Vol. 7, Issue 8, Part F (2021)

Salman Rushdie’s Shame is one of those novels in which he has focused on Pakistan’s history which represents its political conditions. This work has been taken as a feminist novel. The author shows his intention by declaring that he is going to write “her story” in place of “his story” that is he means to write about the empowerment of women. Shame is a novel in which Salman Rushdie questions patriarchal dominance which kills women’s desires for selfhood which loses it identity. When Sufiya, a girl child, is born in the rich family of national leader Raza Hyder, she also is deprived of any freedom and enjoyment only because her parents had hoped to beget a male child. The author tries to establish the point that this treatment has become the greatest hindrance in the empowerment of women.

Sufiya zinobia, being a subjugated woman, becomes passive in spite of the fact she is the central character in the novel. She indeed, has been portrayed as a peripheral character. The point Rushdie wants to bring home is that women should be empowered and should no more remain peripheral.

Thus, Salman Rushdie in his novel Shame raises his voice against the patriarchal as well as the matriarchal construct. In a way, the authors seem to suggest that a women’s search for self identity should not end up in an epiphany of multiple selves. However, this very thing makes her realize his strength of being a beautiful woman.