Women Are Boring Because We Locked Them in a Courtyard…

“A feminist classic of Partition literature”: referring to the violence and trauma connected to the partition of India from Pakistan. “…A newly revised translation by Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell.” Rockwell is an American translator (with a PhD in this field) who has specialized in translating Indian classics into English. She won the Booker for translating in 2021 Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. Khadija Mastur (1927-82) is a Pakistani Urdu-language storyteller. Women’s Courtyard was first-published in 1962 as Aangan; it was the first of her two novels.
“Set in the turbulent decade of the 1940s, The Women’s Courtyard provides an inverted perspective on the Partition. Mastur’s novel is conspicuously empty of the political pondering and large national questions that played out, typically, in the arenas of men. Instead, it gives expression to the preoccupations of the women in the courtyard, fighting different battles with loud voices.” Oh, no… Whenever, women are silenced from addressing politics, this can’t be a humanitarian text. Women being happily isolated to a “courtyard” sounds like a Stepford Wives nightmare, rather than a “feminist” ideal… “Chapter 1” opens by hinting that this work is anti-feminist, or meant to bore readers: “She’s sleeping soundly…” Mentions of sleep in the opening paragraphs tends to make readers drowsy. “The novel follows a Muslim girl, Aliya, and her family, about and around the climax of the Independence struggle. While the national struggle rages on the street, Aliya and the other women in the courtyard are tethered hopelessly to their own problems of life and death… An experience in suffocation.” But this experiment is practiced on the reader, who is suffocated by the mundanity of the lives of these women, who are thus made repelling, and uninteresting. Such bored views of women are likely to convince men to avoid talking to women, assuming they would have nothing interesting to say. “Within the strict religious and social framework of a rigid Muslim family, there is a purdah between Aliya and the rest of the world. While the men in Aliya’s family wage politics, get beaten up, and go to jail in the unseen outside, their families back home are forced to wait in deteriorating conditions, trying desperately to hold up the social structure that confines them.” I searched for “beaten” to figure out if these incidents are dramatically portrayed. A couple dozen pages in: “the barber’s wife came to call, wondering what terrible deed Safdar’s father and grandfather had committed to be beaten with shoes in front of everyone…” Instead of explaining what this beating was about, the author mentions that it made “Salma Aunty” act as if she was “dead”, as “she stopped dressing properly and never touched a comb to her hair”. Women are only allowed to express their uniqueness through their outward appearance, so seizing grooming makes her as-if-dead. This is a depressing perspective. I would have been happy to read about the politics of the Partition. But it seems the Brits have censored books that honestly describe this event, in favor of this type of light coverage that focuses on Indian women being boring gossips. This is not what “feminism” should look like, and people should stop using such works to exemplify what this term means. This might be why guys tend to denigrate “feminists”, without having a clear understanding of this movement.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024