Point of View

Sunlight on a Broken Column is written from the first-person point of view of Laila, a fifteen-year-old girl coming of age in Lucknow during the 1930s. The author chooses this lens in order to give agency and authority to her protagonist’s internal thoughts and emotions in a narrative centered around Laila’s entrapment and lack of autonomy. Hosain utilizes the perspective to upend Laila’s family assertion that “she has neither the upbringing nor the opportunity” to make her own decisions and have freedom of thought and action (21). By granting the reader access to Laila’s internal world, Hosain illustrates the arbitrary and debasing practice of subjugating women to a life of silence. Laila’s emotionally and mental world is punctuated with thoughts on British colonialism, gender politics, and a liberal approach to Islam. She is not void of autonomous thoughts despite the familial...