WOMEN, CHOICE, AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTANI ANGLOPHONE FICTION: A CASE STUDY OF BEST OF FRIENDS

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between women’s agency, ethical choice and moral responsibility in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction through a focused reading of Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends (2022). Situating Shamsie’s work within feminist ethical theory and postcolonial literary studies, the article argues that her fiction reconfigures female choice not as an expression of autonomous will but as a situated moral practice shaped by friendship, class, migration, and political constraint. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates how Shamsie foregrounds moments of hesitation, silence, and compromise to expose the ethical costs of intimacy in politically charged contexts. In Best of Friends, female friendship emerges as a contested moral space in which loyalty and responsibility are continually renegotiated against the pressures of global surveillance, state power, and diasporic belonging. By tracing continuities and shifts across Shamsie’s oeuvre, the article shows how her recent work advances a more complex ethics of female agency—one that resists moral absolutism and instead emphasises relational accountability. The study contributes to ongoing debates on women’s moral subjectivity in South Asian literature and highlights the significance of contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction in articulating ethically nuanced representations of women’s lives.