A Discourse on Gender Asymmetry in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to explore gender disparities in Afghanistan from a South-Asian perspective. Social and cultural construction of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Srilanka is more or less similar. Women suffer at many levels i.e. domestic, social and institutional leading to dehumanizing, belittling, oppressing in sexist terms. The theme concerns widespread violence in Taliban regime outside and at the domestic front at the same time. The girls are seen as economic liability while the boys are proof of social and economic security. The socio-political conditions and male hegemony are the two oppressive instruments under which the Afghan women suffer silently. The three women characters of the novel, Mariam, Laila and Nana fall prey to political and cultural stigmas. They are silenced and made invisible objects in the hands of their father, husband and male chauvinists of the society. It is a kind of double affliction, the women of the novel are compelled to undergo the overlapping oppression of hegemonic masculinity amid social and cultural expectations. It also investigates the female characters’ attempts of resistance to such discriminatory practices.