The Complexities of Inter-religious Courtship and Marriage in Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Abstract

The paper at hand focuses, through the close reading of Alice Bhatti – the central character in Mohammed Hanif’s novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011), on inter-religious courtship dynamics as well as the complexities resultant to such marriages in Pakistani social context. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, being a dominantly Muslim society, has often times occurrences of the instances of marginalization and ‘Othering’ of its religious minorities making vivid the crevices in its social stratification. Hanif’s novel attempts to explicate the acute situations of inter-religious courtship and marriage vis-à-vis its fictive presentations of the characters of Alice Bhatti – a nurse in a hospital and Teddy Butt – a thug and a toady for Sindh Police. Drawing its theoretical framework from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953), particularly its section titled “Situations,” the paper presents the complexities of courtship and marriage in inter-religious contexts: Alice Bhatti belongs to a low caste Christian ‘Choohrah’ community while Teddy Butt is a Muslim with no recognizable secure job. Marriage instead of giving respect to a low caste non-Muslim nurse becomes a torture and later ends in her tragic death. The paper concludes that inter-religious marriages in Pakistan, instead of giving shelter and respect to low caste non-Muslim women, rather become complicated as in the case of Alice Bhatti who is shown to have met a tragic death.