Double Jeopardy of a Christian Woman in Muhammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Abstract

The research aims at exploring the double jeopardy of a Christian woman as presented in Muhammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Using the terminology of Arundhati Roy, Alice Bhatti’s voice is either ‘deliberately silenced’, or goes ‘preferably unheard’ at various instances of discrimination against her in the novel. In one of his interviews, the author calls it ‘the double jeopardy of Alice Bhatti’ (Dutt). Alice Bhatti suffers as a woman and the suffering is doubled because of the fact that she belongs to a minority, a Christian in a dominantly Muslim society. This research furthers this idea and explores through this novel how poverty, religious discrimination and gender inequality go hand-in-hand in Pakistan. This research falls into the category of ‘subaltern studies’. The framework used is conceptual, as it is composed of writings of Gayatri Spivak, Arundhati Roy and Antonio Gramsci. Alice Bhatti is jeopardized at various levels due to her gender and religion. Alice belongs is a Christian which is a minority in Pakistan. So, she dealt with a lot of troubles due to her religion beliefs. People especially men didn’t like to drink or eat in the same dishes in which Alice had meal but when it comes to sexual contact, the male members of the society showed diplomacy and approached her in every possible way and tried to harass her sexually. She raises voice whenever she is discriminated against but it goes unheard. Alice is a nurse by profession. She respects her profession and is proud to be a nurse but she feels sorry for the diplomatic behavior of the society towards her sacred profession.