THE POSTCOLONIAL PHALLUS: HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND COLONIAL ANXIETY IN SARMAD SEHBAI’S THE BLESSED CURSE

Abstract

This article analyses Sehbai’s The Blessed Curse (2024) through the interlacing lenses of R.W. Connell hegemonic masculinity and Mrinalini Sinha colonial masculinity to suggest that the novel enacts Pakistani political masculinity as a structurally unstable, performative, and historically encumbered construction. Instead of making masculine authority look natural and safe, the satire of Sehbai reveals it as an offsetting project that is perpetuated by spectacle, repetition, and subjugation. The tragicomic rise of Nawabzada Noor Mohammad Ganju, from a repressed aristocratic subject to Chief Minister and finally to a grotesque phallic emblem, becomes the narrative vehicle through which the novel dramatizes masculinity’s dependence on public validation, bodily symbolism, and coercive power. The article presents this argument on four dimensions that are related to each other. First, it follows the historical stratification of colonial anxiety in the family of Ganju, showing how the postcolonial masculine desire is still determined by the acquired insecurity and the memory that is influenced by the class. Second, it examines masculinity as theatrical performance indicating that political authority within the novel relies on witnessing, acting out and repetition. Third, it studies technological improvement as a compensatory measure to psychic and bodily inadequacy, exposing the ridiculous and pathological extremes of masculine authority to which the maintenance of legitimacy is extended. Fourth, it claims that the subordination of women and non-hegemonic men is not accidental to the establishment of patriarchal authority. Through synthesis of postcolonial masculinity studies and close textual analysis, the article proves that The Blessed Curse provides a critical analysis of the colonial remnants, psychological vulnerability, and gendered violence that inform the quest to attain masculine legitimacy in postcolonial Pakistan.