The courtyard is a central open space where women gather to cook, prepare paan, talk, garden, sew and often live out their entire lives. It is surrounded on three sides by a covered veranda, and along the veranda are doors to individual rooms. The fourth side would often be a wall, with a door to the outside. A room near the wall would be a sitting room for male members of the family to receive guests, and that room would have a door on to the street as well, so that strange men could not accidentally enter the women’s space. Only approved men from the family would be allowed into the courtyard, and on the rare occasions that outsider men showed up, women would retreat to a part of the veranda that had a large heavy curtain, or pardā (this is where the English term ‘purdah’ comes from), that could be lowered to protect the women from view. A richer home would have another storey above the first one, with additional rooms, and rooftop terraces, where women could also move about freely.
It should be noted that despite all these precautions taken to protect the women of the family and preserve their purity, male cousins are not considered outside the core family group, and first cousin marriage is still preferred in many South Asian Muslim communities. Because of this tradition, the only men that a young woman is not barred from interacting with are her cousins, even if they are cousins that the girl’s parents do not think suitable for marriage, as in the case of Safdar. This social reality leads to the peculiar situation in which many Mastur protagonists find themselves. Romances, tragedies, love triangles, sexual harassment and even assault occur almost always between cousins. Cousins in love are surprisingly under-chaperoned; stalker cousins have easy access to their prey and sexual assault can be carried out relatively easily without anyone noticing. Women are virtually imprisoned with their cousins whether they like it or not. And yet, purdah from ‘outsider’ men is observed so strictly that Aliya—or, for that matter, any woman in her family—has never spoken with her pathetic uncle Asrar Miyan, because, as the illegitimate son of her grandfather, he is deemed an outsider. Thus Asrar Miyan is relegated to the men’s sitting room and can only be fed or given tea by the unwilling family servant, Kareeman Bua.
The Urdu title of The Women’s Courtyard is simply Angan. For Mastur, the courtyard is not merely the setting of the novel, it is a rigid delimitation for all the action of the entire book, apart from a few scenes at the very beginning when Aliya recollects life as a small child when she could run about freely outside with neighbour children. Interestingly, unlike her mother and aunt, Aliya is not literally a prisoner in the courtyard, in that she attends school outside of the house in the section ‘Past’, and later even spends a year in Aligarh getting a teaching degree, after which she works outside of the house as a teacher for the remainder of the book. But whenever Aliya leaves the home, we do not see her again until she returns. This strict adherence to the mise en scène makes the novel resemble a play, a form that demands relatively static locations due to the restrictions of the stage and sets.
Limiting the narrative and dialogue to the courtyard can also be seen as a formal feminist experiment on the part of the author. In a men’s world, during a tremendously active political moment—the Independence movement in the United Provinces in the 1930s and ’40s—how can you keep the story focused on women’s lives, without allowing male dialogue and male activities to hijack it? Indeed, in novels by men in Hindi and Urdu that cover this period, there are endless political debates, speeches, rallies and excerpts from newspapers. The men are scarcely ever inside their homes. The national political moment is important, indeed critical, to the story of The Women’s Courtyard, but if the narration were to follow the men out of the door to rallies, processions, prison or even men’s talk in the sitting room, the voices of women would immediately become marginalized.
In 1985, the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel created a comic strip depicting a conversation between two women complaining about the male-centric nature of most Hollywood films. One woman tells the other she will only go to movies that 1) have at least two women with distinct identities in them; 2) feature women talking to one another; and 3) portray women talking to each other about something besides a man.* This set of three criteria has come to be known as the Bechdel Test, and most films and many books the world over continue to be so infused with patriarchy that they do not pass muster in these terms.
Thanks to Mastur’s formal experiment, The Women’s Courtyard passes the Bechdel Test with flying colours, despite being set in a strongly patriarchal milieu. Mastur does not eliminate male voices; far from it—the men in the family all play prominent roles in the narrative. But her choice makes it possible to privilege women’s voices. In this way she also foregrounds an anti-patriarchal feminist politics. The men in the family are obsessed with independence from British rule, and endlessly argue about Congress versus Muslim League ideologies, yet fail to see how the change of rulers on a national level has virtually no impact on the lives of the women in the courtyard. Independence from foreign rule is vastly more important for the men than for the women—not because women have no political beliefs, but because it is men who will step into positions of increased power. Women are not automatically emancipated from male dominance by a change in rulers.
III. A Different Kind of Partition Novel
Despite The Women’s Courtyard’s strengths as a feminist novel, it is most often referred to as a Partition novel. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, which coincided with the end of British rule in the subcontinent, was marked by massive upheaval and movement of peoples, loss of life and the rape and abduction of women. The events of Partition gave rise to numerous works of fiction, particularly in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali, and later in English as well. Partition literature, as a genre, is quite varied, with some authors focusing on the violence and inhumanity on display during the days immediately preceding and following Partition, and others turning their attentions to the sense of nostalgia and loss for those who lost their homes, ancestral lands and family members.
The short-story writer Sa’adat Hasan Manto (1912–55) is perhaps the best-known Urdu author to write about Partition in numerous scathing short and very short stories describing, in his classic ironic style, unspeakable acts of cruelty and stupidity and man’s inhumanity to man (and even more so to women). Manto’s stories depict horrifying violence against women in skin-crawling detail, a quality that has led many to laud him as a feminist, though the case can be made that the obsessive detail of his descriptions of rape and assault can shade into a kind of voyeurism. Qurratulain Hyder (1927–2007), another famed Urdu author, is known for her lengthy novel Ag kā Dariyā (1959—‘River of Fire’). River of Fire, which follows a series of characters over millennia in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, starting with the era of the Buddha and ending in a post-1947 era with a diaspora that leaves the characters isolated and lost, in England, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Where Manto’s stories focus on violence and inhumanity, Hyder’s novel is concerned with Partition as a destroyer of a syncretic and harmonious civilization. Her characters are centred around Lucknow, not Punjab (or Bengal), where the most brutal violence occurred. They are erudite, learned and imbued with the multiple layers of culture that have existed over the history of the Gangetic plain.
Mastur’s novel takes a different course from either Manto or Hyder. Partition occurs late in the novel, and the main characters, who live somewhere in the United Provinces, are far from the bloody events taking place at the new Punjab border between India and Pakistan (Hyder’s characters all enjoy a greater degree of privilege than Aliya’s family, and many are in London during Partition, whilst Manto’s are in the thick of the violence). The riots and atrocities are mentioned in The Women’s Courtyard, but only in the context of newspaper stories and a general atmosphere of fear. Aliya and her mother—who has decided to follow her brother’s family to Pakistan—take a plane to Lahore, thus avoiding the disasters unfolding at the border at the land-crossing point.
Mastur thus takes a
subtler approach to depicting displacement and loss, as the characters are not subjected to bodily harm by Partition, and their sense of bereavement comes from their separation from the family members they have been confined with for many years. At the same time they are not of the socio-economic class as Hyder’s characters; no one could possibly afford to travel to England. On their arrival in Lahore, Aliya’s maternal uncle has them assigned to a house abandoned by Hindus who have fled to India. The lock is broken for them and they enter a new home that is fully furnished but covered in a thin layer of dust. Aliya’s mother tells her to give the Hindu idols they find in the house to neighbourhood children to play with, but Aliya cannot bring herself to desecrate another person’s holy objects and hides them away:
In the small room . . . there was a statue of Lord Krishna above the fireplace. His garland of flowers lay littered all about; only a yellow thread hung about his neck now.
‘Do get that out of here, dear; give it to the children outside, they can play with it,’ Amma had said several times since they’d arrived.
Aliya did not respond. The Krishna idol stayed there for several days. When it was no longer possible for Amma to manage things without using that room, Aliya picked it up and hid it in her trunk (see p. 336).
Such minimal descriptions are hallmarks of the spare writing style of Mastur, who often opts for a gestural description over baroque details. Thus, the abandoned Hindu gods, and Aliya’s attachment to them, stand in for her empathy towards the refugees who have fled to India. Whereas Hyder’s characters will be given pages and pages of dialogue and interior monologue regarding their feelings on everything from the personal to the political, Mastur’s characters express their views sometimes with only a single gesture.
Interestingly, it is only by moving to Pakistan that Aliya and her mother end up leaving the sphere of male-dominated households. In their new home, Aliya becomes the primary breadwinner, abandons the burqa and begins to stay outside the house more and more. She teaches during the day and volunteers at Lahore’s crowded Walton refugee camp in the evenings. Her mother is enraged, and accuses her of being just like her father, always focused on what’s outside the house:
One day, when she returned at six in the evening, Amma was seated on a chair on the dry lawn as if waiting for her.
‘Why do you go there?’ she demanded harshly. ‘What do you get out of that useless work?’
‘I get peace,’ Aliya answered gently.
‘Like father, like daughter; do you wish to ruin me now as well?’
‘If you are ruined by me teaching children, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ she replied in annoyance.
‘There’s nothing you can do?’ Amma asked angrily.
‘Yes, there’s nothing I can do.’ She got up and went inside. She didn’t even turn around to look and see that Amma was crying into her sari border (see pp. 339–40).
Does Amma think her daughter takes after her late husband, or does she object to her actions because she is behaving as men do? While the stories of rape, abduction and abandonment of women during Partition are important to tell, Mastur’s quieter narrative tells a tale of liberation tinged with loneliness and loss. Migration, Mastur reminds us, does not always result in trauma, and for women, it can sometimes disrupt a patriarchal milieu and lead to a quiet empowerment. In this way, The Women’s Courtyard is reminiscent of Hindi writer Yashpal’s two-volume 1958–60 novel Jhūṭhā Sach (translation published by Penguin Classics as This Is Not That Dawn, 2010).
Though Yashpal’s woman protagonist, Tara, is abducted during the riots of Lahore, her subsequent repatriation to India leads eventually to employment, independence and emancipation. For both Aliya and Tara, the disruptions and migrations of Partition create new possibilities to find independence from traditional family structures and patriarchal hierarchies. This same formulation occurs in Krishna Sobti’s recent autobiographical Hindi novel Gujarat Pakistan se Gujarat Hindustan (forthcoming in my translation as A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There, Penguin India). Set in the years immediately following Partition, Sobti’s novel depicts a young woman embarking on a quest for a career in education in independent India. Despite the challenges she faces, she finds no small degree of success and independence. A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There is written more in the classic style of a Bildungsroman about a male protagonist, setting out on the threshold of adulthood, ready to take on the world. Sobti’s autobiographical character feels her future is full of possibilities, and she has only to scan the ‘help wanted’ sections of the newspaper to find her next adventure.
Narratives of rape and abduction during Partition, and tales of women’s post-Partition emancipation from traditional patriarchal family structures can be read as two sides of the same coin. During the chaos of Partition, women were literally forced out of the safe space of the home, out of the courtyards that protected them. But those courtyards were also prisons for some. As Mastur shows us throughout her oeuvre, sexual violence existed even within the friendly confines of the āngan. The rupture of those walls led to worse violence and imprisonment for some, but liberation for others. When we think of women in Partition we are more likely to think of Bhisham Sahni’s village women committing suicide by jumping in wells in Tamas, or Manto’s horrendous rapes, than we are of Yashpal’s Tara, Mastur’s Aliya and Sobti’s heroine finding personal independence.
IV. In Praise of Unhappy Endings
After Tehmina’s suicide, Aliya looks through the books her elder sister had been reading—romances given to her by Safdar. She blames this genre for Tehmina and Kusum’s unrealistic expectations for love and romance:
One day, she began to leaf through Tehmina’s books absent-mindedly. Such tales of love and fancy! Women would commit suicide for love and depart as examples of perfect fidelity, and then, some dark night, men would appear to momentarily light a lamp over a tomb, then leave, and that was that. She threw the books back in the cupboard and cried tears of rage, as she felt Tehmina watching her with disdain from the other side of her curtain of tears (see p. 78).
Aliya is intent on avoiding love herself. Love makes people do ridiculous things and foster unrealistic expectations. Love is not the same thing as marriage, which is also to be avoided, because it brings disappointment and dependence. Even her vain, educated, English-speaking aunt Najma is deceived in marriage, and forced to contemplate divorce. Love is for fools, marriage is for slaves, in Aliya’s view.
But Mastur knows that women’s investment in popular tales of romance, betrayal and true love help perpetuate the patriarchal system and it is with these tales and the expectations they create that Mastur wishes to engage. Narratives of eternal love, overcoming all odds and romantic bliss are exactly what Aliya becomes sceptical of after the suicides of Kusum and Tehmina. She has heard of the suffering and death of her aunt, Safdar’s mother, because of her forbidden love. Aliya wants nothing to do with love—she makes this clear. She knows that those who believe in true love seem to end up dead. And those who believe in tradition, hierarchy and class end up like her mother’s generation. Alive, but twisted and gnarled beyond recognition.
But these are Aliya’s intellectual views. Mastur’s depiction of the battle between Aliya’s emotions and intellect is artfully done—her romantic feelings for Jameel distress her, but she is able to master them to the end, when she and her mother depart for Pakistan and leave behind Jameel and his family forever. And the way Mastur writes about this inner conflict seems designed to produce confusion in the reader as well. From a certain perspective, nothing Jameel says or does is out of character for the genre of literature that Tehmina and Kusum consumed. His passionate avowals of love, his stormy speeches, his brooding good looks and yes, even his physical assaults on her would all be expected in a romance novel, an epic love story, a contemporary Bollywood film and even (or especially) a Brontë hero.
Thus, despite Aliya’s very explicit interior monologues about her reasons for distrusting Jameel and rejecti
ng his advances, a reader’s instincts for the romantic genre will tell them that she will ‘come around’ in the end, accept his love and live happily ever after. Every heroine protests for a certain period, but then she gives in and we all cheer. Yet Aliya is right. Jameel is not particularly bright. He writes bad poetry. He pretends not to have manipulated or seduced Chammi to get her to pay for his education. He is unable to get a job, and he is in all likelihood going to follow in the footsteps of his father, despite his loathing for him, ignoring his family and hanging around with his political friends outside the house. And no means no.
All the same, Mastur knows that we, her readers, are also deeply conditioned in the cult of romantic narratives, whether through literature, song or film. It is somehow easier to process the tragic deaths of star-crossed lovers than the deeply uncomfortable love triangle of Jameel, Aliya and Chammi, an unpleasant dynamic that damages all involved and drags on for years and years. In current terminology, Jameel is a stalker, a sexual harasser and a gaslighter. He assaults Aliya, does not respect her wishes and manipulates her. She never believes in him, even when his performance of true love for her is the most credible.
But it is not just Jameel whom Aliya refuses to marry. Once in Pakistan, a doctor at the refugee camp where she volunteers asks her to marry him. She considers it, but then feels that all he is offering her is material wealth and status symbols: a fine house, a car, a comfortable income. She already had a house and a good income and doesn’t see the point of the car. She will not marry for material benefit, because she already supports herself. Finally, in a surprise entrance at the end of the novel, Safdar reappears. He too wishes to marry Aliya; his approach again fulfils the requirements of romance writing: he sees in Aliya her dead sister; they share a bond of nostalgia. For a moment she is tempted, until Safdar tells her mother that he is no longer an activist and plans to set up an import–export business. Another illusion is broken: Safdar is not a romantic hero, but an insufferable romantic who drove her sister to suicide and now wishes to renounce his political ideals in favour of pursuing wealth.
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