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Accepted Paper:

Writing of Home: the retrospective gaze of Attia Hosain and Imtiaz Dharker  
Arjun Rajkhowa (University of Delhi)

Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on two South Asian writers, Attia Hosain and Imtiaz Dharker. Hosain wrote her novel about India after her expatriation to England in 1947, and Dharker, a Pakistani Muslim brought up in Scotland, wrote most of her poems, after moving to Bombay in later life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on two South Asian writers, Attia Hosain (1913-1998) and Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954), the former an Indian novelist and the latter a Pakistani poet. Hosain's Sunlight On A Broken Column is set in pre-Independence India and captures an era characterized by the dissolution of traditional feudal, as also patriarchal, affiliations and marked by the uncertainty of the transition from colony to sovereign nation. Her novel is a fictional rendering of her childhood and early adult life in an old landowning conservative Muslim family that emblematizes the encounter with Anglicization and the conflicts of political change. Imtiaz Dharker was born in Glasgow to Pakistani parents and currently works in Bombay. Her books of poetry, Purdah, Postcards From God, I Speak For the Devil and The Terrorist At My Table, capture the poetic consciousness of an immigrant/ emigrant, and trace the experiences of feeling both rooted and alienated 'here' and 'elsewhere', two constantly evolving and unstable entities. She cognizes her transcontinental world in multifarious ways, some of which engage with issues of female repression in orthodox Muslim families, racism, cultural alienation and several others. What is interesting for the purposes of comparison in this paper is that Hosain wrote her novel depicting a childhood in India at a time of great political discord after her expatriation to England in 1947, the year of Independence, and Dharker wrote most of her poems, about growing up Muslim in Scotland, amongst other things, after moving to Bombay in later life.

Panel P09
The artistic imagination in ruptured landscapes
  Session 1