BOOK
REVIEW
TITLE:
THE WOMEN’S COURTYARD
AUTHOR: KHAJIDA MASTUR-TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL
URDU BY DAISY ROCKWELL. THIS TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT DAISY ROCKWELL
PUBLISHER
: PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, 2018
FIRST
PUBLISHED AS AANGAN IN URDU BY SANG-E-MEEL PUBLICATIONS, 1962
Feminist
Cry For Independence & A Dignified Voice Against Patriarchy
This is the latest translation into English of Khajida
Mastur’s poignant book on the claustrophobia felt by Islamic women restricted
within the house set during the run up to and the aftermath of Partition. For
page after page it builds a tension of
living in a very proscribed universe.
The ignominy of receiving word of the world outside second-hand,
based on what the men might have said, the dynamics between the women and servants in
the house, their hopes, fears, frustrations and aspirations. There is the radio
of course, and newspapers.
There is value in this book in terms of its relentless
sociological commentary that is relevant to this day amongst the rank and file
Muslim communities certainly, and even in the rigid behavior of most Khap
Panchayats and other such organisations amongst the Hindus. A recent stir about
Brahminical Patriarchy only underlines the issue.
Partition came after the daily struggle between Congress
and the Muslim League in the backdrop of
WWII, till the British, much weakened, finally retreated in 1947. And
yes, the ruling dispensations did change on thee subcontinent. This gave power
to the men, excited by their emergence into independence, but did little or
nothing for the situation of or attitudes towards the women, restricted still
to their houses and courtyards.
Daisy Rockwell’s rendition of the book is, as if it was
written originally in English, without the awkwardness of a translation from
Urdu, a much more flowery language on average.
An earlier translation by Neelam Hussain titled The Inner
Courtyard, published by Kali for Women in 2001, did use a more sonorous tone
that Rockwell avers was not the writing style of the original.
This version then, a retranslation, has been undertaken
by her to expose Khajida Mastur’s “ spare and elegant” writing style, this time
in English. In this endeavour, The Women’s Courtyard certainly succeeds even
though the restrictions of a cloistered
existence seem a little dated in this age of the Internet and television.
The only men allowed into the Women’s Courtyard and house
were cousins and other elderly relatives. There is an outside room, off the courtyard,
with a service door from the inside for refreshments and the like, and another,
leading directly to the outside for the men who came and went.
There is a touch of Anne Frank’s restricted and secret
world in this story, with suppressed romances between cousins. Frank and her
family were eventually discovered in their hiding place, transported, and
eliminated by the Nazis. But, in this story, there is a desolate suicide, that
of the protagonist’s elder sister Tehmina, the ending of life seen by the
victim, as escape from a kind of prison and a life sentence. Aliya, the heroine
of the piece, sees her elder sister’s suicide however, as weakness.
Rockwell, focuses on the feminist leanings of the narrative,
remarkable for the milieu and time from which it has come, and likens Mastur,
like others before her, to one of the Bronte sisters.
She hastens to add, that though the Brontes too lived
circumscribed and extremely short lives, they were certainly free to wander
outside in the Yorkshire moors.
But Mastur, who
died at 53, said to be meek and unassuming in person, wrote with conviction on
patriarchy, classism, chauvinism and misogyny. She saw them as “systemic
poisons that destroy and kill women intellectually, emotionally and physically”.
Additionally, Mastur points out the role of elderly women like her mother and
grandmother in “perpetuating the rigid bonds of patriarchy and class hierarchy”.
Here in the Women’s Courtyard, liberation of sorts comes
after the partition. Aliya, the protagonist, leaves her Indian amours,
unrequited as they are, and part of her extended family behind in India. She gets
a job outside, once her lower middle class family moves from somewhere in Uttar
Pradesh to Pakistan. She becomes the primary breadwinner there, being educated,
and is able to come and go at last.
Aliya teaches
children during the day, and volunteers at a refugee camp in the evenings. But
her mother waits up for her, and complains that she has become like her dead
father, always focused on the outside world.
At the refugee camp, after endless years of sheltered
domesticity, a well-to-do doctor proposes to Aliya. Tempted though she is at
first, she turns him down. What is the point of selling my soul for secure
domesticity she thinks? Her dead sister’s one time suitor Safdar appears,
fortyish, after over a decade, this time in Pakistan, and proposes to her. She
turns him down too. This is the ironic triumph of feminism in the Women’s Courtyard,
a lonely refusal to submit to patriarchy. That it flew in the face of a
sensitive woman’s natural hopes and desires was just the price that had to be
paid.
(798 words)
For:
The Sunday Pioneer, AGENDA, BOOKS
November
27th, 2018
Gautam
Mukherjee
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