بانو قدسیہ کے ناولوں میں نسوانی کردار اور ہجرت کا صنفی تجربہ

Female Characters and the Gendered Experience of Migration in the Novels of Bano Qudsia

Abstract

Bano Qudsia (1928–2017) is often read as the most traditional of the Urdu women novelists who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. Recent feminist criticism has gone further and described her fiction as an endorsement of patriarchal values. This paper argues that such readings, though not without basis, overlook two things: the narrative structure of her major novels, which are told largely through male narrators, and the recurring presence of migration in them. Taking migration as a gendered experience, the paper reads the female characters of three novels, Shehr-e-Bemisal, Raja Gidh and Haasil Ghaat. It draws on Saba Mahmood's notion of agency, Deniz Kandiyoti's "bargaining with patriarchy" and Gérard Genette's distinction between "who speaks" and "who sees", and proposes the working term "counter-context" (zidd-e-siyaq) for texts that are aware of feminist claims but answer them in opposition.

References in Roman Script

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9. The term "Zid-e-Siyaq" (counter-context) is used here out of practical necessity. It extends the distinction between "Tanazur" (perspective) and "Siyaq" (context) and is not a separate theory.
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24. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
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28. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
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30. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, chap. 5.
31. Ali Ahmad, "Raja Gidh 1981 (Bano Qudsia): Tanqeedi Jaiza," Zone Urdu, July 24, 2023, https://zoneurdu.com/raja-gidh-book-review/.
32. Bano Qudsia, "King Buzzard," trans. Masood A. Raja, Synkrētic, No. 2, June 2022, p. 91: "Agree or disagree, but madness is caused by only one thing: Ishqe-lahaasil! Unrequited love."
33. Bano Qudsia, Raja Gidh, p. 291, cited in Khalid Sohail, "Bano Qudsia, Raja Gidh aur Muqaddas Deewangi," Hum Sub, August 20, 2020, https://www.humsub.com.pk/339096/khalid-sohail-344/.
34. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, Paris: Plon, 1961.
35. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, introduction.
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37. Rafiq Sandelvi, "Raja Gidh, Deewangi ka Suragh aur Bano Qudsia."
38. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970, chap. 2.
39. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, No. 1, 1989, p. 140.
40. Farah Deeba and Ahmed Usman, "Rediscovering the Discourse on Women's Freedom," p. 142.
41. Sonia Arif, "Raja Gidh ke Kirdaron ka Nafsiyati Tajziya," Hum Sub, May 25, 2025.
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43. Ali Ahmad, "Raja Gidh 1981 (Bano Qudsia): Tanqeedi Jaiza."
44. Bano Qudsia, Raja Gidh, p. 231, cited in Sajid Ali Ameer, "Raja Gidh Meri Nazar Mein," Hum Sub, November 13, 2022, https://www.humsub.com.pk/486040/sajid-ali-ameer-10/.
45. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979, chap. 2.
46. Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghaat, Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2024. The novel was first published in 2005.
47. Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 238–39.
48. Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghaat, p. 9.
49. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, New York: Viking, 1989, introduction.
50. Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghaat, p. 49.
51. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, chap. 1.
52. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, part 4, chap. 14, "The Independent Woman."
53. Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghaat, p. 55.
54. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, New York: Routledge, 1990, "On Psychological Oppression."
55. Bano Qudsia, Hasil Ghaat, p. 224.
56. Ibid., p. 99.
57. Ibid., p. 94.