Gendered spatiality: twentieth century Muslim women's writing from the Indian subcontinent

Abstract

This dissertation undertakes the first sustained examination of material space in the literary works of Anglophone and Urdu-phone Muslim women writers from India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. Reading the short stories, novels and memoirs of Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Attia Hosain and Khadija Mastur, I develop a socio-spatial framework of agency that women employ to assert their identities as modern women. The various spaces in colonial and postcolonial India and Pakistan consecrate a spatial bildungsroman through which women’s complex identities are moulded and re-moulded, along architectural axes of power relations in the modernising nation(s). To illustrate this, I study private and public spaces, domestic and institutional spaces, and in-between spaces occupied by Muslim women in the 1930s-1960s, in north India. The tumultuous geographical dislocations of Indian Muslims before, during and post-Partition, shape their actions, and vice versa; their agential activities transform regimented spaces into transgressive spaces through the phenomenological-material frameworks of spatial agency. I approach the texts analysed through the lens of gendered spatiality to argue that progressive writing by South Asian Muslim women during the twentieth century mapped a material relationship between women’s thought and action, that produced an archive of gendered and sexual expression.