Academic literature on the topic 'Tehmina Durrani'

This paper investigates into Durrani’s Blasphemy to scrutinize Heer's marginalized individuality. Heer is forced to marry a man, Pir Sain, with a high position in the society. Hermarriage proves a source of troubles and repression of self-satisfaction. When Heer fails to tolerate severe torture and exploitation, she revolts against patriarchy that pushes the female sex to the margin in the name of religious norms and values. Hence, this article exposes the desperate condition of women and their sufferings in Pakistan as depicted in the novel. The paper questions the system that does not allow women like Heer to make decisions in either household chore, not in the public affairs.

The prism of female writing has expanded itself in the current scenario. Contemporary writers have broken all the shackles of the feudal society and have come forward to make people aware of the ubiquitous and distressing condition of women. The unapologetic and unabashedly realistic portrayal of women bound in the shackles of caste and gender in Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy and Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero brings to surface some of the major issues concerning women’s plight. The issues of captivity, matrimony, violence, subjugation and sexism are delineated with prowess. Blasphemy and Woman at Point Zero through the narratives of their protagonists Heer and Firdaus disclose religious and patriarchal norms as a tool to subjugate and oppress women in an orthodox society. Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy depicts how distorted Islamic family code of conduct is thrust upon women compelling them to cohere to fundamental values of wedlock, motherhood, servitude and domesticity. Heer becomes a prisoner in her own haveli after her marriage to Pir Sain. Whereas Nawal El Saadawi in Woman at Point Zero portrays the captive life of Firdaus who is a female prisoner, waiting for her execution. The female characters demonstrate how the social, cultural and political structures are responsible for their captivity, degradation and violation. The present paper attempts to critically study and draw comparison between the two female protagonists. Heer and Firdaus turn captives in the haveli and prison respectively, but eventually they rip off the fake mask of the society which claims to protect women behind the veil of hypocrisy, strangulating even their basic right to be treated as a human.

The present paper is based on Tehmina Durrani’s novel, “My Feudal Lord”. The paper aims at studying various institutions like feudalism, patriarchy, religion and cultural mechanism which, according to the novelist, is the root cause of suppression, exploitation and subjugation of women in Pakistani society. The novel is a struggle by a woman towards the assertion of her identity. The present paper proposes to dismantle the existing female identity of submissive, meek, docile, weak, and passive to strong, active, speaking, and courageous as the novelist does.The main intention of the study is to emphasize the problems of women in the male dominated society and also to upgrade the condition of women. Women endures lot of physical and mental cruelties during the whole of their life in the male dominated society. Each and every woman should learn to challenge the disagreeable conceptions which have been considered as truths. Women should not tolerate violence, exploitation and subordination as part of their destiny. They should raise a voice against all kinds of suppression.

Generally regarded as one of the most influential factors in the human history, religion has frequently been used as a strong political force by the ruling pundits. In the hands of retrogressive elites, religion has often been operated as an aggressive tool to subdue the voices of the common. In the recent political history of the subcontinent, the aforementioned political role of religion can hardly been overemphasized. Made on the rhetoric of Islam, Pakistan has frequently identified herself as Islam ka Qilla (fortress of Islam) since the very inception till date. Such a monolithic approach of religion has substantially shaped the individual and collective socio-political consciousness of people in Pakistan. Driving the country’s contemporary sensitivities, the politics of religion pivots Pakistani society. The contemporary English fiction in Pakistan largely represents the cultural issues, deeply rooted in religion. Tehmina Durrani, one of the most acclaimed Pakistani novelists, frequently writes about the religiosity and the status of women in Pakistan. Setting against this socio-political preference of religion in Pakistani society, it is proposed that Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy can be read as a critique of the retrogressive roles of clergy and aristocracy in Pakistan. Highlighting Pakistan’s patriarchal and religious society, it is contended that Blasphemy is a realistic representation of the wretched conditions of women. Investigating the politics of religion in Pakistan’s rural setting, the paper foregrounds Tehmina’s bold stance on issues of women in the harsh social conditions caused by the nexus of retrogressive clergy and oppressive feudal aristocracy.

This paper aims to analyze Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy in light of Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. The paper dwells deep in the study of the religious hegemony of the colonial master in the subcontinent, particularly in the Muslim communities. Although the novel is set in after partition Pakistan, the issue discussed is very much related to the role of British imperialists in establishing religious hegemony. The paper takes a content-based analysis of the novel and unravels instances of religious hegemony. The plot of the novel illustrates how the British colonial masters, to subjugate the natives, fabricated the religious hegemonic ideas in the Muslim society of the subcontinent. Durrani has not only adroitly exposed the hegemonic designs of the British colonial masters, but she has also delineated the after-effects of such hegemonic ideas on the society in general, and on women in particular. This study also, from evidence present in the novel, tries to portray the history of shrines in the subcontinent and studies the behavior of the Pirs who rules these shrines and their attitudes towards women.

The study discusses epistemological aspects of power and the dynamics of its perception in the process of life-writing. Autobiography is presented as a specific form of epiphany. The paper suggests that writing one’s own life enables the author to better understand the past. As a result of a retrospective self-analysis the writer shapes a new look at the borders of his/her personal power and the level of its dependence on others. In investigation of life-writings, a qualitative method of social sciences in combination with hermeneutics, close reading and discourse analysis reveal deep and hidden social norms, gender roles, religion, and their role in empowerment and disempowerment of the author. The study consists of two parts. The first part is theoretical and interrogates the notion of personal power. It finds links between writing the own life and conscious empowerment, arguing that the author becomes more conscious about the own personality after having analysed the past decisions from the perspective of present times. The second part presents two autobiographies by female authors from two different Muslim cultures. These authors negotiate between the larger nationalist agenda and their own personal concerns. These autobiographies (Pakistani author Tehmina Durrani, My Feudal Lord; Azerbaijani writer Banine, Caucasian Days and Parisian Days) are the end of their authors’ long silence, their revolt against the conventional norms, their decision to have an agency to confess and protest. These autobiographies are the authors’ attempts to break the established matrix of perceptions, imposed norms, and gain power to build the real picture of their identity. The study sums up with the conclusion that in spite of very similar motifs of female authors to get empowered through self-analysis, different cultures and time create specific subjectivities associated with particular historical events and geographical location.