Freedom

In Sunlight on a Broken Column, Hosain thematically explores freedom. The author parallels the female characters’ personal struggles to find freedom, within the family structure, with India’s political struggle to achieve freedom from British colonial rule in order to explore the relationship between phycological and physical entrapment. At the outset of the novel, Laila is confined to the house, observing purdah with her aunts. While the family is wealthy and enjoys political and financial freedom under British rule, Laila feels entrapped by her family’s traditions and lack of autonomy as a woman. The narrator has no physical mobility and has to ask Asad to be her “contact with the outside world, running errands for [her and] Zahra, buying those things with which [they] did not trust the servants” (37). Additionally, her elders arrange her future and assert that she “cannot choose her own husband” (21). Laila...