From Shadows to Survival: Trafficking, Sexual Violence, and Systemic Oppression in Pakistani Narratives

This chapter explores sexual and gendered violence as systemic crises that inscribe deep psychological and political trauma within South Asian subjectivities, focusing on contemporary Pakistani narratives, Aysha Baqir’s Beyond the Fields (2019), and Awais Khan’s No Honour (2021). These novels, set in Pakistan, explore how patriarchal control, gender-based marginalization, and institutional silences co-produce layers of oppression that restrain women’s agency. The study interrogates how trauma manifests in narrative form through silence, fragmentation, and disrupted memory, revealing how aesthetic choices mirror internalized disempowerment and social gaslighting. Yet, within these structures of violence, the victims enact resilience not as triumphant recovery, but as unstable, ongoing acts of survival. Rather than romanticizing resilience, these texts portray it as a fragile, politicized process, a refusal to disappear. Importantly, the resilience enacted is neither redemptive nor heroic—it is fraught, tentative, and marked by deep personal and political cost. By framing emerging narrative voice and embodiment as contested terrains, the chapter argues that Pakistani Anglophone fiction offers a critical lens into how women’s trauma of trafficking, prostitution, and sexual violence are shaped by feudalism, gender, class, and postcolonial state power, while also imagining radical futurities rooted in dissent and ethical witnessing.