Displacing Androcracy: Cosmopolitan Partnerships in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water

Set against the backdrop of Gandhi’s Freedom Movement, Water pushes the boundaries of India’s male-dominant cultural narratives beyond patriarchal predicaments by questioning the religious tradition and the oppressive constraints imposed on Hindu widows. This paper aims to show how Sidhwa’s characters move toward more caring and life-enhancing scenarios by portraying relationships of mutual support in which human beings give evidence of ‘other’ possible patterns of construction of the self and forms of co-existence, thus overcoming the rigid discourses imposed by dominator hierarchies