Sunlight On a Broken Column

by Attia Hosain

Laila, orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, is brought up in her grandfather's house by orthodox aunts who keep purdah. At fifteen she moves to the home of a liberal but autocratic uncle in Lucknow. Here, during the 1930's, as the struggle for Indian independence intensifies, Laila is surrounded by relatives and university friends caught up in politics. But Laila is unable to commit herself to any her own fight for independence is a struggle against the claustrophobia of traditional life, from which she can only break away when she falls in love with a man whom her family has not chosen for her. First published in 1961, this has remained a classic on Muslim life.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, India, Indian Literature, Classics, Feminism, Literary Fiction

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Attia Hosain (1913–1998) was a writer, feminist and broadcaster. She was born in 1913 in Lucknow in a taluqdar background. She moved to Britain in 1947.

Attia was born in Lucknow and went to the local La Martiniere Girls' College. She was the daughter of Sheikh Shahid Husain Kidwai and Nisar Fatima, the daughter of Syed Maqbool Hussain Alvi of Kakori.

She studied at Isabella Thoburn College from the age of fifteen and Lucknow University.

She moved to Britain in 1947 and became a broadcaster for the BBC, hosting a popular women's radio programme.

Attia's niece is the Pakistani author Muneeza Shamsie and her great-niece is author Kamila Shamsie. British television director Waris Hussein is her son and film producer Shama Habibullah is her daughter.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed and appreciated this novel, after having read some of Hosain’s shorter fiction last year. It is set in the 1930s and 1940s towards the end of British rule in India and on to partition. It is told from the perspective of Laila, a member of a fairly privileged taluqdar family. It starts when she is fifteen and spans almost twenty years. It covers a period of great change and Hosain illustrates how the change affects a family with traditional values and the strains of modernity vs tradition. It is also told from a woman’s perspective and looks at the changing nature of the role of women in that society. The novel is partly autobiographical and the title is a quote from T S Eliot, The Hollow Men;

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column

There is insight into what purdah meant for women and how marriages are arranged. Reflections on the interior life of a family are set besides the struggle for independence, colonialism and religious tensions within the community. The very different lives and roles of the servants are also part of the picture.
The family home (or Ashiana, the nest) is immensely important in the novel and everything centres on it and it is society in miniature. Jasbir Jain argues;

“Ashiana in Sunlight on a Broken Column serves as a microcosm of the world at large with not only its womenfolk in purdah but its retinue of servants who represent the community at large. It has a living relationship with the past not merely through the culture it cultivates but also through the house at Hasanpur at the outskirts of the city, which symbolizes continuity and permanence”

Laila is given an education and this creates tension within herself as she realizes how restrictive her upbringing has been. There is however a tension here as she realizes that freedom of thought does not equate to a freedom of action. This is a critique of the old traditions and ways; not without nostalgia however. The family is split at Partition and Hosain is able to portray different approaches to the ending of colonial rule and different ideas about the future; some support Congress, some the Muslim League.
The novel is beautifully written and I have the virago edition (thanks goodness for virago). It’s about tradition, change, love and loss and it is also a snapshot of a particular ending of colonial rule and all the struggle and danger that went with it. Well worth reading.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1961, Attia Hosain’s semi-autobiographical novel draws on her experiences of growing up in India in the 1930s, in the final years of British rule. It follows Laila who lives with her family in Lucknow, part of its elite Sunni Muslim community. Her family are wealthy, taluqdars – aristocratic members of the ruling class, the Indian equivalent of land-owning gentry. Like many others, it’s caught between traditional and western-centric customs, so Laila lives in segregated, women’s quarters yet attends school and later university. Through Laila, Hosain tells a story of the years leading up to independence, Partition and the creation of Pakistan: the development of the independence movement, the rifts in, and between, families tied to different political factions and clashing visions of India’s future. She also highlights the experiences of women like Laila, her aunts and friends, as they try to negotiate the spaces and possibilities on offer to them.

It’s a fascinating depiction of a turbulent time in India’s history, as well as a moving portrait of a family in conflict. Hosain’s particularly effective at representing the challenges of life for young women like Laila navigating complex forms of hierarchy and status, and highlighting the ways in which relative isolation could be as liberating as it was restrictive, allowing for the formation of special bonds and forms of community not possible in Eurocentric households. Her approach makes it clear supposedly liberal conventions could also be stifling, bringing in a whole, new set of limitations on behaviour and social interaction. The sense of time and place is vivid and evocative but Hosain makes no concession to readers unfamiliar with India’s history or the minutiae of its political past, so there were a few occasions where I wished this came with detailed, background notes. It’s a slow-moving piece with a large cast of characters, so it took me a while to adjust to its rhythms, some of the discussions around politics and culture could be a little dry, but overall, I found it absorbing and illuminating. My out-of-print, Virago Modern Classics edition came with a useful overview by Anita Desai, but the novel’s recently been republished with an introduction by Kamila Shamsie, Hosain’s great-niece.

Rating: 3.5

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked out this book among the remainders and I see no sign of its having been reprinted. This is very unfortunate, because, as Anita Desai explains vividly in her brief introduction to this edition, Hosain's work emerges from a richly coloured world that has been swallowed by changing times: the world of the privileged class of taluqdar families, aristocratic landowners, in Lucknow in the early twentieth century. She lived and wrote through Partition and her novel reflects the political and cultural currents in motion during the period.

As Desai points out, her style is not modern, rather, a little ornate, formal, agreeably ponderous, yet delicately restrained and never frivolous or sentimental, soaring with powerful emotions and relating the commonplace and the extraordinary with sure-footed, carefully chosen phrases: 'Ugly buildings had sprung up, conceived by ill-digested modernity and the hasty needs of a growing city'. That indigestion speaks - to the faint, persistent pain of bad architecture as much to the sad misinterpretation of the work of modernist visionaries like Le Corbusier (and perhaps I can add the later Indian architect Charles Correa) or listen to this: 'the gossip of women whose minds remained smothered in the burqas they had outwardly discarded, and the men who met women socially but mentally relegated them all to harems and zenanas'. How crisply she puts down hypocritical sanctimony!

Our narrator, Laila, is fifteen at the start of the action and lives in the house of her grandfather in the care of the extended family, but is particularly close to her freethinking, religious and dutiful aunt, Abida, who has taken on responsibility for carrying out her dead parents' wishes for her to receive a 'Western' style education. She seems quite introverted and lives in her books, and often clashes with her traditionally educated cousin and age mate Zahra, who is frivolous and sometimes narrow-minded. Her confidantes also include the girls' beloved nurse Hakiman Bua and other Hindu female servants with whom they chat. The household, including Laila and Zahra, observes purdah, so its female members rarely leave its comfortable confines: when they travel to ancestral lands a few miles away for a funeral, they cannot suppress their curiosity and exclamations over what they see outside their carriage, despite Hakiman Bua's chidings and injunctions to pray for the departed.

Gracefully, economically rendered conversations among people with a wide variety of backgrounds and opinions is one of the richest pleasures of this book, revealing the strong integration of Hindus and Muslims and hinting often at the British hand in setting them against each other. Laila and her group of college friends have different perspectives on the political and religious topics that preoccupy their varied milieus and they discuss them, often in passionate arguments, while remaining very fast friends. Each young woman thinks, I suppose, what might be predicted based on her class and faith background (the group includes three Muslims, one in favour of partition, one totally indifferent, and Laila herself who is engaged and uncertain, a radical egalitarian Hindu (closest in views to Laila) and a pro-Empire Anglo-Indian.

This vibrant array counterpoints the atmosphere within Laila's extended family, where such contrasts of background are less distinct, but ideological and religious opinions are if anything more divergent. While behaviour is controlled (quintessential to Laila's class as exemplified and articulated by her aunt Abida) thought is free, and the ability to articulate arguments and debate is prized among the venerable arts of conversation. I absorbed a mode of respectful, loving tolerance amongst people compelled by tradition to live and speak and act in each others lives however incompatible their temperaments and ideas might make them. There are exceptions, but in general I felt that each person had their confidantes and ample thoughtspace within the joint family structure. This changes during uncle Hamid's time, and it's surely because of his Westernised lifestyle, in which family ties are subordinated to a restricted, individual social life and are hollowed of feeling and joy into arid duty.

If I'm making this sound like a nostalgic paean to the aristocratic taluqdari lifestyle, to feudalism, purdah and traditional family structures, then I'm doing it no justice. Perhaps it is that, in one reading, or in one of its aspects, and I see some reviewers chafing about Laila/Attia's class position and privilege and her according focus. Some critics make it sound as if Hosain should not have taken up her pen at all if not to take the part of the underprivileged classes, which in fact she does as part of a larger, much troubled but passionate impulse towards justice. In her introduction Desai opines that 'perhaps the most attractive aspect of her writing is the tenderness she shows for those who served her family' and Laila criticises Zahra strongly for her thoughtless classism. Hosain's valuable and humane, thoughtfully sympathetic yet astutely critical view of the feudalism she grew up in could not have been revealed by anyone but an insider. In a conversation about Attia and Virginia Woolf, a writer who is often spoken of in the same way, my friend Fionnuala wisely said 'While narrowness should not be totally excused by historical context, context can explain narrowness and help us to put the pieces of the history of our evolving world together.'

Besides which, Laila's view does not seem at all narrow to me; her broadening milieu and education position her exceptionally well to throw light on a variety of ways of life. She is unjudgemental, generous, strong-willed, open and independent of mind, curious, outspoken and she enjoys both varied company and solitary reflection. As a teenager she admires the Satyagrahis and longs to 'march in peaceful protest, to defy the might of the arrogant whites'. Later she criticises the 'stupid and ridiculous' 'old-fashioned nonsense' of the tradition of modesty that prevents husbands and wives from speaking to each other in the presence of parents, and sneaking like thieves into each other's rooms at night even after they have children of their own. We witness her character developing, especially gaining self-awareness, though she maintains the core of herself, her humanistic and empathic beliefs and responses.

This novel, in style, mood, and setting, was for me a glorious change of scene, and I hope it is taken up and enjoyed by many more readers.

[Vishakha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often wonder about the blurring of fact and fiction in semi-autobiographies. Is the author revealing their most interior self, unloading their unspeakable thoughts by making their life indistinguishable from a fictionalised version of it? For instance, did Coetzee think of his mother as a “graceless, obstinate” woman and deliberately distance himself from her, as he writes in Boyhood and Youth? Did he treat women the way he suggests in Youth or did he come across such incidents and incorporate them in his work? I am an eternal optimist, always hoping that such stories are a work of the author’s imagination and not a part of their experience.

Sunlight on a broken column is also a semi-autobiographical work, where Laila, the narrator, is based on Attia Hosain who grew up in a privileged but conservative Muslim household in pre-independence India. This is the story of an almost forgotten era, the 1930s, when the feudal landlords called “taluqdars” were at the helm of affairs in India. Laila’s family was a part of this ruling class in and around Lucknow in North India; their life was an example of the grandeur and extravagance that birth, privilege and wealth can offer. The language of the book reflects those times of “tehzeeb” (culture and etiquette) in language and manner, like “the sweet tongue of the true Lucknavi (belonging to Lucknow) - delicate, flexible, rich in imagery, pointed with wit, polished with courtesy”. Ms. Hosain brings to life this society and the people who inhabited it with her rich, descriptive portrayals and a contemplative tone which respects tradition but questions the deep-seated bigotry, especially against women.

Women’s lack of agency (even in such prosperous, educated homes) was something that the author was deeply frustrated with and concerned about. In those days, females were confined to a secluded area of the house to avoid interaction with men outside their family. So much so that many women had to forgo timely medical intervention because they could not consult male doctors.

The book is narrated by Laila and covers the period from her adolescence to early twenties. Receiving the benefit of both traditional and English education, she is a curious, conflicted mix whose liberal attitude is contradicted by the traditional environment around her. She believes that one cannot live fully out of what is borrowed and one must love their own language and heritage, though her love for this ancient culture is balanced by a more pragmatic and progressive mindset. Laila’s musings on honour, family, society, colonialism, 1947 partition, religious tension, love, and death reflect timeless issues whose relevance is not limited to the pre-independence days in India. Let me quote some of her thoughts here:

“Death was acceptable only as an abstraction and a speculation, in stories and not in reality, at a distance and not in such cold proximity.”

"I wondered about the dead whose graves we had come to visit, whose stream of life flowed in us and through us. They had been kept alive by generations that respected their traditions. Did our alien thoughts and alien way of living push them into oblivion? Or was it final release for them and freedom for the living?"

I enjoyed the touch of humour which made the otherwise serious tone of the book a bit lighthearted, mostly the amusing (and slightly mean) descriptions which young Laila offers.

"Mrs. Lal and Sita gushed over each other with a sweetness that only dislike could engender."

"Her frock, stretched across her knees, showed her thick ankles. When summer covers, shrunk in the wash, were put over armchairs with thick wooden legs, they looked just as Mrs. Martin did at this moment."

Another thing I loved was that the book has so many forms of address used for elders as they are not referred to by name. Readers not familiar with Urdu/Hindi might not be aware of these. I’m also from the North India and particularly partial to the endearment “bitiya” (used for a daughter) which Laila was mostly addressed as.

I will leave you with an excellent introduction for this book by Anita Desai who herself has captured the pulse of India in her novel “In Custody”.

“In India, the past never disappears. It does not even become transformed into a ghost. Concrete, physical, palpable - it is present everywhere. Ruins, monuments, litter the streets, hold up the traffic, create strange islands in the modernity of the cities. No one fears or avoids them - goats and cows graze around them, the poor string up ropes and rags and turn them into dwellings, election campaigners and cinema distributors plaster them with pamphlets - and so they remain a part of here and now, of today."

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have roots in Lucknow (though of not remotely as lush a leaf as Hosain's), so I found myself hopelessly enamoured by the prose style used in this book. Sunlight On A Broken Column does—as many have pointed out—quite literally render the gilori-sweet, lyrical zubaan of the region in English, but it does so with a delicacy only someone who understands the intricacies of both tongues can; it is virtually lossless in a way translations—even the ones we learn to carry out seamlessly within our heads—rarely are. The prose illustrates itself.

And what a picture it creates, what a story it tells from the cusp of change: a story of transitions and passage—from girl to woman, from confined to content, from British India to the upheaval of self-rule and coloniality taking root. Hosain and her protagonist, Laila, tell us their tale from a position of privilege both literal and literary: Laila, like the author, is an orphaned daughter of taluqdars, raised in a distinguished orthodox household but differentiated from many women of her standing by the benefits of a 'western' (opposed, here, to theological) education. Her story, though evocative of an aristocratic opulence she lived through, is not woven of a simplistic or single-minded nostalgia but dazzles with its prismatic portrait of Society with the capital 'S' reflecting the subtleties of a fraught slice of time, of its beauties and ills, of the development of various political strands that rose up to thatch the roof of a subcontinent becoming conscious of colonial injury, and of the relationships that thrived and competed when the reigns came to rest, in theory, with those without feudal pedigree.

I was taken with the narrator, whose critical consciousness reflects a bearing unimaginably progressive for the 1960s, and through whose eyes we are made privy too to the the affairs of women of various backgrounds, of their experiences of orthodoxy, of patriarchal control, and of the paternalism and parochialism of the ruling classes both white and native. Particularly gripping is how Laila's struggle and her inability—though not for lack of volition—to commit herself to a cause is juxtaposed with the political developments of the time and the fledgling towards freedom:

Even as we argued I had recognised how my emotions gnawed at my logic. I recognised my dreams had always been of change without chaos, of birth without pain.

Several times, and in multifarious ways, do we see her grappling with the question of what this freedom is. While her own rebellion may seem more quiet, she does establish her appreciation for something fiercer through the character of Nandi, a companionate servant she grows up with. And though she is not a revolutionary, the way Laila discloses herself given her place in time is nothing short of, made better by the way she uses satire to critique her own class and peppers her observations with humour:

"I like my position in life," laughed Saleem. "It is very comfortable. When I was young I thought otherwise, but that was adolescent masochism which I mistook for Marxism. Mind you, I still appreciate its principles, but I am no Lenin and can establish no Soviets..."

"Linen serviettes?" Aunt Saira frowned. "I do not know what you are talking about."

This is a truly spectacular story, of love and coming-of-age, and if I were to draw comparisons in that manner they would be with Jane Austen (much to the latter's disadvantage). It is a pity that Hosain wrote no other novels, but I am keen to read her short stories very soon. I will also be returning to this book, even though—or perhaps because—neither of us will ever see Lakhnavi culture as the other has lived it.

[Zaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Partition of India in 1947 didn't affect only one family or a class or a group of people. It made its impact on every element of our society. There was damage not only of property but also of lives. But the worst part was the impact it left on the memory of those people who lost loved ones, left their wealth in the native lands and got displaced.
Attia Hussain, being a member of the family of Taluqdars, gives the description of the changes that were predominantly affecting the ruling class at the effervescent moments of partition. Along with representing ruling class, she also mentions the contradictions present in our society. She portrays the miserable life of the underdogs of our society. She showed her empathy towards the ignored section of our society. 
It would be naive of me to compare this novel with Quratulain's Aag Ka Darya(River of fire), because I couldn't fully understand Aag Ka Darya on first reading. Still this novel is divided into four parts just like Aag Ka Darya and both of them are based on Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb. Both novels touch culture more than politics. I was feeling like reading the English version of Aag Ka Darya. 
There are many beautiful lines but my most favourite is,
"The whole city was richer because he was in it, and every street, and turn of a road held the possibility of his appearance."

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was born in a feudal family in Kerala in India, with royal connections, at a time when it was dead and rotting in the state: and grew up among people who constantly chewed the cud on how great the "good old days" were. Because of it, I had a soft corner for feudalism until education and reading opened my eyes on how despicable this system was, and how inevitable its downfall. But even now, I enjoy reading about those times with their decadent charm. Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column is an evocative rendering of feudal India on the cusp of history.

Ms. Hosain was born as the daughter of a taluqdar (feudal lord) of Oudh. She read extensively in her youth and was the first woman graduate from her family. She resented the partiality shown towards sons in traditional households and defied her mother to marry the man of her choice. After 1947, she and her husband settled in England.

Laila, the protagonist of the novel, is the author's thinly-veiled alter ego. She is the granddaughter of Syed Mohammed Hasan, the taluqdar of Hasanpur; the orphaned daughter of his younger son Ahmed. She lives in her ancestral home with her grandpa ("Baba Jan"), his widowed elder daughter Majida and unmarried younger daughter Abida, Majida's daughter Zahra, and various housekeepers, ayahs and servants. Baba Jan's elder son Hamid is in the civil service, and he and his wife Saira live separately in the city. There are also constant visitors to the house in the form of Laila's cousins Asad and Zahid, and various friends of Baba Jan. Indeed, the cast of characters is so huge (like a TV serial!) that Ms. Hosain has deemed it fit to provide a list at the beginning of the novel.

This is a coming of age story. Laila, who is a naive girl of fifteen at the start of the novel, is a weather-beaten widow in her mid-thirties at the end, mature beyond her years. Her growth as a character is punctuated by the significant events of a subcontinent in turmoil. The ideas that shaped and cut it into pieces is represented by the various people with whom she comes in contact. We have Uncle Hameed, the staunch political liberal who however, is a social conservative; the shallow Majida and her even shallower daughter Zahra; Abida who is love personified but conservative to the core; Hameed's elder son Kemal who is a liberal in the true sense of the word; his younger son Saleem who becomes a political opportunist; the idealist Asad who never ever wavers from his principles of Gandhian non-violence; his brother Zahid who is an out-and-out separatist... and a host of others, representing in microcosm the bewildering and maddening entity that is India.

Laila, even though she has liberal, left-wing ideals, is strangely passive when it comes to action. Her rebellion is restricted to verbal outbursts until she falls in love with an "unsuitable" young man, the poor cousin of a local ruler. Laila makes her break with her roots with this marriage; however, her husband's sense of inferiority haunts and forces him to join the army and he gets killed. Laila, left a widow with a young child, is witness to her family literally going to pieces.

The novel is written in four parts. The first three parts (comprising more than eighty percent of the book) trace the growth of Laila from a girl of fifteen to a young woman of twenty. The last part jumps ahead by fourteen years, with the disillusioned, widowed protagonist looking back on the intervening years while wandering around her empty house which is soon to be sold off. This break is deliberate, and jars the reader's sensibilities, which has been dulled to sedateness by the smooth flow of the narrative till then. This section with all the distressing stories told as flashbacks, gives us a sense of a final break - the loss of something which can never be retrieved. This is as much a story of a death (colonial India) and a bloody birth (the twins India and Pakistan) as it is of of the coming of age of Laila.

The novel ends with Laila meeting Asad, who has loved her silently and unselfishly for a long time, in the empty house. The last dialogue is loaded with metaphor.

"Laila," he said, blinking at the shadows, "what have you been doing so long in this empty house?"

"I have been waiting for you, Asad. I am ready to leave now."

Yes. Time to move on.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zahra was full of information, "The cleaner is to be dismissed and Nandi will get the beating she deserves from Jumman, I am sure. Such wickedness, when she is so young! Immoral people cannot he allowed inside the house."
"That will he awkward for certain people."
Zahra ignored my remark. “ The insolence of these menials that she should have dared to talk to our uncle in such a manner, and in front of everyone, of all those servants! Laila, how could you have interfered? Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Yes I am. I’m ashamed to call him uncle. I’m ashamed that you have no pity because Nandi is a servant girl. Besides, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I don't care.”
“Do you know what is wrong with you, Laila? All those books you read. You just talk like a book now, with no sense of reality. The only cure for Nandi is to get her married quickly.”
“The cure for a good girl is to get her married quickly; the cure for a had girl is to get her married quickly. Do you think of anything out getting married quickly?”

This book, in great part, is about boundaries (specifically those in pre-Partition India). Boundaries between children and their elders; boundaries between Hindus and Muslims; boundaries between Indians and the British; boundaries between rich and poor; and, intertwined into these boundaries, the overarching boundaries between men and women.

This book is predominantly set in 1930's India (a brief bit at the end is post-Partition), and is narrated by Laila - at the beginning of the book she has just turned 15, and she is 23 in the middle portion - a strong voiced, bookish teenager, who's persistent and keen sense of observation ties the many threads of the narrative, and the many themes of the novel, together. The book touches on a rather overwhelming list of social topics relevant to 1930's India, especially as it related to young women, but the narratorial voice makes it all come together perfectly.

This was a joy to read; it is beautifully written, and at the same time densely informational. The book contains a keen intelligence, bolstered by a righteous indignation at the boundaries between it and the world, and a caustic regard for the hypocrites who placed and enforce those boundaries. Really damn great.

[Saburi Pandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not always that you find a book, that resonates your fears, your questions, of course never your answers. Because your answers you must find on your own. Through every page that I turned of this book, Laila became me, and I, Laila. It was after long that I could identify with a protagonist so deeply that the story in this book seemed to be something I had read before, rather lived before in some other life. Attia Hosain, I can say after reading this book is a beautiful good woman, someone who can write with so much heart, simplicity of manner and thought, would have to be beautiful inside out. It's sad that she did not write many novels. This book is one of those rare complete novels that truly encompasses the trajectory of thought, personalities and conflict of action and ideas in politics and social life. A true and rare glimpse of the India before and after partition. I would highly recommend this novel to be read and cherished as one of the best in the Indian literature.

[Yasmin Rahman · Rating 3 out of 5]

a very lyrical book on the claustrophobia of growing up in not just a Muslim but any other traditional home. Reflects the search for individualism in extended families that put "honour and duty" and "keeping up appearances" above even truth and freedom. Alternatively,it can be read as a book about the freedom struggle through a woman's eyes.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second book about pre-independence Muslim life in North India I've read in the space of two months, and both of them have been gems.

The first was Ahmed Ali's 'Twilight in Delhi', which is enjoying a late renaissance, and this book, which deserves one.

The books cannot be more dissimilar, Ahmed Ali's books is a lamentation of a story, sad, slow and meticulously told, while 'Sunlight on a Broken Column' is celebration of a world past, of a Lucknow long gone, dead and buried.

There are lines in Ahmed Ali's book about Lucknow, about the 'lucknawi' speech, sweet and respectful, dripping with what they call 'tehzeeb'. The difference in the novels is the same too. Attia Hosain's classic story is a triumph of storytelling. Characters flow into each other, scenes merge to form images in your head, and the passion and fervor among the people of a chained country finds its voice, albeit meekly. The voice is that of a Muslim girl, one with ideas, concrete thoughts and ambitions, but who is still afraid to exercise and affirm them.

This is the moral thread of 'Sunlight on a Broken Column', the friction between a traditional upbringing, a desire to stay true to one's traditions, to the words of our elders, and the pull towards rebellion, towards love, towards what you know is right. This is no dead debate; even now, in our country, these thoughts rage in young heads, and find outlets in dangerous ways.

Beautiful prose, unforgettable characters (Abida being my favorite), and a premise that is still so very relevant, Attia Hosain's novel should be a staple for literature and religion studies classrooms.

An important, wonderful read.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this last year and it has become a favourite ever since. I don't think the five-star rating does justice to the impact this novel had on me.

It is hard to review, especially on goodreads. I'd call it a bildungsroman set in pre-Partition India that is about femininity, Muslim life, growing up, memories, and love. Laila is so dear to me as a lonely girl with escapist tendencies figuring out her politics and herself in tumultuous times.

I wish this were a more notable part of the South Asia literary canon. It tackles so many important themes and weaves them together brilliantly. A hallmark of my favorite South Asian writing is the wispiness of memory and the reactions to trauma. The last scene where Laila traces her old, palatial house does this so well and it provides both her and the audience with some kind of closure. Also, I like subtle romances with intensity like the one in this.

I don't think Indian movies and shows today give interiority to Muslim women's inner lives like this, and I am glad for the existing scholarship on it. It's wistful, moving, and thoughtful all at once.

[Kartik Chauhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent, incredibly tender and emotionally intelligent novel about (the falling fortunes of) a feudal family in Lucknow during the 1930s and ‘40s. Marries politics and personal/filial history so masterfully, and remains so definitively melancholic/nostalgic throughout, much like the city it is set in, described often as one with an “ancient spell”, “graceful”, “poetic” and “sleepy”.
Started reading it in Lucknow on a trip, all the more special to have done so. Highly recommended—I feel like reading it all over again!

[Hena · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Indian partition and love story all in one, how can you go wrong? This is the one book that I loved from my "Modern Muslim South Asia" class in college. For a few years I only had a photocopied version of the whole book, and then I finally found a cheap, used version online. Yay!

[Mohammad Sabbir Shaikh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laila is an orphan, growing up in a traditional Muslim family. The story focuses on her struggle of living in a family where women keep purdah, where questioning your elder's actions and opinions are considered disrespectful. It's the story of her fight for her freedom at the time when the nation itself was gearing up to fight for its freedom. It's a fine book, an important one as it gives us a glimpse of the minds of the Indian youth (Laila, her cousins and friends) during Independence.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Attia Hosain’s only novel, first published in 1961 is a classic novel of Muslim life, portraying the traditional feudal society into which Attia Hosain was born, in pre-partition days.
“Her greatest strength lies in her ability to draw a rich, full portrait of her society – ignoring none of its many faults and cruelties, and capable of including not only men and women of immense power and privilege but, to an equal extent, the poor who laboured as their servants. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of her writing is the tenderness she shows for those who served her family, an empathy for a class not her own”
(Anita Desai – in the introduction to the 1988 Virago Modern Classics edition)
Set mainly in Lucknow of the 1930’s, Sunlight on a Broken Column centres on Laila, the orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family. As the novel opens fifteen year old Laila is living in her grandfather’s house, brought up by her two aunts, who observe purdah, alongside her cousin Zahra. Zahra is frivolous yet happy to submit to the traditional life mapped out for her, as the novel begins conversations around Zahra’s marriage have already begun. Baba Jan, Laila’s grandfather is a formidable figure, hugely respected the entire household is run around him, he is old and ill as the novel opens, and his eventual death brings change for Laila.
Soon Laila is living with her uncle Hamid – a “liberal” though a cold and autocratic figure. As Laila grows up and starts to attend university – she is surrounded by a variety of people; politics is very much on the agenda for many relatives and friends, though Laila herself is unable to commit herself to any one cause, but that of her own freedom. Uncle Hamid’s more liberal household, and Zahra’s marriage allows Laila access to a society that unmarried girls traditionally didn’t experience. In the younger generation of Laila’s friends and relatives we are able to see something of the future of India and the changes that are on the horizon. While in the characters of Laila’s aunts, Aunt Abida in particular, Attia Hosain has portrayed the traditional self-sacrificing obedient role that Laila struggles to understand.
“I think Destiny's purpose is merely to shock us at moments into a state of awareness; those moments are milestones in between which we have to find our own way.”
Laila is a girl with a strong spirit – her struggle for her own independence matching that of India herself. Hosain portrays the claustrophobia of this world and frustration felt by a forward thinking young woman to perfection.Brought up in a world where the traditional rules of obedience, honour and dishonour are more important than personal happiness and the feudal society is still controlling the lives of the servant class, Laila begins to pull against these traditional ways. Laila is horrified when ignorance prevents a servant woman’s family seeking medical help – desperately trying to save the woman Laila sends her to hospital – only it’s too late. In these “Taluqhdari” families – into which Attia Hosain herself was born in 1913 – the rules for the servant classes are just as harsh, maybe more so, the judgments upon a female servant seduced or preyed upon by a man, abysmally cruel.
The conclusion of the novel – is brilliant – as through Laila’s older eyes we see the changes that partition brought to families of this kind, the fracturing of households and the ending of a way of life.
Sunlight on a broken Column is an engaging and evocative story of traditional family life in the decade before partition ripped India apart. I am not sure how well this novel is known now, but it certainly deserves to be well known. I have enjoyed reading this novel so much, – and very much look forward to hearing how Liz and Karen – who have been reading this novel at around the same time as me – feel about it. I really now need to find myself a copy of Attia Hosain’s short stories, what a shame she only ever wrote one novel.

[Inderjit Sanghera]

Hosain’s evocative prose captures a lost world, a world of indolence and upheaval, of late imperial India just as the independence movement is starting to gain ground, a world of decadence amidst the delirium of revolutionary politics, as Hosain captures the last gasps of a dying empire and the awakening of a political new reality in the form of Indian and Pakistan.

‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ ostensibly follows the story of Laila, an orphan who is living with her family in Lucknow. The early chapters are fairly episodic, capturing various important junctures in Laila’s childhood and adolescence. Hosain is able to skilfully recapture the atmosphere of 1930’s India, as Laila’s quiet existence is punctuated by the political upheaval which is overtaking the country, so that whilst the independence movement initially exists on the frays of Laila’s world, she becomes increasingly entangled in its machinations, whether it be via her friendship with her cousin Asad or her conflicts with her uncle. In many ways the tribulations of the independence movement mirror conflicts taking place in Laila’s own personal life, as she feels trapped between modernity and the expectations of her conservative family, which come to a head as she marries Ameer. In many way this clash of cultures is the true theme of the book, as both Indian and Laila’s identities are irrevocably shaped by the British and in many ways the book focuses on them trying to find their place in a world they scarce understand.

‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ is a brilliant story of pre-partition Punjab, a story which captures the chaos and confusion of an Indian which is just about the emerge from the cocoon of the British Empire.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Cphe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and descriptive. The story of Laila who is brought up in a wealthy, traditional household and her struggle for independence, in a time of upheaval. Thought the female characters were well presented here.

[Mahima · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set against the backdrop of the independence struggle in India and the subsequent Partition, Sunlight on a Broken Column is a book that deals in the nuanced subtleties of politics and that raises many questions about the various causes that people commit themselves to. Its protagonist, Laila, in her quest for selfhood and identity, stands in for countless young Muslim women caught in the snare of tradition. Hosain lays bare the reality of oppression and marginalisation of different kinds, her story never oversimplifying any of it, however, but painting a picture of a culture, of a way of life that can only be grasped in the full, when explored from every angle. And that’s exactly what she does with it, the exploration enfolded in a narrative that’s melancholically beautiful, the sadness that it stirs up rising on each page like a haunting presence. It is a tale of resistance and rebellion, and of love and the concerns of the human heart. But the book is as much its story as it is the imagery that it evokes. Hosain's prose, as the novel's title would suggest, constantly plays with light and shadow, creating countless images that are both poetic and cinematic in nature. Her descriptions of the world that her characters inhabit are so rich and sensuous that the world rises, life-like, in the mind of the reader. And once the book is finished, it stays there, playing like footage from an old Hindi film.

[Anushka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only one feeling resonates throughout the book - bittersweet. That is the only way I can hope to explain this book to someone. I loved it.

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain is a semi-autobiographical novel, drawn from the author's childhood in pre-partition India. Set in 1930s with the growing animosity towards the British as well as the growing division between Indians themselves, class, caste, religion ripping the society open. The story is told through the lens of Laila, a young woman belonging to an elite Muslim family, whose political ideas of what it means to be a whole person and what it means to be free is formed through her observations of these immense changes.

The book tackles so many complex political themes through an effortlessly beautiful writing. The privilege of class and the innate violence that comes with it; the divide and rule policy between Muslims and Hindus initiated by the British; the clash of traditions vs. modernity; casteism; and above all, misogyny that is accepted as honour. Every bit of it so nuanced and multi-layered. 

I wondered about the poetic title, and I understand it's about the protagonist, the society, and an India on the precipice of change, a fading world where the old ways give away and a new world as utopian as it may seem also feels like a death (and it was with the horrific violence that partition brought along). It's so easy (and saddening) to see the traces of these themes in today's India, where we are again on a precipice. 'Decolonisation' has become a bastardised word as it is now taken to mean a return to bigotry and misogynistic violence. 'Honour' yet again defines a woman's right to choose, exist, even breathe. Communal hate and control is seen as empowerment. History is being changed to suit this 'decolonisation'. Yet again, the masses accept whatever fate waits for them because yet again, the ordinary person has little say. 

Hosain's writing is so gorgeously sensory, you can visualise it, smell it, touch it. An era brought alive so completely, not seen in sepia tones, but through a multi-coloured lens. Yet while reading it I didn't feel any nostalgia for a forgotten era for it seems we are living through that turbulence all over again. That fear, that uncertainty, the clashing ideologies of what it means to be patriotic. Hosain's writing brings that cruel reality closer home rather than transport you away. I am going to remember this one for a long time.

[qamar⋆｡°✩ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5☆ — what a resplendently rendered indian classic! the writing, the characters, the relationships between them, and even the descriptions of scenes all had a glow from attia hosain's masterful writing. the writing captured and described laila's interiority and her manner of thought with an engrossing ornateness without being excessive. it had a thoughtfulness to it that brought out the richness of what could have otherwise been mistaken for uninteresting observations.

the major themes were of class and classism, memories and their haunting presence, social conventions and the way it limits a person in more ways then one would think. family and one's duty to it is central tenet that we see come forward often, intertwining with the abovementioned themes. there's also the search for one's own identity as an entire nation figures itself out in the background, and, of course, love in all its forms and manifestations.

[P · Rating 3 out of 5]

During his lifetime, the painter Raphael exceeded the fame of Michelangelo among their contemporaries. Now, of course, most people recognize the name 'Michelangelo' and Raphael is one of the sidelights of Renaissance art. Attia Hosain's novel was one of the most well-regarded of its time when it was published in 1961. Reading it today one struggles to understand why. As George Orwell put it, the only real critic of literature is Time. Hosain's novel is brimming with tiresome and claustrophia-inducing descriptions of endless dinner parties, luxurious dresses woven by unseen hands, sumptuous food cooked in kitchens that do not merit a word of acknowledgement, delivered to the table by silently obsequious bearers. It is the sunlight on a broken column, the "dried voices whispering together" (the words from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men). It is also the dull lives of indolently rich women of the feudal landed gentry who would come to be increasingly irrelevant by the rise of the mercantile class. Read it for its occasional gems, such as an Englishwoman's well-meaning but devastating compliment of Nehru as almost British himself. I enjoy Hosain like I would admire a Raphael but give me the fiery Michelangelo of Ismat Chughtai's Tehri Lakir (Crooked Line) any day.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read with the ReadWomen Goodreads group in December 2021/
This 1961 novel centered around the years prior to Partition in India centers on a well-to-do Muslim family in the voice of Laila, a young girl who is able to be educated while many other girls her age are forced into marriage.
There were many things I liked about this book: Hosain's writing style in Laila's voice is thought provoking and unflinchingly political. It was also interesting to look at Indian Partition from a primarily Muslim perspective, and I am not sure if I have read one before. Also, the feminist message of this book must have been unique for its time. Although I had to do more research than usual while reading, I also liked that Hosain thrust the reader right into the setting of her book without many explanations for readers unfamiliar with Indian/Pakistani culture. This was very effective and made me feel as if I were in India with the characters.
What I did not like as much was the plot and the dialogue. I have no problem with politics being a major part of a novel (in fact, I usually enjoy it), but I felt that the characters in this book too often fell into political diatribes that felt unrealistic and honestly sometimes a bit boring. I tend to like more plot in a book, but I really appreciate what Hosain was trying to do in conveying the political and ideological tensions.
All in all, this was a very good read. Thank you Alwynne for choosing this book and bringing so much great information on the themes and subject of the book to our attention.

[Divvy S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depiction of colonialism in India and its aftermath done finally right, thank god.

[Fiona Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt like a very intelligent and thought provoking book, but unfortunately it was too political for my tastes.

[Aalekh D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I recognized my dreams had always been of change without chaos, of birth without pain.”

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a coming of age narrative but then it is so much more. This beautifully written book is very much influenced by the life of the author, but she insisted that the characters were not the actual people from her life but were composites created to describe the world she grew up in and the forces working on Indian society at a time agonizing and disruptive change.
Laila Bitia, born in 1917 is growing up in Northern India in a prominent Muslim taluqdari family headed by her aging grandfather. The taluqdari are the landowning class who rule over a feudal system where a subjugated peasantry provides the labor which gives the landowners their enormous wealth and power. With both parents are dead, she is raised by her Aunt Abida in a house populated by a large extended family headed by her paternal grandfather Bab Jan.
The period of the novel is the 1930 and 40s, a time of increasing social and political tension leading up to independence from Britain and Partition in 1947. Laila’s family life is steeped in tradition. The family’s house is divided into men’s and women’s sections and the older women live in purdah, a lifestyle which ensures that they are never seen uncovered by men they are not related to. Laila describes shopping trips with her aunt where they never leave the car but send a servant into the shops to buy according to their orders. Characters die or nearly die in childbirth because they refuse to be treated by male doctors.
Fortunately for Laila some of the women in her family are well-educated and so she can go to high school and later pursue college and post-graduate studies. At school she makes friends with the daughters of families frim all walks of middle class life. However, her most influential windows on the world are her cousins. Her first cousins Kemal and Saleem, like many young men from wealthy families, have been educated at private school in England and at Cambridge University and are quite clear-eyed about India’s confrontation with modernity. On their return to India they become great friends to her. Her more distant cousins, Asad and Zahid, are also welcomed into the family home and their political activism has a great influence on her. All four young men see that the end of the taluqdari system is approaching.
Not surprisingly the politics of sex have a large impact on the life of young women of Laila’s class. For the servant girl assaulted by a man of higher class, there is banishment while he goes unpunished. For a young woman of the family to be found alone with a man, even one of her own class, leads to a quickly arranged marriage to save face for her family. Hosain effectively uses the characters of her friends to illustrate the different outcomes for her peers. One marries an upcoming young man whose career takes him to London giving her access to a Western style of life which makes her look down on her more traditional friends. Another marries the man chosen for her while keeping the man she really loves emotionally tied to her. Laila marries the man she loves and is cut off from her family forever, particularly the beloved Aunt Abida who had raised her.
“I knew then that understanding was impossible between us. She was part of a way of thinking that I had rejected. I had been guilty of admitting I loved, and love between a man and a woman was associated with sex, and sex was a sin.”
Laila’s struggles to become an individual while remaining connected to those she loves, parallels India’s own struggles of the period. At the beginning of the novel Hindus and Moslems live side by side peacefully fully respecting and often participating in each other’s observances. By the large section of the book which takes place after Laila’s marriage Partition has taken place causing much carnage and Laila’s family members have each had to make hard choices about how each individually wishes to live their lives.
The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is beautiful. Small wonder that Leonard Woolf felt great sadness that he was not able to publish it through Hogarth Press. This is the only novel Attia Hosain (1913-1998) wrote. She authored short stories but the majority of her work was journalism about Indian issues. She presented her own women’s program on the Eastern Service of the BBC for several years. Like her protagonist she was one of the first women to `graduate’ from a Taluqhdari family.

[Anshul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a type of autobiographical story in the last days of British rule in India and revolves around the life of a young Muslim girl just entering into nobility. The author describes the lifestyles of the rich Nawabs of India at that time in a very realistic way. As old people were like in this novel there are a lot of incidents that makes us feel that girls at that time of period use to be a burden on their families.The elders of the community use to think that the presence of a female in making decisions is not at all necessary. The novel tells us that the women of elite classes at that time were greatly dependent on their female servants which were doubly brought under control by caste and class. Hosain has greatly represented the whole of the society,both men and women of both the lower as well as upper classes.