Unveiling Gender And Religious Dynamics In The Narratives Of “Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti” By Mohammad Hanif

Abstract

The language used in literature reveals the culture and social gestalt of any society in which it has been constructed and consumed. This paper carries the same rationale which aims to track certain socio-religious and cultural-economic disparities and discrepancies towards minorities, particularly Christians in an Islamic re(public) where there is a clear majority of Muslims with the help of analysis of instances of language used in the narratives “Our Lady of Alice Bhatt” by Mohammad Hanif. It would highlight social inequalities practised deep in socio-cultural discourse. Moreover, this research would also touch upon the question of gender discrimination and gender construction as a female entity in a male-chauvinistic scenic turnout using language; since the novel revolves around communicative forfeits of Alice Bhatti’s life where she is fraying in fisticuffs to befit herself in a miss-fitted society. It would employ using Fairclough's framework for analysis to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the text at three axiom levels namely textual analysis, discursive practices, and socio-cultural analysis. Thus, the results would reveal textual findings in linguistic analysis, a range of embedded discourses in discursive practices, and consumption of the text into socio-cultural explications with the use of language and lexicalization employed in the selected excerpts.