Gender Discrimination in Postcolonial Scenario

Abstract

Post colonialism involves the study of the experiences in terms of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, race, gender, culture and education of ex-colonial societies all over the world. In order to rise the attention and understanding of these factors, colonized people wrote literary works which remain as a documentary proof of imperialism. According to feminist theories, women have been marginalized at various stages of the history while men were entertained well with sole freedom. The main ideology of discrimination in postcolonial is that the West looked down the East as the “Other”. The aim of this study is to explore how gender related issues were addressed in the post-colonial scenario and how males and females are portrayed in the selected postcolonial literary texts: short stories such as “Post master’ written by an Indian writer Tagore, and “Divorcee’, a Nigerian story, written by Ken Saro Wiwa. This study is based on descriptive and analytical methodology incorporating postcolonial gender based postcolonial and sociological theories. The findings reveal that the female characters are dominated, discriminated and degraded by the male counterparts. Thus, it can be possible to say that the ideology of post colonialism clearly defines the gender marginalization in the male chauvinist society.