Feminist topography: Mediation on women's space and freedom in Angan

Limitations on women's mobility and spatial access have long functioned as crucial mechanisms of gendered subordination within patriarchal societies. Feminist geography has attracted attention to the power relations in the production of space and place to produce women's subjectivities, identities, as well as their daily experiences. Placing itself in this context, this paper intervenes into the discussion on gendered politics of domestic space in the novel Angan (1962) by Khadija Mastur, within the socio-political context of South Asia. The courtyard is analysed as a transitional and ambivalent space, which stands between the realms of privacy and the open world. It serves as a liminal domestic zone in Angan . Through Aliya, the protagonist of the novel, the author shows that the courtyard as a domestic space is not only a restrictive location, but a transitional place where women develop a critical consciousness, agency, and other means of autonomy. Aliya's venturing out of the courtyard to enter the semi-public and public space indicates that mobility in space is a way in which feminist subjectivity can be expressed without necessarily rebelling against the family or culture. This article adds to the argument about domestic geographies, gendered space, and mobility in South Asia and how literature can become a means of understanding the spatial politics of the everyday life of women. By reading Angan through the prism of feminist geography and postcolonial theory it prefigures domestic space as a problematic terrain in which feminist geography negotiates, opposes, and restructures gendered power relations.