Discuss how the purdah is portrayed as both a protection and a prison in the poem Purdah
Answers
Explanation:
Imtiaz Dharker is familiar with being alone in a crowd: in Britain she was a believing Muslim; in India, a Pakistan-born believer in a personal faith; and in a patriarchal environment, a woman of strong will. But the achievement of her poems in Purdah lies in her ability to disrobe feminism of its stridency. Her anger has the eastern quality made memorable by that phrase coined by Satyajit Ray: calm without, fire within.
Dharker is galvanised to making the veil - the symbol of orthodox imposition on a woman to hide what's shameful or outrageous - a preoccupying theme and in her poems the onset of puberty signifies the end of an innocent world for a woman.
Born in Pakistan, Imtiaz grew up in Britain, and later married an Indian Hindu, Anil Dharker. After her marriage she returned to the subcontinent and settled in Bombay. Her school in Britain was the kind puritan parents would thoroughly approve of: a Calvinist Glaswegian school where stockings were worn high and skirts low. Her interests were English literature, philosophy, and Islam.
But she adds: "From a cultural, not religious, sense. I took it on myself to go back to Muslim ways." She was fascinated by the outward symbols of Islam - the rozas, the reading of the Koran - and she accepted these unquestioningly; she wanted to belong, quite strongly. Her early poems, triggered off by incidents in her own life, reveal this. She writes:
“Purdah-I” is a discreet protest and an eloquent criticism of the tradition of veil strictly sanctioned and imposed on Muslim women. Our attention is focused on the turning point in the life of a Muslim girl when she suddenly becomes conscious of her sexual growth, others are perhaps more conscious.
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