Published Paper Details:

Gender perspective in literature has been a great issue which emphasizes the importance of the social construction of the gender and the assignment of specific roles, responsibilities and expectations to men and women. Both the sexes must be given equal importance for a strong social set up but usually women fail to get their own identity in the male dominated society. Since time immemorial they have been relegated to secondary place in relation to male. Man suffers with male superiority that looks down upon the women and makes man 'absolute' and women 'subject', a silent sufferer. A vast majority of women is reconciled to a life of humiliation in the form of gender bias while performing the roles of wives, mothers etc. in the society they live in. In order to establish their identity and keeping in mind their subjugation in the hands of their male counterparts, the women have often tried to do away with supremacy of males; they are more attracted towards the same sex, giving rise to lesbian relationship. Ismat Chughtai, the great name of Urdu fiction is known for her indomitable spirit and other evolving conflicts in modern India, while resolutely refusing to bow to conventional norms, abstinence, and modesty. But Ismat Chughtal's "Lihaaf" foreshadows the idea of exploitations of another corporal body to fulfil one's desires. The story epitomizes the excessive degree of suppression that one undergoes. It aptly suggests how the life of a woman by training is confined to her body; how one's desire are manipulated and how one swings between hopes and ethics. Khurshid Akram belongs to the generation of Urdu writers which came to the fore during the 1990s. His volume of short stories, titled Ek Ghar MashrootMuafinaama contains a number of stories. The story "Coming" is one of the representative stories depicting the state of prostitute in our society. He has portrayed the realities hidden behind the lives of the marginalized women, especially the sex workers. Both the writers have tried to depict objectively the characters in the novel. There is no possibility of reading simply 'what is there' is the texts, for the texts does not have the mode of being of some of neutral object. It is always possible to show that a reading of a text that claims complete objectivity is itself an interpretation. A person reading a text is himself a part of the meaning be apprehends Indeed, Ismat Chaughtai and Khurshid Akram both have tried to analyse the stories critically. The present paper, intends to present a comparative study of Ismat Chughtai's "Lihaaf" and Khurshid Akram's "Coming", related to the writer's points of view about the status of such women as are considered subjugated in our patriarchal social setup. They often suffer from identity crisis and as a result take recourse to such aberrations as are not given social sanction.