Notes on Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column by Student Help.

Notes on Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column by Student Help.

Patriarchal Plight of Women:

 Women are not only sexual slaves of men, they suffer for making their personal choices, even they are treated as commodities for the honour of the family. Women’s lives are full of failed loves, forced marriages and finally. It is a life of struggle and surrender without freedom of choice. Sunlight on a Broken Column tries to depict that women’s subjugation is a universal phenomenon. Women are victims of the patriarchal system even within the domestic space
that is supposed to be their sole domain. The novel re-emphasizes that a woman can exercise her will and choice in a quest for her selfhood, as exemplified in the characters of Nandi and Laila. Zainab is fond of Asad but she could not think of marrying him because he is not his equal in blood. Aunt Saira and uncle Hamid reluctantly accept Kemal’s marriage to Prein Wadia, a Parsee and Laila’s marriage to Ameer. Kemal’s love for sita could never materiallize because Sita is Hindu, Sita’s disillusionment in love, taught her to look at love in a different almost rebellious way: What has love to do with marriage? It is like mixing oil and water. Love is anti-social, while matrimony preserves the world and its respectability. Follow my example. I married with my mind unblurred by sentiment and everybody is happy. (SOBC, 296) After marriage, according to her parent’s will, can be considered as her return to patriarchy that Nandi could defy. But even after her marriage she continues to meet Kemal whenever and wherever they could. She confesses to Laila: I had children by my husband though my body revolted against the touch of any man I did not love. But it was bearable if I had a hope of being with Kemal, as if that cleansed me. After he stopped seeing me it did not matter what happened. If my body could accept one man without love it could accept others. One discovers so many reasons for sleeping with a man once love is put out of the way. I think hate is as good as any. Certainly it is the only feeling that remains in memory. (SOBC, 297) Attia Hosain indeed bares and exposes the limits of patriarchy that except domination it never knows anything else. It is a cruel system that tramples over a woman’s genuine desire and feeling. This is the lot of both Hindu and Muslim women during the 1930s and 1940s in India. Like Nandi, Laila challenges patriarchy and its domination in her own way. There is a parallel between Laila’s assertion of her individuality and the freedom struggle. Thus partition affected the major as well as minor characters in the novel.