Indian Muslim Woman Analysis

The life of the Indian Muslim woman is shaped by her dual identity as an Indian and a Muslim. The just and fair tenets of Islam as a religion often do not come to the aid of the Muslim woman, posited as she is within the hierarchical Indian tradition and the male dominant Muslim community. The minority status of the Muslim community in India leads to the privileging of community identity over gender identity and basic human dignity is often denied to the woman. The Muslim male orthodoxy rigidly and literally interprets the tenets of Islam which accounts for the circumscribed life of the Indian Muslim woman.
Chandra Mohanty defines feminism as “a mode of intervention into particular hegemonic discourses” and not a universal response to an assumed
Marnia Lazreg observes: “To think of feminism in the singular is sociologically inappropriate” (101). Gender is a racialised/historicised concept and the universalist assumptions of Anglo-American feminism break down in an analysis of the concerns of the Indian Muslim woman. The heterogeneity of feminism has to be underscored before accommodating the concept in the Indian and the Islamic contexts. A militant feminism is inconceivable in the Indian scenario, given the hegemony of the structures of patriarchy and orthodox tradition. Islam and feminism, it is widely held, are incompatible. In Orientalist discourses Islam is persistently portrayed as a misogynistic religion. It puts its women in purdah, confines them to their domestic roles and reduces them to mere bodies sans creativity, sensibility or intellect. With this perception of the Muslim woman entrenched in the social psyche, any examination of a Muslim feminist consciousness would appear simplistic unless the contours of feminism in
In this configuration of the zenana as a site of female society, not just as an all-imprisoning enclosure, can be witnessed a divergent pattern of Muslim feminism. It is the comforting company of women like Aunt Abida and Hakiman Bua that Attia Hosain’s protagonist Laila seeks, when tormented by the conflicting values around her. We see how Ashiana is not just an intimidating fortress, which seals its women from contact with the outside world, but a comforting cocoon of love, loyalty, understanding and warmth. The celebration of the female space as cohesive, life-furthering and productive marks a departure from the recurrent representations of Muslim female spaces like the harem and the zenana as brothel or prison like. However, such representations of zenana life are rare in portrayals of Muslim life in Indian fiction in English. Attia Hosain herself presents a contrasting picture of zenana life, vitiated by rankling sexual jealousies, a preoccupation with sexuality and the neglect of emotional and intellectual development. The loveless relationship existing among the females of Aunt Abida’s spousal house and the antagonism they exhibit towards Abida, an outsider, is a case in point:
They resented the sensitiveness of a character