Deplorable Condition of Women and Patriarchal Domination in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride

Abstract

Parsi writers have contributed a lot to Indian English Literature. The Indian Parsi novelists express their feelings in the form of art. The novelists reflect the psychological dilemma of the minority community and its identity crisis through their works. Being a Parsi writer, Bapsi Sidhwa sees a kind of mental migration when she hybrids from her native land, and pours her feelings and thoughts in to her novels. She is known for her exploration of women’s inner psyche who aspire to live in modernity, inept to break traditional quality intrinsic in them. Most of her writings contain a pinch of migration and male dominance taste when one chews them. The expatriate writers face multi-cultural situation which merges with their personal anguish due to prejudice. They project the cultural confusion and confrontation of a multi-racial society. The quest for identity, aspiration for belongingness and love for native land is found as a part of non-erasable conscious in all expatriate writers. This paper reveals the socio-cultural background and the authoritative patriarchal Pakistani society in the novel The Pakistani Bride The novel portrays how the institution of marriage and patriarchy deplores and represses an orphaned girl’s self-identity. It also pinpoints the problems of a little girl Zaitoon as an alien in an alien land or culture. It enforces deportation as a pathway to sculpt for belongingness of her ‘self’. At the end, Zaitoon succeeds by rejecting the alien culture and tradition.