Gendered Pragmatics in the Fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa and Kamila Shamsie

Abstract

This study investigates the pragmatic construction of gender in the fiction of two of Pakistan's most influential Anglophone novelists, Bapsi Sidhwa and Kamila Shamsie, by examining how linguistic interaction shapes gender identities, power relations, and forms of resistance within their narratives. The study analyzes the use of speech acts, politeness strategies, conversational implicatures, silence, indirectness, presupposition, and face negotiation in Cracking India and The Pakistani Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa and Home Fire and Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie. Grounded in Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), Feminist Pragmatics (Mills, 2003; Christie, 2000), and Feminist Stylistics (Mills, 1995), the research adopts a qualitative comparative textual approach supplemented by corpus-informed observations to examine dialogue and narrative discourse. The findings reveal that both novelists strategically employ pragmatic features to expose patriarchal structures while simultaneously constructing female agency. Sidhwa foregrounds conversational conflict, irony, interruption, and linguistic resistance to depict women's struggles within traditional patriarchal settings, whereas Shamsie employs silence, indirectness, conversational ambiguity, and presupposition to represent the complexities of gender, migration, identity, and transnational politics. Across both authors, female characters negotiate power less through direct confrontation than through context-sensitive pragmatic strategies that reshape interpersonal relationships and challenge dominant gender norms.