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Notes on Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column by Student Help.
Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) is a more or less, autobiographical novel.
As there are many similarities between Hosain’s life and the narrator- protagonist Laila’s story. The novel is a first person narration by Laila of her life from the age of fifteen to mid-thirties. She looses both her parents and as a result lives with her grandfather, along with her father’s sisters Abida and Majida and, Majida’s seventeen year old daughter Zahra. She is brought up by her orthodox but principled Aunt Abida. As per the wish of her father, she enjoys the benefit of western education.She has to keep purdah like her aunts. However death of her grandfather makes uncle Hamid, her father’s elder brother, head of the family and her new guardian. Uncle Hamid, a man of ‘Liberal’ ideas, is never the less an autocratic guardian. No longer in purdah Laila starts attending college. Her University friends as well as her distant cousin Asad become involved in antigovernment protests. Thus, it is an extended family. The fading away of the taluqdar family tradition, its feudal system is suggested in the very beginning of the novel. When Baba Jan is on the death bed, it is implicitly revealed by Laila when she says, “We knew Baba Jan had not much longer to live.” (SOBC, 14).
Second part of the novel represents the disintegration of the family. In the novel there are several characters and they are married couples. The out worldly westernized Saira is a mere echo of her husband. If she has given up purdah or is engaged in social work it is at the insistence of her husband. Her Westernization is so super facial that after her husband’s death she reverts back to the traditional values. For Zahra marriage is an escape from the purdah culture and the rigid discipline it imposes on unmarried girls. Marriage grants her the freedom to socialize. Abida’s marriage is a marriage between two incompatible. For her family honour and respectability come before individual happiness. Sita, like Saira, is only outwardly westernized. Even her intense love for Kemal does not give her the courage to fight family, society and the barriers of religion. Laila is a central character in the novel. Laila’s marriage is neither a surrender nor an escape, a compromise, a social necessity, or a matter of family honour and respectability. It is love and trust in the loved man for what he is. Her love for Ameer the one without any social status or money, gives her courage to flout uncle Hamid’s authority and to face aunt Saira’s angry glares. Love gives her the strength to bear the emotional estrangement that arises between her and her dearest aunt Abida. For Laila, Ameer means safety and completeness in life.
In Laila’s family a woman does not have much of a choice as the marriage is arranged within the immediate family or from amongst the relatives. Laila by marrying Ameer rejects her uncle’s authority. Her marriage with Ameer who is not well placed in life is also a statement against the subordination of women in the name of family honour and respectability. Thus, her decision about her future is a triumph over the social world that she inhabits.
Nandi grows up as an individual from an illiterate lower caste background and shows her fitness for survival in the most hostile of situations. According to Jasbir Jain and R.K. Kaul Nandi symbolizes the “Slavery of marriage”.
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