Journal of Migration Affairs

Journal of Migration Affairs x

2023
Paper on Migration

Attia Hosain (1913-1998), a novelist and a short story writer, was born and educated in Lucknow. In 1947, she moved to England and worked at BBC, where she presented her own women's programmes. Attia Hosain's essay Deep Roots, New Languages was first published in Voices of the Crossing: The impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (London, 2000), where she brings up the inadequacy of expressing herself in another language, how she is not able to penetrate the invisible barrier that surrounds her in England. In brief, how does one belong? I would like to look at this essay by Hosain to understand the need to redefine oneself through history. It is this uneasy relationship of a person with his/her host country that I would like to explore in the essay by Attia Hosain and, in doing so, would shed light on the situation of a Muslim woman writer in the times and the age in which she chose to speak about it

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