Speaking with Difficulty

Speaking with Difficulty: Feminismand Antiracism inBritain after 9\îî Pnyamvada Gopal A few years ago, an undergraduate came to see me about his final year dissertation. One of very few young British Asian men reading English at Cambridge University, he was immersed in our postcolo nial literature option, telling me how compelling and challenging this journey back to where his family "had come from" had been. But he now wanted to change his dissertation topic to write about the image of the railway platform in literature from India. Alarmed by the late timing of this change, I asked him why he no longer wanted to work on his chosen area of study, Muslim women's writing in North India during the nationalist movement. After some hesitation, he said that he hadn't yet been able to find what he had been looking for. He had conceived of his dissertation, he said, as a riposte to the discourse of Muslim women as oppressed and passive; he had hoped to write about how, for instance, many Muslim women choose to wear a headscarf or veil as a way of asserting agency. "I've been read ing a lot," he told me, "but I don't think I've found the right texts yet. Should I keep looking?" I told him that while he was unlikely to find the "headscarf" as such a salient concern in the writing of this period—although there were compelling engagements with issues of seclusion and veiling—he should persist with the reading and try to unravel the complexities of the ways in which Muslim women writ FemimstStudies39, no. 1. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. PnyamvadaGopal 99 ers in colonial India were grappling with gender, culture, commu nity, and nation. Interestingly, his idea about working on railway platforms had itself come from "Dilli ki Sair" (A Tour of Delhi), a short story by the socialist feminist doctor Rashid Jahan, which is about the travails of coming out of seclusion for a woman whose husband leaves her by herself at Delhi's railway station. Ensconced in her burqa as she keenly observes the unfamiliar world around her, she finds solace and protection inside it and refuses, in the final instance, to undertake the "tour of Delhi" that her benevolent spouse wishes to take her on. The story is very much about the ways in which a Muslim woman asserts her agency, paradoxically, through her refusal of male-spon sored emancipation in the form of coming out into public spaces. Yet the text is also curiously inhospitable to readings that would make a simple correlation between recuperating the veil and female agency. "Dilli ki Sair" ends not on a celebratory note but one of intractability. If male-sponsored emancipation is problematic, so too is the hostile gendering of public spaces; the burqa provides a tool with which to negotiate a specific space and its challenges, but it is by no means a definitive symbol of female choice or resistance. In a tranche of literary texts written by Muslim women in the firsthalf of the twentieth century, from Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Padmaragand Sultana'sDream to works by Razia Sajjad Zaheer, Attia Hos sain, Ismat Chughtai, and the aforementioned Rashid Jahan, ques tions of agency have a complicated and changing bearing on the practice of everyday life.1 Although in "Dilli ki Sair," the protagonist chooses to wear her burqa and return to the space of the domestic in defiance of male authority, in some stories women speak of their anger at seclusion and confinement, and in others still, women emanci pated from the confines of the domestic critique the gendered politics of the public, not necessarily the sphere of freedom in and of itself. "Mera ek Safar" (A Journey), a later story by Rashid Jahan, calls on women not to be satisfied with emergence into the public sphere but to participate in reshaping its politics, not only of gender, but also of class, caste, and community.2 Women in these works make his tory in circumstances not of their own choosing but, in turn, reflex ively mold some of those circumstances. Agency is not limited within these texts to a voluntarist

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