Sunlight on a Broken Column as a Female Bildungsroman Anonymous College

Sunlight on A Broken Column as a female Bildungsroman

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain is a coming-of-age fiction revolving primarily around the life and journey of the protagonist Laila from her teenage years to the mother of a teenager herself, in parallel to the journey of various other female characters whose lives spin in the same hemisphere, hence making it a female bildungsroman where not just one but many females’ lives, though partially, have been accounted simultaneously.

The novel specifically takes into consideration the socio-political upheavals during partition and its aftermath that contributes to the formation of an individual witnessing the events and how such national incidents impact the lives of each and every character differently, keeping Laila in the center of the narrative for which G.J.V. Prasad remarks, “This is a book about growing up, a woman, during the most existing years of our national history….Her personal struggle for freedom is fought out against the background of national struggle for Independence.”(Prasad, 10).

Hosain’s protagonist is in many ways a reflection of her own self. Laila’s rebellious attitude, her love of reading and her disenchantment from the normative social...