Leaving Home By Agunpakhai Analysis

Humanism believes in the freedom of the individual, including the right of self determination and the full realization of each person’s potentiality and talent. Written in the background of the partition, Agunpakhi is actually an intense search for all these three democratic and humanistic values- freedom of the individual, right to self determination and full realization of each person’s talents. Agunpakhi has never enjoyed the liberty of taking any decision about her own life. At the very beginning of her life, she is never asked about her passion for education. Her wish for schooling appears a flippant idea to her family members. She is not asked about her own decision before her marriage. In her marital life too, she is never allowed to

She is determined to take her decision alone and realizes, for the first time, the importance of her talents. She boldly says, “I will stay in this house” (246; ch.28). She becomes alone in her fight against the partition of her family. However, her two sons and one daughter become settled in East Bengal and her husband, too, decides to stay with them selling all his land property excluding the house. It is like a bolt from the blue for the narrator. She cannot make out, why she should leave her own country where she has fully grown up with a close intimacy with its air, water and soil, year after year, like a plant. She is sure to die if she, at that age, is uprooted from her mother land. She, symbolically, looks at the graveyard at a distance through the window, and philosophically analyzes her own entity from a humanist’s perspective, “I begin to think, someone must make me understand why I should go. If I am convinced, I must go wherever I would be asked to go. No one will be forgiven with the argument that this land is for the Hindus only and that is for the Muslims. All these are