Abstract:
There has been a long debate in the field of knowledge whether women can choose and
speak. Colonisation is commonly considered a process of making the colonised people
(both men and women) non-speaking agents. For women, it is truer as they
experienced colonisation from two edges--the imperial forces and the male domination
from outside and within society. Everything in society was designed to put women in
the peripheral position. The history of literature has been a biased tradition of
entertaining this kind of male attitude but only a few writers have come forward to
posit women in other ways. Mahbub Ul Alam, a Chittagonian by birth, a First World
War-warrior, and a veteran writer has attempted to portray women in a
non-conformist manner in his long story, a novella entitled Mafijon (2003). Under
the narrative style of canonical storytelling, he bravely shows how Mafijon, the
central character of his novella, proves her existence following a self-directed,
revolutionary, and power-oriented self which was unthinkable and uncustomary at
the time when the story was written in 1935. In this article, the author aims to
establish Mafijon as a powerful woman who chooses, speaks, and speaks to denounce
the existing ideologies and the way she gets empowered.
