Men and women are uniformly efficient to carry out social and practical roles at any level but several times they fail to act prudently. Indeed, a woman cannot avoid the reality that she belongs to weaker section, because society has constructed rigid models for her and has labeled woman variously. Feminists have recognised the element of gender-based favouritism a root cause of women's slanderous status in the hierarchical order of most of the civilizations. Few centuries back, because of many social and cultural traditions that were specially created for women's physical and psychological repression, they did not have authority to think and act without any hindrance. They had to go through many cataclysms to enter the intellectual world. Many South Asian female writers have explored subjectivity through their writings in order to establish their own identity. Bapsi Sidhwa and Tehmina Durrani identify culture specific practices such as, child marriage, dowry, polygamy, honour-based crimes, marital rape, prostitution, widowhood, ostracism of women because of so called religious faith as primary sources of patriarchal power that marred woman's selfhood. Both the novels, Blasphemy and Water are completely different from each other in the way they portray people from different geographical regions, different social groups and different religions. But surprisingly these novels share common themes when it comes to depiction of the predicament of women. The paper explores both the violent and profound ways in which patriarchy restrains female of our society. Blasphemy locates all its actions in rural Pakistan, focusing on the life of Pir Sains' wife, confined to a certain portion of house, devoted only to household works. Durrani uses her novel as a mean of exposing the hypocrisy of Muslim clergyman and cruel nature of husband in particular. Whereas, Bapsi Sidhwa has very realistically delineated the plight and exploitation of Hindu widows in our male-dominated society. Water: A Novel is all about the Indian widows from the time of freedom and how they were made to live in a very filthy condition in the widow's Ashram.
Research Scholar, Department of English, Magadh University, Bodh-Gaya
