A FEMINIST READING OF SELECTED KISHWAR NAHEED POEMS AND SHORT STORIES BY MAHASHWETA DEVI (original) (raw)

The paper attempts to trace the intertextual connection between the selected poems of the Pakistani poem: Kishwar Naheed and the Indian short story writer: Mahshweta Devi. The paper argues that the writers share a common thematic concern with destabilizing hegemonic masculinist discourses that get reflected in the exploitation of subaltern and disempowered classes symbolized through the class of women. Both Devi and Naheed represent the class of intellectuals, Gramsci termed: organic intellectuals, the class that articulates and theorizes the subaltern class. A comparison of the selected works of the two writers, would offer interesting insights into the psyche of the ‘sub-continental female’. The premise of exploration of the sub-continental woman, essentialist as it sounds, follows from the premise of gynocriticism, as propounded by Showalter who argued that it entailed a “feminist study of women’s writing, including readings of women’s texts and analyses of the intertextual relations both between women’s writers (a female literary tradition), and between women and men. (Showalter). Drawing from Showalter, I shall try and examine a set of images, metaphors and themes, “which connects” the writing of Devi and Naheed, across the different periods of their composition, and builds it into something as cohesive and as intertextually rich as the traditionally sanctioned male literary canon”.