SOCIO-RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND CRISIS OF MINORITY IN MOHAMMAD HANIF’S OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI AND BINA SHAH’S SLUM CHILD

Abstract

The present study investigates the Socio-religious Identity Crisis prevalent among religious minorities in Pakistan, with reference to the English novels Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif and Slum Child  by Bina Shah. As the selected novels address the conditions of Christians in Muslim-majority Pakistan, the authors chose the case of Christian women to reflect the community's socio-religious and socio-economic struggles. The study is conducted in the light of Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory of personality development. The fundamental component of this research is a psychosocial analysis of the novels employing Erikson's theory. Textual analysis of the novels within a qualitative method was employed to achieve the objectives of the research under hand. According to the findings of this study, Alice Bhatti and Laila, the Christian protagonists of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti and Slum Child, respectively, represent the typical socio-religious rejection and ensuing desperation to escape the suffering. After a close reading of the text it was found that the female protagonists in both novels suffer from low self-esteem, lack of social respect and recognition because they belong to a minority group. In a larger sense, the same social conduct demonstrated against Christians may be applicable to other religious minorities in Pakistan. The agony of Christian characters in both stories may be applied to any minority individual in Pakistan owing to the inherent cultural consequences imposed by the dominant group.