colonialism for its oppression of the Hindus and Indian Muslims for their long, purportedly tyrannical, rule over Hindu majority India. This discourse of essentialist Hinduism is the other stream of negative scripting that the narratives of this study resist and rewrite. That this rewriting can itself slide into essentialism is evidenced by Mumtaz Shahnawaz's text, which constructs essentialist Muslim identities that shape their own fixed, narrowed- down scripts of identity. Such essentialism in identity formation runs the risk of enclosing political practice in rigid and restrictive modes, thereby reducing the possibility of altering that practice to respond to changed circumstances in the future. However, the purported essentialism of identity formation in Shahnawaz's novel is explainable by

Gayatari Spivak's idea of "strategic essentialism." Spivak advocates "a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" for the purposes of achieving interim political objectives {Reader 214). According to the concept, group identities can come together strategically to achieve a "scrupulous" (this is vital)

25 Three seminal texts of British historiography of the period include James Mill's The History of British India (1818), Mountstuart Elphinstone's History of India (1841), and V.A. Smith's Early History of India (1908). A quote each from James Mill and Elphinstone gives a sense of the denigrating representations of Indian identity that these histories produced. James Mill: "The Hindu, like the Eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave" (qtd. in Majumdar 422). Elphinstone: "The most prominent vice of the Hindus is want of veracity, in which they outdo most nations even of the East" (qtd. in Majumdar 422).

41 objective, even though there may be differences between them. In such a situation, essentialism would be a legitimate methodology in the service of the struggle for justice, fundamental rights, and national self-determination. The essentialist Muslim identities in

The Heart Divided are strategic constructs, in the manner identified by Spivak, which project the image of a homogeneous Muslim culture and nation under threat of erosion by colonial rule and Hindu domination.

According to Charles Taylor, modern identity politics places too much emphasis on experiences of subjectivity and the self; it ignores the individual's relations with the community, which play a vital role in forming his or her sense of self. Taylor calls this intrinsic engagement with community, religion, state, and society the "dialogicality" of the human dynamic, which implies that an individual's identity is created in dialogue with his/her perception in the minds of others: "My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others" (Sources 35). As Anthony Appiah has argued, this dialogicality extends to institutions, "concepts (and practices) made available to me by religion, society, school, and state" (95). The three principal texts of this study stress these larger dialogic constructs of identity by relying on the collective or coalitional consciousness of minority groups. Ahmed Ali's text evokes solidarity with the past history of Indian Muslims; Attia Hosain's novel configures female coalitions as resources of group identity; and Mumtaz Shahnawaz's novel conceptualizes a Muslim identity in dialogic commerce with community, religion, and state.

In Beyond Identity Politics, Moya Lloyd discusses resistance discourses, which she calls "reverse discourses" or "catachresis," and asks if they are sufficient in themselves to affect "material political transformation" (106). Is an account of agency 42 "sufficient on its own to offer all the resources that feminists [and other subordinate groups] need in respect of political action?" (106). Political intervention is achieved through these discourses by what Lloyd calls "subversive repetition," a process of alternative articulation that unsettles dominant representations of reality (106). While resistance discourses might not "'contain' any specific directions for political intervention [they] draw on prior invocations and imply future ones," and the "moment of utterance" becomes a moment of "condensed historicity" with a potential for resistance and intervention (Lloyd 101). Lloyd argues that even if this intervention is "non- normative and anti-prescriptive," it acts to "denaturalize what is taken for granted (norms, modes of behaviour)" (106). Following Lloyd's theorizing of identity politics as resistance, it can be argued that the three principal texts of this study "denaturalize" dominant modes of representation by constructing alternative identities, new cultural spaces, and different inscriptions of reality.

New scholarship on the theory and practice of idenity politics has moved away from the essentialist paradigms attributed to early identity-politics movements. Linda

Alcoff and Satya Mohanty suggest a more objective approach to identity politics, which decentres the entrenched subjectivity that can mar identity-politics praxis and theory, offering "a more workable approach to inquiry that aims to accurately describe the features of our complex, shared world" (6). This new, "realist theory of identity" includes an understanding and theorizing of the experience of the "other," and the acknowledgment of hybridity as a factor in identity formation in the contemporary world.

These approaches undercut the subjective essentialism that can attach to identity-politics theory and practice, and suggest new, revised paradigms. According to Alcoff and 43 Mohanty, these new ways of thinking about identity politics can yield a "new liberatory language less fraught with the limitations and hubris of the 1960s era [...] and capable of responding to more current criticisms and political needs" (6). The non-essentialist identities suggested by Attia Hosain and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas need to be read in the context of these theoretical developments, just as these developments should be kept in view in the analysis of identity politics in the works of Ahmed Ali, Mumtaz Shahnawaz, and the "minor" authors of this study.

Feminist Nationalism: The Nation and its Margins

Feminist nationalism is an ideological construct that takes root when feminist and nationalist agendas coalesce to produce cultural artefacts that advocate women's rights within the framework of liberatory nationalist discourses. Feminist nationalism reconfigures feminism and nationalism from a "women-centered viewpoint" or "feminist standpoint theory," resisting women's marginalization in patriarchal nationalist discourses, and "reconceptualising [women's] relationship" with the nation as active participants rather than "passive recipients" (West xiii). Lois West argues that women remain "invisible" in much of the academic discourse on nationalism, "subsumed under the 'fraternity' of nation" and the accounts of nationalist struggles between men (xiv).

The relegation of women to the national periphery is a legacy of the Enlightenment tradition of the "social contract theory" of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which views the social contract as the "ultimate expression of men's ability to create through their own will, a political society" (Lloyd 92). While this "will" was historically seen to accrue to

44 men only (hence the male-centric discourse of Western nationalism), "feminists appropriated this conception for themselves," recognizing women as "agents capable of acting on and thus transforming the world" (Lloyd 93). Shahnawaz's nationalism appropriates the patriarchal discourse of Indian nationalism and reformulates it as a feminist nationalist discourse, granting agency to women and marking a political intervention in the patriarchal ideology of Indian nationalism. In The Heart Divided, national liberation is simultaneous with the emancipation of its women protagonists, and the text imagines a new Islamic state in India premised on an Islamic-feminist nationalist epistemology. Shahnawaz projects women as central to nation formation, and retrieves the woman subject from the political periphery, challenging the gendered discourse of official Indian nationalism and creating a counter-discourse that situates women at the centre of the national imaginary. Shahnawaz subsumes her feminist nationalist model under the rubric of a reformist, egalitarian Islamic polity, constructing an Islamized feminist nationalism that registers its difference from the political paradigms of both the

British colonial state and Indian/Hindu nationalism.

In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Kumari Jayawardena affirms the reciprocity of feminist and nationalist interests in "third world" countries: "The movement towards women's emancipation [in the third world] was acted out against a background of nationalist struggles aimed at achieving political independence, asserting a national identity, and modernizing society" (3). Feminist emancipation and national liberation are synchronous ideals in the liberatory politics of the Muslim freedom movement as it is represented in The Heart Divided. Shahnawaz's Islamic feminism does not draw inspiration from "Western" notions of women's liberation but takes recourse to 45 women's rights within the legal, cultural, and political systems of a modern Islamic state and society. Discussing the Egyptian women's movement in the early twentieth century,

Mai Yamani identifies similar trends in Egyptian feminism: "Rather than merely copying the Western model, Egyptian women fought for rights. The tools women had were their knowledge of their rights within Islam generally and the exercise of their economic rights in particular" (4). In "The Politics of Feminism in Islam," Anouar Majid theorizes

Islamic feminism as a radical political formulation that is premised on "an Islamically progressive agenda - democratic, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist - [that] might provide the impetus for a new revolutionary paradigm" (56). By bringing its feminist discourse under an Islamic vocabulary, Shahnawaz proposes a liberating feminist agenda drawn from within the Islamic tradition.

In Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Peter van der Veer argues that religion is a central matrix in the construction of identities and the shaping of the national imagination in Indian society. Van der Veer studies Hindu and Muslim religious rituals and the cultural influence of religious organizations, including the

Muslim sufi seminaries and the Hindu Sadhu cults, to show that religious practices are central in formulating the discourses of identity and nationalist politics in India. Mumtaz

Shahnawaz's Islamic nationalist rhetoric derives from the Indian cultural and social fabric, and is an attribute of the political consciousness of the Muslims of Punjab and

India around the period of the novel's setting. Shahnawaz's nationalism evinces the paradoxes that are inherent in modern Western nationalism. Benedict Anderson has argued that the "dawn" of nationalism in Europe in the eighteenth century was coterminous with "the dusk of religious modes of thought" (11). According to Anderson, 46 the vacuum created by the waning of religious consciousness was replaced by the idea of secular nationhood; therefore, modern Western nationalism is intrinsically antithetical to the role of religion in the modern state (11). The Islamic nationalism of The Heart

Divided is under continual strain from a tension between secular and religious streams, which it attempts to synthesize by the force of its grandiose Islamic rhetoric. Another paradox of the modern nation state stems from the conflict between the "subjective antiquity" of the imagined nation and its conceived "objective modernity" (Anderson 5).

Shahnawaz's text takes a glorified Muslim past and attempts to conflate it with the historical present to achieve a semblance of historical continuum between the "antique" past and the "modern" present, a conflation that is strained by the pull of contradictory impulses. While Shahnawaz's narrative celebrates "the 'political' power of nationalism," the posture of essentialism and ambivalence in its Islamic rhetoric and national imagination pushes its nationalist vision to the threshold of what Anderson has called the

"philosophical poverty and even incoherence" of modern nationalism (5). These slippages and tensions manifested in Shahnawaz's nationalism are symptomatic of the paradoxes of Indian/Pakistani nationalisms, which emerged during the freedom movement and drew inspiration from the Western nationalist model, yet struggled to construct local and indigenous nationalist frameworks. The principal challenge of

Shahnawaz's text is to demonstrate convincingly that an Islamic-feminist nationalism is a viable theoretical construct to be effectively proposed for contemporary Indian politics.

While theorizing ethnicity, nationalism, and difference, John L. Comaroff spells out the distinction between what he terms "Euronationalism" and "ethnonationalism."

While all nationalisms contain within them a "metaphysical essentialism," 47 "Euronationalism envisages a secular state founded on universalist principles of citizenship and a social contract," while ethnonationalism celebrates "cultural particularity, claims a spiritual charter, and grants membership by ascription - which is taken to ensure an especially deep emotional attachment" (175). While Mumtaz

Shahnawaz's nationalism is not predicated on a belief in racial or ethnic purity, its invocation of cultural and religious attachments brings it within Comaroff s concept of

"ethnonationalism," which, according to Comaroff, is not only impelled by a primordialist bonding with identity and race, but also invokes attachments of culture, religion, and nation. Ethnonationalism thrives on atavistic affiliations and the historical past, which is "often condensed, authoritatively, as tradition or heritage" (176). In such a construction of nationalism, "collective memory and knowledge" are considered vital

"and difference is treated [...] as ineluctable and ineradicable" (Comaroff 176).

Shahnawaz's Islamic-feminist nationalist model is similarly premised on Islamic

"collective memory," and a sense of difference from Western and Indian/Hindu nationalist paradigms.

Politics of Difference: Pluralist Ontologies

The Indo-Muslim texts that are at the centre of this study celebrate the difference of

Indian Muslim culture, signalling the distinctiveness of Muslim identity from other groups or communities in India. Signification of difference is a core strategy in the praxis of cultural resistance, identity politics, and feminist nationalism, and it is emphasized in the three main texts that constitute this study. By insisting on the difference of Muslim

48 culture, these texts establish the "separate" identity of Muslims in the Indian cultural milieu, which sheds light on the complexities of Muslim separatist thought that fuelled the ideology of Partition. Identity politics and cultural resistance praxis need to emphasize the difference of minority groups in order to establish their separate identity, which is under threat of erasure through integration with dominant groups. For this reason, the Indo-Muslim texts of this study construct distinct social, cultural, and political spaces, using the resources of difference and separatism to counter exploitation and marginalization. Even though this strategy of difference constructs single axes of identity, it resists essentialism by hinting at the internal heterogeneity of the marginalized social groups.

In their introduction to Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sneja Gunew and

Anna Yeatman note that the politics of difference promotes diversity and argue that postcolonial and poststructuralist theories enable us to "admit difference, not simply as the self-confirming other, but as the admission and recognition" of differences (xiv). It is

"contextually contingent" whether the politics of difference is seen as oppressive or as a site to recover egalitarianism, diversity, and pluralism. The Indo-Muslim texts of this study undercut the binary of self and other, which "invariably absorbs alterity into the hegemonic and familiar," and deconstruct universalist, "homogenizing categories" to suggest plural, heterogeneous realities. The heterogeneous, alternative identities created in these texts disrupt the hierarchy inherent in the binary of the dominant "self' and the subservient "other" (Gunew and Yeatman xiii). Ahmed Ali and Attia Hosain espouse

Muslim cultural and feminist difference respectively, which Mumtaz Shahnawaz welds into an imagined nation-state predicated on religious difference. Ahmed Ali uses cultural 49 localism, Attia Hosain deploys cultural pluralism, and Mumtaz Shahnawaz constructs cultural essentialism as strategies of difference that create egalitarian, emancipatory, and democratic morphologies in all these texts, situating difference not as a divisive but a diversifying politics.

The first chapter of this study reads Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi as a resistance narrative that deploys an Urdu-centric discourse to challenge the locus of linguistic power in colonial India. Twilight in Delhi has by and large been read as a work of historical nostalgia that laments the lost glory of Indian Islam in a pessimistic strain. No study of

Ali's text situates it within the theoretical parameters of cultural resistance. The chapter engages in a close textual analysis to identify tropes of cultural resistance in Ali's novel, which function as subversive interventions to decentre the hegemonic structures embedded in British colonial and Hindu majoritarian discourses. The chapter also critiques Ali's Urdu short stories to identify intertextual patterns between his Urdu corpus and the Urduized English of Twilight in Delhi. In the process, the chapter also presents a critical appraisal of Urdu as a language of the Indian Muslim sensibility.

The second chapter analyzes Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column as a text of identity politics activism that dismantles the patriarchal structures of Lucknow's feudal society and challenges British colonial hegemony in India. Hosain's novel has been read as a feminist text, as a document of pre-Partition Muslim culture, and as a novel of "purdah tradition" in South Asian literature. No sustained study analyzes it as a text of identity politics activism. This chapter locates Hosain's narrative in the economic, political, and social contexts of Lucknow's upper-class feudal milieu, and uncovers its anti-patriarchal, anti-classist, and anti-colonial ideology. It argues that Hosain's novel 50 deploys localized, non-Western feminist models to advocate the emancipation of women within their material, cultural, and historical locations.

The third chapter reads Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided as a feminist nationalist tract that locates these concerns within the ideology of an Islamic state and society. The Heart Divided has not received much critical attention, and the only sustained study of the novel reads it as an account of Muslim women's negotiation of modernity during the Indian freedom movement. This study examines the Islamic, feminist, and nationalist themes of the book, and coalesces them to theorize the novel as a text of "Islamic-feminist nationalism." The chapter critiques the polemical voice of

Shahnawaz's text and situates its purported essentialism within the historical and political contexts of the Indian Muslim freedom movement. It argues that Shahnawaz conjures up the concept of a pristine Islamic society based on the legal, social, and political structures of an egalitarian and reformist Islamic polity.

The short final chapter offers a synoptic overview of lesser-known Muslim narratives published between 1905 and 1958 to complete an overarching study of the

Muslim Indian fictional corpus of this period. It does not engage in detailed critical analysis; it only introduces these texts and identifies their thematic affinities with the principal texts discussed in the first three chapters. The obscure and hitherto unnoticed

Indian Muslim fictional works noted in this chapter can be deployed in further research to extend the ideas presented in this study.

51 Chapter 1

"Bol Gai My Lord Kukroon-KoonUrdu Tropes in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world implied and expressed by that language. Frantz Fanon

Every language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture. Antonio Gramsci

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness. Marx and Engels

Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi represents the Muslim experience in colonial Delhi during the early decades of the twentieth century, and reveals the complex and shifting delineations of Muslim consciousness during these years. Ali's text deploys Urdu tropes and motifs to construct an Indianized and Urdu-centric narrative that resists the dominant

British and Indian discourses of the period. The Urdu slant of the text marks it as a culture-specific discourse of difference and aligns it with an Urdu/Muslim imagination, suggesting an alternative reality that is independent of colonial and Hindu representations. Ali's text uses historical allusions to imaginatively reconstruct an Indo-

Muslim past and challenge the colonial present by intervening in its hierarchies of power.

Twilight in Delhi reveals a vexed Muslim identity verging on crisis, and a Muslim consciousness that perceives its difference from other groups in Delhi society. As a

52 representative text of the Muslim consciousness of the period, Twilight shows patterns of alienation that foreshadow the Muslim political separatism of the subsequent decades.

Twilight in Delhi is a chronicle of a Muslim family that maps its story against the backdrop of the political, cultural, and social landscape of the period. Mir Nihal, who traces his lineage from the venerated "Saiyyed" Muslims, "direct descendants of the

Prophet," is a Delhi denizen of the old school, "an aristocrat in his habits [...], a typical feudal gentleman" who has continued to live by traditional norms, resisting the cultural change that has begun to permeate Delhi society (28). Nihal's life navigates around his extended family and friends, and his passion for pigeon flying, old china, and alchemy, while he earns his livelihood from property rents and his lace and cloth business. As colonization shifts Delhi's demographics, geography, and cultural landscape, Mir Nihal, unable to adapt or reinvent himself, gets trapped in stasis between an eroding tradition that he reveres and Delhi's emerging new culture.1 Ali's text captures the uneasy transition of Delhi's cultural ethos; Mir Nihal broods over the changes overtaking the city: "New ways and ideas had come into being. A hybrid culture which had nothing in it of the past was forcing itself upon Hindustan, a hodgepodge of Indian and Western ways which he failed to understand" (175). Twilight in Delhi is a love song to the city of Delhi,

"the jewel of the eye of the world" (4), resurrecting the life of old Delhi, the walled

1 Gowda identifies similarities between Twilight in Delhi and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and argues that Mir Nihal and Okonkwo "personify their respective societies at the moment when the social fabric is about to be altered" (53). Gowda contends that the predicament in Ahmed Ali's novel emanates from fate, while Achebe's tragedy is the outcome of human character and social forces (55). Nihal and Okonkwo are intriguing characters for comparative study, even though Nihal lapses into a despairing passivity that may seem less heroic than Okonkwo's self-destructive will.

53 capital of the Mughals, in intimate detail, catching the city in a moment when new cultural and political pressures are bearing upon it. Ali conjures up the living essence of the old city in enduring images that resonate across the narrative canvas of his text. A medley of signature city-sounds marks the cultural richness of Ali's Delhi: the vibrant echo of the azan in the mohalla; shouts of water carriers and flower sellers; incantations of beggars; women's songs of sawan; chants of qawwals; and calls of saqis in the bazaar, among many others.3 As the novel moves towards its finale, these sounds and images gradually fade or recede into the background, as silence and darkness envelop the city and Mir Nihal's life.4

While Ali's text constructs enduring cityscapes of old Delhi, it also celebrates its singular inhabitants, assembling a panoply of characters who sustain the vibrant Delhi summoned in the narrative. Besides its central dramatis personae, Twilight in Delhi introduces a motley group of minor characters that come to represent the unique cultural

2 In one of the first reviews of the book, Bonamy Dobree noted this intimacy of detail in Ali's text: "Taking us as it does, very skillfully, very intimately, into the details of Moslem life in Delhi during the earlier part of this century, it releases us into a different and quite complete world. Mr. Ahmed Ali writes delicately, with here and there perhaps too nostalgic a sigh; but he makes us hear and smell Delhi [....] And amid the smells and sounds a family has its domestic being sustained by religion and superstition [....] The detail, as Mr. E. M. Forster says, is 'new and fascinating'; it is poetical and brutal, delightful and callous" (484-85). 3These and other Urdu terms are deployed in Twilight without translation, constructing the culture-specific ambience of Ali's text. The azan is the Muslim call to prayer; mohalla refers to a locality or district in a city; sawan is the indigenous term for the Indian month of monsoons; qawwals are singers of qawwalis, religious devotional songs; and saqi is the cup-bearer in a tavern, but in this instance Ali is alluding to sellers of tobacco. 4 E. M. Forster, who admired Twilight in Delhi and helped bring about its first publication by London's Hogarth Press, wrote of the book in a letter to Ahmed Ali: "It is beautifully written and very moving. The detail is almost all of it new to me, and fascinating. It is a sort of poetical chronicle. At the end one has a poignant feeling that poetry and daily life have got parted, and will never come together again" (qtd. in Copolla, "Interview" 20). In his notes to A Passage to India (see Stallybrass, ed., 1978), Forster refers to Twilight as follows: "The civilization, or blend of civilizations, which produced Aziz has been movingly evoked by the novelist Ahmed Ali in Twilight in Delhi" (qtd. in Malak 26).

54 essence of Delhi life, conjuring up a vibrant alternative world thriving in the capital of colonial India. Significant among these minor characters are Kumbal Shah, one of the

"Qutabs [...], faqirs [who] act as the naibs or assistants of God on earth" (104); Molvi

Dulhan, "the bride of God, [who belongs to] that order of mystics who dedicate their lives to God" (88); Mir Sangi, who has made alchemy his life-long pursuit; and Mast

Qalandar, "a mad faqir high in the mystic order" (88). The account of each of these characters constitutes a vignette in the tapestry of the text, and their lives, marked by inward, esoteric trajectories, enact a separate realm in the book, an inner domain of difference that is independent of colonial interference and control. With these vignettes always informing the narrative, Twilight in Delhi weaves a narrative of the cultural and political life of Delhi, fashioning an Indianized text that marks its opposition to colonial representations of India.

Published in 1940, Twilight in Delhi spans the years 1911 to 1919, a period marked by the stirrings of nationalist sentiment in Indian political and social life.

Compared with the contemporaneous Indian English novels of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj

Anand, and R.K. Narayan, which engage with Indian nationalist aspirations either explicitly or implicitly, Twilight in Delhi is markedly distant from this mainstream ideology.5 Ali's text creates an isolationist space in the midst of the Indian nationalist discourses of these years, implicitly suggesting that the nationalism of these decades was

5 By 1940, Anand had published Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Village (1939); Rao had produced Kanthapura (1938); and Narayan had published Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937), and The Dark Room (1938).

55 not an all-inclusive movement. Leela Gandhi notes this stamp of difference in Ali's text:

"Ali's characters offer a significant corrective to the historical view that the national movement was entirely representative of, and always responsive to, the needs of India's communities" (185).6 Ali's elision of nationalism in Twilight in Delhi reveals patterns of

Muslim cultural isolation, which imply an internal Muslim consciousness that perceived its sense of difference in the Indian polity of the period. Muslim alienation from the idea of a homogenous Indian nation — and the tropes of Muslim isolationism posited in Ali's text — points to a crisis of identity facing Indian Muslims during the early decades of the twentieth century. The trajectory of Muslim consciousness traced in the novel provides a deeply felt perspective on the Muslim community of Delhi and offers insights into the

Muslim political separatism of the succeeding decades.

The years in which Twilight is set and the year of its publication are closely tied to its political themes. The narrative time encloses two significant political events, the

Coronation of King George V in 1911 and the Rowlatt Act of 1919 - the latter sparked political unrest and protests in India that led to the massacre by British soldiers of hundreds of protesters in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. Ali elides the massacre, keeping the anti-colonial focus of his narrative within the geographic confines of colonial Delhi. The novel's first publication in 1940 coincides with the passage of the Lahore Resolution

6 Jameela Begum reads the depiction of purdah in Ali's text and Attia Hosain's Sunlight on A Broken Column as intertwined with the national and political struggles of the period. Hosain's text, according to Jameela Begum, captures "Within the walls [of the zenana] in miniature the experience of a whole nation fighting its personal and political battles" (210). And in Ali's text, "the drama of subjugation is played out against the background of India's struggle for freedom, [and both novels] create personal histories] that cannot be divorced from the religious and national histories" (214).

56 (later renamed the Pakistan Resolution) by the Muslim League in 1940, which spelled out the roadmap of a separate political identity for India's Muslim majority areas. These epoch-making events, even when not overtly referenced or distant from the narrative time of the novel, function as embedded historical subtexts because of the novel's deep political underpinnings. Therefore, while the narrative covers the second decade of the twentieth century, the political climate of the succeeding decades is not wholly outside its imaginative conception.

Negotiating English: Language and Resistance

It is problematic to view Twilight as a "representative" text of Indian Muslims because of its mediation by the English language, which situates it among a privileged category of texts in India, besides entangling its discourse with the colonial language, with its inherent prejudice and exclusionism and "its atavistically anti-Muslim connotations"

(Malak 7). However, any postcolonial text using colonial language and structures in its aesthetic confronts this impasse. As Edward Said states, it is "the partial tragedy of resistance, that it must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire" (Culture 210). To address this problem, as I will argue, Ali's language reconstitutes the modalities of colonial English, thereby creating gaps in its colonial/imperial epistemes of power and bringing it under the influence of the Indian vernacular tradition, with a specific Urdu slant. The Urdu- mediated English of Ali's text enables it to shape a "different" discourse, which refracts the hegemonic locus of colonial/standard English in British India. The English text also 57 enables dialogue with the English-speaking West, registering an indigenous voice of resistance, charting cultural territory, so to speak, before the initiation of a "process of artistic and literary decolonization" (Tiffin 99). The text enters the "discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories" (Said, Culture 216). Said calls this kind of writing the voyage in.

It may be problematic to speak of a "Muslim consciousness" because

"consciousness" can be an amorphous concept, due to its location in the embedded, intangible realm of the psyche and ideas of the self. However, if we endorse the general critical consensus that Twilight is a novel of a collectivity or a community, we can nudge a step closer to reading this representation of collective life as an embodiment of the

"consciousness" of the Muslim community of the period. The eminent Urdu critic,

Muhammad Hasan Askari, in one of the earlier Urdu reviews of Twilight, calls it a "novel of collective life," which he defines as a work in which the life of a whole society can be presented through the depiction of a group, against the background of a "revolutionary movement or war" (32). Askari considers it remarkable that Ali's text achieves this effect without setting his novel during a war or revolution, and by the depiction of ordinary, everyday life. In his review of the book, Laurence Brander sees the mohalla as a microcosm of Delhi, which is drawn with "intense realism" and offers a unique record of

"Muslim life" in the city (83). Similarly, Harish Trivedi points out the weak characterization of the novel, and calls the city of Delhi the novel's real protagonist, suggesting the collective, representational nature of the text. In Trivedi's words, Twilight

58 is a "novel of a historical moment, a novel of community, and [...] a novel of place" (51).

In a similar vein, Priya Joshi sees Mir Nihal's refusal to accept the cultural changes overtaking colonial Delhi as his attempt to "preserve the [...] Delhi of Bahadur Shah"

(221), and underscores the centrality of Delhi in the novel's imaginative scheme: "Built and rebuilt seven times, Mir Nihal's Delhi from the novel's opening is really Ali's protagonist" (216). Joshi concurs with Trivedi that the novel draws on the eighteenth- century Urdu poetic form, the shehrashob, '"a lament on a misgoverned, depraved, or ruined city'" (216). As a narrative of the city of Delhi, Twilight spotlights the fortunes of the city's Muslim community, capturing the shifting ground of Muslim consciousness or collective Muslim self-perception during the early decades of the twentieth century, which foreshadows ideas of Muslim separateness in the years leading to Partition.

Early English writing in India was produced either by the colonial elites, or by indigenous upper classes, and replicated colonial values, exhibiting complicity with the ideology of empire. From the early twentieth century onwards, coinciding with Indian demands for political self-representation, Indian English writing began to acquire a distinct Indian voice and an oppositional, anti-colonial agenda.7 In The Empire Writes

Back, Ashcrofit, Griffiths, and Tiffin analyze the challenges faced by writers from former

British colonies who choose English as their language of expression. The principal

7Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in his introduction to A History of Indian Literature in English (2003), cites Kylas Chunder Dutt's "A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945" (1835) as a moment of "the imaginative beginnings of a nation," and one of the first texts to use the "language of subversion." Mehrotra identifies Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya's Rajmohan's Wife (1864) as the first English novel by an Indian, and signposts the "Gandhian nationalist phase of the 1920s" as the "second coming" of the Indian English novel (7-11).

59 challenge is to find an authentic voice to render indigenous experience, in a language that is inherently alien to that experience and reproduces a colonial worldview because of its deep-set entanglement with colonial assumptions, vocabulary, and semantic logic.

English-language writers from the former colonies have responded in different ways to the challenge of constructing an anti-colonial aesthetic in the colonizer's language. Two contrasting strategies are noteworthy for mapping the wide spectrum of language resistance envisaged in postcolonial texts.

The views of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o occupy a radical position in the language debate in postcolonial writing. Ngugi urges African writers to write in

African languages to engender a paradigmshift in African literature. According to Ngugi, the colonial language was and continues to be the means of the cultural subjugation of

Africa: "The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation" (9). Ngugi describes the linguistic and semantic disjunct experienced by Africans owing to the dichotomy that exists between their language of experience, which in his case is Gikuyu, and their language of written communication, which is the imposed colonial language, English in the case of Kenya. Ngugi attests to the close ties between an individual's language and her sense of historical identity:

"Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history"

(15). For authentic decolonization, the "decolonization of the mind," African languages must replace the colonial language as the media of African discourse. In Ngugi's schema, this linguistic shift would become an instrument of radical change: "African literature can only be written in African languages, that is, the languages of the African peasantry and

60 working class [...], the agency for the coming inevitable revolutionary break with neo­ colonialism" (27). Ngugi's vision of a clear break with the colonial language reflects the reciprocity between language, culture, and identity in "decolonized" spaces. Ngugi's position may seem Utopian, yet it touches the heart of the problem and alerts us to the crucial role of language in colonization and anti-colonial struggles.8

In contrast to Ngugi, Chinua Achebe argues for the retention of English as an

African language: "I have been given this language and I intend to use it" ("African

Writer" 62). He proposes the idea of a "new" English, moulded to African conditions: "I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience.

But it will have to be a new English, still in foil communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings" ("African Writer" 60). In a direct rebuttal of

Ngugi's "Manichean vision," Achebe underscores the axial position of English as the lingua franca of Nigerian society: "I can speak across two hundred linguistic frontiers to fellow Nigerians only in English" ("Politics" 269).9 While it is Achebe's views that have had widespread support and currency, one of its outcomes has been the proliferation and fetishization of "postcolonial" literatures in Western academia, and in the Western print

8 Salman Rushdie's thoughts on the problematic of English in postcolonial writing are worth noting: "And I hope all of us share the views that we can't simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free" ("Imaginary" 17). 9 Derek Walcott's idea of a syncretic language for Caribbean discourse and E.K. Braithwaite's conceptualization of Nation Language are two other intriguing contributions to this debate.

61 markets and media. This kind of commodification of "other" literatures is fraught with risks of neutralizing anti-imperial voices in these texts, commodifying them as cultural artefacts, and bringing them within the ambit of "Western" discourse. The language debate in postcolonial literatures displays the vital force of language in constructing tropes of resistance, as well as modes of compliance, to the dominant discourses of empire.

The Indian novelists of the 1930s and 1940s articulated their own responses to the problematic of using colonial language in colonized/post-colonized space. R.K. Narayan speaks of incorporating "unobtrusive translations and Indianisms" in his fiction, and

Mulk Raj Anand stresses the need to bring the "higgledy piggledy of English mixed with

Indian languages as spoken in the Indian streets" into the matrix of Indian fiction (qtd. in

Rahman, "Linguistic" 2-3). Attia Hosain speaks about the disconnect between the

English language and the Indian writer's cultural experience: "I grew up with the English language but not with the culture behind it. I was always outside that and deeply rooted in my own [....] What is one to do if a concept or image of one's own culture is so alien to the foreign culture that the word for it does not exist in that language? [....] Maybe the

Eastern writers writing in English [...] can create a new Anglo-Asian [literature]"

("Foreign Tongue" 2-4). The most celebrated statement on the intricacies of Indian

English fiction in the 1930s is Raja Rao's foreword to Kanthapura (1938). Rao speaks of the complexities that confront an Indian who writes in English: "The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.

One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that

62 looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word 'alien' yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up [...] but not of our emotional make-up" (vii). The disjunction between the language of "intellectual make­ up" and the language of "emotional make-up" spotlights the dissonance that exists between language and place, and between language and experience, in the colonial context. For Rao, this dissonance can be addressed by inventing a distinctly Indian

English idiom: "We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians [...] Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American" (vii).

These linguistic concerns of the early Indian English novelists manifest the conflictual terrain of such writing in colonial space, just as they emphasize these writers' conscious endeavor to bring standard English into alignment with Indian experience.

Ahmed Ali responds to this linguistic challenge by bringing his English text under the influence of the linguistic structures and thematic concerns of the Indian Urdu tradition.

By the time Twilight in Delhi was published in 1940, the works of Rao, Anand, and

Narayan had put in place an embryonic Indian English narrative tradition. The discourse constructed by these three writers represented an experience of pre-independence India that stemmed predominantly from a Hindu perspective. Raja Rao's Kanthapura is a prime example of the Hindu-centric discourse of the period. Rao's narrative is layered with Hindu mythological allusiveness and evinces a commitment to Gandhi's nationalist struggle, which is manifested in his text by the untouchables and women of the eponymous village forming a resistance group against British rule. The only Muslim

63 character in the novel is the policeman, Bade Khan, a diabolical figure who schemes to quell the resistance. Ahmed Ali's novel replaces the Hindu domain of his contemporary

Indian novelists with a distinctly Muslim perspective on early twentieth-century India.

Urdu/English Inter texts: The Short Stories

Before the publication of Twilight in Delhi, Ahmed Ali had established his reputation as an Urdu short-story writer of some note. The techniques, tropes, and themes deployed in

Ali's Urdu short stories shed light on the thematic and stylistic features of his English works, revealing an aesthetic continuum in his fictional oeuvre, and an intertextual conjunction between his Urdu and English narratives. Ali's Urdu career began amidst controversy, with considerable social repercussion and debate. While working as English lecturer at Lucknow University, he forged a literary partnership with a group of Western- educated young Indians that changed the direction of Urdu literature in India.10 In 1932, these young writers published a collection of twelve Urdu short stories, titled Angaray

(Blazing Cinders), which constitutes, in the words of Aziz Ahmed, the "first ferocious

10 The group comprised, besides Ahmed Ali, Sajjad Zahir (1905-1973), Mahmuduzzafar (1908-1956), and Rashid Jehan (1905-1952). Zahir and Mahmuduzzafar had been educated at Oxford and, like Jawaharlal Nehru and other young Indians, had received a "thorough grounding in Marxism" there (Coppola, "European Phase" 3). Rashid Jehan, the only woman in the group, was a medical doctor who later married Mahmuduzzafar. Sajjad Zahir gained prominence as a Communist politician in India and Pakistan in later years.

64 attack on society" in modern Urdu literature (qtd. in Coppola, "European Phase" 2).11

The Angaray stories attacked injustice and oppression in Indian society, castigated religious dogma, and held the purported superstition and obscurantism of Indian Muslim attitudes to ridicule. Angaray, "that brave adolescent book," aroused a public outcry, was denounced by religious and secular circles alike, and was reproached for indecency, vulgarism, and blasphemy (Ali, "Progressive Writers Urdu" 35). Ali describes the public reaction to the book: "Mullahs from the pulpits and priests from the minarets cried invectives against the book and the authors; semi-political and all-India organizations passed resolutions condemning it [....] On the floor of the United Provinces Assembly questions were asked and demands made for its proscription" ("Historical Perspective"

92). The short story that aroused most ire was Sajjad Zahir's "Jannat ki Basharat" (A

Vision of Paradise), which insinuated that the piety of its protagonist, a devout cleric, was latent sexual desire masking as religious devotion. By its open treatment of the subject of sex and sexuality, the book had penetrated a taboo area of Indian and Muslim orthodoxy and was eventually banned by the Government of the United Provinces on March 15,

1933, under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.12 Ahmed Ali contributed two stories

11 The book had a manifest anti-colonial agenda, as affirmed by Ali: "Whereas we were ardent nationalists and anti-British, Marxism was not a ruling passion, though a Progressive outlook was inherent in the revolt" ("Progressive Writers Urdu" 36). Ali's relationship with Marxism is a subject of debate, and allows insight into his views on the intersections of literature and political commitment. (See Footnote 18) 12 Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code reads: "Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of His Majesty's subjects, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, insults, or attempts to insult the religion, or religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or both" (qtd. in Mahmud 450).

65 to the collection, "Mahavaton Ki Aik Raat" (A Night of Winter Rains) and "Badal

Naheen Aatay" (Clouds Do Not Appear), both of which register protest against constricting social customs and bring to the fore the plight of Indian women. "Mahavaton

Ki Aik Raat," the interior monologue of a woman left destitute and unable to feed her children, depicts the scene of a winter night with rain falling on the roof and dripping inside the woman's dilapidated room, establishing commerce between the "external and the internal, present and memory" (Coppola, "European Phase" 17). "Badal Naheen

Aatay" uses the symbolism of night, heat, and dust to depict constricting social and religious customs. The tropes of night and darkness deployed in these early stories recur with consistency in Ali's English fiction, as discussed later in this chapter, revealing the confluence between his Urdu and English works.

Between 1932 and 1938, Ahmed Ali published approximately 30 short stories in four volumes, employing various narrative modes, from staid realism to fantastic surrealism.13 His best-known Urdu story contains themes and tropes that he later reworked and perfected in Twilight in Delhi. "Hamari Gali" (Our Lane), the genesis for

Twilight, is an atmospheric narrative dominated by night scenes and images of darkness, depicting the lives of the working classes in a Delhi mohalla. A work of immaculate craftsmanship, "Hamari Gali" is one of the pioneering short stories of Urdu literature, and has a layering of anti-colonial sentiment that assumed maturation in Twilight in Delhi. In

13 Ali's Urdu short story collections include Shole (1934), Hamari Gali (1936), QaidKhana (1942), and Maut Se Pehlay (1945). A selection of his stories in English translation, The Prison-House, was published in 1985.

66 austere language and with strict adherence to social realism, Ali conjures up the atmosphere of a small street in a Muslim mohalla of Delhi, using snippets from the lives of ordinary characters to construct a narrative of everyday Indian life. Like the many beggars and street characters of Twilight, those in "Hamari Gali" become synecdoches of the popular and everyday lives of Delhi's citizens, and of Delhi's rich cultural heritage. A blind beggar sings the poems of the last Mughal king, which express "the plaint of India's slavery": "Bahadur Shah's poems which he used to sing brought back the memories of the olden days when Hindustan had not been shackled in its new sorrows" (83).14 This comment is made with regard to another beggar in Twilight (see 97), showing the close intertextuality between the two works. The curses of the milk seller's wife in "Hamari

Gali," whose son is killed by police firing on a Non-Cooperation Movement rally, signpost the popular emotion welling up against British rule: "May God destroy these

Farangis. They have murdered my loved one. May they die" (78). This episode is reproduced in Twilight with similar emphases (see 182). Entrenched in the outdoor life of the city, "Hamari Gali" captures the ambience and emotional pulse of Delhi's cityscapes

- streets, alleys, bazaars - motifs that are also prominent in Twilight in Delhi.

In the story's weakest passages, the narrator assumes a moralizing voice and engages in didactic commentary, eroding the impact built by plain, unembellished narration (87). This penchant to editorialize and overstate recurs in Ali's English fiction.

In "Hamari Gali," after having built up the emotional effect of the azan, the Muslim call

14 Quotations from Ahmed Ali's Urdu stories are from his own translations, unless otherwise indicated.

67 to prayer, in restrained prose, Ali attempts a "closure" of this episode, verbosely proclaiming the Muslim "dread of objective reality" and "how well this azan symbolises our life" (87).15 This direct announcement of the symbolism of the azan dissipates the horizon of meanings built by the nuanced suggestiveness of the earlier narration.

Continuing in this mode, the narrator tries to clinch the moral lesson for the reader, as if it is not already explicit enough: "[Muslims have] inflated dreams of Creation and End.

There are shackles on our feet [...], our hands are fettered, there are iron rings around our necks, our tongues have been tied" (87). These homiletic effusions break the atmospheric spell of the scene and alienate the reader by their explicitness. The narrator of Twilight in

Delhi is a persona in the same mould as the narrator of "Hamari Gali," didactic and loquacious, and his stylistic strategy to overindulge in a scene or emotion plays a substantial part in building the sense of ennui and gloom that the book conveys to many readers.

When read against the grain, the didactic parts of "Hamari Gali" reveal alternative, contesting meanings that belie the assertions of its narrator. For instance, in the azan episode just described, there is discernible conflict between the narrator's assertions and the meaning suggested by other verbal evidence in the text. The azan is described in these words: "His golden ringing voice filled the atmosphere. There was sadness yet peace in that voice that my boredom vanished and changed into a silent

15 Hisaan-ur-Rahman, who calls the azan in "Hamari Gali," is a prototype of Nisar, the muezzin in Twilight, whose azan produces a similar effect: "His resonant voice came bringing peace and rest, and a sense of the transience of life, that all that we do is meaningless and vain" (23).

68 gloom. There was neither glory nor greatness in that voice, but it communicated a sense that life is transient and ephemeral" (86). The "golden ringing voice" of the azan conveys a sense of "peace" and a semblance of meaning, even if tragic, which challenges the dissipating vacuity and imaginative nihilism projected by the narrator's wistful asseverations. Similar embedded meanings operate in Twilight in Delhi, revealing submerged layers of suggestion that are swept aside by its narrator's verbose melancholy.

In some of his other Urdu stories, Ahmed Ali constructed experimental narratives layered with dream sequences, magic-realist moments, and allegorical structures. One such story, "Maut Se Pehlay" (Before Death), uses phantasmagorical imagery and a surreal atmosphere to create an allegorical narrative that interrogates quintessential philosophical questions about life, death, beauty, and art. "Maut Se Pehlay" also uses the symbolism of night and darkness - "It was that time of evening when death overpowers life and the darkness of night begins strangling the light of day" (22) - to convey a wider arc of meaning. The symbol of a tree is crafted in clear, unadorned descriptions at strategic moments in the story, yet the subtle suggestions are compromised at the end by an explicit declaration "explaining" the symbol: "It did not seem a tree but the God of

Destruction with arms upraised in a dance of Death" (38).16 By such explicit assertions,

Ahmed Ali's narrator assumes the controlling consciousness of the story, a strategy that

16 The tree in the courtyard of Mir Nihal's house in Twilight suggests similar associations: "In the centre of the courtyard an old date palm tree raises its head up towards the sky, and its long leaves clustering together conceal a part of the sky from view, and its trunk, curved and sagged in the middle, looks ugly and dark" (6).

69 is applied with similar emphatic manipulations in Twilight in Delhi. Another experimental story, "Mera Kamra" (My Room), uses the Urdu tradition of the dialectical poem to stage a debate between Lenin, Satan, and the Artist, attesting to the influence of the Urdu poetic tradition on Ali's narrative imagination.17 Similar Urdu linguistic and literary influences inform the language and tropes of Twilight in Delhi, which suggest its affiliation with an Indian Muslim consciousness. Ali's commitment to Urdu and its centrality in his artistic vision show his belief in the relationship between language and social consciousness. Speaking of the significance of Urdu in his writing, he said, "We dreamed of winning for Urdu and the regional languages the same respect, and for the

Indian people the same dignity, which other civilized languages and societies enjoyed"

("Progressive" 36). Ali's association with the Progressive Writers' Movement early in his career is also a testament to his belief in the intrinsic interrelationship between literature and politics, and testifies to the radical antecedents of Twilight in Delhi.™

17 As Coppola notes, Muhammad Iqbal, the leading Muslim poet of the period, used this genre in a number of his poems, including "Lenis Khuda Ki Majlis Main" (Lenin in God's Assembly), "Farishton Ka Geet" (A Song of the Angels), "Karl Marx Ki Awaz" (Karl Marx's Voice), and "Iblis Ki Majlis-e-Shoora" (Satan's Parliament), among others. 18 Ahmed Ali's association and later break with the All-India Progressive Writers' Movement sheds light on his belief in the revolutionary potential of literature. The formation of the Progressive Writers' Association, as Ali describes it, was "announced in the Leader, Allahabad, on 5 April 1933, in a letter signed by Mahmuduzzafar on behalf of the authors of Angaray" ("Progressive Writers Urdu" 35). Ali parted ways with the movement, on grounds that it had allied itself to a rigid political stance that saw all social conflict within the parameters of the peasant-feudalism clash, a rigidity that fettered creative impetus. According to Coppola, Ali was "disillusioned with the politicization of literary issues that the Progressives demanded" in keeping with the United Front of Communist Internationale's vision that all literary production should be "proletarian to combat Fascism" ("Poetry" 67). The Manifesto of the All- India Progressive Writers' Association, as it eventually came to be named, was drafted in 1935 in London by a group of young Indian students, which included, among others, Mulk Raj Anand, calling for bringing the "arts into the closest touch with the people [...], the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjugation," in order to "fight for the right of free expression of thought and

70 Unsettling English: The Vernacular Voice

A discursive set of linguistic and thematic patterns in Twilight in Delhi constructs its distinct Indianized voice, which becomes a mode of resistance in the text.19 The text combines semantic interplay, Urdu or Urdu-inflected words, colloquialisms or Urdu speech acts, and code-switching between standard and "indigenized" English to formulate a linguistically exclusive aesthetic. Ali's Urduized language assembles translations of Urdu expressions and idioms, untranslated Urdu words, and verses from

Urdu poetry in English translation. These elements are juxtaposed to carve an indigenous cultural space in the text, the novel's culturally distinct language that unsettles the colonial hierarchy of languages and refracts the value system encoded in them. These discursive strategies construct a text of cultural difference and mark its distance from

Western conceptions of the Indian reality.

opinion," and to "lead our country to the new life for which it is striving" (Coppola, "European Phase" 6- 8). The objectives adopted by the Indian chapter of the Movement on April 10, 1936 similarly express the radical political purpose that these writers strove to achieve in their writings: "To produce and translate literature of a progressive nature, to fight cultural reaction, and in this way to further the cause of Indian freedom and social regeneration" (qtd. in Ali, "Historical Perspective" 95). 19 While this chapter argues that Ali's English is imbued with Urdu influences, Laurence Brander has drawn attention to the "raised rhythms of biblical English" in Ali's novel, which, he contends, were appropriate for Indian themes, and a stratagem that Ali had learnt from E. M. Forster. Alistair Niven argues that Ali deploys English cliches without irony, revealing his sense of class, and the "impurity" of his language (8). Ali's penchant for slipping into platitudinous formulations stems from the over-indulgence of his narrator, as argued later in the chapter. The Indianness of Ali's text was noted in its early reviews in London, after its publication by Virginia Woolf s Hogarth Press. Maurice Collis (Time and Tide, November 30, 1940) comments: " [Ahmed Ali's novel] is so delicate and charged with such colour and emotion, that a bold statement of what it is about can give no ideal of its quality [....] It may well be that we shall not understand India until it is explained to us by Indian novelists of the first ability, as it was that we understood nothing of Russia before we read Tolstoy, Turgenev and the others. Ahmed Ali may be the vanguard of such a literary movement" (qtd. in Coppola, "Interview" 20).

71 The Urdu imprint on Twilight in Delhi emerges poignantly in the novel's dialogue, which subsumes Urdu idioms and words in literal translation and captures the cadences of Urdu speech. When a character uses an Urdu idiom in speech, it is neither rendered in a parallel English idiom, nor glossed in any way for the non-Urdu reader.

Instead, Ali's text incorporates the Urdu idiom in literal translation, which disrupts the flow of standard English and becomes a signifier of cultural difference in the text. For example, Mushtari Bai welcomes Asghar with these words: "You have become the moon of Eed. The eyes long for a sight of your face, but in vain" (53). "Moon of Eed" is a literal translation of an Urdu idiom that is used to greet someone the speaker has met after a long time, suggesting the analogy between the addressee and the Eid moon that appears only once a year.20 The dialogue in this scene is conducted entirely through Urdu poetic metaphors, showing the centrality of Urdu poetry and poetic emotion in the everyday lives of these characters. The following fragments from Mushtari Bai's speech illustrate its metaphoric drift: "I am that candle that burns its own self, shedding tears of blood [...]

I am like a caravan-serai [...], my life is a desert in which no oases exist" (55). In another idiomatic utterance, Siddiq, "the fat bania" or moneylender, reprimands Mirza, the milk- seller, for speaking against the rule of the British King, "Jaraj" (George): "You eat his salt and are talking like this about him" (154).21 The Urdu idiom "to eat someone's salt"

20 Bilqueece uses "moon" with a different connotation when addressing her child: "Ami is not well, my moon" (162). Here, the use is not idiomatic but connotative, and moon is a signifier of affection or of something priceless and lovely. 21 The Muslim-centric world of Ali's text can be judged by the fact that even the moneylender, a profession typically associated with Hindus, is a Muslim. The only Hindu character in the book is Dr. Mitra, who

72 implies indebtedness to a person for one's livelihood. Similarly, Mir Nihal gives his consent to Ghafoor's marriage in words that are a verbatim translation of an Urdu idiom:

"When husband and wife are willing, what can the Qazi do" (69).22 Examples of some other idiomatic usages in the novel's dialogue include the following: "I say, you seem to have all your five fingers in ghee these days" (98); "They 'sweetened' her mouth with crystallized sugar" (114); "Your enemies should die and not you" (164).

Along with the dialogue, the main narration of Twilight also includes Urdu idiomatic conventions. For instance, the narrator describes Begum Jamal as follows: "She could shout, and if anyone interfered then tears began to flow, breasts were beaten, and heaven and earth made one" (30). The Urdu idiom "heaven and earth made one" refers to a scene of commotion, especially a quarrel or an argument. While discussing Achebe's use of idiomatic translations, Tariq Rahman argues that such language enacts an

"idiomatically deviant [...] syntactic or morphological structure" ("Linguistic" 3). Such an interlingual process coalesces two languages whereby the "syntactical rules of one language are overlaid on another" (Ashcrofit et al., Empire 42). At other moments, Ali's text deploys words or phrases that create culture-specific epistemological fields of reference and meaning. For instance, the zenana, or the women's quarters, is described as follows: "The four walls stood high, shutting them all in from the world" (31). In this instance, "four walls" is a literal translation of an Urdu phrase, which suggests the

makes a brief appearance towards the end of the novel. In this regard, Twilight is a foil to Raja Rao's Hindu-centric construction in Kanthapura (1938). 22 This conveys a playful acknowledgement of the inevitability of a particular marriage.

73 sanctity and privacy accorded to women in Muslim cultures. However, Ali uses the phrase ironically, suggesting not sanctity but oppression. As Tariq Rahman points out,

Ali employs words in the "connotative sense" they carry in Urdu, in order to create the novel's culture-specific semantic fields. Rahman cites the example of "fairy," which is deployed in Twilight in its "Perso-Urdu" sense of an enchantingly beautiful girl: "Then she would bring a fairy from Caucasus?" ("Linguistic" 5).

In a study of the West African novel in English and French, Chantal Zabus uses the term "relexification" to denote the process of transference from one language into another that occurs in these novels. Zabus contends that this movement is not

"translation," "transference," or "transmutation," but a mechanism that creates an

"interlanguage," which is neither the source language nor the target language, "but a third register [...] of communication out of an alien lexicon" (285). When language is thus

"relexified," "it is not metropolitan English [...] that appears on the page, but an unfamiliar European language that constantly suggests another tongue" (286). Ahmed

Ali's "translations" of Urdu idioms, phrases, and colloquialisms create a language that is neither Urdu nor standard English, but Zabus's third "relexified" interlanguage. Zabus explains that relexification does not occur from one text to another, which would make it

"auto translation" or "transcodage," but within the same text, which makes that text a palimpsest, because "behind the scriptural authority of the target European language, the earlier, imperfectly erased remnants of the source language are still visible" (288). Ali's text answers to this definition of a palimpsest, interceding the "scriptural authority" of

English by embedding Urdu tropes in its discourse. Zabus sees relexification as a

74 subversive strategy that revises colonial discourse. Twilight endorses this view, as the linguistic "transferences" in Ahmed Ali's text suggest proclivities of resistance against the dominance of colonial English in India.

Twilight in Delhi also reflects Antonio Gramsci's idea of "spontaneous philosophy," a people-centric intelligence that functions as a counter-hegemonic configuration against dominant powers in society. In Ali's text, forms of "spontaneous philosophy" create spaces of alterity that assert the difference of the text both from Hindu majoritarian and British colonial discourses. The language of Twilight in Delhi functions at the thresholds of its ambit of meanings, adapts to local conditions, resists formal semantic categories, and moves in and out of colloquial and populist articulations.

Through diverse interpolations, both "common sense" and "folklore" find utterance in the text, fashioning autonomous zones of meaning. The colloquial practices of Urdu speech are integrated into the text and function as synecdoches of local culture, and as epistemes of popular and folk-religious knowledge, the latter recounted vividly in the incantations of faqirs and the speech of characters of folk-religious and mystical persuasion. The spontaneous philosophy of Ali's text derives from the linguistic, popular, and folk- religious culture of Muslim Delhi, which helps to orient the text towards its representative Muslim character.

The internal Urdu imaginative terrain of the novel reinforces its Muslim sensibility, locating it in a Muslim milieu because of Urdu's deep historical and cultural

75 association with the Muslim community of India.23 As Ralph Russell says, "Urdu literature has always been, and still is, a Muslim literature [...] overwhelmingly a literature that depicts the experiences of the Muslim community of the subcontinent"

(21). Endorsing this view, Muhammad Umar Memon regards Urdu literature and the ghazal form as expressions of the Indian Muslim imagination: "Let it be unequivocally mentioned that Urdu literature remains primarily a product of the Muslim mind, [and the ghazal is] a major determinant of the South Asian Muslim culture [...] and talks about the Muslim world view and Muslim responses to questions of time and religion" (ix- xvii). Reaffirming this idea, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in his discussion of Ghalib's poetry, points to the Muslim-centric frameworks of the Urdu poetic tradition: "Such poetry could only have been written by one who was absorbed in Indo-Muslim culture. In the crucible of Urdu ghazal, Indian and Islamic elements fuse into a true Indo-Muslim consciousness" ("Expression" 13).24

In "Islamic Language," Tariq Rahman traces the origins of Urdu and its evolution into a language of the Muslim community of India. Originally a language of power associated with the dominant local elite, Urdu became more inclusive when the elite lost political power during British rule. Sufi mystics and the Islamic revivalist movements of the subcontinent appropriated Urdu for the spread of their teachings, which contributed to

23 This does not insinuate that non-Muslim communities, primarily Hindu, have not made contributions to Urdu literature; it only spotlights the dominant patterns in the broad spectrum of Urdu literature for the purposes of this argument. 4 Hiresh Trivedi also identifies the sensibility of the Urdu tradition in the language of Twilight in Delhi, and regards it as the representation of an India that is predominantly Muslim.

76 Urdu's growth and deepened its affinities with Muslim thought and culture. The Islamic reform movements in India brought about a transformation in Muslim social and political life, and remained on the vanguard of resistance against British rule. These movements used Urdu as their vehicle of expression, nurturing a subversive, anti-colonial potential in

Urdu language and discourse. In her study of the Deoband movement, Barbara Metcalf documents the rise of Islamic revival movements in the eighteenth century after the loss of Mughal power in India. Metcalf reiterates "Albert Hourani's judgement that the eighteenth century is the 'Indian century' of Islam," and discusses the anti-colonial locus of the Islamic reform movements (9). Metcalf describes the appropriation of Urdu poetry by the Ulama, or religious scholars, for "expressing religious feeling," and quotes Fritz

Lehman's contention that the shift to Urdu was a "statement of Indianness" by the

Muslim religious fraternity, "a desire to speak not to an international but an Indian

Muslim community" (28). In the introduction to The Literatures of India, J.A.B. van

Buitenen endorses Urdu's underlying Islamic lineage: "The milieu of Urdu literature is

that of Muslim court culture and sufi religion, elitist and urban [...;] the literature began

to develop in the sixteenth century around courts in Golconda and Bijapur in the Deccan,

later on in Aurangabad, until in the eighteenth century it reached into Delhi itself, from

where it also spread to Lucknow" (24). Kachru affirms that Urdu maintained its "Perso-

Arabic stylistic devices, metaphors, and symbolism" and did not assimilate the influence

of Sanskrit. He believes that this aspect of Urdu alienated traditional Hindus, who argued

that "in its formal experimentation, thematic range, and metaphor, it [Urdu] has

maintained an 'un-Indian' (Islamic) tradition" (273). Thus, as the language of the

77 Muslims of India and because of its adoption by the Islamic revivalist movements for the dissemination of their message, Urdu acquired a subversive, anti-colonial vocabulary.

This established a close intellectual nexus between Urdu and the Indian Muslim imagination, and augmented Urdu's position as a language of anti-colonial resistance.

Ahmed Ali's Urdu-centric discourse, therefore, has a definitive Muslim and anti-British subtext.

Tariq Rahman identifies Khvaja Gesu Daraz (1312-1417), a Delhi saint, as one of the earliest sufi mystics to use Urdu in his sermons. From the fourteenth century onwards,

Muslim saints used Urdu words in their sermons and Mulfuzaat (Conversations), a pattern that reached wider currency with the Islamic revival movement of Shah Waliullah

(1703-1762), whose sons Shah Abdul Qadir and Shah Rafi-uddin were the first to translate the Quran into Urdu ("Islamic" 104-06). The archive of Urdu religious writings, which gradually came to include prose translations of the Quran and Hadees, Quranic exegeses, Fatavas (legal judgements), besides Malfuzaat and sermons, ensured Urdu's pivotal position in Islamic thought and imagination and reinforced its elemental allegiance with Indian Muslim identity. These historical linkages between Urdu and the

Muslim imagination culminated in Urdu becoming a major symbol, second only to Islam, of Muslim identity during the Pakistan freedom movement. It is tenable to postulate that while Urdu tropes in Ahmed Ali's text establish its affinity with an Indian identity in general terms, in more specific terms they situate Twilight in Delhi as a Muslim text, a signifier of Muslim identity and consciousness in early twentieth-century India.

78 The dialogue of Twilight in Delhi frames a range of meanings, encompassing the cultural and intellectual prolificacy of Ahmed Ali's Indian space. For example, the etiquette of refined Urdu speech is manifested in the brief exchange between Mir Nihal and Sheikh Muhammad Sadiq: "Is everything all right?" Mir Nihal asks, and Sadiq replies, "It's your kindness" (68). Sadiq's reply is a customary expression showing the speaker's humility and his respect for the addressee. By not translating the dialogue into an English expression, Ahmed Ali implants an Urdu signature on the text and refracts the modalities of colonial English in India. The mundane, everyday speech of the ordinary

Delhi citizen, covering a wide range of Urdu speech habits, also finds voice in the novel.

For example, a neighbor reprimands a servant in colloquial Urdu that wedges a distinct cultural marker into the page: "O thou, Fatto, may God's wrath fall upon thee. Where hast thou died?" (70). An Urdu speaker would recognize this expression and catch its phonological, semantic nuances and its colloquial flavor by a literal translation. Ali captures the colloquial nuances of the speaker's words by translating them literally, word-by-word, without catering for the requirements of standard English usage; he thus catches the lilt, accent, and rhythm of the original Urdu utterance. These strategies conjure up specific traditional, cultural, and emotional connotations of words, and signal cultural difference and autonomous fields of meaning in the text. In this cultural space, the colonial is marginalized while the indigenous is accentuated, inverting the stipulated hierarchies of colonial India, even if briefly.

79 In the cityscapes of Ahmed Ali's Delhi, the street is an enduring motif, an autonomous space of indigenous life,* vernacular speech, and transgressive expression.• 25

Ali's text is resonant with visual, olfactory, and auditory images of Delhi's streets, teeming with the living, spontaneous language of everyday life and speech. The street- speak of the text is a language in motion, changing and evolving within colonial time and place, and unsettling the notion of a stable official discourse sanctified by colonial authority. For example, a group of boys poke fun at Asghar's English dress in these words, "Bol gai My LordKukroon-koon" (182). This is a concocted phrase that conveys the speaker's derision of English culture, and challenges the power and prestige attached to it in colonial space. In Inqilab (1955), his novel of the Indian freedom movement,

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas indicates that the above was the opening line of one of many popular anti-British street songs at the time of the Khilafat Movement: "There were other songs, derisive in character, calculated to lower British prestige. 'Bol gai, My Lord,

Kukroon-koonl' (His Lordship has begun to crow like a frightened rooster)" (67). This is what Mikhail Bakhtin would call "carnivalesque humor" or "folk humor" that dismantles the mystique and power associated with English culture in colonial India, with a "neologistically" created phrase of pure mirth (Rabelais 15). Ali's street vernacular is

25 The street is also a frequent motif of Urdu poetry, suggesting multiple nuanced associations of intimacy with place. Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq, the court poet of Bahadur Shah Zafar, refers to the streets of Delhi in one of his verses, which Ahmed Ali quotes in Twilight: "Let it be granted that there is today / A greater patronage and love of art / In Hyderabad; but, Zauq, who has the heart / To leave the lanes of Delhi and go away" (144). 26 Abbas elaborates: "Whenever they encountered a solitary Englishman, the boys would simulate a cock crowing and rend the air with the cries of Kukroon-koon to the utter discomfiture of the proud White Sahib" (67).

80 also a language in transgressive evolution, never stable, ever elusive, evading the suppression of colonial control, obedient only to "the laws of its own freedom," and drawing the narrative into a zone of contact with an open-ended present (Rabelais 7). In his introduction to The Cultural Resistance Reader, while enumerating the modes and strategies of cultural resistance, Stephen Duncombe describes cultural resistance as a language that "speaks in a more familiar and less demanding voice than political dissent"

(6). The street-voice of Ali's narrative answers to this familiar language of dissent, carving a "free space" in the narrative for developing ideas "away from the constraints of the dominant culture" (Duncombe 6). Ahmed Ali's cityscapes and streetscapes are also, in Hakim Bey's words, "temporary autonomous zones," "pirate Utopias" enacted by the people to combat the hegemony of the colonial state (116).

Twilight in Delhi resonates with songs and incantations of beggars, along with other vernacular songs, overheard or sung, that register a cultural presence in the text and problematize the language of colonial space. A few examples include the following: a beggar's cry, "Dham! Qalandar, God will give / Dham! Qalandar, God alone" (14); the song of a kite flier, "With one twist I've cut thy kite / O my darling boy" (22); the chant of Shah Maqbul, the beggar who appears only in Ramazan, rendered in his "singsong voice," "half prose, half verse," "Here is Shah Maqbul, / He will take a pice / And a yard of tulle" (93); and Iron Shah, the beggar, singing "Noor Naama, a semi-religious poem dealing with the seven skies," "the sixth is made of rubies red, / The seventh of emerald

81 green, 'tis said" (92).27 These cultural interventions release the music of the vernacular in the text, composed of rhythms and refrains embedded in the local and divorced from the imperial by an unbridgeable cultural chasm. This popular, folk-religious language emphatically suggests the uniqueness and difference of Indian culture, as it is played out on the Indian streets, unaffected by colonial influence and eliminating it through cultural assertion. In his study of slave songs, Lawrence Levine shows how American slaves used songs to connect to their past, give meaning to their present, and aspire for a future of freedom. Slave songs re-enacted the social roles these songs played in African culture:

"In Africa, songs, tales, proverbs, and verbal games served the dual function of not only preserving communal values and solidarity, but also providing individuals the opportunity to transcend, at least symbolically, the inevitable restrictions of their environment" (216). In America, these songs became "outlets for individual and communal expression," showing the inherent vitality of the culture of the blacks, and affirming their emotional and spiritual dignity in the face of extreme hardship and oppression. For the slaves, these songs became "barriers [...] against the internalization of the stereotyped images their masters [...] attempted [...] to foist upon them" (218).

The popular songs in Twilight function on a similar level, revealing a dynamic culture thriving in the midst of colonial oppression, their cultural trajectory forming, like African slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, and prison memoirs, a "counterpoint to the

27 Noor Namas and Jang Namas were popular Urdu religious poems in the mid-eighteenth century (Rahman, "Islamic" 106).

82 western powers' monumental histories, official discourses, and panoptic quasi-scientific viewpoint" (Said, Culture 215). Ali's text also recovers popular religious songs, including qawwalis, which create their own sacred time and space, reassert an inner, traditional world of spiritual vitality, and mark the cultural and spiritual difference of a people under subjugation. These songs signify a subcultural space, separate from the colonial, an emblem of the cultural consciousness of a people, potentially vibrant to fashion a counter culture of resistance.

As noted earlier, Ahmed Ali refrains from glossing the Urduisms in his text, which gives the English-centric narration its Urdu slant and ensures the distinct local space of Urdu cultural markers in his discourse. Similarly, he does not italicize the Urdu words, thereby taking away even that indicator of foreignness from his Urduisms. The space created by the Urduized elements in the novel's language also becomes a creative and imaginative interval, because when the Urdu lexical features are transmogrified, they are reinvented in the act of migration to English, allowing more room for subversive wordplay. The Urdu inflections of Ali's language surface poignantly in Bilqees Jehan's

Urdu translation of the book, which matches the English original with immaculate precision, revealing the ease with which Ali's text can switch between English and Urdu

28 The 1966 edition of Twilight included a glossary of Urdu terms, appended at the book's end. A glossary located outside the narrative but within the physical confines of the book is a kind of second-level glossing and is beyond the purview of this analysis. Moreover, the glossary was not in the original edition and is also not included in other subsequent editions. Ahmed Ali does gloss his words on a few occasions in the text. Once he inserts the English translation of an Urdu word in parenthesis i.e. "Dulhan (Bride)," while on another occasion he uses quotation marks to delineate the Urdu-inflected cultural expression: "They 'sweetened' her mouth with crystallized sugar" (114). Since these are exceptions to the main strategy of Urdu usage in the text, they do not constitute a significant pattern in the larger scheme of the narrative.

83 registers. According to Ali, Jehan's Urdu translation captures the "chaste and inimitable idiom of Delhi, where each social stratum was distinguished by the quality and set traditional gradation of its Urdu, as well as the subtle nuances of the language of the ladies, and the karkhandari dialect paralleled only by Cockney" (Introduction vii).

The lexical and semantic patterns identified in the preceding discussion have no direct equivalent in the English language, which eliminates the Western reader from participating in this linguistic coding and constructs a refracted language, born from a juxtaposition of Urdu and English elements as well as a syncretism achieved by the blending of different linguistic registers. Therefore, the normative readerly function of the text shifts to an Urdu-English audience, which is conversant with both English and

Urdu vocabulary and figures of speech, and with the literary and cultural norms of the

Urdu tradition. This strategy underscores that, to borrow Ashcroft's words, "the language which actually informs the novel is an/other language" and inhabits a "horizon of culture in which these alien terms have meaning" (Empire 63). These interventions of the Urdu voice constitute a language of authenticity for marginalized and submerged voices, constructing identities of alterity and difference. These voices of the local, with an internal semantic solidarity, construct a non-official, localized cultural history, an oral history that undercuts official colonial historiography and its ontologies of stability, form, and linearity. This alternative account of Delhi de-emphasizes the official discourses of colonialism; instead, it emphasizes, as Walter Mignolo notes in his analysis of memory and speech as modes of resistance, "discontinuities and the counterparts of maps,

84 grammars, and histories: the existence and persistence of speech over grammars, of memories over histories, of territorial orderings over maps" (367).

Subversive Intervals: Authority of the Ghazal

Alistair Niven argues that Ahmed Ali's fictional inspiration dried up after Partition, and states that Ocean of Night, Ali's second novel, was written immediately after the publication of Twilight, even though it was not published until 1964. Ali's only other

English novel, Of Rats and Diplomats (1985), does show clear signs of dwindling fictional inspiration. The rest of Ali's writing career was dominated by poetry, including many works of translation, which testify to the poetic lineaments of his artistic imagination. Even Ocean of Night, which is a narrative of subjective transgressions, is conceived as a prose poem with its suggestive, ornate, and allusive prose, sensuous imagery, and stoic surrender to death, motifs that are paramount in the ghazal tradition.

Alluding to Ali's shift to poetry in his later career, Coppola suggests that Ali regarded poetry as a fit medium to enunciate "lyricism and poetic myth" and explore the "depths of a problem," which he found increasingly difficult to achieve in fiction ("Poetry" 73).

The precedence of poetry in Ali's creative imagination explains the authority that the

29 Ahmed Ali's translations of poetic works include the following: The Flaming Earth: Poems from Indonesia (1949); The Falcon and the Hunted Bird (1950), translations of Urdu poems; The Bulbul and the Rose (1950), translations of Urdu poems; Purple Gold Mountain: Poems from China (1960); Ghalib: Selected Poems (1966); and The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry (1973).

85 Urdu ghazal exerts on the text of Twilight in Delhi. By its evocation of Urdu poetic motifs, Ali's text gives expression to the Indian reality in Indian languages and references, rebutting the implication of colonial discourses that India was incapable of self-definition, and needed to be defined, codified, demarcated, and ruled by Britain.

Twilight in Delhi is replete with poetic verses from the works of the Usatiza (the

Urdu masters), and deploys tropes of the Urdu poetic tradition in its narrative. For instance, Asghar describes Bilqueece in language suffused with metaphors from Urdu love poetry: "Her hair is blacker than the night of separation, and her face is brighter than the hours of love. Her eyes are like narcissi, big and beautiful. There is nectar in their whites and poison in their blacks. Her eyebrows are like two arched bows ready to wound the hearts of men" (24). These are seminal tropes of Urdu romantic poetry: night of separation, hours of love, hair dark as the night, eyebrows like bows wounding hearts, nectar, narcissi, poison, and so on. In his discussion of the imagery of the Urdu ghazal,

Farhatullah Baig cites examples of similes used in the ghazal that match those employed in Asghar's speech: "To be killed at the hands of the beloved was a boon sweeter than life without him. Eyebrows became swords, eyes arrows, side-locks bows" (27). This kind of poetic intervention recurs intermittently across the text. For instance, the narrator describes Mir Nihal's grief as "a pressure of blood which wants to burst out of its restricting channels of veins and arteries" (66). The Urdu reader would identify the image of blood bursting through veins as a discernible metaphor of existential suffering in the

Urdu ghazal. The presence and authority of Urdu poetry in the text stresses the contiguity

86 between poetry and everyday life and speech in Indian culture, as well as reinforcing the interconnections between the text and Urdu thought and culture.

According to Ralph Russell, poetic sensibility is ingrained in the lives of a substantial majority of Indians, a phenomenon that is alien to the majority in the West, where poetry is understood by a select class and not used in everyday speech. The elements of Urdu poetry and poetic sensibility in Ali's text align it with the Urdu imagination, and enable its cultural proximity with the Muslims of Delhi and their worldview. The ghazal verses in the text also contribute to its tragic ambience, which has been read by most critics as conveying despair and pessimism. However, the purported pessimism of the book has to be understood in the context of these emotions as they function in Urdu poetry, particularly in the Urdu ghazal. The ghazal expresses passionate longing for something unobtainable such as God or forbidden love, and it pushes desire to the point of death, or even beyond into a kind of triumph, if possible, into transcendence and mystical exaltation. William Dalrymple explains this aspect of the ghazal, while speaking of the genre's influence on Delhi culture: "The love of the ghazal poet was ambiguous - it was rarely made entirely clear whether it was sacred or worldly love to which the poet referred. This ambiguity was deliberate, for just as the longing of the soul for union with God was believed to be as compelling and all-embracing as the longing of the lover for the beloved, both loves could be carried to the point of insanity or what Sufis called fana - self-annihilation and immersion in the beloved" (Last Mughal

79). This "sweet melancholy" is the hallmark of the classical ghazal, and it is this aspect of the ghazal that gets conveyed in Ahmed Ali's text through its affinities with Urdu and

87 the ghazal tradition. It may also be pertinent to mention that the Delhi school of Urdu poetry had its own distinct style. In Dilli ka Dabistan-i Shairi (The Delhi School of

Poetry), Nurul Hasan Hashimi defines the Delhi School or Dihlaviyyat as a "point of view, an outlook, an intellectual simplicity, a poetic temperament" (qtd. in Nairn and

Petievich 174). Nairn and Petievich explain the difference between the Delhi and

Lucknow poetic styles: "In comparison with Dihlaviyyat's spirituality and melancholy

(literally, attachment to sorrow or gham-pasandi), Lucknow's superficial gaiety seems thin and cheap [....] There is not that flame, that profound lamentation, that tone of longing which there is in the poetry of Delhi" (174; emphasis added).30 It is this element of gham-pasandi, reflected in Ali's text but masked as melancholy, that many critics have read as pessimistic defeatism.31

The ghazal is a genre of extreme emotion, either complete bliss or absolute despair. While Western sensibility leans towards understatement, Urdu sensibility as expressed in poetry overstates, which allows the poet to transgress the constraints imposed by strict social customs. It is this facet of Urdu poetry, and the ghazal in

30 It may be noted, however, that the marsiya, a dirge of six-line stanzas that laments the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson in Kerbala, flourished in Lucknow, with Mir Babbar Ali Anees (1802-74) and Mirza Salamat Ali Dabir (1803-1875) as its master practitioners. The marsiya tradition is a further influence on Urdu poetry that veered it towards the tragic and inspired "an epic tradition [...] filled with the grandeur of heroic verse and the depths of intense passionate tragedy" (A. Ahmad 101). 31 An Urdu poetic parallel or intertext to Ali's English text is Khwaja Altaf Husain Hali's "Nauha-i Dilli" or "An Elegy to Delhi" (1874), which is a lament on the devastation of Delhi after the Mutiny. The poem begins, "Tazkira Dilli-e marhoom ka aye dost na chairh /Na suna jai ga hum seyeh fasana hargiz" (Speak not to me of ravished Delhi, O friend, /1 have not the heart to hear that tale of woes) (qtd. in Gupta xxxvi- xxxvii). In a similar vein, Hali produced "Mad-o-Jazar-i- Islam," or "The Tide and Ebb of Islam," in 1879, a poem in the Musaddas (six-line stanzas) form used in the marsiya, which recounts the rise and decline of Islam (Nairn and Petievich 171).

88 particular, that gives it its subversive power. For instance, the frequent references to wine in Urdu poetry become tropes of subversion of religious authority, which prohibits wine in Islamic society; and hence, wine becomes a "symbol for heightened spiritual awareness, disregard for worldly concerns, and openness to a deeper reality" (Russell 7).

The abandon, freedom, and iconoclasm afforded by these aspects of the ghazal are channeled towards an anti-colonial drift in Ahmed Ali's text.

Historically, the ghazal, the dominant genre of Urdu poetry, has been conceived as a subversive form, owing to its attack on the centres of power and orthodoxy, and its exposure of their hypocrisy and ignorance. An ubiquitous target of attack in the Urdu ghazal is the shaikh, "the elder, the presbyter, pillar of orthodox Islam and zealous persecutor of the heresy that lovers represent" (Russell 44). The ghazal challenges the authority of this figure of power, the upholder of society's morals, and exposes his doctrinaire and narrowly conceived notions of piety and religious devotion. Along with the shaikh, other figures or centres of authority and power similarly come under attack in

the ghazal. During colonial rule, the ghazaV s iconoclastic voice became directed towards

the colonial power and its representatives in India. Ralph Russell notes the alignment of

the ghazal" s subversive energies with the ideology of the Muslim Khilafat Movement of

the early 1920s: "Its mood of revolt against the pillars of the established order (now

identified with the British and their Indian supporters) [...] clearly struck a chord in the

contemporary Muslim consciousness" (81). The intensity of longing expressed in the

ghazal stems from the insurmountable barriers that conventional society raises against the fulfillment of love. It is for this reason that the ghazal can express an intensity of desire

89 that prefers even death over separation from the beloved, heightening the mood of existential despair that dominates the genre. The ghazal is an expression of both earthly and mystic love, the ideal figure being Mansur, the mystic committed to the gallows for speaking of his love for God in unorthodox ways. It is this passion and conviction of moral superiority that lends to the ghazal its particular effectiveness as a weapon against symbols of power in society: "All accepted institutions and their leading figures - kings, nobles, and learned divines - are held up to the most unrestrained, vituperative ridicule and condemnation" (Russell 46). Ahmed Ali's text uses this emotional energy of the ghazal to attack British imperialism and articulate its anti-colonial ideology.

The ghazal verses in Twilight are either incorporated in the main text or deployed as paratexts, functioning in both instances as a chorus or commentary on the narrative, heightening its emotive thrust. These Urdu verses function as analogs of what Raymond

Williams calls "structures of feeling," working as intertexts with Urdu poetical works and bringing the English text under the influence of an Urdu aesthetic. The Urdu factor in

Ali's text establishes its affinity with works of the Urdu imagination and their intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and historical vision. As Bakhtin has shown, the text of a novel is not a closed system; it has a "multilanguaged consciousness" and engages dialogically with earlier texts, revealing influences, interrelationships, and identifiable patterns across diverse textual platforms ("Epic" 13). Similar interconnections are suggested by Julia Kristeva's idea of "intertextuality," which recognizes transference of

influence between two or more texts. Twilight in Delhi establishes this dialogical

90 relationship with Urdu literary texts, particularly with Urdu poetry and the ghazal, marking its difference from Western literary and cultural traditions.

Even though the ghazal is a highly sophisticated genre, it retains a vast popular appeal and is composed for recitation before a live audience in a mushaira (a poetic soiree), which keeps it wedged into the local and public domains. Therefore, ghazal verses in Ali's text, while they launch a passionate attack on British colonial rule, also keep the novel in tune with the popular, public imagination. A verse by Bahadur Shah

Zafar forms the novel's epigraph, setting the tone of the ghazaVs voice in the book:

"Delhi was once a paradise / Such peace had abided here; / But they have ravished its name and pride / Remain now only ruins and care."32 The epigraph, when read alongside the account of the Mutiny in the novel, is a verbalization of protest against the British sacking of Delhi after the Mutiny. The same emotion reverberates early in the text in a

Mir Taqi Mir verse: "Delhi which was once the jewel of the world, / Where dwelt only the loved ones of fate, / Which has now been ruined by the hands of Time, /1 am a resident of that storm-tossed place" (4). A devotional poem that Asghar recites mixes religious emotion with a political subtext: "O saviour, come to my aid, /1 am helpless in defeat. / O saviour of men and faith / Come in my need to me" (59). The sense of a people "defeated" in servitude, under threat of losing their way of life, recurs consistently

32 This entire ghazal is rendered in a poignant scene later in the book by the beggar, Gul Bano, Bahadur Shah's granddaughter (see 102).

91 in literatures of colonized and persecuted peoples, accompanied by invocations to indigenous and folk-religious traditions for solace or redress.

Mir Nihal recalls a rubai of the Persian poet, Sarmad, "a mystic faqir [...] beheaded by Aurangzeb," with its strain of rebellion against custom and fearless abandon in the face of danger: "I've lost religion in quite a novel way / Throwing faith for drunken eyes away: / And all my life in piety spent I've flung / At the altar for that idol- worshipper's joy" (70). Such intensity of feeling afforded by the ghazal becomes fertile territory for voicing political disaffection in the text, granting the speaker a vocabulary of resistance and self-definition. The beggar, Bahadur Shah, named thus because he sings the last Mughal king's ghazals, recites the famous Bahadur Shah Zafar ghazal: "I'm the light of no one's eye, / The rest of no one's heart am I. / That which can be of use to none

/ A handful of dust am I" (97).34 Another beggar, Gul Bano, Bahadur Shah Zafar's granddaughter, sings ghazals that Bahadur Shah "had written in his banishment and which had been banned. But people knew them by heart, and they were sung with reverence and tragic memories" (101). This suggests the insurrectionary power and seditious nature of these ghazals, and their association with a pre-colonial Mughal past in the popular imagination.

33 The invocation of local culture and mythology in much African fiction, from Achebe's Things Fall Apart to Ngugi's Weep Not Child, attests to this trend, as does nationalist fiction of colonized locations that celebrates and calls attention to indigenous cultures, value systems, and traditions and lays claim to the ancient lineages of its people and their potential to build "communities" and nations. 34 In The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple states that the poem is not Zafar's and has been erroneously attributed to him.

92 Bahadur Shah's ghazals build an emotional space in the text, indicting the British for their cruelties against the former king and his family. Gul Bano sings a particularly incendiary poem that describes in graphic imagery the British persecution of the Muslims of Delhi after the Mutiny: "They were not even given a shroud, / Nor buried under the ground. / No one performed their funeral rites, / Their graves were not marked by even a mound" (102). As William Dalrymple has documented in his historical biography of

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the British authorities blamed the Indian Muslims for the Mutiny, and followed this by systematic elimination and persecution of the Muslims of Delhi.

According to Dalrymple, sixteen sons of the Mughal emperor were tried and hanged, and three others were shot dead during the British retribution against Delhi's Muslims that followed the Mutiny. Leading artisans and courtiers, "poets and princes, mullahs and merchants, sufis and scholars [were] hunted down and hanged, or else dispersed and exiled" (Last Mughal 5). In Kucha Chelan (a Delhi locality) alone, 1400 Delhiites were slain by the British, "the best poets and artists of Delhi" among them (Last Mughal 391).

Commenting on this persecution of the Muslims after the Mutiny, Dalrymple says, "The beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilization had been ripped out, and could not be replaced"

(Last Mughal 464).

Throughout the narrative, Ahmed Ali whips up emotion against the British for their inhumane treatment of Bahadur Shah Zafar and his family. Mir Nihal's meeting with the beggar, Mirza Nasirul Mulk, "the youngest son of Bahadur Shah," is strategically placed in the narrative, as Nihal is returning from the Coronation ceremony, pumped up with impotent rage against the British. Fanning his anger and sense of grief,

93 Mirza Nasirul Mulk revels in his ancestral glory: "We are the descendants of Timur Leng who was the king of kings. We are the progeny of Shah Jahan who showered the beauties of the world upon a tomb" (109). Delhi's citizens and Muslims in general felt cheated by the British treatment of Bahadur Shah Zafar because his trial and excommunication had no legal grounding: "While the Company's 1599 Charter to trade in the East derived from

Parliament and the Crown, its authority to govern in India actually legally flowed from the person of the Mughal Emperor" (Dalrymple, Last Mughal 432). Therefore, in legal fact, it was the East India Company that was "guilty of revolt against a feudal superior";

Zafar had never been a subject of the Company or the Crown and could not be

legitimately charged with rebellion and treason (432). The invocation of Bahadur Shah

Zafar's memory in Ali's text is a subversive strategy, because Zafar had become a

symbol of resistance in the Indian Muslim imagination of the period. The emotive power

and anti-colonial sentiment insinuated by Zafar's ghazals is brought to climax in the

Coronation scene.35

Forms of Resistance: Narration, Imagery, History

Ahmed Ali's use of fiction to set up modes of resistance is also reflected in his second

novel, Ocean of Night, purportedly written in the early 1940s but first published in 1964,

35 It is noteworthy that Twilight in Delhi was nearly refused publication in England on grounds that it was "seditious." The intriguing chronicle of the first publication of the book is recounted in detail by Ahmed Ali in his introduction to its 1966 edition.

94 which has a distinct anti-colonial drift. While the sympathetic portrayal of a Lucknow courtesan in Ocean has been read as a glorification of Lucknow's decadent culture, it is part of the novel's anti-colonial strategy. The subversive nature of Ocean of Night is manifested in two principal ways. Firstly, like Twilight, Ocean deploys an Urdu-centric idiom, syntax, and vocabulary to resist the hegemony of the colonial language in India.

Secondly, by romanticizing and championing the cause of the Lucknow courtesan, Ali indicts colonialism for causing the decline of the culture of which the courtesan is a symbol. Veena Talwar Oldenburg describes the plight of the Lucknow courtesan after the

British annexation of Oudh: "To consolidate their rule in the province of Awadh, the

British turned their fury against the powerful elite of Lucknow, of which the tawaif

[courtesans] were an integral part" ("Lifestyle" 142).36 By bringing the spotlight on the decaying world of the courtesans of Lucknow, Ocean of Night indicts the British usurpation of Oudh and the destruction of its traditions and culture. Ali may also have imitated the decadent tradition in Lucknow literature that flowered during the reign of

Wajid Ali Shah (ruled 1847-1856), which celebrated the licentious culture of Lucknow

(A. Ahmad 100).

In Twilight in Delhi, tropes of resistance are discernable in more elaborate

formations. While the novel ends in apparent despair, without suggesting a forward

progression for its Muslim protagonists, there are subtle hints in the text that look ahead

36 In Ocean of Night, the narrator insists that Huma, the courtesan who is the novel's central character, is not an ordinary dancing girl, but "belong[s] to a tradition" (29), a "a ghost of a forgotten past" (45), "the last of the line" (78).

95 to an Indian future free of colonial rule. For instance, towards the closing of the novel,

Mir Nihal's grandson, Nasim, recites a revolutionary poem to a rapt audience of family and friends: "The wish for glory and martyrdom / Has begun to sway our hearts again. /

We shall try his skill and see / What strength is left in the enemy's hand" (184). This is radical language that equips its speakers and listeners with a politically subversive vocabulary to articulate an ideology of resistance, a fundamental requirement of cultural resistance praxis. Duncombe identifies two types of cultural resistance: material resistance, which builds networks, organizational models, and so forth; and ideological resistance, which creates a lexicon of new meanings and visions of the future. Twilight is a text of ideological cultural resistance, providing "hidden transcripts of resistance" against British rule in India (Duncombe 10). Mir Nihal's piercing realization of Indian servitude in the Coronation scene brings insights and emotions to the fore that are imperative in fuelling anti-colonial movements. As Edward Said explains, "We must not minimize the shattering importance of that initial insight - peoples being conscious of themselves as prisoners in their own land - for it returns again and again in the literature of the imperialized world" (Culture 214). The Coronation is a show of British power in

India not unlike the official medieval feasts described by Bakhtin, where "everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position" {Rabelais 10). The pageant of King George's military retinue is similarly attired in "full regalia," flaunting colonial power and bringing home the fact of India's imperial servitude. This "consecration of inequality" between British and Indian during the Coronation brings back memories of the Mutiny to Mir Nihal with

96 fresh anguish {Rabelais 10). At this point in the text, in an oracular utterance, Nihal whispers to his grandson, Nasim: "But you will be brave, my child, and will fight them one day [...] You will be brave [...] and drive them out of the country" (108). This vignette projects in the text, even if transitorily, the vision of a sovereign India, liberated from colonial domination. Although Mir Nihal lapses into passive withdrawal towards the end of the book, his quiescent retreat also offers a modicum of resistance to the colonial culture enveloping his world; it would be simplistic to see it merely as an uncontested resignation to despair. His passive "non-cooperation" with the colonial world may have a semblance of identity with Mahatma Gandhi's political praxis of "Non-

Cooperation," even though Nihal's refusal to cooperate is directed inward, towards self- embraced political oblivion. It is important to bear this caveat in mind when interpreting

Nihal's role in the novel's schemata of resistance.

Critics who regard Ahmed Ali's novel as pessimistic base their argument on the elegiac tone of its narration, its imagery of darkness and night, and its purported fixation on a bygone Islamic past. The third-person narration of Twilight in Delhi is problematic because of the authoritative voice of the narrator, which seeks to steer the reader to a homogenous conception of meanings in the text. The narrative voice is omniscient and functions as a definitive expositor of events, shifting its emotive timbre between elegiac, nostalgic, and didactic modes. Ali's narration tends to overindulge in a scene and engage in moral, often polemical, platitudes instead of withholding judgment and leaving the

97 reader to work out her own conclusions.37 Twilight's narrator is voluble and authoritarian, and reserves the final say on the events in the narrative. The narrator is not content merely with "showing" (representing) to the narratee what is happening, but engages in an excessive "telling" of the narrative to drive his moral point home. As Gerard Genette states, the two methods of "showing" and "telling" in narrative are akin to the "Platonic categories of Mimesis (perfect imitation) and Diagesis (Pure narrative)," and it is the

"telling," "Diagesis," or "narrating" that shapes the "mood" of the discourse (35).

Underscoring the importance of "telling" in the story, Genette says: "Narrative discourse is produced by the action of telling, [on which] depends not only the existence of discourse, but also the fiction of the action" (43). While the "telling" of the story makes the discourse, the "manner" of the telling shapes its emotional texture. The effusive

"manner" of Ahmed Ali's narration has consequences for the aesthetic of the narrative, which gets over-sweetened, overstated in places, and risks losing the power of subtle suggestion. While such editorializing compromises artistic finesse, it does achieve one purpose: it establishes a dominant narrative voice that steers the moral action of the novel and controls how the reader perceives it. Ali's narrator may be a believable witness of events, yet his overt emotional entanglement with his material builds a polemical heaviness in the narrative, a predilection that sways the reader to the narrator's outlook.

37 This tendency is also prevalent in Ahmed Ali's Urdu short stories, as noted earlier. 38 Commenting on Ali's narrative, Gerhard Stilz sees a mix of narrative styles, including the realist mode, "authorial symbolism," "scientific rationalism," and the "psychological tradition" of European novelists like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. He also identifies the repetitiveness of Ali's style, and the overzealousness of his narrator (378-79).

98 The overwrought streak in the narrator's voice clamps a tone of deep-set melancholy on the narration, which creates the sense of pessimistic defeatism that many readers perceive in the novel. However, the despondency of the narrator has to be set in relief against the other voices in the novel, in order to locate different, competing intimations in the narrative.

A novel is not a monologic discourse with a single axis, and cannot be reduced to a unitary, authorial/narratological meaning. As Bakhtin has shown, the novel is a

"heteroglot, multi-voiced, multi-styled, and multi-languaged" genre in which contesting voices dialogically encounter each other in a clash of meanings ("Discourse" 266).

Bakhtin sees three principal sources of the voice in the novel: the narrator's voice in a dialogic formation with the author; "the heteroglossic language of (and surrounding) particular characters"; and "incorporated genres" other than fiction that are included in the novel. These "languages" find intermittent expression through "masses of direct authorial discourse," the voices of the characters, and the "stylization" of other genres

that are embedded in the novel, creating the novel's heteroglossic discourse

("Heteroglossia" 422-24). Bakhtin is discussing the comic novel that parodies other

genres, yet these language systems mediate Ali's text as well, serving to decentre the

narrator's dominant vocalizations and inviting varied levels of interpretation. These other

voices that unfix the narrator's point of view are "stylized" incorporations in the text, in

particular the verses from Urdu poetry and the discursive scattering of Urduised elements

in the narrative. These competing voices and interventions steer the novel towards an

orbit of meaning that is independent of the narrator's governing perspective. The

99 alternative meaning constructed by the ghazal and the other Urdu forms in the novel is subversive and anti-colonial, as argued in the preceding discussion, and dismantles the narrator's entrenched point of view, or his despondent "mood" and voice.

Another aspect of Ahmed Ali's text that creates an impression of despair is its

imagery of darkness and night, which pervades the novel's atmosphere. Darkness and

night are recurrent motifs in Ali's fiction and reflect a fundamental aspect of his fictional style, which allows him to create impressionistic narratives. Ali's repertoire of images

and symbols provide a framework and carve an emotive space in the text, which enables

his narrator to project his inconsolable vision of dejection. In her review of Twilight,

Kumar compares it with the lyrical novels of Virginia Woolf, Andre Gide, Herman

Hesse, and Jorge Luis Borges. She traces the lyrical quality of the novel to the use of

"phonological, metonymic, and metaphoric" devices and associative images, which lend an emotional intensity and inwardness to the narrative and create its lyrical form and design (32). Similarly, the novel uses motifs of darkness and night as embellishment and fictional posturing, which supports the melancholy consciousness of the text. The

imagery of darkness and night also allows imaginative accord between Ali's text and the

Urdu literary tradition. Coppola traces the influences on Ahmed Ali's poetic sensibility,

and argues that "the most powerful influence" is that of the Urdu poetic tradition. The

Urdu ghazal tradition speaks of "unrequited love, the cruelty of the beloved, loss of youth," and recollection of the past in a "semi-drunken state," to evolve its existentialist vision (Coppola, "Poetry" 71). In the rich topos of the Urdu ghazal, symbolic deployment of night, darkness, and evening (twilight) represents loss, grief, and the transience of life.

100 The tropes of night and darkness in Ali's text derive from the Urdu tradition, provide imaginative space for the narrator's perspective, and enhance the affiliation of the text with the Urdu poetic and ghazal tradition. The romantic worldview of the Urdu ghazal permeates the text and engenders the sense of loss and despair that many critics have read in it.39

It may also be noted that darkness and night do not always function as metaphors of melancholy in Twilight. In Ali's text, night has its moments of unsurpassed beauty as well, and becomes a symbol of the existential mystery and splendor of the universe: "The night [...] was spreading her dark and star-bejewelled wings over the earth" (149). Night is also associated with the novel's love plot, evoked early in the text in Asghar's half- awake reverie, where it gets associated not with death or decay, but with beauty, life, and sensuality. Lying alone on the roof at night, Asghar gazes at the night sky: "The stars shine in clusters [...], twinkling with a white radiance [...], stars glowing in bunches like pearls strung together in a necklace" (12). Later, when he has fallen asleep, the stars assume sensuous apparel: "He becomes light and travels with ease towards the sky [...] and out of every star a beautiful maiden is born, and the starry maidens dance around him" (12-13). These instances show faultlines in Ahmed Ali's darkness imagery, resisting the interpretation that it is a unified symbol of loss in the text. The "twilight" of the book's title also suggests a transition rather than an end, uncertainty and ambiguity

39 Tariq Rahman interprets the use of Urdu poetry in Ali's text as a reflection of the romantic worldview of India's Urdu-speaking middle classes. Other critics who regard Twilight as a novel of loss have been cited earlier in the chapter.

101 rather than finality, which are states of change rather than culmination or end.40 It is worthwhile to mention that the word "twilight" is also used by historians to denote a specific period in Delhi's history. The period known as "twilight" is "bounded by two of the greatest disasters in Delhi's history: the Persian massacres of 1739 and the equally vicious hangings and killings which followed the British recapture of Delhi after the 1857

Indian Mutiny" (Dalrymple, Djinns 95). Ali may have had this historical allusion in mind when he chose the title of his book.41 To read Ali's vision as mere pessimistic defeatism would be the same as reading the works of Keats and Shelley, for instance, as unequivocal articulations of despair because they speak of life's transitoriness and use metaphors of death, decay, nostalgia, and loss. Ali's romance-laden recovery of the past and the sentimental ebullience of his style also overlap with the Urdu oral tradition, another aspect that unhinges the text from an English-centred axis. The penchant for excessive editorializing and intrusions into "the interpretive territory of the reader" are features employed frequently in Urdu oral narratives (Ashcroft et al., Empire 60).

40 Defying a pessimist reading of the novel, David Anderson mentions the sense of meaning and permanence that is imbued in Ali's text by descriptions of the mohalla and the Muslim call to prayer, which suggests that the surface pessimism of the book is not a vision of nihilist despair ("Growth" 442). 41 In Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, John Clement Ball notes the use of twilight as a metaphor in Caribbean literature: "Twilight is a potent metaphor in Caribbean discourse. Temporally, it expands beyond quotidian sunsets to become, as in Derek Walcott's essay 'What the Twilight Says', 'a metaphor for the withdrawal of Empire [on which the sun was said never to set] and the beginning of our doubt'" (146). In Ali's text, the empire is still ascendant, but at the time of the novel's publication (1940) the beginning of its end is becoming evident. The deployment of twilight as a trope in Ali's narrative could suggest this period of imperial transition.

102 Most interpretations of Twilight in Delhi regard it as a novel of nostalgia and fatalistic melancholy that bemoans the loss of grandeur of India's Muslim past.42 The

Muslim past is evoked as a motif in the novel, yet its invocation envisages a historical continuum between past and present, which resists the fragmentation and alienation of the present historical moment.43 By recollecting the past, the text untangles the historical complexities that have shaped the present and paves the way for a semblance of meaning and cohesion to emerge in the narrative. Moreover, the narrative of India's Muslim past destabilizes the present colonial reality and re-imagines an Indian Muslim consciousness, perceived through the prism of the past. Elleke Boehmer describes the genres of romance and the historical novel in the fictions of former British colonies as texts of "retrospect as aspiration"Both [the romance and historical novels] were concerned with recovering an identity fragmented, displaced, or discredited under colonialism in order to reconstitute cultural integrity and, in this way, to construct the vision of an independent

42 D.A. Shankar reads Twilight in Delhi as a text of "plaintive" nostalgia for Islamic India (80). Alistair Niven calls Twilight a novel of "elegiac fatalism," which is imbued with the "fatalistic spirit of Islam" (5). Niven asserts that Ahmed Ali's "fatalist resignation prevents the antagonism of [Mulk Raj] Anand" or the metaphysical quest of Raja Rao from emerging in Ali's text (12). David Anderson sees the novel as an invaluable document that resurrects the bygone Muslim life of Delhi. He reads Twilight as a story of decline, with the Nihal family at the centre of the narrative, and with politics and history providing a background. Tariq Rahman sees the portrayal of the past grandeur of Indian Muslim history as a trope of sentimental nostalgia and romantic loss in the book. 43 One of the book's earliest reviewers analyzed the melancholy of the novel as an element of the romantic style stemming from an Eastern sensibility. Edwin Muir's review appeared in The Listener, London, 1940: "The atmosphere in which the story passes [...] has a striking resemblance to that of the French Romantics: there is the same exaltation of feeling, the same resignation to the impulses of the heart, especially in love, and the same readiness to embrace death, at least in contemplation, when the heart's impulses are frustrated [....] But if we accept the sentiment, we become aware that Mr. Ahmed Ali expresses it with a distinction and purity of which a Western writer would be quite incapable" (qtd. in Askari 28).

103 future" (122). In Ali's novel, nostalgia provides emotive release and imparts a healing closure to the past, releasing the present from the dead weight of its legacy, a historical psychosis that the Muslim mind is made to face head-on in the book. Alistair Niven marks Ali's debt to T.S. Eliot, and Bruce King compares Twilight with the works of early

Modernists like Yeats who created a mythos of the past through which to approach the present.44 The evocation of a bygone age in Ali's text is not emblematic of despair.

Instead, the retrospective imagining of the past becomes a stimulus for the quest for new articulations of the problematic of the present, with the past always in view. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said emphasizes this aspect of postcolonial writing: "The post- imperial writers of the Third World therefore bear their past within them - as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending towards a post-colonial future, as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable experiences, in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory reclaimed as part of a general movement of resistance, from the colonist" (212).

The imaginative evocation of a Muslim past in Twilight reaches crescendo in the

Coronation scene. For example, Gul Bano recalls her Mughal ancestors: "Yesterday we were the owners of horses and elephants, slaves and territories. But they usurped our throne, banished the king, killed hundreds of princes before these unfortunate eyes which could not even go blind, drank their blood, and we could do nothing" (101). Mir Nihal

44 King traces the emergence of Muslim fiction in India through Ali, Attia Hosain, Zulfikar Ghose, and Salman Rushdie, and compares Ali's vision of a decadent civilization with similar imaginings of early modernists like Eliot and Yeats.

104 remembers the period of Muslim rule in Delhi: "Right in front of him was the Red Fort built long ago by Shah Jahan, the greatest of artists in mortar and stone, but which was now being trampled by the ruthless feet of an alien race [...] Beyond [the city wall] was the old fort built by Feroze Shah Tughlaq many more centuries ago. Still beyond stretched the remnant of the past Delhis and of the ravished splendour of mighty

Hindustan - a Humayun's tomb or a Qutab Minar" (106). Similarly, the beggar Mirza

Nasirul Mulk talks of his Muslim ancestry: "There was a day when we used to go out in state, and people flocked to see us pass [....] We, who had once never cared even for kings [....] We, who had helped the poor once [....] We are the descendants of Timur

Leng who was the king of kings" (109). By these discursive strategies, the Muslim past is recalled and imagined and contrasted with the present reality of colonial subjugation.

The imaginative recollection also underscores the difference of Indian Muslims

from both the colonial British and the majority Hindu community of India, and

problematizes the question of an authentic Indian Muslim identity in the novel's present.

Muslim cultural isolation in the novel reflects the Muslim community's sense of

historical marginality, in which may be discerned the early stirrings of a sense of

separateness that was posited as a solution to the crisis of Muslim identity in the

following decades.45 By engaging with the historical past, Ahmed Ali's text intervenes in

45 Gerhard Stiltz argues that the Hindu-Muslim conflict is concealed in the novel, and states that the novel does not anticipate the India-Pakistan divide of the coming years (378). While the novel does not anticipate the divide, it does establish the difference of Indian Muslims from the other groups in India, which is a step towards the conception of a separate identity.

105 the narratives of Indian history and the master discourses of colonialism. As Ranajit Guha has argued, the British had appropriated the history of India by the early nineteenth century through a schematic historicizing of the Indian past, "applying metropolitan rules and models on native material" - annals, chronicles, anecdotes, folklore, Persian accounts, genealogies, and religious narratives. This appropriation paved the way for the stable and official discourse of British historiography of India in the nineteenth century

that could produce the "smooth, self-confident discourse of JS Mill" (21). History was

one of the master narratives of colonialism that demolished the Indian past and rewrote it

from the perspective of colonial historians of the nineteenth century. Guha states that

Indian histories of India, marked by an Indian historiography rebutting British histories,

began to be written only in the first decade of the twentieth century (67). The British

appropriation of Indian history emphasizes the significance of the discipline of history in

the colonial enterprise, corroborating the view that the formal "discipline" of history

emerged simultaneously with the age of colonialism. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin

endorse this view: "For the emergence of history in European thought is coterminous

with the rise of modern colonialism, which in its radical othering and violent annexation

of the non-European world, found in history a prominent, if not the prominent instrument

for the control of subject peoples" {Reader 317).

Therefore, given the significance of historical discourse in colonial/postcolonial

societies, Ahmed Ali's engagement with Indian history in Twilight in Delhi is a crucial

part of its strategy of resistance, as it combats a pre-eminent master discourse of British

colonialism. Ali's text participates in India's historical narratives and reinscribes them

106 from the vantage point of the Indian Muslim subject, which unsettles the essentialist

paradigms of colonial historiography. The evocation of a pre-colonial past in Twilight,

free from the taint of colonialism, reconnects the Indian Muslim collective memory with

its historical antecedents, stripped of the colonial subjugation of the present. Dipesh

Chakraborty has argued that Indian historiography itself is in a position of subalterneity

to the master discourse of colonial history, as its own discourse gets mediated by the

European historiography of India and the European discourse of modernity. Chakraborty

emphasizes that official Indian history appropriates the "antihistorical devices of memory

and the antihistorical 'histories' of the subaltern classes," which are either silenced or

rendered ineffective when mediated by the official discourse (341). Read as a history of

Delhi, Ahmed Ali's text gives voice to Indian subalterneity without suppressing it in a

Western-oriented Indo-historical discourse envisaged by Chakraborty. While the English-

language medium of Ali's narrative might compromise these subaltern "voices" to a

degree, the "Indian" and Urdu timbre of Ali's text ensures their prototypical culture-

specific place in the narrative. Thus, as historical discourse, the text of Twilight is less

encumbered with the mediations of Western historiography than official Indian histories,

which enables it to introduce an authentic counter-hegemonic historical discourse in its

narrative. The novel enacts two major historical events: the Mutiny of 1857, which is

invoked in retrospect, and the Delhi Durbar or the Coronation of George V, held in Delhi

in 1911, which is described in the novel's present.

The Mutiny is a compelling referent in the novel and a recurring narrative in the

Nihal family, passed down from the older generation to the new. This is emphasized in

107 the very first family scene when Mehro asks her mother to relate the story of the Mutiny:

"Amma, tell us what happened in the Mutiny. You were once telling us how the Farangis had turned all the Mussalmans out of the city" (6). The Mutiny is evoked anachronistically through the snatches of memory, interjections, and perspectives of various characters. Another source of the Mutiny motif is Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last

Mughal King, whose memory is evoked through poems and the reflections of various characters, constructing an alternative narrative of the Mughal king and the Mutiny. In

Ali's text the Mutiny is seen as the Indians perceived it, and not as the British saw it.

Oldenburg articulates this aspect of differing perceptions about the Mutiny: "[The Indians saw the Mutiny] in its all-encompassing sense as a rebellion, a mutiny, and perhaps even a war of independence, and not just a sepoy mutiny as the British chose to see it"

(Lucknow xxi). Dalrymple regards the Mutiny "not as one unified movement but many, with widely differing causes, motives, and natures" (Last Mughal 14). The people of

Oudh saw the Mutiny as a popular uprising because their youth and sepoys were involved in it; the ordinary Delhi citizens, in their petitions, did not use the words ghadr (Mutiny) and jang-e-azadi (War of Independence), but fasad (riots) and danga (disturbance); for the British, the Mutiny was the site of "British heroism against a mass of ungrateful natives"; and for the nationalist historians of India, the Mutiny became a "unified patriotic struggle of heroic freedom fighters against the imperialists" (21).

In Twilight, the Mutiny is constructed as a vital event in the past that showed the heroic courage of the mutineers and the barbaric cruelty of the British. By such allusions, the Mutiny becomes a principal motif in the anti-colonial language of the text. The

108 Mutiny narrative threads its course in the novel and reaches crescendo in the Coronation scene, which enacts the celebratory declaration of British rule in India in an official ritual of "monolithic seriousness," in sharp contrast to the spontaneous life of the Delhi streets represented in the novel.46 By an "internal focalization" in the narrative, the denouement of the Mutiny story is filtered through Mir Nihal's virulently anti-British consciousness and erected alongside the Coronation, a dramatic restaging of two antithetical historical spectacles. By extracting this story of reassurance and empowerment, the novel imaginatively summons that moment of resistance in the past, which unsettles the power hierarchy of the present represented by the pomp and fanfare of the Coronation. Ahmed

Ali's version of the Mutiny recasts Indians not as "passive onlookers and victims of

European action, but as subjects of their own history," in the manner of resistance narratives of colonized or persecuted peoples (Boehmer 195). This representation reinscribes Indian subjects in the narratives of India, granting them agency in their own stories, and reclaiming them back into the fold of history. On the confluence of language, place, and history, Ali's text rehabilitates Indian space for the Indian subject, "rewriting" a place "overwritten by the colonizer" (Ashcroft et al., Reader 346).

46 The Coronation Durbar of 1911 was an event of historical import in colonial India. It was the "first time that a reigning British monarch [had] visited India," and George V used the occasion to announce two important decisions of the British government: the transfer of the "Seat of the Government of India from Calcutta to the ancient capital of Delhi" and the revocation of the 1905 partition of the province of Bengal (Frykenberg 235). It is fitting that Mir Nihal is reminded of the Mutiny and India's servitude in the Coronation scene because the British used the occasion, attended by more than one hundred thousand people, to display their military muscle and valorize their military victory in the Mutiny: "The Durbar itself began with the formal entry of army veterans from past wars. These were led by more than a hundred survivors of the Great Mutiny" (Frykenberg 233).

109 The retrieval of the past in Ali's text enables a restorative connection between past and present, and initiates a movement towards an improved understanding of the present. The Muslim version of the Mutiny challenges the British accounts articulated in official government reports, journals, and memoirs of British men and women; it also provides an alternative to the "Mutiny novel" that flourished in the Mutiny's aftermath.

Ali's narrative of the Mutiny offers its analysis from a local perspective, serving to destabilize received English accounts of the event. In a similar vein, the novel constructs an alternative view of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who is castigated in official English accounts as debauched and derelict, but who emerges in Ali's text as a benevolent and widely loved king. Ahmed Ali's version of the Mutiny and Bahadur Shah have found validation in William Dalrymple's revisionist history, which painstakingly reconstructs the events of 1857 from archival research and contemporary documents.

Conclusion

The sense of a foreclosed future that critics have perceived in Twilight in Delhi results, among other factors, from the fact that Mir Nihal is the moral lens of the narrative.

Nihal's concept of a homogenous Muslim identity in India is tied to an essentialist construction of the past, which creates a fixed, immobile present. Ahmed Ali's characters are unable to reinvent themselves, or evolve hybrid identities, an aspect that collapses the narrative into a stationary, static present. Asghar is the only principal character that

110 shows signs of developing a new Muslim identity from a synthesis of Indian and British influences.47 However, his ethos remains superficial, he fails to grow in the text, and his emotional crisis at the novel's end manifests the impasse facing Indian Muslims at that time. In Ahmed Ali's text of Muslim India, we do not see a "new" Muslim consciousness emerging or being born, and in Mir Nihal's character we see the old consciousness disintegrating into paralysis. If postcolonial literatures follow a process of resistance and reconstruction, as Helen Tiffin has observed, then Ali's text is unable to move to the reconstruction stage, at least not in an overt and manifest fashion. The failure of Ali's characters to reconfigure the binaries of colonizer/colonized, Indian/non-Indian,

Muslim/non-Muslim into hybrid and syncretic formations prevents the text from breaking

free of the Colonial/Metropolitan, East/West axis, and insinuating a new, reformative

vision of historical progression. This is the reason why the narrative is unable to move

into the future, becoming fixed in an uncertain and unstable present. However, this does

not diminish the force of resistance in the text because, as Tiffin says, "decolonization is process, not arrival; it invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them" (99). By constructing Urdu tropes in the text, the novel signals the difference and separation of Indian Muslims from colonial and

47 Askari sees Mir Nihal as the embodiment of tradition and Delhi's collective culture, and Asghar as the representative of the "new man" born out of the clash and uneasy mingling of two cultures. David Anderson also sees the novel as presenting a fusion of "Western English culture" with "Eastern Muslim culture" ("Genesis" 53). However, any fusion that does take place in the novel yields not a workable synthesis but an unviable coalescence.

Ill mainstream Hindu cultures, an initial phase of resistance that does not suggest a clear direction into the future.

112 Chapter 2

"Beyond the Encircling Walls": Resistance and Women's Identities in Sunlight on a Broken Column

As a woman, I have no country. Virginia Woolf

We [women] have an identity and therefore a politics. Barbara Smith

Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column is a resistance narrative that deploys the subjective experiences of marginalized women to unmask patriarchal and colonial forms of oppression at work in pre-Partition Lucknow. A text of identity politics activism,

Sunlight draws on the "epistemic resources of identity," as theorized by Alcoff and

Mohanty in their discussion of identity politics, and situates identities as "markers of history, social location, and positionality," dismantling the patriarchal configurations of

Lucknow's upper-class feudal society (2). Hosain's narrative confronts the power of male privilege in Lucknow from the subject-position of its woman protagonist, creating a counter-discourse of feminist agency in the text.1 The feminist voice merges with the

1 This chapter does not deploy the categories "feminism" and "patriarchy" in their strictly "Western" connotations, but, as discussed below, locates them in the historical and temporal contexts of colonial Lucknow.

113 discourses of identity politics and anti-colonialism, positing cultural resistance to the oppression of subordinated groups in Lucknow during the decades that span the narrative.

Three distinctive attributes of Sunlight categorize it as a minoritarian discourse:

its narrator's identity as a woman in a patriarchal system; the situatedness of the text in a

Muslim family and community; and the location of the text as the voice of a colonized

subject under British colonial rule. The minoritarian typology of the text allows it space

to include the various forms of oppression at work in Lucknow society, presenting the

viewpoint of each oppressed group and the interlocking overlaps and struggles for

primacy between them. According to Nancy Hartsock, a "minoritarian subjectivity"

constitutes a "standpoint epistemology," which she defines as "an account of the world as

seen from the margins, an account which can expose the falseness of the view from the

top and can transform the margins as well as the centre [...], an account of the world

which treats [women's] perspective[s] not as subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but as

primary and constitutive of a different world" (171). The discourses of identity politics,

women's agency, and anti-colonialism in Hosain's text flow from these margins to

undercut the sites of domination in pre-Partition Lucknow.

Hosain's probing of contested and embattled identities not only underscores the

crisis of identity confronting the Indian Muslims of the period, it also establishes Sunlight

as a document of identity-politics activism, whereby identities become subjective points

through which political ideologies are contested, debated, and resolved. Identity-politics

activists have maintained two basic concepts with regards to identity: first, that identities

are "resources of knowledge especially relevant for social change"; and, second, that

114 "oppressed groups need to be at the forefront of their own liberation" (Alcoff and

Mohanty 2). The representation of the inner domains of women's lives in Hosain's text dredges out the innermost recesses of female knowledge, and of female thought and emotions, which become agents for social change and for projecting a feminist standpoint in the text. Similarly, the contestation of identities and the worldviews they embody project each vulnerable identity group to the forefront of its own struggle for emancipation in the novel. As Alcoff and Mohanty explain, minority groups deploy

"subjective experience to criticize and rewrite dominant and oppressive narratives" (4-5).

Subjectivity is not tied to an inner sanctum of the self that has no political, cultural, or societal underpinnings, but extends outward to the public realm: "The legitimacy of some subjective experiences [...] is based on the objective location of people in society; in many crucial instances, 'experiences' are not unfathomable inner phenomena but rather disguised explanations of social relations" (5). These domains of subjectivity are in the vanguard of Hosain's articulation of Muslim women's identities, and the cultural and political ideologies they represent.

Indian Feminism: Local Epistemologies

In "Under Western Eyes," Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that Western feminist discourses that analyze "third world" women should ground their analyses in the historical, cultural, and material contexts that define these women's lives (51). According to Mohanty, writing in 1988, Western feminist analyses of "third world" women are based on the "assumption [that these women are] an already constituted, coherent group 115 with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions" (55). Mohanty asserts that approaches that proceed from these assumptions construct a universal, homogeneous identity of "third world" women and disregard the heterogeneity and the specific cultural, social, and historical underpinnings that shape their lives. These universalist critiques rob "third world" women of historical and political agency, and draw them within the ambit of the problematic of "first world" or Western feminism (55). In her introduction to Third World Women and the Politics of

Feminism, Mohanty makes the same point with emphatic force: "Besides being normed on a white, Western (read progressive/modern)/non-Western (read backward/traditional) hierarchy, these analyses freeze third world women in time, space, and history" (6).2 As

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson assert, "Different texts from different locales require us to develop different theories and practices of reading" (xxviii). Watson and Smith offer a similar qualification regarding universalization in feminist thought: "[The] universalizing agendas of Western theorizing [work to] erase the subject's heterogeneity as well as its agency [and] hypostasize a universally colonized 'woman', universally subjected to

'patriarchal' oppression" (xiv). Following these caveats, Sunlight on a Broken Column needs to be read in its historical, cultural, and political contexts, to steer clear of modes of essentialist readings.

2 In another context, Mohanty explains why feminist analyses should not use Western-centric feminist parameters in non-Western contexts: "[Western] feminist movements have been challenged on the grounds of cultural imperialism, and of shortsightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class, white experiences, and in terms of internal racism, classism, and homophobia" ("Cartographies" 7).

116 In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Kumari Jayawardena argues that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist movements in the "third world" were not motivated by Western influences, but that "historical circumstances produced important material and ideological changes that affected women" and inspired these movements. Jayawardena lists three significant contexts of these struggles: the nationalist movements for political independence; internal reform movements to modernize society and combat imperialism; and the "dismantling of pre-capitalist structures" such as "ruling

dynasties and religious orthodoxies that stood in the way of internal reform" (2-3). These

particular contexts underscore the need to read Indian women's struggles within

indigenous frameworks, and in alignment with other modes of oppression in society,

notably patriarchy, feudalism, and imperialism. There is a close nexus between third-

world feminisms and nationalist and anti-imperialist struggles, as Mohanty explains: "It

is the intersections of the various systemic networks of class, race, (hetero)sexuality, and

nation, then, that positions us as 'women'" ("Introduction" 13). Cheryl Johnson-Odim

endorses this idea: "The oppression of impoverished and marginalized Euro-American

women is linked to gender and class relations, [whereas] that of Third World women is

linked to race relations and often imperialism" (314). While Western feminism focuses

on gender oppression and inequality, "third world" or "Indian feminism" is also

concerned with oppressions based on race, class, caste, and colonialism: "Third World

women cannot afford to embrace the notion that feminism seeks only to achieve equal

treatment of men and women and equal access and opportunity for women, which often

amounts to a formula for sharing poverty both in the Third World and in Third World

117 communities in the West" (Johnson-Odim 320). It is for this reason that it has been vital for Indian feminist movements to embrace the wider anti-colonial and nationalist struggles and their demands for more egalitarian economic and social structures.

Commenting on the Indian feminist movement in the nineteenth century, Kumkum

Sangari and Sudesh Vaid endorse its amalgamation with the nationalist struggle:

"Through the nineteenth century, different versions of female emancipation came to be slowly tied to the idea of national liberation and regeneration" (9). In the light of these qualifications, the women-centric text of Sunlight needs to be read in the context of its location, and of the cultural, political, and historical currents that undergird that location and its women subjects.

In her discussion of feminism and Islam, Theresa Saliba suggests making a similar qualification when analyzing the lives of Muslim women in order to prevent the construction of stereotypical images of oppression, typically signified by the veiled

Muslim woman constrained by a medievalist Islamic society. The representation of

Muslim women in the Lucknow of the 1930s and 1940s in Hosain's text is vulnerable to similar simplistic readings. According to Saliba, Eurocentric depictions of "third world" women regard them as victims of religious traditions, "rather than [seeing this tradition] as a viable form of feminist agency that produces contradictory effects for women participants" (3). Moreover, it also needs to be asserted that women in pre-colonial India were not necessarily worse off than women in Western countries. Johnson-Odim quotes

Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock on this aspect of the feminist debate: "It is critical to clarify the fact that egalitarian relations between women and men are not an imported

118 Western value and that, instead, the reverse is true. Egalitarian relations or at least mutually respectful relations were a living reality in much of the world in pre-colonial times, which was far from the case in Western culture" (321). In a similar vein, if the categories of East/West, Islam/West, and tradition/modernity were deployed as monolithic binaries in an analysis of Hosain's text, it would lead to generalized, stereotypical interpretations, eluding the multiplicity of factors that impinge on these categories and problematize them in their specific historical and cultural location. For this reason, these terms are not deployed as strict binary opposites in this chapter, but encompass the various facets that intersect within these categories and construct them as holistic concepts in Hosain's text. It is useful to keep in view the caveat introduced by

Sangari and Vaid, who note, "Both tradition and modernity have been, in India, carriers of patriarchal ideologies [....] Both tradition and modernity are eminently colonial constructs. We think it is time to dismantle this opposition altogether and to look at cultural processes in their actual complexity" (17). Such qualifications need to be kept in view to resist a monologic, universalist reading of Hosain's narrative. In "The Clash of

Ignorance," Edward Said attacks the propensity to construct "unedifying labels like Islam and the West [which] mislead and confuse the mind" and fail to address "the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, 'ours' as well as 'theirs'" (12-13). When these terms are used in this chapter, they connote the local frameworks by which these categories are formulated in Hosain's colonial Lucknow. They are deployed with an awareness of their complexities, using quotation marks where necessary to unsettle the notion of fixed and homogeneous meanings.

119 Lucknow: Pre-Colonial/Colonial Histories

Sunlight's historical, cultural, and material underpinnings are marked by its portrait of women's lives in an upper-class, feudal Shiite household of Lucknow, the capital city of the province of Oudh in 1930s-1940s British India.3 Oudh first came under Muslim rule during the reign of the Delhi Sultanates from 1206 AD onwards, until the Mughal emperor, Jalaluddin Akbar (ruled 1556-1605), incorporated it as one of the twelve provinces of his empire in 1556. From 1775 onwards, the Nawabs of Oudh created a court and capital that surpassed the Mughals "for its political pretensions and the wealth and vitality of its artistic world," sprouting new schools of poetry, music, drama, and art

(Fisher 2). In this pre-British Lucknow, the urban elite consisted of Shiite members of the royal households and members of Hindu commercial and scribal groups, while the thirty- three villages in or around the city limits were controlled by the taluqdars or large landholders (Oldenburg, Lucknow 182).4 Oudh remained under Mughal suzerainty until

1819 when Nawab Ghaziuddin "broke ties with the nearly defunct Mughal empire" and declared it an independent kingdom (11). From the eighteenth century onwards, the

British East India Company had begun to make inroads into Oudh and the Nawabs

3 The province continued to be known as Oudh, although in 1877 it was merged with the northwestern provinces to form the "North-Western Provinces in Oudh." Its name was changed to Uttar Pradesh in independent India (Reeves 215). 4 The word taluqdar derives from taluqa or group of villages, and a taluqdar was the principal landholder of his taluqa (Kumar 337).

120 gradually ceded territories to the Company, which eventually annexed the province in

1856. This event became one of the important causes of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

After the Mutiny, the British government of Oudh took specific measures to prevent the occurrence of a similar rebellion and transformed the cultural and political landscape of Lucknow, which had been the hub of the rebellion in Oudh. Instead of seizing the property of the taluqdars for their support of the rebels, the British, in a reconciliatory move, "gave them legal and military protection, and authority to act as magistrates and proprietors of their estates" (Oldenburg, Colonial 218). The British won the loyalty of the taluqdars and established them as "the largest landowners in Oudh" and as the new urban elite of Lucknow (182). The taluqdars were made into a protected and privileged group because the "source of their power lay in the people who lived on the lands" and the British needed their loyalty to maintain law and order and extract revenues from the land (259). The British created the taluqdars as a "landed, hereditary aristocracy" who in turn "bartered away their political rights for secure and enhanced incomes and made possible the century-long Pax Britannica in Oudh" (218).

Revenues from lands in India were a major source of wealth for the British empire; according to Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, "An indication of India's value to

Britain can be seen in the fact that in 1857 [...] the British East India Company collected

£15.7 million in land revenue alone, and taxes and customs duties brought in half as much again. In 1930-31, the land revenue provided the British Crown with £27 million"

(24-25). In The New Cambridge History of India, C.A. Bayly comments on the significance of Indian land revenues for British imperial power: "Seizure of cash land

121 revenues of India between 1757 and 1818 made it possible for Britain to build up one of the largest European-style standing armies in the world" (l).5 Therefore, the consolidation of taluqdar power in Oudh was based on strategic imperialist considerations.

In his historical study of Lucknow, Michael Fisher identifies four interweaving influences that shaped the culture of Lucknow in the nineteenth century: the Shiite rulers of the province, who until 1856 influenced the city's culture by their particular values, perceptions, and practices; the landholders, who followed their own peculiar cultural and material forms; the Mughal emperors, who were "almost universally recognized as sovereign until after 1857"; and lastly, the British officers of the East India Company, who exerted their cultural influence on both the rulers and the ruled (1). Fisher describes the landlords or the taluqdars as virtual rulers on their lands who maintained their own courts, fielded their own armies, and mimicked the practices of the kings of Oudh. By strengthening the taluqdars, the colonial government exacerbated the power of the feudal

class in urban Lucknow, thereby reconfiguring and perpetuating the patriarchal structures

and practices of the feudal order. Sangari and Vaid emphasize this point in their

introduction to the study of women in colonial India: "Such ostensibly gender-neutral

land settlements, whether guided by notions of preserving the 'village republic' or of

creating a landed gentry, in fact began a process of social restructuring which was

5 Bayly adds, "Indian raw material exports, notably cotton and opium, shipped to Europe and Asia, helped balance Britain's whole Asian trade, while India's revenues were a significant indirect subsidy to the exchequer" (2).

122 simultaneously and necessarily a process of re-constituting patriarchies in every social strata" (6). With particular reference to Oudh, it was the post-Mutiny Taluqdari

Settlement of 1858 that created the new class of powerful landlords or taluqdars: "[The

Settlement] transformed the former ruling group of rajas, chiefs, and tax-collectors into

landlords legally empowered to grant tenancies on the basis of a 'free market' economy

[....] Not only did this exacerbate patriarchal practices among the exploited classes [...]

but it increased the regulatory power of landlords and upper castes in maintaining caste

and class based marriage norms and sexual morality" (Sangari and Vaid 8).6 It is in such

a feudal taluqdar household of Lucknow in the 1930s, which had to contend with these

complex cultural and political influences, that Hosain's fictional world unfolds.

Sunlight'. The Text and its Critics

Sunlight on a Broken Column is set between 1932 and 1952, a period of volatile political

unrest and change in Indian history. The main narrative that comprises the first three

parts of the novel trails off in 1937, and the events of the remaining years are summarized

in the short last section of the book. Therefore, while the novel covers the decades of the

1930s and 1940s, it is the account of the 1930s that dominates its substantial part.

Orphaned at a young age, Laila, the novel's female narrator-protagonist, has been raised

by her paternal aunt in a household full of people, including her extended family and a

6 Kapil Kumar describes the terms of the Settlement: "By the Taluqdari Settlement of 1858 the British government, in order to establish a social base in the Oudh countryside, recognized the taluqdars as the 'natural leaders' of the masses with absolute ownership rights in the land. Thus, the peasantry was converted into tenantry and agricultural labourers" (338).

123 coterie of servants and retainers. The house, significantly named Ashiana (Urdu for

"nest"), is segregated into male and female quarters, and the women of the family observe purdah and receive a traditional education - learning Urdu, Persian, and Arabic from women teachers at home.7 The shadow of impending death looms over the house when the novel opens; Baba Jan, Laila's grandfather and the family elder, dies with portents that his passing will signal a shift in the stable, traditional, and time-tested value systems and practices of the household. The new head of the family, Uncle Hamid, has been influenced by ideas of Western modernity and allows Laila to come out of purdah and acquire a college education. Laila transgresses the class hierarchies of Lucknow society when she chooses to marry Ameer, who belongs to a class lower in rank and status than Laila's family. India's Partition cracks the family in two, part of the family house is taken over as evacuee property, and Uncle Hamid loses his privileges as a taluqdar and landholder of Oudh. Hosain's narrative breaks off in 1937 at the end of

Section III of the book, only to telescope to 1952 in Section IV, eliding fifteen years of the high phase of the Indian freedom movement, and the traumatic events of Partition and its aftermath. The loss, fragmentation, and rupture of Partition are condensed in the short last section of the book, which untangles the various narrative threads of the story, mediated by Laila's remembering consciousness.

7 There is some ambiguity regarding the levels of education and literacy of the women of Aunt Abida's generation. Abida is adept at deciphering legal documents and is a fervid reader of Ghalib, but the acquisitions of the other aunts are most likely rudimentary. For instance, at one point Laila comments, "She (Abida) was my only aunt I had seen with a book in her hands" (113).

124 Before examining Sunlight as a text of feminist identity politics, it will be useful to map an overview of the existing critical interpretations of the text. Sunlight on a

Broken Column has been interpreted as a nostalgic period piece, a feminist tract, a representative text of the Indian Muslim tradition and purdah literature, and a narrative of nation. In The Twice Born Fiction, her study of Indian English novels, Meenakshi

Mukheijee sees Hosain's novel as following a familiar pattern of "rebellion, romantic quest, and final submission to traditional values," and argues that the novel "badly disintegrates" in the last section of the book (81). By contrast, this chapter avers that the novel's ending is experimental and reveals, among other things, the influence of

Modernist fiction on Hosain's narrative. Sarla Palkar and Uma Parameswaran examine the depictions of purdah in Sunlight. Palkar talks about the "metaphysical and psychological ramifications" and "crippling effects" of purdah (114), while

Parameswaran argues that Hosain represents purdah as a "social custom that has outlived its day" (35). Amina Amin also sees Sunlight as an account of Laila's struggle to negotiate the "tightly balanced tension between freedom and restriction" in her society

(130). In comparison, this chapter reads purdah in Hosain's text as a manifestation of patriarchal control, and argues that Hosain seeks to reform the purdah culture from within the Indian/Islamic tradition.

Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai, and Aamer Hussein talk about the social and historical aspects of the book. Anand describes Sunlight as an autobiographical novel that documents the period of "India's historic transition" in a "tragic narrative full of the poetry of remembrance with an undercurrent of stoic calm" (xi). This chapter argues that

125 Hosain's use of the first-person, autobiographical voice confers agency on her woman protagonist. Desai reads the novel as a portrait of Lucknow's "feudal society as it existed then" (11), and as a "monument [to] the history of north India" (2). My reading of

Hosain's novel contends instead that it resists the feudal structure of Lucknow society and indicts feudalism, patriarchy, and colonialism, showing the relational overlap between these sites of power. Aamer Hussein regards Hosain as a "major chronicler of the Indo-Muslim ethos" and reads the novel as "both a celebration of, and a lament for,

the author's divided country" (174,175). This chapter acknowledges the feminist and

Indo-Muslim voice of the novel, and discusses its elision of Partition in that context.

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham reads Sunlight as a national narrative "about the

emerging Indian nation and about emerging national identities," projecting an alternative

account of the nation from the subject-position of a young Muslim woman (94).

Similarly, in her nationalist reading of the novel, Jameela Begum argues that Hosain

captures "within the walls [of the zenana] in miniature the experience of a whole nation

fighting its personal and political battles" (210). G. J. V. Prasad also comments on the

links between public and private realms in the novel and states that Laila's "personal struggle for freedom is fought against the background of the national struggle for

independence" (10). This chapter does not read the novel as a nationalist text per se, but

considers its women's narratives as alternative histories that challenge the patriarchal

underpinnings of Indian nationalist historiography.

R.K. Kaul analyses the historical context of the book and reads it as presenting a

realistic picture of Hindu-Muslim relations in Indian society. For Jasbir Jain, the novel is

126 a bildungsroman, a resistance narrative, and a narrative of Partition, which projects the

"heterogeneity of subaltern and colonized subjects," and of religion, caste, and class in colonial India (173). In her study of Partition narratives, Antoinette Burton classifies the novel as a narrative of Partition in which the family dwelling becomes a "history house" and a "central character" that functions as "an archive, a storage space from which the past can be gleaned, can be made to come alive" (132). This chapter underscores

Hosain's ambivalence towards Partition and discusses the allegorical construction of the family house towards the novel's end. In his study of Muslim narratives in English, Amin

Malak argues that while Hosain's text is imbued with a "secular and progressive vision," it expresses a "deep affection for her Islamic heritage when compared with European values" (34). Jill Didur studies Sunlight as a Partition narrative that "challenges the argument that religious differences were the defining features of the two nations' [India and Pakistan] identities" (101). Didur argues that "Laila's narrative perspective implodes the normalized oppositions between tradition and modernity, public and private, Eastern and Western, and community and nation," and its "thematic concerns of love, education, and domesticity [...] unsettl[e] the monolithic nationalism[s]" of India and Pakistan (123,

124). Muneeza Shamsie reads the novel as the account of a family caught in the struggle between the norms of "a pre-industrial society" and the "influence of the egalitarian ideals" of the West, and draws parallels between Hosain's text and Kamila Shamsie's

Salt and Saffron (145).

As this brief summary of existing critical opinion suggests, the theoretical tenets of identity politics have not been deployed to critique Sunlight on a Broken Column. This

127 chapter reads the novel as a document of identity politics activism, a narrative of resistance that deploys marginalized identities to unsettle the locus of patriarchal, feudal, and colonial power in Hosain's Lucknow.

Personal is Political: Identity, Resistance, Patriarchy

The personal is elevated to the political in Sunlight, as subjective experiences come to

represent the various political standpoints and categories of oppression at work in

Lucknow society. The novel traces Laila's quest for an authentic identity in a traditional

society that is under strain from Western cultural influences and the radical politics of the

Indian freedom movement. The account of Indian politics and history in Hosain's text is

filtered through Laila's first-person narrative consciousness, conflating the private and

public, as well as the personal and political. As Muneeza Shamsie has remarked, "One of

the novel's great strengths is that political opinions do not sit too heavily on the text, but

are nevertheless expressed" ("Sunlight" 146). Laila's subjectivity becomes the lens

through which her empirical world of family, culture, and politics is spotlighted, its focal

points revealing the attitudes, hierarchies, and power structures embedded in the social

fabric. As Moya Lloyd has argued in her study of identity politics and feminism, subjects

may be linguistically constituted (as Judith Butler contends), but they make sense of their

lives in terms of their sexuality and race, and use these markers of identity to create their

selfhoods and resist domination. In Lloyd's words, subjects redeploy their identities and

sexualities "often in subversive and potentially therapeutic ways in order not just to

generate narratives of the self but actively to produce themselves as particular kinds of 128 subjects, including resistant subjects" (40). Hosain's autobiographical voice and the

"personal history" mode of her first-person narrative construct the subjective "I" that can penetrate the interstices of patriarchal hegemony in colonial Lucknow and unsettle its powerbase. Moya Lloyd concurs with the idea of the personal insinuating the political:

"Treating politics as conjured to the public sphere obscure[s] the fact that the private realm, far from being immune from politics as conventionally argued, [is] saturated with gendered power relations, and thus with politics" (3-4). By projecting the resources of the subjective self, Hosain creates what Moya Lloyd calls the "performative effect," constructing "an identity [that is] produced in its articulation" (42). Subjective identities in Hosain's text are not insubstantial inner phenomena, but intermediaries through which political structures are understood, mobilized, and challenged. In his contemporaneous

comment on the novel, Mulk Raj Anand implicitly endorses this idea when he points to

the archetypal nature of Hosain's characters: "Most of the characters [...] approximate to

the intersection of personal and type behaviour which makes them all symbolic" ("Attia"

xii). A medley of political views and ideologies permeates the text, allowing the narrator

to present the contentious political and historical debates of the period within a pluralist, eclectic schema. It is on the confluence of these conflictual private and public terrains

that the resistance narrative of the text unravels.

The society in which Laila grows up has deep roots in feudalism, which can be

defined as a system in which prestige and class status are dependent on property: "Class

[...] is defined primarily by the ownership of property (land under feudalism, capital

under capitalism)" (Liddle and Joshi 70). The feudal structure of Lucknow society

129 accords power and agency to the male line of the family, which enables the control that the men of Laila's family exert over women. In her discussion of patriarchy, Kate Millet writes, "Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole" (38). She adds, "The principles of patriarchy appear to be twofold: male shall dominate female, elder male shall dominate younger" (38). Millet goes on to elaborate the pervasive reach of patriarchal structures: "Patriarchy as an institution is a social constant so deeply entrenched as to run through all other political, social, or economic forms, whether of caste or class, feudality or bureaucracy, just as it pervades all major religions" (38).

Millet recognizes that patriarchy "exhibits great variety in history and locale," which affirms that the forms of patriarchy that inhere in Hosain's Lucknow are diverse and specific to their location and its cultural and material relationships. The concept of

patriarchy proffered by Liddle and Joshi similarly locates it in particular familial structures: "Patriarchy [is the] particular system of family organization which includes patrilineal inheritance, the sons and the daughters-in-law staying in the father's house, and the authority of the father over the women and the younger men" (52).

This system of family organization is borne out by the gender relationships that obtain in Laila's world, where the power and sanctity of the family are paramount:

"When we were young Ustaniji made us recite the names of our ancestors" (39). The traditions, values, and honour of the family are continuously evoked in the household;

Aunt Abida says to the young Laila at the beginning of the narrative, "Never forget the family into which you were born" (38). This is an important process in the functioning of

130 patriarchy, which Millet calls "socialization": "The chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialization of the young (largely through the example and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology's prescribed attitudes toward the categories of role, temperament, and status" (42). Baba Jan is the standard-bearer of the family-cum- feudal order, which begins to show signs of gradual shift after his death. So great is the fear of Baba Jan that even in death he evokes in Laila the fear of having violated the conventions of propriety and modesty that direct the women of the household: "He was dead; he should have been dead. Yet he was looking at me. I had not covered my head; I had not raised my hand in salutation" (83). In the women's consciousness, Baba Jan is like a demigod with formidable powers to influence and control. Laila observes, "Surely he could not die, the powerful man who lived the lives of so many people for them, reducing them to fearing automatons" (31). Even though Baba Jan is autocratic, there is an underlying acceptance that such power is necessary to uphold family values and traditions: "Baba Jan's integrity gained him authority and recognition. It tempered the unchallenged tyranny which he exercised over his family - from his immediate household outwards to its tribal ramifications, and it earned him respect" (34). Such subordination and its acceptance is a characteristic of patriarchal culture, whereby the women internalize its machinations and come to believe in their innate truth-value.

Baba Jan's son and successor, Uncle Hamid, shares with him a "similarity of temper," but he has been educated in England because "At the end of the last century

Baba Jan had been influenced by ideas of reform among Muslims and had sent his sons to

English Universities. He had thought the weapons of the foreigners should be used

131 against them to preserve inherited values and culture. To copy their alien ways was abhorrent to him" (86). However, contrary to his father's designs for him, Hamid becomes Westernized and acculturated into the English value systems. He brings his wife out of purdah and arranges for her grooming by an English governess; he also neglects the religious education of his sons and sends them to school in England.8 Laila is in awe of her uncle and describes him as autocratic and authoritarian: Uncle Hamid, she says, has "the same obstinate jaw, high cheek-bones, uncompromising mouth, and slightly protruding cold eyes" as Baba Jan (86; emphasis added). If Baba Jan represents

"tradition," Uncle Hamid is a representative of "modernity," yet Laila's emotions towards both men are ambivalent, akin to her feelings about the conflicting influences of tradition and modernity themselves, which she struggles to bring into a viable and coherent synthesis. Laila's relationship to tradition can be gauged by her attitude towards her ancestral house in the village, Hasanpur, for which her emotions are less ambiguous than those she harbours for Ashiana, and where she does not experience the sense of fragmentation that she feels in the city: "[In Hasanpur] it was the fulfilment of the deep need to belong; it was a feeling of completeness, of a continuity between now and before and after" (88). The village itself is wedded to the soil: "In the distance the mango and guava groves were green and the mud-walled villagers were a part of the earth" (88).9

8 Aunt Saira explains the reasons for giving their sons an education in England: "She used to say only a real English education and not its imitation in Indian schools could produce a perfect blending of the best of East and West" (87). 9 Elsewhere, Laila observes: "Life [in Hasanpur] did not feel like a puzzle with its pieces scattered" (95). Even late in the narrative, when she has matured, Hasanpur evinces similar emotions: "My mind traveled

132 Hasanpur represents tradition, permanence, and the past while Ashiana represents uncertainty, change, and the present; Laila's contrary pulls towards both places spell out her conflicted feelings towards the values represented by both locations.10

In Laila's Lucknow, the feudal structure strengthens the patriarchal regime of family and society; the feudal practices of society are interwoven with the patriarchal traditions of the family, and both flow from and energize each other. When Saleem and

Kemal return from England after ten years, they are taken to the family village, where the villagers offer their symbolic vows of fealty to them, acknowledging their power as landlords and patriarchs. Peasants with "work-worn hands and bodies" bow and offer to

Saleem and Kemal "a silver rupee, the token of homage established since the days of my grandfather" (174). Even though the sum of money is not exorbitant, it represents one of the many methods of the coercion and exploitation of peasants: "Foremost among the oppressive practices was the taking of nazrana (extra premium on rent) by landlords"

(Kumar 339). It may seem an incongruity in Hosain's text, which is passionate about freedom of thought and the inherent rights of the individual, and which attacks various oppressions at work in society, that the exploitative feudal structure, the unequal relationship between landlord and tenant, is on occasion seemingly glamorized or

across the scrambled centuries of our lives. There was a wave of nostalgia for Hasanpur, that rose out of the fields and the groves, the dung and the dirt, the poverty and peace, the eternal sameness of the village patterns" (249). 10 After Uncle Hamid renovates Ashiana, it loses more of its warmth and evokes alienation: "The rejuvenated rooms reminded me of English homes I had visited with Mrs. Martin, yet they were as different as copies of paintings from the original" (120-21).

133 projected as a source of pride. However, Laila's attitude towards feudal exploitation has to be seen in the context of her evolving narrative consciousness.

A sensitive and iconoclastic narrator, Laila gradually comes to realize the oppression of peasants under the feudal order as she matures as a person and comes to understand the power dynamics obtaining in her society. Initially in the narrative, she shows a tacit acceptance of the feudal relationship. On one of her visits to Hasanpur, when she witnesses the villagers "bowing low in deep obeisance, salaaming," she does not recoil at the sight or feel pity or doubt, but experiences a feeling of elation: "I felt a sense of contentment. There was a relationship that made these people different from the others we had passed on the highway" (93). While Laila's feeling of "contentment" may stem partly from the fact that, unlike the city, Hasanpur does not present any palpable conflict for her, it shows her implicit acquiescence in the feudal system at this stage in the text. Laila's reticence with respect to feudal exploitation is matched by and can be understood from the political ambivalence that she displays through the duration of the narrative. Just as she takes time to adopt a definitive stance on the politics of the period, understanding of the insidious machinations of the feudal order also comes to her gradually. Moreover, the deep sensitivity that she displays towards the poor through the greater part of the narrative mitigates the moral ambiguity that she may appear to display on a few occasions. On her second visit to Hasanpur with Kemal and Saleem, Laila's impressions reveal a shift as she observes her surroundings with different eyes: "I returned with them to find time had changed me towards Hasanpur. As my circumscribed world opened out slowly, books I had read, people I had met affected my feelings towards

134 it, undermining them with a sense of guilt. I saw poverty and squalor, disease and the waste of human beings whereas before I had looked at them, unseeing, through a screen of emotions" (173; emphasis added). This passage shows the developing sensibility of the narrator, and also points to her awareness of the constricted exposure - "my circumscribed world" - that prevents her from fully fathoming the exploitative nature of the feudal order early in the narrative.

Laila's quest for emancipation and agency constructs a liberatory discourse of difference and feminist activism in the novel. As an individualized, first-person account,

Laila's story risks falling into the familiar Western genre of the bildungsroman with its emphasis on individualist development along the template of the Western autobiographical novel. Smith and Watson argue that as a medium for the subjective experience of the marginalized, the Western bildungsroman would hold the "politicized dimension of identity and self [...] in abeyance": "For the colonial subject, the process of

coming to writing [does] not necessarily fall into a privatized itinerary, the journey

toward something, the personal struggle toward God, the entry into society of the

bildungsroman, the confessional mode and the like" (xx). In colonial space, the

autobiographical voice has the potential to grant agency to the female colonized subject:

"For the marginalized woman, autobiographical language may serve as a coinage that

purchases entry into the social and discursive economy. To enter into language is to press

back against total inscription in dominating structures [...] Deploying autobiographical

language practices that go against the grain, she may constitute an 'I' that becomes a

place of creative and, by implication, political intervention" (xix). By constructing an

135 intimate, subjective narrative, Hosain's text deploys the subversive potential of the autobiographical voice, achieving the "creative political intervention" that Smith and

Watson refer to, yet steering clear of the Western bildungsroman tradition. Even if the narrative of the colonial subject replicates certain patterns of the bildungsroman, as

Hosain's text indeed does, it "does so with a difference [and] exposes their gaps and incongruities, wrenches their meanings, calls their authority into question" (Smith and

Watson xx). Therefore, while Hosain's text deviates from the canonized genre of the

Western autobiography, it deploys the first-person voice to formulate its narrative of resistance and feminist agency. As Caren Kaplan explains, the traditional autobiography has branched out into myriad sub-genres in the hands of marginalized subjects: "Critics have established alternative canons of Western autobiography that include African

American slave narratives, diaries, captivity narratives, abolitionist and suffragist personal records, labor activists' accounts, oral histories of immigration and exile, and modernist fiction, among others" (116). Hosain's narrative needs to be placed in such a sub-category, as the voice of a woman subaltern from a minoritarian religious group entrenched in patriarchal traditions and modes of colonial exploitation.

While Laila's narrative constructs a discourse of identity-politics activism, its feminist voice is problematized by her rigid class-inflected society and her own upper- class status in its class hierarchy. Hosain's text evinces sympathy for lower-class women, without constructing essentialist identities of these women from Laila's subject-position as a privileged upper-class woman. In her book of short stories, Phoenix Fled (1953),

Hosain captures the world of servants and their lives of hard work and poverty with fine

136 sensitivity and compassion, especially in "The Daughter-in-Law," "The Loss," "White

Leopard," and "Ramu." That manner of representation continues in the depiction of the lives of servants in Sunlight. Laila (as narrator) does inevitably appropriate the voices of the lower-class women in the text, which risks compromising their autonomy to a degree, yet her bonding with Nandi, Saliman, and Hakiman Bua lends authenticity to her representation of these underprivileged and marginalized women. Hosain resists the existing class and status hierarchies of Lucknow society through two significant choices

Laila makes: by marrying below her class she transgresses the inflexible class and status hierarchies of her society; and her decision to give Nandi's son a Grammar school education is an intervention in the class divide to bridge the gap between rich/poor, master/servant in the economic structures of colonial Lucknow. Thinking of Nandi's son,

Laila observes, "Maybe one day he would become more than the clerk Nandi dreamed he would be. Maybe he would be a Civil Servant, an officer in the Army or Police, a

Member of Parliament" (293). Laila's move decentres the class hierarchies of her world and establishes a female coalition in the text, challenging the patriarchal, feudal, and colonial forms of control in Lucknow society.

Sunlight offers unique insight into the inner domain of women's experiences in pre-Partition Lucknow; while many women in the text display levels of emancipation and agency, most are confined to sordid lives of duty to family and the patriarchal modes of the social arrangement. The exploitation of women is closely tied to colonization, which has legitimized and reconstituted the patriarchal order in which these women's lives unfold. As noted earlier, the British government strengthened feudal landlordism in Oudh

137 because it needed the landlords to work as intermediaries between the colonial state and the peasants. The anti-colonial and anti-British ideology of Hosain's text also by implication targets the feudal order because of the British-taluqdar nexus in colonial

Lucknow. The text exposes the oppression of taluqdari landlordism by capturing the misery, poverty, and helplessness of poor tenants, who are rendered in moving detail.

When Aunt Abida adjudicates over ejectment petitions against tenants who have defaulted on rent payments, the portrait of an old peasant woman who is being ejected from the land vividly captures the suffering of the peasant class: "She was as worn and drained of life as the dull, ribbed, silver bangle on her fleshless arm [...] She held Aunt

Abida's feet with hands that were blackened with age and work, the nails rubbed back, ridged and horny" (61).

In this scene, Abida performs the role of the landholder and makes the decision to oust a tenant from her land. Abida's power in this vignette flows from her upper-class standing, and she acts like a stern administrator without letting her emotions interfere

with her decision. This decision of the otherwise kind, empathetic, and sensitive Aunt

Abida suggests the pervasive authority of the feudal order and the extent to which women

have been conditioned to internalize its logic of patriarchal relations. This episode

underscores the vulnerability of the tenants in the tenant-landlord relationship, for while

the landlords were granted "absolute ownership rights in the land" by the British

government through the Taluqdari Settlement of 1858, the peasants did not have

"permanent occupancy rights" and could be evicted on various pretexts if another tenant

was willing to pay a higher rent (Kumar 342). Furthermore, the British changed the traditional land tax to rent, "so that the size of the payment no longer varied with the harvest, but was a fixed sum which increased periodically" (Liddle and Joshi 71). Since methods of agriculture did not improve and stayed in their pre-capitalist state, the

"peasants had to pay more and more rent on the same amount of production" (Liddle and

Joshi 71). In this scenario, the more affluent peasants became moneylenders and a large number of others became impoverished, evicted from their lands and forced to become agricultural wage labourers. Since the British stifled Indian industry and shaped India

into an agricultural economy that produced raw materials for British industries, the

labouring peasants could not become industrial or factory workers as their European

counterparts did during the industrial revolution (Liddle and Joshi 71).

Liddle and Joshi explain the impact of colonization and capitalism on the

landlord-peasant relationship: "The British concept of private property changed the

structure of rural land ownership by allowing the zamindars (revenue collectors) to evict the cultivators where previously they had only held revenue collection rights, creating large numbers of landless peasants" (25). Kapil Kumar suggests that women taluqdars and moneylenders could be as oppressive as their male counterparts: "In the estates managed by women taluqdars - a thakurain taluqdar (Rajput woman landholder) - as in those held by men, the peasants faced all kinds of hardships and exploitation" (343). In rural Oudh in 1921, only 2.1 percent of the tenants were "secure tenants," while 97.9 percent were "tenants-at-will," vulnerable to evictions and other oppressions. This is the reason that in 1917-18 the Oudh countryside witnessed the "most militant peasant movement of northern India in the course of the freedom struggle against the British"

139 (344). This movement also empowered the women in rural Oudh. Kumar describes the

"Ajodhaya Kisan Conference of 1920" in which "about 50,000 to one lakh [i.e., 100,000] peasant men and women reached the town in spite of the cold weather" (356). In 1925 the first all-women peasant conference was organized in Oudh; it included "political mobilization for the national movement" as one of its agenda items and was an "overt expression of the oppression faced by women in the countryside" (358-59).

Hosain's exposure of the patriarchal, classist, and imperialist dimensions of the feudal regime, and her vivid depiction of the suffering and poverty of the peasants and the poor, is testament to her liberal, humanist vision. Her portrait of the maid servant and her daughter in Zainab's house in Hasanpur is a case in point. The maid servant is "as ugly as poverty, as thin as hunger," and the menial work that her daughter does deprives her of dignity: "Kalvi, the maid-servant's daughter, cleaning pots and pans; and the light from Nandi's lantern fell on her dim figure as she squatted holding a piece of hemp in one hand and an ash covered copper bowl in the other" (100). Kalvi's situation flows from her lower class status, which is tied to the workings of the patriarchal order and the economic system of the colonial state: "The kinds of employment open to women in modern patriarchies are, with few exceptions, menial, ill paid and without status" (Millet

45). Speaking of the unequal gender relations in a patriarchy, Ketu H. Katrak endorses the idea that they are "sustained as much by power relations with the larger, patriarchal society as they are by economic systems" (396). Colonialism nurtured the oppressive power of feudalism, which in turn accentuated the patriarchal structure, constructing the interweaving layers of oppression prevalent in the Lucknow society depicted in Hosain's

140 narrative. The anti-patriarchy and anti-colonial strategy of the text strikes at the foundations of exploitative power structures in Lucknow, and draws the feudal system within the range of its attack.

Women's Lives: Forms of Oppression

Hosain's account of male privilege and patriarchal oppression provides evidence of the

power that men wield in colonial Lucknow, irrespective of class and economic divides.

For instance, Ghulam Ali, Uncle Hamid's favourite servant, gets away with his excesses against the women servants, until the servants eventually team up against him when he attempts to molest Nandi. Ghulam Ali's power is still not curtailed as he exacts revenge

by permanently scarring Nandi's face with a knife. It is not imaginable for a female servant to have this kind of naked power over other household servants. Similarly, Uncle

Mohsin, though a very distant relative - "He was the son of my grandfather's father's sister's daughter" (18) - has considerable influence in the decision concerning Zahra's

marriage; he patronizes Aunt Abida and Majida and derides their purported naivety in worldly matters. Mohsin epitomizes arrogance and power, which only his gender confers

on him. His aggression and smug satisfaction in his own authority is evident in his

demeanour: "He had a laugh that coiled out of fat-globuled honeyed depths, and bold

eyes, red-flecked" (19). It is Mohsin who derides Laila's English education; while Zahra

has been "brought up differently, correctly, sensibly," Laila, he believes, has been given

too much freedom: "She [Zahra] has not had the benefit of a mem-sahib's education;

though I am glad to see certain abhorrent signs of it have been removed, and your young 141 mem-sahib has given up walking around dressed like a native Christian" (23). The aggression of Mohsin's manner and his impatience with women's opinions derives from the unquestioned superiority that society accords him on account of his gender. It is only when Uncle Hamid takes charge of the household that Mohsin's influence is diminished, because the two have an innate dislike for each other.

The power Uncle Hamid exerts over the household and the way he dominates its

women and younger men is evident in his every gesture and mannerism, and in the

decisions he takes. Millet describes the male and female roles in a patriarchal family and

the traits that each gender is conditioned to practice: "Aggression, intelligence, force, and

efficacy in the male; passivity, ignorance, docility, 'virtue', and ineffectuality in the

female" (38). Within a year of taking over the house, Hamid marries off Abida to an old

widower who has grown-up children of his own, tying Abida to a life of joyless,

unquestioned duty to her husband. Aunt Abida accepts the decision with stoic surrender,

and Hakiman Bua sums up the reaction of the women who are conditioned to accept lives

of diminished happiness: "Who can know what is written? This was the man her Kismet

had kept her waiting for all these years" (112). Abida has remained unmarried because of

her autocratic father, as Aunt Majida divulges: "Abba found no one good enough for her;

and refused one good proposal after another" (22). While gender is a determinant of

power in most instances, on occasion class proves more insidious in setting up barriers

and taboos. Asad, for instance, who is a poor relative, cannot marry Zahra because of the

class divide between them.

142 The feminist strategy of the text works by first exposing the structures of male oppression and then revealing women's resistance and challenge to those structures. Aunt

Abida is the archetype of the upper-class-woman-as-victim-of-patriarchy in the text.

Despite her privileged class, she is crushed by the weight of tradition and her devotion to family, duty, and honour. Extremely gifted and adept at what she does, Abida finds no agency in her personal life, even though her high status in the class hierarchy confers certain advantages on her, which women of the lower rank are denied. Abida is bound by a code of honour which dictates that she do whatever the men in the house decide for her, evidenced from her subservience first to Baba Jan and then to Uncle Hamid. As she says to the young Laila, "Life will teach you to subordinate your heart to your mind" (62); and later, "We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control our behaviour. One must never blunt one's sense of duty" (139). What education she has acquired is derided

by Uncle Mohsin, who implies that it is useless or without value because she is a woman:

"How can I understand the workings of the mind of a scholar of Persian poetry and

Arabic theology infected with modern ideas" (20). Duty is the cardinal principle that defines Abida's life; she says to Laila, "To respect your elders is your duty [....] You

must never forget the traditions of your family no matter to what outside influences you

may be exposed" (38). It is Abida's sense of duty to family that makes her accept

marriage to an old man and a bland life of duty in his bickering joint family household.

When Laila visits her in her new home, she echoes her emphasis on duty: "Some things

never change. Respect your elders and obey them [...] You must learn that your 'self is

of little importance. It is only through service to others that you can fulfil your duty"

143 (252). Abida's strong disapproval of Laila's marriage is a measure of the extent to which she has internalized the patriarchal conventions that define the code of propriety for women in her society: "You have been defiant and disobedient. You have put yourself above your duty to your family [...] You have let your family's name be bandied about by scandal-mongers and gossips. You have soiled its honour on their vulgar tongues"

(312)." Anita Desai points out in her introduction to the novel that "7zza//honour, and

S/zaram/dishonour" are two "ruling concepts" of Indian behaviour, and Indian culture and family life. For Abida, it is the honour of the family that Laila has soiled, and that is an unpardonable breach of decorum. A woman of grace and talent, Abida epitomizes the social conditioning that compels women to accept with stoic surrender what the society and family (read men) decide for them.

Even when her relatives feel sympathetic towards Abida, it is because she has not been successfully married at a young age. Zainab's grandmother comments on Abida's ascetic piety and laments that she is not married: "She should be the mother of sons, and enrich a man's home" (108). The comment shows the extent to which the female imagination in Hosain's society is indoctrinated with the logic of patriarchy: it is the bearing of sons (not daughters) that matters, and the woman's place is in the home, which in actuality belongs to the man; the woman only "enriches" or adorns it. Abida is the

11 Antoinette Burton points to the parallels between Laila's marriage and the circumstances of Attia Hosain's own marriage: "Like Laila, Attia's marriage choice was unconventional: she married a cousin against her mother's wishes. She later remembered how her mother accused her of 'having besmirched the family honour' and that her family considered her a rebel and an anticonformist" (112).

144 archetypal victim of patriarchy: her intellectual and creative gifts are not given space to develop, and she dies in childbirth in a house full of her in-laws who do not love her. As a symbol of self-sacrificing womanhood, Abida's physical appearance conveys her condition as victim: the "wide and restless eyes," the pallor of her face, and the thin, weak body define her vulnerability and eventual sacrifice to family tradition and the patriarchal code (19).

It is noteworthy that Abida's upper-class status protects her from economic

oppression; her oppression stems rather from social customs and patriarchal conventions.

Kapil Kumar points to these gradations in the exploitative regimes of rural Oudh society.

Referring to women privileged by family and those who were themselves taluqdars or

moneylenders, Kumar states: "The problems of these women and those of women from

landlord families, who had no direct control over the means of production, were largely

related to social customs and patriarchy while those faced by women cultivators and

agricultural labourers were economic as well as patriarchal" (338). Abida falls in the first

category, as a woman of a land-owning family without recourse to means of production,

while servant girls like Nandi are in the same category as the women field workers,

though the oppression servants face is less severe than what the field labourers would suffer. It may also be mentioned that the agricultural labourers constituted a class that was created specifically by the machinations of the landed feudal structure, which kept them in a position of perpetual subservience: "The bulk of the rural proletariat was drawn

from the 'low castes' who for generations had been prevented by the feudal aristocracy

from owning land for cultivation in order to facilitate the supply of labour" (Kumar 339).

145 While Abida epitomises the suffering woman of the upper class in Hosain's text, the lives of many other women characters across the class divide reveal similar patterns of exploitation by men and social conventions. For instance, the Rani of Bhimnagar has

"sad doe-like eyes [and her] husband [brings] home from each annual trip to Europe a new young woman" (63); Saliman and Ramzano's mother, "sold as a child during a famine" and brought up by Laila's grandmother, is abandoned by her husband for a

"smart, rustling-skirted, red-coated Ayah, who had found him a job with the English family where she worked" (71-72). Aunt Majida's husband abandons her not for a woman but for God, sacrificing his fortune on the "tombs and charities" of saints (24).

Uncle Mohsin's wife, "a negative, ailing woman, her tattered beauty a mendicant for

love, [knows] her husband only to conceive a child after each infrequent visit home"; and

the Hakim's wife is "perpetually, gigantically pregnant" (21). Nandi's mother dies

because, like Aunt Abida, she is not supposed to be seen by male doctors: "Go to hospital

to have a baby with men standing round looking on? [...] Better to die at home" (136).

Saliman dies carrying Ghulam Ali's child; while she is sent away to the village as punishment and to hush a scandal, Ghulam Ali continues to preside imperiously over the

men servants in the house. All these women are victims of various forms of oppression in

the patriarchal network of home and social relations. Iris Marion Young identifies five

disparate categories of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural

imperialism, and violence. Young argues that there are overlaps between these categories

and that a person could be a victim of more than one type of oppression (92). All these

146 forms of oppression are operative in Hosain's world in varying degrees across the economic, political, and cultural domains.

Even some of the women who are purportedly "free" in Hosain's narrative are

only superficially liberated, and their liberation does not constitute an intervention in the

patriarchal hierarchy. Aunt Saira and Zahra have come out of purdah, but for them the

sociological, economic, and epistemological veil has not parted. The fate of other overtly

liberated women in the text is similarly pitiable. Sylvia Tucker has become the second

wife of the Raja of Bhimnagar, while Sita, despite her sexual liberation, cannot cross the

religious barrier and marry Kemal. These women's situations emphasize the complexity

and ineffectiveness of "modernity" in Lucknow, and the complicated crisscrossing of

tradition and modernity in colonial society. For these women, modernity is not a

liberating influence; on the contrary, it strengthens the structures of patriarchy and

colonialism, erecting its own barriers without extending any real benefits to its adherents.

The superficial nature of modernity in Lucknow is explained by Saleem and Kemal when

they advise their mother not to "pay attention to the gossip of women whose minds

remained smothered in the burqas they had outwardly discarded, and men who met

women socially but relegated them all to harems and zenanas" (207). The overlaps and

slippages between the conditions of modernity and tradition vindicate the idea that they

cannot be regarded as binary opposites, each with its own inner cohesion.

147 Women's Lives: Forms of Agency

While the men exert control over their world, the women in the novel are not always without agency, and their lives reveal patterns that bind them in solidarity and enable them to confront patriarchal domination. The women in Laila's household constitute an internally cohesive world, and display various levels of agency and reserves of creativity.

There is Ustaniji, for instance, a scholar and teacher of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic, "who

had served the royal family and taught in the homes of their courtiers" (36). Aunt Abida

displays remarkable strength of character and grace under pressure. She officiates as

magistrate in the absence of Baba Jan to adjudicate land disputes on the family estate, and

is "able to decipher the writings of the professionals by whom tenants had their

applications and requests written" (60). She is also an avid reader of Ghalib's poetry and

encourages Laila's interest in reading. The courtesan, Mushtari Bai, now old and wasted,

is a singer of refined artistry: "She sang; and at the first rich, deep notes a hush fell. The

perfection of her technique mastered the mind; and the pure tones and depths of emotion

humbled the spirit" (65). Mushtari Bai also teaches the rudiments of culture and etiquette

to the children of the aristocracy, a role that the courtesans of Lucknow traditionally

performed. Laila's father says to Mushtari Bai when he introduces Laila, "An English

governess cannot teach her as you taught us lessons in etiquette and courtesy" (64). In her

study of the courtesans of Lucknow, Veena Talwar Oldenburg notes the influence of the

Lucknow courtesan on the city's refined cultural traditions: "[Courtesans were] not only

recognized as preservers and performers of the high culture of the court, but they actively

148 shaped the developments in Hindustani music and Kathak dance styles" ("Lifestyle"

139).

Laila's college Mend, Nita, is the new Indian woman: a fiercely independent

firebrand who participates in and organizes protests against the colonial government and

is eventually killed from an injury sustained during a protest march. Begum Waheed is

another example of liberated womanhood; she has come out of purdah and eventually

gets elected to the legislative assembly on a Muslim League ticket. Similarly, while many

upper-class women of the royal households suffer from the excesses of their husbands,

there are exceptions like the Rani Sahiba of Amirpur, for instance, "a large, imperious

woman" whose "formidable husband" is "frightened" of her because she had "whipped a

woman in the zenana who had responded to his amorous advances" (63). Zainab's mother

practices indigenous medicine and has "knowledge of medicinal herbs from which she

prepared potions, plasters, and purgatives" (99). Women from all cadres of society

perform creative work of various kinds, from sewing, knitting, and dying their own

clothes, to cooking, baking, cleaning, and keeping the house in prim working order.

While most of this work is done without wages and thus is a sign of exploitation and

oppression, it also shows women's resourcefulness and allows them to claim agency and

appropriate power in the family and in the social world.

Therefore, while women suffer from the excesses of patriarchal culture, they are

not passive victims but are imbued with a desire for emancipation and an alternative way

of life. Significantly, they are conscious of the exploitation they suffer and the narrow

confines of their constricted lives. A small anecdote captures the women's curiosity about

149 the world and their aspirations for a different reality and a life of freedom. During the rainy season the swing becomes a means of crossing the high, enclosing walls of the zenana, and the women experience elation in the feeling of liberation and freedom it affords, even if it lasts only an instant: "During the rainy season we used to hang a plank on thick ropes, on the thickest branch of the tallest mango tree, and Zainab would sings the songs of the season, as we swung, with our dopattas streaming behind, high above the walls, able to look at the green world stretched out under purple clouded skies" (106).

The women are conscious of their closed-in existence, a consciousness that is an aspect of resistance and an overture towards freedom. By depicting the interior world of subordinated women and their modes of resistance, Hosain constructs a text of subaltern feminist historiography, charting the course of women's struggle for agency in colonial

Lucknow. This feminist historiography undercuts the dominant discourses of nationalism and colonialism in India that are predicated on a sexist and classist historicity and write women out of history, projecting male experience as normative to historiography.

Mahatma Gandhi conceived the Indian woman as a model of purity, sacrifice, and silent suffering, thereby subsuming her identity under a nationalism that was primarily based on and stemmed from male experience. As K. Radhakrishnan notes, bringing the woman question in India under the rubric of nationalism compromised women's politics, because nationalism retained a male-centric focus and disregarded women's experiences within the national imaginary. Indian nationalism used an "inner/outer distinction as a way of selectively coping with the West," and brought the woman question within this

"dichotomous adjustment": "By mobilizing the inner/outer distinction against the

150 'outerness' of the West, nationalist rhetoric makes 'woman' the pure and ahistorical signifier of 'interiority'" (Radhakrishnan 84). While important aspects of politics like nationalism were conceived in the outer layer of Indian identity, "the inner and inviolable sanctum of Indian identity had to do with home, spirituality, and the figure of the

Woman"; therefore, "Woman takes on the name of a vast inner silence not to be broken into by the rough and external clamor of material history" (Radhakrishnan 84-85).

According to Mohanty, "Feminist analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and remembering history. This is a process which is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history,

but because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formations of

politicized consciousness and self-identity" ("Cartographies" 34). Hosain's subaltern

historiography achieves this function, writing women into the history of Indian

nationalism as subjects of autonomy and agency. Sunlight offers a corrective to the grand

narratives of Indian history - the discourses of Western historiography and the patriarchal

Indian nationalist discourses - and its feminist historiography fills the gaps and erasures

of these narratives. In her nationalist reading of Sunlight, Needham points to the

"profoundly gendered ways in which nationalism formulates itself' (95), and suggests that Laila's narrative "recast[s] and re-negotiate[s] the preferred narrative of Indian

nationalism" (107).

Along with Laila, the woman who stands for feminist assertion in the novel is

Nandi, whose story of misfortunes unfolds simultaneously with the account of Laila's

development. Nandi is doubly jeopardized because of her low social status, which makes

151 her an easy target of male exploitation. She fights back against oppression, most of the time without success, yet her determination eventually overcomes her difficulties, and the promise of an English education for her son is a promise of upward social mobility and an intervention in the economic barriers placed on her class. Nandi points out the sexual hypocrisy of the upper classes and her vulnerability because of her lower-class status:

"Nothing happens to those who really do wrong because they take care to hide it [....]

We poor people get a bad name because we cannot stay locked up [....] Respectability

can be preserved like pickle in gold and silver" (95-96). It is Nandi who gives direct

expression to the power and exploitation of men, and to women's biological

vulnerability, which is exploited by a phallocentric society: "A man's love is no different

from an animal's. He takes what he can get, because he is not the one who has to bear the

consequences. It is the injustice of the gods that a woman alone must [fear]" (227).

Nandi's upward class progression is significant in a world of rigid class boundaries: from

a washer man's daughter and servant girl she becomes the respected Ayah of Laila's

child. Nandi and Laila form a deep female bond in the text, what Barbara Ryan would

call a "sisterhood against patriarchy," deploying the power and efficacy of female

coalitions in the face of opposition.

Laila's Quest: Agency/Authenticity

As the narrator-protagonist, Laila's development marks the trajectory of emancipation for

a woman of upper-class Lucknow society. From the very beginning of the narrative, Laila

is constructed as different from the traditional young girls of her class, a norm 152 represented by her cousin Zahra. Hosain's text tracks Laila's progress from early teenage to adulthood, tracing her intellectual and emotional development, and her appropriation of ascendancy over her own life. Laila's ambivalence is emphasized throughout the text, as she appears unable to align fully with any of the political and cultural positions espoused by her friends and relatives. In the first three sections of the book, which constitute the main part of the narrative, Laila is precariously caught in a middle ground: despite being drawn emotionally and intuitively to an anti-conformist viewpoint, she lacks conviction and the will to articulate her thoughts or translate them into viable

action. However, her space of ambivalence or neutrality enables her narrator persona to

present all points of view with relative objectivity, even though it is revealed to the reader

where Laila's heart resides in most conflicts that she describes. The ambivalence also

underscores the challenge that Laila faces and the insurmountable obstructions that she

has to bridge before she can take control of her life. A foil to the rebellious Laila is the

conformist Zahra, whose life is uncomplicated because she accepts and fulfills the roles

that society confers on her. Laila's struggle becomes all the more heroic when weighed

against the strong opposition she has to encounter.

Gender roles are affixed from early childhood in Laila's society, and it takes a

great deal of intellectual and moral courage to break free of the appendages that cling to

her owing to her gender. When the village carpenter makes a doll's cradle for Laila as a

child, his gesture is based on the social roles that Laila is expected to play: "The

carpenter once made me a little carved doll's cradle, though I had asked for a bow and

arrows" (98). This an example of what Millet calls the "socialization" of gender, whereby

153 the institutions of society collude to cast women and men in different socio-psychological roles, ascribing "aggression" (hence power and dominance) to males and "docility"

(weakness and subordination) to females (41). Women's subordination is evident from the attitudes of a society that uses fixed yardsticks to measure the suitability of women as prospective wives and sisters- and daughters-in-law. Aunt Majida points out the "market" for the kind of wife desired by men and their families: "She [Zahra] has read the Quran; she knows her religious duties; she can sew and cook, and at the Muslim School she learned a little English, which is what young men want now" (24). Aunt Majida's reasons for educating Zahra are designed to meet the dictates of the patriarchal order and perpetuate women's subordination in the family structure. As Jayawardena explains, the nineteenth-century reform movements in India envisaged the kind of role that Majida has set for Zahra: "Their basic assumption was that social reform and female education would revitalize and preserve the patriarchal family system, [and thus] produce more companionable wives and better mothers" (79). In Recasting Women, Sangari and Vaid make a similar point: "The historical role of the modernizing movements was that of

'recasting' women for companionate marital relationships and attendant familial duties"

(20).

After her marriage, Zahra becomes a "modern" wife as required by her husband's status as an Indian Civil Service officer; she comes out of purdah and plays the role of the emancipated woman: "She was now playing the part of the perfect modern wife as she had once played the part of a dutiful purdah girl [....] Just as she had once said her prayers five times a day, she now attended social functions morning, afternoon, and

154 evening" (140). Zahra has not challenged the hierarchies of patriarchal decorum; she is

merely performing as the male system requires her to do. This is precisely the kind of

"modernity" that Laila does not desire and that is one of the bases of her crisis of identity.

Laila seeks a modernity that does not compromise her Eastern values but that still confers

on her control over her body and her life. Discussing the complex inter-layering and

cross-currents impacting modernity in Indian society, Liddle and Joshi explain women's

response to these developments: "The resistance of women in India did not arise

primarily from the liberalizing influence of British imperialism [...] nor from the direct

influence of the British women's movement [...] but from the powerful influence of the

women's own cultural heritage" (73). Western modernity is only one of the influences at

work in Laila's journey of emancipation, and in her struggle to formulate a viable

synthesis from the disparate influences of tradition and modernity in her culture.

In a culture that maintains a closeted silence on sex and sexuality, Laila's decision

to choose her husband is seen as a violation of the code of morality sanctified by tradition

and upheld for generations. As Aunt Saira spells it out, "No one in decent families talks

of love" (180).12 Aunt Saira wishes Laila to marry Kemal or Saleem because that would

keep her share of the property within the family. Laila does have a degree of economic

agency because she has a share in the property of her father, which would have been

denied to her had she been a Hindu: "[Hindu property laws] forbade the daughters from

12 Interestingly, in Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided, Zohra's mother makes a similar comment, affirming the conservatism of upper-class Muslim families of that period: "Girls of good families don't go about falling in love!" (436).

155 inheriting fixed property, since such property would have passed to their husbands' family at marriage. Instead, women were given a portion of moveable property to take with them, known as dowry" (Liddle and Joshi 64). This is just one instance of the difference between women's rights under Muslim and Hindu family laws, and shows the fallacy of constructing fixed categories like "Eastern women" or "third world women," disregarding the fine and complex gradations within these groups. Aunt Saira's desire to keep the family property within the family reflects one of the traits of patriarchal culture:

"The maintenance of land and other property within the joint family was the material basis of the patriarchal family" (Liddle and Joshi 64). While Liddle and Joshi take the

Hindu family as their model, Aunt Saira's suggestion shows the intermingling and cross- influences of cultures and religious values in India. Laila muses on the subtle machinations of class and status that define her society: "Did she [Aunt Saira] think it was Ameer who stood in the way of her wish that I should marry her son and tidily settle both the problem of my future and my share in the family property? Or was it merely that

Ameer did not measure up to her conventional ideas of wealth, security and breeding?"

(264).

It is Aunt Abida's reprimand noted earlier that conveys the seriousness of Laila's transgression by conventional and acceptable norms of conduct. Laila sums up Aunt

Abida's reaction: "She was part of a way of thinking I had rejected. I had been guilty of admitting I loved, and love between man and woman was associated with sex, and sex was sin" (312). Laila describes the suffocating impact of the restrictions imposed on her:

"In the end not only one's actions but one's mind is crippled. Sometimes I want to cry

156 out, 'You are crushing me, destroying my individuality'" (265). Because Laila's immediate oppression stems from the gender role assigned to her by society, family, and tradition, it is against these forces that her rebellion is overtly directed. Liddle and Joshi explain the importance of resistance within the family sphere, which is what Laila achieves: "The location of women's subordination in the family also affects their methods of struggle. Since the issues that women raise require changes in the domestic sphere as well as in public policy, different modes of resistance may be required [and] the collective, confrontational methods of conventional political activity [...] may be of

limited effectiveness in altering the personal relations of the family" (228). Therefore,

Laila's rebellion against family conventions marks a political intervention in the

patriarchal order, since the family is so intricately linked to the prevalent social and

political power structures, and change in one is reflected in the other.

Laila's sympathy for the suffering of the lower classes and the underdogs is

evident from the beginning of the narrative, as are her doubts about the institution of

marriage as it is practised in her culture. After she has intervened on behalf of Nandi

against Uncle Mohsin, she accuses Zarah of having no sympathy for Nandi because of

the latter's lower class: "I am ashamed that you have no pity because she is a servant girl" (29). In the same scene she voices her anger against the idea of a family-arranged marriage: "I won't be paired off like an animal. How could you sit there listening to them

talking as if you were a bit of furniture to be sold to the highest bidder? How can you

bear the idea of just any man?" (29-30). When Zahra is decked up as a bride, Laila cannot feel the excitement that other girls like Zainab are feeling: "I felt curiously detached

157 towards that glittering, scented bundle, no longer Zahra but the symbol of others' desires"

(114). These two traits, her resistance against prevalent class and marriage ideologies, crystallize into two of her most definitive acts of intervention into the practises of class and gender oppression in her society: her marriage with Ameer and her support of Nandi and her child. Laila is aware even as a young girl that she is different because of the

books she reads: "Was Zahra right when she said I was heartless and selfish? And yet I

cried when reading stories and poems! What was wrong with me inside? What was

'wrong' in itself and what was 'right?'" (31). And later: "Zahra would mockingly reduce

to mere printed hieroglyphics those books which had taught me to think of human

dignity" (45). Laila's liberal ideas are shaped by her reading and her exposure to a

college education, which includes the influence of Western intellectual thought, one of

the factors that empower her to defy the family elders and chart her own course.

However, Laila's modernity is not an aping of the West. It stems from a

conglomerate of influences: her reading of Western literature (it is not specified what

precisely she reads and whether she reads any Eastern literature as well); the radical, anti-

imperialist politics of the Indian freedom movement (Asad's friendship is paramount in

this context and he has been a consciousness-raising influence because of his

participation in politics and the freedom struggle from a young age); Laila's college

friends and cousins (two of whom have been schooled in Britain), who teach her to question preconceived truths and ideas; and lastly, her falling in love with Ameer, which gives her the courage to take decisive action against the deep-set traditional values of family and society. Western ideas shaped the consciousness of young Indians in early

158 twentieth century and the nationalist movement, although premised on an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist agenda, also derived impetus from Western experiences of nationalism. Hosain's narrative veers between a lingering nostalgia for the world of

tradition and the past, and a pull towards the new wave of thinking. She is sceptical about

a Westernizing agenda for India bereft of Indian value systems, seeking instead an

identity nurtured by Indian culture and refined by its contact with a Western tradition.

While observing the awkwardness of the Rani of Phulgaon at the taluqdari elections, for

instance, she defends the Rani's "backwardness" and questions her own modernity: "Yet

she is more true to herself than all the simpering, sophisticated ladies with their modern

small-talk oozing out of their closed minds. She is closer to the people than us, sitting,

standing, eating, thinking and speaking like them, while we with our Bach and

Beethoven, our Shakespeare and Eliot put 'people' into inverted commas" (258).

Laila's ambivalence comes across categorically when her inner thoughts are

revealed in her narration: "I felt I lived in two worlds; an observer in an outside world,

and solitary in my own" (124). These two worlds are her inner and outer selves, the

former having been nourished by her thinking mind and modern influences, and the latter

conditioned to conform to tradition: "Our world was bounded by our books, and the

voices that spoke to us through them were of great men, profound thinkers, philosophers

and poets [....] Always I lived in two worlds, and I grew to resent the 'real' world"

159 (128).13 Laila's dilemma stems from the fact that she is unable to adopt superficial trappings of modernity like aunt Saira and Zahra, while a more authentic modernity is elusive and difficult to formulate: "Inside me, however, a core of intolerance hardened against the hollowness of the ideas of progress and benevolence preached by my aunt and her companions" (138). Her reading and education have taught her to think and analyze, and she questions and challenges conventional modes of thinking, and this causes the clash with her family and her eventual release from moribund social customs.

Even in the most uncertain and tentative stages of her development, Laila is emotionally and intuitively drawn towards liberal, unconventional ideas. She shocks Aunt

Saira and her priggish circle of visitors when she defends a Muslim girl who has eloped from college: "I am not defending wickedness. She wasn't a thief or a murderess. After

all there have been heroines like her in novels and plays, and poems have been written

about such love" (133-34). She thinks about the girl and wonders about the nature of her

rebellion against tradition: "What were the forces within her that gave the strength her

frail figure and frightened eyes belied? How had she crossed walls of stone and fences of

barbed wire, and even stronger barriers of tradition andfear''' (135; emphasis added).

These thoughts reveal Laila's consciousness of the social impediments placed in the path

to emancipation and agency. Even though Laila has been allowed to come out of purdah,

she is expected to conform to accepted traditional behaviour, whereas she can find real

13 Mulk Raj Anand describes this dichotomy in Attia Hosain's own experience of growing up: "The alienation caused by her schooling in the English language had made her grow up between the proverbial two worlds, the one not yet quite dead and the other refusing to be bom" ("Attia" vi).

160 agency only by rebelling against these conventions, cutting off the umbilical cord that ties

her to outmoded traditional values. There are two courses open to her that would be

acceptable to her family: becoming docile and resigned like aunt Abida and Majida, or

becoming outwardly modern like Zahra and Aunt Saira. Both these choices are

unacceptable to her because they do not constitute interventions in the regimes of

oppression, and do not promise emancipation and agency. Laila is conscious of breaking

barriers erected by traditions sanctified through generations: "I imagined myself a poetic

rebel against false values" (311). Her real emancipation comes after a painful ordeal; only

after the break-up of the family and her personal grief over Ameer's death is she able to

dispel old prejudices that cause her ambivalence and uncertainty.

In her journey towards self-realization, Laila's friendship with Kemal and Saleem

is a significant milestone. Through their friendship and liberated, Westernized points of

view, she is able to see farther than the narrowness that her world dictates: "My life

changed. It had been restricted by invisible barriers almost as effectively as the physically

restricted lives of my aunts in the zenana [...] Now I was drawn out, made to join in, and

not stand aside as a spectator. Yet the private refuge remained in readiness for

withdrawal" (173).14 She does seek the "private refuge" frequently, whenever the new

world opening up before her collides with the traditional, familiar one of home and

family: "The conflicting values of the world I lived in with my aunts Abida and Majida

14 Antoinette Burton comments on the influence of Western ideas on the young Attia Hosain: "Hosain was influenced in the 1930s by England-returned friends and relatives who were involved in the Communist Party and Congress socialist circles" (109).

161 and the one I lived in now made me so full of doubts and questions, I retreated more and more within myself' (201). Elsewhere she says to Asad, when they are discussing different points of view on the political problems facing the country, "I want to get away from it all," which is what she later tries to do when she retreats into the hills with her daughter to evade the trauma of Partition and her own private grief (245). Even though

Laila acts to challenge the morbid patriarchal system and find emancipation from its confines, she achieves economic independence only by falling back on her family

inheritance. It is Nita who puts the finger on this problem of Laila's class-inflected world:

"You are all the same, you have money to wrap round you like cotton wool against life.

Nadira, with her opium eaters' religion, you with your lotus eaters' humanity" (125).

Laila's upper-class identity grants her privileges in the power hierarchies of Lucknow

society that other women do not enjoy. When Nita accuses her of getting an education to

acquire "an additional ornament to be listed in your dowry," Laila's response reveals the

extent to which her liberation will take her: "Rubbish! I believe my education will make

me a better human being" (125). Unlike Nita, who is acquiring an education to "help me

earn my living," Laila is not contemplating making a living from her education because

she is secure in the assurance of her inherited wealth. Although Laila does support herself

and her child after Ameer's death, it is most likely done from her family income, because

there is no hint in the text that she works for a living. Therefore, while Laila is a modern,

emancipated woman, her upper-class status confers on her privileges that elevate her to a

position of advantage in her class-inflected world. Laila surrenders her class privilege to

some extent by marrying Ameer and bonding with Nandi and empathizing with her

162 misfortunes. Exploring these interstices of women's lives and experiences, Laila's

feminist voice constructs the language of emancipation that resonates in the text, forming

a counter-discourse against the patriarchal and colonial status quo.

Laila's decision to go with Asad at the end of the narrative has distinct political

implications. By leaving the family home with him, Laila accepts Asad's nationalist,

liberal point of view, and signals her own entry into history, so to speak, quitting the

sidelines of neutrality and taking a definitive course. Laila's choice overtly aligns her

quest for emancipation with the nationalist, anti-colonial aspirations that Asad has stood

for, merging the feminist voice of the text with its anti-colonial ideology. In the powerful

last scene, Laila imaginatively relives the critical events of her past and is able to find

release from the conflicts that have plagued her consciousness. When she sees her image

reflected in the hazy, darkened mirror standing in the room of her youth, she has an

epiphany of self-knowledge and finds liberation from her conflicts: "I began to cry

without volition and seeing myself crying in this room to which I would never return,

knew I was my own prisoner and could release myself' (319). By gazing at her own

mirror-image, she attains enhanced self-perception and selfhood, cleansing the conflicts

that plague her understanding. Her feelings for Asad are transformed and defined into

clarity: "Was it that I resented and envied his cohesion of thought and action, and

therefore could not love him as he wished, seeing him still as an abstraction, not a man?"

(278). Her choice to withdraw from the politics of Partition and its "logic of inculcated

hate" earlier in the text signified her political ambiguity towards its contentious

163 dichotomies (286). Now, her alignment with Asad is not merely a romantic fulfilment, but an intellectual acceptance of the politics and worldview that he represents.

Sarla Palkar refutes Meenakshi Mukheijee's contention that Laila submits to tradition at the novel's end, arguing that Laila's final resolve to leave the house with

Asad is not a return to tradition but entry into modernity and history (117). Asad's life has been the extreme opposite of Laila's because, while she has dithered on the sidelines of social change, he has worked with the people and committed himself to political activism from a young age. As Laila observes, "We had dreamed when we were young of

independence; he was now part of it with all its undreamt-of reality - its triumphs and

defeats, its violent aftermath, the breaking-up of our social order, and the slow emergence of another" (318). It is not the exuberance of romance but a clear-headed, rational

reconciliation of conflicts that impels her last move. It should also not be presumed that

she would marry Asad, because Hosain does not give any explicit signs that that will

happen. There is attraction from Asad's side, and admiration and friendship from Laila's,

and then there is the memory of Ameer: "I could not tell him then that I did not wish to

deceive him with my mind's acceptance while each cell of my body remembered Ameer.

But now I wondered how much my mind had been deceiving me, how much falsehood

there was in my excessive truth" (319). By deliberately leaving the ending open as she

does, Hosain breaks free from the conventions of the traditional courtship plot, not

rounding off the romance thread with a neat closure. Mulk Raj Anand, who knew Hosain

personally, mentions her admiration for the writers of the Modernist movement: "She

was most impressed by [Virginia Woolf]. She had seen how the English novel had gone

164 beyond the uncles, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Wells, to the stream of consciousness process. And she understood, very perceptively, that there was no beginning and middle and end in fiction anymore. No plot. Only pattern. And the form fascinated her because having read Urdu poetry she was aware of the romantic agony" ("Attia" vi). The ending that Mukheijee believes is flawed can instead be seen as cleverly experimental, new for the Indian English novel of that time. This is just one of the ways that the novel is

"syncretic," as Anand calls it. While it is rooted in an Indian cultural tradition, it uses the

form of the Modernist novel, a Western inheritance, becoming, like Laila's modernity, a

composite of contradictory influences.

The anti-colonial and anti-British voice of the text is established early on when

Laila describes her conversion to an anti-colonial ideology after witnessing a protest

march of the Indian Non-cooperation Movement: "We had vowed when we were old

enough to fight for our country's freedom as the Satyagrahis did, to lie on spit-stained

pavements in front of treacherous shops that sold foreign cloth, to march in peaceful

protest, to defy the might of the arrogant whites. From that day we had stopped singing

the alien National Anthem at school concerts, and we used to leave the cinema when its

first chords were struck" (51). The historical grounding of the text in colonial Lucknow is

underscored by references to the plight of the members of the Oudh dynasty, who were

left to languish in penury after the British annexation of the province in 1856: Ram Das,

the jeweller, "possessed priceless pieces of jewellery, precious stones sold to him secretly

and cheaply by relatives and courtiers of the last king. They were too proud to sell openly

and too desperate to bargain" (60). The penury of the erstwhile princely families of Oudh

165 following the Mutiny is a documented historical fact, and reveals the extent of cultural and economic fragmentation suffered by Oudh's ruling elite after British annexation of

the province. The signs of the Mutiny are still visible in the drive through the city in "the

shell-ravaged ruins of the residency" and the confiscated palaces: "We drove past palaces

that were now clubs and courts, official residences and museums" (90). Hakiman Bua

voices the popular perception about English plunder of Oudh's wealth: "When the kings

ruled, [...] it [the dome of a palace] was pure gold. The Angrez took the gold away" (90).

The popular discontent against the Raj is vehemently conveyed in the description

of the Viceroy's visit to Lucknow.15 This episode also exposes the relationship of

servility that the feudal classes of Oudh maintained with the colonial government, and the

alienation of the masses from the elite class owing to its allegiance with the British.

Earlier, Uncle Mohsin's comment points to the relationship between the Oudh elite and

the British: "I have seen rajas and maharajas, respected friend of your father's, laying

their caps at the feet of officials. Only because they were white sahibs!" (25). Laila points

out this obsequiousness when she describes the assembled taluqdars. For instance, "Rai

Bahadur Pushkar Nath of whom it was said that he had not washed his hands for days

after shaking hands with the Prince of Wales in the 'twenties" (151). Hosain makes it

clear that the Viceroy of British India is not welcome in the city, and her description of a

lsThis grand ceremony is in stark contrast to the last reception of the taluqdars, which is "a staid tea-party given by hosts who were soon to have their 'special class' and 'special privileges' abolished." The changed political circumstances are evident in the imperial representatives, who looked on with "anachronistic grandeur" and the "guests in Khaddar [who] outnumbered those in formal attire" (309).

166 students' protest march captures the mood and tension of the event.16 The resurgence of the Muslim League and the enfranchisement of the people by the Government of India

Act of 1935 is hinted at during the election of Uncle Hamid, who "was among the few who recognized the challenge of the Congress and the reorganized Muslim League now

that millions of ordinary men and women were being given the right to vote by the new

constitution" (193). Laila treads a political middle ground by withdrawing from the

chaotic politics of Partition and making a separate space for herself, a choice mirroring

Hosain's own decision to make England her home instead of committing to either India

or Pakistan. The middle ground adopted by Hosain allows her to desist from taking a

totalizing position on colonizer and colonized, India and Pakistan, nationalism and

Partition, enabling her to evade stringent binaries and oppositions and what Sneja Gunew,

in a discussion of identity politics, calls the "ritual enactment of ontologized difference"

(xxii). Hosain's nationalism is a patriotism of the marginalized, not attached to any

particular territory or place, affirming a hybrid and syncretic rather than a homogeneous

reality. She constructs women as integral to nation, culture, and family, equally with men,

only defined by different terms, activities, and references (West xxxii).

16 Laila comments, "Then the road was alive with defiant, determined young people. The sound of their marching feet and angry voices was a surging sea, a roaring tempest" (162). Earlier she describes the Viceroy's reception in the city: "There had been a considerable amount of public feeling against the Viceregal visit, particularly among students [....] Only schoolchildren from Anglo-Indian schools cheered and waved the tiny Union Jacks given to them; and groups of paid men planted along the route, shouted slogans of welcome" (156).

167 Cracking India: Partition and Nationalism

While Laila desists from taking sides in the debates about Pakistani and Indian viewpoints on Partition, she is instinctively drawn to the idea of a united India.

Occasionally, though, she betrays her apprehensions of Hindu domination after the end of colonial rule: "Yet I wonder whether it will be better when the Agarwals of the world take over with their merchant minds" (256). When Kemal and Saleem argue about the choice of staying on in India or leaving for Pakistan, Laila says, "My heart was with

Kemal, but there seemed no way of helping him. I had learned too well the futility of arguments which involved beliefs" (288). Saleem's point of view is not presented with as

much sympathy as Kemal's, which reveals Laila's preference for Kemal's belief in a

united India. However, Saleem does put his finger on the deeply entrenched differences

between Hindus and Muslims, and Hindu aversion to Muslim culture: "What can you

expect from a religion which forbids people to eat and drink together? When even a

man's shadow can defile another? How is real friendship or understanding possible?"

(197). Laila is unable to reconcile to the idea of difference between Muslims and Hindus,

which is one of the reasons that she cannot fathom the idea of Muslim separatism. She

says to Asad: "How can we live together as a nation if all the time only the differences

between the different communities are being preached?" (245). Laila's attitude to

Partition and the fragmentation it has caused is described in a powerful metaphor towards

the end of the novel: "All of us shared that sensation of 'feeling' our roots - whether

severed or not - like the pain felt in the extremities of amputated limbs" (299).

168 Attia Hosain's syncreticism can also be related to the economic, cultural, and political conditions in the Lucknow of her times. Although Muslims were not in a numerical majority in the province of Oudh, they constituted its cultural and political elite. In his study of the influence of language and religion on the politics of north India,

Paul Brass describes the status of Oudh's Muslims: "The Muslims in the United

Provinces from 1859 up through 1931 at least were not significantly behind the Hindus and in many important respects were more advantaged than the Hindus in urbanization, literacy, English education, social communications, and employment, especially government employment" (141). Attia Hosain's inclination towards a united India and her refusal to see Hindu-Muslim differences can be attributed to the dominant status that the Muslim elite enjoyed in Lucknow. The Nawabs of Lucknow patronised culture and the arts in the nineteenth century, and in Wajid Ali Shah's time Lucknow experienced an apotheosis of Hindu-Muslim amity and syncretic social and cultural practices. In his study of Indian music in north India, Peter Manuel argues that Indian music "evolved as an inherently syncretic and collaborative product of Hindu and Muslim artists and patrons" (122). Discussing the cultural ties between the Hindu and Muslim nobility in

Lucknow, Manuel writes: "Hindu-Muslim unity reached a sort of zenith [in Oudh] as

elite Hindus mastered Persian, wore Mughal sherwanis, and worshipped at shia shrines,

while Muslim nobles celebrated the vernal Hindu festival of holi, and the Awadh nawab

(ruler) Wajid Ali Shah staged dance-dramas in which he himself played the role of

Krishna" (122). Seen within the socio-historical context of this tradition of religious

tolerance, Attia Hosain's religious eclecticism and her doubts about Muslim separatism

169 and Hindu-Muslim differences are a reflection of the existing relationship between the

Hindu and Muslim elites of Lucknow, of which Hosain herself was a part.

Hosain's text props up the different viewpoints of the characters on Partition and the Hindu-Muslim relationship, which become representative voices for their respective positions on India/Pakistan and the Hindu-Muslim relationship. The first character who stands for a Muslim point of view in the text is Zahid, who grows up to be a strong proponent of Pakistan and Muslim cultural and political separatism. Zahid is constructed as a rigid Islamist who does not adhere to the syncretic religiosity some of the other characters evince. He also reveals his Sunni prejudice against the Shia practice of mourning in the month of Muharram, revealing the cleft among the Muslims in Lucknow:

"These people use religion to get rid of their hysteria. They distort historical facts thirteen hundred years old, and divide us when Muslims need to be united against great dangers"

(69). Zahid shows his extreme views when provoked: "I hate those who are enemies of

Islam no matter whom they may be, and I am prepared to give my life for it" (69). It is ironic that Zahid, the "most zealous lieutenant" of Pakistan, is killed on the train to

Pakistan, of which he has dreamed, to which he has aspired: "Full of bright hope and triumph Zahid had boarded the train on that thirteenth day of August which was to take him to the realisation of his dreams, on the eve of the birth of the country for which he had lived and worked. When it had reached its destination not a man, woman or child was found alive" (310).

Saleem is the other character who represents the Muslim point of view in the

Partition debate. Saleem is introduced as a person whose political convictions shift from

170 Marxism to Islam, and then to nationalism, until he is eventually converted to the cause of Pakistan and a separate identity for the Muslims of India. When Saleem and Uncle

Hamid argue about the respective positions of the Muslim League and Congress in the

1937 elections, Saleem voices a common concern among the Muslims that was also raised from political platforms. Speaking of the prospect of Hindu majority dominance in a united India, he says, "When it was just a question of fighting the British the progressive forces [among the Hindus] were uppermost; but now that power is to be acquired, now the submerged reactionary elements will surface. Muslims must unite against them" (233). He voices a common Hindu grievance that was cited as one of the reasons for the Hindu-Muslim divide: "The majority of Hindus have not forgotten or forgiven the Muslims for having ruled over them for hundred of years. Now they can democratically take revenge" (234). Nadira's strong faith in Islam, and later Pakistan, also influences Saleem, just as he is drawn to her mother's allegiance with the Muslim

League. Even in her college days Nadira always defends her faith more vehemently than

Laila: "Like their mother her strongest belief was that Muslims had to defend their heritage" (125). Close to Partition, Nadira single-mindedly espouses the Pakistan cause:

"There is such a thing as the loyalty to one's faith. Pakistan needs us as a refuge where all

Muslims can be safe and free" (288). The laconic and withdrawn Raza Ali also finds cause in the Pakistan struggle: "He who had been shy and speechless in Sita's presence now thundered against those who were the enemies of resurgent Muslims" (225).

Generally, those Muslims in the text who migrate to Pakistan do well in the new country, and for many it is a chance to improve their economic condition, or make their

171 fortune. The poor relations, Zainab and her family, have settled in Pakistan with the

prospects of a promising future: "Zainab and her family had gone to start a new life in the young country which offered work and hope to those who had courage and endurance.

They were happy, occasionally homesick, but grateful for a secure future" (306). Also

opting for Pakistan are opportunistic officials like Zahra's husband, Naseer, whose "layer

upon layer of good qualities, when unwrapped, revealed nothing but ambition - the core

of his being" (140). Raza Ali, the rich landowner, buys property in Pakistan, just before

Partition, "which had multiplied in value after it" (309). Even Sharifan, "the Mir asin"

who sings and entertains women at weddings in Hasanpur, "was now a woman of

property" because her daughter succeeds as a playback singer in Pakistan and enters the

society of the "new-rich, the newly-powerful" (306). These instances show, among other

things, that a promise of better economic prospects was one of the motivations for

Muslim support of Pakistan.

The nationalist Indians in the text have different reasons for their political

commitments. For instance, Agarwal, Sita's father, has only his commercial interests in

mind. He is unhappy when his brother is jailed for protesting against the British: "I

remember it upset my father who had just got a contract of cloth from the Inspector

General of Police" (187). Agarwal, who is the son of a moneylender, has prospered

because he knows how to placate all the political powerbrokers: "The pomp and

circumstance of many a Taluqdar was subsidised by him, he contributed generously to

the funds of the Congress party, but kept on the right side of the government" (167).

Agarwal prospers after Partition, as Laila had flippantly predicted quite early, and

172 becomes a government minister, with an "octopus grip on the centres of power" (294).

There are also those whose loyalties shift with the tide, like the lawyer, Waliuddin, who pretends to be a nationalist but quietly slips away to Pakistan after he has safely disposed of his property and warded off the violence of Partition. Sita has adopted nationalism because "I believe in reviving our national art and culture," a pseudo-nationalism that is derided in the text because it is followed not as a political conviction but as a cultural fad

(186). Perin Wadia, who marries Kemal, is another new convert to nationalism: "Her conscious cosmopolitanism had blossomed into the even more conscious nationalism which was fashionable towards the end of the war" (276). Laila comments: "It appeared at times that neo-Indians wore their nationalism like a mask, and their Indianness like fancy dress" (276). Perin Wadia has "transposed the Ajanta look into the twentieth century in the manner of her dress and coiffeur, though she spoke of ancient culture in

European idioms" (276). These representations show the fissures in the Indian nationalist vision, and the multiple, heterogeneous constructions of Indian nationalism during that period. Hosain derides these "brands" of nationalism as shallow and opportunistic and endorses the model of nationalism upheld by Asad: austere, honest, and politically committed.

Kemal's reasons for staying on in India are simple and straightforward: "I don't want the family to split up. There is too much of it nowadays. I want us to stay united"

(286). His nationalist commitment is not ideological, or driven strictly by political convictions, but genuine nonetheless: "This is my country. I belong to it. I love it. That is all" (287). In a brief vignette, the narrative also posits a third point of view in the

173 nationalism debate, albeit one suffused with the cynicism of a disillusioned young man.

Zainab's eldest brother goes to study at Aligarh University, but has to quit because he contracts consumption. His point of view is worth noting, even if only to consider the diversity of attitudes prevalent among Indian Muslims at the time: "What if my freedom gets tangled with the freedom of others? Life is like a knotted skein of thread, and one gets caught not knowing the beginning or the end [....] Look around the village. The people rotted under the rulers of our own race, as they do under the English and as they will do if we rule again" (102). Asad's nationalist viewpoint, which Laila eventually embraces, is approved in the narrative as politically correct. Asad is different from the beginning, serious and sombre, and the memory of his father, who supported the Khilafat

Movement, inspires him to follow similar ideals: "I must become a part of something greater than myself. I have thought of it for a long time, remembering my father, remembering that day Sita's uncle was beaten and arrested" (54). Even as a young eighteen-year-old, Asad is clear about his ambitions and what he wants to do with his life. He confronts Uncle Hamid and chooses his own path: "I want to study at the Jamiah in Delhi [....] I believe that is the kind of institution where I can best learn how to serve my country" (111).

Uncle Hamid represents the position of the taluqdars, who support neither nationalism nor separatism but a continuation of the status quo, even if it is under the

British. Hamid clarifies the position of the taluqdars, who have rights that, as Saleem says, "were given by the British as the price of loyalty": "We Taluqdars have ancient rights and privileges given by a special charter, which we have to safeguard" (231).

174 Hamid is unable to accept the changes sweeping the country because his status is contingent and tied to the British staying on in power. He does not recognize that taluqdari landlordism is based on inequality and injustice: "Our rights do not conflict with the rights of the people; traditionally we have been guardians of their rights" (231).

Hamid is a tragic figure because he cannot accept the loss of feudal power, privilege, and prestige and is consumed by his anger and frustration. Even his politics is self-serving:

"There was no political passion, only an implacable wish for power" (225). Hamid's fears prove true because, as Laila divulges, land reforms in independent India have curtailed the holdings of landlords with large estates. The Raja of Amirpur, for instance, has lost his land and property: "His palace in the city had been requisitioned as a

Government hostel for legislators, and the huge, rambling house on the outskirts, with its ornamental garden divided into building plots, was the centre of a new colony for refugees" (309).

Although Hosain's text elides the actual period of Partition, it still evokes its chaos and horror retrospectively in the last section of the book. This is how the Partition is first referenced: "And in 1947 came the partition of the country, and the people of

India and Pakistan celebrated independence in the midst of bloody migrations from one to another" (283). Partition is a "putrescent culmination," a "violent orgasm of hate"

(283). Speaking of refugees and the cross-migration of populations between India and

Pakistan, Laila comments: "Their presence here, and Saleem's in their erstwhile homeland, was part of a statistical calculation in the bargaining of bureaucrats and politicians, in which millions of uprooted human beings became just numerical figures.

175 The official words describing them had no meaning in terms of human heartache" (272).

Partition is represented as a tragic catastrophe that has fragmented the nation and drawn barriers between people who have lived together for generations. Hosain's views on the politics of Partition retain a degree of ambiguity because, among other things, the temporality of the narrative mandates that they be muted in the text, even though Laila's mind is in harmony with Asad's vision of a united India. As Hosain elides the events of

Partition and the years preceding it from her narrative, her text becomes unable to take more clearly demarcated positions on its conflictual politics.

The family house, Ashiana, is deployed as a symbol for the fragmented Indian nation in the book's last section, and through this imaginative extension, Laila is able to come to terms with new personal, political, and cultural realities. The ruinous, decayed state of the house conveys the state of the nation after Partition and the violence and uprooting it has engendered: "What had once been smooth, green lawns were brown, uneven spaces bordered with plots of tangled plants and a few forgotten flowers growing like weeds. Patches of damp and peeling plaster disfigured the house like the skin of a

once beautiful woman struck by leprosy" (271). Like the fragmented nation, the house

has been split in two parts, separated by "a low fence of crude wooden poles and

straggling wire" (271), and is a physical receptacle of memories and emotions - "My

most private emotions were contained by the house" (272). Like the divided nation, in

which strangers occupy places vacated by once settled communities, the house is

occupied by strangers "living in the rooms where I had once searched for my lost father

and mother" (272). Just as the two nations are barricaded against each other, the two parts

176 of the house are separated by a "dividing courtyard and garden" (310). The final revelation of the house as a symbol of all that has been lost, of a bygone past, is definitive: "And now the house was a living symbol. In its decay I saw all the years of our lives as a family; the slow years that had evolved a way of life, the swift short years that had ended it" (273). In her study of Partition narratives, Antoinette Burton speaks of the significance of place and home in these texts: "The memory of place, and specifically of the physical layout and material culture of home, is a common feature of partition narratives - a phenomenon that reminds us of how intimately connected spatial relations are to social relations" (102). While discussing Sunlight, Burton observes: "It is difficult not to read Sunlight as highly autobiographical and Ashiana as a deeply personal 'history house' - especially since its name is taken directly from that of Attia's own family home"

(116). In the fiction of formerly colonized nations, physical spaces and houses in particular are deployed allegorically. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin make this observation: "The construction or demolition of houses or buildings in post-colonial locations is a recurring and evocative figure for the problematic of post-colonial identity"

(Empire 27). Ashiana functions as a symbol of the embattled nation in Sunlight, and its symbolic formulation assists Laila's emotional catharsis, allowing her to reconcile with the conflict and rupture of Partition.

Despite the narrator's eclectic and humanist vision, and the desire of many characters to bridge the gap between religions, the intrinsic religious differences remain and cannot be bridged. Sita and Kemal cannot marry because of Hindu-Muslim divide:

"I, Sita, loved him, Kemal, and still do. Two individual human beings. But it would have

177 been the daughter of my father and mother marrying the son of his parents, with different backgrounds and different religions, two small cogs in a huge social machine" (215).

Even though the deep-set differences are acknowledged, the overall vision that stems from the book is one of an eclectic, holistic religiosity, as filtered through the moral conscience of the narrator. The best friends of Laila's grandfather include a Hindu and the Englishman, Mr Freemantle. There are various gradations of syncretic religious attitudes or practices presented in the text. Jumman, the washer man, is a Hindu, but during the Shia holy month of Muharram he observes the rituals of the Shia mourning, as

Ramzano divulges to Laila: "That wife of his forces him to have all kinds of vows so as to have a son. This Muharram he is trying to please Allah and the Holy Prophet" (72).17

Mr Freemantle chooses to be buried in a Muslim graveyard: "Mr Freemantle [...] had requested in his will that he should be buried near his friend [Laila's grandfather], and only a simple marble cross distinguished his grave from the others in the family graveyard in the mango grove at Hasanpur" (201). Laila's family belongs to the Shia

Muslim sect, but Hindu festivities of Holi and Dewali are also indulged in a convivial

spirit of cultural pluralism (see 40-41). Similarly, when the rioting breaks out at Partition,

"hate-blinded revengeful men [...] streamed over the border," and Muslim homes are

targeted, Laila is saved by Sita, who takes her and her child to her house, and Ranjit, who

drives them to safety, presenting them as his family.

17 Jumman is the prototype of Shiv Prasad in Hosain's short story, "White Leopard," who is a Hindu but, like Jumman, participates in the Shia rites during the month of Muharram.

178 Conclusion

The Muslim consciousness as it emerges in Hosain's text is amorphous and heterogeneous, unfixed and pluralist. The ambivalence and shiftiness of Muslim identity in the text suggests a self-perception on the threshold of change, re-formation, disintegration, or fragmentation. In her portrayal of a Muslim family of Lucknow,

Hosain's text inscribes the tensions, slippages, and overlaps of Muslim culture and society in intricate patterning. While the Muslim consciousness suggested by Ahmed

Ali's Muslim space is predicated on the exclusiveness and difference of Muslim culture,

Hosain's Muslim identities are variegated constructs, conglomerates shaped by an assortment of influences. Hosain stresses the difference of women in a patriarchy, constructing female identities that posit resistance to the existing social, cultural, and political order. If Ahmed Ali created Muslim identities that were caught in an historical stasis, unable to move into the future, Hosain's Muslim identities indicate mobility and forward historical progression, and the potential to evolve into new, syncretic formulations. These eclectic, pluralist, and heterogeneous identities suggest multiple selfhoods, undercutting the idea of a unitary and fixed Indian Muslim identity.

In her portrait of Laila, Hosain constructs the border or marginal figure characterized by "ambivalence, contradiction, and plurality" who is caught in the nebulous space of what Moya Lloyd calls "relational positionality": "a conception of identity as fluid, hybrid, and syncretic" (45). In the sympathetic portrayal of Kemal and

Asad, the Muslim identity is subsumed under the rubric of an Indian nationalist self that 179 is not predicated on a stringent sense of difference between Hindu and Muslim. In the lives of Zahid, Saleem, and Nadira an entrenched sense of difference demonstrates commitment to a separatist identity for the Muslims of India. Saleem and Zahid are drawn with more skepticism than Asad and Kemal, suggesting that Laila is not convinced by their separatist ideas. A third view is held by Uncle Hamid, who believes and fights for a taluqdari or feudal status quo, which is pro-British and endorses neither the Indian nationalist nor the Pakistani separatist position.

Overall, the construction of Muslim identities in Sunlight conjures up the image of an evolving Muslim consciousness, a state of flux that defies uniformity. The

indeterminate Muslim identity suggested by Hosain is counterpoised in Mumtaz

Shahnawaz's text, which tracks in detail the trajectory of Muslim thought and consciousness during the freedom movement, establishing a more definitive Muslim

perspective on Partition and constructing more cohesive, composite Indian Muslim

identities.

180 Chapter 3

"We Shall Build the World Anew": Islamic-Feminist Nationalism in The Heart Divided

[Muslim] women's identities and agency are shaped not only by their religion and gender, but also by nationalism, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and the debates between Islamist and modernist discourses. Theresa Saliba

Women are (reconstructing the meaning of both nationalism andfeminism from a women-centered viewpoint. Lois A. West

Mumtaz Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided approaches Indian Muslim nationhood from the standpoint of Muslim women's struggle for emancipation, constructing a discourse of

"Islamic-feminist nationalism" that is informed by the precepts of an egalitarian Islamic polity. Shahnawaz's text explores the complex delineations of Muslim political separatism in pre-Partition India, mapping the transition in Indian Muslim thought from ideas of Hindu-Muslim unity to a separatist political ideology. The text imagines an

Islamic state that is premised on women's equality in the socio-political and economic spheres, and a progressive, Islamic national paradigm that is presented as an alternative to

Western and Hindu nationalisms. The Heart Divided deploys romance themes as analogs of political relationships, constructing the ideal of companionable marriage alongside and emblematic of the novel's vision of an egalitarian, Islamic nation. By tracking the ethos of Indian Muslim separatism and juxtaposing the themes of feminism, Islam, and nationalism, Shahnawaz constructs a localized, Indo-Islamic, feminist-nationalist discourse. In this process, she imagines an Islamic space of alterity, a paradigm of

181 reformist, political Islam that is marked by its difference from Western and Hindu concepts of state and society.

Set between 1930 and 1942, The Heart Divided resonates with the political tumult of this period in Indian history, dominated by the Indian struggle for self-determination and independence.1 Set in Lahore, the capital city of the Punjab, the text weaves a

politico-historical narrative that tracks the progressive development of the Indian freedom

movement, and the emerging Hindu and Muslim perspectives on its politics. As David

Gilmartin notes, British Punjab was "one of the two largest and most important Muslim-

majority provinces in India" and "figure[d] prominently" in the history of the Pakistan

movement: "According to the 1931 census, Muslims made up a little over 56 percent of

the population, concentrated in the western part of the province [...] In general Hindus

predominated in the East and Muslims in the west, with Muslims comprising over 80

percent of the population in the far western Punjab districts" (6). Punjab was pivotal to

the Muslim freedom movement, which makes Shahnawaz's narrative of an elite, political

family of the Punjab an important resource for insights into the social, cultural, and

political history of the period. The narrative is focalized through the moral lens of Sughra

and Zohra - sisters from an upper class Muslim political family of Lahore - presenting an

intimate account of the politics of these years mediated by their evolving social and

1 In her autobiography, Jahan Ara Shahnawaz, Mumtaz's mother, drops a hint on the genesis of The Heart Divided, which was written between 1943 and 1948: "For some time Tazi [Mumtaz's nickname] had been writing a book tracing the socio-political changes in the subcontinent from 1932 to 1942 in the form of a novel [....] Her idea was to write a sequel to the book of the developments from 1942 onwards" (222). The sequel never got written because Mumtaz Shahnawaz died tragically in a plane crash in 1948, on her way to New York where she had been invited by the New York Herald Tribune to "talk on Pakistan and Kashmir" (Ahmed Shahnawaz xi). According to her mother, she had taken the manuscript of the novel with her to seek its publication in the United States. The Heart Divided was published posthumously in Lahore in 1957 and languished in obscurity for a number of decades.

182 political consciousnesses. While Sughra is instinctively drawn to Islamic historical and political ideals and the Muslim League's position of self-determination for the Muslims of India, Zohra is committed to the idea of Hindu-Muslim and Congress-Muslim League unity, and converts to the Muslim League's point of view only towards the novel's end.

Hindu-Muslim unity is a cherished ideal in the early sections of the text, finding symbiotic representation in the romantic attachment between Habib and Mohini, which ends tragically with Mohini's premature death, her erasure in the text abrogating the promise of a Hindu-Muslim rapprochement. Just as the Habib-Mohini relationship remains unconsummated, Shahnawaz's narrative gradually veers towards the idea of

Muslim separatism, presenting it as the natural and inevitable progression of historical circumstances. An overtly and sometimes jarringly political text that is propagandist, polemical, and partisan in its narrative strategy, The Heart Divided is an important socio­ political document that vindicates the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan; it conveys the atmosphere of charged political debate and the tensions, slippages, and conflicts between Hindu and Muslim political viewpoints in pre-Partition India.

Published in Lahore by a little-known publisher in 1957, The Heart Divided has received scant critical attention. Tariq Rahman mentions it in A History of Pakistani

Literature, and Gail Minault makes a reference to it in her study of Muslim women's

2 The Heart Divided has distinct autobiographical undertones, and its story is modeled on Mumtaz's own life of growing up in a politically influential family of the Punjab. Like Zohra, Mumtaz was a late convert to the Muslim League's position on Partition. Her mother recalls in her autobiography: "My daughter Mumtaz had been of a Nationalist point of view and had leanings towards the Congress. In a small dinner party in New Delhi one evening, I said in front of Mr. Jinnah that I would give one thousand rupees to the League the day Mumtaz joined it" (173). Mumtaz joined the Muslim League in 1942 and committed herself zealously to political work for the party. True to its autobiographical contexts, The Heart Divided closes in 1942 with Zohra's "conversion" to the Muslim League.

183 roles in the Indian nationalist movement. In his analysis of Muslim separatism in India,

Craig Baxter refers to the novel as a "moving but almost unknown" work (32).

Rakhshanda Jalil notes that The Heart Divided "offer[s] a glimpse into the Muslim mind" and the "making of Pakistan." In her survey of the Pakistani novel in English,

Muneeza Shamsie calls it a work of "great academic interest" and "possibly the first

English South Asian novel to have been written about Partition" ("East-West" 414). The only sustained critique of The Heart Divided is by David Willmer, who suggests that the novel presents the "unifying ideology" of the Pakistan movement, and gives a sense of the conflicts experienced by Indian Muslims in their troubled negotiation of modernity.

Wilmer sees Shahnawaz's vision of an Islamic state as her attempt to resolve these

"contradictions" confronted by the Muslims of India (416). He reads the novel as a

departure from "standard historiography" and the "grand narrative of the Pakistani state's

nation-building mythology" (416). According to him, the relationship between Habib and

Mohini represents "high-minded nationalistic and anti-communal sentiment" (420), a

position that the text gradually moves away from: "Partition, however painful and tragic,

is the inevitable outcome of the narrative that Mumtaz presents, and a necessary step if

Muslims are to properly come to terms with their historical situation" (421). Willmer

contends that The Heart Divided represents the "deeper, more subjective meaning of

Pakistan" and suggests that the Muslims of India reconciled their "social contradictions"

by committing to the Pakistan ideology of the freedom movement (426). Willmer's study

positions the novel in relation to the interplay between the Indian Muslim ethos and the

problematic of modernity in India. In this chapter, the novel is theorized as a tract that

formulates a feminist nationalism under an overarching vision of Islamic political ideals.

184 The chapter unpacks the dense Islamic rhetoric of the text in order to analyze its function in the overall narrative strategy of the novel. Four main theoretical perspectives are deployed in the chapter: feminist nationalism, Islamic feminism, religious nationalism, and "Islamic-feminist nationalism," the last of which synthesizes the first three to

complete the ideological compass of the text.

Feminist Nationalism: Theoretical Constructs

In her study of feminist nationalist movements around the world, Lois A. West argues

that the British colonial government in India bequeathed the tradition of patriarchal

nationalism to the Indian polity, derived from Britain's own legacy of the Roman legal

system that incorporates the rights of women under the rubric of patriarchal family laws.

According to West, "The Roman legal system ofpatriapotesta [...] gave fathers absolute

power of life and death over their children. Where nations developed using Roman

traditions, women as wives and mothers had their rights subsumed under patriarchal

family law, as did slaves, captives and others" (xvi). Under this legal dispensation, the

nation is "lapatrie," a "male-headed [...] patriarchal construct" (xvi).3 In The Nation and

its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee argues that Indian nationalism glorified India's past and

defended its traditions partly because Indian nationalism was criticised as a mimicking of

Western traditions and values. According to West, British colonists cited Indian cultural

practices such as "satidaha (immolation of widows)" to mark the "unworthiness" of

3 Peter van der Veer acknowledges the idea that nationalism was a European phenomenon that "spread to the rest of the world via colonialism, namely, the expansion of the European industrial society" (14).

185 Indian customs, and "Indian (male) nationalists reacted to this by situating women in the spiritual realm of the home, which was superior to the material realm [...] being

constructed [...] by colonial interests" (xvii). Partha Chatteijee concurs that the discourse

of nationalism spearheaded by the Indian National Congress consigned women to family

and home, "an inner domain of sovereignty, far removed from the arena of political

contest with the colonial state" (117). Women and home became emblems of Indian

traditions and customs, which were "untainted by colonialism" and hence constituted the

"inner core of national culture" (121). Because women were relegated to the domestic

space in Indian nationalist rhetoric, women's voices of the period are located in the

middle-class home and the autobiographical writings of educated women, "family

histories, religious tracts, literature, theater, songs, paintings, and such other cultural

artifacts" (133). As a cultural product, The Heart Divided is shaped by similar

perspectives, as it recovers Muslim women's stories and inscribes them into the

narrative(s) of nation.

Shahnawaz's text challenges the gendered nationalism of Indian politics and

suggests a model of nationalism that includes women's interests and perspectives, a

model that is predicated on a progressive, anti-patriarchal Islamic state. The text confers

autonomous subjectivity on women, highlighting the struggle of upper-class Muslim

women in the Pakistan freedom movement.4 The distinct autobiographical undergirding

4 In Western critical discourse on the subject, the freedom movement against colonial rule in India is generally referred to as the "Indian freedom movement," but since the Muslim movement for independence culminated in the Pakistan demand, it is reasonable to allude to the Muslim struggle as the "Pakistan movement" or the "Pakistan freedom movement," especially to distinguish it from the nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress.

186 of Shahnawaz's text, its "theme of the disclosure of the self' (Chatteijee, Nation 138), becomes the voice of marginalized womanhood struggling to find agency in a patriarchal culture, and inscribes its story in the narratives of nation and the social history of the times. The Islamic moorings of Shahnawaz's feminist nationalist discourse create distinct fissures between its assumptions and the ideology of the British colonial state on the one hand, and the patriarchal underpinnings of Indian/Hindu nationalism on the other.

Lois West explains the alignment of feminist concerns with nationalist agendas in feminist nationalist movements: "Various types of feminist and nationalist movement activists [...] work [...] for the identification with their national group - be it based on shared history, culture (language, religion, ethnicity, styles, fashions, tastes), sense of place (the region), or kinship - while simultaneously fighting for what they define as the rights of women within their cultural contexts" (xiii). Shahnawaz's women activists invoke the kinship of shared Islamic history, culture, and identity to construct a national imaginary; they then project women's equal status in the imagined new nation as a quintessentially Islamic cultural and political phenomenon. Shahnawaz's text projects a feminist nationalist construct, a "social movement simultaneously seeking rights for women and rights for nationalists within a variety of social, economic, and political contexts" (West xxx). In addition, the text embeds its feminist nationalist configuration in an Islamic political ideology, fashioning a particularized, Islamic cast of feminist nationalism in The Heart Divided.

187 Religious Nationalism: Hindu/Muslim Constructs

In Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Peter van der Veer makes a case for Hindu and Muslim religious nationalisms, which he studies in the context of the

"historical construction of Hindu and Muslim identities in India" (ix). Van der Veer calls for treating "religious movements and ritual action as part of historical practice" and argues that, instead of being "primordial attachments," religious identities are viable political configurations that are constructed by religious discourse, religious organizational structures, and religious communications (ix-x). According to van der

Veer, religious nationalism is not regarded as a viable political construct because "both nationalism and its theory depend on a Western discourse of modernity" (x). He attributes the exacerbation of distinct Hindu and Muslim identities in nineteenth-century India in part to the British attempts to "enumerate, classify, and thereby control a quarter of a billion Indians," a practice that used caste and religious categories to distinguish groups, thereby validating identities based on caste and/or religion (19). Similarly, British attempts to apply indigenous law created distinct divisions between Hindu and Muslim legal spheres, just as the census (begun in 1872) "established a Hindu 'majority' and a

Muslim 'minority' that in turn became the basis of electoral, representative politics" (van der Veer 19). While discord between Hindu and Muslim communities existed prior to

British rule, the rigid system of Hindu-Muslim classification by the colonial state "to some extent [...] created these facts" and made them into a "contemporary reality" (van der Veer 19). Van der Veer argues that the undermining of both Hindu and Muslim traditions in Orientalist discourse motivated revivalist and revitalizing trends among both religious groups, contributing to the rise of collective Hindu and Muslim identities. He

188 also suggests that the 1872 census, by documenting the presence of a substantial Indian

Muslim population, exploded the colonial myth that the Muslims were a group of outsiders who had settled in India. The large number of Hindu converts among the

Muslim population affirmed the indigenous roots of Indian Islam and refuted the colonists, who justified their own "outsider" status by arguing that they had replaced another non-indigenous group, the Muslims (van der Veer 26).

Van der Veer identifies "Hindu nationalism" with the Hindu concept of Hindutva, developed in the 1920s, which "equates religious and national identity: an Indian is a

Hindu - an equation that puts important Indian religious communities, such as Christians and Muslims, outside the nation" (1). In his study of the Hindu nationalist movement in

India, Christophe Jaffrelot argues that Hindu nationalism was first conceptualized in the

1920s with the publication in Nagpur of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's Hindutva: Who is a Hindu (1923), which is a "basic text of nationalist 'Hinduness'" and casts Indian

Muslims and Christians outside the pale of the Hindu nation (25). Savarkar writes:

"Mohammedan or Christian communities possess all the essential qualifications of

Hindutva but [...] they do not look upon India as their holyland [....] Their holyland is far off in Arabia and Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin. Their love is divided" (qtd. in Jaffrelot 31). In the light of these facts, it is safe to hypothesize that religious nationalist identities had begun to be consolidated in India by early twentieth century, "equat[ing] the religious community with the nation and thus buil[ding] on a previously constructed religious identity" (van der Veer 80). Following this, it is reasonable to argue that distinct Hindu and Muslim political identities had

189 started to take shape in Indian society and politics by the 1930s onwards, the years covering Shahnawaz's narrative and the heyday of the Indian freedom movement.5

Islamic Nationalism: Subversive Spaces

The quest for women's rightful place in society constitutes the core of Shahnawaz's novel, the vicissitudes of Zohra and Sughra's lives marking the trajectory of women's emancipation in the narrative. The novel opens by identifying the separate social realms of men and women, an arrangement that is perceived to ensure the equanimity of the social order: "The two parts [of the house] that were almost like two different worlds, one a man's world reflecting in its myriad activities all the rush and turmoil of the world outside, and the other a serene and sheltered domain, a woman's world [...] where clothes and food and children were the main interest and the chief topic of conversation"

(11). These separate worlds shift their boundaries in the course of the novel, as women gradually penetrate the social domain traditionally reserved for men. The portents of change are indicated at the very beginning of the text, immediately after the separate spheres have been described: "Lately, however, other interests and new thoughts were beginning to enter this secluded domain, and its peace was disturbed by a flood of ideas from the surging world outside, a flood that could no longer be held back by its old walls

5 Hindu nationalism in India has continued to thrive as a Hindu right-wing populist movement and witnessed a renaissance with the rise to power of the Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the national elections in 1998 and held office in a coalition government from 1998 to 2004. The BJP and its allied Hindu organizations such as Vishva Hindu Prasad, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Mahasabha, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh "together [...] represent the efforts by Hindu nationalists to form a Hindu nation- state" (Ludden 15). The mass appeal of the movement was evident in the Babri Mosque incident in 1992, when a mob of 150,000 Hindus attacked and demolished a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodha because it allegedly stood on the site of the mythical birthplace of Lord Rama.

190 and ancient traditions" (11). Shahnawaz's text traces women's negotiation of this

"outside world" to attain subjecthood and agency, a development that corresponds with the Muslim political struggle for national identity and independence in the text. Instead of drawing inspiration for women's emancipation from a Western tradition, Shahnawaz's text constructs its liberatory rhetoric by deploying Islamic vocabulary, cultural configurations, and historical precedents. This strategy of Islamic exclusivity distances the text from a Western/European axis, and attaches its ideology to a non-

Western/Islamic standpoint, lending it a subversive edge.

In Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, Anouar

Majid calls for developing indigenous and progressive political models in post-colonial

Muslim societies, because both Western secularism and clerical Islam have failed to bring emancipation to women in these societies. Majid suggests that while Islam shapes intellectual and cultural practice in Muslim societies, it is problematic to include Islamic viewpoints in Western critical discourse because of the endemic distrust of religion in contemporary thought. According to Majid, "The challenge of including Islamic subjectivities and cultural epistemologies into a world of equal differences has been left untheorized probably because the religious imaginary is dismissed ahead of time as either conservative or unredeemable" (vi). Majid advocates charting a "third way" that is progressive and constitutes a "dynamic relationship with other cultures" to evolve alternative models "to both Westernization and extremist religious practices" (129).

Shahnawaz's recourse to Islamic traditions, legal precedent, and historical exemplars in

The Heart Divided formulates the episteme of a progressive Islam as an alternative to

Indian/Hindu nationalism and British colonial ideology. Shahnawaz's Islamic-feminist

191 nationalism draws impetus from an indigenous, Indo-Islamic ethos and seeks to counter the oppression of women from within the Islamic tradition itself. The Islamic vocabulary and rhetoric of the text constitute an important part of its strategy of subversion, providing alternative epistemic spaces against prevailing cultural and historical models:

Western, Hindu, and Orthodox Islamist.

Much secular political discourse on the Indian freedom movement derogates group-formation based on religious identities in India as "communalism," which is presented as a narrow, retrogressive ideology that caused the break-up of the Indian nation. However, as Gyanendra Pandey has argued, the term "communalism" is an essentialist Western coinage, which is "acquired in Orientalist usage in order to capture the Otherness of life - and politics - in the 'East'" (8). Communalism, for Pandey, "is a form of colonialist knowledge [and] stands for the puerile and the primitive - all that colonialism, in its own reckoning, was not" (6). Pandey argues that the term

"communalism" is "another characteristic and paradoxical product of the age of Reason

(and of Capital) which also gave us colonialism and nationalism" (5). Tracing the geneaology of the term in colonial India, Pandey shows that from early nineteenth century onwards colonial administrators began to develop the "communal riot narrative" to explain incidents of unrest and to redirect attention from the state's own responsibility and incompetence in dealing with these disaffections (24).6 The term "communalism"

6 David Ludden makes a similar observation about official reporting of riots that suggests the colonial construction of communal conflict: "They [colonial officials] often gave reports [of riots] an air of expertise by using the phrase 'communal riot.' Because Hindu-Muslim conflict was assumed to be brewing all the time in India, the label could easily be made to stick, and it was very handy in describing conflicts for which local officials sought to deflect responsibility" (11).

192 entered Indian political discourse when phrases like "communal feeling," "communal representation," and "the communal principle" were used by participants in the debates on the Minto-Morley (1909) and Montagu-Chelmsford (1919) reforms (8). In the 1920s and 1930s, Indian nationalists appropriated the term and "'communal' was on its way to

becoming an adjective derived not from 'community' but from 'tension between the

(religious) communities'" (Pandey 9).7 The Indian nationalists, struggling as they were to overthrow the colonial government, perceived communalism as a "great political threat"

to their cause and counteracted it by mounting a campaign to "expose the narrowness, the

opportunism, the backward-looking character, the 'illegitimacy' as it were of

communalist politics" (Pandey 9). These etymological roots and political/historical

associations have established "communalism" as a dreaded and retrogressive idea in

nationalist discourse, even though like "nationalism" and the discourse of colonial Indian

history it is a colonially constructed category.

According to Peter van der Veer, who studies the development of religious

nationalisms in India, "Communalism is only a form of nationalism. In communalism it

is a common religion that is imagined as the basis of group identity; in nationalism it is a

common ethnic culture that is imagined as such" (22). Like Pandey, David Gilmartin

notes that the British encouraged communalism by "defin[ing] Muslim identity in the

census and in politics as an ethnic category, encompassing all Muslims equally and

7 Pandey emphasises the specific Indian connotations of the term as it was/is used to describe Hindu- Muslim relations in India: "Let us note straightaway that the term 'communalism' is never applied in this sense to feudal Europe or other pre-capitalist societies where religiosity was no narrower and strife between members of different religious persuasions not rare; nor for that matter to the bloody conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland which persists to this day" (7).

193 defining their common relationship to the political system" (4). According to Gilmartin, communalism created the sense of "deep, horizontal comradeship" that Benedict

Anderson has described as the integrating principle of the modern nation state:

"Communal rhetoric paved the way for the definition of an 'imagined' political community - a nation - whose presence justified the emergence of an independent state"

(4). Just as print capitalism had facilitated the creation of national identities in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of a community of "equal and like- minded Muslims" was fostered "through the growing power of the press and the pamphlet in India's cities" (Gilmartin 4). The rhetoric of Islamic nationalism constructed in The Heart Divided needs to be positioned in the context of these developments.

Shahnawaz's religio-cultural imagining of the nation assembles a religious/Islamic nationalist paradigm, which is deployed as a strategic rhetorical device to construct a polemical discourse of Islamic nationalism. This polemical layering of Shahnawaz's text

problematizes its ideological design, because it brings her discourse on par with the

official nationalist discourses of "pro-Pakistan" historiography. While the overstated

Islamic nationalist ideology of the text is detrimental to its fictional aesthetic, it draws on

the intellectual and political constructs of the time: this was a revolutionary period in

Indian history, and vocabulary and allusions that might appear bombastic today could

readily become part of everyday parlance during a period of political revolution. The

heated political debates that constitute the core of Shahnawaz's text are also explainable

partly by the history of its composition: the book was written in close proximity to the

rapidly unfolding events of the 1940s, which lends it immediacy in time and space and

explains the charged sentimentalism of its polemical sections.

194 Politics of Romance: Marriage and Nation

The apprehensions that Shahnawaz's society harbors toward women's independence is reflected in the attitude of the Jamaluddin family, which, despite its "modernity" and education consigns its women essentially to domestic roles.8 When Mansur is marrying

Sughra, he has misgivings that she is more educated than him, but his mother allays his fears, "saying that Sughra was a simple and well-brought-up girl and deeply religious:

'She will settle down and be completely happy with home and husband - and children.

You need have no fear, my son'" (85). Sughra's marriage collapses into deadlock, which is the first sign in the text that traditional marriage structures are no longer workable in

Sahahnawaz's upper-class milieu. Sughra affirms this later in the book when she says to

Kamal: "They no longer fit into the fabric of our lives, these arranged marriages" (364).

While Shahnawaz's text critiques the institution of traditional marriage, it projects the companionable marriage of equality as the new alternative marital paradigm, insisting that such marriage is envisioned in and sanctioned by Islamic culture and custom. By invoking Islamic principles as the basis of a marriage of equality, Shahnawaz's text achieves two objectives: it avoids seeking justification of such marriage from the Western tradition, and it establishes that women and men have equal rights under Islam. The ideal of companionable marriage complements the desire for an egalitarian society and nation, establishing the symbolic underpinnings of the marriage motif in the text.

8 Both Jamaluddin and Habib have been educated in England, and Zohra graduates from college and becomes a college lecturer. Sughra's education is cut short by her arranged marriage, but she compensates later by her reading and social and political work.

195 Marriage is not merely a site of romance in Shahnawaz's text, but subsumes social, cultural, and political attitudes, as illustrated by the three marriages that take place in the narrative, and by the Habib-Mohini romance that dominates its first sections.9

Sughra's marriage fails because of her intellectual incompatibility with Mansur, and the social conformism of his family, and is salvaged only after Mansur's transformation through social and charity work. When Sughra falls in love with Kamal, she breaks off with him because marriage is sacrosanct like the nation, and "Women of our country are true to their marriage vows" (365). Marriage, therefore, reflects the state of nation and society, and the nation is made alternatively strong or weak by the quality of marriage of its citizens. By equating marriage with nation, Shahnawaz brings the idea of women's emancipation through a companionable marriage into the orbit of the nationalist theme of her text.

The pattern of Sughra's development in the text is different from that of Zohra: as a social conformist, Sughra enters into a marriage arranged by her family and tries to perform the roles of wife and daughter-in-law expected of her in Mansur's traditional household in Multan. Before her marriage, Sughra imagines married life as she has been conditioned by social convention to imagine it: "I shall be happy in my own home, for a

Muslim woman's kingdom is her home" (6). She envisions for herself a domestic life of peace and quietude: "She would live up to her ideal of Muslim womanhood. A dutiful daughter, a loving wife and devoted mother [....] Her menfolk would go into the world to do deeds of valour and daring, and she would be there in the background to encourage

9 The following three marriages take place in the text: Sughra and Mansur, Zohra and Ahmad, and Habib and Najma.

196 and inspire" (7). However, this "ideal of Muslim womanhood" is jolted first by her disillusionment with Mansur, and then by her grief over her son's death, which draws her into despondency, doubt, and withdrawal. The text suggests that women's emancipation is proportionate to their involvement in the social and political spheres: Sughra finds meaning in social work for the poor, and her intellectual horizon expands as she begins political work for Muslim women and later for the Muslim League. She becomes passionately involved in her work for the Anjuman-i- Himayat-i-Islam, a Muslim social and educational organization, and becomes joint secretary of its orphanage committee

(285).10 While Sughra entertains doubts about arranged marriages after her own bitter experience, she puzzles over the question more deeply than Zohra does: "On the one hand, she had developed a definite bias against arranged marriages, and on the other hand, she did not know how Muslim girls who led secluded lives could possibly choose their own husbands" (285). When Sughra gets emotionally attached to Kamal, she is confronted with a moral crisis, which finds resolution once again in terms of the larger concerns of nationhood. She eschews romance for duty as a Muslim woman and citizen, because the new nation has to be built on solid moral foundations. In her choice, the personal gets enmeshed in the political, just as it does at every stage in every relationship in the novel. It is through such amalgamation that the personal - marriage, romance - is

10 Jahan Ara Shahnawaz mentions the setting up of "Anjuman-i-Khawateen-i-Islam" by her mother, Lady Shafi, (Mumtaz's grandmother) "for the social and educational needs of women," which "helped Punjabi women to later take part in the wider political 'women's' movement" (23). Like other important incidents in the text, Sughra's development as a social worker also draws on Mumtaz's own experiences, attesting to the autobiographical lineaments of the narrative. David Gilmartin has shown that anjumans provided a platform for the "public expression of Muslim identity" (77). The Anjuman-i Himayat-i Islam was the most important and active organization at the time, promoting Islamic religion and culture and contributing to the consolidation of Muslim collective identity in the Punjab.

197 tied to the political - nation, citizenship - bringing feminist concerns in line with nationalist aspirations and subsuming both under the rubric of the imagined ideal of a reformist Islamic society.

The Habib-Mohini romance is similarly framed by the novel's political theme: it becomes a site to put the Hindu-Muslim relationship to the test, with Habib and Mohini's desire becoming symptomatic of the aspirations of amity between the two communities.

The unanimous opposition to the idea of their marriage, and the failure of the marriage to find maturation in the text, reveals the latent tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and anticipates the schism and separation that will follow later. Habib and Mohini are conscious that their marriage will bring the two communities together, and their youthful idealism spells the daring yet precarious nature of their desire. Mohini says, "If we are to be a free country, we must break down these walls that divide our people [...] Now we must build a nation. A nation that can take its rightful place among the peoples of the world; and young people like us must have the courage to break down such customs and traditions as come in the way of unity. You are not merely you, and I'm not just I. We represent two parts of a great people. Two parts that must harmonize and pull together if we are to gain freedom" (166-67). The symbolic underpinnings of this episode are made explicit by such emphatic, albeit unsubtle, language, which conceives a prospective

Habib-Mohini marriage in terms of nation-formation, and the possibility of a unified

India absorbing its two communities equally with love and compassion.

That Habib and Mohini's attachment meets with stiff resistance and cannot find common social ground on which to thrive is a measure of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in Shahnawaz's India. Even the free-thinking Zohra realizes the hurdles in the way of

198 Habib and Mohini's marriage: "She knew that such things never happened, and that neither custom nor society nor the law allowed them. Muslims married Muslims, and

Hindus wedded Hindus, so it had been for centuries and so it would always be" (151).

However, the strongest opposition comes from the older generation. Mohini's grandfather explains his point of view on the situation: "There are things that are bigger than our individual selves, there are customs and ties that have grown up with the centuries until our lives are rooted in them - You cannot uproot them in a day. Try and the very tree of society will wither and die" (185). The reaction of Mohini's father, Sham Lai, is more severe, as he denounces the notion of Hindu marrying Muslim: "Because religion disallows it, because custom prevents it, because society abhors it, because Hindus are

Hindus and Muslims are Muslims and [...] it just isn't done" (185). Sham Lai's imperative language leaves no room for conciliation or intervention, and signifies the rigid religious demarcations embedded in the Indian social fabric.

The text resolves the dilemma of Habib and Mohini's romance not through a progressive, internal development of the plot, but by ejecting Mohini from the plot through a melodramatic enactment of death. Mohini's death is an external intrusion in the plot and disrupts the relationship from taking its natural course, bringing it to a forced closure. In symbolic terms, the death motif suggests that, like the political and social forces, nature and natural forces too are poised against such a union. The abortive romance reinforces the idea that Hindu-Muslim separation is the inevitable logic of circumstances, and social, cultural, and religious differences cannot be bridged, despite

199 the best intentions of individuals from both sides.11 If Mohini and Habib can join in marriage, the two communities can come together to build the foundations of a united

India. Mohini expresses her views on this political ideal: "Believe me, it's men and women like Habib and myself who can, if they have the courage to rise above personal ostracism and injury to their families, lay the foundations of that true nationalism which alone will lead to the liberation of this lovely land of ours" (187).12 Mohini's death ruptures such hopes, and mirrors the tragic yet inevitable parting of ways between Hindus and Muslims in India's Partition. As the title of the novel suggests, Hindu-Muslim separation is like the tearing of the heart in two, yet it is a split that has to be endured before a new world can be born.

While Sughra starts life as a conformist, Zohra is inherently rebellious and unconventional, and passionate to break free of the constraints imposed on her owing to her gender. Her entrance into public space is paved gradually through her debating talent, her friendship with Surayya and Mohini, and finally her job in Amritsar, where she takes up the cause of the labor unions and falls in love with Ahmad.13 Zohra's determination to resist traditional marriage, or marriage to a man she does not love, is unequivocal and

11 Anwari explains to Bilquis the impossibility of Habib and Mohini's marriage: "There's a whole world of religion, custom, tradition and public opinion to keep them apart" (128). Similarly, Mohini's thoughts early on in the relationship spell the difficulties of such a marriage: "Better not to meet. Better not to let him hope for the impossible. Better to let it die at birth, this love that could know no fulfillment." 12 Mohini expresses similar sentiments in another speech: "We live in the same land, breathe the same air, till the same fields, reap the same corn, drink from the same springs! Is there not a greater law than the law of communities [...] are you going to build your nationalism upon the flimsy foundations of communal barriers?" (186-87). Later in the text, Mohini thinks on these lines again: "When she thought of Habib and her love for him, when she saw again her vision of a free India where all people were united, she knew where her path lay and resolved to follow the dictates of her heart" (200). 13 Jahan Ara Shahnawaz mentions that Mumtaz made speeches and worked in the labour areas of Amritsar (256).

200 becomes a measure of her independence and emancipation. Early in the narrative, she says to Mohini: "But as for me, I shall never marry [...] well, not for years and years, anyway. There is much else I want to do [....] Go abroad and take part in politics and a hundred and one other things. Give me a life of adventure, just sitting at home and

looking after babies doesn't appeal to me" (172).14 Her resolve gains strength with the

passing years and her struggle for personal emancipation is coterminous with the

trajectory of national independence in the text.

For Zohra, it is a vital move towards independence when she surreptitiously

applies for a teaching job and informs her family only when she has got it: "She knew

that there would be strong opposition from the family, who did not see the 'necessity of

her earning money' when they provided her with everything, but she was determined to

be independent" (282). As Fatima Mernissi notes, economic independence is a major step

towards the emancipation of women in Islamic societies: "The access of women as

citizens to education and paid work can be regarded as one of the most fundamental

upheavals experienced by our [Islamic] societies in the twentieth century" (23). In Zohra,

and also in Sughra, therefore, Shahnawaz creates the new Muslim woman, in charge of

her own destiny, her body, and the choices that she makes. With economic independence

comes agency and control, and Zohra refuses to marry Anwar, whose Indian Civil

14 Zohra expresses similar emotion about women's role in marriage and society with her typical vehemence later in the text: "All this humbug about the woman's place being in the home! I tell you, it's getting on my nerves [...] A healthy husband and a child every year. No, thank you! There are other things I want to do" (222). In one of her poems, published by Ahmed Ali in Pakistan P.E.N Miscellany, Shahnawaz voices the fieriness and independence that enliven Zohra's character: "If it is peace you seek / Then go your way, / With me you will only find/Fire, / The urge of the stream, / The surge of the sea [...] If it is the quiet hearth you want, / The mellow sunshine, / And the pleasing shade, / When hours lengthen into days, / Never disturbing the mind's / Tranquility; / Then go your way" ("Two Poems" 13).

201 Services job, though appealing to her family, is a drawback to her because these officers

"were generally known to be British stooges" (283). The theme of marriage is again entrenched in a political subtext, and Zohra's ideas on marriage and her choice of Ahmad as husband have distinct political and ideological undertones. When Zohra speaks of women's emancipation, she equates it with national freedom and responsibility: "I, for one, will not be confined to the home. I am a citizen as well and have a duty to my country - besides, I want life and adventure and independence" (304). Women's public participation, personal emancipation, and political agency as citizens of the nation are fundamental tenets of the new society envisaged in Shahnawaz's text.

Zohra subverts the class and status hierarchies of her society by marrying Ahmad, who belongs to a social class lower in rank than her family. A marriage of choice that defies social custom confers agency and a promise of emancipation. When Mehr reprimands Zohra for speaking about her marriage and prospective husband, Zohra invokes Islamic precedent to justify her decision: "Why does our religion enjoin that the girl's consent must be taken at the time of marriage, if her preference is not to be considered" (283). Throughout the text, Islamic tradition is presented as the model for

"modernity" and the social change it will bring. Through this strategy, the text marks its departure from Western feminist and nationalist paradigms, and explores Islamic exemplars for its assertion of women's rights. By deploying exclusively Islamic precedents for women's emancipation, Shahnawaz's text affirms that, as Majid points out, Western feminist ideas cannot be applied to Islamic social contexts: "Discourses of

Western feminism, largely shaped by gender relations in Christian capitalist cultures and by the exhausted paradigm of Western social thought, have hindered a more subtle

202 appreciation of women's issues under Islam" (99). By constantly invoking Islamic

principles to support women's liberation and gender equality, Shahnawaz's text

constructs an Islamic feminist epistemology that contests Western and Hindu cultural and

political ideologies, and shifts social and religious interpretations away from patriarchal

and towards "egalitarian woman-centered understandings" (Moghadam 38).

The arranged marriage tradition is also critiqued in the episode that describes

Najma's failed marriage. When she is being married against her will, Najma appeals to

her father, a judge of the High Court, and her English school teacher, but both ignore her

pleas, which shows that social conditioning impels even educated members of society to

accept women's subordination as inevitable.15 When Najma wants a divorce because her

husband has married another woman, her reluctance stems from fear of public opinion:

"It never happens - in families like ours [....] I shall be - almost an outcaste" (240). After

the divorce, she does risk becoming an outcaste, as Mehr observes: "A divorce is not

exactly a good thing, you know. It's not the sort of thing that happens in respectable

families" (253). It is Zohra and her friends, however, who rally behind Najma, building a

female coalition, summed up in Zohra's simple yet emphatic declaration, "Then it is up to

us to stand by our own sex" (253). The marriage theme thus intersects with the feminist

and socio-political concerns of Shahnawaz's text, and marriage becomes a site on which

to contest moribund social attitudes towards women. The idea of a companionable,

socially and politically correct marriage corresponds to the ideal of the new nation,

15 Najma spells out her concept of the marriage of equality, which clashes with the view upheld by her father: "I told him that [...] I did not love him [her prospective husband] and that I believed that marriage should be based on mutual love and respect" (106).

203 premised on the conception of an egalitarian, reformist Islam. By aligning the marriage theme with its nationalist concerns, Shahnawaz's text coalesces the disparate strands of feminism and nationalism, establishing its peculiar feminist nationalist perspective. In a similar vein, by bringing both marriage and nationalist concerns under the arc of an ideal

Islamic polis, the text gives an Islamist slant to its model of feminist nationalism. These three intellectual streams - feminism, nationalism, and Islam - become the sites on which the model of the new nation is projected.

Politics of Difference: Hindu/Muslim Identities

The Heart Divided is rooted in the political history of the period, and the historical past is repeatedly invoked to reinforce the significance of its influence on Indian society and politics. Early in the narrative, Shahnawaz presents the Hindu and Muslim positions on the communal question, using the points of view of the elders of the Sheikh and Lai families to open a debate that is reproduced, discussed, and contested over the course of the narrative. In the novel's early sections, the characters are passionate about Hindu-

Muslim unity, yet it remains elusive and its loss is lamented, especially by the younger generation, including Habib, Mohini, and Zohra. The text insists that religion is a major determinant of identity and group consciousness in Indian society. Mohini's father states this early in the narrative, while explaining Hindu-Muslim differences: "Religion is a great force in India [...] and a great barrier [....] India is vast and has many communities and between them are barriers of religion and language, and culture and custom" (130-

31). The early sections of the novel present both Muslim and Hindu perspectives on the communal divide, with Muslims blaming the Congress and Hindu desire for domination,

204 and Hindus blaming Muslims for encouraging communalism and playing into the hands of the British. When Habib talks about the common heritage of Hindus and Muslims,

Sughra refutes his views, expressing thoughts that are identical to what the Hindu characters in the text articulate about communal differences: "The roots of our cultures draw nourishment from different springs. Your history is not her [Mohini's] history and her traditions are not your traditions [....] your heroes are her villains and your villains

her heroes [....] We are still apart as we have always been, eight hundred years have not

welded us together. We believe in one and they in many gods. We believe in the

brotherhood of mankind and they in the caste system" (195).16 Gradually, the Muslim

position on the reasons for the Hindu-Muslim divide comes to dominate the text,

establishing its polemical voice.

Difference between Muslims and Hindus is taken as axiomatic in Shahnawaz's

text, and efforts for Hindu-Muslim amity are systematically thwarted by collective social

attitudes and larger historical and political forces. The Hindu-bias and anti-Muslim

agenda of the Congress ministries finds recurring mention in the book, and is cited as one

of the reasons for the Muslim community's discomfiture. At a political tea party attended

by Sughra, an old man spells out the feelings of the Muslims: "It's obvious that the

16 Sughra's ideas are strikingly similar to the arguments put forward by the Muslim League in its case for separate nationhood. For instance, Jinnah's views on Hindu-Muslim differences and his "two-nation theory" closely parallel Sughra's thoughts: "It is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality [...] They neither inter-marry, nor inter-dine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on life and death are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspirations from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different [...] very often the Hero of one is a foe of the other and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the governance of such a state" (qtd. in Brass 122).

205 Congress is out to crush the Muslims. If they go on like this, we shall one day become untouchable like the Scheduled Castes" (322). The Muslim fear of Hindu domination is voiced consistently and is cited as one of the major reasons for the two groups' eventual split. Early in the text, Sughra states the position of the Muslims, which is to seek freedom both from the imperial British and the dominant Hindus: "What good is freedom if it only means a change of masters - the Hindus instead of the British" (26). The power of a Hindu majority and the Muslim fear of becoming a persecuted minority in a united

India is stated in distinct terms. Saeed, Zohra's uncle, explains to her the causes of the rift in the Hindu-Muslim relationship: "The unity forged in battle began to break down.

Hindus, who were still educationally and politically ahead of us, began to want all the

power for themselves and to grudge their share to the Muslims. Under pressure from the communal Hindu Mahasabha, Congress took a stiffer and stiffer attitude towards the

Muslims" (43). Shahnawaz's text details the political developments of the period in documentary fashion, which makes it a socio-historical document in which history and

fiction overlap, intersect, and complement each other.

While the text highlights the political rivalry between Hindus and Muslim, it also

brings home the sociological differences between the two communities. Rajindar points

out the past amity between Hindu and Muslim communities: "Surely the common people

on both sides should be able to come together. They have lived together in the villages

for hundreds of years" (263). Sughra's response is an oft-repeated refrain in the text: "But

they have never mixed and mingled [....] In some places, they don't even eat together

and there's no inter-marriage" (263). The "Cambridge school" historian C. A. Bayly has

argued against the commonly held belief among scholars and researchers that Hindu and

206 Muslim communal identities surfaced during the late nineteenth century, and gained momentum from 1860 onwards. Bayly traces incidents of communal violence from 1700-

1860, pointing to a deeper, incipient communal and religious fracture.17 He comments,

"Until recently little was known about conflict in Indian cities before 1860, but

fragmentary evidence has now begun to accumulate, revealing a long history of violence associated with clashing religious festivals and disputed mosques and temples" (Origins

225). Bayly emphasizes the existence of "preconditions" in the social structures, which in periods of "severe crises such as those attendant on Mughal decline, early colonial rule or the Depression of the 1930s [...] provided pre-existing lines of social fracture" (Origins

234). Shahnawaz's text underscores the nearly atavistic roots of Hindu-Muslim

differences, which may remain latent yet erupt in moments of crises in complex and

problematic ways.

Bayly enumerates the following theories that were advanced to support the

argument that Hindu-Muslim violence increased dramatically during the late nineteenth

century: 1) the "divide and rule" theory, which asserts that the British conspired to pit

Hindu against Muslim - Indian nationalist historians claim that the British supported

Muslim communal identity, and Pakistan's official historical discourse claims that the

British lent their support to the Hindu community; 2) historians like Peter Hardy impute

the rapid rise of communalism to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hindu

17 Bayly draws an interesting distinction between "communal" and "religious" strife: '"Religious conflicts' [are] disputes over symbols, rites, and precedents," while '"communal conflicts' [are those] in which broader aspects of a group's social, economic, and political life were perceived as being unified and marked off from others by religious affiliation" (Origins 212). Obviously, there is an overlap between the two categories, but Bayly cites cases that "contain examples of both types" (Origins 212).

207 and Islamic revivalism, both of which were "vitalized after the spread of communications after the 1860s"; 3) the Cambridge school historians emphasize the "importance of new arenas of local power" in which local social conflicts could be played out; 4) historians like Sandria B. Freitag identify the period between 1880-1930 as a pivotal phase during which "local practice" in religious festivals gave rise to a new form of group identity; 5)

Pakistani historians who hold that Hindus and Muslims had always been two nations argue that the "pan-Islamism" at the end of the nineteenth century gave a "great fillip" to

Muslim identity in India (Bayly, Origins 211-12).

While Shahnawaz's text is set in the Punjab, it attempts to take an all-India perspective in outlining the broad parameters of the Hindu-Muslim problem. Sughra's cousin, who has come from Bihar, talks about the Muslim community's persecution by the Congress ministries in that province: "We are now slaves twice over, slaves of the

British and slaves of the Hindus" (306). Saida puts this in a more specific context: "The trouble really is that the rank and file members of the Congress are no longer controlled by their leaders. They think that they have won their freedom and can now do anything they like, and this often includes the harrassing of Muslims" (307). In Patna, Sughra is given an account of the controversial measures being taken by the Congress government to impose Hindu educational and cultural hegemony in state schools: "The whole education plan is calculated to destroy Muslim culture, learning and religion. Urdu has been replaced by Hindi, which is sometimes called Hindustani to mislead people, and even from this, words of Persian and Arabic are being weeded out. Perhaps the worst thing is the way history books have been changed. There is gross abuse of Muslim kings and emperors, and our national heroes are derided" (315). Syed Nesar Ahmad points out

208 the linguistic rivalry in the Hindu-Muslim struggle, which stemmed from the competition for government employment, as the Hindus demanded the introduction of the Devanagari script in government communications to minimize the influence of Persian in the services

(65). Aamir Mufti endorses this idea, stating that the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India from 1860s onwards was "formulated in linguistic terms," and was focused on the status of Urdu and its "problematic relationship to the emerging nationalist discourse of indigenousness" (140). Mufti identifies a discourse in the 1860s in Allahabad and

Banaras on the indigenous status of "'Hindi' - the newly standardized and Sanskritized version of the northern vernacular in Devanagari script," and the foreignness of "Urdu - the vernacular written in Persian script and with an interweaving [...] Persianate

t o vocabulary and morphological forms" (140).

The Hindi-Urdu divide has also been attributed to the British attempt to tabulate and systematize the languages of north India and demarcate the Indian people on the basis of their linguistic affiliations.19 Aamir Mufti calls it the "colonial moment of invention of 'Hindi' and 'Urdu' prose," when John Gilchrist, Professor of Hindustani from 1800 to 1804 in Fort William College, Calcutta, commissioned "munshis, maulvis, and pundits to produce Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Braj classics in vernacular languages of'Muhammadan' and 'Hindoo,'" in order to "popularize the vernaculars for

young Englishmen trained for [government] service" (145). Thus, while the linguistic

18 Aamir Mufti elaborates further that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, writers and intellectuals "invented the case for a Sanskritized vernacular, cleansed of all Persian influences and to be called Hindi, as the only legitimate language of the nation" (142). Even Gandhi saw Urdu as a "deviation" and considered Hindi/Devanagari as the proper national language for Hindus (Mufti 149). 19 Aamir Mufti concurs with this contention: "The notion of two languages, one Hindu, the other Muslim" has its origins in "British attempts to comprehend populations under their purview from late eighteenth century onwards" (145).

209 divisions had always existed, they were exacerbated by the onset of colonization and the

British penchant for classifying and codifying the knowledges of India and its people. In

1837, the vernacular written in Persian script was made the language of the lower courts in north India, and from "1870-80 onwards the Hindu Mahasabha leader Madan Mohan

Malaviya" argued for making Devanagari Hindi the court language, castigating the

"foreign nature of Urdu" and its "inherent defects" and "Persian vocabulary" (Mufti 146).

The Muslim attachment to Urdu and its near "sacralization" was due to the "proximity of

Urdu script to Arabic" and "myriad lexical and morphological associations" between the two languages (Mufti 152). Gail Minault makes the same point with reference to Urdu:

"Urdu was of great symbolic importance. Its script was a link to the language of the

Quran, and its propagation as the lingua franca for Indian Muslims was an important part of both the traditional and modernist reform movements" {Khlifat 10). Peter van der Veer affirms the "historical formation of Hindi as a Hindu language and Urdu as a Muslim language, as well as the relation of these languages of everyday life to the sacred languages of Hinduism and Islam, Sanskrit and Arabic" (xiii-xiv). During the freedom movement, Urdu was cast as the language of the Muslims of India, and eventually formed part of the nationalist agenda of the Pakistani state at the end of colonial rule.

The Heart Divided cites economic disparity between the Hindu and Muslim communities as a major cause of the Hindu-Muslim divide. While Hindus thrived in the new economy of the colonial state, Muslims lagged behind: "Wherever there was a Hindu in charge of an office, no Muslim had a chance of getting in. It was the same in business, if any Muslim tried to come in, all the Hindus united and crowded him out" (316). The economic backwardness of the Muslims is traced to the Mutiny and its aftermath, and the

210 economic superiority of the Hindus is attributed to their business acumen.20 Ahmad describes to Zohra the Hindu domination of the economy and the Muslim sense of deprivation: "The trading class among the Hindus took it [industry and trade] up first in the ports of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Then it began to spread and new industries were opened up in fresh places, but invariably it was the existing industrialist or trader or his relation or friend who began in the new place and got control of the trade and industry there as well, for he had the backing of the great banks and the existing industrialists"

(400). C. A. Bayly attests to Hindu and Jain economic domination in north Indian cities between 1820 and 1850: "The growing assertiveness of rising Hindu and Jain commercial groups matched the widespread decline of the Muslim warrior and gentry classes of the old regime" (Origins 231). Syed Nesar Ahmad has endorsed this view and shown that only groups on the outer fringes of the Muslim community engaged in trade - the

"Khojas, Bohras and Memons" (16). Even in the feudal economy, "Muslims exerted influence from above, leaving intermediate and mercantile activity in Hindu hands" (17).

This line of argument concludes that the Muslim middle class was not successful in trade and industry and also lagged behind the Hindus in the government services, which prompted the Muslims' demand for economic safeguards and their eventual support of the Muslim League's idea of a separate state.

20 At a dinner party in Patna, a guest says to Sughra: "While we were crushed and oppressed by the British after the Mutiny and our industries were destroyed, while we were bitter with the whole West and scorned Western education, the Hindus came forward, went to schools and became baboos and later captured the services when these were Indianized. The bania class on the other hand went into business and captured the trade and industry, and as British hands have grown weaker, they have grasped more and more" (315). 21 The Muslim fear of being reduced to a powerless minority group in a united India is similarly voiced often in the text. Ahmad remarks: "Then the Muslims begin to think that they will be swamped and lose

211 Parting the Veil: Purdah and Islam

Shahnawaz's text contests the institution of purdah and the seclusion it imposes on

Muslim women, asserting that purdah prevents women from acquiring social and

economic agency and performing their roles as equal citizens of the state. The shedding

of the veil in the text is synonymous with women's emancipation and their entrance into public space. Zohra's gradual discarding of the veil, including surreptitious violations of

its rules and clever manipulation of her father's indulgences, becomes the measure of her

"modernity," economic independence, and political participation. When she makes a speech in the college debating competition, she equates the discarding of purdah with

women's identity as citizens: "She had felt so deeply upon the subject, and now, all the

frustrations and longings of a girl behind the purdah, aching to take a citizen's part in the

happenings of the world, were poured forth in a voice so full of feeling that all who heard

her were visibly affected" (226). Purdah has complex gradations in Shahnawaz's text that are embedded in the social and cultural fabric, with different implications for individual women.

Zohra first defies purdah by going out shopping without her burqa but in a

curtained car, and gradually manipulates her family to bend its rules of observance. When the family moves to its new house, the segregation practiced in Nishat Manzil is discarded, and Zohra comments, "I like it here. We've done away with all that zenana

their identity in this vast land, or worse still, that they will become 'lower caste'; whether these feelings are justified or not is another matter, the fact remains that they think like this" (401).

212 business" (234). The end of the "zenana business" does not mean the end of purdah, but it does imply that the strict division between male and female spaces in the house has been subverted. For Mehr, coming out of purdah means being introduced to some of her husband's friends, and Sughra remains in purdah as long as she stays in Mansur's house

in Multan. Women's own complicity in perpetuating purdah is evident in the case of

Kamal's wife, who refuses to dispense with the veil even though her husband desires it.

After the death of Zohra's grandfather, her father adopts more leniency towards purdah,

and it is on vacation in Kashmir that Zohra goes out without purdah for the first time and

records her sense of exhilaration: "At last, the purdah was being lifted completely, and

through the half-open door she could see the enchanting vistas of life and was more

impatient than ever to step out into the world that called to her" (171).22 The struggle to

be free from the restrictions of purdah is coterminous with the aspirations for political

independence for the Muslims of India. Hanna Papanek comments on this linkage

between purdah and national independence in postcolonial societies: "In the first half of

this [twentieth] century, the emancipation of women and the rejection of veiling were

closely related to national movements for independence from colonial rule [....] Among

Indian Muslims [...], women's participation in the nationalist movement, not only as

followers but also as leaders, was paralleled by their gradual emergence from purdah"

(59). Roushan Jahan, speaking of the observance of purdah among upper-class Bengali

women, points to the socio-economic dimension of the institution: "Observance of strict

22 In her autobiography, Shahnawaz's mother recalls the moment when she went out without the veil for the first time. While Zohra's initiation takes place in Kashmir, Jahan Ara mentions Simla, another hill station and summer resort, like Kashmir: "It was in that city that Father asked us to discard the veil and we went out to the New Market without burqas for the first time in our lives" (56).

213 purdah not only provided women with separate living quarters at home, but guaranteed their invisibility in public spaces through covered transport and burqa. These measures involved considerable expense, which only the affluent could afford. Purdah observance quickly became a status symbol" (46). The use of purdah by the elite upper classes as a symbol of exclusiveness and class status is evident in the case of Kamal's wife, who does not want to dispense with purdah because of the distinction and social privilege it accords her.

The critique of the institution of purdah in the text is not based on grounds of

Western mores or traditions, but is linked to women's equal rights in a progressive, reformist Islamic society. By invoking Islam and Islamic history and tradition to formulate a new "modernity," the text provides alternative non-Western and non-Hindu paradigms of resistance, creating a separate and exclusive Muslim space. Moghadam explains how such indigenous paradigms can be liberating and break new ground in

Islamic societies: "A progressive Islam, empowered by the equal status and dynamic contributions of women and extending full rights to minorities, is therefore one way to break away from Eurocentric structures and re-dynamize progressive non-Western traditions in a genuinely multicultural world" (57). In The Veil and the Male Elite, Fatima

Mernissi, in a perspicacious analysis of the origin of hijab and the status of women in

Islam, reveals that the egalitarianism of early Islam was distorted by patriarchal elites in

Muslim societies for their own vested interests. The equal rights accorded to women in early Islam were revolutionary for their time and historical context; Mernissi notes,

"Women fled aristocratic tribal Mecca by the thousands to enter Medina, the Prophet's city in the seventh century, because Islam promised equality and dignity for all, for men

214 and women, masters and servants. Every woman [...] could gain access to full citizenship" (viii). It is this pristine egalitarianism of an Islamic society that Shahnawaz's text seeks to recover in its imaginings of a new social order. According to Mernissi, the rights granted to women in Medina during the early years of Islam threatened the power of its male elite, which had enjoyed unchallenged privileges and power over women in pre-Islamic customs: "They [men who opposed women's emancipation] suddenly found themselves stripped of their most personal privileges. And unlike slavery that affected

only the wealthy, the change in the status of women affected them all" (126).

In her elaborate discussion on the meaning of hijab, Mernissi argues that Islam

challenged tribal customs by granting inheritance rights and equal social and legal status

to Muslim women. Mernissi shows the many semantic and historical associations of

hijab, revealing that the particular conditions in Medina during the Prophet's time

enabled the male elite to manipulate the meaning and practice of the hijab to their

advantage: "The concept of hijab is a key concept in Muslim civilization, just as sin is in

the Christian context, or credit is in American capitalist society. Reducing or assimilating

this concept to a scrap of cloth that men have imposed on women [...] is truly to

impoverish this term, not to say to drain it of its meaning" (95). Mernissi identifies the

following semantic connotations of the word "hijab": in the historical context of its first

revelation in the Quran, the hijab implied a "curtain that the Prophet draws between

himself and the man who was at the entrance of his nuptial chamber" - it was meant as a

reprimand to a guest for his lack of civility in the Prophet's home (85); the hijab also

refers to the "curtain behind which the caliphs and kings sat to avoid the gaze of members

of their court" (94); in the Muslim sufi tradition, hijab refers to the barrier between an

215 individual and her God that results because of the individual's entrapment in an earthly reality, which prevents the perception of the "divine light in the soul" (95). In her study of women and gender in Islam, Leila Ahmed endorses the idea that the hijab is alien to the essential spirit of Islam, and was assimilated into Islamic customs from regions that came under Muslim rule with the spread of Islam: "The adoption of the veil by Muslim women occurred by a similar process of assimilation of the mores of the conquered peoples. The veil was apparently in use in Sasanian society, and segregation of the sexes and use of the veil were heavily in evidence in the Christian Middle East and

Mediterranean regions at the time of the rise of Islam. During Muhammad's lifetime and only toward the end at that, his wives were the only Muslim women required to veil" (5).

Fatima Mernissi has argued in detail that the Prophet's wives used hijab when they went outdoors in order to be distinguished from other women, just as hijab was also used to differentiate free women from slave or captive women, the latter being vulnerable to sexual advances from men in the streets. The attack on the institution of purdah in

Shahnawaz's text is, therefore, rooted in its strategy to retrieve a pristine Islam from its source, cleansed of the residue of patriarchal distortions.

Islamic Polemics: Imagining the Nation

The Heart Divided continually evokes Islamic social, economic, and political principles as the inspiration for modernity, change, and political activism. Sughra's emancipation and political consciousness are closely tied to her ideas on Islam and its past glory, which she has romanticized since her childhood: "She had been thrilled then, when he [her grandfather] had related the lives of Omar and Ali, and told her about the victories of

216 Khalid, Tariq and Babar, and even today, she felt a thrill when she thought of the past glories of Islam" (7).23 When Sughra envisions a change of status for Indian women and a socio-political revolution, she constitutes her ideas within an Islamic framework. In her imagination, she endows grandeur to the Muslim past, and revels in visions of Islam's

historical grandeur: "She could see the armies of Salahuddin marching across the desert,

drums beating and banners flying, with row upon row of knights and heroes mounted on

restless chargers ready to die for the greater glory of Islam. And in front of them, always

in front of them, the unknown knight with the crescent banner" (115). Such glorification

of the military ascendancy of Islam recurs as a motif in the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal,

the leading and highly influential Muslim poet of the period, and provided stimulus to the

ideas of Muslim difference and separatism.

Sughra's friendship with Kamal reinforces her Islamic vision. When she first

hears Kamal speak, he voices her own dreams of an Islamic renaissance, and she clothes

him in mythic garb: "He was Tariq himself, who had torn the veil of the past to stand

there before her. He was Babar, with his Mughal features and his flashing eyes, he was

Zafar the poet-king as the liquid Urdu flowed from his lips like a fountain" (322). By romanticizing and glorifying the Islamic past, the text carves a separate space for its vision of an ideal Islamic state and society. Such "forms of postcolonial remembering" engage in the "recovery of an authentic Indian-Muslim identity" and move from a

"contested and conflicted view [of Muslim identity] towards a homogeneity" (Mufti 18).

The ascendancy of Islam imagined in a historical past in far-off lands also reveals what

23 Jahan Ara Shahnawaz similarly recalls reading in her childhood the life stories of "great Islamic heroes like Tariq Bin Ziyad and Khalid Bin Walid" (12).

217 Aamir Mufti calls the "extraterritorial affiliations [of] the Indian Muslims," which result

from their "attachment to tradition and their less than complete transition to modernity"

(135). Sughra is adept at these leaps of "extraterritorial" imagination: "Across the sea was

far Arabia and further still Syria and Palestine and Turkey. Would she never see these

lands, whose very history beat in her blood" (115). This "extraterritorial" attachment

disrupts the notion of a "coherent self-contained national culture" (Mufti 135) envisioned

by the Indian National Congress and constructs the separatist space of Indian Islamic

nationalism.24 This faraway imagination would have been conducive to ideas of

separation among Indian Muslims, engendering in them a measure of the Nietzschean

"desire to be elsewhere," which could be fulfilled by emigration to a new state with its

promise of new beginnings. The rhetorical strategies of Shahnawaz's text conjure up its

imagined Islamic space, and build its discursive field of Islamic idealism, which becomes

pivotal to a conception of Muslim separatism and Islamic nationalism.

Shahnawaz's text is vociferous in asserting that Indian nationalism is synonymous

with Hindu nationalism and does not promise an inclusive, pluralist state and society. For

instance, in Patna, Sughra is told that the Congress government has introduced Hindu

religious and cultural practices as part of daily school routines, which threaten to erase

the cultural identity of Muslim students. If Indian nationalism imagined the nation as a

community of multiple religious groups, then it had to ensure that those groups were

represented in the state, in education, and in the laws, and that their languages, religions,

24 Aamir Mufti elaborates this point: "Muslim elites who produced a public discourse on Muslim identity continued to see themselves in early colonial times as outsiders long settled in India with individual families tracing their lineages to Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, even Arabia" (136).

218 and cultures were acknowledged. Shahnawaz suggests that by the late 1930s there was a growing perception among the Indian Muslim community that it would not find a space of equal opportunities within a united India. This is repeated as a reason for separatist sentiment among Muslims, spotlighting the Muslim community's apprehensions of a

Hindu-dominated India. According to Peter van der Veer, a pluralist state in the Indian context has not been sufficiently imagined: "Important in all types of Indian nationalisms is a perception of a transcendent state that is modeled on 'traditionalizing' constructions, either of the 'Hindu kingdom' or of the 'Muslim sultanate'" (23). Such monolithic imaginings of the nation undermine a pluralist, inclusive, and heterogeneous nationalism in India, and explain the division in the Indian polity into Muslim and Indian/Hindu nationalisms. While Indian nationalism was (and continues to be) predicated on the assumptions of one nation, seen as a homogenous entity of coreligionists, Islamic nationalism, with its separatist ideology, envisioned a pluralist India (or, more specifically, saw India as a "two-nation" state) in its attempts to create a homogeneous

Islamic nation from within that Indian plurality.

When Sughra begins social work and becomes active in politics, she is drawn to the Muslim League instead of the Congress: "Although she sympathized with all that

Congress had done for the freedom of India, she instinctively turned to the Muslim

League for guidance" (260). Through Sughra's charged imagination, Shahnawaz's text formulates the vision of an ideal Islamic state, and provides a measure of the sentimental attachment felt by the Muslims of India for an egalitarian Islamic social and political order in the years preceding Partition. In her imaginative construction of an Islamic society, Sughra is conscious of the difference of the Muslim community and its distinct

219 political identity. Defending her decision to support the Muslim League, she says: "We want our own leaders, our own flag, our own songs. It's only natural" (308). She is passionate about her commitment to the League and is never in doubt about the differences between Hindus and Muslims: "We, who were always free, who ruled this land for eight hundred years. Who would be free today if we did not have millions of banias tied around our necks" (310).

Nationalists typically argue that the nation has always existed in history, and

Sughra's emphasis on the past age of Indian Islam is an attempt to trace the genealogy of

that Indian Muslim nation and construct an exclusive and homogeneous Muslim identity.

When Sughra visits Agra and Delhi, the majestic architecture of past Islamic empires

evokes in her the sense of a unified Muslim consciousness: "When I was in Agra, I had a

strange feeling as if I had come to my real home. That feeling persisted when this

morning I saw the tombs of Humayun and Nizamuddin and other old buildings [....] I

seem to have seen it all before, to have lived here and laughed and loved and wept in

some former life" (320). Through such expressions of passionate attachment to Islam,

Shahnawaz's text constructs an Islamist perspective that is emphatically brought into the

novel's visionary scheme, giving fillip to its conception of an ideal Islamic state. While

the recollection of the Islamic past is nostalgic, sentimental, and often effusive, it

constructs an indigenous, Indo-Islamic vocabulary, and serves to set up an Islamic model

of society and state - a non-Western and non-Hindu alternative. Anouar Majid explains

the significance of such semantic constructions in postcolonial societies: "The restoration

of an indigenous vocabulary is not the nostalgic and sentimental gesture that many of its

critics make it out to be, but is the very act of cultural affirmation and political expression

220 needed to reconnect individuals with their traditions" (24). While the Islamic idealism articulated in The Heart Divided has a somewhat rambling, rhapsodic, polemical edge, it succeeds as a rhetorical strategy to construct the exclusive Islamic identity that

Shahnawaz's novel is seeking to project.

In the riot scene towards the end of the book, when Sughra and Zohra defy the

police and prevent them from battering the factory workers, Sughra takes recourse to

Islamic semantics when describing her vision of a new social order. Addressing the

workers, she says, "And then together we shall build the new world that you sing about.

Islam not only sanctions but enjoins the building of a society where all men [sic] shall be

equal" (432; emphasis added). The new state is to be built on the model of an Islamic egalitarian social order. When Sughra tries to convince Zohra to join the Muslim League, she emphasizes the struggles of women and the ideals of an Islamic nationalism: "You also sympathize with the Muslim women's struggle for their rights [....] They've joined together for a national ideal [...] the achievement of Pakistan [...], the right of the

Muslim people to assert their will in their homelands where they are in the majority"

(442; emphasis added). The "Muslim women's struggle" is identified with the struggle to create a new Islamic nation, effectively conjoining the feminist, nationalist, and Islamist agendas of the text.

The vision of a new state is also projected in the women's political meeting that

Sughra attends as part of her election campaign for Muslim League women candidates.

One of the speakers urges the unity of Muslim women: "She exhorted them to awaken, to

221 unite and to fight for their rights as women and as human beings, and their heads were lifted proudly and there was light in their eyes" (271).25 The "consciousness" of the participants of this women's meeting has a distinct Islamic bent, providing evidence that by the 1930s a Muslim consciousness had begun to permeate the ordinary masses, including subaltern women who purportedly had little voice or social agency: "Sughra also noticed how deeply religious the speakers were and how thrilled the audience was when instances of Islamic history were quoted to show the bravery and sacrifice of

Muslims in the past" (272). As this scene conjures up the ideology of Islamic nationalism, it is constantly informed by notions of women's rights and collective solidarity, entrenching the ideological strands of nationalism, Islam, and feminist activism in the text. Sughra exhorts the women to participate in the movement: "Awaken, my sisters in Islam, for until you, who are the mothers of our people, bring your sons to live and die as free men, our nation cannot progress" (272). The nation is imagined in terms of its women, whose Islamic identity is emphasized in projecting the image of an

Islamic state that would guarantee equal rights to its women citizens. Peter van der Veer comments on the use of such vocabulary to construct national identities: "Nationalist ideology [...] uses the idiom of family ties to express the loyalties, rights, and obligations, as well as the ambiguous passions, involved in belonging to a nation" (85).

By drawing women into the political sphere, Shahnawaz's text emphasizes a public role for women in the new state, contesting their marginalization by patriarchal traditions in

25 The woman speaker is a persona of Shahnawaz's mother, who, like the speaker in this scene, had attended the 1930 Round Table Conference in London. Jahan Ara Shahnawaz recalls this moment in her autobiography: "I made my first speech in the Conference within the first week of the session" (100).

222 Islamic societies. Moghadam asserts this point: "Restoring women to the political arena thus becomes the necessary condition for restoring the long-eclipsed democratic spirit of

Islam" (62). By these discursive formations, Shahnawaz articulates an "Islamically progressive agenda - democratic, antipatriarchal, and anti-imperialist - [providing] the impetus for a new revolutionary paradigm" (Majid 102). The text also attempts to recover the subjecthood of the Indian Muslim woman, "metamorphos[ed]," as Fatima Mernissi's says of Muslim women, "from a veiled, secluded, marginalized object, reduced to inertia, into a subject with constitutional rights" (22).

Sughra comes to understand that the problems of Muslim women stem not from their religion but from social customs that they are made to adopt: "She saw that Muslim women did not enjoy those rights that their religion had given them, but lived and laboured under a social system that not only suppressed their liberty as citizens, but even deprived them of their rights as human beings" (274). Islam guarantees rights and

privileges to women that are denied in actual social practice, and which the new Islamic

state will restore to its women citizens. Sughra identifies three broad areas of social

practice and the law that affect women and need reform: laws of inheritance, right of

divorce, and widow remarriage. She says, "Islam had been the first religion in the world

to give the rights of inheritance to women and yet Muslim women in the Punjab were

deprived of these. Islam had made divorce easy, but not only was it considered a terrible

disgrace, but under British-made laws, there was hardly any way by which an ill-treated,

neglected or even abandoned wife could get it. Islam had enjoined widow-remarriage, but

223 Muslim widows who married again were looked down upon" (274).26 Shahnawaz's text envisions an Islamic state, built on the foundations of an egalitarian Islamic legal and social order, as the solution to the problems confronting Indian Muslim women. It advocates the difference and exclusiveness of this Islamic society, establishing its alterity from both Western and Hindu political constructs and projecting it as a redemptive paradigm for contemporary Indian Muslim society. Shahnawaz's strategy to resurrect an emancipatory, liberatory Islamic paradigm recovers what Anouar Majid, in a discussion of women's rights in Islamic societies, calls the "long obfuscated egalitarian conception of Islam, together with an effort to reconceptualize a progressive Islam for the future"

(100). Majid adds that such recovery of a pristine Islamic model can be successful as a feminist strategy: "The recovery of an Islamic past, thoroughly cleansed of the residue of centuries of male-dominated interpretations, can be useful to women fighting for freedom in the Islamic world" (109).

In Shahnawaz's state, equality and justice flow from Islamic traditions and construct a new social order: "Islam does not differentiate between man and woman where good and bad are concerned, nor make the punishment or reward different. But society does" (348). When Habib decides to marry Najma and Mehr raises the issue of social stigma attached to a divorced woman, Sughra asserts the Islamic voice again:

26 Anwari, Zohra's aunt, who is portrayed as scheming and hypocritical, has not been given her share in the family property because her father, Zohra's grandfather, followed Punjab's customary law rather than the Islamic law of inheritance. The narrative, however, reflects no trace of sympathy for her, nor does it acknowledge that she is a victim of patriarchal injustice. David Gilmartin comments on the patriarchal dictates of Punjab's customary practice: "Since control of land determined the distribution of status and authority in most Punjabi villages, the structure of 'tribal' kinship dictated that inheritance by daughters had to be strictly controlled" (15). Shahnawaz's narrator is too engrossed in representing Anwari as the villainous aunt to notice her victimization by the same injustice that Zohra and Sughra are opposing.

224 "Taking a divorce is no sin. It's allowed by our religion" (374). Similarly, when Zohra's marriage is being discussed, Sughra reprimands Mehr when she protests against Ahmad's purportedly inferior class and caste: "Islam made all men [sic] equal, and yet Muslims like you talk of class and caste. Our present degradation is not to be wondered at for we have forgotten the lessons our Prophet taught us, those principles that every great thinker has tried to keep alive" (438). It is through this kind of rhetorical insistence that Islam is pushed to the forefront of the intellectual and political vision of the book, and provides justification for the ideology of Muslim political separatism. By taking recourse to Islam and indigenous cultural traditions, the feminism of Shahnawaz's text marks its departure from Western feminist models "which partake in many of the assumptions of Western secularism and orientalist legacies" (Moghadam 71). The Heart Divided suggests that the model of a Western secular state would be ineffective in Islamic societies because, as

Moghadam argues, secular values "cannot be superimposed on a culture in which human agency is constantly negotiating its boundaries with those of the Revelation, in which accommodation to divine intent is a fundamental principle" (72).

Just as Islam is projected as the standard for a new egalitarian social order, it is also imagined as the basis for democracy, appropriating the purportedly "Western"

democratic principles for the Islamic body politic. Sughra marks out the constituent parts

of the progressive Islamic order in the imagined new state, which are borrowed from both

Islamic and Western traditions: "The foundations of democracy lie in the Islamic way of

life, and with it, we must combine all that is good in the modern world, like new methods

of education and medicine, with schools and hospitals for all [...] and above all economic

planning" (275). The moral, social, and cultural elements of Shahnawaz's modernity stem

225 from Islamic and indigenous roots, while its material and scientific aspects draw inspiration from the West, proposing a society formed by the integration of both traditions. This synthesis replicates the paradox of Indian and Pakistani nationalist movements, which developed in resistance to Western colonialism, yet deployed the prototypes of Western secular statehood to fashion their nationalist visions. Partha

Chatteijee has explained this phenomenon as the separation between material and spiritual realms in Indian nationalist discourse: "As Indian nationalists in the late nineteenth century argued, not only was it undesirable to imitate the West in anything other than the material aspects of life, it was unnecessary to do so, because in the spiritual domain the East was superior to the West" (Nation 120). This led to a bifurcation between the material and spiritual realms, marked by the "modern techniques of Western civilization" and the "distinctive spiritual essence of the national culture" (120).

Following this division, the nationalists argued that the "world is the external, the domain of the material, [while] the home represents one's inner spiritual life, one's true identity"

(120). In this binary of material and spiritual, external and internal, world and home,

women were associated with the domestic and spiritual domains, which formed the

"inner core of national culture" that needed to be protected and preserved from external

influences (121). This relegated the women's question to the margins of the nationalism

debate. By including the voices and interests of Indian Muslim women in its Islamic-

feminist nationalist discourse, Shahnawaz's text unsettles the domestic/spiritual/inner

position accorded to women in the discourse of Indian nationalism.

In order to retrieve the democratic principles of its imagined nation from Islamic

history and tradition, The Heart Divided attempts to recover a pristine Islamic political

226 order, unspoilt by the distortions of Islamic political history. As Fatima Mernissi avers,

Prophet Muhammad did not name a successor from his clan, thereby departing from the pre-Islamic tribal tradition of succession, and pointing the way towards an elected leadership by a consensual process (33). Mernissi shows that early Islam's struggles to institute a "democratic" order were finally thwarted by the Umayyad dynasty, which established a dynastic tradition of political succession: "With the accession of Muawiya to power, no one would any longer believe in the myth of an 'orthodox' choice (today we would call it 'democratic') of the head of the Muslim state. Muawiya would simply name, during his lifetime, his son Yazid as his heir. Islam, which wanted to avoid the system of tribal aristocracy, fell back into a similar pattern, but on the scale of empire - the dynastic pattern" (42). Shahnawaz's text seeks validity for a democratic Islamic nation from the earliest Islamic experiments with statecraft. This recourse to a purist

Islamic tradition remains Utopian, a rhetorical gesture and an effulgent sentimentalism, which projects a vision of political Islam that belies political practice in most Islamic societies. Shahnawaz's sentimental Islamic nationalism is also suffused with retrospective historical ironies, particularly because of the failure of the Pakistani state to establish democratic institutions. Nevertheless, with its idealized version of political

Islam, Shahnawaz's text grasps the emotional pulse of that historical moment, affirming the Islamic leanings of the Pakistan freedom movement. It is less for its aesthetic finesse and more as a socio-political document that The Heart Divided has relevance in the Indo-

Muslim discourse of the period. Fatima Mernissi states, "It is more than ever necessary for us to disinter our true tradition from the centuries of oblivion that have managed to obscure it" (76-77). In Shahnawaz's text, this attempt is evident, and shows an

227 intellectual current in the Pakistan movement that perceived the emerging new nation as a space to develop new, reformist, and egalitarian Islamic ideals.

Conclusion

Shahnawaz's construction of a new society based on freedom, justice, and equality from an Islamic intellectual and historical archive is problematic because, as Aamir Mufti has said, any recovery of a "theologic or poetic, medieval or postmodern text of South Asia and Islam" cannot be approached "except through the Orientalist archive"; it "comes to us already constituted as an object of (Orientalist) knowledge" (19). According to Aamir

Mufti, the "Post-Orientalist critical task is to undermine the inevitability of this circle," yet "the authority of the Orientalist archive is not ultimately displaced by this posture of return to a reanimated text" (19). Aamir Mufti elaborates the ambiguities and paradoxes of such a recovery of past knowledge and traditions: "The premodern corpus can only be approached from a position of exile from it, that is, through a careful elaboration of the forms of displacement, distance, alienation - and, yes, remembrance, familiarity, and recognition - that characterize our contemporary relationship to it" (19). The struggles of

Shahnawaz's characters to recover the epistemic heritage of an Islamic polity reflect these slippages between alienation and familiarity. By invoking Islamic history in a polemical strain, Shahnawaz's text participates in the ideology of the political literature of the period that articulated the concept of an Islamic nation in India. David Gilmartin, who studies the Islamic resurgence of the period and its relationship with the structures of the British colonial state in the Punjab, identifies these "millenarian tendencies" in the political discourse of Islamic nationalism: "Much of the political literature of the mid-

228 1940s equated the struggle for the creating of Pakistan with the paradigmatic religious struggles of early Islamic history" (2). Shahnawaz reaches out for an original Islamic archive, untarnished by Orientalist and Western interpretations. While this attempt cannot but be seen as idealistic, especially because we read it with the hindsight of our knowledge of Pakistan's troubled history, it enhances our understanding of the mass wave of Muslim support for the Pakistan movement, and captures the passionate idealism of that period, with a particular spotlight on the consciousness of Muslim women.

Shahnawaz's Islamic vision draws on popular mystique and is superficially intellectualized and historicized, yet its effusive rhetoric is a measure of the Muslim sentiment and mass support of the Pakistan idea. The polemical, partisan, and propagandist narrative strategy of Shahnawaz's text strives to achieve this purpose, and succeeds in its endeavor.

229 Chapter 4

Other Voices, 1905-1958: An Overview

While Twilight in Delhi, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and The Heart Divided could be

said to belong to a "canon" of Indian English Muslim narratives of the period - if a canon

can exist in an already marginalized tradition - this chapter examines other, lesser-known

Indo-Muslim fictional narratives produced between 1905 and 1958. Seen alongside the

narratives discussed earlier, the texts in this chapter complete the study of the corpus of

Indian Muslim English fiction written between 1905 and 1964. These sixty years

comprise a formative phase in the Indo-Muslim fictional tradition and signpost important

thematic patterns of this oeuvre. Taken together, these narratives provide a terrain to

identify patterns of Indian Muslim identity and consciousness as reflected in these

writings. The "minor" texts examined in this chapter illustrate themes and ideologies that are consistent with those reflected in the three main texts of this study. The women writers of this group present an intimate account of the challenges facing Indian Muslim women of the period, and register protest against the patriarchal structures that oppress

and complicate women's lives in Indian society. Most of the texts discussed in this

chapter reveal the intricate interweaving of religion and society in Indian Muslim culture, and show the impact and centrality of religion in the construction of Muslim identities.

They project a humanist view of Muslim religious identities and confront religious prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance. At the same time, these texts conjure up a separate and distinct Indian Muslim culture, endorsing the stamp of difference that characterizes

230 the Indo-Muslim discourse of this period. A few narratives examined in this chapter address the violence of Partition, contrasting the silences and erasures that mark the treatment of Partition in most other works of this study. Finally, all these narratives are unequivocal in their indictment of colonialism, and their voice of resistance aligns them

with that central theme in the principal texts of this study.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce these "minor" texts to the critical

discourse in the field and lay some groundwork for further research. The texts are

grouped thematically and discussed in chronological sequence under each of the

following sections, mapping the progressive development of the principal themes in these

writings. This chapter is meant to merely draw attention to these unknown texts, point out

their thematic affinities with the principal texts of this study, and include them in the

Indo-Muslim fictional tradition of these years. The following discussion offers brief

synopses of this material, and does not perform the kind of detailed critical analysis the

earlier chapters did.

"We Shut Our Men Indoors": Narratives of Feminist Protest

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's short story "Sultana's Dream: Purdah Reversed" (1905), the

first English-language narrative by an Indian Muslim published in India, constructs a

feminist Utopia and affirms, as Roushan Jahan and Hanna Papanek observe, that Indian

"feminist sentiments grow from indigenous roots, without depending on foreign

influence" (vii). The grounding of Hossain's text in a homegrown, Indian feminism

marks its affinities with the local feminist epistemologies developed in Sunlight on a

Broken Column and The Heart Divided. A dream-fantasy that overturns the social roles 231 of men and women, Hossain's story imagines a feminist Arcadia where women manage

public affairs and men are consigned to "their proper places, where they ought to be,"

living in purdah and tending to household duties: "You need not be afraid of coming across a man here. This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here"

(8). "Sultana's Dream" upends the myth of male superiority and registers protest against

the conventions of purdah and women's subordination: "Men, who do or at least are

capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the

zenana!" (9). In Ladyland, women have appropriated social and political power, and have

excelled in scientific invention, creating an efficient system of state and society. The men

of Ladyland, like women in a patriarchy, have become conditioned to their abbreviated

lives: "Now that they are accustomed to the purdah system and have ceased to grumble at

their seclusion, we call the system mardana instead of zenana" (14). A playful, satirical

attack on patriarchy, "Sultana's Dream" is remarkable for its radical feminist sentiment,

its faith in the resourcefulness and creativity of women, and its belief in the power and

efficacy of science and progress. As a feminist narrative, "Sultana's Dream" is an apt

precursor to the feminist texts of Attia Hosain and Mumtaz Shahnawaz, and to the other

oppositional women's narratives discussed in this section of the chapter.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the most prolific English

Muslim writer of these decades, published short stories, novels, and semi-

autobiographical/journalistic pieces that are humanistic in their vision, indict colonial rule

with their acerbic satire, and express disdain for religious bigotry and prejudice. Abbas's

writings also express solidarity with the plight of women in Indian society. In Tomorrow

is Ours (1943), Parvati has to quit her medical studies when her mother dies and becomes

232 a classical stage dancer. A self-willed, modern woman, Parvati befriends Roopmati, a fellow dancer who has "suffered because of the ruthless laws of a man-made world which condemns women, even tender girls, to be sacrificed at the altar of masculine passion"

(40). When Parvati marries Srikant, a Europe-returned doctor, his feudalist mother does not accept a stage dancer as her daughter-in-law, and Parvati leaves her husband to return to her dancing career. An indictment of feudalism, untouchability, and the caste system of

Hindu society, Tomorrow is Ours advocates women's emancipation from "the centuries old tradition of servility" (104) and pushes for the defeat of the "masculine ego, inherited from a thousand years of male superiority" (128). A novel of social protest, Tomorrow is

Ours attacks exploitation perpetrated in the name of class and creed, the scourge of feudalism, the heartlessness of untouchability, and the tyranny of patriarchy, while celebrating the redemptive power of art and human compassion. In its advocacy of the emancipation of women from decadent social customs, Tomorrow is Ours forms part of the feminist tradition in the Indo-Muslim English fiction of this period.

Continuing the feminist strain in Indian English fiction, Iqbalunnisa Hussain's

Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household (1944), the first English- language novel published by a Muslim woman in India, is a diatribe against polygamy, the purdah system, the exploitation of women at the hands of men, and the complicity of a certain class of women in perpetuating their social isolation and dependence. In his foreword to the novel, Ramalinga Reddy says of Hussain, somewhat dramatically,

"Without exaggeration I can hail her as the Jane Austen of India" (1). Purdah and

Polygamy is a poorly crafted narrative, yet its ire against the injustices and suppressions of patriarchy, polygamy, and purdah make it an important study of Indian Muslim

233 women's lives of the period. The setting of the novel is not made explicit, except its location in an Indian Muslim family, and the novel is vociferous in exposing the misogyny of men in Indian society: "To him and to all other men there is no such thing as temperament in a woman. A woman is supposed to live under any circumstances. Her only needs are food, clothing and decoration" (31). When Kabeer's wife is examined by a male physician, it is his mother, Zuhra, who goads her son against her: "A man can't own a woman as his wife after she has been touched by a man. There were men in former days who used to cut off that part of the body which was touched by a stranger" (65). Zuhra's role in the text reinforces the idea of women's complicity in the exploitation and degradation of their own sex. She coaxes her son against his first wife and arranges his second marriage; for her, his second wife is nothing more than a commodity with utilitarian value: "No servant would be so cheap or useful. She's here day and night. She feels this is her house and the work is hers" (100). Purdah and Polygamy offers glimpses into the traditional gender roles in a middle-class Muslim household in pre-Partition

India, and its feminist politics places it in the tradition of Indian Muslim women's fiction that includes Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Attia Hosain, Mumtaz Shahnawaz, Zeenuth

Futehally, and Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah.

Humayun Kabir's Men and Rivers (1945) is a novel of peasant life, set in a

Bengal village along the banks of the river Padma. It evades the politics of the period and sets up a private world in remote rural locations, offering a close look at Muslim village life in Bengal. Although women are secondary to the novel's action, their point of view is voiced in Kulsum's frequent outbursts: "And yet, you know no better [than] to deliver a sermon on male superiority. Superiority indeed! I should like to see one man who is not a

234 foolish windbag" (93). Kulsum's marriage illustrates the lack of agency that women of her class have over their lives. She is married to Aziz against her wishes and forced to consent: "Thrice Basir asked the question, 'Kulsum, do you agree to marry Aziz?' She made no reply, but every time, some of the women caught hold of her head and made her nod" (123). Men and Rivers is raw and sketchy in places, yet its narrative is redeemed by some elegant writing, an interesting plot and set of characters, and a twist ending, and its articulation of women's lives draws it within the fold of the feminist tradition in Indian

Muslim fiction.

In Rice and Other Stories (1947), Khwaja Ahmad Abbas takes up the cause of women in stories like "Sylvia," "Flowers For Her Feet," and "Reflection in a Mirror." In

"Sylvia," a career nurse searches for love and the meaning in life, while "Flower for Her

Feet" is a powerful depiction of the underside of life as lived in India's brothels, uncovering the tragic exploitation of prostitutes by pimps and others who control their lives. "Reflection in a Mirror" brings home with cutting irony the class divisions of

Indian society and the exploitation of women by the rich and feudal classes. The concubine of a Raja dreams of marrying him, but sees her own future in the senior Raja's once beautiful and now wasted mistress, haggard and discarded like a piece of old furniture. Abbas's humanist voice comes through effectively in his feminist narratives, allowing him space to showcase the plight of women subalterns in India's male-centric social structure. Abbas's women characters are strong and self-willed and show resilience and "grace under pressure," even when crushed by circumstances; they resist their objectification by an exploitative society, and strive to be free agents and subjects of their own lives.

235 In 1951, Zeenuth Futehally published Zohra, an intimate account of a young woman's life in the princely state of Hyderabad. In his preface to its original edition, E.

M. Forster called Zohra a "picture [of] the old Moslem society of Hyderabad," in which

"Zohra's personal struggle for self-expression is paralleled by India's growing desire for independence" (261). In its depiction of the emotional and moral development of a young

Muslim woman, Zohra has close parallels with Sunlight on a Broken Column and The

Heart Divided. Zohra, a gifted young girl with a talent for painting and poetry, grows up

in the confined atmosphere of the zenana and its "high-walled garden" with her mother,

Zubaida Begum, and their maidservants (1). Zubaida Begum's wet nurse, Unnie, voices

the social role that Zohra is assigned and expected to play in life: "May the bridegroom of

your auspicious kismet arrive soon; and may the flowers of your bridal garland blossom

swiftly" (2). Unnie's words echo Hakiman Bua's articulations in Sunlight on a Broken

Column, showing similar social attitudes towards women in the upper-class milieus of

Lucknow and Hyderabad.

Zubaida Begum's views on women's education reveal the barriers that thwart

women's emancipation and self-realization in the patriarchal society of Hyderabad:

"Learned girls never settle down happily to domestic life [....] They pick up ideas from

reading unsuitable novels and always think marriage and children can be delayed" (11).

Similar attitudes towards women's education are evident in Sunlight in a Broken Column

and The Heart Divided, which hint at a unanimity of views towards Muslim women's

emancipation among the elite of Hyderabad, Oudh, and Punjab. In Sunlight, Abida,

Majida, and Zahra are allowed only a rudimentary education, whereas Laila is given a

"memsahib's education" to honor the wishes of her late father. In The Heart Divided, the

236 opposition to Zohra's education and the family's unease about her teaching career suggest similar attitudes towards women's education. In Zohra, consistent with the social role imagined for her by family and society, Zohra is married at a young age to the laconic and self-absorbed Bashir, an England-educated university professor. Marriage stifles Zohra's individuality and she finds transient comfort only in the friendship of

Hamid, Bashir's non-conformist younger brother, before succumbing to a premature death hastened by spiritual and emotional stagnation.

Zohra is a thoughtful account of the limiting effects of the zenana system, and the struggles of conservative Muslim families to come to terms with social change and

"modernity" in Hyderabad. Zohra speaks of the complexities of women's seclusion, which provide a social safety network yet restrict choice and action: "The purdah system is a great saviour [....] This mode of marriage [arranged] can hold good only in a zenana society where there are no standards of comparison. Difficulties would arise if girls started moving about in mixed circles" (191). The zenana perpetuates the patriarchal status quo and constrains women's lives, yet it is difficult to dislodge because no alternative social model is available to the women of Hyderabad's upper classes. Zohra's thoughts on arranged marriages are in conformity with Sughra's views in The Heart

Divided, particularly when she considers the practical difficulties of forming companionable marriages in the restrictive atmosphere of zenana culture.

Zohra's comments on women's lack of choice in their own marriages show the unquestioning sway of tradition and patriarchal norms in her society: "A Hyderabadi girl would no more think of questioning her parents' right to arrange her marriage than she would of questioning God's right to dispense birth and death" (191). Contrarily, in The

237 Heart Divided, while she consents to an arranged marriage, Sughra implicitly protests against her parents' decision by leaving her husband. Similarly, Zohra, in Shahnawaz's novel, refuses arranged marriage for a marriage of choice. Laila's marriage to Ameer in

Sunlight also defies tradition, and shows her intervention in the accepted decorum of marriage in her society. Futehally's heroine, by contrast, is unable to find agency to make free choices or carve a meaningful and fulfilling social role for herself. She dies young, a martyr to and victim of tradition and patriarchy. Zohra's premature death, and the impasse she faces in her quest for emancipation and self-fulfillment, suggests that there are no easy solutions to the problem of women's subordination in Hyderabad's upper- class Muslim culture. Futehally's novel raises perennial questions about the role of

Muslim women in a changing Indian society; its resistance and protest stem from the articulation of these questions, even if it is unable to formulate and offer a socially viable solution.

Following close on the heels of Zohra, Attia Hosain's Phoenix Fled (1953) champions the cause of Indian women and society's underdogs, revealing a diverse fictional canvas. A collection of twelve short stories, Phoenix depicts the lives of Indian

Muslims across the social spectrum, including middle- and upper-class women, domestic servants, young and old, rich and poor. In "The Loss," "The Street of New Moon," and

"The Daughter-in-Law," Hosain turns her attention to the world of women domestic servants, showing their innate dignity and grace in the face of ceaseless poverty and drudgery. The women servants depicted in these stories are trapped in the twin tyrannies of class and gender: Amma in "The Loss," the narrator's foster mother and housemaid,

who has served the family for thirty years at ten rupees a month; Hasina in "The Street of

238 New Moon," married young to an aging, opium-addicted cook, who elopes with a younger man and ends up in a brothel - "black-painted [eyes], powdered face pallid in the harsh light, with red-circled cheeks, and a straight-lipped painted mouth set in a smile around tobacco-blackened teeth" (56); and the young girl in "The Daughter-in-Law," married when "barely nine or ten" (88), who is turned out of the house because she is

"possessed of a devil" (106). Read alongside the sympathetic portrayal of Nandi,

Hakiman Bua, Saliman, and Ramzano in Sunlight, these stories affirm Hosain's humanist vision and her attempt to recover the voices of subaltern groups in her work with empathy, compassion, and fidelity to the truth.

Attia Hosain explores the intricate lives of middle- and upper-class Indian women in "The First Party," "Time is Unredeemable," and "A Woman and a Child." In "The

First Party," a young wife feels alienated among her husband's circle of Anglicized friends, which includes women who are "grotesque mimics of foreign ones" (21) and speak in a "bi-lingual patchwork" (18). She is repulsed by the drinking and dancing at the party, and the "righteousness of her beliefs, deep-based on generation-old foundations" make her long for the "sanctuary of the walled home from which marriage had promised an adventurous escape" (22). The story underscores the disruptive effects of Western

"modernity" on Indian society, and the uneasy cultural transition of individuals caught in a precarious middle ground between two value systems. In "Time is Unredeemable,"

Bano is married to Arshad at age sixteen - "because safety and wisdom counsel an early marriage" (59) - and a month later he leaves for England to study. He is detained by the war and returns after nine years, while Bano lives all this time with her in-laws.

Westernized and urbane, Asghar shuns Bano, revealing the disconnect between the

239 values of East and West and the painful consequences of acculturation. In "A Woman and a Child," a childless wife longs to become a mother to evade the social stigma attached to women's infertility. Her mother-in-law coaxes her son to remarry: "She has brought us nothing but barren death" (134). Her husband turns to God and she goes "from shrine to shrine," praying and following local superstitions and beliefs: "I have tried wearing holy amulets, and drinking holy water" (135). Unsuccessful in all her attempts, she becomes obsessed with a friend's young daughter, and in her desire to possess her, smothers her to death in a maniacal embrace. Attia Hosain's stories weave a rich tapestry of Indian Muslim culture and constitute an important voice in the feminist tradition of

Indian English Muslim narratives.

Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah's The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958) depicts family life in Indian Muslim households, representing a broad spectrum of characters,

from the upper and middle classes to the working classes, including peasants, house

servants, beggars, and so on. Some of the stories are set in former East Pakistan (now

Bangladesh), Hamidullah's birthplace, while others unfold in colonial and post-

independence Karachi. Focused on the inner lives of women, the stories highlight

women's struggles to define their identities and find agency in their patriarchal societies.

Hamidullah's narratives include accounts of intergenerational conflicts, mother- and

daughter-in-law relationships, the insidious effects of the class divide, and the religious

and spiritual lives of ordinary people. While women in Hamidullah's stories lead lives

that are circumscribed by endless household work and the rearing of children, they reveal

reserves of creativity and resilience, which become resources of resistance against these

women's exploitation by culture, custom, and patriarchy.

240 In the eponymous "The Young Wife," Aliya grows up observing her mother waste away in domestic drudgery and resolves to lead her life differently, independent of male control. Aliya fears that she will be "given in marriage to some coarse, domineering male who would crush all the spirit of freedom within her soul" (15); she detests the thought of ending up like her mother, who performs "monotonous tasks [...] ungrudgingly day after day, [produces] children year after year and just as stoically

[buries them] when dirt and disease claimed them as victims" (10). When Aliya resists a marriage arranged by her family, her mother's admonishment voices a mantra repeated in the Indian Muslim women's texts of this study in varying forms: "Are you not a woman, and what is a woman for but to wed and bring forth children so that the family may continue" (16). This statement affirms that female sexuality is constructed in specific ways in patriarchal systems, emphasizing the biological function of womanhood. As

Moya Lloyd states, patriarchal societies consign women to the domestic sphere and consider them "fit only for reproduction and mothering," preventing them from acting

"agentially" (99). Aliya cannot escape arranged marriage but takes her revenge by being

"cruel to [her] young husband" because "she hate[s] men and their treatment of women," experiencing "feelings of triumph" when he is hurt by her behavior (21). The story ends

with a whimper as Aliya's resolve that "no man shall rule me and do with me as he will"

(18-19) is tamed all too soon by her realization that "the wife appeared to be weak and submissive, not because she was forced into being something other than she was, but because in this was her happiness" (25). The terrain set up for "battle of the sexes" in the story peters out because of Aliya's sudden change of heart and her resolve to become "a

good wife and bear her husband strong, sturdy children" (27). The swift and complete

241 turnaround in Aliya's character suggests either that the patriarchal code is too hard to break, or that outright rebellion is not a viable form of resistance and women need to find

agency within the social structures that define gender roles in their socieities. This

problem is addressed in different ways in Sunlight on a Broken Column and The Heart

Divided. While Sunlight envisages women's emancipation within the broader cultural

rubric of Indian/Muslim society, The Heart Divided seeks to discover agency for women

in Islamic social, cultural, and legal frameworks. Aliya's implausible initiation reveals a

flaw that recurs in Hamidullah's stories: too often, she foists hasty syntheses on complex

and contentious questions and represents character progression that is not supported by

internal plot developments. Despite its flat ending, Aliya's story is an overture towards

women's social dignity and selfhood; its resistance stems from the fact that Aliya does

not submit unquestioningly to tradition, but tries to understand the complexities that

define gender relations in her society.

In "Cold Tea," Hamidullah draws the poor and the elderly with depth and

empathy: the aging father of a rickshaw driver struggles to eke out a living to maintain

his dignity before his daughter-in-law. Set in post-Partition Karachi, in "those [...]

difficult days [...] when there was hunger and unemployment even among strong and

sturdy men like his son," the story alludes to the struggles of a young nation emerging

from colonial rule (42). The hard-hearted daughter-in-law suddenly turns a new leaf,

without an internal impetus from the plot, stamping a forced "happy" ending on an

otherwise well-crafted narrative. In "Munnoo," the dhobVs (washer man's) four-year-old

daughter gets her first taste of vicious class inequality when she befriends the rich and

spoilt Nasreen, only to be shunned when Nasreen's rich cousins come to live with her.

242 Hamidullah's treatment of the class divide of Indian society is reminiscent of the exploration of class conflict in its varied forms in the works of Attia Hosain, Mumtaz

Shahnawaz, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. In "The Paralytic," a husband acknowledges his

wife's life of drudgery and toil only after he has been paralyzed by a stroke, while in

"The Bull and the She Devil," a narrow-minded husband is unable to accept or understand his wife's kindness to his brother and nephew, and the desire "to possess her

[becomes] his one object in life," impelling him to kill his nephew before taking his own

life (102). Hamidullah's stories cover a broad vista of women's experiences and show the

challenges confronting their lives, showcasing their struggles to find dignity and self-

realization in the midst of these difficulties. The stories are also important because they

represent the lives of Muslim families in Bengal and Karachi, suggesting an underlying

commonality in Muslim experience across diverse geographical locations.

The feminist texts discussed in this section establish definitive strands of

resistance to patriarchy and oppression, reinforcing the ideology of feminist protest

articulated in the works of Attia Hosain and Mumtaz Shahnawaz. They endorse Chandra

Talpade Mohanty's contention that for "Third World" feminists "writing is a tool for self-

preservation and revolution" ("Cartographies" 9). Mohanty sees these writings as

"oppositional practices" (15), subaltern histories, and "testimonial narratives" that "speak

from within a collective" (36-37). These women's narratives and the Muslim characters

represented in them reveal Indian Muslim identities that are integrated within an eclectic

Muslim religious culture. The women characters of these stories seek emancipation from

patriarchal oppressions and envisage their liberation within the broader frameworks of

Indian Islamic culture and traditions. They do not seek to overturn the foundational core

243 of Indo-Muslim culture; instead, they insist that the constraints imposed on women in the

name of religion are grounded more in social custom than in religious doctrine.

These feminist writings interrogate prevalent Indian Muslim religious and cultural

values, and advocate their reformation based on a humanist Islamic legacy cleansed of

moribund parochial and patriarchal traditions, suggesting ideological affinities with the

local feminist epistemologies of Sunlight on Broken Column and The Heart Divided.

Through "consciousness-raising" strategies, these texts reclaim and transform subaltern

women's identities from erasure, stereotyping, and marginalization in masculine

discourses. They show that, as Judith Butler contends, when the culture that constructs

gender is construed as "fixed law," then "gender is determined and fixed as it was under

the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, not biology but culture becomes

destiny" (8). The oppression of women evidenced in the women narratives of this study

affirms that in Indian society gender and culture work in tandem to thwart women's

emancipation.

"Religion is a Force in India": Islam and Muslim Identities

The Indo-Muslim fictional oeuvre examined in this chapter is imbricated in Islamic

religion and culture, endorsing the significance of religion in the lives of Indian Muslims

and its centrality in the construction of their identities. Even when religion and the sacred

appear peripheral in certain narratives, their presence and centrality in Muslim culture is

still made evident. For instance, religion is not prominent in Humayun Kabir's novel,

Men And Rivers (1945), yet the village mosque is described as the centre of village life,

and the call to prayer captures its religious atmosphere: "The call to prayer rang out in the

244 evening sky. The sonorous Arabic sounds hung tremulously in the air and were echoed from the distant fields" (97). The mood suggested by this depiction is analogous to the ambience of the azan described in Twilight in Delhi. Similarly, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's

"Sparrows," in Rice and Other Stories (1947), does not have an overtly religious theme,

yet its narrator mentions that Rahim Khan, the principal character of the story, was

prevented by his parents from marrying Radha because she is "a Hindu, a Kafir [and] the

very idea was infamous, and irreligious" (32). Such remarks serve as reminders of

religion's significance in the lives of these characters.

In Inqilab (1955), consistent with his humanist vision, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas

takes a bipartisan approach towards the Hindu-Muslim conflict, expressing his

bafflement at the divisions between the two groups. At the railway station, Anwar

observes a sign of the elemental cleft between Hindus and Muslims: "And above this

babble of many voices rose two distinct cries, 'Hindu pani', 'Muslim pani'! Hindu water!

Muslim water!" (20). Anwar suggests that Hindu-Muslim differences are a matter of

perception rather than tangible fact when he observes the water-bearers filling their

containers from the same tap. While the novel purports to erase Hindu-Muslim

difference, it also evinces sympathy for Muslim culture and a sense of Muslim communal

sentiment. For instance, Anwar feels a sense of connection when he reads the Quran:

"Anwar liked the sound of the rich words which [...] flowed from the tongue like thick

golden honey" (9). During the Friday prayers at the mosque, Anwar experiences a sense

of collective belonging: "This sight of thousands of people offering prayers in disciplined

formation and with rhythmic movement held him enthralled" (69). He emphasizes the

245 "democratic basis of the congregational prayer" that allowed "men of all classes [to rub] shoulders with each other" (69).

The Hindu-Muslim theme is brought to a resolution by Abbas's typical ironic twist when

Anwar learns that he is the son of a Hindu, although he has been brought up as a Muslim in a Muslim family. He feels that his liminal self reflects the experiences of both communities and offers the possibility of a Hindu-Muslim entente: "He [...] was neither a Hindu nor wholly a Muslim or, rather, he was both, an oddly symbolic Son of India"

(349). Like Abbas's hero in "The Man Who Did Not Want to Remember," Anwar personifies a symbiosis of the two communities. While the short story ends in despair, the novel ends on an ascendant note, evincing Abbas's faith in the potential of the two communities to find a common meeting ground.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's narratives attack religious bigotry and prejudice and assert the need for an "Indian" as opposed to a "Muslim" or "Hindu" identity, which is consistent with his bipartisan approach to India's religious conflict. His narratives, nevertheless, reveal the power of religion in the construction of identities and in the determining of destinies in the India of his times. Abbas's views on the religious strife in

India are consonant with those of Attia Hosain, rather than with either Ahmed Ali or

Mumtaz Shahnawaz. Like Hosain, Abbas constructs and favours an eclectic Muslim identity, cleansed of the baggage of religious prejudice, and by engaging with the religious question affirms the interrelationships of religion and identity in India.

In The Young Wife and Other Stories (1958), Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah dabbles in the supernatural in "The Peepul Tree," "Motia Flower," "Wonder Bloom," and "The Bull and the She Devil," uncovering the superstitions of ordinary people in narratives that

246 have structural defects and border on the melodramatic. These stories reveal the deep-set religious and spiritual attitudes prevalent in Indian Muslim culture, and create characters whose identities are entwined with their religious beliefs. The nexus between religion and identity evidenced in these stories surfaces in all the Muslim narratives of this oeuvre in different formulations, suggesting distinct overlaps and continuities between

Hamidullah's stories and the other texts of this study. In "The First Fast," the rigid religiosity of Pervin's grandmother is countered by her mother's more lenient and flexible view: "Don't you know that Allah understands everything [....] Allah judges not by what you do, but what you strive to do" (75). An eclectic, unorthodox religiosity is suggested by another story with a religious theme, "No Music Before Mosques," which reveals the folk-religious, esoteric spiritualism of Indian Islamic culture; it portrays a young man whose flute-playing represents "the way [...] he prays to Allah [....] That's his way of telling Allah how much he loves Him" (112). However, the young man's father and the villagers cannot fathom his folk mysticism, and he takes his own life, consumed by the viciousness of pontifical religion and intergenerational discord. The story demonstrates what Muzaffar Alam has identified as the tension between "normative and textual Islam" and popular or folk Islam in India, the latter adapting to local spiritual customs and resisting the fixed, doctrinaire practices of the former, or "elite Islam" (xi).

The narratives discussed in this section endorse the idea that religion is a force in

India, and that Indian identities have distinct overlaps with India's entrenched religious culture. It is noteworthy that while a preoccupation with religion and religious conventions is dominant in these narratives, they unanimously condemn bigotry and

247 dogmatism, offering a tolerant, eclectic, and life-affirming view of religion that stems

from human compassion and aspires for human dignity and happiness.

"The Undoing of My Country": Indicting Colonialism

The Indo-Muslim narratives examined in this chapter indict colonialism through multiple

strategies: satire, situational irony, polemic, and direct exposure of the excesses of

colonial rule. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's collection of stories Not All Lies (1945) is the first

among these texts to express its vitriol against colonialism. In "Mother-in-Law India," the

narrator observes, "India might be 'mother' to her 400 million children, but the white

skinned foreigner who lands on the Indian soil is in the position of a favoured son-in-law,

entitled to all the courtesies and lavish hospitality which the daughter's husband receives

in an Indian household, including not an inconsiderable amount of dowry" (14). The

narrative satirizes the language of colonial discourse and the British historiography of

India by an ironic repetition of its modalities: "The real history and progress of India

began with the coming of the English. These friendly merchants had come from the

distant islands purely for commerce but, being humanitarians at heart, they were appalled

at the disunity and fratricidal warfare prevailing in India [....] So the English decided to

take a hand in Indian affairs, and by strictly non-violent and truthful methods they

acquired the empire on which the sun never sets" (16-17). Anger and bitterness at the

injustices of colonial rule are evident in the narrator's cuttingly satirical voice: "The dogs

in India have only one complaint, that sometimes they are classed with the natives. And

certain exclusive clubs and hotels still insult the dogs by exhibiting such signs as 'Indians

and dogs not admitted'" (20-21).

248 In "The Biggest Bamboozler in History," the House of Lords deliberates on "the biggest bamboozler of the century in Eastern history" (83) and the nominees include Lord

Clive, "the father and founder of the British empire in India," who says, "I forged a treaty and on the strength of it laid the foundations of the biggest empire in world history [...] and I would do it again a hundred times if necessary" (85). In "All Lies," at the "All-

World-Lying Championship," the Englishman declares, "Once upon a time my people began to get a feeling of divine discontent. They were possessed by the desire to serve humanity. Having reached the zenith of civilization themselves, they wanted to spread the light all through the world - especially the dark continents of Asia and Africa. [The natives] were so overcome with gratitude that they invited us to settle down and rule over them" (97). While the stories of Not All Lies may be wanting in craftsmanship, their vociferous anti-colonial sentiment stands out with poignant force, reinforcing the voice of resistance that permeates the Indian Muslim narratives of this study. Abbas takes another jibe at colonial rule in "The Umbrella," in Rice and other stories (1947), which sets up the ironies in a racial encounter when the Indian narrator shows deference to a

"memsahib" on a bus but she steals his purse. The colonial symbolism of the story is evident: "She was a memsahib - and I was a gentleman [;...] this gentlemanly temperament was the cause of my undoing - perhaps also the cause of the undoing of my country?" (143).

Aamir Ali's Conflict (1947) is a coming-of-age narrative that chronicles the story of a village boy (Shankar) who is sent to the city (Bombay), setting up a comparison between life in India's villages and in its big cities. The novel is silent about the communal conflict, although its publication coincides with the year of Partition. In

249 Bombay, Shankar comes in contact with a radical group of young men and eventually organizes his own villagers to protest against British rule. The novel culminates in 1942, with a poignant description of the Quit India Movement, which establishes its definitive

anti-colonial slant.

While women's concerns are at the forefront of Nusrat Futehally's Zohra (1951),

the novel also insists on the insidious impact of colonization and envisages resistance to it

on an eclectic, secular plane. Zubaida Begum's grandfather refers to the 1857 Mutiny and

his family's exile from Delhi in its aftermath, offering insight into the anti-British

sentiment of Indian Muslims during these years: "Could we have watched with any

equanimity, the English firangis walking through our marble palaces [....] Could we have

tolerated a stranger delivering judgement under our scales of justice [....] Could we have stood aside and watched Paradise turn to infernal hell" (8-9). The embedded narrative of

the Mutiny in Twilight in Delhi evokes similar emotions about the ransacking of Delhi by the British, and the loss of power and prestige suffered by Delhi's Muslims in the

Mutiny's aftermath. Set in the 1930s (Mahatma Gandhi's 1930 Salt March to Dandi

Beach is referenced in the text), Zohra captures the mood of social protest gripping the

young generation: "Gandhiji's Satyagraha movement had affected them [students and young people] profoundly and the more thoughtful ones were against joining government service and helping the British maintain their Raj" (93). The young Hyderabadi Muslims' disdain for British government service recalls Zohra's contempt (in The Heart Divided) for the "British stooges" of the Indian Civil Service (283). Hamid conveys the views of an educated upper-class Muslim on the detrimental effects of colonization: "The last two hundred years have been the most sterile in our cultural history. The creative powers of a

250 nation suffer disastrously under any foreign domination" (172). While the text conjures

up the distinct cultural heritage of Hyderabad's Muslims and reveals their anti-British

sentiment, it does not comment on Muslim separatist politics. Similarly, the Hindu-

Muslim divide is not accentuated in the text, except in Bashir's passing remark on the

irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims: "How can we come closer to

each other when they won't even eat with us" (157).

The short stories of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's Cages of Freedom (1952) indict

untouchability, colonialism, religious hypocrisy, and the shallowness of popular

nationalism. "The Flag" exposes insidious social inequalities and draws a vivid picture of

the poverty of the lowly and the destitute in Indian society. The city is in the grip of

nationalist celebration - "It was said that the country had been granted something called

'azadV' (35) - but the newfound freedom has not put an end to the suffering of the

masses. When Ramoo finds a tricolour Indian national flag lying in a street he takes it

home and wears it as a dhoti, because he has only one loincloth that he shares with his

wife. In the street, he is accosted by a man who claims to be the owner of the flag and

snatches it away, leaving Ramoo stark naked in front of a crowd. In a further ironic twist,

Ramoo is then arrested and charged on three counts: theft, "insulting the national flag,"

and "being found naked on a public thoroughfare" (37). A smouldering attack on the

ritual, ceremony, and superficial fervour of nationalism, the story underscores that

nationalism has changed nothing for India's poor - the nation, symbolized by the flag,

cannot hide or redeem the naked poverty of its penurious citizens. While the story is set

in post-colonial India, its condemnation of shallow nationalism indicts the neocolonial

state, which represents a perpetuation of colonial rule.

251 Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's Inqilab (1955) is a rich and detailed account of the

Indian freedom movement, covering the years between 1919 and 1931. The novel takes a panoramic view of Indian politics, society, and culture, capturing the spirit of inqilab

(Urdu for revolution) and independence sweeping India during those years. The novel's protagonist, Anwar Ali, has a traumatic initiation into India's turbulent politics when, as a ten-year-old, he witnesses the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. His friend Ratan, who watches his father, Ajit Singh, die in a hail of bullets, becomes an anti-state revolutionary, supporting the Sikh Akalis and Bhagat Singh's militant resistance movement. In the Jallianwala Bagh scene, Ajit Singh confronts General Dyer, the commanding officer and mastermind of the shooting: "Ohejarnel sahib [...], I fought for you in the war. I saved an English officer's life. Look at these medals if you don't believe me" (41). With Abbas's characteristic irony, Ajit Singh is shot through the very medals that he has been awarded for his loyalty to the British.

Anwar studies at the Muslim Aligarh University, befriends revolutionaries,

Marxists, and poets, and is eventually expelled when he participates in an anti- government protest on campus. He gives up the promise of an Indian Civil Services job and life with the woman he loves for his commitment to the movement against colonialism. Anwar eventually becomes an apprentice reporter, working with an

American journalist, which enables him to witness the tumultuous politics of the period at close range. Although not directly involved in anti-colonial politics, Anwar helps the subversive activities of his friend Ratan, and assists him in his plan to bomb the legislative assembly. The novel is remarkable for presenting all the important political personalities of that time as real flesh-and-blood characters. Anwar becomes acquainted

252 with Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali, leaders of the Khilafat Movement, Mahatma

Gandhi, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Gangadhar Tilak, Bhagat

Singh, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, and a host of others, whose charismatic presence in the narrative lends particular impetus to the novel's anti-colonial theme.

lnqilab does not mention Jinnah or any other Muslim League leader, and Anwar castigates the League for fuelling Hindu-Muslim tensions and playing into the hands of the British. By contrast, the novel evinces deep admiration for Jawaharlal Nehru, and also for Gandhi and his politics of non-violence. However, Anwar also comes to question

Gandhi's political tactics, and his "feelings of exultation [are] considerably chilled by the religious aspect of the Mahatma's Satyagragha" (259). He expresses frustration that

Gandhi tolerates the "servile idolatry" of his followers and turns their attention "towards his holiness" (259). Anwar also criticizes Gandhi for his lack of positive action, wondering why he does not urge the peasants to "revolt against not only the foreign

Sarkar but also against the landlord and money-lender who oppressed them?" (259).

Similarly, the militant Ratan condemns Gandhian non-violence as a "convenient cloak for cowards" (188).

The entire narrative of lnqilab is a systematic attack on the injustices of colonial rule. After meeting the Viceroy, Lord Irvin, the American journalist Robert talks about the incompetence of the colonial rulers: "He [Lord Irvin] knows so little about the country he is supposed to govern" (317). Robert speaks of the "ill-informed" English government officials at Simla, the summer capital of the Raj: "No one reads the newspapers here for they arrive two to three days late. Everyone, including the Viceroy, depends on the heavily-censored, one-sided and all too brief news digest supplied by

253 Reuters" (318). The anti-British sentiment of the text marks its voice of resistance, and aligns its concerns with the larger thematic interests of the other texts of this study.

The condemnation of colonial rule in these texts is symptomatic of the disenchantment of Indian Muslims with the colonial present. While none of these

"minor" texts indicates specific directions towards a post-colonial future, their anti- colonial sentiment captures the atmosphere of resistance and anticipates the radical politics of the freedom movement.

Narrating Partition: Voices in the Silence

As noted earlier, the general trend of the Indo-Muslim fictions examined in this study is to elide Partition and its attendant violence. However, there are exceptions. Khwaja

Ahmad Abbas's novella Blood and Stones (1947) breaks the silence on Partition's communal violence and its psychological import. Nirmal "escape[s]" from "blood-stained

Bombay" (5), a city partitioned into "Hindu Bombay" and "Muslim Bombay," and visits the caves of Ajanta, which symbolize ancient India and its legacy of peace, creativity, and human endeavor. Ajanta's beauty and serenity are in stark contrast to the bloodbath of communal strife. The narrative underscores Abbas's humanist vision and his condemnation of all religiosity (Hindu or Muslim) that breeds fanaticism and violence:

"Who was Hindu? Who was Muslim? In the fraternity of death they were one [....] This futile death! [...] so this was their freedom, this was their Islam, this was their Vedic dharma" (26). Nirmal points to India's disconnect from its heritage and civilization:

"India has never learnt anything from Ajanta except the lesson of escape. Escape from the world, from reality, from truth, from life?" (16). Towards the end, in a moment of

254 epiphany, Nirmal learns the "message of Ajanta": "Work! [...] Effort! [...] Endeavour!," because "Work is worship" (46). Blood and Stones is important for being the first English

Indo-Muslim narrative to address Partition's communal violence, signalling a departure from the web of silence shrouding Partition in these writings.

Some of the stories in Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's Cages of Freedom (1952) depict life during and after Partition, noting its emotional scars and physical violence. "The Man

Who Did Not Want to Remember," the most powerful story in the collection, is a scathing critique of Partition and the fanaticism and violence it engendered. Abbas satirizes religious fervour and hatred by introducing a character who has forgotten which faith he was born into: "For more than two months now I have been trying to find out who I am: A Muslim or a Hindu who might have been forcibly shaved and circumcised?

A Brahman or an untouchable? [...] a resident of Lahore or Amritsar?" A refugee,

nameless and unknown even to himself, "the man" has been found "unconscious, in a

shalwar and shirt soaked in blood, lying sprawled across the border so that while my legs

were in Pakistan, the rest of the body was in the Indian union," suggesting the traumatic

in-betweenness experienced by migrants scurrying across the new borders during

Partition (79-80). He is pestered by everyone to disclose his religious identity and

eventually comes to a resolution of the dilemma: "I don't know what I am. I am not a

Hindu, I am not a Muslim, I am not a Sikh. I am nothing. I am only a human being" (86).

Ironically, just as he was found straddled across India and Pakistan, he dies from two stab

wounds sustained in one case from a Muslim who takes him to be a Hindu, and in the

other from a Hindu who mistakes him for a Muslim. The story recalls Saadat Hasan

Manto's classic Urdu short story, "Toba Tek Singh," in its depiction of the psychosis and

255 horrors that attended Partition.' While the story indicts religious fanaticism, it also suggests the indelible connection between religion and identity in India, which manipulates the lives of India's citizens, and in this case, also the manner of their death.

The allegorical "Cages of Freedom" exposes the unequal and selective "freedom" that has come in the wake of Partition: "The jungle was partitioned into Birdland and

Parrotistan. The Age of Freedom had come. But except for a few leader-birds who could fly about with ease, the vast majority was still unable to use their wings and to take advantage of their new-found freedom" (46). In "Revenge," Hari Das's teenaged daughter is raped and killed by Muslim hooligans and he becomes obsessed with the desire for revenge. When he gets an opportunity to kill a young Muslim girl who has been captured by Hindus and forced into prostitution, he cannot bring down the lifted dagger because the girl has transformed into his own daughter, suggesting the essence of humanity and the human condition, irrespective of religious belief: "A look of stark terror came into her eyes. Hari Das recognized more than terror in that look - there were fear and hate and a plea for mercy and complete hopelessness. It was the exact look that he had seen in his Janki's eyes" (65). The Partition stories of Cages of Freedom reveal

Abbas's innate humanism in their scalding denouncement of violence perpetrated in the name of religion, and in their rendition of the pain of ordinary people caught in the vicious swirl of history. Abbas is able to look at Partition and the Hindu-Muslim divide with the eyes of an impartial observer, and his approach is typically either elegiac or

1 The fate of "the man" in Abbas's story who is found lying across India and Pakistan is similar to that of Toba Tek Singh, Manto's protagonist: "There, behind the barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth, which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh" (15).

256 satirical. In this regard, his works offset the Muslim separatist vision and the essentialist

Muslim identities projected in Shahnawaz's The Heart Divided.

In Phoenix Fled (1953), Attia Hosain obliquely refers to Partition in two stories, setting up interesting comparisons with her treatment of this event in Sunlight on a

Broken Column. In the eponymous "Phoenix Fled," Old Granny refuses to leave her ancestral village with her children and grandchildren who are fleeing the Partition riots, stunned by the knowledge "that neighbours should turn murderers" (14). The trepidation and panic of the moment of escape is captured in Hosain's measured language of understatement: "Terror silenced the women's wails, tore their thoughts from possessions left behind; it smothered the children's whimpering and drove all words from men's tongues but Hurry, Hurry" (14). "Phoenix" muffles the moment of violence, keeping it suspended on the threshold of impending horror. Old Granny is alone in the house when it is set on fire by the invading mob: "She smelt the flaming thatch, and as shadows came nearer across the courtyard she tried to sit up" (14). The restrained treatment of Partition in the story is not inconsistent with its depiction in Sunlight, in the latter, Hosain evades the immediacy of Partition's violence by temporally distancing her narrative from it, while in "Phoenix," the spatial and temporal proximity of the narrative to the scene of violence conveys a chilling sense of terror about to be unleashed.

In "After the Storm," Hosain filters her descriptions of Partition through the memory of a child, thereby keeping them indistinct and fragmented. Bibi is separated from her family in a Partition riot, but is saved by strangers and eventually becomes a house servant. She carries her story within her, and the narrator pieces it together in bits and snatches gleaned from her child's memory: "She was now a symbol and around her

257 hovered all the ghosts one feared" (81). The child's account, rendered with simplicity and directness, captures the psychosis of memory in subtle evocations: "I ran into the field and a man said 'Come this way', and he carried me, we hid in the sugar cane - then he put me on a train, and I came here" (82). The restrained account of Partition in Hosain's stories replicates its truncated, retrospective rendering in Sunlight, except the felt immediacy of the scene, which is alive in the stories but not in the novel. The finespun and understated descriptions of Partition in the two stories succeed in conveying the trauma of Partition embedded in the psyches of Hosain's characters.

Conclusion

The narratives discussed in this chapter together constitute a tentative oeuvre, an embryonic stream of Indian Muslim fiction that lacks the assurance of an established fictional tradition. Many of the works are marred by stylistic and structural flaws, or beset by blemishes of character development, of narrative strategy and voice, and of the

Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time. However, while compromised in their aesthetic execution, these narratives make cogent thematic and ideological statements that align them with the central thematic concerns of the principal texts of this study. The feminist narratives of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Zeenuth Futehally, Zeb-un-Nissa

Hamidullah, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and Iqbalunnisa Hussain register a definitive voice of protest and resistance against women's subordination in Indian society, establishing affinities and continuities with Sunlight on a Broken Column and The Heart Divided.

Futehally, Hamidullah, and Hussain are also preoccupied with the dynamics of a Muslim religious identity and develop their feminist ideologies within the broader rubric of

258 Islamic cultural and social norms. Aamir Ali's text is not concerned with Indian Muslim identity, but is explicit in its protest against British colonialism. Humayun Kabir's novel is silent about colonialism, but captures the ambience of Muslim life in a Bengal village and expresses sympathy for women's suffering. The rich fictional terrain of Khwaja

Ahmad Abbas touches the seminal issues addressed in the Indo-Muslim fictions of this study: sympathy for women and the desire for an egalitarian gender structure; protest and resistance against British colonization; sorrow at the violence of Partition; the rendering of facets of Muslim cultural life; and the articulation of a humanist vision that transcends communal religious association. In all these aspects, these "peripheral" voices form a thematic unity with the works of Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, and Mumtaz Shahnawaz, setting up an Indo-Muslim discourse of feminist protest, anti-colonial resistance, and

Indian Muslim identity, history, and politics.

259 Chapter 5

Conclusion

The Indian Muslim narratives of this study share certain common characteristics that reveal larger patterns of this incipient tradition, and chart the trajectories of Indian

Muslim thought of the period. First, a number of these texts reveal a fascination with

Islamic history and its ethos in India, revealing an Indian Muslim imagination/identity grounded in the past and seeking to understand the present in relation to Islamic historical precedents. Second, these texts suggest patterns of a Muslim consciousness that is predicated on its perceived sense of difference from other groups, Hindus and the British.

Tropes of difference are also employed in these texts to construct women's separate identities, shaping "alternate structures and [...] alternative narrative[s] of legitimation" that resist the patriarchal status quo (Spivak, "Editor's Note" xii). Third, these texts insinuate various modes of resistance by constructing alternative epistemologies that draw upon nationalist, religious/Islamic, and feminist knowledges to challenge dominant political and cultural ideologies. Finally, taken together, these texts constitute an elitist discourse that reveals an intricate interplay between forms of agency, power, and representation in their narratives.

History and Indo-Muslim Fiction

The invocation of history in the texts of this study enunciates what Gayatri Spivak calls

"the traffic between the historian and the writer" ("Literary" 244). Spivak describes

260 historical fiction as "history imagined into fiction," a phenomenon that is manifested in the works of Ahmed Ali, Mumtaz Shahnawaz, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, among others

("Literary" 243). In his classic study of European historical fiction, Georg Lukacs states that the historical novel "follows inevitably upon the great historical transformations of modern times [and its] different problems of form are but artistic reflections of these social-historical transformations" (17). Twilight in Delhi and The Heart Divided conform to this definition, deriving, like Sir Walter Scott's novels, "the individuality of [their] characters from the historical peculiarity of their age" (Lukacs 19). Mir Nihal in Twilight, with his attitude of an old-school Delhi Muslim, and Sughra and Zohra in The Heart

Divided, whose passion for personal and national independence derives from the politics of the times, are characters in this mould. Attia Hosain and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas also create characters of historical specificity, formed by the machinations of politics and the cultural/historical ethos. While the historical impulse lends vitality to the works of

Hosain, Ali, and Abbas, Mumtaz Shahnawaz embroils her narrative more directly in historical experience, fitting Lukacs' description of the historical novel as a receptacle of

"important events of contemporary history which it links with the fortunes of the characters" (20). The Heart Divided struggles to integrate its historical content with its fictional aesthetic, falling short in its endeavour perhaps because it operates in a void, without the assurance of a tradition of historical fiction in the Indian English novel. The nationalist strain in The Heart Divided brings it close to Lukacs' definition of the nationalist tradition in European historical fiction: "The appeal to national independence and national character is necessarily connected with a re-awakening of national history, with memories of the past, of past greatness, of moments of national dishonour, whether

261 this results in a progressive or reactionary ideology" (25). The Heart Divided and

Twilight in Delhi appropriate the discourse of colonial historiography, rewriting its epistemes and restoring the Indian subject's connection with the Indian past, which has been ruptured by the erasures and omissions of colonial historical discourses.

The Indian Muslim writer's preoccupation with history reveals her penchant to stress the influence of history on plot and character, yet the narratives of this study paradoxically elide the most significant historical event of the period - India's Partition.

While Twilight was written well before Partition, The Heart Divided was written in the run-up to and during Partition, but its narrative closes in 1942. There is no way to ascertain whether Shahnawaz would have addressed Partition and its attendant violence in the sequel to The Heart Divided, which, according to her mother, she was planning to write. The most noticeable elision of Partition occurs in Sunlight on a Broken Column, which swoops past fifteen years (1937 to 1952) of historical time, effectively turning its back on Partition. Attia Hosain does allude obliquely to Partition in two of her short stories, while Khwaja Ahmad Abbas confronts the horrors of Partition in his narratives, the first Indian English Muslim fiction writer to do so. The shying away from Partition in early Indian Muslim fiction reflects what Antoinette Burton calls the "unnarratability of

Partition." Partition can only be referenced by silences, erasures, and intervals, because its trauma is too raw in the early post-Partition years to be orchestrated into art or fiction.

Difference and Identity

The principal texts of this study are premised on the difference of Muslims from other groups in India, mainly the Hindus and the British. The mark of difference is not only

262 evident in Ahmed Ali, Attia Hosain, and Mumtaz Shahnawaz, it also surfaces in the narratives of Zeenuth Futehally, Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah, and Iqbalunnisa Hussain, which construct distinct Muslim cultural spaces to suggest the difference of Indian

Muslims. Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi asserts the difference of the Muslims of Delhi

by incorporating Urdu language and literary conventions, while Mumtaz Shahnawaz

proclaims the difference of Muslim culture and history to make a case for Muslim

political separatism. Attia Hosain conjures up the distinctive culture of the Muslim upper classes in Lucknow, while she employs the difference of her women characters to challenge the hierarchies of Lucknow's patriarchal culture. While the Muslim identity constructed in the texts of this study is premised on difference, it is fundamentally conceived as non-essentialist and non-normative, and in the works of Attia Hosain and

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas embraces hybrid formulations and more inclusive selfhoods. A few of the "minor" writers of this study bypass physical descriptions of landscape and place and enact their stories in undefined, nondescript locations, vaguely demarcated and half-formed. This ambiguous relationship with place is symptomatic of the Muslim writer's struggle to relate to colonial India as "home," revealing what Aamer Mufti has called the "extraterritoriality" of the Indian Muslim imagination (135). While ambivalence about place and location reflects the problematic of identity and self- perception, it also puts a stamp of difference on these narratives.

Narratives of Resistance

The texts of this study deploy discursive strategies to posit resistance against various modes of oppression in Indian society. Ahmed Ali uses the resources of the Urdu

263 linguistic and literary tradition to disrupt the notion of a steady, linear, official discourse of standard English in colonial Delhi. Attia Hosain deploys the prolificacy of marginalized women's identities to resist the patriarchal constructs of Lucknow society and mark an intervention in its hierarchies. Mumtaz Shahnawaz uses the epistemes of feminism, Islam, and nationalism to articulate resistance against the dominations of patriarchy, Hindu majoritarianism, and colonial rule in India. Similarly, Khwaja Ahmad

Abbas uses scathing satire and irony to undercut the exploitation and hegemony of

British colonialism, while Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Zeenuth Futehally, Zeb-un-Nissa

Hamidullah, and Iqbalunnisa Hussain insinuate different modes of feminist agency to resist the patriarchal networks of their societies. These women's texts assemble a robust voice of feminist protest, which equips their discourse with a radical agenda to unsettle and challenge the intricate webs of patriarchal power in Indian society. Similarly, these texts resist the exploitations of colonial hegemony to make a gesture towards political independence, just as their resistance to women's oppression is a gesture towards women's cultural independence.

Elite/Subaltern Consciousness

One of the complications in reading these texts as the representative imaginative

expression of India's Muslims is their apparent "elitist" consciousness and their

mediation by the English language, which marks them as products of the elite upper strata of Indian Muslim society. This raises questions about voice, representation, and

agency: who speaks in these texts, who is spoken for, and consequently whose identity

and consciousness do these texts represent. Can they be read as representing the

264 consciousness of "Indian Muslims" generally, or do they represent the voice of a select and elite group of Indian Muslims? In the context of Indian history, the problem of appropriation of voice has been addressed by the Subaltern Studies historians, whose work has endeavoured to bestow subject-position to subaltern voices and bring them within the fold of Indian historical discourse. However, as Gyatari Spivak has argued, it is problematic to recover subaltern consciousness in elite, academic discourse, because, in the act of articulation, these discourses appropriate the subaltern's voice, so that it is not the subaltern but the Western-educated academic who "speaks" in them. As Spivak explains,"Because 'the person who speaks and acts ... is always a multiplicity' [no]

'theorizing intellectual... or party or ... union' can represent 'those who act and struggle'" ("Subaltern" 1432). Therefore, according to Spivak, in the process of representing the subalterns, "the intellectuals represent themselves" (1432). While it is difficult to capture the pristine voice of the Muslim subaltern in English language discourse, the representation and re-presentation1 of the subaltern in the Indian Muslim writings of this study is nevertheless a step towards the articulation of their muted voices.

The representation of the subaltern in the texts of this study, particularly in the texts surveyed in chapter 4, also gains some authenticity when one considers that Indian

Muslim discourse is itself in a position of subalterneity to the mainstream Indian English

fiction of the period. In some ways, this is a question that can never really be answered. It is similar to the charge made by a certain school of historians that the Pakistan movement itself was manipulated by elite groups to safeguard their economic interests.

1 Gayatri Spivak explains the difference between the two terms: "representation [entails] 'speaking for,' as in politics and representation as 're-presentation,' as in art or philosophy" ("Subaltern" 1432).

265 While the question of voice appropriation is a matter of circuitous academic debate, there are other limitations in a methodology that approximates the identity and consciousness of Indian Muslims on the basis of Muslim English-language narratives.

Firstly, this inquiry leaves out non-fictional English works produced by Muslims in the same period (i.e. 1905-1964). Secondly, and more importantly, this study does not take into account the corpus of Muslim writings (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction) of these years produced in Urdu. Since Urdu was/is the language of the Muslims of northern

India, its elision from a study that attempts to understand Indian Muslim identity and consciousness represents a significant omission. This elision also mirrors a central problematic of postcolonial studies itself, as it has evolved in Western academia from the

1980s onwards. The impressive body of postcolonial theory in the West has burgeoned often without recourse to the indigenous writings and intellectual traditions of colonized/formerly colonized locations, about which this theory purports to "speak." This deficiency becomes more pronounced in the case of places like India and Pakistan, which have longstanding, entrenched, and sophisticated intellectual and literary traditions.

While the conclusions made in this study need to be qualified by these limitations, they are nevertheless representative of an important body of imaginative writings that have significance in their own right. New research should complement the inferences of this study by findings from the other two streams (Urdu writings and English non-fiction writings by Muslims) of Muslim intellectual thought of the period.

In summation then, the texts studied in this research provide evidence that

Muslim identity and consciousness in pre-Partition India were derived from a pluralist, inclusive, and eclectic concept of Islam. The Muslims' self-perception of difference in

266 the Indian polity stands out in these texts, a perception that is pliable and gradually moulds itself, in the work of Mumtaz Shahnawaz, into a vision of political independence in a progressive and egalitarian Islamic nation. Even when Islamic identity is seemingly constructed as essentialist or normative, it does not branch into belligerence or bellicosity but presupposes tolerance and coexistence with other groups, while maintaining its sense of separatism and difference. The texts present an enlightened idea of Indian Muslim identity, drawn from the cultural milieu of Indian Islam, flexible and capable of transforming and evolving into new formations, in consonance with emerging historical, cultural, and political conditions.

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276 Email: [email protected] Khurram N. Khurshid

0 Education

• Bachelor of Laws (LL.B), 1992, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan • M. A. English, 1984, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan • B. A., 1981, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan

Research Interests

• South Asian literatures, African and Caribbean literatures, postcolonial literatures and theory, emigration and diaspora, minoritarian and subversive literatures, colonial discourse analysis, literary translation

Publications and Conferences

• Forthcoming. "Resistance and Difference: Urdu Tropes and Muslim Consciousness in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi." Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Spring, 2010 • Forthcoming; "Attia Hosain" and "Nadeem Aslam" in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century World Fiction. Ed. John Clement Ball • Forthcoming. With Waqas Ahmad Khwaja, translations of Urdu poems for Modern Poetry of Pakistan, Eastern Washington University Press: - "Program" - Josh Malih Abadi - "Address" - Josh Malih Abadi - "Yearning for Leisure" - Hafeez Jallundri - "A Staff in Old Age" - Hafeez Jallundri - "What Am I" - Hafeez Jallundri - "A Gecko's Mind" - Jamiluddin Aali - "Orthography" - Jamiluddin Aali • Colloquium, Department of English, University of New Brunswick, January 15, 2010 • With William Randall, paper presented at Narrative Matters 2008 in Toronto: "Why Does Narrative Matter: Reflections on Narrative Matters 2002 and 2004" • Narrative Matters 2010 Conference, May 21-23, Fredericton, New Brunswick Accepted for Presentation: "Rushdie's Stereotypes: Narrative of Two Nations in Midnight's Children" • CACLALS, Annual Conference, May 28-30,2010, Montreal, Quebec Accepted for presentation: "'Our Life is Like a Candle Flame': Urdu Tropes and Muslim Consciousness in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Dehli"