Woman as Doubly-Colonized Postcolonial Subject in the Short Stories of Hameedullah and Abbasi

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the representations of women after the establishment of Pakistan in the short stories of Hameedullah and Abbasi in the light of Postcolonial Feminist Theory and interprets the recolonization of women in the post-independent Pakistan. Holst-Petersen and Rutherford claim that the women in the postcolonial societies are doubly colonized: first by the colonizer and second by their own men. Soon afterwards, the spirit of freedom movement started to dwindle very fast, especially after the death of Jinnah in 1948. Like many other British colonies, men tried to re-colonize the bodies of women under their newly won freedom and, in imitation of their former colonizers, asserted their role as the masters willing to find obedience in women and hence legitimize their control over them. Once again, social values were stressed and women were required to maintain the strong cultural tradition of the Muslims and Islam. The social and political changes influenced the images of women in the English literature written by them in Pakistan. In order to discover the post-independence representation of women in fiction of Hammeedullah and Abbasi, the lead women characters have been studied critically and analyzed with reference to the double colonization of women proposed by Holst-Petersen and Rutherford. The study reveals that the women have been represented as colonized subjects still struggling to win their freedom, even after the independence, from the oppression and control on their bodies.