Female Resistance and Reclamation of Space in the Historical Backdrop of Fall of Dhaka in Raihana A Hasan’s Sips from a Broken Teacup

Abstract

This qualitative research identifies with the Hélène Cixous and Virginia’s Woolf’s concerns regarding silencing of women in history and reclamation of their right to keep writing. This study can be placed under the larger context of Feminism.  It traces active female consciousness in portraying the role of women: their quest for survival, contribution towards the society and their fighting spirit during the troubled times of partition of Pakistan in 1971. It is an attempt of retrieving the history on which there is a patriarchal control. Raihana A. Hasan is a Pakistani author who has resisted against the phallocentric control on knowledge where history is mostly documented by male members of the society. Thereby, this paper aims at exploring how Hasan has reclaimed her position in writing by documenting history and narrating her-story [perspective based on female experience]in the form of a memoir. She has proved that with acute female consciousness, a woman becomes a huge source of knowledge and recorder of socio-cultural and political histories. The objective of the study is to explore how Hasan has raised her voice against injustices towards women in the socio-cultural setup of tea plantations in the Eastern Wing of Pakistan in the 1960s. This article also depicts how multilayered and significant women writings are and why there is need for women to write. Hence, the gender inequality and resistance of women in Sips from a Broken Teacup is traced for this purpose in the article. There are works in which history of 1971 is recorded but there is shortage of first-hand narratives of survivors of the time. Hence, Hasan’s memoir fills the gap of the research. Moreover, this article will aid in inculcating the notion that women can use writing as a tool to retrieve their lost socio-cultural and political identities from the past and raise their voice against the subjugation in current times and in future as well.