Gender and social class in India: Muslim perspectives in the fiction of Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally

Abstract

This article investigates representations of gender and class inequality in Attia Hosain’s classic novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and her short story collection Phoenix Fled and Other Stories (1953). It compares her work with that of Shama Futehally, another elite Muslim Indian woman writing in English several decades later. Born 40 years after Attia Hosain, the postcolonial world of Shama Futehally is very different, but the issues she explores in her fiction are remarkably similar: social and economic inequality, exploitation of the poor, and the ambiguous position of women privileged by their social class and disempowered by their gender. Both authors write carefully crafted realist fiction focusing predominantly on the experiences and perspectives of female characters. Shama Futehally’s novel Tara Lane (1993), like Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is a young Muslim woman in an affluent family, coming to terms with the uneasy combination of class privilege, gender disadvantage, and a strong social conscience. Both authors explore the perspectives of working-class Indian women in their short stories, emphasizing their vulnerability to exploitation (including sexual exploitation), as well as the deeply problematic nature of “noblesse oblige”. Aware of the interconnections between gender and class inequality, Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally have written powerful fictional works which effectively dramatize not only the complex relationship between gender and social class hierarchies, but also the ways in which all privilege is predicated on inequality.

In India, English has traditionally been the language of the elite. Perhaps the seeds of change for future generations have been planted now that every schoolchild in India is learning basic English and Hindi in addition to his/her regional language. However, as Aatish Taseer (2015) has recently reminded us, proficiency in English remains a key signifier of social class in India, where deficiency in this skill is often a barrier to professional success. ¹ Many postcolonial literary scholars have been uneasily aware of this situation. For instance, in my own study of Indian women writing in English (Jackson, 2010), I have found it necessary to emphasize the elite class position of the writers because it inevitably influences their literary vision, particularly in a markedly hierarchical society. Other components of identity are significant too of course, including religious community, region, and caste, all of which criss-cross and overlap with social class. However, there can be a danger of over-emphasizing these factors because, to put it simply, an elite perspective is not necessarily synonymous with an elitist perspective.

Approaching the vexed area of identity politics in India with due caution, I have nevertheless noticed striking similarities between the perspectives and narrative concerns of two Muslim Indian authors writing in English from successive generations: the well-known Attia Hosain (1913–1998) and the more recent writer Shama Futehally (1952–2004), whose work I think deserves to be more widely known outside of India. Although the possibility of authorial influence cannot be dismissed, there is the additional consideration that Muslim women writing in English are in a somewhat exceptional position in India. Recent statistical studies have shown that Muslims, who currently comprise approximately 13 per cent of the population of India, continue to be “generally poor and disadvantaged” compared to other groups (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 42). Obviously this economic disadvantage does not apply to all Muslim families in India, but it is notable that there are proportionately fewer Muslim women than Hindu women writing in English. I pointed out in an earlier article in this journal (Jackson, 2011) that while there are many fine writers of Urdu fiction, including Zakia Mashhadi and Ismat Chughtai, an Indian Muslim woman writing in English would almost certainly be from among a tiny privileged minority whose families are wealthy enough — and liberal enough — to provide an elite Western education for their daughter(s). This is certainly the case with Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally, who in this respect have much in common with their Hindu counterparts such as Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, and Shashi Deshpande, all of whom have written from an explicitly feminist postcolonial perspective. It is notable that among these writers, Shashi Deshpande (a personal friend of the late Shama Futehally) has been the most concerned with exploring the intersections between gender and social class in her fiction — an area which is central to the literary vision of Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally, reflecting their somewhat unusual position as elite Muslim women writers of Anglophone Indian literature. Interestingly, Hosain and Futehally have each written one novel in which they explore the paradoxical position of Indian Muslim women privileged by their social class and disadvantaged by their gender, as well as a collection of short stories in which they explore the perspectives of less privileged female characters. In this article I compare the ways in which the intersections of gender and social class are handled in the novels Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Tara Lane (1993), by Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally respectively, together with selected stories from Hosain’s Phoenix Fled: And Other Stories (1953) and Futehally’s Frontiers: Collected Stories (2006).

Attia Hosain’s classic novel Sunlight on a Broken Column, first published in 1961, is perhaps the best-known work of fiction in English by a Muslim Indian woman. It has drawn attention from scholars interested in literary perspectives on partition (Didur, 2006; Nabar, 2000), on purdah (Palkar, 1995), on feminism (Roy, 1999), on elite Muslim culture in India during the late colonial era (Burton, 2003), and on the construction of Indian nationalism (Needham, 1993), among other areas of enquiry. Hosain’s only other published fictional work was her earlier short story collection Phoenix Fled: And Other Stories (1953), which has received considerably less attention than her novel, despite Antoinette Burton’s intriguing comment that:

With the possible exception of Nandi, the servant characters in Sunlight are generally underdeveloped, both in an absolute sense and also as compared with the complex ideological work they are made to perform in Hosain’s short story collection from 1953, Phoenix Fled. Here entire narrative arcs center on ayahs and kitchen servants, albeit with a touch of the same benevolent aristocratic tone that surfaces in Sunlight. Some are heroic, some are cruel; but to a person they make those who inhabit “the big house” seem “pale and ghostly” in comparison. (2003: 123)

Interestingly, Burton’s observation that Attia Hosain’s servant characters are more fully developed in her short stories than in her novel is equally applicable to the oeuvre of Shama Futehally, despite the later production and later fictional setting of Futehally’s work. Hosain’s vision of India is that of a recollected past, mostly before independence and partition, but also in the immediate aftermath. The work of Futehally, by contrast, is set during the postcolonial late twentieth century. It is my contention that despite the different historical contexts in which — and of which — they are writing, both authors share a particular social background which influences their literary vision and thematic concerns. Although they experiment with the perspectives of non-elite (mostly female) characters in their shorter fiction, the writing of a novel requires a more sustained engagement. It might therefore be a more suitable genre for exploring issues with which they are intimately familiar, such as the paradoxical position of elite Muslim women in India.

Some contextual material on the family background of Attia Hosain is necessary for a fuller understanding of the relevant issues, not least because of the parallels between her own life and that of her narrator–protagonist Laila in Sunlight on a Broken Column. Hosain was born in 1913 in Lucknow, described by Vrinda Nabar as

a city which even today retains some of the old nawabi ambience of the Mughal period. Lucknow has always been associated with the culture and mannered patterns of behaviour that marked a life lived in courts and feudal Muslim households. (2000: 124)

Like her protagonist Laila, Hosain herself grew up in a wealthy, aristocratic family of taluqdars, “a class that owned much of the land in the region outright and ruled — like the zamindars elsewhere — almost as feudal lords under the British, paying taxes to the empire but administering the domains themselves” (Brians, 2003: 75). As the daughter of the Taluqdar of Oudh, Attia Hosain was a person of some status. Lucknow was the capital of Oudh, a large, well-to-do province in which the taluqdars functioned as intermediaries between the British colonizers and the peasants and small landowners. However,

[a]s the anticolonial, nationalist struggle gained strength, the taluqdars had to come to terms with the steady erosion of their powers underwritten by colonial rule in the first place. In addition Muslim taluqdars had to come to terms with what it meant to be a Muslim in a previously Muslim-ruled but now largely Hindu dominated India. Should they stay on in an independent India with, perhaps, diminished power and rights? Should they join the Muslim League, support its demands for a separate but distant Muslim state, and after independence move to Pakistan? (Needham, 1993: 101)

All of these issues are debated by the characters and dramatized in the narrative of Sunlight on a Broken Column, in which we also see the effects of changing gender ideologies among the elite in India at this time. Traditionally, upper-class Hindu and Muslim women had observed purdah (seclusion within the home), and the most well-to-do households had separate quarters for men and women. “The antahpur or zenana (in Urdu) was the women’s sphere, and in the large structures and palatial buildings or havelis, there were often open spaces, secluded gardens, etc., for the women to get fresh air or exercise” (Channa, 2013: 44).

However, the colonial encounter gradually led to (uneven) changes as many Western-educated elite men were influenced by European gender ideologies. Attia Hosain herself, like her character Laila, spent her early life more or less in purdah at home, where the women’s quarters were separate, as they are in Sunlight on a Broken Column. However, she and her sisters did not observe the practice of purdah when they went out, and Hosain was educated at the prestigious La Martiniere School and later at Isabella Thoburn College. Like many progressive elite Muslim men of his generation, Hosain’s Cambridge-educated father “considered the education of girls to be crucial to both their marriageability and to the cultural capital of the family” (Burton, 2003: 108). At this time:

Elite Muslim men saw the need for more formally educated wives as social companions and political allies. In an effort to meet this need and counter the influence of Christian missionary schools and Hindu revivalists, [elite] Muslim women were now encouraged to be educated in institutions (albeit, gender-segregated) outside the home. Hence, as this epistemological shift suggests, attitudes to educational reform in the Muslim community were not adopted with an eye to women’s emancipation […], but to serve the needs of an evolving patriarchal upper middle class. (Didur, 2006: 103–4)

Nor was this trend unique to the Muslim community. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a class of gentry had been emerging among India’s English-educated elite of every religious community “modelled on the premises of the British gentleman and its counterpart, the lady” (Channa, 2013: 42). Thus, what is shown in Rabrindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire — the British governess being employed to teach the young wife English, piano, and singing — was “common enough in aristocratic homes where the norm of high-born women not stepping out of the antahpur was complemented with educating her and making her accomplished in the arts of the English ladies” (Channa, 2013: 54).

However, there was much debate — sometimes even within families — about what the nature and extent of women’s education should be. In Sunlight on a Broken Column, for instance, Laila receives an academic education at an elite girls’ school followed by a local university, while her cousin Zahra, the “good Muslim girl”, is expected to marry early after a domestic education: According to her aunt, she has “read the Quran, she knows her religious duties; she can sew and cook, and at the Muslim school she learned a little English, which is what young men want now” (Hosain, 1961: 24). ²

In addition to the tension created by conflicting ideas about women’s education, the exposure of the Indian elite to the British colonizers was also at times a source of tension, not least because of competing hierarchies of race and social class. This is evident, for instance, in Laila’s wincing at the crass arrogance of her British former governess, Mrs Martin, who tries to claim her as a protégée. Evidently taking it for granted that even a common Englishwoman like herself is superior to all Indians, Mrs Martin clumsily states that “as for dear Lily’s father, well, he was just like one of us” (48). While not wishing to condone class snobbery, I would suggest that this could sometimes be an understandable psychological defence against the obscene racism to which even the Indian aristocracy were at times subjected during the Raj. Perhaps the best illustration of this in Sunlight on a Broken Column is Laila’s justifiably sarcastic reply when asked whether she knew that taluqdari families had a right to an audience with the king: “I wonder whether that knowledge would have helped me when the king’s groom’s grand-daughter called me ‘nigger’ at school and refused to play with me?” (147).

Hosain’s nuanced awareness of the ways in which issues related to British social class and the anglicization of the Indian elite could complicate gender relationships in India is evident in several stories from her Phoenix Fled collection, particularly “The First Party” and “Time Is Unredeemable”. One source of tension was the conflicting expectations to which upper-class Indian women were subjected at this time. Unlike their male counterparts, they were not educated in England, and many of them were still secluded within the home. Yet they were often expected to appear “Westernized” at social engagements with their husbands while maintaining Indian cultural traditions at home. According to Subhadra Mitra Channa (2013: 54), elite Indian men wanted wives who were mostly housebound but also “accomplished in the arts of the English ladies” in order to reinforce the status of their husbands: “No matter how highly placed a man was, to have at his household an uneducated and ‘rustic’ wife would definitely place him at a social ladder [sic] lower than that of a man with a cultivated wife” (Channa, 2013: 80).

“The First Party” explores the painful feelings of a traditional Indian wife suddenly expected to exhibit Western-style “sophistication” at a party with her more Westernized husband. The wife feels out place at the party, wrongly dressed, and above all shocked by the drinking and dancing. Her shyness, anger, defensiveness, and confusion are described in a detached way and without much sympathy by a third-person narrator who seems to view her attitudes as “backward”. R. K. Kaul (Kaul and Jain, 2001: 126) has a slightly different interpretation of the situation, arguing that “the story does not blame, it merely states” and that the experience is traumatic but “does not necessarily make her feel inferior. She measures it against her religious training and feels a sense of anger as her husband goes on drinking, and the women sway their hips to the music of the record”. I would suggest, however, that the protagonist’s feelings are more complex than this. At times she does feel inferior:

She wondered how it felt to hold a cigarette with such self-confidence; to flick the ash with such assurance. […]

She found the bi-lingual patchwork distracting, and its pattern, familiar to others, with allusions and references unrelated to her own experiences, was distressingly obscure. (18)

Her bright rich clothes and heavy jewellery oppressed her when she saw the simplicity of their clothes. (Hosain, 1988: 17–18) ³

Moreover, she is characterized by the narrator as narrow and judgemental, particularly in her angry reaction to behaviour which is alien to her experience:

It was wicked, it was sinful to drink, and she could not forgive him. (19)

The disgusting, shameless hussies, bold and free with men, their clothes adorning nakedness not hiding it […] She fed her resentment with every possible fault her mind could seize on […] These women who were her own kind, yet not so, were wicked, contemptible, grotesque mimics of the foreign ones among them for whom she felt no hatred because from them she expected nothing better. (19–20)

Bano in “Time Is Unredeemable”, similarly faced with a Westernized husband, emerges as a more sympathetic character. This is the story of a young Indian wife whose husband is away studying in England for several years. Even before the denouement which reveals the couple to be irreconcilably estranged from each other as a result of their radically different life experiences during the husband’s absence, the third-person narrator’s disapproval of the arrangements is evident:

Bano was sixteen when she was married to a reluctant Arshad a month before he sailed to England. In that brief, busy month she accepted the young stranger, barely two years older than herself, as the very focus of her being […]. For two years after her marriage Bano’s life was pleasant enough because there was no questioning of its circumscribed character. She was isolated from the outside world not only by physical seclusion but by mental oblivion. (59)

Wishing to impress her husband upon his return from England, Bano decides to learn some English and buy some new clothes. However, when she chooses the amiable but “common” Mrs Ram to teach her English and take her shopping, her obliviousness to British class differences is bound to combine unfortunately with her husband’s newly acquired Western-style polish:

Her father-in-law, who considered himself a man of liberal ideas, was pleased when Bano decided to learn English from his old friend Hari Ram’s English wife. Of Mrs Ram’s shortcomings as a teacher, her dropped aitches, her ungrammatical colloquialisms, Bano was unaware; she was conscious only of the fact that Mrs Ram could help her prove to Arshad that she was not like the other girls in the family, ignorant and old-fashioned. (60)

Predictably, Arshad, upon his return, is unimpressed with poor Bano’s “thickened waist” (74), her cheap, ill-fitting new clothes, and her inexpertly applied makeup. These superficial details point to a more profound rift between them because Arshad is already feeling that he and Bano are “like strangers” to each other (76). Far from judging her harshly, Arshad “felt a tender pity, which covered him and drove him to helpless anger against himself, his homecoming, his father, his mother, everyone” (75). Bano’s feelings, too, are sensitively conveyed, and the social criticism here is difficult to ignore. The author herself appears to be pointing to the potentially tragic consequences of husbands and wives having very different opportunities and experiences, but other interpretations are possible. Some might see the story as a demonstration of the corrupting effects of “Westernization” on the Indian elite, arguing that Arshad’s English education and lifestyle during his years abroad had inculcated him with ideologies of individual fulfilment which caused him to disregard his family duties. An alternative interpretation would point to the pernicious effects of women’s seclusion and dependency, while others might emphasize the role of image in the construction of the modern anglicized Indian bourgeoisie. All would probably agree that the story points to the profoundly destabilizing effects of contested, inconsistent, and rapidly changing gender ideologies among the Westernized elite in India — an issue which is still relevant today, though it is less explored in the more contemporary fiction of Shama Futehally, as we shall see.

As influential as the colonial encounter was, independence and partition inevitably wrought profound ongoing changes in Indian society and culture, in addition to the obvious political and economic changes. In writing of the history of this period, Vrinda Nabar has referred to

the several socioeconomic changes that became part of free India’s move toward what was called a “socialistic” pattern of development. New laws made the old feudal structures impotent […] The more tangible changes were the new land laws, the curbing of landlord and princely privileges, and the gradual emergence of other hegemonic forces in the socioeconomic and sociocultural structure. (2000: 123)

The beginnings of these changes can be seen in Sunlight on a Broken Column, in which “eventually, as did many families, Saira and Hamid had to accept the constitutional abolition of their feudal existence. Kemal was forced to sell the house” (Burton, 2003: 130). Looking back on this bygone feudal lifestyle, Laila’s social criticism is tempered by a heavy dose of nostalgia. The narrative features lovingly detailed descriptions of the beautiful house, its exquisite furnishings, and the luxurious lifestyle of the privileged occupants:

On the starched white tablecloth, red roses in a silver bowl splashed their violent beauty. Light from the delicate chandelier was warm on rosewood, glittered on silver and copper, glimmered on crystal and glass, lay softly on china plates and the paintings on the ivory walls, and deepened the folds of lime-green damask curtains. (232–3)

Years later, when Laila visits the now dilapidated house which no longer belongs to her family, the contrast between these beautiful memories and the ugliness that the intervening years have fashioned is difficult to ignore:

Tattered settlements for refugees had erupted on once open spaces. Ugly buildings had sprung up, conceived by ill-digested modernity and the hasty needs of a growing city. (270)

A low fence of crude wooden poles and straggling wire cut off the main house from the garden in front of the rooms where my aunts and the women servants had once lived. (271)

These aesthetic responses are accompanied by a sympathetic insight into the feelings of Laila’s Uncle Hamid witnessing “the gradual crumbling of all his dreams and ambitions” (282):

Politically, he had fought a losing battle against new forces that were slowly and inexorably destroying the rights and privileges in which he had believed.

Socially, he had seen that way of life going to pieces which he had cultivated so carefully; the new ruling class either derided it as a slavish copy of the British, or simply were ignorant of its conventions and had no wish to learn. (282)

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham notes that Laila’s assessments in these passages are a function of her situating herself within Hamid’s world, occupying a position she both shares and criticizes: “Laila presents herself as an onlooker who watches, listens, absorbs, and remains open to competing claims” (1993: 102). This is evident, for instance, in her observation of Aunt Abida’s dealings with the local peasants:

It was a source of wonder to me that she sanctioned gifts of wood and loans for weddings and funerals with the same detachment with which she ordered the ejection of those who had not paid their rents, or the digging up of their mud huts if built without permission. (60)

Again, her sympathetic but critical attitude toward the feudal order is perhaps best summed up in her reflections on its passing:

At the end of a long, legal struggle landowners had to accept the fact that their feudal existence had been abolished constitutionally as swiftly as the revolution they had always feared.

Hundreds of thousands of families were faced with the necessity of changing habits of mind and living conditioned by centuries, hundreds of thousands of landowners and the hangers-on who had once lived on their largesse, their weaknesses and their follies. (277)

Intrinsic to the feudal order is the notion of noblesse oblige, described by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan as an attitude of “paternalism towards those of lesser privilege, born out of feelings of responsibility (and sometimes guilt)” (2013: 62). Its limitations are obvious: it perpetuates a system of inequality while softening some of its effects. Often a sense of noblesse oblige appears to be most strongly felt by privileged people who are in regular and direct contact with their dependants — for example, in the case of household servants. As exemplified in Sunlight on a Broken Column, the women in purdah often developed close relationships with their servants, because it was through these lower-class women that they had a glimpse of the outside world. In this novel, for instance, the two daughters of the house confide in Nandi and are pampered by Salimam Bua, Hakimam Bua, and the older women. Commenting on women and their servants in another context, Channa notes that “there was little difference between them except that of wealth, which anyway belonged to the men” (2013: 44). One major difference, however, was that female servants could sometimes be sexually exploited not only by their male employers, but also by other men who saw — and continue to see — them as exploitable. As Nandi in Sunlight on a Broken Column laments, “Laila Bitia, you don’t know what life can be for us. We are the prey of every man’s desires” (168). Resisting this situation,

Nandi had thrown an accurate and sharp stone at the groom of the English family next door, because he had peeped over the wall while she bathed in the enclosure where there was a tap for the women. A few days later she had bitten the postman, saying he had attempted to molest her. (27)

Preyed upon by Uncle Hamid, she is finally sent away for daring to defy him and speaking disrespectfully to him after resisting his advances.

With the exception of Nandi, the focus of the narrative in Sunlight on a Broken Column is almost exclusively on the privileged characters. However, household servants take centre stage in several of Hosain’s short stories, particularly “The Street of the Moon”, “After the Storm”, “The Daughter-in-Law”, and “The Loss”. The theme of exploitation is a particularly forceful undercurrent in “The Street of the Moon” and “The Daughter-in-Law”. Here, as R. K. Kaul observes, “the servants are underpaid but even as they grumble, they stay on as they learn to be wily in order to extract more out of their employers, but they are not disloyal” (Kaul and Jain, 2001: 117). Kalloo’s plight in “The Street of the Moon” is summed up in the first paragraph:

Kalloo the cook had worked for the family for more years than he could remember. He had started as the cook’s help, washing dishes, grinding the spices and running errands. When the old cook died of an overdose of opium Kalloo inherited both his job and his taste for opium. His inherent laziness fed by the enervating influence of the drug kept him working for his inadequate pay, because he lacked the energy and the courage to give notice and look for work elsewhere. Moreover, his emotions had grown roots through the years, and he was emotionally attached to the family. (24)

Thus, Kalloo is shown to be trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, exploitation, opium addiction, and affection (rooted in dependency) for a family who underpay him. If his life choices are limited, those of the young Hasina (the daughter of one of the other servants) are even more so. Brought to the household to be trained as a servant, Hasina is “viewed as a possession or a utility object whose fate can be decided by others. There is nothing she is free to decide — where she lives, where she works, who she marries — none of these decisions is for her to take” (Kaul and Jain, 2001: 119). Deemed to be a useful bride to the widowed Kalloo, the outcome of her arranged marriage to this aged opium addict is not entirely surprising. After much unhappiness, she eventually runs away with Husnoo (one of the other servants), who soon abandons her so that she finally ends up working in a brothel on the Street of the Moon. The traditional double standard of sexual morality is much in evidence here:

When Husnoo returned contrite and self-conscious after a month, and his father got him back into service as a reward for his long years of work, Kalloo bore him no grudge […] He had left her because of his father’s threats, and in any case why should he have married such a woman? (55)

“After the Storm” is a brief, enigmatic story told by a first-person narrator who reveals nothing about herself but tells the little she knows about the young servant girl who appears in her room one day. The little girl’s quiet strength and self-respect in the face of a life of hardship and trauma are poignantly evoked through the narrator’s descriptions of her appearance and manner:

I could not tell her age. Her assured manner made me feel younger than herself. Her eyes had no memories of childhood. Her body was of a child of nine or ten, but its undernourished thinness was deceptive; she could have been eleven or twelve. There was no telling of how many years of childhood life had robbed her. (79–80)

The nails of her peasant hands were worn with work […] She kept her clothes very clean — old, discarded clothes which were cut down for her and hung loosely on her. (80)

This little girl has apparently escaped unimaginable horrors (perhaps associated with partition) which she is reluctant to describe, but the narrator’s questioning gives us a chilling insight into the nature of her experiences. The child insists that she doesn’t know what happened to her mother and doesn’t know why she subsequently ran away, but she is clear about someone named Chand Bibi: “Oh, she was brave […] She fought and fought and killed so many of them — then her arm was cut off” (81–82).

While there is no doubt that Attia Hosain’s fiction exhibits what critics have variously described as “a social conscience” (Kaul and Jain, 2001: 117), “great compassion” for the plight of the poor (Palkar, 1995: 109), and so on, her underprivileged characters are invariably household servants dependent on the benevolence of their employers for their well-being. Moreover, there is sometimes a suggestion that one of the responsibilities of noblesse oblige is to save the poor from being brutalized by one another. This is the case not only in “After the Storm”, in which the little servant girl reports that the heroic Chand Bibi “had a big house” (82), but also in “The Daughter-in-Law”, in which Nasima Begum is apparently the only person who has ever been kind to her servant’s young daughter-in-law Munni. Munni is exploited and ill-treated by her mother-in-law Nasiban, but Nasiban herself is subjected to a more subtle system of exploitation:

Nasiban was the fourth Ayah she [Nasima Begum] had interviewed that week and the fourth who seemed suitable […] Her references were excellent, the wages she demanded were mercifully reasonable, and the tone of her voice betrayed an anxiety which encouraged bargaining. (83)

The practice of underpaying household servants while bestowing gifts, favours, and no-longer-wanted clothing on them is explored most fully in “The Loss”. This is the story of the narrator’s awakening to the realities of inequality when her ancient ayah is robbed of the box under her bed containing her life savings: “I saw her poverty and self-denial with intense clarity in the light of her lost savings” (122). Having always taken her ayah for granted, the narrator is suddenly interested in the details of her past life in the household:

[Her child] was taken from her breast and fed on cow’s milk so that she should nurse me, and a special maidservant looked after him so that she should devote all her time to me. She was paid eight rupees a month, given three sets of clothes that she should always be clean, special food that her milk should be rich, and on feast days and birthdays she was given presents of money, clothes or gold jewellery. Her child wore my old clothes. She hoarded everything for the day her son would marry and bring home his bride to care for her in her old age.

When I grew too old for her constant care she was put in charge of the stores and the kitchen. It was responsible and hard work in a household where the smallest number of people to be fed was twenty, as most of the servants were given food as part of their wages. (123–4)

Thus we see the paternalistic attitude of the employers toward their household servants, who are “looked after” in a way that makes them profoundly dependent. The ayah’s savings box, in addition to containing all the fruits of her labour and sacrifices over the years, is her only source of independent security:

I saw it now, clearly. It had not been enough, the abstraction of love and respect; it had not made poverty and hard work bearable. The power had been in the little box under the bed. The money and gold had brought her no visible comfort, but were an assurance of it. The rich foundation was gone, and her poor life crumbled.

“What am I, robbed of my possessions?” her grief cried.

“What am I without mine?” my heart echoed in fearful recognition. (125–6)

The narrator gives the old servant some extra money but, finally aware of the nature and implications of inequality, she reports feeling “ashamed that it meant so little to me and so much to her” (128).

Born 40 years after Attia Hosain into another elite Muslim family in India, the postcolonial world of Shama Futehally is very different, but the issues she explores in her fiction are remarkably similar: social and economic inequality, exploitation of the poor, and the ambiguous position of women privileged by their social class and disempowered by their gender. Both authors write carefully crafted realist fiction focusing predominantly on the experiences and perspectives of female characters. However, while Attia Hosain was looking back on the end of the heyday for prominent Muslim families like her own as India made its transition to independence, Shama Futehally’s fiction is set during the postcolonial era in the secular but Hindu-dominated nation of India, in which Muslims have been — and continue to be — an often embattled minority. In contrast to the affluent backgrounds of both authors and many of their fictional characters, it should be noted that on average, Muslims in postcolonial India tend to be poorer and less educated than their Hindu counterparts (Hasan and Menon, 2004). There are of course many exceptions and variations, but this statistic is significant here because it points to the relative marginalization of Muslims in India after partition, which created the separate Islamic state of Pakistan. Despite popular perceptions that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon (2004) have demonstrated in their recent study that most Muslim women in India are oppressed not by Islam but by gender ideologies not specific to the Muslim community, and often by poverty. Their study has also shown that most Indian women have severely limited control over all aspects of their own lives, regardless of class, caste, or religion. These findings are consistent with the ideological assumptions reflected in the fiction of Hosain and Futehally. In their fictional worlds, women are oppressed by gender ideologies and often by poverty, but never by religion as such.

In addition to their inequality within the family, Hosain and Futehally have both emphasized the extra vulnerability of lower-class women to sexual exploitation. As we have seen, the plight of Nandi the servant-girl is an important subplot of Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. Class-based sexual exploitation is also the central thematic concern of Futehally’s short story “The First Rains”, which explores this issue more explicitly and more directly through the consciousness of a poor girl named Sarita, whose father gets her a job cleaning and cooking in one of the new officers’ quarters near their village. The quality of Sarita’s life is revealed through vivid details about the daily scramble for essential food and water:

The women herded themselves around the well like buffaloes. Sarita, clutching her water-pots, was thrust from side to side in a cauldron of knees shoulders breasts. She cried out at them all, as she did every day, as they all did. (Futehally, 2006: 99) ⁴

Although indoctrinated with ideologies of female “purity” and chastity, young girls like Sarita are also influenced by stories and films featuring the familiar scenario of a poor heroine winning the heart of a kind and wealthy man who saves her from poverty. Understanding that this is a romantic fantasy, Sarita is attracted and horrified in equal measure by the more realistic prospect of seduction by a wealthy man who (she believes) can offer her a more comfortable lifestyle — which she knows would come at the price of her “honour”. The imaginative power of this fantasy is effectively evoked in a conversation between the village girls:

Her friend Chandra had told her that in Bombay all the saabs made love to their servants […] “And if you don’t do what they say … finished!” said Chandra, rolling her eyes with all the horror at her command. But her words had set Sarita’s heart racing. (98)

Already seeing with pleasure the lust in her employer’s eyes, Sarita was feeling “in some obscure way, more powerful than him” (100). Indeed, it is repeatedly emphasized throughout the narrative that the pleasure Sarita derives from the relationship is based on her first (and last) experience of power. The first time the saab led Sarita to his bedroom, “she felt a triumph such as she had never felt before” (101), and “she soon learnt that while she was on the bed with him, she was not his servant” (102). Predictably, the relationship turns out to be short-lived and Sarita’s concomitant feeling of power turns out to be illusory, with tragic consequences.

Shama Futehally’s novel Tara Lane, like Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column, is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is a young Muslim woman in an affluent family, coming to terms with the uneasy combination of class privilege, gender disadvantage, and a strong social conscience. As a child, the narrator–protagonist, Tara Mushtaq, becomes vaguely aware that her pleasant and privileged life is underpinned by something not altogether comfortable. The source of the Mushtaq family’s wealth is the factory that is located next to the house, so that the young Tara sees stark contrasts between her own life and those of the factory workers and household servants. Taking a paternalistic attitude toward his dependent employees, Tara’s father completely lives up to the ideals of noblesse oblige: “The source of all good seems to be so entirely my father. Mushtaq saab has put up tube-lights in the slum; Mushtaq saab has ordered that an extra tube-well be dug” (Futehally, 1993: 33). ⁵ Gradually, the consciousness of her father’s sole responsibility for the welfare of so many people makes the young Tara uneasy: “It would have been reassuring to learn that other people were capable of putting up lights; or rather that a whole lot of people did what they were supposed to do” (33). Here she is already becoming aware of the limitations and dangers of noblesse oblige, not only because it is predicated on inequality, but also because of the dependency it fosters among its recipients. Moreover, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan reminds us, “the obverse of giving — the threat or the actual withholding and even taking away, of favours, gifts, livelihood itself — is a continuous and powerful weapon that the givers exercise against the recipients” (2013: 68). Although Tara grows up to be a well-educated young woman, aware and concerned about the well-being of the servants and factory workers, she has absolutely no stake in the running of the family business, which operates unashamedly as a male preserve. As Shama Futehally herself has said:

The whole thing is written from the point of view of an aware woman who is none the less outside the world of action. She sees everything, in the factory and everywhere, but she has no say […] I think of her as being behind a wall or a door and just peeping through. (qtd. in Kuortti, 2003: 85)

Thus, Tara occupies the same narrative position as Laila in Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column: an intelligent and reflective observer who is granted no agency and no voice in a powerful family in which all of the important decisions are made by men. The wall or door referred to by Futehally is reminiscent of purdah (which literally means curtain) — a symbolic and sometimes physical separation of men’s and women’s spheres. Like Hosain’s Laila, Futehally’s Tara is pampered but powerless, educated but restricted, and close to her servants who are a valuable source of information. Although she is obviously more privileged than her servants, she shares their state of dependency.

If noblesse oblige has always been insufficient at best, it is also shown in Tara Lane to be unworkable in modern capitalist relations. Faced with corruption in every sphere of government and business, as well as a more militant trade union movement, Mushtaq is eventually forced to resort to bribing the labour union official in order to keep the factory going. Significantly, this breach of his integrity is precipitated by the pressure he feels to maintain the family’s comfortable lifestyle for the sake of his wife (Tara’s mother), who suffers a breakdown when faced with a drastic reduction in their standard of living. Thus the narrative points to some of the disadvantages of women’s constructed dependency: Tara has a social conscience but lacks the power to put it into practice, while her mother understands nothing beyond her own need to maintain domestic “standards”. This in turn raises troubling questions about the relationship between patriarchy and class inequality. While it is well-documented that gender inequality is strongly correlated with poverty and that sex discrimination is “a pervasive factor in most poor women’s experience of poverty” (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 242), the paradoxical position of dependent women in wealthy families has received less attention. I noted in an earlier study (Jackson, 2010: 18) that other Indian women writers — such as Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande in particular — have called attention to the ways in which many elite women have used their class privilege to cope with their gender subordination. Kumkum Sangari has suggested that when women consent to patriarchal values, practices, and arrangements, it need not be construed as consent to these alone since “the patriarchies they are subjected to are simultaneously located […] in class structures and in particular forms of […] inequality” (1993: 869). Thus, even if they have a social conscience, elite women undoubtedly have less of an incentive to challenge structures of inequality, given the advantages that they enjoy in return for what Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) has called “patriarchal bargains”. The intersecting axes of privilege and subordination for elite women are thus complex and not always easy to untangle.

Given its thematic concern with power hierarchies in India, the resolutely domestic focus of Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane is interesting in itself. Although we do get a sense of contemporary capitalist relations in this novel, other wider factors affecting power relationships (such as communal issues and the impact of globalization on gender norms) are not highlighted in the narrative. By contrast, we have seen the ways in which Attia Hosain’s fiction places its social critique against a backdrop of historical change and within a broader framework of cultural contestation and conflicting gender ideologies. To some extent, this can be explained by the circumstances in which the texts were produced. As emphasized earlier, Attia Hosain was looking back on a period of revolutionary change in India, whereas Shama Futehally was writing during the early 1990s — a seemingly less turbulent time for elite Indian women, who were well aware of feminist ideas but often living in family structures imposing gender subordination softened by class privilege.

Comparing representations of gender and class inequality in the fictional writings of Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally, we see striking similarities, despite the very different times and political circumstances in which they were writing. While it is rarely valid to draw conclusions about reality from fictional texts, both writers do give us interesting insights into the lives and perspectives of women from a range of social classes in India. From the perspective of these fictional characters, the power dynamics in domestic life (the “private sphere”) seem to have remained remarkably constant during several decades of revolutionary change in the public sphere. Reflecting the 1960s feminist slogan that “the personal is political”, Hasan and Menon have emphasised the overarching interconnectedness of all forms of inequality, arguing persuasively that:

Inequality itself is shaped by the larger context: the persistence of relationships that emphasize differences between communities, classes, and sexes at all levels of society. All of these take their toll on the well-being of women because gender inequality is strongly correlated with poverty. (2004: 242)

This is because when resources are scarce, women’s limited access to them is further curtailed. Aware of these interconnections, Attia Hosain and Shama Futehally have written powerful fictional works which effectively dramatize not only the complex relationship between gender and social class hierarchies, but also the ways in which all privilege is predicated on inequality. Far from taking their own privileged status for granted, they fearlessly explore its implications, creating socially critical fiction from an elite — but not elitist — perspective.