In almost all the stories, in the conflict between tradition and modernity or westernisation and a time-honoured way of life, Hosain’s empathy seems to be with the traditional because, for all its injustices and inequalities, she found it a more humane order, one where the principle of noblesse oblige entrusted the strong to look after the weak. In this she differed from her more radical-minded contemporaries, especially the progressive writers such as Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who wrote also about roughly the same milieu, i.e. Begum sahibs and their retinue of servants and hangers-on, but with far more sympathy for the underdog and a far more scathing denouement of the effete begums. For Rashid Jahan, who had joined the CPI in 1933, Marxism was crucial to understanding, and ultimately changing, many things that were unfair in the privileged world she occupied, such as colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, industrialization, socio-economic developments and other forms of uneven or lopsided development. Rashid Jahan’s own experiences as a doctor reinforced her belief that in an essentially unfair world, women were more unfortunate than most. Ismat Chughtai, born in more straightened circumstances and having had to fight for education and a place under the sun, wrote bold stories that challenged traditional morality and worn-out notions of a woman’s ‘place’ in society. She was feistier, less willing to conform to the traditional notions of feminity or even literary propriety and certainly far more confrontationist than even her male colleagues. Also, given her interest in sexual matters, comparisons between her and Manto have become inevitable.

The nearest parallel between Attia Hosain and a contemporary woman writer, to my mind, is with Qurratulain Hyder who was born to affluent parents who were not merely in favour of education for women but were themselves writers and one who straddled the world of Urdu and English with equal ease. Given their privileged birth, both Hosain and Hyder invited derision and scorn. Ismat Chughtai, for instance, wrote a scathing denouement of Hyder entitled Pompom Darling deriding the world of hyper-anglicised characters with names like Shosho and Fofo who swam and danced and played, a world of charming people all cast in the same mould, all living in a Camelot that was destined to end. Ismat’s rants against Hyder typifed the progressive writers’ worst ire for another sort of writer who recreated a world of lost glory. Attia Hosain escaped the outright hostility meted out to Hyder in the early days because she does not look back to lament, instead she celebrates; less requiem to a lost world Hosain’s work rejoices in what once was but is no more. The use of English allows her a certain freedom of expression, certainly more latitude. Writing while living in London in the late-1950s, while working for the BBC, afforded her an audience such as the one the Urdu writers, especially the women writers who were often first published in magazines and only later in a book form, could not even imagine! Writing in English and being published first in the West and much, much later in India did to her what in a sense happened to Mulk Raj Anand; it made them an overnight sensation and the toast of London’s literary circuit.

Its title taken from T S Eliot’s The Hollow Men, Sunlight on a… is an unsentimental look at world where power, privilege and position slips from one hands to another. Attia’s father was Shahid Hosain Kidwai, a taluqdar from Gadia in district Baranbanki, one of the early batch of western-educated fiercely anti-imperialist young Indians. Her mother was from a distinguished family of poets and writers and judges from Kakori, men of learning who had moved away from land-owning. Attia grew up in a home where Sarojini Naidu, Attia Faizi, Ali Imam, Abbas Ali Baig, Sir Sultan Ahmad, Motilal and his son Jawaharlal Nehru were regular visitors. In their company, families like hers despite being an active member of the British India Association — an organization of the taluqdars that Husain once memorably described as ‘a kind of a trade union’[3] — Attia was drawn towards the swadeshi movement. Moreover, with the city of Delhi lying in ruins after the devastation of the Mutiny, it was Lucknow that remained the only citadel of culture and learning, in a word tehzeeb. And it is this world, teetering at the edge of decline and decimation, that Attia Hosain brings to life as only one who had belonged to it can. The plurality of this world is such that even the beggars ask in the name of both Allah and Bhagwan, a childless man makes vows to both the Holy Prophet and Hanuman, and families such as Attia’s celebrate Holi and Diwali with as much fanfare as Eid and Shubarat. Some dietary restrictions were indeed observed but they did not come in the way of friendships. Years later, it was still inconceivable to Attia Hosain that faith could divide; she said: ‘That was their life, our life was ours and it came together in friendship. We were together in marriages, at births, deaths and any festivities.’ [4]

‘Soon you will have to apologise for your birth and breeding, not be proud of them,’ a character prophecies early in the novel. And, indeed, it turns out to be so. The protagonist, Laila, an orphan brought up in a wealthy family, vows to one day join the satygrahis; till then, she stops singing God Save the King at school concerts, and leaves cinema halls when its first chords are struck. At 15, she feels like she is a ‘part of a great movement’. Sunlight… goes on to tell the story of her childhood, adolescence and coming of age. Like Hosain herself, Laila is educated at an English-medium school (the La Martiniere) and then goes on to do a Masters from the Lucknow University. The palatial house she shares with a gaggle of relatives and retinue of servants is a ‘living symbol’. She returns to it five years after the cataclysmic events of 1947 and finds it in ruins. ‘The house had buried one way of life and accepted another.’ ‘In its decay,’ Hosain writes, ‘I saw all the years of our lives as a family; the slow years that had evolved a way of life, the short years that had ended it.’ However, where Sunlight… departs from other partition chronicles is in its complete lack of bitterness and Attia Hosain rises above her contemporaries in her clear-sighted depiction of why some Muslim families chose to leave for the new country, Pakistan, and why some stayed on. Her belief in friendship and tolerance shines through, as does her unsentimental understanding of the human heart. She has her questions and her doubts but she rises above them. Her recognition of struggle – be it against despair or destiny – and her positive acceptance of life makes Sunlight on a Broken Column not merely an engaging story told with a certain style and sophistication but a testament to pluralism and multiculturalism.