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

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

 The novel is a first person narration by Laila of her from the age of fifteen to mid-thirties. Covering a socio-politically turbulent period in Indian history during 1932 and 1952, the novel is a sensitive and poignant tale of the growing up of the orphan Laila. The novel divided into four parts covering a period of twenty years in the life of the country and of Laila. The first part begins with the illness of the orphan Laila’s paternal grandfather Baba Jan and the resultant changes in the lifestyle of the Zenana, the women’s quarters. Laila’s spinster aunt, Abida, who has brought up Laila after the death of her parents, is forced to move into her father’s apartment in order to nurse her properly. Soon after Baba Jan dies and his only other surviving son uncle Hamid comes back to take over his responsibilities as head of the household. Laila’s aunt Abida is married off, as is her cousin Zahra, her distant cousins which comprise of the poor relations in the aristocratic household Asad and Zahid are packed off to college and Laila moves into the new house. The second part begins with Laila’s new world college, new girl friends of her own age but from very different background and the politics of this new social world. The third part charts the changes in Laila’s life with the arrival of her uncle Hamid’s sons from England, Kemal an ICS officer and Saleem a lawyer. Through them she has the opportunity to meet other men, nearer her age, go to parities and she soon falls in love with a lecturer, Ameer, who does not come from a comparable aristocratic background. Laila joins postgraduate studies her affair is discovered. The last section of the novel, the fourth part, is fifteen years later, when Laila revisits her ancestral home in 1952, and the intervening years are narrated in snatches, in flashback. Covering a period from pre-war years to partition, the novel depicts a vivid picture of a social and political change during that period and its impact on simple innocent life of the villagers. The novelist realizes that before the bestial horrors were enacted on the eve of the communal riots. There was communal harmony in the subcontinent. In spite of differences in both thereligions they respected each other’s religion, loved and valued each other’s culture and life and lived in peace and harmony.