Abstract
The present study focusses on Nadeem Aslam’s use of love plot in
his novel Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) as the means of showcasing
resistance to a misogynist culture in a fictional multicultural town in
England: Dasht-e-Tanhaii. The Chanda/Jugnu love plot,
contextualizing the complicated dynamics of a multicultural society,
serves the purpose of granting the female characters a peculiar sense
of liberty and identity in the wake of an oppressive male dominant
society and culture. The study reflects critically upon the
Chanda/Jugnu love relationship by employing feminist thoughts of
Gayatri Spivak supported with Erich Fromm’s ideas about love.
Reading Aslam’s female characters, through Spivak’s (1988)
perspective, as the speechless subalterns of the Third World, the
paper endeavors to establish Aslam as a Third world, albeit male,
intellectual who grants his female protagonist Chanda to pursue
love as a speech action to defy her subalternity in a social milieu
essentially designed by an imperialist patriarchy. Fromm’s (1956)
notion of learning and following the art of love, as a sole recourse to
seek out solutions to the problems of human existence, remains a
guiding principle to understand the Chanda/Jugnu love plot. The
study, exploring Aslam’s use of women’s love as an emancipatory
force helping them raise their voices to reclaim their freedoms and
identities, is significant as amid other critically evaluated social
issues presented in Maps for Lost Lovers, the issue of Love as an
emancipatory force for women’s liberation and identity had
remained neglected and in the background.
Aamer Shaheen, Sadia Qamar, Nazia Kirn. (2019) Love as A Force for Women’s Liberation and Identity in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, The Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences, Volume-27, Issue-1.
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