“Rainbow Alliance”: A Subaltern Study of Selected Pakistani Fiction in English

Abstract

This paper attempts to address how marginalized communities as represented through the stories of main characters in the selected texts experience exclusion and marginalization through oppression. This oppression makes them confused about their social and cultural identities and keeps them as subalterns – at the periphery. The Pakistani writers of fiction in English have endeavoured to give space to the marginalized communities in Pakistan by a conscious privileging of the subaltern voices which are often silenced in the texts. They seem to reject the categories of discrimination and form a “rainbow alliance” to give voice to various kinds of marginalized groups in Pakistani society which makes us understand and acknowledge the subalterns as autonomous people. In the light of the theories of Subaltern School and Postcolonialism this paper interprets the selected texts i.e. Bina Shah’s Slum Child, Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing, Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti as representation of subalterns in Pakistan.