The Architecture of Laila’s World in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column

Abstract

Attia Hosain’s Partition novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), offers possibilities for the physical structure of the home to be analysed through a spatial lens to decode architectural metaphors of the zenana (women’s space). This paper explores how the women characters negotiate with the often dichotomised private and public spheres of the home and outside, to show their rising confluence in a mod­ernising nation. This paper grounds gendered space in the materiality of courtyards, walls, stairwells and rooftops to argue that the homosocial, homospatial bond that exists within the zenana court­yard is reinvented by Laila in the wake of the socio-political changes of the 1930s–50s, which allows for Laila’s imagined ‘world’ to become a reality. By studying the architectural sites of seclusion not as static but charged with agential capacity through their enclosed openness, this paper reads the courtyard as a transgressive space of resistive politics.