Tabooed Subaltern: A Study of Ghulam Abbas’ Reshma and The Women Quarter

Woman in Pakistan is defined through her body. Throughout her life she bears the burden of family honour and prestige to move in patriarchal society of Pakistan. In such a society where women experience different socio-cultural and economic marginalization, it becomes difficult to articulate oppression of the fallen women who trade their honour and prestige for the sake of money. While challenging the sociocultural standards of honour, the sufferings of their lives are completely neglected within the confinements of hegemonic patriarchy. These socially outcast women are tabooed subaltern who experience the brutalities not as human beings but as objects and commodities. An invisible line is being drawn by the patriarchs between these fallen women and the mainstream society whereby the respectable women devoid of any socio-economic discrimination live and struggle for their survival. To investigate the intricate lives of tabooed subaltern, present study dwells on subaltern theory of Gayatri C. Spivak. This research aims to investigate that how tabooed woman exhibits her agency but remains unheard or silent and how the literary world articulate intricate existence of tabooed subaltern within socio-cultural chains? To examine this, I have selected Ghulam Abbas’ Reshma and The Women’s Quarter which discuss the positioning of tarnished women who are, because of their ruined celibacy, alien to the society where men and women perform their traditional roles with honour and respect. The study is significant to extend and develop Spivak's dealing of socio-cultural silence to identify how literature might form an alternative archive attuned to the complexities of voicing the tabooed subaltern.