The present volume is a diptych volume and the first full-length study of Attia Hosain’s work. Attia Hosain (1913-1998), is one of the earliest women writers of the Indian diaspora. Despite the fact that her work was mainly written in the fifties and sixties, her reputation has been an enduring one. Her work has gone through several resurrections and continues to have both relevance and meaning. The two sections of this volume, though written independently, complement each other. R.K. Kaul explores the historical and literary aspects of her work contextualising her within the Indian, and more specifically the Urdu, literary tradition while Jasbir Jain goes on to open out her work in many different ways locating her within the topos of exile. Exile is a subcategory of the diaspora, and defines itself by a withholding and an exclusion. Together the two sections reveal the hidden depths of Hosain’s work and bring out not only its thematic richness, the partition theme, the dilemma of the Indian Muslim, the relationship with the Raj, the dislocation of the aristocracy, but also the significance of space and of the cultural inheritance as it adapts and evolves. Attia Hosain brings out the interplay between personal and national histories with the theoretical underpinnings of the diasporic discourse as it reads her work in multiple ways.
There are no reviews yet.