Negotiating Identity and Womanhood: A Feminist Reading of One and a Half Wife by Meghna Pant

In One and a Half Wife, Meghna Pant writes a powerful story about what it means to be a woman while navigating concepts of identity, displacement, and self-realization through the lenses of patriarchy, migration, and cultural hybridity. In this paper I offer a feminist reading of the novel as I explore how Amara Malhotra, the protagonist, manoeuvres her identity and femininity in the face of clashing social demands and transnational realities. The story follows Amara as she navigates her way back and forth between India and the States, encapsulating the lives of many diasporic women who exist in the liminal space between tradition and modernity. Pant uses Amara's shifting awareness to question how Indian and immigrant women have been shaped by entrenched patriarchal standards, exposing both the price of compliance and the power of self-assertion. Employing feminist theoretical insights from Simone de Beauvoir and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this paper questions the representation of Amara in her role as an incomplete “half-wife,” a metaphor for the disjointed identity of women in a patriarchal system. It carries on to assess how Pant, by the deconstruction of the romanticized details on matrimony, chastity and sacrifice, discloses the cultural and religious patriarchy-enabled subjugation. In the end, Amara's road to self-acceptance and self-reliance is a reclamation of power, redefining what it means to be a woman outside of the expectations of society. Locating One and a Half Wife in the feminist/postcolonial discourses, the paper asserts that not only Pant raises the voicing of diasporic Indian woman but also questions the universals on gender, belonging and freedom. It is then that the novel transforms into a tale of rebellion and restoration, in which the notion of identity and womanhood are seen as moving acts of negotiation rather than static markers by which one is defined.