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{{Short description|British-Indian writer, broadcaster and actor (1913–1998)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=November 2015}}
{{Use Indian English|date=November 2015}}
{{Infobox writer 
| name = Attia Hosain
| image = Attia Hosain in the 1930s.jpg
| caption = Hosain in the 1930s
| birth_date = 20 October 1913
| birth_place = [[Lucknow]], [[United Provinces of Agra and Oudh|United Provinces]], [[British Raj|British India]]
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1998|01|25|1913|10|20|df=y}}
| death_place = [[London]], [[United Kingdom]]
| occupation = Writer
| nationality = Indian, British
| genre = Novels
| children = [[Waris Hussein]], Shama Habibullah
| spouse = {{marriage|Ali Bahadur Habibullah|1909|1982|reason=d.}}
| relatives = [[FS Hussain]] (brother)
}}

'''Attia Hosain''' (20 October 1913 – 25 January 1998)<ref>{{cite web |last1= |first1= |title=Frauendatenbank fembio.org |url=https://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/frauendatenbank?fem_id=13918 |website=fembio.org |publisher= |access-date=25 April 2022 |language=German |date=}}</ref> was a British-Indian novelist, author, writer, broadcaster, journalist and actor.<ref name=":0">''Distant Traveller'', new and selected fiction: edited by [[Aamer Hussein|Aamer Hossein]] with Shama Habibullah, with foreword and afterword by them, and introduction by [[Ritu Menon]] (Women Unlimited, India 2013). This contains the first publication of a section of Attia Hosain's unfinished novel, ''No New Lands, No New Seas''.</ref><ref name=":1">{{Cite web|url=http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2017/08/14/india-at-70-a-muslim-womans-story-of-nationalism-partition-an_a_23076448/|title=India at 70: A Muslim Woman's Story of Nationalism, Partition and her awakening into Feminism|last=Ghoshal|first=Somak|date=15 August 2017|website=[[HuffPost]]}}</ref> She was a woman of letters and a diasporic writer. She wrote in English although her mother tongue was Urdu.<ref name=":3">{{Cite news|title=Obituary: Attia Hosain|last=Hussein|first=Aamer|date=31 January 1998|work=The Guardian}}</ref> She wrote the semi-autobiographical novel ''[[Sunlight on a Broken Column]]'' (1961) and a collection of short stories titled ''Phoenix Fled''.
Her career began in England in semi-exile making a contribution to post-colonial literature. [[Anita Desai]], [[Vikram Seth]], [[Aamer Hussein]] and [[Kamila Shamsie]] have acknowledged her influence.
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==Background and education==
[[File:Shaikh Shahid Hussain Qidwai.png|thumb|right|150px|Portrait of Shaikh Shahid Hussain Qidwai {{small|(1878-1924)}}, taken in 1914.]]
Born in [[Lucknow]] to a [[Muslim]] family of the [[Qidwai]] clan, Attia had five siblings, two sisters and three brothers. Their father, Shaikh Shahid Hussain Qidwai {{small|(1878-1924)}} was a [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]]-educated [[barrister-at-law]] and [[Taluqdar]] of the Ghadia district in the [[United Province]] and died shortly before her youngest sibling [[FS Hussain]] was born.<ref>{{cite book|title=Sentinels in the Sky: A Saga of PAF's Gallant Air Warriors|author=Azam Qadri|year=2014|publisher=PAF Book Club|pages=12–19}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QOa1AAAAIAAJ&q=shaikh%20shahid%20qidwai|title=Second Supplement to Who's who in India|year=1914|pages=63–64}}</ref> Her mother, Begum Nisar Fatima, came from the Alvi family of Kakori. From her father, Attia inherited a keen interest in politics and nationalism. From her mother's family of poets and scholars she drew a knowledge of Urdu, Persian and Arabic. She was the first woman from her background to graduate from [[Lucknow University]], after having attended [[La Martiniere College|La Martiniere School for Girls]] and [[Isabella Thoburn College]], Lucknow.<ref name=":4">{{Cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-attia-hosain-1142971.html|title=Obituary: Attia Hosain|last=Khan|first=Naseem|date=5 Feb 1998|work=[[The Independent]], UK}}</ref>

Hosain grew up in two cultures, reading the canon of English and European literature as well as the Quran.<ref name=":1" />
[[File:Attia Hosein aged 15 in 1928.jpg|thumb|Attia Hosain aged 15]]
Attia came of age as the struggle for independence was gaining strength.<ref name=":3" /> Attia's father was a friend of [[Motilal Nehru]] at the Inns of Court. In 1933, Attia was encouraged by [[Sarojini Naidu]], "my own ideal of womanhood from childhood", and attended the [[All India Women's Conference]] in Calcutta.<ref name=":0" />

In her own words, Attia said, "I had been very influenced by the political thoughts of the Left in the [[Progressive Writers' Movement]], through my friends Mulk Raj Anand, [[Sajjad Zaheer]] and Sahibzada Mahmuduzaffar and was asked by Desmond Young to write for ''The Pioneer''."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Voices of the Crossing|last=Hosain|first=Attia|publisher=Serpents Tail|others=The impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa|year=1998|editor-last=Davis|editor-first=Ferdinand|pages=19|chapter=Deep Roots|editor-last2=Khan|editor-first2=Naseem}}</ref> She also wrote for ''The Statesman'', Calcutta.

She married her cousin, Ali Bahadur Habibullah, her mother's sister's son, against the wishes of their families. They had two children, Shama Habibullah and [[Waris Hussein]]. In the early 1940s the couple moved to Bombay, where Ali Bahadur was in government service, first in the Textile Commission and later as Supply Commissioner for South East Asia after the outbreak of [[World War II]].

She turned her home into an extension of her childhood open house, a Lakhnavi "adda", a gathering that attracted an eclectic crowd of people, writers, filmmakers, members of social and business world of the city, which expanded to include her husband's more western world. A young Raj Thapar was brought in by her future husband Romesh Thapar to meet Attia, whom he called 'the only woman with a man's mind."<ref>{{Cite book|title=All These Years: A Memoir|last=Thapar|first=Raj|publisher=Seminar Publications|year=1991}}</ref>

Ali Bahadur Habibullah moved to England with his family in 1947, before India became independent, posted to the Indian High Commission, in the newly created Trade Commission. When India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the division of the country and the separation of two religious communities caused Attia great pain. "We belong to a generation that has lived with our hearts in pieces," she said.{{citation needed|date=March 2020}}

Later in life she wrote: "Here I am, I have chosen to live in this country which has given me so much; but I cannot get out of my blood the fact that I had the blood of my ancestors for 800 years in another country."<ref name=":4" />

==Writing==
In London, where a diaspora of displaced people had gathered in a post-war world, Attia Hosain became a ''Qissa-go'', the storyteller of her own roots. Her stories appeared in the English magazine ''Lilliput'' and the American Journal, the ''Atlantic Monthly''.

Despite her cosmopolitanism, her creative directions as writer, broadcaster with the BBC and actress were enriched by her own identity and diverse cultural strands.{{citation needed|date=November 2025}}

In 1953, ''Phoenix Fled'', her first collection of short stories, which are set just before the partition, was published.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Hosain|first=Attia|url=https://archive.org/details/phoenixfledother00hosa|url-access=registration|title=Phoenix Fled: And Other Stories|date=1989|publisher=Penguin Books|isbn=978-0-14-016192-2|language=en}}</ref> In 1961, Chatto and Windus published ''Sunlight on a broken Column''.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Hosain|first=Attia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=d1OaAAAAIAAJ&q=Sunlight%20on%20a%20broken%20Column%201961|title=Sunlight on a Broken Column|date=1961|publisher=Chatto & Windus|language=en}}</ref>

For a long time this was thought to be her only published written work, until ''Distant Traveller, a collection, new & selected fiction'' was published in 2012, to honour her coming centenary year, which included excerpts of her unfinished novel, ''No New Lands, No New Seas'', set in England. Many of her stories have now been included in other anthologies.

In 1998 ''Sunlight on a broken Column'' and ''Phoenix Fled'' were re-launched as Virago Modern Classics. Attia Hosian was reborn as a writer enjoying a considerable reputation.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.wasafiri.org/article/celebrating-attia-hosain-1913-1998/|title=Celebrating Attia Hosain|last1=Hussein|first1=Aamer|last2=Menon|first2=Rita|date=2013|website=[[Wasafiri]]}}</ref>

To the young writers, she wrote: "You must keep trying because it is as essential as drawing breath – like exhaling! All the thoughts breathed out and shaping themselves visibly after being inside the cells of the brain, and then released. If you hold your breath and do not breathe out, you will suffocate."

Attia did not apologize for English as her chosen language of expression. "In the struggle for freedom, English was both a weapon, as well as the key to what I might call the ideological arsenal. The result of this clashing and merging of different cultures was that I, like many others, lived in many worlds of thoughts and many centuries at the same time, shifting from one to the other with bewildering rapidity in a matter of moments", ''Writing in a foreign tongue'' by Attia Hosain.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.culture24.org.uk/am24149|title=Writing in A Foreign Tongue|last=Hosain|first=Attia|website=SALIDAA|type=South Asian Diaspora Literature & Arts Archive - broadcasting, scripts and correspondence|access-date=7 February 2018|archive-date=28 February 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190228065928/https://www.culture24.org.uk/am24149|url-status=dead}}</ref>

To the end of her life, she retained a fierce, iconoclastic political consciousness and was scornful of hypocrisy, extremism and sectarianism. She struggled for harmony between the languages, cultures and beliefs that surrounded her and drew strength from socialism, humanism and enlightened Islam, although she accepted no philosophy without rigorous analysis.<ref name=":2">{{Cite news|last=Hussein|first=Aamer|date=31 January 1998|title=Passages from India|work=The Guardian|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/jun/19/books.guardianreview11}}</ref>

==Fiction==
* ''Phoenix Fled'', London: Chatto & Windus, 1953. A collection of short stories. Reissued by Virago UK, 1988. Indian edition, Rupa & Co, 1993 - Foreword by Anita Desai.
* ''[[Sunlight on a Broken Column]]'' - London: Chatto & Windus, UK, 1961, A novel; Reissued by Virago, UK, 1988; Reissued by Virago, UK, 2021, with introduction by [[Kamila Shamsie]]
Indian Editions: (1) Arnold Heinemann, India, 1979 - Foreword by [[Mulk Raj Anand]]; (2) Penguin India, 1992 - Foreword by [[Anita Desai]]
* ''Distant Traveller,'' new and selected fiction: edited by Aamer Hussein with Shama Habibullah, with foreword and afterword by them, and introduction by Ritu Menon (Women Unlimited, India 2013). This contains the first publication of a section of Hosain's unfinished novel, ''No New Lands, No New Seas''.

==Excerpts etc==
* ''Indian short stories.'' Edited by Iqbal Masud & [[Mulk Raj Anand]]. The New India Publishing Company, 1946. Attia Hosain: "The Parrot in the Cage".
* ''Cooking the Indian Way.'' Ed. Attia Hosain, Sita Pasricha, London: Paul Hamlyn, 1962.
* "Light on Divided Worlds", ''The Independent'', 18 August 1988. By Attia Hosain celebrating the Virago edition of her books ''Sunlight on a Broken Column'' and ''Phoenix Fled'', 1981.
* ''Loaves and Wishes'' – writers writing on Food. Edited by Antonia Hill. London: Virago Press, 1992.
* ''The Inner Courtyard.'' Edited by Lakshmi Holmstrom. Attia Hosain: "The First Party" (1), London: Virago Press, 1990 (2) India version – Rupa & Co., 1993
* ''Infinite Riches - short stories''. Edited by Lynn Knight. London: Virago Modern Classics, London: Virago Press, 1993. Attia Hosain: P. 176, "Time is Unredeemable".
* ''Voices of the Crossing -'' The impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. [[Ferdinand Dennis]], [[Naseem Khan (activist)|Naseem Khan]] (eds), London: Serpent's Tail, 1998. Attia Hosain: p. 19 "Deep Roots".
* ''Shaam-e-Awadh -'' Writings on Lucknow. Edited by VeenaTalwar. Oldenburg, 2007. Attia Hosain: Excerpt from ''Sunlight on a Broken Column'' (ref. pp. 165–178).
* ''Unbound'' – 2000 years of Indian Women's writing. Edited by Annie Zaidi. Aleph Book Co., 2015. Attia Hosain: Excerpt from ''Sunlight on a Broken Column'' (ref. p. 52 on marriage).

==Recordings and broadcasts==
===BBC Eastern Services (Urdu)===
Shakespeare plays – translations. Played various parts, including Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, alongside Zia Moinuddin, Ijaz Hussain Batalvi, Amira Ahuja.

Also in Urdu – translations of plays by [[Jean Cocteau]] and [[Harold Pinter]], among others, as lead actor.

===In English===
BBC Third Programme ''Writing in a Foreign Tongue'', 7 May 1956.

''Woman's Hour'', "Passport to Friendship", 1965

Audio conversations (public and private) with Literary Estate of Attia Hosain.

==Theatre and film==
* Film treatment for proposed film ''Mourning Raga'' by Ellis Peters ([[Edith Pargeter]])
* ''The Bird of Time'' by [[Peter Mayne]] at the Savoy Theatre, London, 1961

==As journalist==
* ''The Pioneer'' (Lucknow). Ed. Desmond Young
* ''The Statesman'' (Calcutta). Ed. Evan Charlton

== Organizations ==
* Attended foundation of Progressive Writer's Association [through Mahmudu Zaffar and Ali (Bunnay) Zaheer]
* Attended All-India Women's Conference Calcutta, 1933 [through Sarojini Naidu]

== Research ==
Hosain's Partition novel Sunlight on a Broken Column has been widely studied for its representation of gender, displacement, and social change. Ruvani Ranasinha's South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007) examines Hosain's negotiation of cultural identity in postcolonial Britain.<ref>Ruvani Ranasinha, ''South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation'' (Oxford University Press, 2007).</ref> Fawzia Afzal-Khan has analyzed the novel's treatment of women, tradition, and modernity in South Asian Muslim contexts.<ref>Fawzia Afzal-Khan, "Sunlight on a Broken Column: Attia Hosain's Feminist Politics," in ''Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel'' (Penn State Press, 1993).</ref> Priyamvada Gopal has also discussed Hosain's work in relation to feminist and postcolonial literary traditions.<ref>Priyamvada Gopal, ''Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence'' (Routledge, 2005).</ref>

More recent doctoral research has examined Hosain's Partition fiction through the frameworks of feminist geography and memory studies, situating it alongside other Muslim women's Partition narratives that reconfigure spaces of home, city, and nation in times of trauma and transition.<ref>Sana Asif, ''Gender and Spaces in Partition Fiction: A Study of Select Novels by Muslim Women'' (PhD thesis, National Institute of Technology Patna, 2022). Available at: [http://hdl.handle.net/10603/591661]</ref>
== References ==
{{Reflist}}

== Further reading ==
* The Literary Estate of Attia Hosain, 1928–1998. Diaries, letters, images, notes.
* [http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/a-part-of-the-whole/article4468920.ece ''A part of the whole''], Rakshandha Jalil, The Hindu, 2 Mar 2013.
* ''I am a Universalist-Humanist,'' Nilufer E. Bharucha. Biblio 3.7-8 (July–August 1998).
* ''Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory.'' Jill Didur, 2007.
* ''An image of India by an Indian Woman: Attia Hosain's Life and Fiction'' -'Unpublished MA thesis. Laura Bondi. For University Degli Studio Venezia, 1993.
* ''Dwelling in the Archive'': ''Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India.'' [[Antoinette Burton]]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
* [http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/69/101069617 "Hosain, Attia Shahid"]. [[Anita Desai]]. ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''
* ''Attia Hosain, Her Life and Work.'' Lakshmi Holmstrom. ''Indian Review of Books'' 8–9, 1991.
* Mushirul Hasan. "The Heart in Pieces Generation", ''The Indian Express'', 21 February 1998.
* ''The Silent Gap''. [[Shashi Deshpande]]. Biblio May–June 2013.
* ''[https://batulm.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/attia-hosain-1913-1998-the-sunlight-on-a-broken-column/ "Attia Hosain (1913-1998) - The Sunlight on a Broken Column"]'', ''Batul Mukhtiar'', Blog, 1 May 2017.

== External links ==
* ''[http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/attia-hosain Making Britain: Attia Hosain page].'' The Open University.
* ''[https://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/377809/AH-finding-aid.pdf Attia Hosain Collection: finding aid]''. The Brunel University, London
* ''[https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2216 Attia Hosain]''. [[Muneeza Shamsie]]. The Literary Encyclopedia.
* ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20180504073948/http://hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.in/2011/12/ Attia Hosain, A Liberal Voice]''. Rakshanda Jalil. Blog - Hindustani Awaaz: Literature, Culture and Society. December 2012.
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGsFRbncfpk Literature Help: Novels: Plot Overview 514: Sunlight on a Broken Column.]
*[http://old.harappa.com/attia/attiahosain.html Interview with Attia Hosain.] Harappa, Glimpses of South Asia before 1947. 19 May 1991.

== Video references ==
* ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMm4CZAJRto Attia Hosain - A life.]'' Urdu & English interview and comments by [[Mulk Raj Anand]] and [[Gopalkrishna Gandhi]]. Nehru Centre, London. 1998.
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGsFRbncfpk Literature Help: Novels: Plot Overview 514: Sunlight on a Broken Column.]
* [https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lih-2ALTePO Lecture on Attia Hosain] by Dr. Anand Prakash, Professor (Retd) of English, University of Delhi.

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hosain, Attia}}
[[Category:1913 births]]
[[Category:1998 deaths]]
[[Category:Writers from Lucknow]]
[[Category:La Martinière College, Lucknow alumni]]
[[Category:Women writers from Uttar Pradesh]]
[[Category:20th-century Indian Muslims]]
[[Category:University of Lucknow alumni]]
[[Category:20th-century Indian novelists]]
[[Category:Indian radio presenters]]
[[Category:Indian women radio presenters]]
[[Category:Isabella Thoburn College alumni]]
[[Category:Novelists from Uttar Pradesh]]
[[Category:20th-century Indian women novelists]]

Attia Hosain - Revision history

Eziosolution at 04:42, 29 April 2026