Embodying Gender, Class, and Religion in 20th Century India: An Analysis of Rashid Jahan’s “Merā ek Safar” or “One of my Journeys”
Rahma Ali
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16535905
Abstract. This paper takes Rashid Jahan’s “Merā ek Safar” (One of my Journeys) as a case study into the Progressive writers’ literary commentaries on 20th century India. These writers distinguished themselves based on the following themes: contesting colonial stereotypes of South Asian identity, the South Asian subject as the antithesis to the archetypal modern man, communal strife as it emerged in the years surrounding partition, and the quotidian experiences of the underprivileged in India. Rashid Jahan engages with all these themes by emphasizing the interactions between women of different religious affiliations. The short story is about a young college student witnessing a catfight during an inter-city train journey. The fight ensues after a Muslim woman’s dupatta (scarf) touches a Hindu passenger, escalating into a violent interaction between the Hindu and Muslim passengers. The story pokes at the multiplicity of identity in South Asia, dismantling the single-dimensional stereotypes erected by the colonial regime. This paper is an attempt at both a literary analysis of the story, and a retrospective commentary on communal strife rampant in 20th century India. It analyses Jahan’s approach towards the representation of womanhood, caste, and religious identity in the story. And it brings the story’s emphasis on the common Indian subject in conversation with the post-colonial approach forged by Subaltern Studies. Since satire is the author’s genre of choice, it equips the texts with the agency to offer political commentary on these crucial questions. In this tendency the short story shares an intimate relation with the leading themes of Angarey.
Keywords. Communal strife, National identity, Postcolonialism, Subaltern subjecthood, Modernity, Primitivism.
Works cited
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Rahma Ali holds an undergraduate degree in Social Science from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. She pursued a concentration in history and her research interests include 20th century Urdu literature, North Indian performance cultures, and gender construction in Indian society. She recently completed her undergraduate thesis, which was a sociological survey of the nautanki, a folk theatre tradition of North India. Her work examined the experiences of the women in this performance space. She considered women’s participation as both performers and audience members against the social backdrop of the nautanki. Rahma is dedicated to furthering her research on North Indian performance traditions and their broader social dynamics at the master’s level.
ORCID:
Email: r.ali.22724@khi.iba.edu.pk
Embodying Gender, Class, and Religion in 20th Century India: An Analysis of Rashid Jahan’s “Merā ek Safar” or “One of my Journeys” © 2025 by Rahma Ali is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
