ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the literary liminality of two novels by Indian Muslim women: Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) by Attia Hosain and The Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz (written in 1947 and published posthumously in 1957). By analysing both English-language novels as belonging to two popular subcontinental fiction genres, partition fiction and the social realist novel, this chapter expands the parameters of genre fiction as a literary category to argue that both texts can be read as autobiographically inspired realist fiction. This symbiotic classification, rather than autobiographical novel, encompasses how both authors used their own lives as mirrors to illuminate parts of their societies – coalescing family ties with complex networks of kinship and dependency in the decades before and immediately after Partition. I consider the parallels between the authors and their works by comparatively exploring their narratives through two veins: first, gendered navigations in the making of identities amongst elite upper-class women and second, Pakistan as an idea within Muslim experiences of Partition. Within gendered navigations, I consider how three themes pervade the texts: negotiations of purdah, education and mobility in political life, and negotiations of the marriage framework.
