Abstract :
Clothing helps people to publicly manifest their religious or cultural identity. In the Islamic world, Burqa is considered a garment of modesty both in the religious and cultural contexts. This corpus-assisted discourse study aims to find out the behavior of the press and the actual Burqa users by analyzing the corpora of Pakistani and British newspapers through the Sketch Engine software and field surveys in the form of audio interviews and questionnaires with the help of the Grounded Theory and Thematic Analysis. This study looks at different forms of collected data to drag out the image of the Burqa created by the press and used by its actual users to show their distaste for the cultural-cum-Islamic Burqa such as the Shuttlecock. The current study takes into account both qualitative and quantitative research paradigms to triangulate the findings retrieved from the analysis of the newspapers discourse; which is mainly based on retrieving the keywords in context, their collocates and concordances and the field surveys; which will be analyzed with the help of coding process. A conceptual framework has been designed for the current study using the principles of the Grounded Theory and Thematic Analysis to categorize the important themes. The analysis of the current study will also reveal the future of Burqa or Purdah garments in the Pashtun culture. This contrastive analysis sheds light on the reasons why females in the Pashtun community are divided on the use of the Burqa and explains why some Pashtun women prefer to continue wearing it.
Keyword :
Burqa, Shuttlecock, Paronay, Pashtun, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.