Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column

Multiple patriarchies have attempted to circumscribe women within the private sphere, encrypting their identities with broader definitions of class, caste, community, and nation. Malashri Lal in The Law of the Threshold has suggested the threshold – a real as well as symbolic bar that patriarchies place before women – as a tool for literary criticism. The paper takes up Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column to examine negotiations of women from varying classes and communities with the dynamics of the threshold and their positioning inside, on, and outside the threshold. Issues of gender and the transgression of the controls and harness upon women’s sexuality are examined with the intersecting paradigms of class, community, and the changing face of the nation. The forces and anxieties emanating from opposing pulls of the inner world of the traditional order and the outer modern Western world that pre-empt the move outside the threshold are also traced against a colonial backdrop.