Purdah II (Imtiaz Dharker)

Imtiaz Dhaker
Imtiaz Dharker is a Scottish Muslim women poet, artist and documentary film maker. She
belongs to three cultural heritages. She was born in Pakistan in 1954, brought up in Scotland and
come back to India for work with her husband. So, the question is always in her mind about her
national identity. She was part of the judging panel for the 2008 Manchester Poetry Prize, with
Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. Imtiaz Dharker is a Third World feminist poet who has
examined the issues of racism, class, sexuality and nationality in her poems. She is a dislocated
poet who tries to explore the reality of her identity through her journey into various countries,
cultures and religions Imtiaz Dharker has written five collections of poems. They are as follows.

 Purdah (1989)
 Postcards from God (1997)
 I speak for the Devil (2001)
 The Terrorist at my Table (2006)
 Leaving Fingerprints (2009)

All the above collection of poems is published by the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe. Tension
is the key that we find in her poems. She is totally neglected by her society as well as her
husband. However, the influence of her painting is depicted in her poems. Her poems highlight
powerfully the social, religious, racial and sexual entrapment. Her work has been totally or
consciously feminist, consciously political, consciously that of a multiple outsider, someone who
knows her own mind, rather than someone full of doubt and liberal ironies.

Themes of Purdah 2
‘Purdah’ provides an interesting perspective on the way people’s ideas about female subject
relate to the way she is seen in public. However she memorializes the betweenness of a traveler
between cultures, exploring the dilemmas of negotiation among countries, lovers, and children.
Purdah is windows, shuttered upon a private world. The movement of the poem reminds us of
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. The discrimination against women and their alienation from
many human activities around them is highlighted in the poem. Following are the basic themes
of the purdah 2:

Religion
In “purdah II”, Imitiaz Dharker discovers all basic tenets of religion favoring man and
suppressing woman. This kind of alienation makes her realize as if the prayer-call “Allah-U-
Akbar” is only a piercing note; the pages of Koran are like old bones; the words of the Moulvi
sound unsympathetic, the prayers are nothing more than a rhythm on the tongue to which the
body mechanically sways and all these provide hopefulness to the men but offers no solace to the
agonized women. Her mind visualizes the myriad women before her who prayed and still
suffered miserably. Imitiaz considers this kind of religion as a farce created by a patriarchal
system under the weight of which woman is cracking.

Gender Inequality
All privileges relating to education, health, food and respect are kept for the men folk and
women exist on the margins-unwanted, uncared for and unsung. The world may be changing for
the better but the radicals, regardless of religion, resist change and any attempts at initiating
value-oriented modernity. Insisting on conformity to age old outdated customs, they loudly
condemn, delay and resist any attempts to initiate women emancipation in the society. Knowing
of the contrast between the isolation, the seclusion, the detention and the slavish existence of
women in the Indian Sub-continent on one hand, and the growing number of liberated, limitless
and empowered women in the west on the other, Dharker is intolerant of the arguments of gender
inequality. Consequently, through her works she explains this global patriarchal lashing.

Dehumanization of culture
In this, she gives the examples of individual characters Saleema and Naseem. Saleema married,
divorced, remarried, produced children annually to each husband; when she could bear this all no
more, she sought refuse in her mother’s lap. Unlike Saleema, Naseem eloped with an
Englishman, hoping a release from the manmade bondage of her culture, society and religion.
She manages to get out of her purdah, but in or out, her condition remains the same. She is faced
with the stark reality and learns that “a man is a man”, no matter where he is and to whatever
community he belongs to. Her condition is described in these lines:

There you are, I can see you all now

In the tenements up north

. In or out of purdah. Tied or bound.

Shaking your box to hear

How freedom rattles---

One coin, one sound

Thus by referring the Muslim tradition of Purdah, Imtiaz Dharker overtly hits hard on the wide
spread male power regardless of boundaries of countries, religion or community. Whereas
section one of the volume Purdah focuses on the internal suffering of private woman who is tied
and bound with the shackles of cultural, religious and social tenets, section two exposes the
external suffering of woman fraught within the coils of the conventional society.
Rerences:
Purdah II: And Other Poems. New Delhi and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988.

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