Attia Hosain, Phoenix Fled
A few more points:
A few more points:
- Firstly, it seems that I was right. There's an interview with Attia Hosain from 1991, where she says that she 'did not read much about Urdu literature except when I had to', and was 'totally influenced by the West'. So in her introduction to Virago's 1988 reissue, Anita Desai is constructing a rather facile opposition between India and 'the West' in emphasising the supposed influence of Urdu literature on her work.
- In my previous post I suggested that these stories were 'works of memory'. It is interesting that Attia Hosain produced so little fiction. Her other published work consists of a single novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, and a cookery book, Cooking the Indian Way (in collaboration with Sita Pasricha), which I imagine must have seemed terribly exotic when it appeared in 1967! There are lots of reasons why an author only publishes one or two works, and Attia Hosain did leave behind more stories, and an unfinished second novel. She was also a broadcaster and journalist, but her son Waris does suggest there may be more to her literary silence following the publication of her novel.
According to her biography she was producing stories as early as the late 30s. It's not clear if that includes all of the stories that were published in Phoenix Fled. Several of them were clearly written after 1947, since they reference the violence of Partition. It's the appearance of the collection in 1953, 5 or 6 years after she made the decision to remain in England rather than move to Pakistan, that I'm trying to construct this narrative around. Ultimately, it's a question of biography, which I don't have quite enough information to answer. Still, whenever they were actually written, they were at least published in 1953. For any reader then or since, these are stories of a world which was and is located in the past. The act of publication works as the means of recuperation.
According to her biography she was producing stories as early as the late 30s. It's not clear if that includes all of the stories that were published in Phoenix Fled. Several of them were clearly written after 1947, since they reference the violence of Partition. It's the appearance of the collection in 1953, 5 or 6 years after she made the decision to remain in England rather than move to Pakistan, that I'm trying to construct this narrative around. Ultimately, it's a question of biography, which I don't have quite enough information to answer. Still, whenever they were actually written, they were at least published in 1953. For any reader then or since, these are stories of a world which was and is located in the past. The act of publication works as the means of recuperation.
- As I've alluded to above, the historical moment which separates the past that these stories depict from the present of the 50s in which they first appeared as part of a book is not just Independence in 1947, but more significantly, the violence of Partition which accompanied it. Since reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns a while back, I've become interested in this notion that in the north of India in particular, despite the huge differences between the two faiths, there was actually a comfortable mixing and sharing between the cultures of Hindus and Muslims, a shared culture that was to a large extent ripped apart and destroyed in the aftermath of Partition. And that there were Muslims who believed in this shared culture and were consequently opposed to the creation of Pakistan. Especially nowadays, I don't imagine that it's a voice which is often heard in either India or Pakistan.
The two stories which reference the violence do so obliquely. It's so subtle in fact, that I even had to reread the final few pages of the title story just to work out what was happening: it ends with the beginning of an act of violence, which is clearly the horrors of Partition. More effecting still is the bleak narrative of a young girl in the pertinently titled 'After the Storm'. Her account of what she has experienced emerges in fragments as she struggles to describe her experience. Experience which, mercifully perhaps, she appears unable to fully comprehend. The narrator who is encouraging her to talk similarly looks away from what is being described: the central moment of historical and personal trauma can't be faced directly.
The two stories which reference the violence do so obliquely. It's so subtle in fact, that I even had to reread the final few pages of the title story just to work out what was happening: it ends with the beginning of an act of violence, which is clearly the horrors of Partition. More effecting still is the bleak narrative of a young girl in the pertinently titled 'After the Storm'. Her account of what she has experienced emerges in fragments as she struggles to describe her experience. Experience which, mercifully perhaps, she appears unable to fully comprehend. The narrator who is encouraging her to talk similarly looks away from what is being described: the central moment of historical and personal trauma can't be faced directly.
- One final point, one I'm not sure that I know how to fully articulate: it's been strange to read this collection in the same week that also saw the transmission of the harrowing documentary 'India's Daughter' about Jyoti Singh, a film which I've not been able to get out of my mind since I saw it on Wednesday night. I suppose there's little which directly links them, other than my encountering both in the same week. Both are stories which have come out of India, separated by decades, the one fiction, the other tragically, horrifically real. Many of Attia Hosain's stories are concerned with women's experience of a deeply patriarchal culture, and it's difficult not to find the concerns of these very different works resonating together in my mind.
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