“An all-weather, all-terrain fighter”: Subaltern resistance, survival, and death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Abstract

Victor Li's theory of necroidealism draws our attention to the tendency in literary works and writings by Subaltern Studies historians to romanticize the dead subaltern so that in death he or she emerges as an "exemplary, heroic symbol of resistance". In these works, the "ambiguity of struggle" of the living subaltern contrasts sharply with the idealized heroism of his or her dead counterpart. The eponymous protagonist of Mohammed Hanif's Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is an untouchable, lower-class Christian woman in contemporary Pakistan who is determined to survive and surpass her subaltern status but dies a brutal death, following which her father makes a case for her canonization. This article is an in-depth analysis of the depiction of Alice's multifaceted subalternity and the strategies of resistance that she deploys as well as an evaluation of the portrayal of her death to demonstrate that the novel unequivocally rejects an idealization of both subaltern life and death.

“Yes, I am Joseph Bhatti Choohra:” Reading Joseph Bhatti as a Palimpsest

“…Unlike in India, where the Untouchable castes self-consciously identify themselves as Dalits 26 and actively engage in identity politics, the Chuhras of Pakistan neither identify themselves as Chuhras nor do they engage in any politics as such. Scholars like Mirza (2015;151) and Sara Singha ( 2015) have used the term Dalit for the Pakistani Chuhras. While the employment of Dalit as a theoretical category does provide a certain level of methodological convenience to look at the Chuhra Christians in Pakistan, its usage in this context is problematic.…”