Every year as August 15 approaches — and this year it does as the 70th anniversary of Independence and Partition — it comes as a summons to update ourselves on the ever-growing, and ever more nuanced, body of work on how freedom came to India, and in the form that it did. In this exercise, Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column is a classic that keeps giving, with each reread giving you a different crevice in the sprawling saga to embed yourself in.
A vanishing world
The novel was first published in 1961, and it is many things. It is perhaps foremost a coming-of-age novel as Laila, the bookish orphan in a taluqdari family of Lucknow, chronicles the world around her, as the purdah-ed household of her grandfather gives way to the Westernised world of her aunt and uncle, as she moves from a rather physically circumscribed existence to a bracing exposure to the social, political and intellectual winds sweeping across the country, as she watches her family try to reconcile their feudal order with the democratic ideals of the freedom struggle they have individually committed to in varying degrees.
It is a novel about breaking social barriers to win love, and about finding the big heart to survive grief and the toll Partition extracts. Eventually her two dashing cousins opt for different countries, Saleem for Pakistan and Kemal for India. Kemal earnestly calculates his brother’s share “to the last pot and pan and stool and chair” to be handed over as “evacuee” property to the Custodian, with the line drawn between the two new countries being superimposed on the family estate. When he tries to convince his mother to sell their share of the Lucknow residence to be able to buy what’s Saleem’s share in the ancestral home, she speaks less of the property and more of a mother’s pain and incomprehension at the sudden finality of the split in a shared geography as she cries, “Is this a war with Custodians for enemy property? Did they not consent to the partition themselves? Why treat those people like enemies who went over? Were they not given a free choice?”
It seemed it had been just the other day when she walked in on Saleem talking of his college-days’ enchantment with Marxism, “Mind you, I can still appreciate its principles, but I am no Lenin and can establish no Soviets…” She had frowned, “Linen serviettes? I do not know what you are talking about.” Saleem had laughed, “How fortunate you are, mother. Oh, brave new world!” How swiftly that innocence vanished.
Equally, if this is a world of extraordinary privilege, Laila mindfully tracks its class, gender and agrarian inequities, and Sunlight… is a valuable work of social history too. Yet Laila is not just the watchful centre of the novel — she is its beating heart. She is making her way in the world on her terms, always searching, heeding her elders’ sensitivities while staring down snobbish society ladies who sniff at her cotton sari while scouting around for appropriate brides for their sons. The college-time discussions, with Congress and Muslim League supporters, with nationalist thought taking on the colonial argument, are as reflective of Laila’s intellectual spine as of the larger discussions raging nationally about India’s future.
It will be Laila’s task to tie up the loose ends in the narrative of the Lucknow household, those of her family as well as those who work there, and place the aftermath against the “arguments and untested ideals” of her youth.
Progressive, inclusive
It is easy to read Attia Hosain’s backstory in the novel. Her father was a taluqdar, growing up she read compulsively, and, as her daughter Shama Habibullah points out in the foreword to a recent collection of Hosain’s work ( Distant Travellers ), she was the first woman from a taluqdari family to graduate from Lucknow University. Habibullah also quotes from the 1936 manifesto of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, with which Hosain was associated: “It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature. They should undertake to develop an attitude of literary criticism that will discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war and society. They should combat literary trends reflecting communalism, racial antagonism and exploitation of man by man.”
With Sunlight on a Broken Column , Hosain heeded the manifesto in full measure. Sadly, it is the only novel she published.
