Progressive Laments and/on Partition: The Cost of Freedom in Khadija Mastur’s Aangan (1962)

Abstract

During the 1947 Partition, the new manifesto of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), which had committed to portraying the ‘radical changes’ within Indian society, demanded ‘neutrality’ from its writers to dissuade ideas of communalism. Using Khadija Mastur’s 1962 novel Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard), this paper analyses women’s writing as embodying, and yet encoding ambivalence towards, the PWA’s directives on progressivism. In the novel, Mastur takes readers behind the scenes of established narratives, destabilising preconceived notions of men’s freedom-fighting and its aftermaths. This utilisation of women’s Progressive Partition literature will thus showcase women’s history of dissent in the Indian subcontinent’s freedom struggle through the interweaving of autobiography within the literary landscape of their fictional works.

Keywords:

• Aangan
• freedom-fighting
• Khadija Mastur
• Partition
• Progressive Writers’ Association
• women’s writing

Introduction: Women and the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA)

The Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) was a formal organisation of writers, intellectuals and political activists whose activity spanned almost four decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. It comprised regional branches throughout the subcontinent leading to cultural productions in Urdu and English, as well as Punjabi, Bangla, Malayalam and Hindi. From its inception, the PWA’s manifesto challenged the ‘fixed ideas and old beliefs’ of portraying the Indian way of life in literature.¹ While men, particularly from the educated, upper-class echelons of society that made up the PWA, dominated intellectual fields in colonial India, the PWA was founded to examine and dismantle these unequal power structures and bring excluded sections of society into the limelight. The PWA drew attention to class disparity, poverty and colonialism, and while gender was certainly a subject within their literature, there is a clear absence of any discussion of it when formulating a definition of ‘progressive’ in manifestos and at conferences. Therefore, the women writers of the PWA had to create a space for themselves and their writing within the movement as well as within the canon of Indian literature.

In writing themselves into the literary history of colonial India, both men and women of the PWA practised the genre of socialist-realism. In undivided India and after Partition, the PWA adopted and adapted this burgeoning genre, which many members had been exposed to through their international connections, particularly with Europe and the Soviet Union.² It was the latter’s implementation of the genre that the PWA used the most, following Maxim Gorky’s 1934 doctrine for socialist-realism in literature.³ In it, Gorky emphasised the duties and responsibilities of writers in the face of a changing world, advocating for greater representation of the working classes. Drawing from this, Weir classifies socialist-realism as a genre in which ‘literature and politics are all of a piece, with literature providing a vision of a future socialist reality’.⁴ In the Soviet Union, therefore, socialist-realism as a genre was used as a tool to comment on the authors’ society and their desire to change it. For example, in Soviet socialist-realism, the protagonist, or ‘positive hero’, was ‘decisive, self-sacrificing, and lets nothing divert him from the pursuit of a better world order’.⁵ In accordance with this description, Morson has accused Soviet positive heroes of lacking the ‘psychological complexity of Western counterparts’; for him, it is merely a literature of ‘purpose’ without the literary merit of aestheticism for which classical Russian literature was known.⁶ This also summarises the PWA’s stance upon its inception and beyond, with its primary purpose being a commitment to anti-colonial resistance, a foundational theme for progressive writing. Nevertheless, as this article will discuss, the PWA also reworked the Soviet positive hero, keeping the self-sacrificial tendencies, but weaving it into the socio-political landscape of the subcontinent, particularly in the context of women’s writing on Partition, as well as in adherence to the traditions of revolutionary Urdu poetry and prose.

In accordance with its commitment to literary dissent, the PWA’s manifestos saw many changes across its nearly forty years of activity. By 1949, Progressive writer Khadija Mastur was part of a group of Pakistani writers who committed to furthering the progressive cause in independent Pakistan by establishing a Pakistani branch of the PWA.⁷ It was within this group that women further cemented their voices, accessing the literary circles in independent Pakistan that remained dominated by men, and yet increasingly saw a need for women’s perspectives and stories. Hence, I use Aangan as a way to understand women writers’ critique of progressive politics, through a focus on the gendered concepts of home. Here, I argue that Mastur’s work serves as a critique of men and their preoccupation with national freedom, often at the cost of domestic harmony, following the legacy of women progressives such as Jahan and Chughtai, but carving her own niche in the literary canon of Pakistani literature. Examining these concerns as laid out by Mastur’s novel means to analyse how public space events like the ones hosted by the PWA, the 1947 Partition and the Indian Freedom movement directly and indirectly impacted the women of the subcontinent.

Narrating the outside world

In the early 1940s, the PWA was establishing itself as the foremost cultural organisation for progressive writers, artists and intellectuals. Yet there remains little documentation of the exact role women played in this evolution of its status. A critical oversight in the early years of the PWA stems from the omission in its manifestos that specifically address the unique experiences of women. The short story collection, Angaaray,⁸ had preceded the drafting of the first manifesto, and Rashid Jahan as the sole woman contributor had faced most of the criticism for her participation in it, yet the absence of even the word ‘woman’ within the first manifesto is jarring.

This marginalisation of women in progressive literature is in direct contrast to the PWA’s ideology, which, by the nature of its socialist foundation, did not discriminate based on gender. On this basis, Rashid Jahan was enthusiastically included in Angaaray by her male co-authors, and Ismat Chughtai was publicly defended for ‘Lihaaf’ by the PWA. However, Jahan’s fellow contributors were powerless to defend her from the backlash the collection generated, and even Chughtai was privately rebuked for drawing the Association into another charge for obscenity. Moreover, by omitting all mention of women in their manifestos, the PWA lost a great opportunity to champion women’s writing as another ‘radical change’ in the subcontinent.⁹ Attracting more women to the PWA, independent of their connections to male writers, was not something they prioritised. Rashid Jahan’s scathing critique of this mindset amongst progressive male writers, narrated by Sajjad Zaheer, is notable:

[She said] The trouble is that all of you merely pretend to be Progressive. When it comes to practice, whether it is Sajjad Zaheer or Mumtaz Hussain, the expectation from women is that they should do all the uninteresting and dirty work in the house, keep your homes clean for you, and make your tea for you, so that you can sit back as the masters of the house and create literature.¹⁰

Jahan’s observations serve as a reminder that the women of the PWA were different from popularly remembered male writers of the time, such as Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55). Although he engaged with issues of class, caste and religious differences in compelling ways, Shingavi explains that Manto and other tangentially progressive figures like him remained ‘sympathetic but aloof’ to the PWA’s ideologies and dictations.¹¹ Jalil describes Manto as ‘always too individualistic, too idiosyncratic, too irreverent to adhere to any laid-down policy or guideline’.¹² The PWA expected its members to follow its values set out by the manifestos, and writers were openly criticised at conferences when they did not. Writers like Manto—often male and popular amongst readers—had the luxury of going against PWA values, such as Manto’s alleged ‘lack of ideology’, yet remain associated with the organisation, which benefitted from the publicity generated by their work.¹³ However, the positionality of the women writers meant that they approached intersecting issues such as feminism, masculinity and the treatment of women from both an empathetic and sympathetic point of view. They wrote about issues that affected them personally, not just the matters they observed. Thus, they could never be considered ‘aloof’ from their subject matter or the PWA’s politics, which may explain the harsh public reaction to ‘Angaaraywali’ Rashid Jahan’s work. Thus, given their relegation to the domestic, it is no surprise that only a few figures like Jahan and Chughtai take centre stage when discussing female progressives. However, it is essential to pay attention to those who persisted and remained aligned with the movement even if they did not have the same—often negative—publicity and scrutiny these two women received.

In the 1930s, as noted by Jahan and admitted by Zaheer, women had played a supporting role, such as managing the day-to-day administration of the PWA and its conferences. Many women were also involved in the Association’s activities only due to their proximity to well-known male progressives, whether through friendships or familial ties. For instance, Rashid Jahan was the wife of Mahmuduzzafar and a close friend of Sajjad Zaheer. However, there is a distinct lack of women’s voices in ‘official’ accounts of the PWA’s activities, such as Sajjad Zaheer’s memoirs. Due to the domination of these male-centric sources regarding the Association’s history, it is necessary to examine alternative sources of information to establish what exactly the position of women was at this particular moment in the PWA’s history.

These sources offer further insight into why the role of women has been omitted from these official narratives. A striking example is Shaukat Kaifi’s¹⁴ memoir, Kaifi and I, which contains detailed accounts of the All-India PWA conference before Partition in Hyderabad.¹⁵ Like memoir and life-writing, fiction also serves as a window into the lives of women, particularly those belonging to progressive circles, and the particular impact they had upon Partition, as well as its impact upon them. By the 1940s, women of upper- and middle-class families began to achieve higher levels of education and entered the workforce, thereby circulating in both the public and the private domains. However, these are not the kinds of female characters that feature heavily in the male-dominated progressive literature of this period. This is because, for the PWA, literature concerned with the Freedom movement, Partition and the broader genre of socialist-realism was primarily preoccupied with the accomplishments of men. The acts fictionalised in PWA narratives ranged from: the everyday lives of peasants and farmers—who were often men—to galvanise support for the causes of freedom; to anti-colonialism and the war against fascism—again, roles that they expected only men would and could fulfil. Exceptions to this rule are Manto’s stories about sex workers in Bombay (now Mumbai), which centre on women’s voices, opinions and desires. However, Manto’s ostracisation from the PWA due to the frequent charges of obscenity as well as his unwillingness to conform to the ‘topical’ brand of literature¹⁶ that the PWA advocated at this time means that while his work is commendable, it does not align with the mainstream progressive narrative with which women’s writing is being compared with here.

Progressive Partition women’s writing

At a time when progressive writers like Krishan Chander and Saadat Hasan Manto were writing about the tragedy of Partition and the violence on the streets, the women of the PWA were also working with similar themes but setting their stories in the domestic space of the home. Antoinette Burton examines the twentieth century work of women writers Janaki Majumdar, Cornelia Sorabji and Attia Hosain, and summarises her findings thus:

Occupying a unique place at the intersection of home and history by virtue of their relationships to imperialism and nationalist projects (not to mention their complex identities as ‘Indian women’), all three women produced histories that preserve the domestic—not simply to commemorate it but also to critique the present in which they lived and, with it, facile notions of home itself.¹⁷

This preoccupation with the idea of the ‘home’ was prevalent in the works of women progressives, particularly their writings on Partition and the Indian Freedom movement. Mostly writing in Urdu, their concerns mirror those of their Anglophone counterparts, as noted by Burton. Furthermore, Yaqin has argued that the ‘concerns of middle-class women continued to shape the development and popularity of Urdu prose’ from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.¹⁸ As such, unlike their Anglophone peers, women’s writing in Urdu was read by a different subsection of society, such as the literate housewife relegated to the domestic sphere of the home, and thus was considered much more accessible. In addition, an essential distinction in this literature produced by men and women centres around Partition and the nationalist struggle for freedom. The dominant trend places women’s writing within the domestic space of the home, thus allowing them to focus on the micro-concerns of the everyday.

To discuss the private in this context is to access the privacy of the home, the ‘domestic’ as Burton calls it, and glimpse the everyday workings of ordinary life that continued along its own routine.¹⁹ In doing so, while the Partition writings of women showed that they dominated this routine, the outside world and its disruption was still largely the men’s domain, both in literature as well as reality. Saikat Majumdar identified Partition writing by men as largely concerned with ‘the larger, public processes of nationalism, nation-building and nation-breaking’.²⁰ Jill Didur, meanwhile, advocated a ‘gendered’ understanding of Partition through women’s writing, to better encapsulate the literary concerns of the time:

A gendered understanding of the partition necessitates a shift in the scholar’s attention from the public to the private, from the high political story to the local, everyday account.²¹

It is this shift from the high political to the local every day that concerns this paper. The aim is to home in on the domestic space as the site of contention within women’s Partition narratives, in comparison with the politicised space outside the home with which men’s narratives have been concerned. Through this framework, I examine the unique concerns that women PWA members highlighted within their Urdu writings that were reflective of the broader experiences of women during this time. Even though the Freedom movement was accelerating, familial concerns dominated the domestic space, such as educating children, paying bills and arranging marriages. The fight for freedom from British colonialism was not unknown or unconsidered within this domain of women, but their preoccupation centred on maintaining a sense of normalcy within the space they controlled.

Women’s writing immediately before and after Partition was often autobiographical, particularly the work of female progressives. Individuals like Mastur were well educated and privileged enough to interact with people from all sections of society, including men. However, they often made their observations from within the private domain, reflecting on the outside world and its events through the perspective of female characters confined to the home.²² The element of realism that the PWA advocated is central to these works. While Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai were critical literary figures from the 1930s and 1940s, respectively, it is essential to remember that they were exceptions, and the subjects of their writings were often women who, like them, existed in a privileged and urban environment. Their experiences were an idealised version of what the average woman of the subcontinent could achieve, and more often than that, they too focused on what was not achievable: mobility, agency and the freedom to choose.

However, the inhabitants of the private domain were not ignorant of the wider political and social upheavals happening beyond the home. Women progressive writers and the literature they produced reveal that women were leading their lives, and the outside world’s problems served as a backdrop to domestic and private concerns. What makes these stories important is that these concerns within the domestic space allow us to examine the public domain in a new light. In this paper, therefore, I argue that progressive women writers’ narratives of Partition offer a history of literary dissent, uniquely posited due to their personal and literary confinement to the domestic space of the home. This confinement did not restrict their narrative abilities, but rather allowed women members of the PWA to both adhere to and stray from the Association’s directives regarding the progressive standpoint on Partition. To this end, I analyse Aangan to showcase how the political upheaval outside the domestic space reflected in these household narratives set during the Partition of 1947.²³

Freedom’s cost—The Women’s Courtyard (1962)

Aangan (The Women’s Courtyard) by Khadija Mastur (1927–82), published in 1962,²⁴ is primarily set in Punjab, a province where much of the violence of Partition occurred and the site of significant events in the freedom struggle, such as the 1940 Lahore Resolution. It is also distinctly autobiographical, drawing on lived experiences like much of Partition literature. Mastur, born in Bareilly, moved to Lahore across the Radcliffe Line upon Partition, where she became associated with the Savera group of the Pakistani PWA. The group comprised well-known individuals such as Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sibte Hasan, Hajra Masroor, Abdullah Malik, Arif Abdul Mateen, Zaheer Kashmiri, Mumtaz Hussain and Mastur herself.²⁵ They were termed as the most ‘radical’ of the PWA’s membership in Pakistan and remained associated with the progressive movement their whole lives, even after the government of Ayub Khan banned the Association in the late 1950s.²⁶

The Women’s Courtyard presents freedom on two levels, portraying not only the struggle for freedom in the Indian subcontinent in the 1940s but also the struggle for women’s personal freedom within the home. The novel tells Aliya’s story from within the confines of her uncle’s home, a location she only leaves upon Partition. It differs from the dominant Urdu narratives of progressive Partition literature by interweaving autobiography with personal perspectives on the violence their characters encounter, contrasting with the objectivity and neutrality that the PWA demanded. This preoccupation with freedom in both the public and domestic space is fitting for a novel set between the late 1930s and 1947 but written in 1962; by the time of its publication, the subcontinent was free, but the aftershocks of Partition were manifesting through the Indo-Pak wars, a military dictatorship in Pakistan and the decline of progressive ideals in India. Against the backdrop of this legacy, The Women’s Courtyard is nostalgic for the idealised freedom the subcontinent had visualised in the early twentieth century and juxtaposes it with the reality that its characters have to confront after the events of 1947. This is showcased by the novel’s sections, with the first 14 chapters labelled ‘Past’, a space Aliya eagerly inhabits.

In Mastur’s novel, Aliya’s struggle for freedom takes place in the home as the national struggle seeps into the domestic space through the men in her life, each of whom represents a different ideology within the Freedom Movement, with a different fate. Her father is an anti-imperialist government servant; her cousin Safdar is a communist; her uncle is a Congress supporter; and his son Jameel joins the Muslim League. Using Aliya’s relationship with these characters and how their decisions impact her life and the lives of the women around her, I argue that Mastur utilises the interconnectedness of both public and private space to highlight the cost of pursuing freedom, which is the central premise of the novel.

Aliya idealises her freedom based on what she does not want to become at the hands of men: duty-bound and bitter like her mother and aunt; destroyed by love like her sister, Tehmina; ostracised like her neighbour, Kusum; and even miserably taken advantage of like her cousin, Chammi. In Aliya’s eyes, the suffering of all the women around her is linked to their romantic relationships with men. The psychological impact of her observations, combined with her sister’s suicide after not being allowed to marry the man she loves, manifests in her decision to never marry: ‘Nobody can push me around. I am not Tehmina!’²⁷ Her goal is to live her life free of the pain her female relatives and friends face, and is in direct contrast to the men, who idealise national freedom without knowing its meaning other than the expulsion of the British. They constantly prioritise this struggle over domestic affairs, leading to the breakdown of their political ideologies and family life.

Fatima Rizvi calls The Women’s Courtyard a ‘multi-faceted text’ where ‘national and familial prospects become intertwined—the breakdown of the one heralding the breakdown of the other’.²⁸ Signalling the violence of Partition infringing upon the home as a sign of the breakdown of the family unit, Rizvi’s analysis focuses on Aliya’s ‘emotional and economic anguish’ and the development of her personal womanhood.²⁹ Expanding upon this observation, I argue that all of Mastur’s female characters serve as links between the national and the domestic, struggling to keep the familial unit from breaking down even when the male-dominated nationalist struggle threatens the sanctity of the domestic space. Despite their attempts, however, the breakdown is inevitable:

To Aliya, Aunty was the cautionary tale in that house. Her eyes seemed filled with centuries of grief. She alone had taken on the burden of worrying about all these people.³⁰

Aunty’s eyes are not only filled with the worry and grief triggered by the men of the family, but her ‘burden’ is also the responsibility of managing the traditionalist domestic space, which has for centuries centred around the needs of the men. In Aunty’s lifetime, the men prioritise the freedom struggle over the needs of their family; in the case of Aliya’s grandmother, for example, it is the loss of her favourite and youngest son to the Khilafat movement.³¹ Seeing this play out across generations shows Aliya what her life would be like should she forgo her own struggle for freedom, which she pursues by getting an education, a job and rejecting marriage offers. In doing so, she strives for a life that directly contrasts with the lives of the women around her.

However, Aliya’s rejection of the idealism of marriage manifested before she arrived at her uncle’s home. The psychological impact of Tehmina’s death is that Aliya grows to ‘detest politics’ after witnessing Safdar’s loyalty to the Communist Party of India (CPI) over his loyalty to her dead sister.³² Like the Soviet-style positive heroes we see in the works of male progressives such as Mulk Raj Anand and Krishan Chander, Aliya too embodies some aspects of this form of socialist-realism: her dream, however, is personal emancipation and freedom from the life of despair that she sees marriage and romance lead to, rather than independence from colonial authorities. Aliya, therefore, aspires to a world where she is free from the societal expectations that dictate women’s mobility as well as their attitudes in the aftermath of experiencing violence and trauma.

The shattering of Aliya’s home and her sense of personal stability at the hands of a man who cares more for the national struggle for Independence than his family does not stop with Safdar. Her father’s hatred of the British, from refusing to send his daughter to a missionary school³³ to calling the British ‘dishonest businessmen’,³⁴ and finally to his arrest for attacking a British officer, causes Aliya’s entire world to change: ‘She felt so peaceful under his protection, but now she was bereft of that protective love’.³⁵ The cost of her father’s anti-imperialist fervour is the helplessness of Aliya and her mother, who are forced to leave their home and move in with her father’s eldest brother’s family.

In her uncle, Aliya finds another man unwilling to confront the impact of his political activities on the home: ‘Uncle had already gone to jail several times and had been chained up and sentenced to solitary confinement. There were huge black callouses on his ankles, and when he washed his feet he’d gaze at those callouses with pride and affection’.³⁶ However, the only reason Uncle can actively participate in Congress rallies and debate politics all day in his study is because his half-brother runs the family business for him, and Aunty manages the home. This traditionalist domestic space the family lives in demands that Aunty run the household, but it also demands that Uncle provide for them, whether by paying for the children’s education or arranging suitable matches for the girls of marriageable age. Uncle’s inability to fulfil his obligations as the family patriarch is the reason for Aunty’s worries. However, the novel’s other characters rarely confront him regarding his shortcomings. Even Aliya, the narrator of their family’s struggles, makes it clear she does not—and is unable to—dislike him:

She could not understand why she still felt the stirrings of love in her heart towards these agents of the households’ sorrows and ruination. What sort of affection was this, what sort of love was this, that made her long for them at the slightest prompting?³⁷

Aliya’s realisation of her unconditional love for the sources of her pain foreshadows her future, where she turns away from the romantic love that both Jameel and Safdar offer her at different times. These ‘agents of ruination’ and their preoccupations with the entirety of the world rather than the inner workings of their homes cause tension in the novel. Here, it is necessary to add that although the home is the domain of the women, it is not only they who suffer at the hands of these men of the world; the cost of Uncle’s commitment to the freedom struggle is even more apparent when his son Jameel, who joins the Muslim League, partly to stand against his father, calls out his hypocrisy:

And don’t you talk down to me about my intellect; you only paid for my education through primary school, then left me to play gulli-danda and went off to liberate the country—as though I wasn’t a citizen of your country, as though I had no right to live a good life too.³⁸

This confrontation is a rare example in Mastur’s novel of a character calling out Uncle for his failings as the family patriarch. Jameel’s criticism of his father’s failings within the family mirrors his own political convictions, as well as Aliya’s: while the men ‘went off to liberate the country’, the ones at home were left to fend for themselves. However, Jameel’s words have little impact on his father. Uncle consistently dismisses both his sons as frivolous—Aliya describes Jameel as a ‘sham poet’ who is not even allowed to access his father’s precious library³⁹—and so feels no need to advocate for their future in the same way he advocates for the country. In doing so, however, Uncle exacerbates the tension in the household, which culminates in Jameel enlisting to fight in World War II to provide money for the household.

On the subject of World War II, through her female narrator, Mastur highlights the impact the outside world has on Aliya’s life and, thus, the lives of those confined in the home. Here, the novel’s title is significant; an aangan is a courtyard enclosed by the home’s walls. In the novel, this courtyard is the furthest point of the home where Aliya and the other women can venture and is the centre of all their activity—the cooking, the talking and the resting all occur here. Therefore, the aangan offers a compromised version of freedom and the imprisonment that Aliya is eager to release herself from, particularly on her own terms. It is here that, while the women are cooking, Mastur offers the reader snippets of Aliya’s thoughts that reveal the family’s financial troubles due to the impact of the war:

Somehow they eked out their expenses by economising on everything. The war had been going on for a few years now and inflation had completely destroyed their household. Everyone worried all the time. Even if they got enough to eat, their clothing barely covered their bodies.⁴⁰

Although financial problems are never directly discussed with Aliya, whose education is still paid for by her mother despite the family’s hardships, the space of the aangan allows her to eavesdrop on conversations between her mother and aunt. Therefore, the aangan, as the most ‘outside’ space of the enclosed home, serves as the backdrop to all other ‘outside’ issues. Aliya does not learn about her uncle’s politics from him but rather from sitting outside in the aangan while he meets with friends in the library; similarly, every time there is a family incident, such as the announcement of her father’s death, she rushes to the aangan to hear the news. To add to this feeling of restrictiveness, Aliya’s narrations only occur when she is in a domestic space: in the second half of the novel, she works at the Walton refugee camp in Lahore and tells her mother it brings her ‘peace’.⁴¹ However, the reader is never given access to those peaceful thoughts because the narration abruptly cuts off when she leaves home, and begins again once she re-enters through the house’s gate. By confining our image of Aliya to private spaces such as homes and aangans, therefore, Mastur ensures that we, as well as Aliya, only receive news of the outside world, from the War to Partition and beyond, from external sources, while remaining confined within the walls of the aangan ourselves, thus making this a shared experience between reader and narrator.

Despite economic difficulties and the inability of the men of the family to provide for them, Aliya’s life goes on, and revolves around the women in her life, with whom she spends the most time in the aangan. When any trouble arises, it is they who find a solution, while Abba languishes in jail, Uncle goes to Congress rallies, and Jameel goes to Muslim League processions. For instance, Aliya’s mother finds a way to pay for her education; Aunty bestows upon her the maternal love that her mother does not have the time for; and Chammi becomes like a sister to Aliya in place of Tehmina and serves as a cautionary tale of the devastation love can wreak upon a woman, due to her unrequited feelings for Jameel. Furthermore, while Aliya finds herself eagerly reading stories featuring the romance of the freedom struggle and listening to her Uncle’s narrative of what a free India would look like, she is wary of the archetypical freedom fighter herself, because she knows the fate of those around him:

Her heart felt the greatest sympathy for all the characters in the books who had been shot in the struggle for freedom, fighting for the welfare of man, but she also feared them. She believed that such people loved no one: they got married, had children, then destroyed them. Their own homes had no part in the world. Their families were not mankind, they were thorns in the feet of love that injured you in just a short while.⁴²

As this passage highlights, Aliya can sympathise with these freedom fighters because, in those men, she sees the men of her own family, for whom she still holds affection. She continues to write to her father, worries about his health in jail, humours her uncle by asking him questions about what Independence will look like, and even slips her youngest cousin, Shakeel, money to pay for his books and schooling. Nevertheless, the one thing she cannot compromise on is loving anyone she is not already duty-bound to care for.

Time and again, Aliya rejects romance and companionship with the opposite sex in favour of economic security, her education and even her pride. However, the common thread between all her rejections is the men’s participation in politics. When Aliya’s first suitor, Jameel, declares his love for her, she rejects him, fearing that agreeing to marry him would doom her to a fate like her mother’s:

The truth is that I have no faith at all in the love of any man, and if at some point I do begin to have faith, it wouldn’t be in someone like you. It wouldn’t be in anyone like my father or yours. Those who are consumed by the needs of others are always unaware of their own households.⁴³

Rizvi reads Jameel as an amalgamation of Mastur’s ‘own interest in two of Pakistan’s well-known Progressive writers, Faiz [Ahmad Faiz] and [Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi]’.⁴⁴ He is a poet, like both men, and a soldier, like Faiz; however, unlike his supposed inspirations, he is not an avowed Marxist, even though his participation in the freedom struggle means he does care for ‘the needs of others’.

Through Rizvi’s analysis, Safdar can be read as the ‘true’ progressive out of the range of male characters since he joins the CPI and gives up life and love for the communist cause, like the progressives Mastur was surrounded by. When he finds Aliya in Pakistan and asks her to marry him, he tells her she reminds him of her sister, and the surge of affection Aliya feels for the memory of her dead sister is equivalent to the affection she had for Safdar in her youth. However, the Safdar of the present is in direct contrast to progressive ideology. He says:

I’ve changed the direction of my life—if the world is destroyed, so be it, it has nothing to do with me. I will just earn money now, enjoy myself; now I will fulfil the dreams of owning a car and a house. I cannot go to jail now. Right now I’m trying to get an import-export licence.⁴⁵

Aliya realises that Safdar is not the principled man from her past, having abandoned the ideals that led to his departure from their house and, ultimately, her sister’s suicide. His inconsistent loyalty to his politics shows his unreliability to Aliya, which makes him just as repellent to her as the behaviour of her father and uncle, who had dedicated their lives to politics at the cost of their families. Therefore, she rejects Safdar as well, and the novel ends with the realisation that she has achieved her goal of not becoming like the women of her family—the price, however, is the realisation that she will be alone for the rest of her life.

Mastur’s major accomplishment, then, is to showcase how each freedom has a cost: for Aliya, freedom from the fates of her Amma, Aunty and her sister Tehmina and friend Kusum, meant that she had to reject everything they stood for, including the hope for romantic love. Aliya’s desire was not for the nationalist idea of freedom that prioritises the patriarchal restraints of her society, which she is eager to resist throughout the novel. Instead, her goal was emancipation from the societal expectations that would condemn her to the same life of grief and worry led by the women in her family. Therefore, for Aliya, the nationalist goal of freedom is merely a condition the outside world desires; her world continues to repress her freedom no matter the country’s status. And for the men of the family, their involvement in the struggle for Independence through various movements and ideologies ultimately ends in disaster: Abba, the anti-imperialist, dies in jail, and Uncle, the Congress party worker, is killed after Partition. Jameel, the Muslim League-er, loses all hope of marrying Aliya and so marries Chammi, and Safdar, whose involvement in the CPI held him up as a beacon of higher ideals for Aliya, is rejected by her because of the loss of those ideals. Thus, Aliya is free, and so is the subcontinent, but the cost is the partitioning of households and the Partition of the country.

Conclusion: Reframing freedom and dissent

In a 1968 Mahfil interview with Carlo Coppola, Amrita Pritam stated:

In science, there are many good women doctors, even women in politics. But there, things are different. They are accepted. Basically, there is a prejudice against women in literature. Men take women’s writing lightly; they doubt a woman’s sincerity.⁴⁶

In Pritam’s opinion, women easily find acceptance in workplaces where literature is not the active profession. Her assessment of the wider ‘doubt’ against women writers’ sincerity can be read as existing because women’s writing unlocks a world that men remained disconnected from: the domestic space of the home. The Women’s Courtyard also highlights this, with numerous male characters presented as archetypes of politicians and freedom fighters in the 1940s. For them, the nationalist struggle and Freedom movement override the family’s needs. For Pritam and Mastur, as for other female progressives including Ismat Chughtai and Rashid Jahan, women’s works are sincere and inherently progressive because they highlight the plight of the common woman. However, these women do not have revolutionary songs sung about them like male freedom fighters have, so they are not taken as seriously. Hence, by focusing on these women and drawing attention to the domestic space, I argue that the history of Partition can be read in a more nuanced way, making this novel an exemplary point of access for the ‘cost of freedom’ for both the nation and women in the aftermath of Partition.

The above reading of The Women’s Courtyard reframes the history of freedom-fighting and dissent, contrasting with the mainstream Partition literature attributed to the PWA, which male writers dominated. Due to this, women negotiated the PWA’s blind spots by setting their novels within the private space of the home. As established above, protecting the home from the outside world’s impact was impossible. Hence, in the novel, Mastur forces her readers to interrogate what happens at home when the heroic freedom fighter’s family is left destitute after his arrest. By confining Aliya to the home, where the assumption is that there is safety from the outside world, Mastur exposes the harsh reality that in times of political and social upheaval, where neighbours turn against each other and bloodshed is around every corner, there is no place of safety left.

Acknowledgments

I extend my sincere appreciation to the peer reviewers and my fellow editors of this special issue for their guidance in shaping this work. I am particularly grateful to editor Shameem Black for her extensive feedback and invaluable guidance in the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014): 432; see also Sajjad Zaheer, The Light, trans. Amina Azfar (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Carlo Coppola, Urdu Poetry, 1935–1970: The Progressive Episode (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 

2. For more on the use of literary dissent in the PWA’s work, particularly its international influence, see Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005); K.H. Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought among North Indian Muslims (1917–1947) (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015); Coppola, Urdu Poetry.

3. Maxim Gorky, ‘Soviet Literature (Speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers), August 1934’, 17 Moments in Soviet History: An Online Archive of Primary Sources, accessed June 19, 2023, https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/writers-congress/writers-congress-%20texts/gorky-on-soviet-literature.

4. A.L. Weir, ‘Socialist Realism and South Asian Literature’, Journal of South Asian Literature 27, no. 2 (1992): 135–48; 135.

5. Ibid.

6. G.S. Morson, ‘Socialist Realism and Literary Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38, no. 2 (1979): 121–33; 121, 126.

7. Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

8. Composed of Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali and Mahmuduzzafar. Angaaray (Burning Embers), a collection of nine short stories and a play, was first published in December 1932, and subsequently banned by the colonial authorities a few months after publication in 1933: Sajjad Zaheer et al., Angaaray, trans. Snehal Shingavi (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2018).

9. Jalil, Liking Progress, 432.

10. Zaheer, The Light, 231.

11. Shingavi, trans., Angaaray, xxi.

12. Jalil, Liking Progress, 44.

13. Ibid.

14. Also credited as Shaukat Azmi, Kaifi (1926–2019) was an actress in theatre and film, and a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). She was the wife of the progressive poet Kaifi Azmi.

15. Shaukat Kaifi, Kaifi and I, trans. Nasreen Rahman (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2010).

16. Jalil, Liking Progress, 328.

17. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): 3.

18. Amina Yaqin, ‘Truth, Fiction and Autobiography in the Modern Urdu Narrative Tradition’, Comparative Critical Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 379–402.

19. Burton, Dwelling, 5.

20. Saikat Majumdar, ‘Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction’, in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 208.

21. Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006): 7.

22. Examples include the works of Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Pritam. For more on women and the space of the home, see Inga Bryden, ‘There Is No Outer without Inner Space’: Constructing the Haveli as Home’, Cultural Geographies 11, no. 1 (2004): 26–41.

23. Khadija Mastur, The Women’s Courtyard (Aangan), trans. Daisy Rockwell (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2018).

24. While the Daisy Rockwell translation from 2018 and Neelum Hussain’s 2000 translation cite 1962 as the year of publication, Fatima Rizvi’s 2010 article states the year of publication as 1956. This date cannot be evidenced anywhere else except in Rizvi’s article. Therefore, I will continue to state 1962 as the year of publication, evidenced by both Hussain and Rockwell’s translations and Mastur’s win of the Adamjee Literary Award, which the Government of Pakistan bestowed upon her in 1963 for Aangan.

25. See Toor, State of Islam.

26. Ibid.

27. Mastur, Women’sWomen’s Courtyard, 117.

28. Fatima Rizvi, ‘Politicizing Literature: Progressive Nationalism and Feminism in Khadija Mastur’s Inner Courtyard (Aangan)’, South Asian Review 31, no. 1 (2010): 141–64.

29. Ibid., 141.

30. Mastur, Women’sWomen’s Courtyard, 81.

31. Ibid., 111.

32. Ibid., 78.

33. Mastur, Women’sWomen’s Courtyard, 50.

34. Ibid., 55.

35. Ibid., 79.

36. Ibid., 80.

37. Ibid., 81–82.

38. Ibid., 124.

39. Ibid., 117.

40. Ibid., 152.

41. Ibid., 272.

42. Ibid., 82.

43. Ibid., 183.

44. Rizvi, ‘Politicizing Literature’, 143.

45. Mastur, Women’sWomen’s Courtyard, 287.

46. Carlo Coppola and Amrita Pritam, ‘Carlo Coppola Interviews Amrita Pritam’, Mahfil 5, no. 3 (1968–69): 11.