World Literature Reading Group

Our World Literature Reading Group aims to showcase literature written outside of the anglophone world. On our journey we will make a variety of stops in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania, tracking down the masterpieces that have otherwise been overlooked. In this twelfth group, we will read and discuss Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard.

Aliya lives a life confined to the inner courtyard of her home with her older sister and irritable mother, while the men of the family throw themselves into the political movements of the day. She is tormented by the petty squabbles of the household and dreams of educating herself and venturing into the wider world. But Aliya must endure many trials before she achieves her goals, though at what personal cost?

“The Women's Courtyard offers an unrelentingly bleak portrayal of poverty, deprivation and the needless cruelties of time and circumstance. [...] While nearly all the action in The Women's Courtyard takes place inside the home, it is not a hermetically sealed world. It depicts the tumultuous era of great social and political upheaval in India. News of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, food shortages, Gandhi's civil disobedience movement, rampant unemployment, growing hatred for British rule, horrific jail sentences for those who refuse to serve the colonial interests, the importance of education in middle-class homes, of families being split down the middle due to political differences, young men going off to enlist in the world war and the eventual uprooting brought about by migration, and more filters into the claustrophobic world of the zenana through neighbourhood gossip, newspapers and male relatives.” (Rakhshanda Jalil, India Today)

“Within this confined setting, Mastur gives us a narrative on the epic scale, ranging across four generations, the life-arcs of dozens of characters - births, marriages, suicides, imprisonments [...] - and taking in Gandhi’s leadership of the national movement, the rise of the Muslim League, and the birth of Pakistan. [...] Rockwell’s translation is superbly judged. Her English renders the spareness of Mastur’s Urdu, the efficiency of her physical descriptions, and the devastating concision with which she handles tragedy. [...] One of the most powerful indictments of patriarchy in Indian fiction.” (Keshava Guha, The Hindu)

Our previous selections include:

Human Acts by Han Kang
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Potiki by Patricia Grace
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias
Tamas by Bhisham Sahni
Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani
Egyptian Earth by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali