A Critique of the Misuse of Religious Discourse in South-Asia in Aslam’s The Golden Legend

Aslam in The Golden Legend (2017) has attempted to record the misuse of religious discourse and its impacts on personal and political levels focusing on South-Asia's most relevant country Pakistan. This research is qualitative where Guha’s ideas of Dharma and Danda from his masterpiece Dominance Without Hegemony (1997) has been used to unlock the text. Guha argues that before the arrival of the masters in the subcontinent certain forces were being projected in society in order to keep the lowers classes on periphery. Subaltern voices were shocked and mocked openly. Aslam has magnanimously recorded the situation of subalterns where these are still at periphery and are living in ghettos to face the existential crises they are suffering from. Pakistani fiction is wonderfully focusing on all those sections of society which are deliberately being marginalized. Aslma’s liberal approach proposes love which can bind people irrespective of racial religious and sexual orientation. He overtly mocks at the idea of using religion in order to kick the masters off from the sub-continent. Aslam’s acute picture shows that in this nation-state, subalterns are still facing threat because of the misuse of religious narrative and its ontology.