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Gender Representation In Pakistani Literature

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Gender and representation in Pakistani literature is very different from what we usually see in the western media. If we talk about gender representation and especially a feminist portrayal in literature then we need to define the following words. Sex is what your born into which is defined on the basis of your reproductive systems i.e male or female whereas gender is society 's expectations of either male or female. Femininity is the quality of being female, it 's generally described as womanliness.
Feminism is the movement that started in the 1960 's in the west as a result of patriarchal society which women felt the need to break. At that very time British were colonizing the sub continent and while they were doing so they also felt the …show more content…

Saadat Hasan Manto popularized for his work in Pakistani literature wrote about the struggles these post colonial women faced. His stories, 'Kholdo ' and 'Sharifan ', are based on double colonization and abduction of women during partition. Kholdo is a story of a father and his daughter migrating to Pakistan at the time of partition; while migrating the father loses his daughter in the crowd and reaches Pakistan without her, worried, he sends some of his friends as rescuers to look for her daughter and bring her back. When the rescuers find the daughter they rape her and leave her in a hospital after informing the father that they found her. When her father arrives, the doctor asks the father to undo the knot of her shalwar to check injuries but the daughter is in such messed up state that she thinks the doctor is trying to rape her and she unties the knot herself. In 'Sharifan ' a whole cycle of multiple colonization starts when during partition, some villagers unknowingly rape the daughters of their friends and relatives and they get to know that when these daughters arrive in a messed state to their village the next day. A whole cycle of revenge continues as men start raping the girls avenging the rape of their daughters by their

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