Women’s Education in Cambodian and Indian Literature: A Comparative Study of Rim Kin’s Sophat and a Selected Indian Novel

This article develops a comparative framework for examining women’s education in Rim Kin’s Cambodian novel Sophat and Shashi Deshpande’s Indian novel The Dark Holds No Terrors. Education is approached not only as formal schooling or professional qualification but also as access to literacy, practical knowledge, social recognition, and the authority to make consequential choices. The discussion places the two novels in their distinct historical and cultural contexts and asks how gendered expectations about marriage, family reputation, work, and respectability shape the meanings of learning. In Deshpande’s novel, Sarita’s medical career offers a documented point of entry into the contradiction between professional achievement and patriarchal expectations within marriage. In the case of Sophat, claims about specific female characters’ schooling and narrative voice remain provisional until passages in the original Khmer text or a reliable translation are checked. Rather than asserting an unsupported equivalence, the article proposes a comparative reading of the conditions under which education becomes a resource for agency and of the limits imposed by social hierarchy. It argues that educational advancement and social emancipation should be analytically distinguished. The study offers a text-based research design and a set of testable interpretive propositions, not a substitute for completed close reading.