Parallel Silences: Gendered Repression And Resistance In The Short Fiction Of Ama Ata Aidoo And The Indian Progressive Writers

Abstract

This paper provides a cross-cultural comparative analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s “The Late Bud” and “The Message” and two iconic short stories from India’s Progressive Writers’ Movement,Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” and “My Friend, My Enemy”. The study utilises a feminist-progressive framework to show that silence, emotional repression, and institutional abandonment act as narrative strategies that tell the stories of women and emotionally burdened people. Through close textual analysis of the primary narratives, the paper disposes of the idea that silence is simply a manifestation of suffering, positing instead that silence is a complex form of resistance and interior expression. The protagonists, Yaaba, Begum Jaan, Esi and Chughtai’s narrator, move through spaces of domesticity and ideology in which love, justice or emotional recognition are denied. From the grotesque movements of a quilt, to a child’s tearless endurance, to a comrade’s smouldering regret, each of the stories shows how postcolonial and patriarchal systems render absence the only form of human connection. By setting out these transnational literary echoes, then, the paper highlights how African and Indian progressive writers reconfigure silence as both trauma and testimony,refusing erasure through formal experiment and emotional realism.