Feministic approach in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

Abstract

The present paper intends to represent feministic approach in Khushwant Singh’s novel, Train To Pakistan in the context of postcolonial gender study. In this novel Singh appears to be indifferent in sketching female characters. He has sketched a few female characters that have no voice of their own. His female characters are weak, docile, marginalised and above all the victims of family and colonial oppression and they represent the fate of all Indian women of the time. The main motive of the novelist is to show the conflicting issues like the relationship between the West, the ‘Center’ and the East, ‘Other’ i.e. the conflict between the assumed Master and the Slave along with the same conflict between the male, the symbol of power of the family and female, the weak is reflected from the narratives of the novel with multiple textual references. With postcolonial discourse analysis the study has focused many other issues relating to socio-cultural, socio-political, and socio-economic and socio historical background of colonized India. Along with Patriarchal hegemony the author has pointedly narrated the role of other multiple issues like race, gender, ethnicity, partition, separation and communal violence and his meticulous observation has made them viable in the context of the discourse.