Gendered Nationalism and Emotional Confinement in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column

Abstract

Gendered nationalist discourses and the emotional prisons in Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961)145 Spanning pre-independence India and the years of Partition, the novel depicts what happens when feudal Muslim nobility goes into decline, and individual identities change- amalgamate/ divide under colonial modernity that was vying for a place alongside indigenous nationalist movements. The paper contends that the novel's understanding of nationalism is male, allowing men to participate in politics, while relegating women to symbolic and domestic positions. Women serve as the custodians of cultural values, moral righteousness, and family honour but are denied the public space of modern nation-making. By the means of Laila, through revealing how emotional entrapment works in family structures, patriarchal powers and within the zenana by means of spatial isolation. Employing a feminist-postcolonial lens, this paper examines the way Hosain critiques nationalist ideologies and patriarchal traditions to embody the idea that political freedom does not always result in gender emancipation. But what women know of nationalist history is the fragmentation of emotion and the shackles of psychology.