The Portrayal of Love and Romance in the Selected Pakistani Short Stories

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the portrayal of love and its expression in Lahiri and Sidhwa’s short stories and attempts to determine the voice and agency of female expression of love. Love and its expression have been the privilege of males in the narratives emerging from South Asia, and females generally had been unexpressive and maintained silence. But the women of modern times wish to give agency to their thought and so the fictional narratives from the Indo-Pak subcontinent are currently giving voice to the women. This problematizes the socio-political and cultural norms and their working in South Asian societies which necessitates exploring the current narratives. The writers intend to read the selected chunks of short stories by Lahiri and Sidhwa under the lens of postcolonial feminist theory. The stories Interpreter of Melodies (1999), Their Language of Love (2013) by these two writers respectively convey a dominant view of women’s agency of love with the significant impact on the social and literary scenes. The most probable outcome of the research is that the women in the 20th century Indo-Pak subcontinent are finding their voice not only represented but are being listened to through the narratives from South Asia.