Racial Discrimination in Lillias Hamilton’s A Vizier’s Daughter and Khaled Hossenei’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the racial discrimination in Hamilton's A Vizier’s Daughter: A Tale of the Hazara War and Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner: A Vizier Daughter by Lillias Hamilton deals with the themes of racial discrimination of Hazara during the reign of Amir Abdur Rehman (r. 1880-1901) due to the reasons they were immigrants and sectarian beliefs. The Hazara have been the targets of systematic racial discrimination for decades in Afghanistan. After 100 years, Khalid Hosseini published The Kite Runner (2003) which portrays the same theme. In A Vizier Daughter, Gul Begum, an ethnically Hazara woman, is marginalized and leaves her home due to her Hazara identity. She also faces prejudice, exploitation, political and institutional oppression, fear and anxiety, economic hardship and identity conflict due to her Hazara ethnicity. Her tragic fate highlights the social and racial injustices faced by the Hazara community in the novel. In The Kite Runner Hassan, experiences racism in many ways including being raped by Assef, compelled by Amir to leave his house and killed by the Taliban because of his ethnicity as Hazara. Assef and other Pashtun characters call him a mice-eating, flat-nosed and load-carrying donkey. The study employs qualitative-interpretive research methodology by applying textual analysis as a research tool for data analysis, including Clifford Geertz's theory of primordialism as the lens. Moreover, the finding of the paper is that racial discrimination against Hazaras in both novels is due to religious belief, ethnicity and their struggle for autonomy.