ਆਂਗਣآنگن

About the book

Aangan, which means courtyard, is a period novel by the Pakistani writer Khadija Mastoor, published in 1962. It is widely considered a masterpiece of Urdu literature, and it won the Adamjee Literary Award for Urdu prose in 1963. The novel has been translated into thirteen languages, and its English versions, The Inner Courtyard and The Women's Courtyard, have carried it to readers far beyond Urdu.

The book is set in British India and Pakistan in the 1930s and 1940s, and it takes in the freedom struggle, the Second World War and the Partition of India, but it tells that history from inside the home. Almost everything happens in the courtyards and houses of its women, while the world outside arrives as news, argument and loss.

ਕਹਾਣੀ

The novel follows Aliya, a girl who grows into a young woman over its course. It is divided into two parts. The first, much shorter part, called Past, describes her childhood and ends with the arrest of her father, who struck a British officer and was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted murder.

In the second part, Present, Aliya and her mother move into the house of one of her uncles, where they live until Partition. The household is crowded and quarrelsome. Her elder sister Tehmina loves their cousin Sadfar, a match her mother cannot accept, and the arranged marriage that follows ends in tragedy. Her cousin Chammi, more or less abandoned by a father who married repeatedly and sends only money, is lively and gossipy and constantly visiting neighbours, and she loves another cousin, Jameel, who uses her affection while he studies and is drawn instead to Aliya.

Aliya spends ten months away from home studying for her degree in Aligarh, the one long stretch of the novel spent beyond the four walls, and returns to a household still arguing about the future. Her uncle supports the Congress and a united independent India, while his son Jameel supports the Muslim League and a separate Pakistan. The men fixate on independence while the women wish they would attend to daily life, and the housekeeper asks the question at the heart of the book: will anyone really get independence by destroying a household?

When Partition comes, the family leaves for Pakistan almost overnight, flying rather than travelling by road, so they do not see the worst of the sectarian violence first hand. Independence does not bring the paradise the men dreamed of. Aliya's uncle, who committed himself to Pakistan, is broken by the violent turn it takes, and the novel closes on the gap between what was hoped for and what arrived.

What is Aangan about?

At its centre, Aangan is about the distance between public history and private life. The great events of the 1930s and 1940s, Gandhi's leadership of the national movement, the rise of the Muslim League and the birth of Pakistan, all happen offstage, in another room, while the novel watches what they do to a family. Births, marriages, suicides, imprisonments, assault and divorce fill the courtyard, and the women bear the cost of choices made by men.

It is also a feminist classic, as reviewers of the English translation have called it. Aliya's mother, Amma, guards propriety fiercely and is displeased with almost everything about her fate. Chammi, by contrast, stands up to a bad marriage, confronts her mother-in-law and returns to the family, the one reasonably happy ending in the book. The novel questions love, marriage and the need for happy endings, and it does so without leaving the domestic world it knows.

ਲੇਖਕ

Khadija Mastoor was born in Bareilly in 1927 and settled in Lahore after Partition. She began writing short stories at fifteen and published five collections before Aangan made her name. She wrote for forty years, in frank and everyday Urdu, without joining any literary movement, and she died in London in July 1982. Her second novel, Zameen, appeared after her death in 1983.

Translations and screen adaptations

Neelam Hussain translated Aangan into English as The Inner Courtyard in 2001. Daisy Rockwell's translation, The Women's Courtyard, appeared in 2018 and was recognised as a Penguin classic. The novel has been translated into thirteen languages in all.

A Pakistani television series based on the novel, starring Sajal Aly, Mawra Hocane, Ahad Raza Mir and Ahsan Khan, aired on Hum TV from 2018 to 2019, and a version was also made in India by DD Urdu. The renewed interest made Aangan the bestselling book in Pakistan in 2019.

Reception and legacy

Aangan has been praised since it appeared. The critic Nazir Siddiqi wrote that Mastoor had possibly surpassed all the male and female novelists of Urdu, with the exception of Qurratulain Hyder, and that in her perfection of art she came close to Jane Austen. Uslub Ahmad Ansari counts it among the fifteen best novels in Urdu, and Shamsur Rahman Farooqi has said that it deserves more attention than it has received.

The novel is now taught in the syllabus of the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad and in Pakistan's Central Superior Services examinations. Reviewers of The Women's Courtyard have called it elegant, poignant and unputdownable, and a magnificent book that depicts the bitter battles women fight, far from the battlefield. More than sixty years after it was published, it remains the book by which Khadija Mastoor is remembered.