Representation of Karnali vis-a-vis the Marginalized Women Characters: A Feminst Reading of Karnali Blues and Sunya ko Mulya

Abstract

This paper critically examines the representation of women in Buddhi Sagar’s Karnali Blues and Nawa Raj KC’s Sunya ko Mulya, exploring how these novels illuminate the socioeconomic, emotional, and cultural realities of women in Nepal’s Karnali region. These texts locate the women in one of the most marginalized communities in Nepal where poverty, migration, reproductive work and systemic neglect is a burden they carry, and maintain moral and emotional support of their families. By examining the character of the mother in Karnali Blues, the paper investigates the endurance of the maternal as a basis for survival, and it spells out how childbirth, care-taking, and absence of women's suffering become emblematic of structural violence and the state's absence. Likewise, the novel Sunya ko Mulya is cast with the third-person voice of a non-narrated narrator, a preborn child who embodies the trauma of generations as it is passed down before being born. The study draws on feminist and postcolonial theories and concepts, such as the concept of 'intersectionality, otherness, emotional labour, and capacities' to conclude that these stories recenter women as agents of resilience and subtle resistance. In a fusion of realism and allegory, both texts unsettle women's marginal role in the literary discourses that come out of positions that focus on Kathmandu and place it at the center of perception of Karnali's problems. The study reminds us that there is a need for justice for women’s endurance in the forms of better maternal health care, better rural infrastructure, recognition of the value of unpaid care work, adequate redistribution of resources and institutional accountability.