Subjugation of Females in Hridaya's Letter from a Lhasa Merchant to His Wife

Abstract

This research work attempts to study the Chittadhar Hridaya's novella Letter From A Lhasa Merchant to His Wife, from the perspective of feminism as it examines the subordinate condition of females in the contemporary Newari society in particular. The male dominated patriarchal society creates different negative stereotypical images and represents females as weak, emotional, irrational, imaginative and so on. In the novel, the female characters like Miam, her mother-in-law, Bhamula and many others are victimized and subordinated by their male relatives in particular and by the male oriented patriarchal society in general. The female characters are behaved as if they are not human beings rather they are the saleable commodities without having their proper identity. The patriarchal society, impose the artificial rules and regulations upon females which they cannot resist because of the lack of consciousness for their rights and equality.