In Attia Hosain’s unfinished, untitled 1972 novel, two Indian men have renounced their ‘country’

Shortly after Independence, Attia Hosain left India, and went to England. Pakistan was not an option for her, but then, nor was India, not now that zamindari had been abolished and all the erstwhile taluqdari families, like hers, left more or less bereft of their lands. Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), her one and only novel, was also part of the memorable Partition literature of the time, written in an idiom of loss and longing. It was her requiem for a time that would never return, for a country she could no longer call home.

In 1972 Attia began writing what would be her unfinished, untitled novel, her only fiction located outside India. The novel is set in London of the 1970s and the characters are diasporic South Asians (as they are now called), Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis making their way in a country, and at a time, that was tense with a reactionary politics. Enoch Powell, conservative MP, had threatened that “rivers of blood” would flow if there were not an immediate and drastic curb on immigration.

Murad, the protagonist, has decided to return to India, to Lucknow, feeling “stifled by the alien pressures” of this new environment. That very environment which...

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