"...all that had been simple, unquestioned and changeless changed."

Attia Hosain, Phoenix Fled

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.

- 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.

- 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.

Currently reading...

...and here's a wonderful connection between things I'm interested in: her son, Waris Hussein, was director for the first four episodes of Doctor Who, as well as a later serial 'Marco Polo'. He seems to be an interesting person in his own right, but of course, it's being the very first director of Doctor Who for which he'll always be most remembered. I love his own memories of it:

"[I was] a graduate from Cambridge with honours, and you're directing this piece about cavemen in skins...I thought, 'Where have I landed up in my life?'"

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On the face of it, it seems such a delightfully odd juxtaposition. Stories of pre-partition feudal North India, and the first story of what now seems to be an almost quintessentially English science fiction show for the BBC. The Sceenonline profile argues for a consistent interest in 'female psychology' throughout Waris Hussain's work. Certainly what I've read of his mother's work suggests a concern with the roles available to women within a feudal patriarchal society.

In her introduction to my edition, Anita Desai tries to make a connection with the Mughal school of miniature painting and the influence of Urdu. This feels rather a stretch to me - a touch of exoticism for a Western audience that is being reintroduced to an Indian author - but even allowing for that, there's surely equally a modernist influence. A concern with the confrontation between an older feudal India and modernity. These are also works of memory, describing a world which by that point no longer existed - written after Attia Hosain decided to remain in England following Partition in 1947. So the bridge between tradition and modernity, which I'm rather artificially setting up here with my somewhat comical juxtaposition, was present in her life.

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Other family connections: her niece is the Pakistani author and journalist Muneeza Shamsie, and her great niece the novelist Kamila Shamsie. Quite a family!

I'm reminded of something I once read in an interview with Martin Amis, when he was promoting his autobiography. Part of the the inspiration for writing Experience was that he wanted to record his relationship with his father. This fact, two successful writers in the family, one the parent to the other, was a 'special case'. Even at the time, I thought this was off. Just of the top of my head I could think of Dumas pere et fils. Now I can see how his claim is part of the romanticising of the writing life. As though plenty of people don't follow their parents into similar or related careers.

And what about siblings? The Brontes? A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble? Vidia and Shiva Naipaul? Or is it only parents and children that count. The literal act of generation paralleling the metaphorical one of literary production.

It's also about opportunity. How many writers had parents who nursed ambitions, but never made it into print? Or who might have done once or twice? Or worked in journalism? How many mothers or grandmothers had gifts for storytelling, but never even dreamed of making it into print? So yes, I think it's a rather gendered claim which sees only certain kinds of writing, of literary art, as worthy of importance.

As so often with Amis, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if he'd been a bit less impressed with himself, he'd have been a better writer.