Struggle for Human Rights: Women in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride

Human rights are the rights inherent to all human beings. These rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression etc. But women, because of their sex, often referred to as “weaker sex”, are denied their fundamental rights as human beings. Throughout the Ages of Literature, the image of woman has remained one of subjugated, sub-ordinate being, always to maintain silence in the public sphere and give unstinted respect to the male members of the family. They are forced to face many unfortunate situations like subjugation, violence— physical, mental and emotional, imprisonment in marriage, objectification, dehumanisation, child marriage, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, rape, ostracism, denial of identity and many more. Bapsi Sidhwa, one of the most prominent Pakistani-Anglophone novelists, in her novel The Pakistani Bride, takes up as its theme one of the pivotal concerns of feminist discourse i.e. oppression and subjugation of ‘the soft target’, the ‘other sex’ in the patriarchal set-up. The novel not only vividly depicts the struggle of the Pakistani girl Zaitoon for human/women rights but the struggle of an American girl Carol also. All the major and minor female characters in the novel are confined within the restricted framework of rules imposed by the patriarchal system of the society. None of these women is allowed to play any role in taking important decisions for her life even though her whole being might be at stake. Through the life-stories of different women in the novel, Sidhwa shows how dangerous the patriarchal world can be for a woman who dares to ask for her rights, and challenges or resists the so called codes of conduct defined by the male members of the society. The novel strongly and earnestly puts forward a demand for equal human rights for women.