Treatment of a Wife's Body in the Fiction of Indian Sub-continental

345 Pages·2017·5.89 MB·English

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Dissertations
Summer 8-2008
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Hafiza Nilofar Khan
University of Southern Mississippi
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The University of Southern Mississippi
TREATMENT OF A WIFE'S BODY IN THE FICTION
OF INDIAN SUB-CONTINENTAL MUSLIM WOMEN WRITERS
by
Hafiza Nilofar Khan
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Studies Office
of The University of Southern Mississippi
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Approved:
August 2008
COPYRIGHT BY
HAFIZA NILOFAR KHAN
2008

The University of Southern Mississippi
TREATMENT OF A WIFE'S BODY IN THE FICTION OF INDIAN SUB
CONTINENTAL MUSLIM WOMEN WRITERS
by
Hafiza Nilofar Khan
Abstract of a Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate Studies Office
of The University of Southern Mississippi
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
August 2008
ABSTRACT
TREATMENT OF A WIFE'S BODY IN THE FICTION OF INDIAN SUB
CONTINENTAL MUSLIM WOMEN WRITERS
by Hafiza Nilofar Khan
August 2008
Ismat Chughtai of India, Tehmina Durrani of Pakistan, and Selina Hossain of
Bangladesh depict some of the sociological, religious and legal aspects of wife abuse that
is a chronic, yet little discussed anathema in a Sub-Continental Muslim wife's life.
"Treatment of the Wife's Body in the Fiction of Indian Sub-Continental Muslim Women
Writers," examines the fiction and autobiographical works of these women writers who
problematize the deeply ingrained traditional modes of domestic violence as perpetuated
upon the minds and bodies of Sub-Continental Muslim wives. Chughtai, Hossain and
Durrani identify culture specific practices such as child marriage, dowry, polygamy,
honor crimes, marital rape as primary sources of masculinist power that convert a wife's
body into a site of oppression. It has been the aim of this dissertation to prove that in the
absence of sufficiently adequate and specific Muslim Personal Laws pertaining to
marriage, a gnawing gap exists between what the core discourses of Islamic heritage and
attitude towards gender hold, and the actual situation of repression of Muslim wives that
becomes apparent from the fiction of Chugatai, Hossain and Durrani. These writers
contend that marriage does not entirely deprive a wife of her agency to subvert the status
quo although socialization of her body under the auspice of the institution often proves
devastating for her irrespective of her class, age and location.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to take this opportunity to give thanks to my dissertation director, Dr.
Linda Pierce, and committee members, Dr. Martina Sciolino, Dr. Ken Watson, Dr. Louis
Iglasius, and Dr. Ann Marie Kinnell for their advice and support throughout the duration
of this project. I would specially like to thank Dr. Linda Pierce for her meticulous
revisions and enormous patience during times when I felt that this project was impossible
to finish. I would also like to thank Juliana Nafah Abbenyi under whose guidance this
project originally began.
My special thanks go to writer Selina Hossain for her endless time and tea that
she offered me during my stay in Dhaka from 2000 to 2005. I am indebted to Dr. Maleka
Begum of Dhaka University and Dr. Dina Forkan of North South University for lending
me copies of their unpublished dissertations. I would also like to express my gratitude
towards Tahira Naqvi, Shukrita Paul Kumar and Dr. M. Asaduddin of Jamia Milia
University in Delhi for their assistance with material and discussion on Ismat Chughtai.
Generous appreciation should also be expressed towards my husband, Carl N.
Bloom for our endless literary discussions and his constructive academic advice despite
many instances of my ill temper and neglect of wifely duties. My heartfelt thanks goes to
my father and mother without whose progressive influence and active support towards
my educational endeavors I would not have developed interest in women and Islam.
Finally I would like to thank my children for their patience and kindness towards me
despite the fact that I have often given my academic work more preference over my
responsibilities as a mother.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENT iii
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. CHILD BRIDE'S BODY 38
III. DOWRY ABUSE AND HONOR CRIMES 97
IV. MUSLIM PERSONAL / FAMILY LAWS (SHARIAT):
POLYGAMY AND MARITAL RAPE 147
V. A WIFE'S AGENCY 216
VI. CONCLUSION 280
WORKS CITED 322
iv
1
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
And it is my body, after all that is the site of your utmost confusion.
--Minal Hajratwala
In the name of those married women
Whose decked up bodies
Atrophied on loveless,
Deceitful beds
—Faiz Ahmed Faiz
A wife's body in the Muslim societies of the Sub-Continent (India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh) is often the site of moral exhortation and patriarchal control. The
primordial story of human creation where Hawa(Eve)is created out of Adam's
crooked rib in order to provide him a help-mate, and is eventually punished with
painful childbirth for her transgression, has considerable impact on the enculturation
of the wife's body as a subordinate, contaminated, evil and sinful entity. The concept
of marriage in the Islamic subconscious as a contract of ownership/authority of a man
over a woman further reinforces the idea of a wife's body as a commodity for
domination and sexual enjoyment by the husband. Indeed, in Islam a wife is not
obliged to contribute to the expenses of the family; however, whatever benefits she
receives from her husband, are often considered to be in return for the 'gift' she
makes of her body. This kind of marital treaty coerces a wife's body to conform to
the rigid compartmentalization of ideal wife and self-abnegating mother. The
visualization of a Sub-Continental Muslim wife as the embodied form of love,
sacrifice, devotion and purity, can also be an outcome of the influence of feminine
archetypes of Sita, Savitri and Yashoda in Hindu mythology.
Most Sub-Continental Muslim wives themselves attach utmost value and
dignity to their social and biological roles as a wife and a mother. Traditional marital
2
norms form such a huge part of their inherited consciousness that these wives do not
see their bodies as disenfranchised in any way. Instead, in keeping with the cultural
meaning ascribed to them, the wives force their bodies to accept and accommodate
the idea of male anxiety over them. At times they go to the extent of repudiating then-
own bodies, or de-sexing and locking them in a space of non-enunciation.
This dissertation is an exploration of attitudes towards a wife's body in Sub-
Continental literary thought. It particularly aims at deciphering the ways in which
Sub-Continental Muslim women writers view, evaluate and represent a wife's body in
their fiction. On one hand, their writings often project a wife's body as a site of
surveillance and oppression. It is literally marked in the name of marital rites, and
forced to go through humiliation for its inadequacy to reproduce. It is also mangled
and annihilated in the name of family prestige. Many repressive socio-religious
mechanisms operate against the concept of a wife's bodily freedom and self-
fulfillment. On the other hand, in the modern feminist thought of Sub-Continental
women writers, a wife's body is also the site of abundant energy, desire, pleasure and
innovation, allowing the woman to follow the trajectory of resistance and
empowerment.
In my dissertation, I examine the fictional and autobiographical writings of
three Sub-Continental Muslim women writers, including Ismat Chughtai from India,
Selina Hossain from Bangladesh and Tehmina Durrani from Pakistan, in order to
produce a comparative analysis of their treatment of a wife's body. These authors use
a wife's body as a conceptual tool to examine certain discursively constructed social
determinants that deprive a wife of rights over her own body. One such social
determinant is marriage. By way of commenting on the need to authenticate a
woman's body through marriage, Ismat Chughtai's narrator in her short story, "A