Giving Voices to Voiceless Pashtuns Women in Mountsturt Elphinstone's: An Account of the Kingdom of Cuabul and Alexander Burns' Travels into Bokhara

Abstract

The practice of representation gives rise to cultural variations and divides, which in turn give rise to the circumstance in which individuals and groups belong to more than one culture. Western literature comes with issues of representation, as they have represented the Oriental people through what is called misrepresentation. The Oriental people are more inferior because the reality is different, as explicitly orientalists give voice to women, but the strategy is beneath the surface, undertaken for some implicit purpose. The research also analyzes the same issue of representation and giving voices to Pashtun women in Mount Stuart Elphinstone’s An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and Alexander Burns’ “Travels into Bokhara. The works show that women are exclusively powerless, weak, distorted, suffering, exploited, irrational, deprived, and limited to their houses to bear only domestication. Both writers show in their works that women are illiterate and are deprived of their educational rights as they are intellectuals, telling different creative stories, but they are not allowed to think rationally and are only limited to emotional aspects to make their partners. Therefore, both works are pregnant and meet the criteria of Wollstonecraft from a male perspective, taken as a theoretical framework for the paper. The purposes of both writers were developed by giving voices to the muted women of the Pashtuns, enabling them to speak for themselves. However, it was not possible to eradicate the suppression of women in Pashtun society because the British faced very strong resistance from the Pashtun.