Mapping South Asian Masculinities by Chandrima Chakraborty

Author:Chandrima Chakraborty [Chakraborty, Chandrima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138061613
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

In the semiotic opposition of masculinity and femininity, masculinity is the unmarked term, the place of symbolic authority. The phallus is the master signifier, and femininity is symbolically defined by lack.8

However, Mueenuddin’s characters reflect a subtle yet identifiable shift in these roles. In the first story ‘Nawabdin Electrician’, Nawab repairs machines, rides a motorcycle, and brings home the money, but it is his wife who has a ‘strong body’ and a ‘long mannish face’ and to whom he responds ‘obediently’.9 In ‘Saleema’, the maid with ‘deep-set eyes’, leaves her own pitiful husband with an ‘emaciated face’ and rotting ‘yellow teeth’ sobbing like a child, and determinedly sets out to seduce Rafiq the valet. She is, we are told, ‘exactly as tall as him’.10 Jaglani’s mistress Zainab, in ‘Provide, Provide’, has ‘strong hands’ and a face which is ‘angular, with high cheekbones’ and which appears to Jaglani to be ‘too forceful’ and reminds him of a ‘cattle thief’.11 Jaglani, who ‘could order men arrested or released, could appoint them to government posts, could have government officers removed’, himself ‘feared Zainab’ whom the village men think is ‘like a hatchet’.12 ‘About a Burning Girl’ shows us a sessions judge in the Lahore High Court whose wife is an ‘iron lady’ and ‘the poor man’s Lady Macbeth’ in his own words.13 He pays his ‘respects’ to her every morning as she sips tea in bed.

In contrast, male characters undergo consistent truncations in stature. Shot in the groin, Nawabdin suffers a narrow escape from possible impotency. Rezak is stripped by the police and tortured horrendously, his legs tied wide apart. Jaglani develops a fatal cancer, and witnesses a cruel decline in political and physical power as he helplessly awaits his own death. K.K. Harouni has a serious heart condition, his earnings are dwindling, and he is being manipulated into selling off large chunks of his land at nominal prices. Murad Talwan, with his ‘feminine lips’, suffers being cuckolded. Rafik has thin arms and body, false teeth, and an inadequate ‘rotating’ mouth. Images of men in dentures and yellowing teeth recur in the stories as motifs of eroding power.

The description of K.K. Harouni’s dead body, in particular, can be viewed as a metaphor for the death of the traditional Pakistani male within Mueenuddin’s story realm. The corpse is a mockery of his earlier image as a polo and tennis player, with a ‘handsome golden face’ like a god.14

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