Sunlight and Salt: The Literary Landscapes of a Divided Family

This paper combines memoir and criticism to compare the treatment of Partition, class, colonialism, history and gender in two Partition novels from the same family: Sunlight on a Broken Column by the Indian writer Attia Hosain (1963) and Salt and Saffron (2000) by the Pakistani writer, Kamila Shamsie. Both novels portray a young woman's struggle for selfempowerment alongside their country's assertion of independence. Attia Husain's narrator, Laila, grows up in feudal pre-Partition Lucknow, never agrees with Partition and is heartbroken by the division of her family and the disappearance of her world; Kamila Shamsie's narrator, Aliya, the daughter of urban, Karachi professionals, does not question Pakistan, but, haunted by a bitter quarrel between her Pakistani grandparents and their Indian siblings, she looks for answers in history and their princely past. What family links do these novels reveal? Where do they differ? How has the gap of the two generations influenced both writers and their writing? This essay provides a personal comment on these questions because Attia (1913—98) was my aunt, and Kamila (b. 1973) is my daughter.