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.