This autobiographical novel won the Italian Marrissa Bellasario prize and was later translated into several languages. Professionally a charismatic champion of democracy, on the personal front he was an inveterate wife abuser. Tehmina Durrani, a Pakistani English authoress, in her autobiography My Feudal Lord describes her traumatic marital life with Gulam Mustafa Khar, an important politician in the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto government, who later became the Chief Minister of Punjab. Such an insight into the marginal self is provided by Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal Lord. The feminine is essentially the marginalized consciousness that operates on the periphery of patriarchal discourse. As Nabaneeta Dev Sen points out in her article Women and Literary Imagination, writers like Jean Rhys, Anita Desai, Buchi Emecheta, Olive Senior, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Nichols and Arundhati Roy have placed women at the center of history, as makers and agents of history, not mute witnesses to it.Īll across the world, especially in the Indian sub-continent, the act of writing is for a woman essentially an act of breaking her silence because her repressive patriarchal/racial society has taught her to be culturally silent. Many of the fixed representations of non-Western women have been powerfully rejected in a plethora of contemporary writings most of them in their different ways refute imaginings deeply. An important consequence of post-colonialism has been the acknowledgement and reappearance of women’s experience after being concealed from the histories of colonial societies. It addresses the concerns of history, identity, ethnicity, gender and language.
Post-colonial literature consists of a body of writing emanating from Europe’s former colonies.