Choice, Voice, and Power: An Analysis of Mafijon in Mahbub-Ul-Alam’s Mafijon

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.